Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

The faces of quite a few of the passengers looked familiar. While boarding the bus, she had involuntarily nodded to them, and her greeting had been returned promptly and as a matter of course. And the driver seemed familiar as well. And she knew where she had seen him before, unlike the others. He was the one she had taken the previous night for the new settlement’s idiot, the one who had looked almost like an old man, with the harelip, shining his flashlight into her face. By daylight, in the rearview mirror, the same harelip, only less noticeable, under a broad pug nose. Yet no more resemblance to an idiot or an old man.

As usual the driver was engaged in conversation with someone on the seat diagonally behind him, without ever turning to look at this passenger. But the person he was talking to was not the young girl who would usually stand next to the driver, displaying herself to the other riders and thus making herself the star of the bus trip, but a child, the driver’s young son, still far from adolescence. And several more children on the bus, all crowded together in the back; the vehicle also serving as a school bus. And the windows in the midsection blocked all the way to the roof by bookshelves, every inch of space filled with books, a sort of darkened corridor; the bus also serving as a traveling lending library.

From where did she recognize one fellow passenger or another? These were no cases of mistaken identity. They had met before, and not merely once, though not in this particular way and constellation, which was as new to her as to the others, but rather in their everyday settings, where she, the adventurer, and the familiar faces likewise, in contrast to here, were all at home. They had had a relationship — but where? in the riverport city? or earlier in the Sorbian village? or at some other way station in her life and his and theirs? — if perhaps not a daily relationship, nonetheless a fairly constant, regular one; and even if such a relationship far away in their shared setting had no doubt been a rather impersonal and fleeting/momentary one, for instance that of seller and buyer, of mail carrier and mail recipient, of cemetery superintendent and visitor, or simply of passersby on the, her, their, particular street, on opposite sidewalks each time, here and now in this unfamiliar and remote region, very early in the morning, unexpectedly together in this somewhat unusual vehicle, heading for a not exactly frequented region, they appeared close and familiar as never before, familiar half an eternity already, familiar almost like accomplices or even desperados who had already been involved in some pretty unsavory schemes together and were now setting out on a particularly shady adventure.

And each of them brooded, for at least part of the way, over where he or she had had something to do with her, under what murky circumstances? And what guilt they had incurred toward one another back at home? Or she toward him? Or him toward her there? Or had it been only in their thoughts? And now deeds would follow here. But if the few of them in the bus really (really?) did know each other from earlier: no one remembered from where or how. And the brooding soon ceased. They were all simply riding along; letting themselves be driven.

They were heading south, with numerous roads turning off to the left and right toward villages far from the main road and invisible from it — often merely appearing to be villages, for once the bus passed the first houses, they often turned out to be towns, with a network of narrow, twisting streets and in the center a large, if unpaved, sandy square.

The terrain rose, fell, and rose in long waves, dips, and elevations, almost imperceptibly, as was usual on the mesa. But after a while the land climbed noticeably for quite a long stretch. Ice flowers formed around the rims of the bus windows and then melted away in the hour after sunrise. Despite the climb, hardly any curves. Instead, where previously there had been turnoffs, there were now repeated detours, taking them away from the carretera in great arcs and then back to it, traversing the bleak, barren landscape, an utterly uninhabited in-between region, on gravel tracks. No one had got on or off the bus.

The only inhabited place visible from the road, at a distance, was the city of Ávila, on its hill, far to the east; the houses of the old town almost hidden behind the encircling wall, bumped out in hundreds of places; round about it on the high plain, New Ávila, La Nueva Ávila, the larger of the settlements, half cordoning off the hill with buildings, forming a second, very different perimeter. The black clouds above the cathedral tower were flocks of jackdaws, as always.

The bus had bypassed this old and new Ávila, maintaining always the same distance. The detours in the uninhabited area now occurred in the same rhythm as previously the turnoffs to the villages or towns. Later, when she described the bus trip to the author, she kept falling into the first person plural. “We had long since taken off our earphones.” (Yet at most one or two girls were listening to their music this way in the beginning.) “Instead of watching the film on the monitor above the front windshield, we looked out the windows, and despite the low angle of the sun had drawn back all the curtains.” (Yet only she and the children in the back, whose view of the screen was blocked by the library shelves in the midsection of the bus, were not following the film. “We sat ramrod straight, our hands on the backrests in front of us. Although we were familiar with the route from long ago, at every turnoff and detour we wondered where we were now; was this really the route to the Sierra? was it possible that this familiar village had changed so much since the last time we passed through? only the name still the same? and over there, was that still the cliff from all the previous years, in the form of a rabbit stretched out on the ground? and is it only because of the detour that today we see in its place a kneeling camel?

“And on the one hand, as unfamiliar as the foreland of our Sierra de Gredos appeared to us in almost every detail, on the other hand it seemed tremendously homelike to us; the more novel, the more homelike. The more unknown the fountain in the marketplace there — iced over, by the way — the clearer; we had had it before our eyes all along, and had merely overlooked it. The more surprisingly the medieval stone bridge arched away from the concrete bridge over which our bus drove straight ahead, the clearer: from the very beginning we had been crossing this section of bridge, we knew every stone, we could balance in our sleep on the remains of the parapet high above the rushing brook. The foreland was strange to us during that morning bus ride in a way that an area could appear strange only when we had not only traveled through it many times but had once actually resided and lived there, if very long ago. Resided long ago? Perhaps the entire time.”

And she continued her story: “Perhaps it was not so much in this landscape that we had always lived but more or less together on this special bus. When I recall our trip into the foothills of the Sierra — you should remember, we should remember, one should remember—, from a certain moment during our travels together I can no longer say which of us passengers, or, more accurately, travelers, was who, which of us did what, or to which of us what was done. The one who bit into an apple was the old man there wearing the mountaineer’s hat, and at the same time the driver, bent over the wheel, as well as the young city girl next to me with a student’s briefcase, and me myself. The person with one arm in a sling was, among others, also me.

“Several people in the bus, including me, had taken off their shoes or boots. One time this person or that, no, all of us, heaved a sigh, in the same moment, a deep sigh, a brief accompaniment to the hardly changing sound of the engine. You and I, and likewise he and she, turned a page. One woman was in the late stages of pregnancy, and I with her. For a while our ears were blocked from the change in altitude, and we could no longer follow the conversation between our driver and his son, which continued uninterrupted during almost the entire journey. One time I vomited, no, that was one of the children in the very bumpy back, or wasn’t it me after all, in addition to this person and that?