Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Or did these people with differently pigmented or overly white skin stand out so markedly because some of them turned up in garments and with headgear entirely unknown in the Sierra, and furthermore known nowadays only from archival pictures: so to speak, in tribal or native costumes (words like “tribe” or “native” also long since out of use, if not suspect and frowned upon), in “caftans” (?), “saris” (?), “burnooses” (?), with a “fez” (?), a “turban” (?), a “kaffiya,” or God only knows what they were all called?

Yet individuals of the third type were apparently not so unknown in the village after all; or no longer, and for a considerable time already. They moved across the Plaza Mayor as matter-of-factly as the others; spoke the language of the country halfway fluently, although each with an immediately recognizable, not seldom transnational, accent; except for that one ancient Chinese (the term “ancient” otherwise to be strictly avoided), wearing a visored cap and an all-blue tunic buttoned up to the neck, padding in silent cloth shoes with a sort of delicate shyness, such as had not been observed anywhere else in the country and thus striking to the eye — the eye was what mattered — and describing a monumental arc of courtesy, of “deference,” around everyone, even the dogs, and then, in the bus, pointing mutely but firmly to the one book for whose sake he had made his way to the library. It was the book in his language, with Chinese characters, stepladder-like.

And like the ancient Chinaman, others from the races, peoples, and tribes foreign to this region would borrow, along with a, let us say, domestic Spanish, Romance, Latin, or European book, one from their land of origin: obviously the one they asked for, whether requested ahead of time or not, was available in the traveling library. Initially amazed at this scene, she soon experienced no further amazement as she perched on the drinking trough and watched; or her amazement became so powerful and exclusive that it was no longer recognizable as such?

And again the signal for driving on. Departure from Polvereda, away from the dust clouds. But this time no ringing of a hand bell: ordinary honking, though considerably more insistent, more shrill to the ears. Nor did it come from the glass and library bus, but from another vehicle, which at that moment came backing out of a shed previously assumed to be an abandoned storage building.

The second bus was an ordinary one, not exactly new, but more suitable than the first for the mountain switchbacks. The travelers changed buses, except for the children, who will ride back with their library, driven by the bus driver, who in the meantime has fallen silent, next to him his silent son — their dialogue having in the meantime become unnecessary? Already they have driven off. But the new driver likewise has a companion sitting next to him, an enormous, very quiet sheepdog, his face, in profile, pointed constantly toward his master.

In this connecting bus it had been cold, not only as they set out but also long after that, and it had reeked of cigarette smoke and various other things. And trepidation had crept through the thinned ranks of the passengers; as if, with the children gone, they no longer saw themselves protected.

No one said a word. No one turned his head, not to any other passenger and certainly not to the mountain landscape, now growing increasingly precipitous, where, after the first switchback — part of a system of serpentine curves laid out evenly over the entire width of the last rise and barrier before the Sierra — the summit plain, visible just a little while earlier from the village square, was now blocked out again.

No one responded, not even the new driver, when a farmhand waved from a wheat field no larger than a garden, located just over the tree line and separated from its rocky surroundings by a stone wall of granite, the wheat shocks scattered among the stubble; no one took the time to interpret the old man’s gesture as a wish for good luck or even a blessing for the journey; nor did anyone take the time to be surprised at seeing wheat fields at such an altitude, almost two thousand meters above sea level, if only one such field.

She alone, the adventurer, seated directly behind the driver and the dog, seemed to have time again, as since the beginning of this journey, — “her last, it was to be hoped”—time and more time. “And having time,” she indicated to the author, “meant to me: being free of anxiety, of worry, of constraint; no fear of winter, of slippery roads, of getting stuck on this otherwise long impassable stretch of road, of a below-freezing night in the mountains, of pitch-darkness, of anything of any sort.

“Nonetheless I naturally — naturally? — had an awareness of the dangers, perhaps more acutely than my fellow passengers; and of one danger in particular, the great danger. But on that stretch of road my feeling of having time was more powerful than my awareness of danger. It was like that game where the paper covers the stone and therefore the ‘paper’ player beats the ‘stone’ player: in this instance, feeling trumped awareness, while in a different situation, at a different time, awareness could certainly have been the scissors to my feeling of having time — my feeling would have been cut to shreds by my awareness …”

Awareness of being in danger and the feeling of having time: if this was in fact a game, it was one without a winner and a loser. Instead one complemented the other, and, furthermore, both together gave birth to a third factor. In this confined, tinny, drafty vehicle she felt the kind of jolt go through the story for whose sake she had set out on this journey; a tightening, a powerful tugging and pulling, a pull. She sensed, no, she saw and felt, that her book, after all the intervening explications and descriptions, which of course were just as much part of it (a little like the lasso-like, looping serpentines along which the bus was rolling uphill), was now back to simply being told, or, even better and lovelier, was telling itself; was approaching that most sublime of narrative sensations, when “it narrates itself,” “I, you, it, all of you, she, we, we are freely narrated, out of one country into another, at least for a while, and again and again in this fashion, and now and then, as the entirely appropriate rarity and precious thing in the book of our life.”

She was the one passenger in the bus who looked out the window; who waved back at the farmhand in the enclosure, with a mere shimmer in the corners of her eyes; who turned around to the others, all of whom gradually got up from their scattered seats and moved toward the front, huddling together, more around her than around the driver, forming a cluster in the front of the bus similar to that of the children in the back of the bus on the earlier stage of the trip.

Only a few passengers were left, and as she gazed at them one at a time, it seemed to her that not only the bus had been changed in Polvereda but also, except for her, all the passengers, and at the same time that each of those few faces was familiar. They had already had something to do with each other, and in a life-altering way at that; their life lines had crossed at some point, but in what manner? under what circumstances?

And again the bus was approaching a pass, in the first twilight, which could just as well be the first light of dawn. After that the Gredos massif would finally stand there without any foothills, with the upland valley to the north carved by the río Tormes, whose headwaters lay in the Sierra. And again this crossing point was marked by clouds welling up thickly against the deep blue, almost black, air over the notch in the rocky ridge, and alternating with swaths of mist and light snow and moments of clear weather.