Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Next to the chef’s work counter in this corner, not hidden but clearly visible from the drive, the following items lay about: an old window frame, leaning against a door jamb; a pile of half-broken roof tiles; a rusty wheelbarrow; several large and small balls that had long since deflated; a rabbit coop without rabbits (only tufts of fur caught in the wire); a cement mixer, missing its cord, its drum full of hardened concrete; a stone-lined well with a pulley but no rope; an empty refrigerator missing its door; a child’s swing attached to a broken beam, with the seat’s single slat sticking up at an angle; a bathtub (the only object that was partly hidden, in the box hedge); a pyramid of animal bones — seemingly washed clean. A small open fire of knobby broom roots was burning in a pit, and roasting on a spit above it was a lamb, and she was allowed to turn the spit from time to time.

As was usual on the southern plateau, away from the mountains, the biting winter morning air yielded from one moment to the next — a leap that could be felt in body and soul — to a nonseasonal mild warmth. The chef on his work stool gazed at the woman through an opening in a knife handle, as she had gazed yesterday through the key bow, and said, “I have left the corner like this on purpose, and even arranged it this way. My nickname for it is ‘the Balkan courtyard,’ and if it were not so bad for business, I would also use that name publicly for the entire complex, with a neon sign up on the roof ridge: El corte balcánico. If the name scares off my guests, that’s not true of the thing itself, this place, this spot. On the contrary: you will see — even if you are not around to see it — that along with my cuisine and the name of my venta, El merendero en el desierto , The Snack Shack in the Desert, it is above all this courtyard that accounts for my popularity. Thanks to it, I was able to pay off the loan you gave me, ahead of schedule. All the tables in the three dining rooms have a view of my Balkan or Lithuanian or Lapp courtyard with its broken ladders, empty cable spools, and sideless baby carriages. Unlike the usual views of a park or the ocean, the nook offers a sense of reality, if perhaps a mournful or painful one, and helps the guests focus, while eating, on the thing at hand, on the important things, and thus makes them value eating here as something out of the ordinary and at the same time enjoy the food both heartily and lightheartedly. The people who seek me out need the view of this courtyard, even if they are not aware of that.

“And—” (a transition that was a specialty of the innkeeper’s?) “—you have, so I hear, commissioned someone to write the book about you. You did not want to write it yourself, and not only to avoid the first person. And the author was not to be a woman but a man, absolutely had to be a man, but why this one in particular? And now you want to, no, you must, head farther south, and, worse still, to the almost treeless Mancha, and are counting every hour, even this one here, until you are back home again, or at least over the roof-tile border, away from the curved southern tiles and back with your flat northern tiles! And at the expression ‘you must,’ you still have that smile.

“Yes, you must continue heading south, for the sake of your book and for something else. And you have never turned back in the face of anything. Ah, and you do not allow anyone to touch you. For you have a plan. And you have almost always had a plan. And at times you have the eyes of a madwoman. Nowadays it is almost only in women that one sees these crazy eyes.

“Why don’t you let me write a chapter for your book, too. Or at least a paragraph? Albanil , meaning mason, is a word from the time of the Arabs here. Look at the albaniles ’ cigarette butts here in the Balkan courtyard: only masons smoke this way, down to the butt of the butt! And listen to the loud voices of the roofers; they constantly have to shout, from the roof to the ground, and vice versa. And listen to the carpenters: so quiet, almost silent. And when they do speak now and then, while fitting beams and hammering laths in place, it is of something entirely different — whatever comes to mind, more like talking to themselves. And are there really any carpinteros left? These here, at least, come from abroad, as do the masons, as do the roofers, all from different countries, and no work crew understands the other. During the last war here, the well shaft was used by the resistance for a radio transmitter. Today the radio operators would be tracked down immediately.”

