Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Wild dove feathers on a conveyor belt, and one person or another also picked them up and pocketed them. Some people dressed in black, about to take off to attend a village funeral. A family sleeping on a bench off to one side, even the parents barefoot. An army of deep, gleaming reflections that catch our eye and make us turn our heads, but nowhere an image, a live one? A child, staring straight ahead, ignoring the motley scene, and thus also ignoring it for me.

Single raindrops on the dusty road. Walking up a creosoted plank, as wide and thick as a door, from the wharf to the ship. Where had she seen this plank before? In the maritime museum in Madrid, in a display of the equipment with which the sailors of the Spanish-Austrian empire had sailed across the seas, especially the western ones, to “West India,” Venezuela, Mexico. The board was so thick, and it was seated so firmly on both ends, that it did not sway or bounce once under her feet, all the way to the railing. So when was that? In the sixteenth century, around 1556, to be precise, shortly after the abdication of the emperador , the emperor Charles the Fifth, and at the time of his crossing, in a litter because of his gout, of the Sierra de Gredos, on the way to his retirement in the cloister of (San) Yuste, in the southern foothills. And where was that? In the largest Spanish international port of the time, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, also a kind of riverport, on the río Guadalquivir, below Seville, where they hauled in the Indian gold from afar. The gangplank was not yet positioned vertically, fastened to a wall with ropes, as later in the museum, and it was also not creosoted, but scoured white by salt (from the famous salt mines of Sanlúcar, with their “salt unequaled for drying cod”), and she had walked up it barefoot, like the sleeping family from overseas today, or whenever, on another morning of departure here, or wherever, in the airport terminal.

She was famous in a way that allowed her pretty much to decide for herself whether people would recognize her or not. And thus she usually went unrecognized, even though someone always stopped short in front of her and involuntarily traced her face and her outlines in the air — and was then at a loss as to what to do with her: the drawing erased.

Becoming blurry and interchangeable in this way was difficult to sustain in airports, however. That was where she was always most likely to be recognized, for better or worse. Usually for worse. It never happened immediately upon her being recognized that people wished her ill. At the first sight of her, many eyes even expressed surprise and pleasure. Someone or other seemed almost happy to run into her. Even those who had some prejudice against her were at first taken aback and barely refrained from greeting the woman warmly. She looked completely different from the impression people would have formed from yet another report, article, photograph, news item, portraying this devious string-puller and puppeteer.

First of all, in real life she was infinitely more beautiful. And then, in contrast to her occasional staged appearances on television, where she displayed a grimly noncommittal expression, she was open and accessible. The very way she moved revealed that from everything and everyone she passed she absorbed some feature and took it with her, in her swinging shoulders, at her temples, behind her ears, in the curve of her hips, in her wide knees, and it was precisely that feature that stood for one as an entire person — the feature discovered by her in a flashing glance and scanned into memory, that reminded one of oneself as a figure that bore no resemblance to a type or to one’s role in the current situation.

A jolt, and just as quickly it was over. The attentiveness and empathy shown by that person were all an act. Didn’t everyone know that in her youth, before she took up her few previous professions — before her present one — she had starred in a film (a film, by the way, that was still shown, not only in certain movie theaters in Europe but also in clips during her television appearances: a tale from the Middle Ages in which she, one lay performer among others, had played Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur and at the same time the mysterious beloved — was she or wasn’t she? — of the knight Lancelot).

This era, the time in which her present story was taking place, was one of distrust, by now unprecedented. No one believed anyone anymore. Or at least people did not believe others’ displays of affection or friendliness, compassion or desire, let alone love, of no matter what kind. If a person beamed and expressed joy, others did not accept his assertion of happiness — even when the person in question was a child. A person might scream in pain — but after a moment of hesitation and concern, all too brief, the person he was with would look at him askance: not just with distrust but also with disdain.

None of the true or perhaps primal emotions were taken at face value for long, with the exception of hate, disgust, contempt. Were those primal emotions? The primal emotions from the dawn of time? At any rate, this was an era of spectators who were not simply malicious but actually evil-minded. Perhaps not at first or second sight, but later, and then relentlessly, they wished those who crossed their paths ill. This woman’s beauty now: ah, yes! But as they turned away, the spark of pleasure and reflectiveness changed abruptly to thoughts of violence: of hurting her for her beauty; humiliating her for it; punishing her for it. Was there such a thing as primal hate, primal rage, primal disgust, initially undirected, then seeming to find redemption in taking aim at beauty, this most rare phenomenon? I, the spectator, as judge and hangman? Redeemed in this manner from the hate inside me?

Airports seemed in those/nowadays to have become the breeding grounds for the spoilsport activities of the millions of malevolent spectators. At least in these surroundings their hostility was not subject to any soothing influences (which, on the other hand, were hoped for? after all, didn’t I myself suffer from this blind rage?). Was it the stale air and the ubiquitous artificial lighting — even in places where the natural light, coming in from outside, would have been adequate — that made us all the more irritable? Or the impatience, unavoidable in such a place, that also provoked ill will? Airports, especially the large ones — and there were almost nothing but large ones, or enormous ones, now — irritated people into hostility. And a person who had already been a sort of enemy was almost always transformed, when we bumped into each other there, into a definite, definitive enemy (without words — precisely because we did not exchange a word).

Thus she now ran into one of her enemies from work, who was clearly on his way to some other place entirely, but crossed her path again and again in the labyrinthine complex, or was walking in front of, behind, or even next to her. Finally he turned white as a sheet, and she heard him grind his teeth with hate as he lit a cigarette, clicking his lighter fiercely and making it flare up as if he were about to burn someone at the stake, while at the same time he punched the airless air with his metal attaché case. And countless strangers, at the sight of her well-known face, were ready to hurl insults at her. The insults could come unexpectedly, from a side corridor, or when someone passed her on the moving walkway, or from behind her, hissed by someone she could not see — who remained out of sight, either because after launching the sneak attack he promptly disappeared or because as a matter of principle she never turned to look at such people.

Now, in the hour before her flight, a voice became audible, close to her ear, the voice of a woman, not soft, just shaking, with rage? with age?: “You should be ashamed of yourself. You have brought shame on your father and your mother and your country. Shame on you!” Beauty as provocation? It seemed that in this transitional era it had become a wicked provocation — her kind of beauty made people turn wicked? And how did the woman react to this contempt? On the one hand, it left her unscathed, this woman who was happy to have no parents and no home. But on the other hand, as a mere rebuke, it awakened and deepened her awareness of guilt — no hour passed when that did not suddenly intervene in her life, between one step and the next. And yet on the other hand: an ants’ trail there beside the moving walkway! The dead pigeon, skeletal, way up on top of the glass dome, where it had lain for years. The rustling of the palms of Jericho. Or are, and were, those the equally towering palms of Nablus? She had sat, was sitting, is sitting, will have sat, all alone in the sun on a deserted terrace with a view of the desert. The dog half rolled in the sand; next to his stomach, the much smaller cat, likewise.