Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“Another thing was that any child in the Zone, if asked about the points of the compass, would be incapable of pointing out south, north, west, and east (and most of the adults could not do so either). Bees were called wasps, or vice versa. Chestnuts, although people enjoyed eating them roasted, on a plate, were not recognized when they were lying under their tree (in spite of everything, there was still the occasional chestnut tree on the edge of the Zone). An apple, if it was not arranged in a basket in front of a store, but was hanging from a tree, among the leaves (in spite of everything, there were still …), was not recognized as a fruit, and was left there to rot.

“Of course one also from time to time saw the Zone, which, by the way, was not in a world of its own, dotted with the colorful neckerchiefs of all sorts of scout troops. But instead of exploring nature, these troops behaved more like militias, with casually worn daggers (whose forms could be ascribed to the many ethnic groups that had moved into the area), under the motto ‘Do one bad deed every day,’ even if that consisted merely of pushing someone from another ethnic group off the sidewalk. In the Zone, even gardeners, who are favorably looked upon everywhere else, were likewise no longer considered ‘good folk’: even they, the good gardeners of yore, went all out to make life miserable for their neighbors, perhaps by deploying all their equipment, enough for ten fire departments, against every individual blade of grass, and with blaring sirens to match, and preferably on Sundays; or else these battalions of gardeners, the most avid patrons of taverns after work, would move in like an eviction squad and beat up a person standing alone at the bar, preferably a former hunter from the steppes, a remnant of the original population, quietly sipping his drink by himself.

“It is uncertain whether the many mutations among the plants in the Zone can be traced back to the gardeners’ constant spraying with toxic chemicals, etc.: what was clear, at any rate, was that the stinging nettles that still sprang up vigorously here and there, in spite of everything, no longer stung — yet some of them stung all the more savagely: one of the increasingly cruel perfidiousnesses of the Zone’s gardeners, who had mutated along with the plants — just as during that period the Zone’s sparrows more and more mutated into vultures, and the small black ants into termites (overnight all that was left of the Zone’s parliament was its façade. But even before the building was gobbled up it had become a mere stage set).”

The conclusion drawn by our would-be archivist followed: “In light of all this, one could ask oneself whether these very conditions in the Zone might not give rise to a longing for another world, for entirely different possibilities, or any possibility at all. Except that there was no other world or possibility anywhere.” (So the person drawing this conclusion did not consider such a longing worthy of even a question mark?) “On the contrary, one of the influential books of the time, entitled The New Candide , argued that the conditions prevailing in the Zone were the best of all possible worlds!” Yet didn’t precisely the crowding, the large number of inhabitants of Nuevo Bazar, argue for the opposite? How can one imagine forming such a large number? Imagine? Image? For shame!

Back to my woman from the northwestern riverport city. In contrast to her hired author in his village in La Mancha, she had no objection to the tendencies manifested by that would-be historian from whom we have heard in the interim. For during that night in Nuevo Bazar, a night as bright as day, she found his seemingly groundless assertions confirmed in some fundamental respects.

It was true that almost everyone on the streets strode along as his own king, and also expected anyone he encountered to make the appropriate obeisance. And because each individual used his personal sense of time to tyrannize over the person in whose company he happened to be, repeatedly the apparently peaceful bustle would experience from one moment to the next an audible and visible jolt: shouting, screaming, hitting, violence (which would then subside just as suddenly); among the faces that looked so similar, and so balanced, wherever one went there would be one, two, or several that in the twinkling of an eye could turn into grotesque masks, with teeth bared, tongues lolling or stuck out, and the well-tempered, almost overly civilized voices — which everywhere, even among the older children, could easily be mistaken in intonation and pacing for the sonorous tones of radio and television announcers — after an abrupt catching of the breath were transformed into the screeching, growling, and hissing of apes? hyenas? beasts of prey? no, of human beings turning savage, with a savagery utterly different from the putative primeval variety.

And immediately afterward — the grimaces and howling suppressed and silenced with such uncanny rapidity that the bared teeth and screeching seemed to have been a chimera — the earlier monolithic equanimity and radio-announcer sonorousness restored; except that now one increasingly suspected general pretense, masquerade, and playacting; as if it were already Carnival time here in Nuevo Bazar; except that each person, following his self-declared time-reckoning, was making his way to his very own celebration; intent upon appearing as the particular historical figure and assuming the particular role that had been reserved for him since birth.

Then she, too, felt almost infected by the constant oscillation between sonorous magic, shrill unmasking, remasking, and growing suspicion. She also noticed that the longer she stayed in Nuevo Bazar, the more she herself regarded people, and hence also the smallest phenomena, with suspicion, even at a distance and with gun cocked, as it were, no, not merely as it were. And she realized that suspicion and the proliferating mix-ups in the Zone went hand in hand — although in her case without the terrible consequences so common there.

“Mix-ups?”—“Yes, at first I mistook the heartbeat in my ear,” she told the author later, “—not surprisingly, after a long day of driving alone — for someone pounding on a steel door or the rumbling of a wrecking ball. But that was all. Or I more and more often mistook the books that quite a few people had in their hands for dog leashes. Or when someone raised his cane, I saw it as a gun pointed at me — except that I did not immediately pull my own trigger, as is said to have happened more than once in Nuevo Bazar.

“What continued to haunt me: the suspicion that every phenomenon in that place had been tampered with — and the sense of irreality. That became most clear to me at the time, at the time? when I, who usually derive my perceptions of real shapes and colors from a kind of tasting, tried to recall the evening meal I had eaten at the hostel: I simply could not remember what I had eaten there barely an hour or two earlier, and in particular I had not the slightest aftertaste.

“But,” she continued, “unlike the Zone historian’s, my gaze did not remain fixated. Or I used whatever I was fixated on as a point of departure. I willed it that way, for my story.”—The author: “Is that something a person can will?”—She: “Yes, it can be willed and resolved. I willed and resolved to push off from my fixations, and by means of them, and that came to pass. And thus it was that there, in the so-called Zone, I found my way back into my story and our book.

“That historiador and those who consider themselves his successors or disciples, the whole tribe of ‘friends of history,’ with their cultural continuity: all well and good. Yet our book has an even greater continuity as its subject, which should not preclude — on the contrary — the narration of equally brief, even the very briefest, moments, and the inclusion of various things that verge on dreams — though only verge—, in which time leaps, or is suspended, or piles up, becoming concentrated and even dense enough to touch, as occasionally happens in a Western; remember The Searchers , when the family waits in silence, alone on the prairie, for the Indians’ attack and for death; and the compressed time in Rio Bravo , where all night long the trumpet of death is played for the group under siege in the jail, and in the end it feels as though not just one night has passed but an epic year, an epically compressed eternity.