Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And she had the man climb in next to her with his suitcase and drove off, heading almost due southwest, in the direction of Salamanca, Piedrahita, Milesevo, Sopochana, Nuevo Bazar, Sierra de Gredos. Above her the first stars were out. And next to her flowed the río Pisuerga, which soon merged with the great río Duero. And the road was increasingly free of traffic, because of a war? harb in Arabic, don’t know, don’t know what that is, either, a “war.” And the Arabic book in her knapsack did not smell of her, the stranger, not in the slightest.

All during the flight the heroine had expected that when she left the plane she would suddenly see her brother behind her. In her mind’s eye she pictured him initially striking out in the same direction as she had taken and sitting in the same aircraft, after changing planes. This image was so powerful that she assumed the shouting behind her was part of it, and only much later, when the shout was repeated over and over, did she turn to look. No, it did not come from her brother.

But the man who was calling to her was also no stranger. It was one of her former clients, once a major entrepreneur who had then gone bankrupt. (In the meantime there were hardly any entrepreneurs left, at most manufacturers and vendors of toys of all kinds — with almost every item, every product, the main selling point was no longer its usefulness or nutritional or some other value, but its value as a plaything, or as a brand, or as a pastime — and swarming around the leaders in the toy business were the hordes of game players and speculators.)

From a certain moment on, she had refused to extend him credit. And besides, he was already so deeply in debt to her bank that the bank seized all his company’s assets and then almost all his personal property. He viewed her, the head of the bank, as responsible for his failure. Against the background of all his faceless competitors, who had in fact collapsed even before he did, and more wretchedly, the victims of impersonal market forces, of an economic situation to which one could not attribute blame or malice, this woman was the only person, the only individual who now, embodying these incomprehensible forces, but also as a particular being, or beast, of flesh and blood, represented something he could identify as his adversary, his destroyer, his executioner. He hounded her for years, and not only with letters. He had to get revenge, but did not know exactly how. Revenge, that was almost his only thought during that entire time.

But no action to match the thought occurred to him. With this woman, there could be no question of killing or beating or rape, of setting her house on fire or — the only thing he had briefly considered — kidnapping her child. All that remained was to wait for her punishment to be carried out by someone else, someone who had also been plunged into misery, or perhaps by the gods, or, best of all, by her herself, for with the passage of time her guilt vis-à-vis him had to become unbearable; at the thought of the injustice she had done him, one day, and he hoped it would be soon, she would throw herself off the roof of her office building into the confluence of the two rivers or, an even more delicious prospect, go stark, raving mad.

For the time being he took satisfaction in seeing her — this woman who could sometimes be remarkably clumsy — stumble, lose a shoe, bump into a door frame, try to open a door by pulling it instead of pushing, or, conversely, pushing instead of pulling; he witnessed such incidents from time to time, if only from a distance, or even only on television. Village bumpkin! A village bumpkin has me on her conscience! And upon hearing the news of her (almost grown-up) daughter’s going missing and then disappearing altogether, he had had no thought at all, or at least none that he put in words. Everything had gone very still inside him, and from that moment on had remained so, as far as that “evil woman” was concerned. No more letters. Once, in the company of a former competitor, who had also been dropped by her and then began to spew hate and threats, the silence in which he listened to the other man was such that the latter felt compelled to interrupt his tirade and say, “But let us speak of something more pleasant!” In the meantime, however, he had finally launched a new company, producing toys for all ages, from the youngest to the most doddering.

Outside the Valladolid airport, the once and future business leader called after her, not because he was sure of having recognized her but because he was not sure it was she. Just as she was probably preoccupied at the moment with her recently released brother, he was preoccupied with her, and not only at that moment, but so much so that if she were to be suddenly standing before him, he would most likely assume she was a look-alike or a mere apparition. And indeed, each time one saw her, she looked so different that at first one took her for someone else altogether, someone completely unfamiliar; and each time, her appearance of the moment made such a deep impression that the next time, one again could not (and did not) associate her appearance with the earlier one.

She, however, had recognized him at once. And he identified her from the uncomplicated way she behaved toward him after that glance of recognition: as if he were still her client, and a good one, an important one actually. The friendly manner in which she invited him into the Landrover was not that of a powerful person or one of higher station but of one who was at his service; as if she still cared about managing his money, and, as his money manager, famous banker or not, were of course at his service as no one else was; as if this service were second nature to her by now, or had always been.

And of course she then proved to be fully informed about him and his business; she knew that he had a meeting the next day in Tordesillas, which was more or less on her route. If they had met anywhere else, at home in the riverport city, in an international airport, or in one of the well-known metropolises, he would have avoided her, even hidden from her, and, if forced to be in her presence, would have preserved an obstinate silence. But in this environment, far from the beaten path, it seemed curiously easy for them to deal with each other. And his speaking seemed to come of its own accord. It may be that the war impending not far from here did its part. (Except that by this time there were so many reports and such contradictory ones every day, and from all over the world, that we could hardly lend credence to yet another.)

He talked and talked, and almost all the while she listened in silence, as she chauffeured her once and perhaps future client across the plateau, deserted now that it was evening. Especially at this hour it became obvious, as at hardly any other, how ancient this region was; one could see it in the residual mountains, silhouetted against the very distant horizon and without exception bare of trees, in the residual hills, in the remnants of cliffs poking up from the earth, worn down and eroded over millions of years. And yet precisely this ancient land here seemed to have the strength to rejuvenate one. At least it rejuvenated them, the two new arrivals. At least it rejuvenated him.

His speaking was lighthearted, and in the course of the drive, over which night soon fell, it grew more lighthearted still. This was a period in which the atmosphere, the “ether,” was buzzing, humming, reverberating with dialogues. The word “dialogue” itself constantly crackled from all channels. According to the most cutting-edge dialogue research, a newly established scholarly discipline that promptly boasted of attracting a huge groundswell of interest, the term “dialogue” by now occurred more frequently — and not merely in the media, the interfaith synods, and philosophical treatises — than “I am,” “today,” “life” (or, alternately, “death”), “eye” (or “ear”), “mountain” (or “valley”), “bread” (or “wine”). Even among prisoners in the exercise yard, “dialogue” was registered with greater frequency than, for instance, “motherfucker,” “scumbag,” or “bitch”; and likewise “dialogue” was recorded ten times more often among the insane and the mentally retarded taking supervised walks in town or in the woods than expressions like “the man in the moon,” “apple” (or “pear”), “God” (or “Satan”), “fear” (or “meds”). Even the few remaining farmers, located at least a day’s journey from each other, were understood to be involved in ongoing dialogue, or at least they were shown again and again engaged in dialogue, and children were also shown dialoguing, even in the last picture in the children’s books approved for adoption as school texts.