Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

It also happened that the elderly vehicle, which creaked at the slightest unevenness, rammed into a block of granite in one of the fords. But that did not make any of the travelers uneasy. With her as the driver, nothing troubled them anymore. The very fact that a woman was driving cradled them in a sense of security, and the repeated traversing of the fords added to the temporary state of dreamlike carefreeness. None of them even looked up when the alder branches hanging far into the water whipped against the windows, sweeping from left to right; and even if a falling boulder had hit the roof or a grenade had exploded in front of the bus, they would not have been startled out of their peaceful reveries.

The woman holding the reins up front on the coachman’s box also fell into a reflective daze, while remaining completely alert. Fording the brooks reminded her of the film in which she had played the youthful heroine. In that saga, set in the Middle Ages, she had also been constantly fording bodies of water, less brooks like these than rivers, often broad ones with deep spots, where the story required her, dressed in a kind of chain mail, to sink, fight for her life, and so on. Also a proper single combat, the final and decisive one — which, to be sure, was then broken off in the middle — between her and a, the, man, took place in just such a ford, complete with clashing swords, snorting steeds, and so on, the only variant being that, instead of slashing away silently at each other, they had to alternate shouting at one another, uttering tirades of insults that were by no means purely medieval and, in the course of the scene, gave way to an entirely different kind of speaking, and so on: cut, end of the film, man and woman up to their hips in the water of the ford, motionless, facing one another.

And driving along cautiously and briskly, at the same time deep in reflection, she then brought to a close on this final stretch her silent monologue addressed to the absent author: “Whenever I cast my mind back to myself in all my misadventures and not seldom life-threatening solitary passages through the Sierra, I experience it not as something from the past but as the most intense present, assailing me and piercing me infinitely more keenly than during the moments, hours, or entire days and nights when I hovered between life and death. If in that blizzard I just missed letting myself fall down in the snow for good, the moment I revisit the situation I am threatened even more by that ultimate surrender: with the snow already up to my chest, I take one last step and after that will let myself tumble into the depths, never to return. And from an even earlier point in time, yes, point, from that first time in the Sierra, with the child in my womb, when I unexpectedly found myself completely disoriented, found? I am still there in the blazing sun on the southern flank, and the next time I recall that hour I will die, along with my unborn child, of heat stroke and abandonment.

“But the images that come flying or flashing to me from the Sierra after the fact are also very much of the present. All such images — the only kind that matter to me for my, and our, story — not only those from the Sierra de Gredos, take place in the present. Yes, in contrast to my terrors and bad situations, the images become present to me playfully; the image itself as a game in which an entirely different present is in effect than my personal one. The images play out in an impersonal present, which is more, far more, than mine and yours; they take place in the grander time, and in a single tense, for which, when I consider them, the images, the term ‘present’ is not really appropriate — no, the images do not take place either in a grander or grand time, but in a time and in a tense for which no adjective, let alone a name, exists.

“And listen, look: are not the images therefore, is not ‘the image’ a thoroughly epic problem, material for Homeric tales by the dozen? Material for a different odyssey, whose action takes place both externally and internally?”

To the accompaniment of these and other conversations with herself, she drove her fellow passengers, including the incapacitated driver and his dog, toward the late-evening bus’s destination, the village of Pedrada.

Pedrada, which can be translated as “stone toss,” or “rain of stones,” or “hail of stones”—“siege of stones” would also be possible — is located in the innermost reaches of the Sierra region, or, as it says in that book set there many centuries ago, “in the bowels of the Sierra de Gredos.” And this Pedrada is one of the few villages at the headwaters of the río Tormes that lie right on the banks of the river and not, like Navarredonda (“Round Hollow”), Hoyos del Espino (“Thorn Hole”), Hoyos del Collado (“Hill Hole”), Navacepeda (“Vine Hollow”), and Navalperal (“Pear Hollow”), at a safe distance from the floodplain of the river, which here near its beginnings is not regulated anywhere. The houses of Pedrada are scattered through the river’s far-flung source area, slotted in between several streams and also mere rivulets, which singly and collectively, as they snake along from various sides, from the gentle slopes, flanks, and mostly treeless high plateaus, are referred to as the río Tormes.

The sparse settlement lies among these almost innumerable, still narrow watercourses, which often meander through mountain-grass meadows, and it becomes a bit more prepossessing only at one spot, where the thousands of tributaries have gradually converged to form one river that quickly and unimpededly shoots over rapids and cascades, finally deserving of the name.

The road that branches off toward Pedrada in Navarredonda de Gredos was a dead-end spur terminating in the village. From there no passable route continued; there were only livestock trails, and for a long time now there had been no paths for crossing the mountain chain to the south; those that had once existed were overgrown with broom, which by now had spread everywhere, forming a thicket as dense as a jungle, or, closer to the ridge, the path had been blocked by scree and boulders; the only exception the partially preserved path, or cordel, still used for driving the cattle caravans down to the flatlands in late fall or back into the mountains in spring.

The author, not given to enthusiasm for such things, or simply lazy, had commissioned someone else to do research on that cordel , and on the transhumancia (= cattle-driving), “just as”—thus his excuse—“Flaubert did not snoop around himself at agricultural fairs or whatever for his Madame B. or whomever, but had an acquaintance describe such things for him in letters”: that trail, that cordel , or whatever, ran on the other side of Pedrada more or less from west to east, from El Barco de Ávila toward the deep trough of the Puerto del Pico, to spare the animals’ hooves the mountains with their razor-sharp wind gaps, and this route, with its bomb-crater-deep gullies and washouts, coming one after the other and taking up the entire stretch, had been impassable for decades to even the most heavy-duty vehicle or conveyance, whether with four-wheel or all-wheel drive. Even a hundred-wheel tank would have tipped over there sooner or later; not to mention a bus, and especially this one, driving through the night, even when driven by this stranger, this woman to whom the region around my Pedrada seems to be more familiar than to me, almost a native of the area, and under whose care — how nice and straight she sits at the wheel, her arms extended like oars, hardly moving the wheel — so does it turn itself on the curves? — I would like to stay on the road as far as the last stable of Pedrada and even up to the ridge of the Sierra, and then on and on forever.