Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And subsequently, so the story goes, the other one, the pale young woman at his side, the former magazine-story girl, took charge of this almost grotesque figure, entangled in itself like a medieval gargoyle, as follows: one after the other, she unraveled, separated, loosened, freed the various limbs of the man beside her, with astonishing effortlessness in fact, just plucking at one hand, tapping the other, patting a knee, rubbing an ankle.

And then the woman did the final untangling by blowing on him from a slight distance, that, too, without straining, very delicately, a mere puff, which reached, however, not only his face, but the entire body of the stonemason and solitary wanderer, widened his eyes and nostrils, expanded his shoulders, arched his thorax, bumped out his hips, curved his buttocks, tightened his thighs.

And then, according to the story, a first kiss was exchanged between the woman and the man, before the eyes of all the others in the midnight clay-wood inn-tent of Pedrada, in the innermost reaches of the Sierra de Gredos, a kiss from mouth to mouth, again something that had become the rarest of the rare in the particular period in which this story takes place, especially with others looking on, and, as in this case, downright festive. At this time one had to earn something like this! And the two had earned it.

And furthermore: the two kissed each other without touching in any other way. They remained seated with a space between them. And their hands were completely uninvolved. They both kept their hands motionless, wherever they happened to be. Before this the woman had taken a swallow from her paper cup. And even this drinking had been done without the assistance of her hands, merely with her lips, which she allegedly dipped into the drink, with her head bent. And the two are said not to have closed their eyes. On the contrary, as the story goes, they kept their eyes fixed on each other, without blinking.

And subsequently, in the background of the barn or hall of the Milano Real, for a moment a long-legged animal flitted past the sleeping tents, a deer? a gazelle? an ostrich (in the meantime they were being raised even up there in the mountains)? a Great Dane? And after the long kiss, qubla in Arabic, which lasted past the stroke of midnight — impossible to tell whether their tongues were involved; that was apparently superfluous — the new couple leaned back with a laugh, a soundless one, supposed to have lasted almost as long as the main thing just now. It was chiefly the stonemason, or whatever he was, who laughed, and, according to the story, it was the longest laugh of his life up to then, also one unlike any he had laughed before. (“‘Laugh,’ djahika in Arabic,” the woman who had commissioned the story dictated to the author.)

That night he, like the woman, did not speak another word. But if he had said something, it might have been this, for example: “I once spoke twenty-four languages, and now I do not speak a single one. There: the spot of sunlight deep in the underbrush, by the ruins of the wall I knocked down: my departed mother!” Or he might perhaps have said: “From now on I shall give the widest possible berth to all the people of today who are not my type, and not our type, and no good for you and me — I know that immediately, do I know it? — give the widest berth to the overwhelming majority, I know that — how do I know that? — and shall pass outside the range of their seeing and hearing and reality, but no longer slavishly and constrained by them, but rather of my own free will and with verve, strengthened by their kind of being or reality, pushing myself off from that type, moving, with the help of their tyrannical omnipresence, away into a different, at least equally promising realm of reality, into a no less real reality, and thus, full of joy and in good spirits, staying as far as possible from those others, and at the same time, thanks to them, tracing or plotting the world around its edges, arc by arc, and this will be the world, this will yield a world; and those who are not my type, not our type, and not good for you and for me, and who fill me with the most profound disgust, will thus at least have been something for us; beyond the boundaries of their world, the world of my world will begin, the genesis of the world will come into view, the worlding of our world — but what does ‘my,’ what does ‘our’ mean?”

And the woman would have said, “You wonder whether I am all dressed up this way for a man? For whom else? To be nothing more than a body, entirely body, all body, a single body. To matter. And for whom else but a man?”

And then, so the story goes, sometime after midnight, the king, emperor, the one in costume, the actor or amateur player, or whatever he was, got up from his metal drum, or whatever it was, at the end of the table, or, more precisely, was heaved to his feet by his bearers or assistants, with considerable effort, and now began to sing, no longer supported by anyone, in an ageless voice, clear and almost too high: “No more journeys! And no more flies flying into my mouth. And no more battles, either in Tunis or in Mühldorf or in Pavia, either on water or on land. And no business transactions, no money chests, no more gold and silver routes. And no more popes, and no more of that alleged community of faith, which has long since become the greatest and most brutal of all sects. And no painter, and no paintings, and no more picture galleries.

“And no more summer residences. And no rivers, no río Guadalquivir in Seville, no río Guadiana in the Sierra Morena, no more río Tormes in the Sierra de Gredos. And no more love affairs, either in Regensburg or in Lodi or in Pedrada. And no more king and no more emperor. And no more music and no more fading of music into silence. And no more olive trees with roots like rocks. And no more reek of cadavers.

“And no more Flanders and no more Brabant. And no more godforsaken, seemingly insane mother. And no more sour milk. And no more woman and no more tears. And neither Turks nor French, neither Augs-burgers nor Würzburgers nor Innsbruckers, and neither marks nor talers, neither dollars nor escudos, neither maravedi nor gulden for my songs anymore. And no more ibexes. And no more Sierra, Almanzor, Mira, or Galana. And no more apple trees. And no more wooden ladders propped against the apple trees. And no more blue pickers’ tunics on the rungs of the ladders propped against the apple trees. And no patches on the blue tunics of the pickers on the rungs of the ladders propped against the apple trees.

“And no Lord have mercy, and no lift up your hearts, and no transubstantiation, and no more go in peace. And no more children’s voices. And no more fountainheads and deltas. And no more Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, Cheyenne, Sorbs, Wends, Sufis, and Athabasques. And no more salt mines. And my lonely-hunter heart no more. And no more white angel. And no more moons in my fingernails, and no more nails on my fingers, and no more fingers on my hands. And no more sun never setting over my empire. And no more empire. And no more feral dogs. And no more dirt on my comb. And no more mountain passes and mountain taverns. And no more wild strawberries.”

The singer, so the story goes, was carried back to his tent as soon as his song ended, as if to die. And in that night the last word belonged to that guest at the table who had barely been mentioned up to then (except that he seemed to be the only one “entirely of the present,” “unmistakably of today”). He set down his cutlery — he had been the first to start eating and now was the last to finish — and said, in a voice that sounded as if it had been trained for years in front of microphones, in radio studios, or elsewhere: “To an outsider such as myself, it immediately becomes apparent that your most frequently used expressions are ‘not,’ ‘no,’ ‘neither this nor that,’ ‘not he, not she, not that, but.’ You express yourselves chiefly in negations, evoke and define yourselves and your concerns almost exclusively ex negativo , by reference to something that you and your concerns are not, or are no longer, or are on the contrary or in contrast to. To judge by the words you use, your experiences in particular consist almost entirely of things you have not experienced, or at least not in the way that would be considered experiences elsewhere. To all of you, experience often means something diametrically opposite to what is commonly called ‘experience’ elsewhere. As a result, almost all of your so-called stories consist chiefly of negations. They are the stories of things that did not happen. You did not go to war. You did not cross the tracks. No one has read today’s paper. No one fired at you. You did not see anyone throwing stones. No black smoke billowed out of any window. No one placed the noose around someone’s neck.