Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And like the heroine of a nineteenth-century English novel, for example, she would have taken refuge that second night in a hole in the ground, surrounded by so-called fairy circles of mushrooms, to her mind always the most uncanny of plants, enormous, black-gilled mushrooms that glowed in the dark and beamed their disgusting odor of decay at her in the middle of the circle, their giant umbrellas having the form of black suns. And there was lightning and thunder. And an avalanche — in the southern gullies of the Sierra it was early spring, with a constant danger of avalanches, especially when the mild winds blew from the south — roared by so close to her that she felt its draft for a long time, like an ice-cold spray on her flushed face.

And that one zone in the stretch of forest that had had a fire, where she had constantly stumbled over nothing but dead birds, all the cadavers close together, as if they had been blown there, the hawk with the mountain titmouse, the sparrow with the eagle, the wren with the sparrow hawk or hawk, and in all cases only their bare bodies — what had happened to their feathers? And that scene in a storm, as she cowered in a sheltering niche under a rock shelf, and little by little a fox, a viper, a scorpion, a salamander, a family of wild boars, a snow-white weasel, and even more animals that were otherwise mortal enemies by nature, had gradually joined her, and how they had all waited quietly and peaceably for the storm to pass. And one time, as she slept in a sitting position, the blow on the back of her neck.

None of this happened during her descent from the Sierra de Gredos, or perhaps some of it did, after all, but under different circumstances, in a different light, and especially in a very different rhythm. She encountered drama at every step, whether walking, standing, or lying, but not of the cheap variety sketched out here.

Accordingly, on that first night, in the first stretch of forest, a jungle-like tangle, she saw a fire flaring up in the pitch-darkness, though well contained in a circle of upended stones, and in fact she did come upon a solitary person, the only one during this phase of her journey, a nocturnal Jew’s harp player. And she asked him whether he wasn’t afraid, of what? of other people in this unsafe time and area, whereupon he — was this the rape? — looked at her with burning eyes and replied that he was never afraid, for “I love human beings” (yet the author, when she repeated this, word for word, so that he could write it down, looked at her as if in dismay; as if such a thing, both as a fact and as a statement, had long since become impossible and unthinkable; dismayed? disarmed?). The hermit had exuded a strong smell; he smelled of having gone astray.

And during the second night, as the asendereada was crouching somewhere, she in fact, almost literally, had her head knocked off. Yet the blow came from her own head, which, as she nodded off from exhaustion, struck her chest with practically lethal force: “One could have died of it, as if executed by the weight of one’s own head.” And it was also true that she lay in a ferny hollow for almost a day, “more dead than alive,” but without the “poisonous toads” that “crawled over her”—but what did this mean? wasn’t this a way of being truly alive for a change?

How it came about that she then lay dying, as it were — no, leave out the “as it were”—and without anyone else’s doing, that was, or so it seemed, exciting enough to the author and reader caught up in the story — and exciting in a way that annoyed him less than those many stories that were written, and even more often filmed, as if “excitement” were the be-all and end-all — as if it were required nowadays that all books and films be exciting.

Even the steep southern face of the Sierra was punctuated by granite ribs, rock spouts, and ledges, poking up amid the fallen rock and scree. As the woman passed them on her way down, for a while she was still so preoccupied with the settlement of Hondareda that she was repeatedly tempted to knock on one of the rock piles and step through a doorway as into one of the dwellings carved out of the former glacial trough. Except that these were no delicate chaos-rocks resembling houses or inhabited towers. For here on the southern flank there had never been a glacier. The topography was too steep for a gradual flow of ice. And where the author’s client had initially, just past the crest, wanted to push open the door to what she thought was a stone dwelling, the rocky ruins — not as rounded and polished as those of Hondareda — came from a peak that had gradually crumbled in some prehistoric era: parts had sheared off one after the other and hurtled into the depths, over the course of ten thousand or a hundred thousand solar years — until finally all that was left of the former mountain, at one time perhaps just as pointed and almost as high as the Almanzor, was the flat, slightly jagged rump, today’s ridge, the crossing point. The largest and heaviest pieces of that former mountain had fallen almost halfway to the valley, and stuck out in the middle of the steep slopes, in the form of spurs, onto which one stepped on the way down from the Sierra as onto an almost horizontal platform, easy to walk on and seemingly intended as resting places — whereupon one suddenly found oneself on the edge of a vertical rock wall, falling off into a veritable abyss, not a good idea to scramble down, at least not during the night.

Time and again she knew she must turn back there — still that smile upon turning back? her smile glowing in the dark? and go slightly uphill again, until she finally ignored the spurs and the smoother stretches they seemed to offer, and in fact all apparent shortcuts. Better to stick to the reliable step-by-step serpentines through the trackless scree. She had everything she needed. She even felt increasingly enriched, “in the sense of being showered with presents,” as she described it. In contrast to all her previous crossings of the Sierra, where the moments of fulfillment — the sense of experiencing the entire possible range of existence, body and soul — had been pierced almost immediately with the pain of guilt at being farther than ever, infinitely far, from love and her loved ones, this time she did not see herself as alone, and at one point said out loud into the night: “I can do nothing better for you than to keep on doing what I am doing. In doing that, in doing it in rhythm, in a conscientious rhythm, without sloppiness, finding my own rhythm and getting it to vibrate, oscillate, and show the way, I am doing for myself and for you the best I can do, for myself and you.”—“What do you mean by rhythm?” (the author chiming in here). — She: “Intensification of what is already there.”

And as she walked, climbed, and scrambled, there appeared to her for a moment, as briefly as a single snowflake flitting by before the real snow came, the old nursery in her house on the outskirts of the northwestern two-river city, lying there silent in dim light, where the toys lined up on the floor for a game were suddenly illuminated, then gone just as suddenly.

That must have occurred at approximately the spot where the asendereada left the treeless, and also almost vegetationless, high-altitude precinct of the Gredos massif and began threading her way past the first Sierra pines, all of which along the edge of the woods were denuded, stripped of their bark and their tops by lightning. A lone star above one of the split crowns: an accessory, an essential one. But contrary to her supposition, it was not one of the stars forming the forehead of Orion, the central winter constellation. Indeed, there was no more Orion to be seen anywhere in the entire vast sky. Also no more Pleiades. No more Castor and Pollux. Not a single winter constellation left. No more winter? So that is how long we have been traveling together. A good long time. A swath of time. A wave of time. A hedgehog’s snout of time. A plane tree’s notched leaf of time. A bomb crater of time. And now, too, an expression from the Arabic book, this also flaring up like a snowflake or a falling star: “And the breath of the Merciful One wafted in from Yemen.”