Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And yet another background image of this sort came from the duplicate posters pasted on every display window, photos or artists’ renderings of children and adolescents who had gone missing here in the Zone — there were dozens of these posters — and dozens upon dozens of the equally many wanted terrorists: and since the children had often been missing for so long that their photos had been altered to make them recognizable at an older age, and, conversely, because often the only available portraits of the long-sought perpetrators of violence were from their youth, the posters, which all had the same size and the same format, resembled each other to the point of being indistinguishable.

And another such background forms precisely in conjunction with these other images, the prevailing, conspicuous ones — from which one pushes off or allows one’s gaze to be propelled like an arrow from a special bow: for instance (there it is again, “for instance”), up high, on the seventh and top floor, the attic of a bookstore, all of whose floors up to that one are chock-full of piles, in the form of temples, pyramids, pile dwellings, from level two to level seven the same title, all the millions of copies equally thick, with the same colors on the dust jackets, with identical spines; but under the roof one book that apparently slipped through the cracks and was hung, facedown, its pages open, on some rope or in a fishnet used as decoration, of a thickness different from the others’, without its dust jacket, obviously already partially read, so that, if one had a good telescope handy — which one does — in whose sight the book and its individual lines could be brought as close as certain figures on the cornice of a medieval tower could be brought to an observer on the ground, from whose naked eye they were far, far away, they would allow themselves to be deciphered thus: “In a village in La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall, there lived not long ago …”

Despite the winter night and the icy cold, which blew in all the more piercingly because the settlement itself was heated by the banks of electrical coils, for a long time you could not see anyone’s breath in the crowd; but suddenly there was one breath cloud here, and then another there, literal billows of fog in front of their faces; and finally one of the nocturnal passersby completely shrouded in a ball of white vapor, having just stepped out of a walk-in refrigerator? or from out there on the crackling-cold dark steppe on the mesa?

And now the lone farmer’s vehicle on the diagonal street, a small delivery van, the back filled with sacks of potatoes and fruit, the vehicle and its load evenly covered with a thin layer of snow, which, regardless of the heaters, remains frozen solid, the snow reproducing the wind out on the savannah, in ridges, ripples, small mounds like dunes.

And the lone pedestrian now, who surprisingly looks unlike the others, otherwise so similar to one another, and in general stands out, more staggering than walking, not because he is drunk, but rather out of seemingly terminal despair, his eyes crisscrossed by it as if by ceaselessly scratching and scraping razor blades, in his hands on either side two knives at the ready, no, not yet at the ready, not yet snapped open, and why not? why not yet? when will he brandish them? what is holding him back? and how does he even manage to place one foot in front of the other, to hold himself halfway upright, to avoid collisions?; extraordinary that he can make his way alive from one curb to the other without being torn apart halfway across by wretchedness and howling misery, which dribbles from his lips in the form of thick spittle and from his nose as snot, and bursts from his thorax as a howl (mistaken by the passersby for the roar of a distant Formula One engine as it accelerates on the final lap). Yes, when and where will this kind of despair finally tear this citizen of Nuevo Bazar to pieces? with a violence so terrible that it will have to tear each and every one of his fellow citizens and neighbors to pieces as well?

And if the crowd of people along the diagonal, gradually thinning out and becoming sparse and no longer constituting a corso for quite a while now, moves along in procession as if on an invisible line, this happens out of uncertainty and fear: stay out of the wind and in the shadow of the person ahead of you at all costs! shielded by him as much as possible, as by the person behind you; eyes on the ground, so that you will be able to say with a clear conscience that you saw nothing of the explosions, the flames, the bloody tangles; and likewise blocking out the sound of the bombers droning high above this dome of artificial and warming daylight at midnight; talking at the very top of your voice, to yourself? on a satellite phone?; each person in the single-file procession uttering sounds with wide-open mouth that are neither Catalan nor Asturian nor Navarrian: a new language that has no adjectives, and especially no verbs, but only nouns; and these exclusively in abbreviations, such as MZ for manzana , apple; SDD for soledad , solitude; DS for dolores , pain; MC for merced , mercy; GRR for guerra , war; CBL for caballo , horse; SRR for sierra ; CHN for chesnia , longing; and so forth; almost exclusively consonants; a vowel a rarity, a chance to take a breath; and all of these abbreviations or chopped-off words following each other in crazily quick succession, at the same time issuing from the throats as drawlingly, sloppily, and indistinctly as if this language were not being spoken by local residents, Spaniards or speakers of Romance languages; as if it were not a language at all but a mere intonation; and that of a very different language, borrowed from another language family entirely; outdoing even that people’s exaggerations and puffed-up, self-assured way of speaking, including the use of abbreviations and consonants, as if this ostentatious style helped them, in their solitary rushing along behind one another, banish their nocturnal fears by stalking along boastfully and giving them additional cover and protection.

And not every building on the diagonal artery is exclusively a store or a warehouse; at least here and there some floors are occupied, especially basements, with awning windows high up on the walls, at street level; and every two dozen or so paces one hears a kind of music issuing from these semicellars into the loop being constantly repeated along the entire diagonal, always solitary drumming; but this, too, always the same from basement to basement, the same rhythm, the same volume; the drum always tuned to the same note, struck as if by the same youngster home alone — his parents gone, on vacation, or vanished, never to be seen again; all the boys, and not a few girls among them, pounding on their instruments in the same monotone, whether with their fists or drumsticks, in a devil-, or whoever-, may-care fashion.

And once, for a moment, for hardly as much as a measure, a third kind of music: suddenly chiming in and then immediately inaudible again; darting in from an unidentifiable direction, the instrument also hard to identify, a guitar? perhaps a lute? a gusla? a Jew’s harp? or maybe just a voice, after all? or, yes! a voice and an instrument, hovering in the air for a measure before falling silent, coming together, merging, melding; a single moment during the night along the diagonal line, when, out of the very meager backgrounds, instead of hopelessness and blind indignation, that sheltered preserve of the grander time came into focus, if only to the ear? precisely to the ear! insistently audible; two or three notes from afar and at the same time from just around the corner and heart-piercing, like a stiletto or a scalpel; stabbing as deep as possible, but not lethally.