Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“And the gunfire — in the parents’ cries here in Hondareda I hear the pow-pow-pow again — continued even after the corpse was already floating downstream. The masked man at the ford went on shooting at the dead man while his masked comrades kept us pinned down. I opened my eyes wide. Can one even say that of oneself? Yes, I, I opened my eyes wide. And my eyes were opened. And above the murdered man I saw the open sky. And I, I was innocent. I am innocent, I thought. And never, never will I kill anyone. And altogether: an end to revenge!

“And I was almost, almost grateful to that killer, grateful that he had saved me, saved me from my chief obsession, my obsession with murdering people. How tender was the sex of that woman who had called to me from behind that night on the street leading to the railroad station. Clasping me tenderly. And how noble. Noble and dark and wide, and above all special. And it was not only we who were together there in the night. Outside her apartment window stood a birch tree. A kind of millrace flowed past the house. And in the next room her child was sleeping.”

The evening on which she saw the person out of whom she heard her brother speaking was bright, with spring just around the corner, and outside on the mountain steppe a few of the reporters were running to their helicopter. And at the sight of them her host involuntarily made a gesture like aiming a machine gun at the string of runners, pressing the trigger and spraying them with bullets.

He had even leaped to his feet and pushed open the window. The last deep-yellow rays of the sun shone on the walls of smooth-polished granite, and one equally yellow Sierra hornet, smaller than those in the valleys but with wings that droned all the more loudly, came shooting at the shooter, swerving just in time to miss him, and he jumped back, as only her brother could jump back, easily startled, especially by small things, and it was almost, almost all right with her that even Hondareda did not lie outside the labyrinthine world.

She scaled the gentle northern slopes and reached the crest of the Sierra with the last light of day. In the old books the word used for ridge or crest was “eyelash.”

At one time there had been a crossing here, a path used mainly for driving the livestock over the ridge, worn by the cattle themselves, the only human addition being the road markers on the rocks consisting of very small, narrow columns of stones. These still existed here and there. But they had either toppled over or been overgrown by the little forests of broom. It was better not to try to locate them and risk being misled by these unreliable signs, which might just as well be chance heaps of weathered rock. Instead one should feel one’s own way, one step at a time.

And that had to be possible on the almost bare, steep, rock-strewn descent to the south. Standing on the ridge, she saw the lights far, far below in Candeleda, where it was already night in the small town that now appeared much larger from her sky-high vantage point, the lights forming an island of light in the sea of blackish gray and black black that stretched to the horizon in almost every direction. Only in the west could one still see blue strips, one above the other, and the top one almost bright blue. It was the same blue as in the uppermost and outer wing portion of that white angel on the lost or stolen medallion. “If the angel had not gone missing,” she said to herself, “I would not see its wing color in that blue over there.”

Although no path leading down the mountain was evident anywhere, along this section of the ridge one could safely cross and head downhill. The air was clear way down into the lowlands. Far in the distance the outlines of the Montes de Toledo, the mountains of Toledo. The wind wafting up from below was mild. The remaining snow patches and snowfields apparently behind her. The jagged peaks and escarpments of the summit plain of the Almanzor, the little knives, the Galayos, and the Galana disappeared behind the nearer, more rounded peaks. Gone, too, the depression of Hondareda. As she looked around, only the faint glow from a few seemingly inaccessible villages on the slopes, above the high valley of the río Tormes; Pedrada, too, the stone-pelting place in the headwaters region, gone.

Now came the moment when she wished she were home on her own property on the outskirts of the riverport city, or under her fruit trees there. Never had she experienced such indecisiveness in herself, just at the point in her journey and her hike where her destination lay at her feet, and not only figuratively. This amused her even more than it took her by surprise. One step forward, one step back, one to the left, one to the right. And her initially jerky, puppet-like indecisiveness — her gaze, likewise, jerking forward, then back over her shoulder, then up to the summit, then down to the ground — produced a kind of harmony, as if the indecisiveness and the hesitating gradually became dance steps (and, accordingly, she later told the author about her “dance of indecision” up there on the crest of the Sierra de Gredos).

And then emerging, thanks to this dancing, from her back-and-forth hesitation, she really, without any as-if, gained the momentum for a decision, the indecisiveness now transformed into decisiveness: time to be on her way! onward, down into the nocturnal blackness, which, once one plunged into it, had a clarity of its own. That wood-road with protruding tree roots at home on the outskirts of the city came to mind, but not because she still wished to be back there, where in the layered and intertwined roots the mountains and foothills and base of the mountains here had appeared to her in miniature, in peaceable and harmless form: no, this purely playful format of the Sierra de Gredos now revealed itself on location: it was a matter of crossing and leaping over the mighty Sierra in her mind’s eye just as light-footedly and quickly as over the layered roots at home in front of her own house.

And already she was running and leaping downhill, in imaginary serpentines, an asendereada , which usually meant “a woman who has strayed from the path,” but not here, where for the first stretch of the path (yes, path), as she drifted off as if in a drift originating inside her and safeguarding her, nothing could go wrong, and for the moment she was the mistress of her story again.

Leaping from ridge to ridge, as back there at home from one root branch to another. What contributed to her current sense of security was the phenomenon that one of the settlers in Hondareda, a rock expert, had once described in her presence as the “rhythm of the Sierra de Gredos.” According to him, the Sierra was a rhythmic formation in the sense that, whether on the gentle northern face or the steep southern face, the many chimneys, clefts, gorges, rivulets, and torrents fanned out evenly, the result of reciprocal action of water and the granite bedrock, which had created a relief characterized by rhythmic regularity, without the distortions, gaps, dislocations, and “unpleasant surprises” one often encountered in sandstone or limestone mountains, which consisted of masses that had been blown in or been deposited from elsewhere, rather than of original bedrock.

And that rhythmic quality, according to her geologist, also communicated itself to anyone hiking through the Sierra — the rhythm of the ground under his feet assured evenness, order, and controllability in his movement, “at least for the time being” (“for the time being” was also a much-used expression among the new settlers).

And as the asendereada cast her thoughts back to Hondareda once more, she said, again to herself, in the very penetrable darkness surrounding her descent from the mountain: “Lost country. Authentic country. Leaving behind the authentic country for one’s own lostness! What a rhythm that creates. What energy. I know who you all are. Of mixed blood, like me. How fortunate to be alive in the time when the last homogeneous people ceases to exist. A rich time. Fullness of time.” She almost sang this, like an old hit. But the moment had not yet come for her song. It was only the time for a greeting, sent in the direction of the glacial basin settlement, a greeting after the farewell, as if imagined in an Arabic poem.