Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

The principal traveler awakened as if someone had been moving through her all night, crawling through her armpits, stepping on her ribs, balancing above her legs. She opened her eyes: in spite of the heavy curtain, the red light of dawn filtering into the berth. A body next to her; or no, her own body, her chest and stomach and knees, nestled against the back, buttocks, and knee hollows of someone else, almost as if her body and the stranger’s were one.

She found herself waking up in the company of the young girl from the next compartment. Had the girl crept in with her during the night? No, again the opposite: in her sleep she had sought out her neighbor. So she was sleepwalking again, as she had done long ago in the village, as a child, but never since then. And how she had nestled against the other person’s back! This person, the girl, lay there sound asleep, with sleep-puffy lips; the rock-crystal chess pieces set up in orderly ranks for a new game, within easy reach.

Moving, as if weightless, from the stranger’s berth back to her own. Everywhere else, blessed stillness, not only in the venta . “Saved!” Falling asleep again in her own bed, this time without any dreams. Awakening refreshed, after a couple of deep breaths. Pulling open the sleeping compartment’s curtain, carefully, so as not to wake anyone.

She wanted to be the first one up, and to remain alone like this for as long as possible, surrounded by the thousands who were sleeping peacefully at last, if only for the time being. In the morning chill of the mesa, gusting from above into the open inner courtyard, a larger, intensely frosty, almost breathtaking cold: a breath of the air from the peaks of the Sierra de Gredos, invisible from the new settlement down in the hollow.

She made the hostel bed, shaking the bedclothes out over the patio, smoothing and stretching the linens, as if the bed were located on her own estate and she were beginning the day there with simple household chores. Yet she carried them out several degrees more meticulously than back home in the riverport city; she could not leave a single wrinkle or lump in the bed — from which the hostel maid would later promptly strip the bedding. In the same way, after her solitary, ceremonial morning ablutions in the still empty common bathroom, as big as a hall, she applied shoe cream and polished her laced boots with more obvious care than ever at home; combed her hair longer than before going to a party there (not to mention before going to the office).

She did notice that, unlike on the other mornings, not one image from other places where she had once been flashed before her or came dancing along, although she performed these everyday actions so much more carefully and calmly, but this fact did not trouble her: she ascribed it to the peculiarity of the “Zone” of Nuevo Bazar, including its location in the hollow.

It gave her pause that one of her bootlaces broke and that her brush split in half while she was brushing her hair. She had always experienced such misfortunes, often precisely after a confident awakening, and from one time to the next, the more trivial they were, the more menacingly they restricted if not the day then at least its first hour, which had seemed so open to possibilities. No matter that the author indicated to her that according to his research “all truly beautiful women” (“truly beautiful” in the sense that they goaded everyone who saw them to go forth and seek his own lost beauty) were clumsy, and that precisely this trait animated their beauty and produced a soothing effect: she herself remained cross at her clumsiness, did not consider it harmless, but rather an expression of the guilt she was keeping to herself — whereupon the author, as was actually to be expected, retorted that “all truly beautiful women” were afflicted with a more or less vague sense of guilt, and precisely that … and so on.

After breakfast from her bag, which resembled something not just from the Middle Ages but from an even more bygone time — leftovers, but what leftovers! packed up for her by her friend the chef — in the gallery, at the one small table there (making constant noises, but the softest possible, so as to allow the others to continue sleeping, better and more gently than complete absence of sound), she went down to the ground floor. There, surprisingly, the entire hostel staff, which was numerous, already up and preparing for the day: filling out orders, writing up menus, carrying cases of wine down to the cellar. And from them, too, came no loud sounds. Voices uniformly quiet, yet without whispering, and thus also no hissing.

And overnight various venta people seemed to have switched roles in some way. One who the previous evening had stood way in the back of the kitchen as a dishwasher was now sitting in the booth at the entryway, obviously the boss. The girl in the taproom the day before, hardly out of school, was now his wife, her hair drawn back tightly, wearing a gray suit and holding a child in her arms. The only other guest, at one of the neighboring tables, was busy today in the boiler room, serving as the house electrician and plumber. The chamber- or compartment maid from before, who had shyly backed away from every stranger, was the boss’s sister, now a teacher by profession, sitting this morning in a corner and, with a stern face and expansive gestures, correcting the last of her pupils’ notebooks.

And similarly, out on the otherwise empty street, one of the falling-down drunks from the previous evening’s crowd had become a traffic policeman, on duty but with nothing to do, standing all the straighter out there with no one around. And in the next figure, the only one far and wide, she recognized the person who, the night before, had been filled with wild despair and looking daggers, but in the light of the new day had been transformed into a brisk jogger and, dressed accordingly, was bounding lightfootedly over all possible obstacles, even seeking out wheelbarrows, traffic barriers, and garbage cans as he circled the Zone for the sixteenth or twenty-fourth time.

To the vacant lot, the only one remaining, where she had left her car the previous day: the site built up overnight, the exterior walls already erected, only the roof still missing. Had that really been the place? Yes; the splintered medallion with the white angel still lay in the construction debris, among other tiny fragments. On a side street her Santana Landrover: smashed and burned out. No surprise: she had already dreamed this. And no thought of reporting it to the police, but on the contrary: “All right. Time to go. Now everything can get under way.” (Here the author characteristically deleted the exclamation point — merely hinted at in any case — in contrast to his positively elaborate question marks.)

So off to the bus station, to which no sign had pointed for a long time already, but which was familiar to her from earlier, together with the venta the only somewhat older structure in Nuevo Bazar, with a round inner courtyard in place of the hostel’s rectangular one. In this circle now dozens of buses, their engines running, roaring with readiness to hit the road, the rotunda mottled with blue clouds of exhaust. Boarding one particular bus without hesitation, taking the last free seat — how many people had suddenly turned up in the bus, after the hour of emptiness that morning—, the door closing, and off they go. In the mirror above the driver, her face, one among many: she almost does not find it, almost does not recognize herself in the violently vibrating bus-mirror image. But the turnoff from the previous evening is the same — except that the sign seems to have become even smaller and more out of date, as if no longer valid, scrapped: “Ávila — Sierra de Gredos.”