Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

From this weather-basin haze emerged now and then the silhouette of one of the flying men letting the rising air currents carry them aloft on their artificial, brilliantly colored wings. Initially some of the flyers were swept so high that they were bathed in the last sunlight, while for the earth below, including the crests of the foothills, the sun had already set. And in very slow, snaking curves, almost as gradual as the winged creatures tracing their spirals in the air, the bus drew closer to, then farther away from, then closer to the pass and the kite-flyers, or whatever they claimed to be. Alongside stretched a short, naturally formed plateau, used by the sportsmen for their running starts and takeoffs. It was swept by uninterrupted courses of clouds rushing by, and lay there in a haze.

And when the bus had almost reached the pass — the sign reading “Puerto de Peña Negra [= Black Rock Pass], 1900m” all the more legible for moments at the threshold to the cloud kitchen — one of the birdmen landed, instead of taking off like his companions, there on the flat spot, and having hardly touched — almost crashed — down, ran, no, dashed out of the picture, as if sucked into and dissolved by the mist, including his wings, crossed or tangled on his back.

Wherever was the place, necessarily much higher up, from which he had pushed off earlier? And hadn’t his flying apparatus actually been a parachute, which had briefly billowed behind and above him again as he ran? And no brightly colored sports parachute, either, but rather one in rock gray or Swiss-pine brown, in camouflage colors, so to speak, and not only so to speak? A military parachute?

Or had all the peculiar cloud formations in all the Sierra passes, or could it have been something else? cast such an evil spell on the passengers in the bus that they saw war in peacetime? saw instead of a boulder one made of papier-mâché and painted stone-color, “in reality” a covering for a tank concealed underneath? saw behind the façade of an apparent woodpile the storage place for a stack of machine guns? just as the hero of the book set in that region had once seen a marauding knight in every shepherd?

Or was this in the meantime a period unlike that one long ago, and did the vanes of the windmills sawing the air now in fact represent something other than mere “windmill vanes,” not exactly “evil giants,” but certainly something else? and the same was true of the ball-like object that came rolling unexpectedly around the foot of a cliff? of these scarecrows mounted clear across the valley? of these naked mannequins stacked in the back of a passing truck?

And who could know whether “in reality” the ugly-as-sin or perhaps imaginary chosen lady of the hero in that immortal book may have been, and perhaps is, just as beautiful and noble, yes, infinitely more noble and beautiful and especially more real than her suitor portrayed, and portrays, her? and that she was waiting, and is waiting, for him in precisely that village in La Mancha where he imagined her, and, the epitome of beauty and youth and reality, will continue to wait for him?

Be that as it might: what was certain was that these travelers here had not set out in the spirit of adventure, in contrast to that literary hero. They even visibly feared adventure. If it had been up to them, they would perhaps not have set out in the first place. Even when they were children, tunnels of horrors had held little attraction for them. It was not only the old folks whose heads bobbed back and forth like those of helpless infants as they were driven along. The only adventurer among them was the woman sitting up front in the bus, at once a total stranger and familiar.

She looked as if she were lying in wait or poised to throw: to throw herself into an adventure, to hurl herself completely off balance — wasn’t the word “lance” part of that concept? What a glow in her eyes as she had turned to watch the paratrooper, or whoever he was, dart among the sport-flyers. And when the bus had driven through the Puerto de Peña Negra, or whatever the pass was called, and scraped against the side of a cliff, and, after veering this way and that, seemingly no longer under the driver’s control, come to a halt diagonally across the road, with its engine stalled, she was instantly up front at the wheel, where she grasped the driver, who had slumped over it, under the armpits and carefully bedded him down at the feet of his enormous dog, who was whimpering almost like a small child.

“Not something like a stray bullet?” the author asked: “The very expression ‘stray bullet’ is something I could never bring myself to write, at least not in your, and our, book!”—“You could have been one of the passengers in the bus with me,” she replied. “But not to worry: if there is to be any adventure, it will have the most limited or strictly abbreviated episodes of overt violence or fighting possible. How else would you have been the one I went out of my way to hire to write the story? If there is to be action, there will generally be less emphasis on purely external action than on the kind that from time to time erupts from the inside to the outside in the rhythm of a long, long story.

“Accordingly, you may go ahead and write that at the last summit of the last pass before the Sierra the driver was not struck by a bullet, either a stray one or any other kind. He just felt sick all of a sudden. He had probably had a heart attack, or it was an asthma attack that ripped the steering wheel from his hands. Another woman in the bus helped me drag him outside, where he promptly regained consciousness.” And she helped him up. He did not want to sit; stood leaning against the cliff by the road. The color drained from his rooster- or birthmark-red face. She scooped up icy water gushing from the cliff and sprinkled it on his wrists. The dog trotted back and forth in front of its master in a figure eight, whimpering, and then lay down quietly on its belly beside him, its head raised.

After that, no one will have moved. The two women also motionless, one of them right beside the driver, her hand on his shoulder. Not one word was spoken, either, the other woman having turned off the bus radio the minute she came forward to help. Nothing but the rattling of tall thistles in the wind from the Sierra. The tableau held. The sick man repeatedly tried to straighten up and get back on the bus, and again and again his knees buckled. The two women — it was clear that no one else was allowed to help them — picked him up by his arms and legs and carried him inside, bedding him down on one of the unoccupied rows of seats toward the back. The dog followed and lay down parallel to him, its back so high that it would keep him from rolling off.

By now the adventurer had taken her place in the driver’s seat and turned the key; the bus drove on, heading downhill, just as steadily as before. Although for some time now she had hardly been playing her professional role as the lady banker, the skills peculiar to this profession continued to manifest themselves in the situations typical of this altered world, allowing her to take charge, make decisions, and determine the sequence of events: the combination of service and authority so characteristic of her work; patient, almost somnambulistic waiting for results and seizing the one favorable moment in a seemingly brutal yet at the same time gingerly fashion; forestalling, saving the day, promoting one’s own interests.

But there was one adventure-averse passenger or another who saw in her intervention a missionary zeal at work: a zeal that was “characteristic” in a different sense, stemming from guilt and intended to cover up a specific guilt. Were there not numerous examples of this sort of thing in history? The kind of person who gravitates toward being a helper, and at the same time a trendsetter or even leader, out of a guilt impossible to assuage in any other way? And then a third party chiming in, our author, let us say, with his daily view of the stony steppe of La Mancha, who wanted no truck with such opinions and explanations, and explained and opined that his protagonist simply was the way she was, and whatever she did or declined to do was simply what she did or declined to do.