Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And at the end the abdicated king and emperor was also no longer an archivist but simply the dying man, with the Spanish flies around his mouth more numerous than ever, who muttered that he hoped he “hadn’t spoiled the party for you”—what party? — and whose lips, after his death, still moved, in total silence, as if to continue speaking, and finally, for a long, long time, only the lower lip, that protruding lip characteristic of his royal line. And not until after his death did the sounds of pain he had suppressed all his life escape. Before that, he — with his soul already between his teeth — to her: “I regret only that I cannot read your, and my, story to the end.” Although he was letting himself die, he broke off several attempts. And when he finally succeeded, a child standing by his bedside clapped. Then a few adults standing around clapped as well. And toward the end they all applauded him, and how.

And she? had looked that day away from the man who had just died and gazed through the opening in the rock to the outside, which was not at all deathly still, or rather into the window slit in the back of the building next door, slightly off center, which let one see through a third house, and beyond that through the next of the little windows in the rock, and thus through the house with the corpse to the next and the next and the next, all the way to the end of the row and on through the last of the windows and finally at a tiny yellow-gray-blue segment, all the more clearly in focus, of the granite surface that formed the summit plain of the Sierra, and against that backdrop the inhabitants bustling hither and yon, from dwelling to dwelling, or lounging, or reading, just as on a moving train one can look from a car up front, near the locomotive, back through all the other cars, and see the passengers from compartment to compartment to compartment, and behind the train the vanishing landscape.

Another of the transitional travelers, after he had beckoned her into his cottage, no doubt told her that the reason for his being here, if indeed there was a reason, was the light. Another: here at long last he did not understand a word, no longer had to hear his own language, its sounds and accent. And one person explained that he had left his country not because, as was often said, it was too limiting or insignificant or trivial, but actually the opposite, for at least to outward appearances, with its natural resources and especially its economic power, which gave rise to other forms of power, it had suddenly no longer been so limiting and insignificant, and then had become so powerful and finally even more powerful than in its glory days. And one person said he had set out for this region as a reader, as the reader of a long, long story that was set here in the Sierra, about a woman and her vanished lover.

And one day in Hondareda she also came upon her own would-be lover from the riverport city: as she now wanted it to be for her story, he had forgotten her, or had he? and he was thriving. And in the course of time she saw yet another person from home: the idiot of the outskirts — and the change of locale to the high Sierra seemed to have done him good likewise. His idiocy, which when expressed day in, day out, on the outskirts, with their identical curbs and the front lawns all mowed to exactly the same height, wore thin, flourished up here near the stratosphere, among the lichen-covered cliffs, got a second wind — was that expression still in use? — and adapted to the doings of the others.

And finally the story wanted the andariega to see in one of the new settlers her brother, recently released from prison, who she thought was in an entirely different country, committing his first act of violence directed not at things but at human beings, from which there would be no turning back.

And the person who appeared to her as her surviving brother — although outwardly there was little similarity to discover — or out of whom the supposedly lost brother spoke, said, as they shared an evening meal, at an hour unusually early for the Iberian Peninsula, in his living shed/storeroom /warehouse, approximately the following:

“I could already feel killing in my upper arms and my fingertips. Now! I said to myself one morning when I woke up lying next to yet another stranger, a woman who had called to me on the street the previous night as I was heading for yet another railroad station: ‘Wait for me!’ The woman claimed to have known me for a long time. And my absence, to quote her verbatim, had lasted ‘for centuries.’ How rough and at the same time tender her sex was. I had never encountered anything so rough yet so soft before. And as with all the other women, I never saw this stranger again. And with the passage of time I became her admirer. If you meet her, give her my best. I adore her. And I am sure she knows it, even if she will never hear me say it. And perhaps she will read in your story that we met not here and not there but in a third country that was at war.

“And I was in that country because of the war. I wanted to be in the war to take part in the killing. So there would be at least one less of these mindless and soulless two-legged creatures who are everywhere and nowhere nowadays, taking up space and even being paid handsomely for it! And that morning the moment had finally arrived! Off to clear the decks! And even though I was armed, I would do it with my bare hands, or with a stick — the whole combat zone was strewn with sticks and stones. And I would not kill an adversary or an enemy — I considered those of us on the two warring sides to be not enemies but woeful comrades in arms or whatever — but rather someone who was not directly involved, one of those bystanders who, as has become customary or fitting in wars in third countries, instead of trying to prevent war actually incite and whip it up, at the same time turning it into a business opportunity, or rather the sidewalk superintendents and kibitzers with whom the place was swarming.

“My grandfather was in the first world conflict and my father in the second, and both of them told me that it never crossed their minds to want to shoot at a so-called enemy, and to the very end they made a special effort to aim so as to miss. In contrast, however: death and destruction to those on both sides who had sent them off to fight one another and turned the killing and dying into a spectacle — except that neither my grandfather nor my father ever had a chance to look these ‘devils’ or ‘charlatans, ’ as both of them called those responsible, in the eye or lay hands on them.

“On that day in my war I was assigned to a unit that was actually deployed to keep a fire-free zone open, secure a transit route, provide safe conduct. With a few others I was posted along a river in the mountains, at a ford where the road crossed the river at a shallow spot. At some point during the day, I saw, way off down the road on the other side of the river, a man walking alone, making his way through the bushes that had grown far into the travel lane since the war began. He was obviously not native to the area — although the civilian natives in the war zone had long since lost any native characteristics, by which I mean any sense of time and place, and were constantly mistaking yesterday for today, or for a day in the previous year, and constantly losing their way in their own village and even in their own house and grounds. No, that is not the one I am going to do away with, I thought, not yet. But the next one, from the Third Column, that of the sightless ones, in the armored personnel carriers with nineteen times nineteen banners waving!

“The lone pedestrian came to the ford. And at the same moment a vehicle actually appeared behind him, not armored, true, but instead seemingly disguised, and the car stopped, and a few actually masked men jumped out, some of the ones who were waging their own special, uncontrollable, and also, thanks to the masks, absolutely ruthless war-within-a-war. And one of the masked men, all of whom were wearing long, dust-colored greatcoats as if to be ready for being filmed, promptly took aim at the man who was wading through the ford with his pant legs rolled up. With the rushing of the water it was almost inaudible at first. But then I heard nothing but gunfire.