Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

In similar fashion, the table, which took up the entire length of the hall, was not all of a piece. On closer inspection, one saw that it consisted of several tables, of varying heights and widths; here and there a door removed from its hinges, a plain board, even the roof of a car, all resting on sawhorses; a barrel, a chest-high library stepladder, a piece of a raft. This entire table was covered with empty fruit and potato sacks of a coarse material, true to a Pedrada tradition: as the innkeeper explained, this was supposed to assure good harvests in the coming year.

What, harvests at such an altitude? Yes, hadn’t they seen the apple orchards? And the fields of stubble near the Peña Negra Pass? And Navalperal de Tormes, the pear-growing village? And up here, where oats, rye, wheat, and even peaches grew (the latter in sheltered spots) amid the cliffs and boulders, didn’t other crops flourish even more reliably — the patatas , potatoes, also known as krompire , or, in the Arabic still alive in many expressions, batatas ?

The story goes that during that evening meal no one spoke while others were speaking, or interrupted anyone else. Only one person spoke at a time, and all the rest, even those way down at the other end of the table, listened; apparently no one had to raise his voice, and the rattling of the generators outside actually served as a kind of sound carrier.

As the story tells us, the first to begin to speak was the former Friulian or Argentinian magazine writer. And at the same time it was clear that everyone would have a turn to address the others during the time they spent together. Without blushing, the young woman, instead of looking around while speaking, gazed directly at the person who had been the subject of her magazine piece years earlier.

What she said, however, was not meant only for the ears of the powerful banker, or whatever she was, or had been. We are told that she probably fixed her eyes on this person because her face was the only one she recognized in the gathering, and even more because she believed, no, was convinced, that she would come to know this person, encountered unexpectedly and, what is more, in a decisive, yes, decisive location, set apart and remote from the places familiar to the two of them, in a decisively different way, yes, decisive from this day on, just as she, speaking here in a foreign setting and teetering on the edge, would show herself in an entirely different light to her former interviewee, as well as to the others and to herself.

As she spoke, she occasionally twisted a rusty tin can that stood in front of her, filled with a bouquet of dog-rose canes covered with fruit, red as only rose hips can be; while the speakers coming after her twirled in the same fashion rock crystal vases, jade goblets, old beakers missing their caps and handles, discarded baby bottles, ink wells, tin tea caddies, bronze mortars, and so on, while in each of these “vases” were the same bright rose-hip-red rose-hip bunches, which, according to the bus-driving tent-innkeeper, had been used for centuries in the Sierra de Gredos to ward off melancholy or to protect one against snow-blindness, a life-threatening danger especially for those crossing the mountains now in the winter months, and emphasized in the guide to local dangers. Like the rest of the company, the pale young woman had not changed for dinner. And likewise everyone’s hairdo had remained the same.

And nonetheless she looked, as did those next to her, as if she had not come there from the present, or rather, only from the present. Without being in costume or dressed up, with the possible exception of the “emperor” or “king” or whatever he was — but was that really a costume? — they sat there as if at a time boundary, on the one hand clearly in the current era, and on the other hand, in the next moment and breath, perhaps even more clearly and distinctly in a second era, from which a curtain had been suddenly raised behind one, not a bygone period, not a historical one, also not one at odds with the present or a merely imaginary one: no, a period as undefined as undefinable, one that existed in addition to the current one, a present offering expanding possibilities and all the more real or tangible.

This new era found its clearest image in the persons of the adolescent couple and their small child. They sat there, as one can sit there only now, in the moment, on a winter evening, quite high in the mountains, with flushed cheeks, tired yet intermittently wide awake (the woman who had commissioned the book rejected the expression “full of beans” proposed by the author): also very contemporary, she with yellow and green streaks in her hair, he with blue and silver streaks in his, both of them wearing their hair cropped short, both of them wearing an identical single tiny earring, of aluminum or some such — and the next moment this very up-to-date couple, moved as it were (“Strike ‘as it were’!”) into a new dimension, distant and deep, out of sight and at the same moment unexpectedly close—“something artificial and virtual images can simulate only feebly and deceivingly”—were vouchsafed an additional present, incomparably stronger and above all more durable than the previously mentioned presents, which nonetheless also remained in view, “and the durability of this image in comparison to a virtual one is like that of infinity to zero!”

She then tried to explain to the author that a splendid present like this, “beyond any doubt the most splendid possible,” in the image of the youthful couple, had its origins, among other things, in the distance between them as they sat there, a distance not entirely usual “nowadays”: “This distance between her and him was now, and more than simply now.”

And, as she explained, part of it was that both the boy and the girl held themselves remarkably erect, their torsos, necks, and heads, one the spitting image of the other, and likewise hardly turning toward each other, each of them constantly looking straight ahead, their eyes focused on the rearmost horizon of the tent hall, yet “not at all” fixedly, and their upright, erect sitting beside each other was remarkable not in the sense of “strange” or “weird,” but rather in the sense of “noteworthy” or “wondrous” or, yes, “moving”: “first re-presenting” that which was present.

Accordingly, she said, the young couple, together with the infant, who chewed alternately on his mother’s and his father’s finger with his first teeth — they allowed it without wincing — seemed to be inside yet another tent, an invisible one, not measurable but just as, yes, just as substantial as the one of mud and wood, as the ones of tent material or whatever.

She went on to mention that this scene suddenly brought to mind the only remaining photo of her parents, killed in an accident: the two of them likewise almost still children, long, long before her birth, during or shortly after the end of the war, side by side, ramrod straight, sitting on a felled tree trunk at the edge of a clearing near the village, and, in addition to their similar way of gazing into the distance, dressed almost exactly the same, as far as fabric, pattern, and cut went, as the couple here with their very trendy hairstyle and — color—“timeless”—neither urban nor rustic, and certainly not in folk costume (Sorbian or any other) — simply white and black — which had nothing to do with the fact that the photo was in black-and-white. And just as every time she envisioned her (future) parents as perching there together in a prewar period, contrary to the facts, now in the present she saw their two revenants (“not at all returned from any kingdom of the dead”) the same way.

And drawn into this present, perhaps preceding a war but on this night even more tangibly peaceful, was the “itinerant stonemason,” having seemingly drifted there like a ghost, previously on the carretera and then, upon entering the tent-inn, from some medieval period, and likewise the “first and last local and pan-European emperor,” as if on the way to a son-et-lumière spectacle, in the park at Aranjuez, let us say, conceived as the crowning event in the annual historical reenactment there, carried over the Sierra in his legendary litter to his final resting place, together with his entourage: all of them, though seemingly disguised and their bodies transported by their disguises to a distant, dusty, dilapidated past, which no living images could revive (they least of all), protruded from their earlier time — if they indeed came from some such — with their shoulders, necks, and heads, into a present as vivid as any, and next to this one the current present seemed dimmer than any allegedly dark past.