On the little almond tree a few blossoms were already opening: from the closed bud a single feathery petal stuck out. She involuntarily began to count: three, four, five … She closed her eyes. She opened her eyes. In the air in front of her floated the afterimage of the trees at home near the northwestern riverport city that had been felled by the storm, along with their upended root masses, the image of a vast shipwreck from olden times, an entire Viking fleet. Was that possible, an afterimage with one’s eyes open, and a day and a night later? She closed her eyes, opened them. And above the flat Iberian high plateau floated the jagged peaks and pinnacles, the knife-sharp points and wind gaps of the Sierra de Gredos, along with the sun-bathed fields along the ridges and the pools of shadow in the hundred and twelve gorges. Was that possible, an anticipatory image of something that still lay beyond seven horizons?

Her principle, her ideal, her project: having time. Yes, as almost always in her life up to now, she had time. She had time and stood up to take her leave. It was up to her now to go forth into the land, the embodiment of that old German expression, now fallen into disuse, according to which the days went forth into the land; she would go forth into the land, just as, in another age, one that had never been graspable and countable or counting and valid, the days went forth into the land; had gone; will have gone.

Yet now a sort of dialogue sprang up between the innkeeper and the adventurer, as they stood facing one another in the Balkan courtyard in the middle of the meseta , and this, too, running counter to what was called dialogue in the era that is to be bypassed by her story, yet owing the energy for that bypassing to the era and, in the process of bypassing it, circumscribing the era all the more powerfully and making it recognizable, leaving it as a gray zone, untouched (similar to our heroine’s arcane banking knowledge): the gray zone of a present day—“which does not deserve this name!” (so who was it who said that?) — left gray; hence nothing of the gray current era in my, your, our story, unless as a negative image, in which the gray may grow lighter or for moments begin to flicker and vibrate. And the scraps and fragments of many languages in the speech of the masons, roofers, and carpenters, Slavic, Berber, but also some native, as it were, Castilian, a suitable accompaniment to the conversation between the two of them, which was not at all contemporary.

It was she who began, with a question: “What is your guilt?” (It remained unclear: emphasis on “your”? Emphasis on “guilt”?) — He, after a pause: laughs. — She: laughs, too. — He: “Explain high finance to me.” —She: “I find it uncanny, too, and increasingly so. — Will there be war?” —He: “I do not believe in war. A war is an impossibility in our story. — When will we taste the morning again together this way?”—She: “When the dog rose forms an arch at sunrise.”—He: “Look in a different direction with your crazy eyes; I do not want to cut off another fingertip.”—She: “Perhaps I will encounter my greatest male enemy today, and my greatest female enemy. That would be nice.”—He: “On the border between La Mancha and Andalusia they’re still mining mercury, to separate gold and silver for coins from the lifeless rock.”—She: “That was once upon a time. And besides, there are no coins any longer. Look, a bird’s nest in the drum of the cement mixer.”—He: “And do you remember what causes the sound down there in the gorge?”—She: “The pounding? It sounds like a giant hammer beating on a hard pad, but with something soft inserted between the hammer and the pad? The blows landing at regular intervals, four or five times a minute, and all night long, and all day long?” —He: “The drumming, the thumping, the stamping, the giant water-driven wooden hammer on a flywheel, the as-yet-undestroyed remnants of the long-gone tannery that used to exist at the bottom of the gorge, abandoned hundreds of years ago and hammering in the void when your predecessors, traveling on money business, passed through here on their way to the kings and the one and only emperor, whose realms without your loans would have fallen apart like grown-ups’ playthings, which is what they really were behind the shield of gold and money, and correspondingly childish and deadly, and for you, their successor in the world of finance, equally or differently powerful, the tanning hammers, drive wheels, and fulling pads have continued working, without raw materials and without any product — except that in the meantime the pads sound as if they were the hides themselves — and as long as this rhythmic knocking and banging continues, I, too, would like to continue with my dicing, slicing, turning, shaking, and sprinkling from morn till night.”