Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

The lord wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie, as if he were simultaneously the hotel manager and the maître d’hôtel, in charge of the restaurant. The curved staircase looked as if it were of marble, and had steps so shallow and broad that one floated up it as if being carried. Their rooms, located in opposite directions, were as spacious as ballrooms, the bed in each case tucked into a corner, and they had floors of something like red brick, with uneven spots, dips and miniature valleys and chains of hills, which made her feel, as she told the author, as if she were walking back home in her garden; “the only thing missing was the swampy patches.”

And when she opened the casement windows and leaned out, gazing toward the south and the Sierra, it looked as if down below in the manor grounds, now brightly lit by the moon, “in my eyes a farmer’s pasture,” a hedgehog hobbled by, the same one as at home; with teeny glittering eyes, as if to say, “I am here already.” And in the castle pond, “in the village puddle,” the glaring reflection of the moon, now transected by the reflection of the familiar matitudinal bat. When, not until their last morning? And the bat mirrored in the still water with a clarity of contour never seen in reality.

The two travelers supping on the ground floor, not in one of the reception rooms but in one of the corner rooms, to be reached by way of a labyrinth of corridors, some of which ended at blank walls or trompe l’oeil doors. The corner room no larger than a niche, yet with a domed ceiling set with thousands of tiny enameled tiles whose colors and shapes formed a repeating pattern, so that at first it looked as though the dome were growing larger and larger, and then as though there were no dome at all but a low, flat ceiling, almost low enough to touch with one’s fingertips from a seated position.

The small chamber was reminiscent of certain almost inaccessible places into which people used to withdraw in earlier times, not for any clandestine activities but because they wanted to be alone with their own kind — close friends, members of their own social class or sex. And in fact this had once been a smoking room, a place reserved for men. Only now it was the woman who led the man there, unhesitatingly taking this turn and that, and, playing hostess, pointing out his place at the table, barely large enough for two, making as if to run her finger over the likewise enamel-tiled wall, to wipe away centuries-old soot. And in fact her hands were now sooty, from the fire in the fireplace, whose dimensions matched those of the niche, the opening no bigger than the stovepipe aperture low in the enameled wall. A mere hand’s breadth from the “firehole” (her term for “fireplace”), the enamel was already cold.

A cold winter night, cold as only winter nights on the plateau can be. Distant thunder. Explosions. In the still damp piles of firewood? The once and perhaps future client had changed for supper; was dressed like the lord of the manor or whomever (who in the meantime was standing in the invisible, inaudible, unsmellable kitchen or wherever). The lady banker or whoever was still in the outfit she had been wearing earlier. At most she picked up from time to time, as if playfully, one of the fans lying next to her plate and ran her finger over one of its five, or six? classic segments, always the same one, painted with landscape images, in this case depicting the Sierra, the Sierra de Gredos? — in this country everything was a “sierra,” from the Bay of Biscay to the Straits of Gibraltar, and this sierra or whatever on the fan could just as easily be the Sierra Cantabria, or the Sierra Guadarrama, the Sierra de Copaonica, the Sierra Morena, or the Sierra Nevada. And appropriately, the traditional term for the obligatory landscape images on all fans: simply país , countryside.

And as if the entrepreneur had tacitly asked the lady banker what she was doing in the Sierra de Gredos, of all places, and in winter, of all times, and with the current world situation, of all things, she then, speaking on her feet (or sitting), delivered one of those pronouncements for which she was famous all over the continent and beyond. (The designations “lady banker” and “entrepreneur” no longer fit the two of them, and not only since their arrival at the castle or hostel; from the moment of their landing at the remote little airport of Valladolid, they had become something else besides; and then, during the evening drive along the road, almost exclusively that something else; a different reality; the second wind of being no one in particular.)

During that meal, eaten in the orbit of the queen who had gone mad, she had a deep voice, hardly recognizable as a woman’s voice, and she said more or less the following: “To me the Sierra de Gredos is the mountain range that epitomizes danger — not just physical danger, but danger per se. I have known this Sierra for almost two decades now. The first time I came, I was pregnant with my daughter Lubna, in my next-to-last month. The child’s father was also there. It was summertime, and we were driving along the southern flank of the mountains, coming from the west, from Portugal, from the Atlantic, where we had landed, and heading east, toward Madrid. The plain, or rather lowlands, across which we were traveling, between the Gredos massif and the Montes de Toledo, was and is in the grip of blistering heat. It seems to me we were not making any headway there in the valley of the río Tajo; hardly stirred from the spot, although at the same time we were traveling along at a good clip. That had to do with the Sierra in the distance: a single naked mass of rock stretching to infinity, always at the same distance and unchanged every time we looked, although in the meantime we had covered perhaps ten kilometers and some twenty miles.

“Finally it became clear that we would turn in that direction. That occurred on the heights of Talavera de la Reina. And the route led north toward the foot of the Sierra. And as we approached, the Sierra remained the same pale blue, almost white (yet even on the sharp Almanzor peak there was no snow left), at any rate paler than the sky. And the night was spent in the konak , the guest house (still in existence at that time) belonging to the cloister of San Pedro de Alcántara, near the only town for miles around, little Arenas de San Pedro.

“The following day we began to climb, on fairly overgrown paths through the wilderness. The child in my belly was quiet as a mouse, much quieter than usual. I could not walk fast, and soon we separated. The plan was to rendezvous in El Arenal, or Mahabba, its earlier name in Arabic, the highest mountain village on the southern slope.

“Along the way I rested one time in the shade of an overhanging cliff, and fell asleep, perhaps for a short while, perhaps a long while. Perhaps I did not sleep at all, just closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I found myself in an image from an alien world. Everything that had just now been familiar had been jettisoned, and me along with it. Nothing about the vegetation, the granite boulders, the path, was familiar, nor was this hand, this belly, this navel, this big toe. The whole world, and I along with it, stood there twisted and displaced, completely awry, without one’s brain being able to straighten it out one way or the other, everything either crooked or upside down, and the sky, too, upside down.

“Despite my round belly I broke into a run, up the mountainside, which in reality meant down the mountain, and promptly fell flat on my face, luckily into one of the many natural water basins on the south side of the Sierra, troughlike hollows in the otherwise slippery-smooth granite beds of the innumerable mountain brooks. Glorious swimming then, and for years and years after that, soon with the child by my side.