Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And then, already on the way to the car, she looked back along the line formed by her shoulder (no one could sight along the shoulder as she could, into the near and far distance at once), and said: “Listen, the footsteps in the gravel of the plateau. How the ground of every landscape one walks through produces its own unique sound — as here, in this old, drowsy, silently weathering residual area, the ever-thickening layers of soft, coarse-grained sand consisting of granite and mica, mixed with bits of rotted wood and plant stalks: a crunching so different from the gravel in any garden or cemetery you might think of; crunching? a sound without a name, new, like a new color.”—And here one of the roofers chimed in loudly from the almost completely repaired roof, understandable despite his foreign tongue: “Yes! Walking in the Berbers’ sand makes a different sound. Absolutely not to be compared with the sound here. Not a sound — a tone!”—A mason spoke up, already dismantling the scaffold: “Yes, and walking through the mountain pastures below the Gran Sasso d’Italia: every blade of grass a taut guitar string, and every step — ah!”

And finally the carpenters, usually so silent, spoke up. Since their profession was seldom called upon, in this period they had become specialists in all sorts of auxiliary trades, and here at the hostel, after quickly accomplishing their main business, had also pruned the acacias for the innkeeper, repaired the rickshaw-like shopping tricycle, had ironed the tablecloths and napkins, and installed a satellite dish, with which their employer could bring in all the local stations from Alaska, the land of his persistent longing. And at the moment they were sitting in the back of their pickup truck, ready to depart, their legs dangling over the tailgate, and they said, “Back in the Balkans we walked only on limestone. And the limestone was porous and hardly made a sound. And certainly no tone. We hardly heard ourselves walking on the limestone there. Our steps were swallowed up by the lime subsoil. But our walking did become audible in the mud of the lowlands, from Voyvodina to the plain of Thessaloniki. One half of our Balkan lands consisted of this mud, the other of limestone. And back in the days when there was still work in the Balkans, we went from the limestone to the mud, and vice versa, and vice versa again.”

Finally — all the workmen were gone, but a brigade of sous-chefs and waiters was arriving, and the woman had just turned the key of the rough-terrain vehicle — the chef came running toward her, knife in hand, the point aimed at the ground, handed her a bundle of provisions, wrapped in white linen, through the window, and said (this, too, belonged to the dialogue): “Do not start eating this too soon. One’s first hunger is not real hunger. — In the books it used to say that one could not set out on an adventure without clean shirts and money and, in case of need, salves for the healing of wounds. And a long time ago you said you wished you could walk somewhere with me, out there — not for a hike, simply walking. And then you walked so fast that soon I could not keep up.”—And she: “Look—” What was it she said: “a wood pigeon”? “a flash of lightning”? “a polecat”? it was no longer audible; she was already driving away.

There was another recurring passage in the old books: “He” (the hero — why were they almost exclusively men, with a woman rating at most an intermezzo? why, for example, was there no detailed story of a woman to be read, from the sixteenth or seventeenth century?) “traveled on the road for many a mile without encountering anything worthy of telling.” And now, during the drive south toward the Sierra de Gredos, she encountered hardly anything that, according to the more or less established conventions or rules, would have been suitable for her story, which she did want to be thoroughly adventurous.

The sun shone. A still haze hovered over the unvaryingly bare and crumbly tableland. The poplars in the few riverside meadows, or vegas , or lukas , stood ramrod straight and leafless. The olive zone, where a harvest would have been under way, did not begin until the southern foothills of the Sierra. She rolled along, hers almost the only vehicle in her lane. Coming in the opposite direction, at close intervals, however, were mostly trucks, and each time the same model and the same color, bearing the name of one and the same firm, which apparently owned a huge fleet, all with seemingly identical mustachioed men sitting high behind the wheel, all without passengers; yet each accompanied by a dangling, rocking rosary, complete with dagger-shaped cross, in the front windshield, identical to that of the driver in front of him; one after another of these drivers in his cab raised his hand to greet her with the same gesture, each smiling at her with his eyes as a sign of comradeship but also friendly concern, wishing her all the best as he passed: as if she needed that.

And dangling in her windshield was always that same medallion with the white angel pointing rigidly out of the image toward the empty tomb of the resurrected Christ. And no one was walking along the side of the road. And in the sky floated a single cloud that did not change during the entire trip. And no city came into view. And no fire burned in the thousand fields of the meseta , which with time came to represent a single field. And although during those hours nothing worthy of telling occurred, it seemed to my heroine as if one event were following the other, as if the happenings were coming hot on each other’s heels and overlapping harmoniously with one another, as in a traditional story, yet also in a completely different way; as if the narration of her book were moving along all the more emphatically during this interim.

“I experienced spells of faintheartedness, something previously unknown to me,” she told the author later. “This faintheartedness — what a word — urged me to turn around and go home. One time I stopped the car and made a half-turn. And at that very moment I felt: my story was breaking off. And you know how it is with me: feeling myself being narrated — my be-all and end-all, my one and only standard. And I must endure that, I must. Not that I am addicted to danger: but danger is part of it, without danger, no story; without my story: I have not lived, I will not have lived. And so there was only one thing to do: press on. And then came the moment when I accepted the idea of never returning home. It was even all right with me. Inwardly I crossed a line and was ready.”—The author: “Ready for what?”—She: “Ready.” And for the time being she wanted to be alone as she continued her journey.

The only thing that occurred on this stretch: she filled her tank. Where a male hero seeking adventure would perhaps have grown grouchy and impatient, under the same circumstances she drew patience and lightheartedness from the absence of particular happenings; patience she would need for what lay ahead, of that she was certain.

Usually practically a race-car driver, she drove in a leisurely and steady fashion, and at the filling station — this, too, far from any city, along the deserted highway — she inserted a pause after each self-service operation. It suited her fine that the station owner, actually just a shopkeeper, came from his field behind the building, where he was plowing under the previous year’s cornstalks with his tractor, and engaged her in a lengthy exchange about nothing of significance. She even dragged out the conversation, with if possible even more meaningless comments, such as, “Yes, and almost three months till Easter,” or: “Right: the cans of motor oil are heavy,” or: “Yes, soon summer will be here.”