Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

The morning’s seeing and listening, her liturgy of preservation, was then interrupted by a sound such as she had never heard in the Sierra or in any village, not even in the village of her childhood: a siren. It sounded less like an alarm than like a factory whistle. And a few blinks later the mountainous horizon was filled with a dull roar, and a heavy, dark airplane approached, very slowly for an aircraft, so close to the ground that it almost grazed the rounded cliff tops with its fat fuselage, despite the even whirring of its four propellers — she had always had an eye for numbers, seeing the number of objects along with the objects themselves — the wings teetering constantly in the air, hardly a rope ladder’s length above the roofs of the settlement, which almost seemed to sway sympathetically.

The airplane, blackish, and appearing from the ground, and probably from the same altitude as well, to consist of a thick, opaque metal envelope, more massive and powerful than even the largest of the centuries-old granite buildings below, did not remain alone. It was followed by a twelve-plane squadron — she involuntarily counted again. One warplane (they did not have to be bombers) after the other crossed the horizon, a ridge of the Sierra facing the sunrise, which thus took on some of the character of a rampart, and each plane then wobbled over the village, almost within hand’s reach, and seeming to set Pedrada in motion.

But none of the twelve followed the one ahead. Each flew breathtakingly close to the ground — as was intended — but then chose its own course over the houses and tents, having appeared from the same point on the horizon. And this course was painstakingly plotted: no spot, no bark-covered roof, no chimney, no satellite dish, no fruit stand — no corner in Pedrada without one — no root cellar, no structure occupied in any way, was to remain untouched and undarkened by “the rest of us” and the shadows of our air-supreme force (which, according to the external observer in his report, first and foremost gave the old and the new settlers a sense of being protected).

Before people even had a chance to get a good look, the morning flyover ended. The twelfth plane had flown its course over the village, then had gone shooting off to the common point on the next horizon, of which there was one after the other in the Sierra, and had promptly been swallowed up by it, along with the hearing-loss-like sudden cessation of the dull roar; only an echo, as if from a dozen distant waterfalls; or were those actual cascades?

With the siren and the flyover, the village of Pedrada in the remotest and innermost Sierra had finally emerged from its slumber, which, as time passed, had come to resemble hibernation (as if the residents had turned overnight into dormice). Village? Quite a few large iron shutters, not very village-like, were raised. A garbage truck — and not only one — thundered along, and here and there on the paved roads urban street sweepers turned up. One man stepping out of a tent-house was wearing a necktie, and he did not remain the only one. Convoys of delivery vans were forging their way across the farflung mountain region, almost the only vehicles in the area, except for the very similar ones belonging to hunters. Other than in size, their vans differed from the delivery vans only in that their contents — if there were any — remained out of sight (barely even a trace of blood in back on a loading door). The goods being brought in and shipped out remained in equilibrium, and among the goods that were, so to speak, exported, local crops and products — venison, fish, honey, fruit — did not particularly predominate, and among the goods imported, those unique to cities or industrial areas similarly tended to be in the minority.

Now, although around Pedrada there were droves and droves of rather small white mountain pigs running around loose, whole truckloads of different pigs were arriving, those enormous black-bristled ones with black hooves, fattened up with acorns from the plains of Extremadura to produce that famous flavorful meat, now destined to be processed — winter, pig-slaughtering time — in the Sierra factory up here.

And, likewise, the square in front of the local oil press, to whose existence nothing had previously called attention, was unexpectedly darkened for a while, in a way that differed from the shadow of the air squadron, by the trucks uninterruptedly rolling up, filled to the top with blue-black olives from the “sunny sides” of the Sierra: winter, olive-harvest time. And among the goods — the usual herbs, cheese wheels, juniper berries, rowanberry schnapps, etc. — which moved in the opposite direction, out to the rest of the country — were equal numbers of refrigerators, washing machines, flashlights, knives.

In this respect, too, the place had become quite different since her last visit. And there was a local school again (all the previous times it had been closed, as if for good). The odd thing was that the teachers seemed to be in the majority — until she realized that these adults, although without book bags on their backs, were going to school just like the children, pupils among pupils. Such things occurred otherwise only in nightmares. But this was nothing of the sort.

Had all of Pedrada in fact lain in a deep slumber until now? The not infrequent columns of smoke from the stone chimneys had spoken against such an assumption, and in particular the silence, less dozing than breathing. And then when the grilles, the curtains, the doors to the stores — every third tent-house was a store, a stand, a business — and the cafés opened — every ninth tent an eatery — an image presented itself to her such as she had never seen or experienced before, either in the Sierra de Gredos or anywhere else in the world: in all the interior spaces of the village, the day had long since been under way or going full blast.

The activities inside the stores were not just beginning or being prepared for. Nowhere were the goings-on in these places taking place in expectation of the first morning customers: the hairdresser, for instance, was not straightening a pile of magazines (he was long since busy cutting hair); the jeweler was not taking items out of the safe and arranging them in his window (they were already there); the restaurant managers and waiters were not removing chairs from the tables (which were already set); the butchers were not spreading sawdust on the floor (it was already there, in many cases showing fresh footprints).

Wherever one looked, the daily routine was not just starting but rather was going on as before; not a new beginning but a continuation. Before this, after the opening of curtains and doors, turning out of lights, raising of shutters, opening of barriers, there had indeed been a moment when the stores and businesses of Pedrada had been not empty but at a standstill, which, if the paused images had not revealed an almost imperceptible swaying and quivering, one might have taken for paralysis or doll-like rigidity. The hairdresser and the woman under the dryer formed an almost motionless ensemble, the comb and scissors in the hairdresser’s hands suspended in midair, halfway to their destination. The already numerous diners in the small eating places, as if having a first coffee break, might here and there have their fingers wrapped around glasses and cups, but one did not see a single one of them drinking. The bicycle dealer, kneeling by a child’s bicycle, seemed to pause in the middle of pumping up the tire, next to him his customer, the child, with its hand motionless on the saddle.

The impression that this barely perceptible moment, when events were at a standstill, had been preceded by moons and entire years of the same. And that now, let us say, “ten years later,” all at once, let us say, at the boom of a gong or a blast on a whistle, the interrupted game resumed, as if nothing had happened, no multi-year interruption, not even a momentary one.