Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And she accepted the idea of perishing. Hadn’t she, hadn’t one, foundered long since, in existence, in life, in relationships, and didn’t that now finally become obvious in the loss of images, brought on almost intentionally? The sweetness of acceptance. To disappear from the face of the earth: as it should be.

On the other hand, acceptance did not mean wanting to die. She had never felt anything like a longing for death, and certainly did not now. How incomprehensible she found the sentence “I look forward to dying.” True, even before the crossing of the Sierra, she had counted on perishing. But if she were close to it, one thing was clear: she would fight for her life to the last. For her life? For life.

And so now she girded herself to resist, at first only inwardly, yet where else would one begin? And as had always been the case with her, this taking action, like all her doings, was a form of management — and didn’t one say, instead of “I must find a way out,” “I must manage to get out of this situation”? While she lay there, not moving a finger, her thoughts were already focused on managing again: budgeting, measuring, calculating, ordering, surveying, projecting, taking precautions, planning. Except that no plan for forging ahead presented itself, or, in her words: no managerial opportunity. For in her terms, rather than “It’s all over,” the conclusion was “There is nothing more to manage!”

It was of her own free will that she then decided to remain lying this way in the ferns, in the death zone, for the day and one night, el día y una noche.

At least she had one thing in common with the hero of her Miguel’s story: she looked for adventures where there were none to undergo, at least no external, visible ones. And accordingly he, that good-for-nothing, that inept soldier and galley slave, that one-armed son of a quack, would have been the right one to tell her story after all, the only one? But this man Cervantes never did narrate primarily internal adventures such as hers? Or did he? Was it not true that his adventure stories, too, no less than that of the loss-of-images-and-how-one-can-manage-one’s-way-out-of-it, belonged primarily to an interior world, and were for that very reason universal?

First of all, so the story goes, the woman who had fallen into the image-loss pit turned onto her back.

Through the gaps in the fern-frond canopy, the daytime sky, high and blue. A period of just lying there in the heart of the Sierra. Springtime or late-fall sunlight penetrating all the way to the ground. On a sunlit stone there, the feathery shadow of a fern, like a fossil from prehistoric times. Or was that not a shadow at all but an actual petrified fern? Intentionally reaching out to touch one of the stinging nettles, which, according to the danger guide, like to “cohabit” with ferns and in the Sierra de Gredos sting “both piercingly and persistently.” (The author, though not particularly familiar with the Sierra, shared her experience one time.)

But even this pain did not help in the absence of a management plan. The only thoughts: meaningless wordplays and spoonerisms — crime waits for yeoman, or: a penny paved is a penny spurned; and so forth.

And then, on the other hand: what a relief no longer to have to be master or mistress of the story, la Señora de la historia, and once and for all. Just as in the chaotic or panicky helter-skelter of the external world one could find a kind of peace or even shelter for a while, so one could in the frantic inner world, at least for as long as it took to inhale and exhale. The tranquil blue sky above the ferns, and another nonsensical thought: all souls’ sky. Nonsensical? The roar of a squadron up there, heading for the high Sierra. The bombers snored, the entire sky filled with their snoring and their terrible heavy load. Hondareda! Did no one but you see and hear this? No one whose heart broke like yours at the sound?

The camera panning from your face to a grasshopper next to it, its eyes — are those eyes? — black like yours, the antennae flailing in midair. Grasshopper, dzarad in Arabic — but even thinking of this word did not help you out. Another pan to — a toad? — no, a frog, not toadlike at all, and too skinny for a toad, so small, hardly as big as a pencil point, as if he has just been transformed from a tadpole, in water, into an amphibious being, and is trying out his first hops on the earth, like a flea (that is how small he was), and now his attempt to get out of the hollow, observed from extremely close up: the tiny fellow scrambling, all his limbs operating alternately as he climbs, the spitting image of the first and last human.

Image? Yes, image, but not of the sort under discussion here. And how had the man-frog come to be here beneath the ferns, so far from his primal element, water? The camera panning back to you, not merely to your face this time, but to your whole body. In her film long ago there had been many such pans.

How glorious — find a different word — a body could look — and not only because of the particular camera angle and the special cinematic lighting — awakening the oldest dreams ever dreamt about a woman, about you. How glorious? How majestic. How childlike — find a different word — how pure — find a different word — like man, woman, and child all in one, but also how simple and touching, for instance a glance at your hands, those fruit-thief hands, which did not even have slippery fingers. But how pulse-quickening, too — find a different word — how heart-pounding (in medieval stories, and thus also in your film, such expressions were never used, yet those love stories were infinitely more physical, corporeal, and steamy than those of today!), how igniting, how kindling, how flame-fanning, how … — God alone knows how, and above all: how delightful such a body can be, how heartening, how amusing.

In the story about you and your man, you were as much admired as desired. There admiring and desiring went together again, and anew. The more you were admired by him, the more intensely — find a different word — the more unconditionally you were desired by him. “My body!” is what he called you in those days, and both his secret exclamations of astonishment, of joy, of wonder, and his equally secret oaths, even when they had nothing to do with you, began with “O body of my woman!” or “On my woman’s body, I swear … (pledge …)” What body-travels the two of you undertook, then and there: even when you were both as naked as only a woman and man can be when they are together, you continued to strip each other, of a thousand and one garments, one at a time: another one gone, and another, until you came together truly naked.

Except that even then, from the outset, he, the only one you loved and wanted, saw himself as not your equal and equal to your body, or to put it differently, he was not synchronized with you, or, to put it differently, the fullness of love, or, to put it differently, the fulfillment of love, did not come about for him until you were absent. “Yes, I was never equal to this woman of mine.”

And his vacillating feelings reached the tipping point as the two of you were going through the Sierra de Gredos, you with the child in your womb, shortly before the birth. After you had lost sight of each other for an hour or so, instead of zooming to you from a bow-and-arrow distance, he took to his heels, or he simply stayed where he was and let you climb on alone, in the knowledge that once under way you would not turn back. He fled from you, he hid from you, he left you in the lurch, believing he had led you astray, and not merely outwardly, there in the Sierra, but above all led you astray as a man, with his wanting to be your man.