Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Upon her joining them, the engine of the completely silent vehicle started up; and for the moment it sounded as if there were several engines. A blast on the horn rather like the steam whistle of an old paddleboat, halfway into the mountains, and now they were rolling along the old pass, on a road out of use since peace had come to the region, since the civil war, that is, heading down to where this road merged into the so-called new road, no longer all that new; enveloped all the way to the merge in a cloud of dust that matched the name of this intermediate stage of the bus trip, “Polvereda.”

They drove along for a while without any noteworthy events. If there was a village somewhere in the Polvereda region, hidden behind the lower ridges that accompanied the carretera and gradually closed in on it, no road sign pointed to one. The stretch of road they were traveling had no side roads branching off, and if there happened to be any, they soon ended at a mountain pasture, where, however, no cows or sheep or any other animals were standing, only here and there a solitary raven, no longer molting. The name “Polvereda” was still appropriate once they left the hard asphalt road; for, at even the slightest breath of wind, plumes of dust rose here and there and formed narrow funnels, swirling into the air.

They rode for a while beneath a sky where, whatever looks might suggest, no airplane had ever appeared, or Leonardo da Vinci’s flying man either. No jet contrails way up high; and if a cloud occasionally could be mistaken for one, none of the passengers made the association; not one of them saw anything other than a cloud. And no trucks came toward them. No electric poles. No pasture surrounded by wire fences; instead interlaced fieldstones, branches, and broom twigs. The colorful scraps in the bushes were not paper or plastic but cloth, fleeces, also skins.

The only vehicle approaching from the other direction: a bus in which not a soul was sitting but the driver, who, contrary to custom, did not wave to his colleague; also no engine sound, as if this other bus were rolling down this steep stretch of road with the engine off, coasting. And not a soul outside, except the hiker, the one from earlier, from some past era, still walking along the shoulder, with his knapsack, his pack, from which dangled, no, not a camera and binoculars but a mason’s hammer, chisel, square, and compasses, the latter two made of wood, monumental in size: the stopping of the bus, on her, the adventurer’s, command. The itinerant mason had then not climbed aboard the bus — had peremptorily waved the travelers on, without stopping or even raising his head. His gait, with long strides and arms swinging rhythmically, his hair fluttering behind, his sleeves and trousers flapping and whipping like sails, his tools — or hadatt , as she thought, not “tools”—bouncing around him, circling and swinging like the gondolas on a carousel: and all this happening for just the second — again she did not think “second” but thania —of the bus’s stopping and opening its door. And the hiker in close-up, chewing, as he walked, on a raisin, zabiba in Arabic.

Ah, to get off the bus and go on foot, too; to walk like this stonemason, or whatever he was; to place one’s feet like him in the footsteps, deeply imprinted in the natural gravel along the roadside, of one who had passed that way before, which — and these, too, as also became clear in that one moment of the bus’s stopping — not those of a human being but rather of an animal, a hoofed animal, not a horse but an animal with smaller, more delicate hooves, evidently a long-legged one; ah, to stride through these seemingly oceanic spaces between mountain ranges with as much verve as that figure already disappearing in the distance; with ever new horizons or frames of vision; horizons entirely different from those visible from the vehicle, even if they were the same ones, stimulating appetite, creating desire, touching one’s lips, breast, and belly, even when, and precisely when, they were still a day’s journey away; even if the horizons were an illusion.

The bus drove for a long time through the Polvereda, from time immemorial a far-flung region of sand and dust clouds at the foot of the Sierra. Now and then little clouds and wisps of wood dust even came puffing out of the bark of the ancient trees, more and more isolated from one another. Almost all of these trees had broken crowns. Was it possible that the hurricane that had struck the riverport city, back home in the northwest, had also swept through these southern mountains? No, this destruction had occurred long ago. Furthermore, these beheaded trees displayed streaks of soot, although not all the way up the trunks (which would have indicated a forest fire), but only at the points of breakage or beheading; and unlike that of a lightning strike, the damage had come not from the top but from the side, had swept through horizontally, had split the trees’ necks without leaving traces of fire, the soot mark looking like a black ruff placed around the headless neck as it stuck up into midair.

It had been neither lightning nor storms nor forest fires. No, these trees, so crippled that they were no longer recognizable as oaks, birches, or mountain acacias, often not even as living things (they might just as well have been the ruins of pile dwellings or telephone poles), had been shot in two, and if not with full-sized rockets, then certainly not with mere pistol and rifle bullets either (these had turned every single road and advertising sign into a sieve, such that the holes, if one took the time to look at them, formed their own unique symbols, words, and outlines of images).

Here in the Polvereda region a battle had taken place; even, over the centuries, several battles; and the most recent one could have been fought a week ago or a dozen years ago already — the destruction seemed at first sight a thing of the distant past, but at second sight as if it had just now swept across the landscape with a single massive karate chop — the splintered wood so white, the fibers so fresh and marrow-moist.

And in old tales and books, this Polvereda here, this dust-cloud region, had already been mentioned as a perpetual theater of war. One of those old stories, however, suggested that this region, the comarca , the marches, merely presented travelers with phantom images of war and battles (see “dust clouds”). In that book, the Polvereda figures as a generator of hallucinations for any stranger; and since the region has always been largely uninhabited, it is almost only strangers who find their way there. The Polvereda as the “enchantress turned to dust,” “the deceiver”: and it deceives people also with respect to time: the stranger who goes astray and sees those mysterious dust clouds, now here, now there, experiences even things from the distant past, things that have become the stuff of legend, as very much of the present, all the more terrifying and unexpected.

And, inversely, the stranger is incapable, according to this book, of recognizing all the incidental occurrences, both large and small, of the current moment, of the day and hour in which he is crossing the region, as the actual, harmless, peaceful, vital present and letting them govern him: all the tiny birds whirring by — in the Polvereda, too, there are titmice, sparrows, and robins, for example — the rust-yellow lichens on the largely flat ledges that protrude everywhere from the upland savannah, the brooks that cross the road in various places, actually mere rivulets: all these the newcomer to the region sees and hears only in connection with the mirages of battles appearing to him momentarily from the depths of the decades and centuries, the armies clashing or the campaigns about to be waged. The sparrows are the harbingers of the cannonballs. The yellow lichens are artificial, camouflage for the tanks concealed under tarpaulins, not ledges. No matter how reassuring their gurgling sounds, the mountain brooks cascading so rapidly have a reddish cast that by no means comes only from the iron contained in the granite and quartz sand, which also hovers constantly over the brooks in a haze of weathered particles.