Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

The winter/January traveler was last seen turning and walking backward until she disappeared from view: a considerable stretch on the straight, steeply rising main road out of town. From the two rivers down below the crackling of the thawing ice floes as they gallop toward the sea, one piggybacking on the other. Up there the crest of the throughway, with the glint of a pass.

It is still early in the day. Plenty of time! (The greeting customary in these parts.) Before night’s end, which had been just a short while ago, almost her only companions being objects and their outlines, trees, houses, empty streets, the only sound the hooting of owls, taking on the contours of an endlessly repeated Arabic letter; and just after that the great majority of the animals, morning birds, ravens, blackbirds, falcons; and just after that the suddenly swelling swarm of pedestrians, among them not a few schoolchildren, all still in the darkness; and after that an hour in which machines dominated the scene, cars, planes, tractor-trailers, helicopters, with the passersby reduced to background figures, the animals (especially the birds) to sporadic undertones; and now, with the woman’s, “Ablaha’s,” vanishing up on the pass, that interval, still half-morning, half-midday, when with or without sunshine the whole region is going full blast, and yet stillness returns, a sort of second stillness, in which the machines, too, including the noisiest ones, have subsided into a kind of backdrop of activity, the occasional clatter of a helicopter, the drone of a motorcycle now almost reduced to memories, like the TV antennas, whether arrow-shaped or parabolic, and only the smoke rising straight up from the chimneys represents the present and creates a foreground reaching to the horizon on all sides (“hearth”: Wasn’t that once another word for “home”?), one step at a time the area around the rivercity was re-created in its morning guise, this time as well, today once again, or it reconstituted itself, embodied a being of flesh and blood, earth and fire, din and silence, a mighty being, a planet that in spite of everything still rose from the dead each day, stretching to its outer limits, not so much bursting with life as infinitely elastic.

Yes, a special planet had forced, pushed, fought, elbowed its way into the light of the world (so yesterday morning had not been the last time after all). And what reinforced this impression was precisely the fact that the area served as a transit point or passageway and as an intersection or junction and place of exchange — witness the bank building at the confluence of the rivers — for all continental and transcontinental movements. How would her area manage without her? How would her planet survive without her?

Perhaps she continued to walk backward for a while longer. But by the time she reached the top of the pass she had been striding full speed ahead for a good while. She did not even look back; presumably the so-called lady banker did not look back even once at her so-called riverport city down below, at her so-called planet! Not one thought for us here, no image of me in my narrow galley of a room, no good wishes sent from up there to us down here, the hiccups of the boy in front of the gatekeeper’s lodge long since switched off, the drawing tossed in the trash, the drawing with her face most likely twisted into the grimace on a clumsily forged banknote!

Yet as she crossed the first lane of the highway she had almost been run over by a truck. And even before that, the garden gate, snapping shut, had almost jammed her fingers. And while still in the house, luggage in hand, she had missed one of the several stair steps and for a scary moment had teetered on the verge of a major fall (a young woman in the neighborhood, whom she of course did not know — only I know of this accident, and hardly anyone shares my dismay — recently fell to her death this way).

And far from being relieved at having been spared, she had actually been indignant. Indignant? Yes, indignant at the thought that her trip might have come to naught; she would have missed the Sierra de Gredos; she would not have seen the village in La Mancha where her so-called author lived; she would not have been able to recount her other life, unofficial, but for her all the more characteristic, to this self-appointed, so-called author! In reality, this disloyal woman was even glad to get away for a while from her “leeched-out” country, from “this suburban life, beset by tedium — suburbaniting being the equivalent of rusticating,” “the life there, often measurable only in numbers and in countdowns, only in seconds, minutes, hours, instead of in moments, daydreams, surges, inhaling and exhaling. Desiring, letting go, desiring all the more.” What kind of desiring? What kind of desiring? Already she is too far away; she cannot hear me anymore. Did she ever hear me? Will she ever hear me? (The narrator here, dear reader, will not chime in again for quite a while.)

While crossing the top of the low pass, up there on the highest crest of the straight-as-a-die highway, she sang. Exotic singing, even for this day and age when the most unfamiliar tones, those of pygmies or other aboriginal peoples, can apparently belong to everyone. Singing without words; or rather with words, but in an idiom that no one understood, not even the singer herself — but what was there to understand? A singing analogous to riding; high in the saddle? but without a horse.

She had become once more the adventurer she had always been. And she had already survived the first adventure of this sortie, if only a minor one, right after she crossed the city limits: a man in a car had recognized her despite her disguise, which excited him all the more (a celebrity defenseless in the wild), and pulled up next to her, not only pointing to the backseat with his thumb but at the same time grabbing for her with his other hand. Through his open window she had struck him in the face with her bag, which she was still carrying over her arm, so hard that he tipped forward, his foot slipping off the brake, and involuntarily stepped on the accelerator — the car lurched forward and was already shooting past; what else could the driver do now but get out of there — but from the look in his eyes it was clear that she had made another enemy, an irreconcilable one, and he would take revenge, not immediately, for this was not the moment, but the moment would come. And once again that was fine with her: beyond the borders of her area she knew she was in enemy territory.

A strange state of affairs: back home hardly anyone knew who she was, and that helped her feel at home there, but elsewhere many people recognized her, and this recognition was usually accompanied by hostility. Threats, danger, exposure: so there were times when one experienced oneself out there in the real world only this way, as an adventurer more or less against one’s will? And now she suddenly found herself back — at last — in just such a period (which in the meantime had faded from memory, relegated to the realm of legend). Heroic life? From now on, nothing but the heroic life! (We shall see.) She swung her bag onto her back and now had both hands free. And she stuck one of the feathers from her belt into her hatband.

It was a man’s hat. Except that in the period when she undertook her legendary journey there was hardly anything for men that could not also be for women (the reverse, however, was hardly the case). From the top of her head to the tips of her boots she had on nothing that a man could not have worn just as well. Yet the way she wore it, and the way she strode along: there, under the open sky, on the shoulder of the highway, this was a woman if ever there was one, and not a woman disguised as a man, but a woman with rather broad shoulders, unusually large hands, and also rather large feet, recognizable from a distance, at first glance, as a woman to the core, as never before: Good God, what should one look at if not at her? And will she favor me now with so much as a glance?