Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“In the years that followed, together again in the house, they found their relationship reversed, just imagine! Now it was the child, long since grown up, who wanted to be rescued by her mother, only by her. And if perhaps not rescued, at least constantly cared for, hovered over, spoken to, interrogated, advised by her; not simply mothered but rather challenged, and indeed as sternly as possible; evaluated, judged, and without maternal indulgence, please.

“The mother, on the other hand, now no longer saw the grown woman as a child or even as her own daughter, her flesh and blood, but only as a family member, and that even in her dreams; as one who, despite their life together, was increasingly pulling away. That fundamental lack of synchrony, which, except for that moment of reunion on the Atlantic island, had always existed between mother and child, persisted between the woman and her grown daughter, but now with the signs reversed.

“Imagine, the woman would never have guessed that her big, beautiful, strong, self-reliant housemate would seriously have expected; needed; wanted anything of her. And imagine: whatever the daughter undertook or chose not to undertake during those last years was done with complete seriousness in reference to her mother: What will my mother say to that? What will she think? And whatever is wrong with her? Why is she not there for me anymore? Why does she not help me? Why does she not rescue me? Why does my mother not love me anymore? Why is suggesting games the only thing that ever occurs to her to do with me (although she still does not know how to play)?

“And you should know that one day the daughter, the child, the woman, let out a whimper in the middle of a conversation between the two adults; a whimper as if coming from all the lost children in the universe at once; the leap between the down-to-earth discussion and the misery that suddenly broke through was again a reversal of the earlier state of affairs, when the little child, if she had a bad fall or was hit by another child, would sob so hard that she could not say a word, even to her own mother — and then suddenly, after drawing a deep breath, would begin to speak in a perfectly calm voice, picking up where she had left off. And do you believe me when I say that on one of the following days this child again disappeared from her mother’s house, and has remained gone to this very night?”

Finally pain; pain: finally! And while she cowered in the berth, her shoulders slightly hunched beneath the low ceiling, she was swept out into the open by it, this final and seemingly infinite pain. And at last she could fall silent, stop talking to herself; no longer had to open her mouth to tell her story: the story continued on without her; with the help of pain, her story moved forward, beneath a not only open but also vast sky. Before that only one last little question: “What happened between her and her child: Was it connected somehow with her ‘secret guilt,’ or what she herself referred to as her ‘delicious secret, guilt only if it came to light’?” And the answer was?: “No.”

And now, as if a weight were being lifted from all those sleeping and more or less suffering nightmares in those berths extending to the edges of the hostel’s roof, there and there, and down there and up there, the oppressed sighs and near-death cries gradually fell silent, also the simple coughing and sneezing, until suddenly complete silence descended, not only over the venta but far beyond it as well, disembodied, overflowing, rushing in through every opening and pore — transforming the bodies themselves into openings and pores — pushing into the distant refuges of the nocturnal animals and the woodworms’ last holes, and filling these, too, with silence; that entire part of the world a bowl filled with silence, followed, accompanied, and undercoated by expectation. Preceding this, two or three final sounds: in her berth the switching-off of the wall light; in the neighboring berth the falling-down or rather laying-down of a fairly heavy chess piece, the king: checkmate; and finally, from outside, a single owl’s hoot, unexpectedly not repeated — how so? in the middle of the settlement of Nuevo Bazar? yes—, and precisely the same blowing into cupped hands as — when had that been? — back home in the riverport city.

She threw off the blanket. Despite the curtain’s being open a crack to the winter sky, it had become almost hot in her niche. The wood panels, surrounding her on all sides in the short, narrow bed, felt sun-warm. And her skin adapted to this solar collector and expanded. In contrast to the Spartan decor of the hostel, the bedclothes were of a luxurious splendor. The linens were not merely old but from a rich and glorious time, and had acquired their splendid sheen only as they aged. “Luxurious” referred not to the number of pieces, colors, or layers, but to their weight. The two top sheets, pure white like the bottom sheet, lay heavily upon her, more heavily than the rather ordinary cotton blanket earlier, and yet, unlike the latter, did not weigh her down in the slightest. And although they were tucked in up to her neck and hardly left a hand’s breadth of space between themselves and her body anywhere, as she lay there the woman did not feel at all confined by the sheets. She would sleep lightly under them as seldom before.

And at the same time she, or a part of her, no, something that went beyond the usual, everyday, mundane “she,” remained awake. Under these bedclothes there was a sense that weight and floating, warmth and cooling, were in equilibrium; and she felt as though she could taste that. Hadn’t she once reached out her hand to someone under just such sheets? Or, on the contrary, hadn’t someone reached out to her? Pain and desire? Desire and pain?

And had that actually been her? Or hadn’t it rather been the young woman from the Middle Ages whom she had portrayed long ago in her first and only film? The story goes that in that scene in the film, which has been lost in the meantime (not a single copy to be found?), she was covered with the same white linen up to her shoulders, first seen from the front in a full shot, the camera high above the bed; then a torso shot, again from the front, with the camera closer; and then finally a long shot, but this time with her profile in sharp focus, her facial expression unchanged, with an additional turning-away at the end to what is allegedly known in technical terms (author’s research) as a “lost profile” shot.

And the story goes that in that final long shot, her face, which in any case was already very white, along with her shoulders, which were also already very white, became whiter and whiter, and imperceptibly dissolved into the white of the bed linens. And the story goes furthermore that during this night in the hostel berth, without a camera present, without opening of the shutter or any other cinematographic tricks, this blending into the white of the bedding was repeated, for heaven’s — or hell’s — sake. In the Australian desert the hot wind swept from one solitary bush to the next, a few dunes away. On the planet Mars an avalanche of ice came cascading down the sky-high mountain there, the Olympus Rex? In Nuevo Bazar, in the middle of the smoothly paved diagonal artery, a rock ledge broke through. Hazelnuts and chestnuts bounced off the belly of a woman, a different one? (Which suitor said that? Or wanted that? Or wanted to imagine that?)

That same night her brother, released from prison, crossed the last of several borders since his departure from the country of his imprisonment and arrived in the country he had chosen as his new home. It was snowing there, as almost always in wintertime. By now he was driving a car, lent to him by the woman with whom he had stayed all day until an hour after the early nightfall. At a signal from him, she would follow him to a place yet to be determined. There was no woman who would not have done everything for her brother, after spending at most an hour with this almost silent man, who alternated constantly between monumental weariness and flashes of alertness.