Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And as the years passed, he left you without word of himself. And in doing so, he had no sense of privation. For he knew he was incorporated into you from a distance, perhaps even more intensely than you into him. Night after night he disappeared, experiencing himself and being extinguished in you. That sufficed for him.

And one day it no longer sufficed for him. For at last he knew that he was synchronized with you. The discrepancy between his, the man’s, time and your, the woman’s, time was at an end. Or at least that was what he pictured: now, at least, instead of “in his own time,” both your time! Or that is what the story called for. The story decided that the man and woman who have lost each other, seemingly forever, shall come together again, and that is also no myth. “That we may no longer come together on earth, but only in some heaven or paradise — that must not be. And that will not be!”

She lay among the ferns the following night as well. She felt almost at peace. Had it not been for the thirst, which returned, this time a thirst that no blackberries could quench (besides, the last ones had been consumed long since). Again the starry sky, now showing its Sierra multiplicity above the translucent fern fingers, and with it the pencil-thin sickle of the new moon and the Milky Way, which brought to mind her vanished daughter’s Arabic book: the figure of the “teacher” in the book had “the form of milk.” Ah, her vanished child: one could draw strength and resolution from the dying, but from the vanished …

The air that night was no longer still, but wafted, barely perceptible, past her temples. Nocturnal birds, far, far off, called — not owls, but bird calls such as she had never heard before, like those of crickets at a great height, and she could not get enough of them. What hurtled across the sky intermittently were showers, not of bright stars but of dark foliage, blown through her field of vision. This foliage created at least a transient horizon, and horizon meant: relief. (Loss of images meant: lacking a horizon. And at the same time this gave her a remarkable sense of filiation.)

Now and then, as if for a short journey in a sleeping car, she also fell asleep and dreamed, the same dream every time, in which she was walking through a ford, with shoes on, and the water was getting deeper and deeper, and then there was no more ford, and she lost her shoes, would have to appear in public barefoot.

Wasn’t that something like an image? So there was not a complete image blackout? Nonsense: the loss of the image and images had nothing to do with dream images. For it was not, or had long since ceased to be, dream images that refreshed existence and constituted the world, but rather almost exclusively those that came when one was wide awake, the matitudinal ones — or those had been the ones.

She woke up. The blackness of night still around her. But a morning breeze was already blowing. And then the notion came to her that she and her story could continue only if she spoke of her “guilt.” It was time to confess it, in detail, out loud, distinctly. But to whom? For she could not address her confession to the air or to a rock or to the human frog. Or could she? Why not tell the story to the underside of a fern frond, for instance? With impatience — which was rare in this woman to whom that expression from the Sierra, tener correa , hold your shoelace, meaning “Be patient!” applied nicely — she awaited the light that would herald the dawn.

There: the first fans, jagged like a lizard’s tail, and after a moment of grayness already greening, and on the underside of the delicate dwarf fern leaves the pattern of dot-shaped spore sacs, like the dots on dice, here two eyes, here five, here only one, many sixes! and, as was proper for dice eyes, nowhere more than that, never seven, eight, or more of the dots, though in some cases little fingers that lacked them altogether. All right: speak, tell your story.

And as she opened her mouth, she saw that all around her in the ferns other people were lying. They were in uniform. They were soldiers. And they were all asleep, as exhausted as one could possibly be. The one closest to her was even sleeping with his eyes half open.

And she promptly turned to him and told him, who, like his comrades, would have heard not a word, even if she had begun to shout, that during her first time in the Sierra de Gredos, when her man went missing, she had wished that the child in her womb would die, or at least she had entertained the idea.

So? Hadn’t many parents, and perhaps mothers in particular, wanted for a moment to be rid of their children, or, at least — what was the expression—“entertained with approval” the thought of their going away? And did one not hear every day of mothers who had actually killed their children, not in the tradition of that sorceress in antiquity — to take revenge on their vanished father, who had abandoned her — but out of despair?

“Yes, but at the time of my death wish for my unborn child, I made up my mind to be successful and to become powerful,” she told the sound-asleep soldier, whom neither a Katyusha launching multiple rockets nor a Lincoln’s drum or whatever right by his ear would have awakened — maybe only a cry of pleasure, she thought involuntarily.

So? What was objectionable about success and power? “It was the kind of power and success,” she said. “I wanted to be a player on the world stage. And for a while I believed in that, and especially in the ability of an individual to make a difference in this day and age. And how easy it was to achieve the sort of success and power I acquired. But what was my success? A pattern without value. And my power? There was and is no more power, only the abuse thereof. In addition, my guilt was that I wanted to win. That I made a profession of my business of foreseeing, seeing what’s what, seeing clearly. That I wanted to show the world. That I wanted to conquer the world.”

Well? Why not? “Yes, why not? But not that way.”

Several versions have been narrated of the reasons or stimuli that got the victim of the loss of images back on her feet early that morning in the heart of the Sierra de Gredos and sent her on her way. Let the reader decide which of the reasons seem credible — perhaps less important — or sensible — perhaps more important — or so crazy that they, without being one or the other, are perhaps most important.

One of the versions went as follows: the heroine, and thus also her story, was able to move on as a result of admitting her guilt and betraying her secret (so according to plan).

The second: it was the voice. She could have spoken about anything — the main point was that she opened her mouth and spoke, even if only to herself—“for with the sound of her own voice she pulled herself out of the pit.”

A third version: it was the declaration of love, or whatever it was supposed to be, by that narrator who had intervened before, the narrator “from above,” which lit a fire under her and gave her new legs and arms, and so on.

A fourth or seventh version (the one appealing most to a certain reader, which would mean, however, that it is because of him, the reader, and his particular ways?): the strength to get up resulted from a mistaken impression, when she first mistook an object in the fern hollow, or an animal, for instance a bird, for something else, then realized her mistake, and in observing the object in question, a robin, let us say, teetering on a fern frond above her and eyeing her and clearly not a wren and certainly not a hawk or a fern rat, saw the difference between the two objects, the one before her eyes and the one for which she had at first mistaken it: the adventurer of the loss of images derived the strength to get up and continue on her way, as this version has it, from the breeze of observation, which wafted toward her from the thing she was observing, as in the Arabic saying “The breath of mercy wafted hither from Yemen.”