Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Then to the north a group of people on foot came into view, and among them the litter with the gout-plagued abdicated emperor was carried past the venta and over the pass. The annual reenactment of the final journey of Charles V, which had taken place almost half a millennium earlier, over the Sierra de Gredos and down to its southern slopes, to Jarandilla de la Vera and to the final stage of his life in the Yuste monastery? Four young fellows, familiar with the area, in summery clothes, some of them barefoot, carried the old man on poles over their shoulders. Yet Emperador Carlos was not really that old—“about my age when I was hired by the banking queen to write the book” (the author)—, and was actually peering like a child from his litter, or perhaps like someone about to die, on the way to his place of burial.

As during all the years when the woman and the emperor had held meetings, she was bringing him a chest full of money, transported on a horse-drawn cart and now hauled up by her entourage (far more numerous than that of her business partner), but this time it was simply meant as a gift, no longer for financing one of his dozen or two wars and for paying his army of mercenaries scattered throughout war-torn Europe, and farther afield in North Africa, in South America. But the abdicated emperor, the dying man, merely waved it away; did not want the money; did not even wish to see it.

All he wanted or wished for was that she might let herself be carried in his litter, by his side, for a few paces, until just over the top of the pass; which was then done. There was ample room for both of them, and the bearers actually seemed to find the double load, that of the winter emperor and the winter queen, lighter, far, far lighter, and not only because after the long climb the road finally leveled out and then headed downhill. They almost ran, dancing and skipping, and the man marked for death, face-to-face with his unfamiliar-familiar friend-foe, bit his lip; but unlike the bus passengers in the previous episode, did so voluntarily.

A trained falcon perched on the emperor’s forearm, on the ermine sleeve of his robe; so much smaller than its mountain relatives wheeling in the air above, and looking not at all bird-of-prey-like or avid of the chase, but just as greatly in need of help and childlike in its beseeching manner as its litter-borne master. A flock of ravens, black as only ravens can be, caught up with the group, not cawing or screeching, but bawling, as if from one throat and one body, in bloodthirsty rage and murderous lust; and again the pinkish-white almond blossoms wafted past the solid raven-feather cloud now dispersed in all directions: against the sky-darkening raven blackness, spots of brightness never before seen in this way.

And among the innumerable colorless water droplets on the blades of grass, where was that one bronze-colored one from yesterday, or whenever, near Tordesillas, or wherever? There it was, at the feet of my adventurer, as she squatted in the circle of her traveling companions in the ruined inn, even if it was not melted hoarfrost as before, but a drop of melting snow, and instead of on a blade of grass on a folio volume poking out of the debris on the ground: a tiny but glowing bronze lamp just a bit above the earth, no larger than the head of a pin and all the more blinding, at least for a moment, just as, at night, also for moments, a single glowworm can be.

In a corner of the wall, overlooked until then, the wheel of a barouche, it, too, having followed her here from elsewhere, along with its tried-and-true twelve spokes, counted at one glance — but from where? from the hurricane-lashed garden behind her house in the riverport city, or from elsewhere. And on the interior walls of the ruin, inscriptions, familiar from long ago, even those in Hebrew, Cyrillic, Arabic, one or another of which she had already deciphered, again effortlessly and without any specific intention of reading them: “Here begins the land of the swine — death to the swine-eaters” ( al chinzir , “the swine”), and: “Here ends the elephant kingdom and begins the donkey kingdom.”

One of the travelers found in the rubble an old, or perhaps not so old, wanted poster, as large as a movie advertisement: a search had been under way, or was still under way, for a band of bank and armored-car robbers; and the likeness of the only woman on the poster resembled her so much that for a while some of the travelers kept glancing back and forth between the photo and her; the children even pointed at her, and, as they did whenever they thought something was afoot, whatever it might be, waved and clapped.

For a while the entire group held their breath, then breathed all the more deeply; an audible puffing and expelling of air, pushing air out of the deepest recesses of the lungs, as if in a game; the clouds of breath thicker and whiter than ever before, eddying from the throats and floating away from each traveler’s mouth into the surrounding area and, entirely unlike the fire-spewing of dragons, marking the contours of all objects in their path, the rounded notches in the oak leaves, the half-buried folio pages, the snowflakes floating past the faces — how sharp their crystalline forms became in the expelled breath — the intermittent rays of the sun, the bundles of rays distinct enough to touch, like writing emerging from a plain background. And in the mountain air, the features of this person or that in the group took on sharp outlines from this playful blowing at one another from filled lungs, outlines at once alien and familiar: no mistake, no confusion of identity — I know you. The hissing and crackling of the fire in the open-air stove matched the general puffing and rattling expulsion of breath. Now someone or other was already opening his mouth to speak to someone else; then hesitated after all.

After a while the driver will have given the signal to resume the journey, swinging a hand bell, a rusty one that still clanged, also found in the rubble, from the inventory of the inn that had once stood there. The travelers will have risen from their squatting position. The children are promptly seated in the back of the bus. The driver’s son, whose head comes up only to the hips of the adults, has punched them in the stomach, an additional signal for departure. With some he also had to take a running leap to get at them; and that included the women as well as the men. Finally, for her, a particularly energetic, remarkably powerful blow, below the belt, for which he hurled himself at her.

She acted as if nothing were amiss; as if she did not even notice. As was so often the case, she continued eating, whereas all the others had long since finished their meal; she had postponed starting, as usual; had first sampled with her eyes and then eaten with provocative slowness; left not a shred, not a crumb; savored every morsel, as she now did the flakes, the kernels, even the bits of membrane in the cracked nut, until there was nothing left; let the aftertaste of every molecule linger on her tongue, not allowing herself to be disturbed or hurried.

The others had all been sitting in the Sierra bus for more than a while, some of them already asleep, others with their eyes closed, when she finally joined them. She simply had her own sense of time, and, when circumstances warranted, this sense also had to prevail over the people around her, who had always tacitly accepted being ruled by her casual attitude toward time; even bowed to it willingly and often full of curiosity and anticipation. Thus the passengers now sat there in the bus as if something were about to be offered to them; as if they were about to witness a special performance. Even the driver and his son waited in patient suspense, their dialogue interrupted.