Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

The only place where the dining hall has other decoration is on the walls, at the same time forming the exterior walls of the structure. Hanging cheek by jowl on nails of all sizes, driven at random into the clay stucco and wooden ribs, on hooks, some of them bent downward, and on loops, are — not pots and pans but fire extinguishers (loose, not screwed to the wall), strikingly many of them; also guns (they, too, like the credit-card plaque, seemingly no longer current, but on the other hand no mere souvenirs, not decor, but ready for firing); first-aid kits and pouches (at least as numerous as the extinguishers); gas masks (these being the most numerous wall objects, from infant- to hydrocephalic-sized, a whole slew of them — was that expression still used? — a question thrown in by the Mancha-author, who had been away from the land of his mother tongue for a long time); and in between, there, and there! a stringed musical instrument, one unfamiliar to her, hanging by its strap, but for the most part wind instruments, trumpets and clarinets, and also an accordion.

And the floor of the inn-tent — only now does she take this in — is covered with carpets, some fairly shabby, partially covering a wild-strawberryred kilim or a peacock-blue Isfahan. And the man sitting motionless in one of the particularly dusky corners of the hall or barn or tent, seemingly waiting for the supper guests, in a collarless white shirt, ripped in places, and an all the more flawless waistcoat trimmed with silver braid under his ermine, is the same older man who was being carried in a litter over the old Puerto de Menga during the day, who reminded her of the emperador who centuries earlier was carried the same way to his place of retirement in the southern spurs of the Sierra de Gredos.

And the stocky dog lying at the threshold to the tent, on a particularly thick carpet, still belongs to its owner, the previous bus driver who is just now entering, but it is not stocky, but — only now will she have noticed this, through the wall of her chamber — pregnant (“One does not say ‘pregnant,’” she corrected her author, “one says ‘with young’”).

The bus driver or hotelier drummed the guests together for the mountain supper. In point of fact, he did not actually bang on a drum, nor did he blow one of the trumpets; he merely ran a bow over that one stringed instrument, over its single string, thickly plaited out of horsehair or whatever, moving the bow back and forth, forth and back, without stopping: a bellowing sound, in which the woman who alternately blushed and went pale heard a “sobbing,” while the other woman heard “an animal in heat,” a third person heard “the opening measures of a long ballad, which will accompany us through the meal and after that into sleep”—a narrative song that then did not materialize after all.

It was not only the three of them but almost a dozen who came, a few at a time, to the table under the dome of that high tent or barn, most of them from the cloth chambers, but also some from the outside.

It was also from the outside that the innkeeper brought in the food. There were several courses. What they consisted of in particular — as she indicated later to the author — was of no relevance to the story. “I contributed only a couple handfuls of the chestnuts I had brought along from the riverport city, a rare delicacy in the northern Sierra — strangely enough, some of them were already starting to sprout.”

But what did matter: that the dishes were brought in each time from the outside. One sensed, smelled, and tasted that they had been cooked in the open air, on outdoor fires; that local water had been used, from all those tributary brooks, one of them right behind The Red Kite, and the river they converged to form; and that the dishes were served almost the instant they were ready. Did not one row of tents in the village, the one directly on the Tormes, consist of fishermen’s tents, open on the side facing the water?

“Served”? No, they were wheeled in — by the chauffeur, aka innkeeper, who moved with the light-footedness found perhaps only in someone who but a short while ago had been lying there as if weighed down with stones — wheeled in on a four-wheeled serving cart similar to those that at one time — this story was taking place in an entirely different time — had been standard equipment in the state-operated hotels and restaurants of the communist states or countries of various stripes: the familiar squealing of the wheels, seemingly a thing of the past, even more piercing indoors on the carpets, on which the vehicle repeatedly got hung up, than outside in the alleys between the tents, but always audible there from almost infinitely far off as it approached the diners, creaking around innumerable corners, in that respect, too, a throwback to the achievements of the Eastern bloc or some other bloc that had hurtled into the pit of time.

Unlike the usual waitstaff in those days, the man steering the cart today hopped from one foot to the other as if in a surfeit of high spirits, dancing from guest to guest and serving each one with heartwarming delight.

And one’s heart needed warming. As in the glass bus during the day, throughout Pedrada, despite the tents, a persistent menace, growing from one second to the next, could be detected.

The fact that it was night, that no more low-flying planes and big-bellied helicopters were to be heard, nothing but a sporadic, almost outer-space-like, quasi-peaceful hum (could one still use the term “quasi”?), surely from an intercontinental aircraft, did nothing to assuage the almost universal feeling of defenselessness, of vulnerability, of teetering on the edge.

With the faltering of the generators, the lightbulbs kept going out and then coming on again with apparent difficulty (causing those dining beneath them to alternate between opening their eyes wide and squinting), which made for great uncertainty; the filaments in the bulbs, which they instinctively turned their heads to look at while engaged in the most enjoyable eating and most animated conversation (in spite of everything), appeared each time they met the eye as the fine, superfine, spiderweb-fine threads that they indeed were; which also suggests, however, that this sensation of being in danger was not the prevailing one and could be felt only on the edges of the group of diners.

From the very beginning, even before everyone had taken a seat at the table, a general exchange and mutual sharing sprang up in the center of the group, independent of the external uncertainty.

The emperador , or the actor playing the emperor in a historical film being shot just then in the Sierra, or whatever he was, had taken his place at the head of the table as one of the dinner guests. In spite of his ermine cloak, he was visibly shivering as he sat there surrounded by his bearers or fellow actors. His seat was an upside-down fruit crate, padded with an old automobile tire. His plate was of an alabaster- or quince-blossom-white porcelain, his cutlery, however, of plastic.

At the foot of the table, or the other head, the actual one, sat a small family, a very young father and even younger mother, barely even a teenager, and an infant with enormous blue eyes: their spoons, forks, and knives were of heavy silver, as if just fetched out of an old chest, while their plates consisted of fragments of earthenware held together with wire, and for drinking — the beverages also came from outside — the boy and girl, that is to say, the parents, had a single paper cup, with which they toasted the others, who raised their various coffee cups (with something other than coffee in them), crystal goblets, tin cups (like the drinking vessels in Westerns), athletic trophies, or entire bottles and the like to the youthful parents, he perching on a bus seat, still attached to its frame, while she lounged in a sort of choir stall, as if in a wing chair.