Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

At last she turned off, to the side, to the outside. What? in Nuevo Bazar, where any and every spot represented the center, there was an outside? Yes, in the sense that all her life, whenever she had been in a place where she could not find her way out of the center, but was trapped there, encircled by foregrounds, superficial images, and other such provocations, she had made a point of hurling herself at the center; instead of darting to the side to escape, she had headed straight for the middle of the center; just as in a bazaar (and not only an Oriental one), assailed on all sides (and not merely by hissing Oriental voices), one could find peace and a space of one’s own by resolutely heading in the direction of the (not only Oriental) disturbers of the peace and taking a seat in their midst, as if one were one of them — which one was, after all, wasn’t one?

And in this spirit, my, our, adventurer suddenly turned aside, that is to say strode straight toward a tent-shaped structure, the same height as the others, which, according to its neon sign, was apparently called LSC, or “Lone Star Café,” and took a seat at a small round table that seemed to be waiting for her in the middle of the tent. But why did she not go home to her venta , where the bunk was waiting for her in the same way, yet entirely differently? — First of all, she had forgotten how to get to the hostel, and in particular it was out of the question for her to capitulate in the face of such centrality, all-encompassing and devastating to any alternative sense of place and time. There was an adventure to undergo here. Even here, in this off-putting realm, there had to be something worth telling. But do the things that happened subsequently in the Lone Star Café fit the spirit of our book? “They do.” (She to the author.)

In the middle of the night, on the tent site at the heart of the center of Nuevo Bazar, a familiar face finally crossed her path (though hadn’t it been the morning of that same day that she had been in the company of the businessman she had ruined and the cook?).

It was as if all those who had not yet found their way home, local residents and new arrivals, had gathered in the Lone Star Café. Much jostling at the hundreds of glass-topped tables, even among those who were already seated. If one was not at home — wherever that might be — at least here in the tent, which, like the tables, chairs, and counters, was of glass, one had to stake a claim to one’s place and one’s seat.

And amid the pushing and shoving (especially when a seat became free, as in the subway during rush hour), suddenly at a distant table she saw the face of a woman with whom she was almost friends—“almost”; for she did not have any women friends; and the situation with her vanished daughter entailed something altogether different.

The other woman was in the same profession as hers, in a similar key position, but less visible. At the global “monetary experts’ conferences,” at that time not yet and no longer held under police protection, the two of them had repeatedly interacted and had grown closer. Why? Because they had both studied economics (to the extent this subject could be taught and learned)? — No. There was no more bitter rivalry, despite their putting a good face on a bad situation, than between businessmen, and especially businesswomen. Each expected to be stabbed in the back by the other man, and especially the other woman. Why, then? Because both of them had found their way into banking and finance more or less by accident, because it had just “turned out” that way, and both of them, the minute they left their workplaces and business hours, at the drop of a hat, in the twinkling of an eye, when the lock snapped shut behind them, forgot their jobs: not merely refraining for the time being from mentioning the money markets and the power of money, but also not giving the matter a second thought, and each time setting out for a completely different life?

Almost all our tycoons — and this has been confirmed by more or less thorough surveys conducted by the author — landed in their profession without plan or purpose; when they were students, if they had any goal in mind, it was certainly not “that kind of thing.” And once in the profession, they had no sooner stepped out of their temples than they metamorphosed in a fraction of a second into carefree mountain climbers, kayakers, gardeners, lovers (source: the author).

Because both women’s ancestors had had nothing to do with the business in which their descendants were now involved, because they were both descended from villagers, though from different countries, and both had been born and had grown up in a transitional period, when, at least in a village, goods and barter played a greater role than money, and in the villages “money” was not yet automatically associated with “bank”? Because both of them had lost their parents early? Because both of them, without otherwise resembling each other in figure or facial features, radiated a similar beauty, when the moment was right?: a twinlike beauty, that of a very rare type of twins, able to be mistaken for each other only at certain moments, but then what a beauty! a rustic beauty, which was certainly quietly aware of itself yet did not thrust itself into the foreground or make much of itself, and could, in the next moment, turn into homeliness or even repulsiveness, or simpleminded, idiotic, no, moronic, ugliness — because both of them were in every sense noncompetitively beautiful, also of an “old-fashioned,” no, “timeless,” beauty, no, of a beauty belonging to a different time — which did not mean, did it, that the two women stood outside of current reality; did not help shape this reality; had no power?

Because that other woman, before she landed by accident in her current field, had, in her youth, just like the woman here, been a star for a year or so, the woman here by playing the lead in a film, her only one, the woman there on the strength of a song, a soft ballad, which in the middle suddenly erupted in cries for help and cries of rage and then returned to its starting point: a song still often broadcast today, at least in her country (portions of it also used in tourism promotions), which had been imitated, in contrast to the film role of her current “colleague,” by several other songs, performed in a provocatively similar style, in the same rhythm, and with a melodic line that hardly differed from hers?

Or, on the contrary, had it not contributed to the vague attraction between the two of them that our heroine, often without identifiable reasons, found herself suddenly confronted by people with hostile intentions toward her: acquaintances, who up to then had been the soul of considerateness, or at least had displayed unfeigned respect, and now suddenly bared their teeth, and likewise strangers, men as well as women, repeatedly smearing her out of the blue, as the one person responsible for all misfortune, including their own — while the other woman, her occasional twin, had the reputation of having never had an enemy; of being incapable of speaking a single unkind word or making a face; of being unable to raise her voice, let alone utter a scream as in her hit song long ago (indeed, so her almost-friend told the author later, “I never heard anyone with a gentler voice, a voice that came more from the heart, and consistently so, without fluctuation, in the work setting as well as outside, and no contradiction between her business dealings and her voice”)?

And now, in the depths of that night, in the Lone Star Café, she saw her almost-friend make a face, and then another. The other woman, the former singer, was not alone at her table. Across from her sat the man who, it was said, had been the love of her youth, and had then become her husband, and at the same time, at least up to now, had remained all the more the love of her youth. If the woman witnessing the scene had been asked to name one couple among her contemporaries one could have faith in, only these two would have come to mind. To put it more emphatically: to the extent that one could have faith in this couple, no, had to, one could have faith in something else, something that transcended these particular two people and their particular case.