Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“We cried from toothache, held our heads to counteract sinus pressure, expelled clouds of breath when we got off at the first rest stop. In between we laughed in unison during one-minute naps. We jumped when a heavy blackbird crashed into a window. One woman had a nosebleed, as did the man over there, and I over here was also bleeding from the nose, even though only one nose was bleeding, drops so hot that they almost burned a hole in my clothes when they fell. From a certain threshold on, chataba in Arabic, in the area or merely on the bus trip, we had become communicating tubes, and what happened to one of us flowed at the same time into the other travelers and equalized its level.

“And the most obvious thing we shared was the sensory impressions. Blinded by the first sunlit patch of snow, all of us shut our eyes at the same moment. Together we tasted, yes, tasted the steady morning wind during that first rest stop in the foothills. And what united us the most during that entire time, for better and for worse, in patience or in tranquillity, in fear or in worry, was our shared hearing or listening: to the way the engine kept running; to when a plane would break the sound barrier again; to the way the children in the back, and thus the rest of us with them, played their games, calmly and thereby generating patience, as uninhibitedly and loudly as if nothing were wrong; to the way the library books in the flexible bumped-out midsection of the bus constantly rubbed against each other, pounded against each other, or, when it was a question of movie cassettes, clicked and clacked against each other, they, too, as if nothing were wrong.”

“It sounds as though the bus provided a kind of shelter or refuge for all of you,” the author remarked. She continued: “If we were all of one mind during the journey into the Sierra, it was against the backdrop of a constant threat and a heightened vulnerability, exacerbated by our sitting still so long in that large, overly long bus, whereas, on the other hand, riding along, precisely in that immensely long vehicle, created the feeling, or the illusion — but: the main thing was the feeling and illusion! ¡sentimiento y ilusión! — of safety.

“In becoming open and receptive to one another this way, between anxiousness and gentleness, we formed, for the duration of the travel interlude, a society, a lovely one, full of life. It’s up to you, writer, to transform it into a lasting one.”—The author: “Please go on.”—The client: “We drove, whether uphill or occasionally downhill again, at an even, slow pace, as if that, too, provided a kind of security. Although for quite some time now no more detours had been marked, the driver sometimes turned off onto side roads, parts of the old road, narrow, curving, along rushing brooks, between towering cliffs.

“This old road had been out of use for so many years that what remained of the paving was overgrown with ground-blackberry runners. Here and there bushes were also growing in the middle of the road, and our bus snaked between them and drove over them, hardly slowing down, and since not only the roof but also porthole-like portions of the floor were glazed, as is the case with quite a few of the most advanced vehicles nowadays, with shatterproof glass, we could see, time after time, all around us, overhead, to left and right, but also underneath, the branches whipping together and bouncing apart.

“It was almost an eternity since another vehicle had traversed these byways, at least any motorized one, and certainly not a bus — this was probably the first time a bus had passed this way — and in two or three places a tree had grown up in the middle of the road, if only a spindly one, a birch, a pine, an ash; whereupon the driver, who among other tools also had a saw with him, got out with his son and cut down the obstacle without more ado. After one such stop, as we drove on, a bunch of winter grapes bobbed above the front windshield, silvery balls with black pistils in the center.

“In contrast to the new road through the mountains, the stretches of the old one onto which we turned off did not run through a completely unpopulated area. At least some stretches of it seemed inhabited — though the houses, all of which were separate structures, with nothing else far and wide, revealed themselves on our approach to be in ruins, and not only since yesterday, apparently, but rather at least since several decades earlier, even centuries. For the most part they were remnants of mills and animal sheds; but also in one place of a school (so, beyond one granite hillock or another there must have once been farmsteads with many children), and in another place of an inn, located where six or eight mountain paths, long since abandoned and half-buried, more likely old cattle trails, crossed each other, forming a star, an inn for which the name venta must have been literally appropriate years ago.

“Our old road was one of these roads crossing the others, the only one that was still passable, if barely, and there it reached its first pass summit, a dip in the peaks of the Sierra de Paramera, the range in front of our Sierra de Gredos and not nearly as high. And there, where a bit farther on, already visible from below, the new road branched off from the main pass, the Puerto de Menga, open on all sides, and rejoined our carretera antigua , reassuringly, yet not so reassuringly after all, we stopped for the first time for a brief rest.

“Even the couple of trees around the tumbledown inn looked rather like ruins, were split, partially stripped of their bark, and seared with burn marks from lightning strikes. The one healthy tree amid the rubble, which elsewhere in the south and up into the lower reaches of the mountains would be a fig, its roots further splitting the walls, was an oak here, a sturdy tree, yet almost like one growing high in the mountains, whose ball-like burls, looking like sharp elbows, seemed to be jabbing at the remains of the building around it and taking them into a headlock; the inn’s roof had in any case long since been sent flying by the tree’s hard-asa-rock crown. We sat and stood during our rest period between what remained of the walls, under the tree, which still had all its leaves, though they were dead, rattling in the mountain wind.

“No one spoke except the driver and his young son, who carried on their conversation as they had since the beginning of the journey, without interruption, in dreamy voices, sounding more and more alike, the little boy’s at the same pitch as the father’s. The group of children also listened in silence, one of them turning out to be an adult once out in the open, yet his face still indistinguishable from the others’. The driver and his son had hauled a crate with refreshments — more than just apples and nuts — from the bus to the ruins of the inn; each traveler could help himself, and did just that.

“Only once were we startled: when the driver and his son, breaking off their dialogue, shouted in unison to a child who had wandered just a step away from the vicinity of the ruins/bus. Mines? A precipice? Overgrown cellar holes? Or did that simply mean: Everyone stay together!!”?

She went on telling her story, in a voice that was increasingly less that of a woman than that of a woman, man, child, and old person, young and old in one, yet with a frequency coming through from time to time, as a tonic or dominant, that could only be that of a woman: “For a long, long while we remained in the roofless and windowless tumbledown inn at the top of that old pass into the Sierra that had outlived its usefulness decades or centuries earlier. The noticeable feature of the few crossings into the mountains is that the weather changes constantly in those hollows, because of the warmer upwind from the much steeper southern flanks. Even in the case of that pass through the foothills, the wind kept colliding with the cold northern air and promptly produced a rain cloud, followed by a snow cloud, then a fog belt snaking along the gentler northern slopes. All around, the sky maintained an unchanging blue, while only at very brief intervals did this blue aloft reach us in the hollow with the ruins.