Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“What kind of happenings do you have? What kind of stories are these, without observations and without images — at least without planned, balanced, and well-observed images; without recourse to anything a contemporary audience would consider eventful; without reference to the realities, either individual or even societal — which you people either proudly avoid or about which you sanguinely keep silent — as if the rest of us, nosotros , could guess them by ourselves or could figure them out.

“Stories like yours, which primarily tell about things someone does not do, and furthermore without any illustrations, without close-ups, without the camera’s viewfinder: to the rest of us, these without a doubt simply do not count as stories. They are actually a kind of stinginess. You stint with yourselves and your experiences. Instead of plunging into life in front of the rest of us, you hurl yourselves into thin air.

“Your way of eating and drinking conforms to that. I have been observing you all evening; I am here for purposeful observation, you know, not for pointless fantasizing: you leave not a single crumb, not a scrap, and not only on your plates. You pick up the tiniest morsel that has fallen to the ground and shove it into your mouths. Not a speck on the table or on your clothes that is not scraped off by you people and licked up. You people, vosotros , lick every bowl and suck every glass to the last blob and the last drop. That is what I have observed.

“No doubt about it: you all live in a state of inexpressible deprivation. You doubtless lack most of the basic things that create social bonds between people of today and make them contemporaries of the rest of us. You convey to us the image not merely of cardsharps but of possible criminals, capable of an appalling act of violence, which you perhaps committed long ago and keep secret here: which is no doubt also the reason for your non-stories, consisting primarily of evasions, distractions, avoidances, and deflections.”

The postmidnight speaker had delivered these remarks with that unwavering, pasted-on smile for which he was known throughout the civilized world at the time of this story, known from newspapers and even more from television, the smile that viewers of the day found “simpatico,” to use one of the terms fashionable at the time: according to contemporary viewers, his lips were always drawn back in a friendly expression, which created “dimples” in his cheeks and a steady “warm glow” in his “fawn-colored” eyes, or, as others would have it, “tawny eyes.”

And while speaking he had propped his legs on the table, “not as a provocation, but to show that in spite of everything he felt at home even here among them, even in the notorious region of Petrada, and to make the others less shy.” For the same reason he had slipped in the two little words in their native language mentioned above, even though nosotros and vosotros were all the Spanish, or Iberian, or whatever, that he knew.

Now he stood up and prepared to leave, still with his tried-and-true smile. Of course he did not pay: that would presumably be taken care of by the organization by which he had allowed himself to be sent out, since early in life, as an observer and reporter, and, after missions here and there, now into the Sierra? Unlike the other supper guests, he would not be spending the night in The Red Kite but “in modest private lodgings,” in one of the infinitely smaller and less comfortably appointed tent huts with a local family, as he always did, “to be as up-close and personal as possible to the pulse of the local happenings.” And according to his fellow observers, as he made his way out of the hall, in the flickering of the lightbulbs, his “boyish freckles and chubby cheeks” and his “eternally rebellious Irish-red hair” showed all the more distinctly.

Other eyewitnesses, however, did not see him leave on foot but rather on a low-slung wheeled chassis, as if drawn by invisible spirits, while he looked straight into a camera being pulled a slight distance ahead of him, whereupon his presence in the half-barbarian mountain hamlet was beamed simultaneously to all the civilized channels. The way in which he moved along just above the ground: was that not in fact a form of being driven, pushed, and pulled, in which he bestirred neither knees nor arms nor shoulders, unlike a person walking?

And now, when he had already reached the door, and stood there for a few seconds, as if expecting the door to the clay tent structure to open automatically, a woman got up from among the crowd of those other eyewitnesses, approached him with giant steps, and, forgetting her image, her office, and her feminine dignity, gave him a kick, only one, but a powerful one, sufficient to propel the reporter through the door, which, before it closed, briefly swung out again, like the door to a saloon.

The report on his stay among the people of Pedrada that he later published all over the world claimed not to be influenced in any way by this incident. Some of the observations captured in the report are supposed to be incorporated later by the book’s heroine into the book on the loss of images and on crossing the Sierra de Gredos; but this is not yet the place for that.

She stayed up all night.

The others were sleeping in their tent compartments at the back of the big tent, or at least were lying there in their beds. She cleared the table as usual, washed up, put things in order, stacked the dishes. Then she sat alone for a while at the bare table — the lightbulbs out at last; no more roaring of the generators — in a shimmer of light that came from the mica cliffs outside.

Later she sat in her tent, almost without light, and later still she made the rounds of the other tents, going from one to the other. She kept watch. But it is also possible that as she sat there, her eyes open, she occasionally dozed off.

And all night long, whether she was awake or dozing for a moment, a pain was gnawing inside her (“an ache,” she told the author), which, if it were to continue, would break her heart. Not only her more or less random entourage, but all of Pedrada, the entire population of the innermost Sierra, was asleep or lying in bed.

At one point she felt cold, in a way that otherwise only a person abandoned by God and the world can feel cold. She was freezing, wretchedly, from inside out. Had she been abandoned by God and the world? “No.” Little by little, the inhabitants of the village came to mind. Although she had seen them for only a few seconds, upon the bus’s nighttime arrival, on the way to the parking lot in the orchard and to the Milano Real, an image had remained with her. And as she thought of the images, she felt warm again.

She had been in Pedrada several times before. Each time there had been some small change or other. But this time almost everything seemed new, and not merely the tent colony at the confluence of the various tributaries of the Tormes. In the crowd of nocturnal roamers outdoors, the natives were clearly in the minority. For one thing, most of them, as quasi-mountain-dwellers, were unaccustomed to a corso and had long since withdrawn into the few ancestral stone houses. And then, since her last sojourn here, the last stop before any crossing of the Sierra, the population had evidently increased considerably. A mighty influx had occurred.

And the new residents were apparently all still up and about, despite the lateness of the hour, outside the tents, which in general had long since ceased to be provisional housing. And what was special about all this bustle: though elbow to elbow, cheek by jowl with the others, each person seemed entirely alone. This movement also no longer had anything in common with a corso . Not that those walking side by side and those coming toward them paid each other no mind: it was a given that for all the individuals, there were no others, or, rather, he or she, that particular man or this particular woman, existed for and mattered to no one but him- or herself (and even that was questionable).