Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

All the passengers got off except the children way back in the rear, who at first did stand up like the rest but then sat down shoulder-to-shoulder on a barrier now lowered in front of the library in the bus’s midsection. As they stood up, it became apparent that some of these children were already adolescents. Today was their library day; their school had sent them out to become acquainted with the northern foreland of the Sierra, and particularly, in that connection, to familiarize themselves with borrowing books, with the people lending them, and likewise with the books themselves, with locating titles and authors, with books as artifacts and articles of value.

At almost the same time as the bus, a tractor-trailer had pulled into the square, announcing itself at a distance, from the houses on the outskirts of the village, which suddenly seemed quite far away, by a rhythmic honking that continued here on the square, like that of a car carrying newlyweds. In contrast to the entirely transparent bus, the truck consisted of a white metal box, completely sealed except for slits in the front for seeing through, until the moment when the driver opened the back of the container and transformed his vehicle into a market booth, slightly raised above the square, its shelves and crates stocked with products that were to be found nowhere else in the mountain village, which, like most of the others, had not had a general store for a long time; in addition to bananas, oranges, and cleaning agents, also bread, ham, and cheese (despite the fact that close to the village, in the hollow, stretched fields with wheat stubble, and before that, after the great expanse of wasteland, goats and also cattle and black-hoofed swine had been nibbling at the sparse grass).

In response to the honking, people flocked to the square; less the rural housewives one would have expected, “aprons and black kerchiefs,” than more urban figures, such as one would find in the capital; the older ones among them were also bareheaded, often in long coats and shawls, with freshly polished street shoes; the female contingent, at first in the majority, seemed to have come directly from the beauty parlor and swayed their hips, even those who were not so young; shoes with extremely high heels no rarity.

The truck driver, metamorphosed into a vendor in the vehicle metamorphosed into a shop, had lowered a running board for these customers, with steps leading up to it. But not everyone came to buy, at least not at first. At the library bus’s open door, one of the children or adolescents had sounded the aforementioned hand bell simultaneously with the honking of the cross-country supermarket, as a sort of reply, but in a different rhythm. A few of the Polvereda folk, and not only women, made a beeline for the bookshelves. More of them, however, hesitated, first doing their shopping and approaching the lending library only afterward, if at all.

But since the book borrowers over here needed considerably more time than the shoppers over there, they were soon lined up in the aisle; and the line in the meantime stretched partway into the arena, whereas to the shop on wheels — which, in a curious optical illusion, had attracted a much larger crowd than the bookmobile — only an occasional latecomer hurried; and in the end the traveling shopkeeper closed up his store and, before he headed for a quick stop at the bar, took up a position in the line of borrowers, by now quite short again.

The lending itself went quickly: the child librarians did the finding, stamping, recording in a jiffy, and the borrowers, some of them the same age but others much older and elderly, almost always knew what they wanted. They were slow only to turn away and leave; skimmed their books while standing next to someone still waiting in line — but avoided showing what they had picked out, covering the titles with their hands or with a videocassette they had also borrowed, seemingly ashamed of what they had borrowed as they trotted back to the square in the reverse line, which moved almost as deliberately as the parallel line of waiting borrowers — or was it shyness rather than shame? — and then one or the other disappeared among the houses with an embarrassed grin and downcast eyes, as if he had just made a fool of himself before the assembled community; “at the same time,” she continued, “you could hear some people’s mouths watering, and not just the young people’s, as they went on their way! A couple of them tossed their books to each other at some distance from the bus, back and forth, like handball players in training, or jugglers.

“I was squatting on my heels again, like my fellow travelers, by the frozen-over drinking trough, or fountain, and then looked up from below, past the glass-sided bus, with the silhouettes of the librarians, the books, and the borrowers, and saw for the first time above the one-story roofs of Polvereda — no curved roof tiles as in the south, indeed, nothing characteristic of the south here — the entire central array of peaks belonging to the Sierra de Gredos in miniature and all the clearer, as if viewed through a reversed telescope, the peak of the Mira, of the Galana, of the pointed Three Little Brothers, and, approximately in the middle, a peak so jagged that, at least to all appearances, it alone, of all the peaks, did not lie under the otherwise unbroken blanket of shimmering snow: Almanzor, ‘The Outlook.’”

The author: “Is it correct if I add to the description of the book borrowers that they also hid the books among their purchases, their heads of lettuce, their rolls and detergent?”—She: “Yes, if you mention that at the same time they did not remove their hands, or their one free hand, from the books hidden there and constantly bent over them as they were leaving and stuck their heads way down into their plastic bags and emerged with their noses looking dusty.”

The author: “During one period in my life, I, too, did not want to be seen with a book anymore, and if I were, I wanted no one to be able to read the book’s title. In the meantime, of late, I make a point of leaving my house, or my residence, my almacén , with a book, and have it with me and visible everywhere, and if someone tries to peek at it, I promptly move it into the light — in case the light is not already shining on it! — so that anyone who has eyes to see it can do so. Another aspect of this is that in the meantime — unless there is real urgency, as with you and your heart’s desire, your story — after a period of using the most speedy means of communication, if I cannot talk directly face-to-face with a person, I send a letter, and by the classic form of mail, too, perhaps destined to disappear soon, and by the least rapid delivery. An airmail letter, even if it is in transit for two or three days, reaches the recipient too fast for my taste, and I choose regular delivery”—“ Barran ” (she, inadvertently)—“and not, as my mailwoman in La Mancha thinks, because that is ‘cheaper’—or, in the case of letters going overseas, surface mail.

“This is not intended to be praise of slowness or anything of the sort. No: for me it is appropriate for the lines I have addressed to various people — of whom there are only a few left, and only a few letters, and a few lines — that they have time to wend their way to the recipients. In my imagination—”—“So we are back to the imagination again—” (she, interrupting him inadvertently)—“—not to say anything against imagination, if it broadens instead of narrowing — well, in my imagination, precisely this kind of long or ‘leisurely’ traveling on the part of a letter adds to the words I have written something they would have lacked if they had been hustled along electronically or whatever. Of course my letter must also be conceived and executed for this manner of transportation, almost quaint nowadays. An angry letter, for instance, is out of the question. So is, obviously, a business letter—”—“Obviously?” (she, inadvertently)—“or, on the contrary, yes, perhaps precisely certain business letters.