Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“Your task is to describe not cultural continuity but the grander time, and it cannot happen, it is simply not permissible, for the future to appear as an impossibility, as is the case with the Zone archivist.”—The author: “Please accept my thanks for this lecture. But in my previous life as a writer have I not done quite a bit, or tried to, to develop a sense of this grander, or also merely different, time, and to make it strong enough to bear the weight of this long story and that, and this and this, and another and yet another?”—The woman from the riverport city: “What do you think induced me to select you, of all people, to write this particular book? Idiot.”—The author: “But why a man for this assignment? Wouldn’t a woman be more suitable, and also more appropriate to the spirit of the times, as the teller of your adventures?”—She: “Storytelling is storytelling is storytelling, whether a man or a woman tells the story. The minute you begin to tell a story, you are neither a man nor a woman anymore, but simply the storyteller, or, better still, you are the pure embodiment of storytelling. And by the way: be more sparing in your use of ‘so to speak’ and ‘as it were.’” —The author: “And should I assume that when someone’s story is told it does not matter whether the subject is a man or a woman?”

The riverport woman: “No, no, no. Our book must be about my story, a woman’s story if ever there was one.”—The author: “In what respect, for instance?”—She, gazing along the line of her shoulder to the distant horizon on that side: “To begin with, simply by virtue of telling a long story, a very long story, perhaps longer than all your previous ones. If a story is to be told about me, and in general, about a woman, it must be a long, long, long story — and something other than a woman’s novel or a chronicle of life at court. If suited to our times, then something of this sort. And simultaneously, my, and our, story should run counter to our age, as is appropriate for a book, or is it not? should circumvent it, transcend it, subvert it, no? And by the way, be more sparing in your use of ‘for instance’: it is obvious that every detail in our book suggests an example, no?”—The author: “A story as long as Gone with the Wind ? And about a woman in finance, whose image as a woman is distorted or even destroyed by the image of money?”—The woman from the riverport city: “For all I care, equally long, or almost as long, or half as long — even that would be something — as Gone with the Wind , but in other respects with no resemblance to it. Or perhaps not, after all?”

And she continued to gaze along her shoulder, and said, after a long pause, “And besides, I have nothing to do with financial matters anymore. I am, so to speak, no longer a banking princess, as it were. I have changed professions.”—The author: “Since when?”—She: “Since last night. An eternity ago. Since my crossing of the Sierra de Gredos. Since the evening, night, and morning in the Zone of Nuevo Bazar.” And she gazed along the line of her shoulder, which swiveled gently as she did so, toward the far-off horizon, now at her back, and fell into a silence that lasted for some time and became more profound with every breath, eventually giving way to something like a pulsing, and gradually drawing in the author.

She had moved through Nuevo Bazar as if along a diagonal or the line formed by a cross section. The images she encountered, also in her pushing-off from the established “track” (the word supplied by the Zone archivist), with the omnipresent images of shopping, organized events, happenings, and other stimuli in the foreground (and in N.B. these foregrounds predominated), prevented even one of those images from poking her, images that, according to her conviction, represented and refreshed the world for her and for everyone, and were the main point of her book.

But that did not matter now. First of all, it had been her experience that in any case those world-conjuring images, whether here in Nuevo Bazar or at home in the riverport city, did not show up in the evening. They belonged to the morning; were part of the morning; brought with them and brought about what made the morning the real morning.

And besides, she had always trusted sleep and the revitalization it could be expected to bring. Nor did it disturb her that the glimpses through the few gaps, actually mere cracks, into the background of the settlement revealed images of desolation, of despair, or of sheer nonsense; that just kept her more awake. From the beginning to the end of the diagonal line, there was no building on the right or the left whose ground floor did not have a shop window. These shop windows usually took up the width of the entire ground floor, and often the entire façade as well, from the street level up to the top floor, the fifth, sixth, seventh. Quite a few of the façades had no front doors, suggesting that the rooms behind them, from bottom to top, were merely display spaces? Next to them almost identical shops, all just as brightly illuminated, the wares laid out in exactly the same way, except that automatic doors let one enter and buy, the stores still open at this late hour, the clerks lit up like statues and as motionless as the solitary mannequins in the neighboring buildings. Each showcase façade showing only one type of item, from bottom to top, but in multiples, masses of them, so that next to one display with thousands of fur coats came another with equally many suitcases, and next to that, one with ten thousand wall clocks, and so forth.

The sensation of moving between two stationary railroad trains, with multiple decks entirely of glass, or are the trains gradually beginning to move after all?; the sensation further reinforced by the music, which remains the same from car to car, from the six hundred thirteen garden chairs stacked up in one, to the three thousand four hundred bicycles symmetrically arranged on stands up to the roof in the next, and the thirty thousand wine bottles in yet another.

And the gaps and backgrounds in this cross section: What is going on with them? They exist, though perhaps not every time in the literal sense. One of the stores, depots, showcase buildings, annexes, although as glaringly lit as all the others, is empty, white walls without shelves; not a clothes hanger nor carton nor even thumbtack to be seen, not merely cleared out and awaiting a new shipment, also not newly erected and therefore standing empty until the following day or the following week, but empty this way for a long time already, and for the duration, yet in its emptiness, even without a sign, or the name of a company, or a street number, in business, like the other stores along the diagonal, or at least ready to go into business.

For first of all there is the usual automatic glass door, opening and inviting even someone passing at a distance to enter; and then in the background (yes, background) of this store that has always been empty, one person, obviously the manager, in a three-piece suit and tie, on a chair, low and extremely narrow, at a very small but immaculately polished table, on which he has placed both hands, his fingers extended, spread wide, his nails rounded and manicured as only a salesman’s or businessman’s would be, while he sits there very erect, keeping his eye on the door — in contrast to the clerks in the neighboring compartments (most of them constantly talking to each other, some of them apparently distracted) — the epitome of presence of mind, without a trace of an item for sale, without a catalogue, without a computer, without a telephone, without paper and pencil, without toothpicks, without a Jew’s harp, without an ammunition belt.

Another such gap and background is formed when, for a change, the stores along the diagonal of Nuevo Bazar are not constructed in an unbroken line but leave between them a crack to slip into, not large enough to slip through — for that there is not enough room. In one of these very rare niches one’s eye then encounters, as elsewhere the metal shopping carts that have been left standing, pushed away, allowed to crash into each other, similarly overturned baby carriages, which seem to have careened off course, a pile of similarly rusted lower and upper frames, the fabric long since gone, the wheels sticking up, as if these conveyances, like the pushcarts, had been merely borrowed (and simply left standing after use, or shoved out of the way).