Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Many children in the crowd, as usual, and they, too, resemble one another, and not only one child resembling the other, but the children resembling the adults, and not as children resemble their parents, but rather as adults resemble adults; children with grown-up faces. No excessively loud voices; any talking is steady, subdued, as on the way to, or on the way back from, a so-called communal experience.

Gradually one was able to see that these masses, instead of forming a uniform procession, were moving back and forth in innumerable little groups, troops, clusters, and units, with gaps between one team (even as few as two could form a “team”) and the next, at first almost imperceptible, but after a while distinct. At the same time, from one group to the next, a great variety of languages, all spoken in the same subdued tones; not entirely different languages, as becomes clear when one listens carefully, in fact almost always from the same source, from the same language family, but pronounced, accented, aspirated, in entirely different ways, apparently intentionally, by the squads strolling by; and this most noticeably and emphatically in the case of mere dialects and patois, where each of the hundreds of little troops is showing off its own particular variant (of the written language shared by all of them) with the most extensive possible display of unique features; distinguishing itself in this manner from the next little unit, as if that group’s members spoke an incomprehensible Chinese or Siberian mumbo-jumbo, and only here, among us, could pure Castilian or Bazaranian be heard; and thus planting each entity like a standard, announcing, as it marches past, a newly declared language, as a challenge; which matches that image from earlier, during the evening drive, of the line of cars into Nuevo Bazar: the banners, flags, and pennants being frenetically waved from every car, with the windows and tops open, and each cloth bearing different colors and coats of arms.

And among these individual squads — hardly any impression of a corso and evening stroll anymore — none who have eyes for another person, behind them, in front of them, coming toward them, or indeed for any individual. People intentionally look away from one another; not out of scorn or hatred, but rather out of a new kind of reticence (in this respect, too, Nuevo Bazar has changed since the last time); these people have become timid toward and foreign to each other, and above all toward themselves. All of them have become afraid of strangers, even in their own country (perhaps it would be different in another country?). And tomorrow they will also turn their head away with a jerk when they are alone and encounter someone from the smaller or larger clan in whose company they are today.

And it is not only the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine faces that resemble each other — almost all of them wear their hair the same way, for instance the old and young men, who have one long, bleached strand of hair tucked into their belt in the back. And all these mortally shy, orphaned, abandoned, and/or widowed men are dressed in the same style, and their shoes or high heels have the same little metal plates tapping a chorus into the night. Night? And many push and bump into each other, unintentionally, in this crowd, so uniform and apparently timid, where no one any longer knows the fine art of stepping aside; and the response to the bumping is an expletive or a hastily drawn weapon here and there; the words and gesture initially not a hostile act but rather an expression of the irritability common to all in Nuevo Bazar, or even more of nervousness — as indeed one peal of a church or temple bell, actually melodious, now leaps out at one as a cold, dry clang, something between a threat and a warning tone, a sort of dog substitute, and makes one — one? many — recoil in alarm.

At some temporal distance from the events outlined here, a historian later provided an exhaustive account of the Nuevo Bazar of that period. Let his ramblings — for that is what they are — be introduced here by a few excerpts, on the suggestion of our protagonist, who sees it as an essential feature of the book devoted to her, first of all, that she disappear occasionally from its pages (though with her presence still felt, for instance as its reader) and, second, that in this book, albeit not too often, a problem of rhythm! some passages occur that are not exactly filthy, but certainly grubby, bordering on the tasteless and abstruse, to be sure only bordering, and playing fast and loose with reality — instead of, as is otherwise a basic principle of her story, seeking and exploring reality in a sort of quest.

Let this point also be made to preface the historian’s passages: he appointed himself the representative of the profession and furthermore a “specialist, respected throughout Europe, on the Nuevo Bazar Zone”; his statements, despite their carefully cultivated tone of historical objectivity, are dictated by overzealousness and ill will (the author of that tendentious travel guide could have been one of his predecessors); and finally, it would be plain to a blind man that he had spent his entire life or half-life as a private historian in a zone very similar to Nuevo Bazar, perhaps even identical with it.

It begins with the historian’s wanting to see each of the many peoples in the Zone as manifesting only the worst, most evil, or ugly of its “historically conditioned peculiarities and characteristics.” The good, better, attractive, likable traits of any people in the Zone were long ago eradicated, precisely by the elimination of borders and barriers between the individual peoples: the elimination of historical ones “rightfully and indubitably” to be viewed as progress and liberation, but with them went the “natural” ones as well, which, along with threshold anxiety, also drove out of the people on either side any of the “threshold awareness” that had functioned as a “basis for national education,” as an “instrument of national refinement”: leaving no ability to distinguish between here and there.

“One people, in the territory of any other people, behaved more and more as though it were in its own territory, in the sense of behaving all the more badly — uniquely and exclusively badly — for over there, beyond the former borders, it is of course not our people, but since the elimination of the borders it is our territory. Our territory? our free range, our space for wallowing and mucking around, our surrogate battleground. If the individual peoples in the Zone would simply regard the entire area as their own, at least now and then one of their good qualities would manifest itself.

“Thus as far as the Zone is concerned, the comforting concept formulated by one of my historiographical predecessors, that of cultural continuity , meaning the indestructible qualities of the peoples, which includes those legendary ties to a place and to a historical mission that persist even in the face of near extinction, exile, destruction of traditions, of economic systems, of compilations of legal precedents — this comforting concept, when applied to the Zone [one of those typical private-historian utterances, so complicated that the beginning has to be reiterated at the end!] is actually tinged with mockery.

“The only cultural continuity maintained among one of the peoples there is the coarseness and obscenity for which it has been known since the Thirty Years’ War (not a trace left of its love of celebrations or its hospitality); among another people nothing remains but the habit, for which it has been known since the early Middle Ages, of yelling and elbowing others out of the way — its newspapers are even so large that when they flip them open anyone sitting nearby has to move — and at the same time a penchant for pussyfooting around (without their once famous ability to turn inward and suddenly step elegantly out of the way); and the cultural continuity of the third or other Zone people, praised in antiquity and earlier still, even by foreign chroniclers, for their love of children, knowledge of the stars, expertise in fruit growing, and skill as mariners, now expresses itself exclusively in two characteristics mentioned previously only in passing by hostile historians: gluttony and a passion for foul language and negative attitudes (not a single statement without a tacked-on opinion, always a bad one, or a profanity, never intended humorously — an honest-to-goodness curse). Thus only negative characteristics as cultural continuity among the peoples of the Zone? Only those characteristics that lash out.”