Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Almost all the passengers then got off the bus before its final destination. Each time they made their way to the front, stood beside the driver, and placed their hand on her shoulder shortly before the desired stop. Each was loaded down, as if returning from a long journey. Each turned in the open door once more to say thank you and goodbye to her, each using the same words but in an entirely different accent; and each, before he or she opened his or her mouth, cleared his or her throat and then said, “Thank you, good night, see you next time,” in the same raspy voice, as if he or she had not spoken for at least the entire day.

All those who got off went on their way alone, immediately heading downhill from the dead-end road, never toward a house, at least not one that was visible, lit up; were promptly swallowed up by the darkness, in which at most an open fire burned, isolated and a long way off, from which now and then pitch-laden smoke wafted through the bus.

When the bus reached the sign saying “Pedrada,” the only people left besides her were the driver, his dog, and the other woman who had helped her with the two of them. She noticed a new sign that announced PEDRADA in several other languages and scripts. And where was the familiar old hotel at the entrance to the village, at the spot where all the tributaries came together to form the río Tormes? What, the inn El Milano Real, “The Red Kite” (named after the bird of prey most common in the Sierra), no longer existed?

In its place, between the streams, at the wellspring of the river, a tent, no, more like a colony of tents, a sort of tent village. And there were no streetlights any longer. Or had there ever been any? Yet in spite of the moonless night — hadn’t it been a full moon here not long ago? or was it too early for the moon to have risen? — all of Pedrada, or what was left of it, could be made out clearly.

The light came from the sky above the source area, which was a sprawling, slightly concave, high plain, hollow and highland at the same time, the highest inhabited one in the Sierra? This sky seemed even bigger by night than by day, and twinkled or flashed with stars, in different colors, yellowish, bluish, red, white, green, and the light was collected on the ground and thrown back by the shiny deposits of quartz and mica, which seemed to be everywhere in this headwaters region, more so than anywhere else in the mountain range, reflecting the light of the firmament even from the clear bottom of the brooks and rivulets, though no higher than, let us say, the waistlines of the villagers, who were bustling about outside in astonishingly large numbers — their faces, and even more the space above the crowns of their heads, remaining in darkness.

So many more and unfamiliar stars were visible that instead of the usual constellations one saw entirely unfamiliar ones and wanted to give them new, entirely unheard-of names. And although the snow-covered expanses on the summit plain that seemed hardly a stone’s or a boulder’s throw away contributed to making the night brighter, these stars hardly suggested wintry images. Did that perhaps have to do with the fact that Pedrada, like a few other places in the northern Sierra, had a sort of microclimate, lying beneath a dome of relatively and only intermittently warm air?

Upon leaving the bus, one involuntarily splayed one’s fingers — that was how surprisingly mild the air was as it brushed one’s skin. Or did the warmth come from the open fires, even more numerous around the tents here in the heart of the village, especially the large fire, the size of several bonfires, glowing red-hot by the main tent, which looked taller than the vanished Milano Real? In Pedrada one could at first make sense of nothing. And one accepted that.

There was also artificial light in the village, of course, but only inside the tents, and hardly any of it penetrated to the outside. This light, produced by generators — every brook dotted with them — rendered the tents phosphorescent, as it were, or not only as it were, lent them a dimly glowing shape from within. Did that result from the hairline fissures and holes, invisible to the naked eye, in the tent walls? And likewise from the material of which the tents were made?

For the tents did not consist of the material commonly used today, either canvas or some other fabric or plastic. Each of the tents, including the central one, was a cone constructed of wooden poles, lashed together with branches and vines, and layered from bottom to top, or was one mistaken? with leaves, grass, and broom twigs, held together with clay — didn’t “Gredos” mean “clay”?—in which the myriad fragments of mica contributed to the phosphorescent effect?

So these were not light, easily transported tents but more like yurts, or what people imagine yurts to be? Earth-brown, clay-yellow hummocks, sprung up cheek by jowl from the earth like termite mounds (or what we imagine termite mounds to look like), into which the people here had needed only to hack a sort of narrow opening for a door, over which they then hung a pelt?

As far as she was concerned, this former lady banker and sometime coach-box lady: Hadn’t she, in that moment of getting off the bus in Pedrada, “my driving duties fulfilled,” seen the tents or yurts as those tree roots, ripped from the ground and tipped over to lie horizontally, in the hurricane-ravaged forests back home near the northwestern riverport city that she had visited the morning she set out? And hadn’t various things from home also followed her during the entire time of her journey? or traveled with her? or seemed to have got there ahead of her whenever she arrived?

Not one ordinary house still inhabited in Pedrada. Or did it merely look that way when one arrived by night? And all the houses, including the barns and stables, in ruins: another nocturnal-arrival apparition? And if ruins: Hadn’t those already been here the very first time she came?

What was certain at least was that except inside the tents no light was burning in a building. Across the entire high plateau the rattling of generators, but as if one of these sounds muffled the other, almost swallowing it up. And was that music in the tents? Were people singing? Or did the hubbub of voices outside, merging with the roaring and rumbling of the various watercourses, create the impression of voices and instruments sounding in unison?

In quick succession some surprising and unexpected aspects of Pedrada, seemingly so remote. Satellite dishes mounted on the tents? A paperboy making his way from tent to tent, with the next morning’s papers? An Asian, or also non-Asian, deliveryman heading at full speed with bouquets of roses toward the main tent, the converted inn called At the Sign of the Red Kite II? — Listen, let me tell you: no, no paperboy, but perhaps, yes, definitely, a pizza-delivery boy, younger than young, swerving out of the darkness on his motor scooter, zooming back and forth, still unsure of the address for his delivery, finally, in his confusion, asking for directions, and whom did he ask? whom else but her, just arrived in the village — every time she is the one, she of all people, whom local folk approach for information when she is in a strange place — and promptly sent on by her, buzzing off, only to come to a halt around the next nocturnal corner, utterly at a loss, with his pizza box strapped to the rack on the back of his scooter.

And right after that, on his way to the main tent, the daytime roamer, the stonemason, with his tools dangling from his belt, who back on the carretera did not board the bus but wanted to continue on and on, on foot: so he, the pedestrian, reached Pedrada before her with the bus, and slips into the tent ahead of her.

And already as they were pulling into the village, the regular driver, having regained his strength and, sitting upright in front next to her in a long, lightweight fur coat, seemingly whisked there by magic, holding his Labrador by the collar, inseparable from him, pointing out the parking lot to her, an orchard — so in the meantime such a thing existed even up here in the mountains — and later clearing a path to the inn-tent for her and the other woman through the nocturnal throng of pedestrians in the semidarkness, and once inside leading the two of them straight to the quarters assigned to them for the night, transformed from a bus driver, a role he was playing perhaps only for the day, into the administrator of the yurt village and the district.