Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“In the course of that snowstorm at the Puerto del Pico, I once again found myself in the realm of the pasture fences, of which only the top strands of wire and the tips of the fence posts were visible. To get over them seemed to drain my last strength, but these obstacles also served as my reference points and provided a rhythm that each time yielded a bit more strength.

“The moment of ‘It’s all over!’ did not hit me until I was standing in the noontime darkness in front of a seemingly insurmountable chainlink fence, as high as a house, that appeared to stretch forever in both directions, and when I then found the gate, it was secured with chains. Had I wandered through an invisible breach into the territory of an abandoned but otherwise intact mountain barracks that blocked any escape route, or a long since deserted Sierra prison (which in my case was again serving its original purpose)? Couldn’t I have turned around and crawled and crept back into the May sunlight?

“Yet stranger still, any turning back was out of the question, just as during the previous times in the Sierra when I had fought for my life there — and not just for an hour in a blizzard but one time for almost a whole day, and once for a whole lovelong, yes, lovelong, night — I could still have turned back at a certain spot, before the snake clearing, before the burned forest, but it was simply impossible that I, that anyone, that we, should have turned back, strange, so strange. When I came upon that chainlink fence, at any rate, I knew this was my point of no return. But that was when the transformation occurred, strange, so strange, of me into my brother, far off behind the walls of the penitentiary in the dunes—”

In her usual way she broke off her tale here before reaching the end and turned to her invisible listener: “Ah, you were about to drift away from me again into your absentmindedness. And not until that little word ‘we,’ and with it my brother, came into play did you prick up your ears again, and did your eyes, which had gone dull, light up. And I also know why my snowstorm story has so little meaning for you, aside from the fact that it seems to you too mired in external adventure: you, my listener and my author, dislike stories that deal constantly with one person, and in which only one person, alone and unaccompanied, does things, experiences things, moves about, even when this solitary person is me, the woman — which really should appeal to you, in that it first presents a surprise — a heroine familiar from entirely different images, all by herself and prostrate in the deep snow — and then a problem worth telling about. No, in my, and our, book you want to see me experiencing things in some sort of company — rather than alone this way — and described accordingly.

“Yet except for my first trip through the Sierra de Gredos, every other time I was alone here. And even on that first trip I soon struck out on my own, accompanied only by the child in my belly, without her father. It is only since the current day and evening that I have not been journeying through the Sierra alone! So the story can move along the way you like it!”

And again she interrupted herself: “And it seems to me now, my listener and author, that the one commissioned to write the book is not you. It was not so much I who gave you the commission as you who gave it to me. I am the one you commissioned — at your service!” And as she momentarily took her hands off the wheel of the bus, she laughed; laughed out loud into the dark, silent bus. “How may I help you?”

What was the seemingly familiar stranger laughing about up front at the wheel, in the pitch-darkness, which was even more intense outside than inside; which made one think from time to time that one was no longer being driven on a road but over bumps and humps, where outside and inside, except for the sound of the bus’s engine (more a grinding than the calming hum of the sparkling glass bus earlier) and the screeching, groaning, and rattling of the whole, whole? bus, everything had become as silent as the grave?

The idiot at the wheel laughed, and did not stop laughing, and if she paused now and then, it was clear that she would immediately burst out laughing again, in the same hearty, childlike way, which after a while infected even the last and most resistant of the few remaining passengers and likewise the regular driver, apparently risen from the dead, if not entirely recovered and still lying there in back on his reclined seat, and made them laugh, too. The story goes that all the people in that night bus laughed out loud, at the same pitch as the woman at the wheel, although the bus then actually did make a detour over bumps and humps — when the road was partially buried by a rock slide — across a pasture, where cattle, looking in the dark like buffalo, scattered at a gallop; even the driver’s enormous dog showed his white teeth and seemed to laugh along, silently.

In a film, the vehicle now meandering over this hummocky grazing area would have been visible first from the side, apparition-like, with the equally apparition-like silhouettes of its occupants, and in the next shot would have been seen from above, with the camera moving higher and higher, until the bus could no longer be identified as such, a small object crawling over the earth’s curved surface, and the occupants’ laughter would have filled the theater as the only sound accompanying the image. “With the laughing idiot as our driver, we felt idiotically safe,” even when she fell silent, and even when the coach rumbled through a mountain torrent that cascaded for a moment over the coach’s roof: the bridge there smashed, and, as later became apparent, not only this one, as if dynamited.

Silently she resumed her conversation with herself, intended for the distant author: “Listen, just like my other landscapes scattered throughout the world, the Sierra de Gredos has come to represent for me, every time I am here, an example of something indestructible, in defiance of history and the present era, promising a life on earth that if not lasting an eternity will at least last half an eternity. Hear this, my listener and witness to my view of things: at some moments when I was on my way through the Sierra de Gredos—” (here she paused in her monologue) “—I have experienced this region as blessed, like many other parts of this planet, including cities, of course. But every single time, this Sierra de Gredos, offering a possible place where not only I but also we and those like us might live, has abruptly become a hostile, even deadly sphere, and each time I have counted myself incredibly lucky to have escaped with my life. Accursed Sierra!

“So now you know the two reasons that spur me to set out whenever I can for this blessed/accursed Sierra de Gredos: on the one hand the world up here, which changes so abruptly, more powerfully and predictably than I have experienced in any other part of the world; and on the other hand, each time when I have escaped and am safe and sound again at home, the rendezvous every morning with images from here in the Sierra — peaceful ones, you understand — image and peace are ultimately one and the same—: images such as did not appear nearly so often and especially so comprehensively — the part for the whole — from those other regions where simply being there immediately filled one with hope.

“And listen as I tell you and repeat what ‘image-forming’ means and signifies: the world is still standing. It has not perished, contrary to my brother’s belief. And listen as I tell you also that earlier on, before my crossings of the Sierra, I liked to travel with others, and often did so, and that soon I will be traveling with others again, here in the Sierra de Gredos and elsewhere.”

Before the bus reached its destination, the route passed through several more watercourses. The bridges over them, too, destroyed. But the road swerved aside from the bridge and in the water became a ford, as it had probably been before any bridges were built, returning to asphalt on the other side. And during the traversing of these very shallow fords, in contrast to earlier in the mountain torrent, the water hardly rose and also did not wash over the sides of the bus; nothing but a splintering of ice floes along the banks.