Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

She shook off the shards of glass. Was that a bullet hole? She closed the roof of the car; when the sun went down, it got cold in this highland hollow. She put on makeup; she could do this while driving — still at a snail’s pace and hindered further by the traffic lights, increasingly frequent, yet without intersections, without any other sign of a settlement, the land to either side still lying fallow. She piled her hair on her head and wound it into a knot. She took the acacia branch, which had fallen into the Santana when the glass shattered, broke off the thorns one at a time, and stuck it diagonally through the knot of hair. She tied on a gauzy white cloth whose hem partially concealed her eyes. She turned on the car radio and set the dial to the station indicated on other roadside columns, now illuminated for the night, these columns, too, coming up at every rotation of the wheels, and, unlike the temperature and time indicators, always giving the same call numbers for the station.

She had been warned about Nuevo Bazar. From several quarters word had reached her that the place had changed recently (and the warnings had nothing to do with the current rumors of war); it was no longer a good place. The author of the most recent travel guide — whom, to be sure, one could not trust any more than most of the proliferating advice- and hot-tip-dispensers, assigners of plus or minus points, for all sorts of regions, no matter how out of the way — wrote: “Nuevo Bazar, a mixture of Andorra, Palermo, and Tirana. Every morning ten truckloads of blood-soaked sawdust to be disposed of. Mounds sprinkled with lime, growing daily, outside the city, which does not deserve the name of ‘ciudad’ but has become a death zone, popularly known now simply as ‘La Zona,’ and no longer Nuevo Bazar.”

But not a word about this on the radio. For a long time, local news briefs, and these dealing only with the weather, the water level, prices at the indoor market, the times of movie showings and church services. Not until almost the end did the word “war” occur, or rather a denial: “no war”; allegedly only scattered skirmishes were taking place, far off in the mountains to the south. And only at the very end, but then for a while, and repeated every few car lengths: “War!”—but somewhere else entirely, not merely in another country — in Africa; no rumors of sporadic slaughters of the mountain tribe in the Sierra, or of tribal members among themselves? no, “the” war was world news: and yet how involved the two announcers on Radio Nuevo Bazar, a man and a woman, both with unmistakably very young voices, seemed to be in this real, universally acknowledged war, as one could hear from their rapid-fire question-and-answer, and also reporting, game. The war over there in Africa — actually not that much farther than the Sierra—: that was the thing; that was it; that was where things were happening; and what are you people doing here, what are we young folks doing here, in this backwater?

Yet the two announcers were for the most part reporting only what was being reported over there in the African war-torn area. “Reported,” that was a word that occurred in every sentence in their accounts, and when an incident, always having to do with mass death and destruction, was introduced with that word, the incident was considered proven; “reported” meant, as far as the war was concerned: this way and no other way; uncertainty impossible; “confirmed”—the usual conclusion of the report; “allegedly” or “probably,” as in the case of the “vague rumors” from the Sierra: out of the question.

And the height of unimpeachability was achieved when one also gave the person doing the “reporting” the status of eyewitness (“one”? the reporter? the war itself?): “According to eyewitness reports …”—no greater truth was knowable. And such reporting, the definitive evidence, could only go hand in hand with the horrific?; reporting and horror were inseparable, and not solely on the news? also in books? or had this always been the case? reporting without horror was not really reporting? commanded no attention? was not heard? no longer heard? was not taken seriously? reporting-and-war-and-atrocities: only that was taken seriously?

Without turning off the radio, leafing at random through her vanished daughter’s Arabic booklet, then even reading bits here and there (that was possible during the stop-and-go drive into Nuevo Bazar): “Al-Halba was a place in Baghdad …” “in the presence of this sheik one felt as if one were in a garden …” No matter how this New Bazaar might have changed since her last trip, from one moment to the next she suddenly had time for the place, at least for this night — time? yes, and not only for the place.

And so what if Nuevo Bazar represented a threat or an obstacle, according to the guidebook? That was all right: after all, danger — not to be confused with “war”—was her element. And the infamous masses of people in the “Zone”? Even there she caught a whiff of value, and certainly not out of nobility on her part (the very notion of catching a whiff contradicted that), but out of animal instinct: an instinct that did not derive from her profession, her managerial activities, but rather had brought her to them in the first place? Without a whiff of value, no adventures that extended beyond conventional banking and benefited business undertakings, and not only these? One of the few sentences the author underlined in the hundreds of articles he was reading in preparation for his book on her: “The secret of this businesswoman: in almost everything, even unfavorable circumstances, she catches a whiff of value. Not a gambler but an adventurer.”

The story, and she as well, wanted my adventurer to remain unseen on the evening of that drive into Nuevo Bazar. Despite the shattered windshield, not one gaze from all the thousands she encountered came to rest on her. And that had to do not only with her partial disguise and the cloth over her eyes. She simply willed people not to register her presence, and so it was.

The author of one of the earlier articles, who had been allowed to shadow her during a workday at the bank and then also accompany her through her riverport city in the evening, had noticed this ability she had, and had ascribed it to a special feature of her office: she sat there alone, inaccessible, closed off, visible to no one, behind a door that could be opened only by a button on her desk; and at the same time she had before her, in the same wall as the door, a pane as large as a shop window that provided a view, not of the outdoors but of the office space, with the cubicles where the bank officers sat and received their clients or whomever; through this pane she could keep her eye on everything happening out there, while those on the other side saw only their own reflections in the matte, silvery, foil-like surface.

The author of another feature on her, who had also written a soccer novel, explained the phenomenon of her not being seen (or the non-phenomenon) by saying that her way of looking past others toward something in the distance, a vanishing point or goal, and of tracing with her eyes a possible passage between the people around her, was reminiscent of the “divinely talented Libero,” who, with the ball on his foot, having glimpsed an opening among the opposing players, would distract and mesmerize them into position, thereby preserving the gaps his eyes had detected, after which he, Libero, now invisible to those who had been thus magnetized and blinded, would kick the ball as he wished, past the other team’s players, or over them, and usually score.

Whatever the case: that evening she did not want to be seen, and no one saw her. Everybody looked away from her; at most someone might follow her gaze: for the way she focused on the horizon suggested that something remarkable must be going on there. But there was nothing to see, not even a horizon.