Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Sleepers, she imagined, embodied their true being. And the true being of every individual, she had always thought, and still thought today, was good! This goodness came to light in a sleeper and could be studied. That was an area of study that had not yet been “exploited,” something like “dormant capital.” This notion, that all people, yes, all, when asleep became childlike and were good, and in the process embodied and even prefigured the best of all possible worlds, had perhaps been, she thought, one of the keys to her power over others: in the confrontations, indeed struggles, with even her presumably most ferocious adversaries, she had pictured them as sleepers, and that had at least contributed to turning one opponent or another into a partner and accomplice.

The author countered by asking how it happened, then, that she had incurred so much hostility, and he added that in his eyes, becoming “childlike” in sleep, and in general, did not at all mean being a good person, or an unsuspecting person, or a pure person, at least not in his experience of “contemporary children”; and then he told her that at one time he had had an opinion of sleepers not so different from her own. But over the years he had noticed, and specifically in himself, that in sleep the momentary surges of hate he experienced while awake, likewise the outbursts of anger and hostility, had not fallen silent as in his earlier years but had erupted even more forcefully.

And by now, he said, evil raged in him even more furiously at night, while he was sleeping, than during the day, when he had tried-and-true techniques for shooing it away whenever it showed its face: lacking any such technique as a sleeper — no matter how much he practiced before closing his eyes — he sometimes roared and bared his teeth, or did so at least in his dreams, all night long at someone he did not know, or darted into a crowd of strangers brandishing a knife, thus embodying only the worst of all possible worlds and in the end feeling nothing but relief at waking up. “It seems to me that today we sleepers are to be feared. Steer clear of sleepers, even those who seem peaceful and quiet! You no sooner bend over them than they will jump up and stab you.”

She was keeping watch. Was she keeping watch? She sat up. She stood up. She walked up and down inside the main tent. Not a sound from the Sierra. Even the tributaries of the río Tormes had fallen silent, as if switched off, or as if they no longer reached her ears.

In her early days back there in the riverport city, at night she had heard every train, no matter how distant, and every steamer’s whistle blowing at night — and after a few months, after a few years, nothing.

So she had been in the innermost reaches of the Sierra that long already? Eyes wide open, for true dreaming! (“Avoid the word ‘true,’” she dictated to the author, “instead use ‘comprehensive.’”) So eyes wide open for comprehensive dreaming. It was the last hour of the night, and as so often she had the notion that a final decision was about to be made, something good or something terrible, a decision affecting not her alone but indeed the entire planet. It was also the hour when the earth always became most perceptible to her as a planet, a newborn one — dependent on its solar system and yet alone in the universe, as alone as anything can be, vulnerable, perilously vulnerable: precisely in this hour it would tip, not, as usual, toward day but into so-called eternal night. Decision? Turning point? Eyes open. Among the constellations of the northern hemisphere — Orion, the Pleiades, the Great Bear — the Southern Cross, actually not visible in these parts, inserted itself, as if gently slipped in.

That snake, no longer than her forearm, as narrow as her little finger, patterned in yellow and black like a salamander, which she had encountered during one of her previous crossings of the Sierra de Gredos, when she stumbled yet again in the trackless wilderness without being able to brake herself, at this moment slithered away in a leisurely fashion — no raising of its head or darting of its tongue at her — and, as she tumbled downhill, let her slide by in the scree, stepped aside (“Can one say of a snake that it stepped?”) ahead of her, leisurely and gracefully.

Poisonous though it was, the snake had not frightened her when she fell toward it: that moment with the viper had even been a helpful one during that crazy hike through the Sierra: with the help of the snake she had achieved equanimity where previously she had been almost too cocksure, also hasty and not always mindful while walking or beating her way forward, and from the viper moment on, she maintained her composure, step after step, even if later she briefly lost her footing time and again. She had borrowed from her snake the rhythm she needed to wend her way out of the rocky maze, which, when one found oneself in it, sometimes seemed to offer no escape. And long after the crossing she drew on or called up the image of the snake to stay on top of certain situations, or simply to remain focused and to follow through on something, intensely and calmly, not allowing herself to be deflected from her course, yet concentrating entirely on the moment, on the now, now, now …

And once again from far, far away in the eastern village the image came to her of herself, the older sister, pushing the baby carriage with her summer-naked brother in it, still a nursling (nursing at whose breasts now, after the accidental death of their mother?), and losing her grip on the carriage, which plunged off the path and tipped over the bank, into the jungle-like thicket of tall stinging nettles there, and again she plunged after the vanished brother-bundle into the dark-green, hairy nettle flames.

And once more she plucked at the unknown love of her life, lying facedown in the damp steppe grass, then stepped over his body, again and again, back and forth, back and forth, and asked him why he was so afraid that she would suck out his blood.

And on her estate, the former stagecoach relay station, on the edge of the riverport city, long since left behind by her, sparks from horseshoes pierced the darkness, the piles of pots in the kitchen shifted, the quinces, the kwite , the dunje , the safardzali , rolled among the piles of laundry, no letter lay on the bare table, no one played with the toys set up in her vanished child’s nursery.

And out here, among the dozens of brooks, rose thousands of mossy mounds, apparent islands, the turbari , softer than soft, which, when someone stepped on them, slowly twisted and sank, now, now, into the depths, into the bogginess, into the bog.

And the author in his village in La Mancha, in the chamber with the narrow cot, against the windowless wall, he, too, on his stomach, his hand over his eyes in his sleep, as if the night were not yet dark enough for him, him of all people.

“I have nothing to do with banking anymore, at least not as it is today,” she told him later. “And yet I am preoccupied with the idea of founding a new kind of bank — an image bank, a worldwide one, for the exchange, use, and investment of all my, your, and our images—” But when the author urged her to expand upon her project a little, as so often, she broke off her flight of fancy when it had hardly got off the ground.

But then the new day after all. The feeder brooks once more audible. The tent crowd holding a brief farewell meeting, out of doors in the morning mountain air in front of the Milano Real of Pedrada.

Each person also drank his coffee or whatever outdoors, from porcelain cups, yogurt containers, toothbrush glasses. She, the heroine, adventurer, or vagabond, had her Blue Mountain Coffee from Jamaica with her as always, which she shared with one person or another: a rich black oily gleam, that mirrored the summit plain of the Sierra. It was wrong to be stingy with these most precious of beans: if you used too few of them, the coffee would turn out more bitter and weak than any other coffee.