Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“Most suitable, it is true, for this kind of slow and steady progress, keeping close to the ground or the earth’s surface and wending its way to the addressee, are letters of friendship and love—”—“Friendship? love? you?” (she, inadvertently)—“—for whatever resonates in them in the way of friendship or love (which need not be explicitly mentioned) is enhanced, as I imagine it, by their particular journey over land or sea; and not merely enhanced, but furthermore validated, given validity in a way different from a photogram—”—“Fax” (she, or a third person?)—“—or a u-mail—”—“e-” (she, or who?).

The author: “Simply the thought that my envelope will sit in the village mailbox for a while, even overnight or over the weekend, with all its little words. The mailbox rumbled when I tossed in the letter, that’s how empty it was! And then the letter being driven to the railroad station beyond the seven plains of La Mancha. Resting in the mailbag during the train’s umpteen stops, day and night, at stations or along open stretches in the various countries it traversed. Being sorted at the junction. Being transferred to a postal bus, and so on.

“And with every additional leg of the journey, I imagine, my letter becomes more believable, and each of its sentences gains effectiveness and truthfulness, or validity, becomes valid in a way it would not have if I had conveyed its contents over the telephone or even here, face-to-face. Only in this fashion can my few words, launched into the distance, become credible to you, clearly coming from my heart, or at least that general vicinity.

“Which brings us back — (some) letters are like (some) books — to books. You and I have in common a village childhood, if in very different villages — or so I picture it. And thus I take the liberty of speaking in passing of my native village’s lending library, long since dissolved into dust. It is evening now, and as happens from time to time on the evenings when I am not alone, my tongue is finally loosened, and I feel an urge to tell stories, and more and more they are stories from long, long ago that are, so to speak — yes, so to speak — of no import.

“That library was located in the schoolhouse and did not have its own room; it was simply a glass-fronted cabinet against a wall in the one room that housed all the grades. At the time I had a sort of terror of cabinets in the village’s houses; also of those in my own home. They were all armoires, crammed full of clothing, most of it old, often worn out and moth-eaten, some of it going back to our forebears and the forebears of our forebears, or the Sunday best of a son who did not return from some war or other; just about every house had one or two such keepsakes.

“And my terror became acute whenever such a cabinet was not locked, as repeatedly happened, but was left half-open, probably to air out the contents, and I was alone in the house and in the room where it stood. The doors would open gradually, one jerk at a time, often without a sound, and behind the rows of clothing hanging in the back of the cabinet — I still cannot get used to using the proper word, ‘armoire’—there would be a concentration of energy, something poised to pounce, soon scraps would be flying, and not only scraps of cloth. On the other hand, whenever the lending-library cabinet was opened, once a week, before my eyes in the classroom—”

Like his heroine or business partner, the author frequently interrupted his narrative in mid-sentence and began to pose questions as usual: “And your image of libraries? Your images? Surely no books ever turn up in these images, as you understand them and want to see them conveyed in our book? Usually nothing but places, landscapes, and if sheets of paper, then without writing, no? Surely you do not want to tell me that you were ever tapped on the shoulder by an image in which something like a library flashed?” And again, as he not infrequently did, the author tried to provoke the woman into talking, which he did not by saying, “Tell me a story!” but rather by coming out with “Do not tell me anything!”

His guest, the client, gazed awhile along the line of her shoulder, focusing on some distant vanishing point, and then raised? or rather lowered, her voice: “Yes, no image, no images of various national libraries where we spent a short or a long time, and if the image of one that burned, then not the library in Alexandria but one from a house fire long ago in the village, the remains of books all mixed up with shattered windowpanes, and apples roasted by the heat lying in the grass under a tree, far from the actual site of the fire.

“And another image: that of a lending library on the outskirts of a metropolis situated by the ocean, installed in a former customs agent’s hut, between the path once used by the customs officials and the steep cliff nearby, the path widened into a promenade, and the hut a single room, rendered much brighter by the windows, which had been enlarged on all sides, and a view, past the people strolling along the customs path, far, far out over the surface of the water, and not a single reader in the image, nothing but the silhouettes of the books between the ocean in the background and the pedestrians, bicyclists, and roller skaters in the foreground, and that, day in, day out, year in, year out, always the same image before my eyes, or perhaps sometimes also an image of this library late at night; the silhouettes of the books and the salty deep way out there viewed together through the display-window-size panes in the near darkness, with not a soul in sight.”—“And in the reality-outside-this-image, this branch library has certainly long since been turned into a branch bank?” (the author) — She: “More likely converted into a customs-path museum.” —Both at the same time, inadvertently: “As it should be.”—The woman, the guest: “Which puts us back in the bus traveling into the Sierra de Gredos.”

Almost as often as she had crossed the Sierra she had also passed through the Polvereda, the dust-cloud region, and the village of the same name. And each time she had encountered almost the same people, evidently mountain-dwellers from way back, similarly dressed, all with a similar accent, similar mannerisms, and especially a similar skin tone.

But on the day described here, much appeared entirely different to her. True, the natives were walking and especially sitting — the older card and dice players indoors in the one bar, those who were too old to play outside in the sun, low in the sky — as if they had always been there. Except that now they no longer dominated the scene. They shopped and borrowed books from the bus in about the same proportion as those wearing big-city clothes, who likewise came from Polvereda, or at least were not strangers here. Yet between these two groups, involved in the same activities, was a third group, apparently a distinct minority, and this one constituted the new and noticeable element in the mountain village. Groups? No, none of the three different sets of people formed anything like a group, not the returnees or vacationers from the capital, not even the natives, and certainly not the last category; they all came and went independently of each other.

The third or last type seemed particularly separate from one another. Was that because each of them had a different skin color, if only in small but obvious variations, from deep black to bronze to reddish brown, from olive to peach to lemony to rich yellow, from quince yellow to yellowish gray to blue-green to snow-white, this last unusual precisely in this mountainous region? Earlier it would have been said that these individuals, one after the other, exemplified a “race” or its “variants” and “subvariants.” And now? At the time of this story the word “race” had long since disappeared, and was used, if at all, merely to designate external, superficial traits, such as skin tone, but preferably it was avoided altogether.