Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And he asked — a rhetorical question that already implied its own answer — whether she, the woman there, had not, on the contrary, become a queen of banking precisely as a result of her innate capacity for service and for leaping into the breach, or because of the fundamental presence of mind that made these capacities possible and, in the case of the person in question, also worked hand in hand with the gift of foresight — the ability to foresee developments, structural shifts, overt and covert warfare, or a false peace born of inertia and an active, energetic peace, opening paths into uncharted territory: in the same sense as one of her historical predecessors, the banker and trader Jakob Fugger in sixteenth-century Augsburg, who was said to have displayed the powerful gift of foresight as “a form of perfect hearing” (here, too, he, the author, said he had done his research, actually more in contrast to his usual practice)?

It went along with this, and with foresight and presence of mind, he said, that she, like Jakob F., the greatest man in history when it came to “fructifying money,” had her roots, or whatever one called them, in a village. Early life in a village, opined and explained the researcher-author, himself a longtime refugee from the city, reinforced the aforementioned gifts, giving them a foundation and at the same time illuminating them, in the sense of “making them shine forth.”

And in the end he further explained these gifts of his heroine’s as resulting from her having spent her village childhood without parents — which meant that she, as the older child, always had to be responsible for her “little brother,” that — but fortunately for her and for the book, he interrupted himself here with a laugh, as if this explaining had been nothing but a game. She had been about to point out to him that he was creating the impression he had to defend her tooth and nail against someone, “almost like an admirer”; and he should refrain from this, in the interest of the story, up to the very last paragraph!

Remarkable how, with the adventurer at the wheel now, the passengers relaxed; likewise the sick driver, lying next to the enormous dog and only a short while ago still fighting for breath. After surviving these moments of mortal dread and loud, premature lamenting, the two of them were enjoying a sleep as sound as it was deep; snoring and wheezing. Yet she was driving considerably more briskly than her predecessor, and not merely because they were heading down the mountain (the serpentines on the southern side of these last foothills had even more extended loops, as if that were possible, and in the Sierra, going downhill usually meant: slow down).

Along the entire stretch, zigzagging across mountain meadows sparsely punctuated with dwarf firs, the arrayed peaks of the Gredos remained clearly in view, as if all at the same distance, on the upper periphery of one’s field of vision, no longer hidden by any range in between.

Also not another trace, except behind them, up on the Black Rock Pass, of a puff of mist or cloud. A clear winter-evening sky, although it remains uncertain whether the darkness forming the basis of the blue — no longer the “blueing” of that morning or afternoon — stems from the blackness of outer space, already perceptible in the high mountains, or from the impending night. No more smell of smoke, it having been drawn out of the bus up in the thinner, or finer, atmosphere; but also no more freezing and shivering.

On the sloping meadows, in contrast to the grazing places somewhat farther down, which tended to be deserted, there are herds of cattle almost everywhere, as well as scattered families of horses, the horses, like the cattle (many bulls), with coats so short that they look like a skin stretched taut over their bodies, for the most part as dark as coal: so a portion of the livestock from the mountains are not driven over the Sierra to spend the winter months in the much warmer and always snowless southern region, the valleys of the río Tiétar and the río Tajo beyond?

“Was it always like this up here?” wondered the driver, she who knew the Sierra inside out. “Yes, every time I came through here in wintertime, there were animals grazing, and only in the pastures here in the central region — but in no other year as many as are here now, and also — this, too, is new — as carefully and strictly guarded: around every herd and tribe a small team of herders with walkie-talkies—, as if in case of an accident.”

From the pass up above, she had still seen some of the mountain pastures on the southern flank below bathed in sunlight, a field of rays that visibly gave way to pitch-darkness — with an afterglow lasting but the twinkling of an eye — until only a single cow, separated from the rest of the herd in a dip below a ridge, had a yellow gleam on its flank, or was that part of its coat?

After sunset, a similar yellow, then reddish, then yellow-red-blue gleam on the clustered peaks of the Sierra de Gredos, far off against the sky. These might have been the central European Alps now, with the all too famous alpenglow on the snowy expanses in the background; and, to complete the picture, the clanging of the bells belonging to the cows and the bellwethers in the foreground and the veil of frost over the high valley carved out below, already shrouded in darkness, from which the thinly scattered lights of houses stood out, clearly nowhere dense enough to signal the presence of a larger village or town.

What was it that brought her back, time after time, as on the current evening, to this Sierra de Gredos, hardly distinguishable, especially now in wintertime, from the Swiss mountain ranges along the Italian and French borders, and whose highest peak, even the Almanzor, was hardly more than half as high as Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, or the Matterhorn?

What in the world was she seeking or expecting in this mountain range without ski slopes or ski lifts, a range completely unknown outside the tableland area, known even in its own country only from hearsay as one got farther away from it, a destination at most for the inhabitants of the region, and perhaps also for those from Madrid? Weren’t even its principal types of rock, the granites, gneisses, and mica schists, the same as in the far more rugged Alps, which seemed to beckon with very different sorts of thrilling adventures, the only variation being that the Sierra ridges were older by so and so many millions of years, though not old in the sense of “phenomenal,” “rare,” “record-breaking,” or even “venerable,” but rather in the sense of “worn down,” “crumbling,” “cast off,” “written off,” in short, “aged,” in contrast to the still youthful Alps, in whose substrate something continued to stir, mountains that rose up year after year, pushed higher and expanded, while the Sierra de Gredos was steadily diminishing, eroding, shrinking, not quite perceptibly, but measurably, and someday, millions of days from now, would be hardly more than a somewhat elevated table in the tableland?

Why, if she was already taking a detour to seek out the author, did she not choose a more exciting one, especially one that would lead through sites of general interest or places where an audience was concentrated — whether the reading public or not — also a more contemporary area, that is to say, a more relevant, and, well, what the heck, a much, much longer detour than this one through the Sierra, which, properly speaking, was no detour at all — for instance, a detour in a great arc by way of North Africa to the author’s hole-in-the-wall in La Mancha, through the Mauritanian deserts, across the High Atlas in Morocco, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and heading inland across the Sierra Nevada, then the Sierra Morena, and finally the Sierra de Calatrava, the “Death’s Head Sierra”—all landscapes she had traveled and hiked at least two or three times, and where she had had almost exclusively good, heartening, happy, and life-enhancing experiences, unlike here in the Gredos massif?