Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“It is true,” she said, continuing to talk softly to herself at the wheel and turning in her thoughts to her so faraway author: “Whenever I think of my previous hikes through the Sierra de Gredos, unless the familiar images come to me unbidden, I usually find myself recalling a borderline situation, not seldom one between life and death, or at least something simply unpleasant and bad. And yet, since that first time, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I have set out to cross these mountains almost every year and sometimes twice in one year, far, far more often than I have made my way through all these parts of the world where I was consistently filled with ecstatic feelings — no, not with illusory ecstasy but rather with a state of love, yes, of love, and of which I have only fond memories afterward. Whereas one time when I was on my way through here I found myself in the middle of a driving snowstorm, with flakes so wet and heavy that I could hardly breathe and was afraid of suffocating. I almost died of exhaustion. That was in January, like now—”

She corrected herself again: “No, that January it was the torrential downpour. Or was it a different January? No, the lost shoes. The snowstorm was in May — in the Sierra I always get all mixed up about time, and that is partly the fault of the Sierra de Gredos itself. — I had just been walking in the mountains in the May sunlight. I was walking as light-footedly, even with my knapsack, mochila in Spanish, mihlatuz zahr in Arabic, as a person can walk. As always when I am going somewhere on foot, I assessed my condition, the moment and hour, and my relationship to the world or to life, by whether I involuntarily spun around myself at least once as I went along.

“And the spinning occurred there again and again, as if at regular, predetermined intervals. Likewise I encountered from time to time, amid the short grass, some of which was still a wintry gray, sorrel, always growing in clusters, all fresh and green, and I repeatedly plucked a leaf and munched on it, and soon it was not merely against thirst but just because, out of contentment, and as if to savor and enhance the contentment with the sourness.

“I was already so high up in the Sierra that there were no longer any ravines to get around. Up to a certain altitude, just below the tree line, let us say, the Sierra is transsected by deep, narrow ravines, yet from a distance it looks so smooth and accessible, at least on the northern side. Yet instead of climbing straight to the ridge — calling it mountain climbing in the technical sense would be something of an exaggeration, since on the northern slopes, unlike the southern slopes, it is seldom necessary — I dawdled across the mountain pastures, devoid of ditches and almost entirely without trees, and also no longer fenced in every few feet, going gradually uphill for a while, then downhill again when I felt like it, and instead of having to wear myself out scrambling over barbed wire every few steps, now, imagine, I had to wade through or simply jump across a little brook that had just welled up and ran almost level with the rocks and the grass, and would not dig itself in until farther down, and on this meandering route toward the Puerto del Pico, the crossing to the south I had chosen for that day, you know, one of these bubbling-up brooks after another, also the rushing of these brooks along the ground, similar to my periodic turning-in-circles yet continuing without pause, in a seemingly preestablished and — determined order.

“I need not tell you what’s up with the passes and crossings in the Sierra de Gredos. And the Puerto del Pico, the north — south crossing, approximately in the middle, between the eastern and central massifs, is carved infinitely deeper and especially more steeply out of the ancient rock than most of the other notches, and can be seen from far away as a deep trough in the mountain range, which is oriented along an east-west axis and falls off sharply from the Puerto on both sides. And if there is a clear and classic border between north and south anywhere, it is there on the crest of the Puerto del Pico, the classic kind of north and south you read about.

“The southern air here, you should know, where it wafts in freely from the lowland, unhindered by any foothills, blows considerably warmer than in the other Puertos, and also with far more force and energy between the steep walls of the trough; it moves — not constantly, but on certain, not infrequent, days, at a specific time, usually at noon — right along the line of the northerly air, which up to this point has tended to hover there and remain cold, or even turn colder and colder in the innermost reaches of the mountains, and slips under it, while the northern air by contrast falls upon the southern air, and the result, as you can see back there to the left at the Puerto del Pico, is no longer mere huffs and puffs of fog and clouds with scattered snowflakes, but thunder and lightning, along with cloudbursts that unceasingly and mercilessly dump cold water over the landscape, refusing to let up before nightfall, and, somewhat higher, around the steep escarpments, snowstorms and blizzards, a sudden hurricane of flakes like the one in which I reached the pass that time in May when I was on my hundred-brook and thousand-sorrel-leaf trek.

“One step and I was out of the May sunlight, with a vista eastward across the open and obvious void to the Escorial and likewise westward all the way to the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, if not straight into polar darkness, then into the prepolar contourless fading of the light on the wintry Bering Sea; no driving snow, but a kind of spewing, and soon no longer individual flakes but an almost solid, suffocating, spongy mass, being hurled at me again and again, soon not snowy white, but deepening the darkness, except when sporadic, almost welcome, flashes of lightning lit up the air for a moment.

“And strange, and stranger still, that this becomes clear to me only now as I am telling you this story: how quickly I, who had been so filled with joy in life, my own, and in all existence, imagining that there in the treeless waste I could smell the June linden blossoms, from one bend of the knee to the next, was on the verge of giving up and being dead. Soon it will be all over with me, I thought. Just a few more steps, and I will not be able to do anything but let myself fall. And once I have fallen, I will remain lying at that spot and will not get up.

“The clumps of wet snow plunked onto the ground. The ground was vernally warm and along the foot of the cliffs already summery warm. But soon the snow stopped melting. It accumulated. It grew deeper and deeper, as rapidly as a brook flooding in a storm. Soon it rose above my knees. Then it was above my belly. I stumbled. Then I fell, or almost. I scrabbled along. You can still see me creeping along for a stretch, on all fours, half blinded, panting, whimpering, dribbling spit — and then no more spit.”

She interrupted herself. “I see you are hardly listening to me anymore. Your mind is wandering. I know you, my listener, my author, I mean: that is because I am telling the story in short, dramatic sentences. A narrative style like that can drive you away. And the kind of adventure that goes hand in hand with such narration — no, not hand in hand at all — has no validity in your eyes. According to you, any external adventure counts, and can be narrated, and is worthy of being narrated, only if it also elicits an internal adventure: when thanks to what befalls you, you are surprised at yourself, startled at yourself, or puzzled by yourself, or simply find some aspect of yourself strange, and thus discover a problem and ponder this problem, and describe it as your problem, or, no, an existential problem, in connection, of course, with the external adventure, so that now the external and the internal actually do go hand in hand, literally and in reality.