Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And the last of the versions: neither the breeze of observation, nor the confession of guilt, nor her own voice after a long period of silence, nor … no, she owed her newfound ability to contract all the sinews of her body and leap to her feet to the morning wind: “It was the morning wind.”

What confusion again until she finally reached the path. First she crept on all fours, wriggled, crawled on her stomach like a seal, as if lacking arms and legs, slid sideways, clumsily, not in the least bit soldierly (the warriors whom she passed on her way out did not react in their sleep to being shoved aside; that was how deathly exhausted they were, sleeping so soundly that no snoring was to be heard).

While she was still pulling herself together, she had uttered a cry, no, a rattle, a stammer, consisting only of consonants. And now a barking, hoarse and grating, issued from the beautiful woman’s throat, followed by a grunting, as if from a creature wallowing in mud, a wolf ’s howling, as if not belonging to her, from beyond the horizon, an old man’s cough, a sound that combined mooing, baaing, and bleating, to which actual animal noises seemed to respond from the distance, here a jay’s squawking, there the fluting of a nightingale, there the whistling of a red kite, shriller than any referee’s whistle.

For the first steps on the path she hopped along in a squat, her mouth awry, her tongue hanging out like an idiot’s. She stank, and was smeared with her own excrement. But at the same time, her eyes: what pride, what clarity and calm, such as one sees only in the heroine of a film, in the most disturbing scenes as well.

She of all people, whose ideal was the Taylor system, originally devised for the assembly line in factories, to assure that every motion would represent the ultimate in coordination and efficiency, focused on the product, although she applied it to life apart from the assembly line and production — she, in a mess that could not be uglier, more unworthy of a human being? No. For this was not a hopeless confusion but an almost holy one. Negra aventura, black adventure? Black and white?

She stood up. Her lips twitched, particularly the lower one; yet not for speaking. She jingled the last few chestnuts and other nuts in her pocket: in the old tales these had been the basic sustenance of the most solitary adventurers. A rumble of thunder directly in front of her: her own breath. She moved backward, and not only for the first few steps. For a while she swayed as she walked, even staggering now and then. Later she noticed that she really was barefoot.

Farther down the mountain she found herself in a strip of forest, and encountered the most harmless and at the same time most terrible plague of the Sierra (actually there were no other plagues, only dangers): the flies.

Even before the sun, with the warmth rising from the lowlands, they buzzed around one, small, almost delicate, also soundless, hardly corporeal, except that there were myriads of them, as in the old stories, and as soon as one paused for a moment, myriads upon myriads, not biting flies, but rather the kind that merely brushed against one, though constantly, and not only brushing but also flying into one’s mouth (see above), or, when one shut one’s mouth, into one’s nostrils, far in, likewise into one’s ears, and in particular into one’s eye sockets; no sunglasses and no scarf could be so tight that they would not slip inside, and scads of them.

And this tongue of forest — the flies kept to the forest — went on forever. The flies clustered on one’s face, in one’s eyes, in one’s nose — buzzed and circled around all the small orifices in one’s head, without letting up for a breath, without letting one breathe at all. And now you could not even stop, despite your thirst, at a trickle of water that finally turned up: already the myriads have whirled through your eyes into your sinuses, and thence under your scalp — a diabolical breed, even if they do no more than tickle, brush, and bump lightly against you.

But, strange to say: that morning this did not upset her. Any other hiker would have slapped at his head every few steps, just missing his face, hit his nose, knocked his glasses off (see “author’s own experience,” as with the Sierra nettles) — a grotesque sight from a distance, where the dot-sized flies are not visible: she went on unaffected, even in the (close-up) blackest swarms of flies.

Was she already, or still, lying there dying? But wait: would a dead person walk in hops, as she did intermittently, or slide along on the balls of her feet? And one time, at a sharp bend in the road, she waded through a pile of leaves, a sort of leafy dune that reached way above her hips, and she heard her footsteps becoming heavy and slow, like those of an old man with whom she had walked through leaves long ago, those of her grandfather, the singer. And wasn’t that an image, an “auditory image”? “Auditory images are not the images that were lost,” she said. “And was she now, at last, ready to sing?” “No, not yet.”

It was also in the forest with the flies that when she spread her arms one time and “stretched,” her child came to mind, who had once responded to just such a posture, such a stretch, with a look of dismay and shame, for her, her mother. Her raised arms, victorious, in the pose of a victor, had been slapped down then by her child.

And in the same instant, in that deserted forest, a cork-oak forest dense with foliage, she felt herself seen by the vanished girl, through the leaves, which were reminiscent of the oak leaves on playing cards. Time and again, when the two of them had agreed to rendezvous somewhere, she had hunted in vain for the child. And every time she had been spotted by the girl first, at a distance, even in a large crowd, and every time the child would then be standing in front of, next to, behind her, no matter how the mother had scoured the scene; or she, the mother, crammed in among thousands of heads, heard her calling, as if she were miles away and at the same time right by her eardrum. A mother-daughter odyssey? In spite of everything, that was not enough for her. Her face-seeking eyes, her eye-seeking eyes, no longer sought only her own child.

Out of the fly forest, and with that, out of the Sierra de Gredos. Before her on the plain the big little town of Candeleda, olive trees, figs, palms. A crisscrossing of the warm, almost sultry air currents from the south and the breezes from high up at the summit plain, and above there a cloud in which one now saw another “barrier cloud,” then the fluffy little formation known in the region as a “butterfly cloud”; in her mouth the taste of tar steaming in the heat, blending with that of new-fallen snow.

Advancing toward the town at the foot of the mountains by a side path that snaked along a narrow, vertical depression, not unlike a foxhole, quite typical of the southern spurs of the Sierra. She asked a child for the date and time, and received precise information. At sunrise, on the sunken path, in the midst of the fields, among orange trees, she turns back once more toward the massif, already shrouded in the blue of distance. And so, walking backward again on the last stretch to Candeleda: the Sierra veiled, an enormous box taking up the whole horizon, yet light in weight.

One of the torrents from above, broadening beside the path into a stream, which widens as it leaves the mountains into deep, clear pools, called “piscina natural.” Letting herself down on the bank and plunging her entire body into the water, diving under, at first not to swim but simply to drink. And drinking and swimming along with her, the little animal brought from the Sierra, the tiny little man-frog.

And if this were a fairy tale, she would have drunk the brook dry in a few gulps. She lay on her stomach, her head underwater, and — yes, gulped. Our orderly adventurer gulped and gulped and gulped. And her thirst was of the sort that not even the waters of the torrent called Garganta Santa María, formed from the confluence of the Garganta Blanca, the White Torrent, and the Garganta Lobrega (from “wolf” or “she-wolf”), could quench.