Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Wherever one looked in the village, suddenly a steady bustle of activity, as if it had never been interrupted, only much more audible now, a veritable racket — a great variety of sounds (reminiscent, in turn, of the coppersmiths’ street in Cairo, or elsewhere). The rushing, hissing, bubbling of coffee machines. The bone-hacking of butchers. Now even the snipping of the hairdresser’s scissors could be heard, the magazine-page-turning of the waiting customers, the thread-biting in the tailor’s shop.

And although these continued activities and busynesses on that morning high in the Sierra did not yield any story for the tabloids, one saw all the people in the village engaged in them telling their own stories through their activities. That something could tell its story in this fashion, without anything added, was a sign that in this place things were all right again, or still, something by no means to be taken for granted, but rather, today, or from time immemorial, well-nigh miraculous.

As the story goes, in that early-morning hour she even forgot her wrath at the conversion of the bank branch into a sheep shed. Did she forget it? That she could be wrathful sometimes, in a way unusual for a woman, or indeed for anyone, also belonged in her book, as she insisted.

Far below, on the río Tormes, to the west, King Charles V and Emperor Charles I was walking along on his own two feet, without an entourage, alone, without hobbling. How he had yawned that morning after his night of dying — so plentifully and heartily, as only one risen from the dead can yawn.

And many people here in Pedrada yawned the same way. And almost all of them had, like the emperador —and like her, the fruit thief, former short-term film star, and current adventurer — their survivors’ wounds, which they displayed openly and as if proudly. She fell in with the throng of her people. Yet unlike elsewhere, here no one recognized her, although this time she would actually have wished to be recognized. (“Wished”: did such a word even apply to her: yes.) Yet not even the stonemason and his beloved seemed to recognize her. Overnight they had opened a store together, with ultramarinos and ultramontañeros , goods from overseas and beyond the mountains, where she purchased cheese and sausage, salt, ham, and above all olive oil for the coming crossing of the Sierra — and slipped one apple into her pocket.

She, on the other hand, saw in every inhabitant, most of whom had moved here from other parts of the world, the doubles of people who had been familiar and close to her at various times in her life. It was striking, by the bye, that as a result of the warlike turmoil in this region a couple of years back, never recognized by the rest of the world as a war (?), even the few remaining inhabitants from long ago had acquired the new arrivals’ timidity and fear of strangers, if anything more noticeable than in the recent settlers.

When one of them, in whom she encountered the image of “my faraway life partner,” had the gall not to acknowledge her, she stuck out her tongue at him (see “wrath”). And almost all the young people, including some males, appeared to her in the guise of her vanished child, yet these resemblances and this repeated phenomenon of a person’s being cut from the same cloth afforded her no comfort. And then one time she caught herself turning in her thoughts — this had never happened before — to her dead parents: “Father, Mother — tell me: Who am I?”

The people of Pedrada, on the other hand, not only did not recognize her; they treated her initially as an enemy. Or was it only her imagination that she was not wanted here? That from inside the store and restaurant tents looks like daggers were hurled at her? That the legs people extended were meant to trip her up?

It was not her imagination. A woman came hurtling out of one of the alleys between the tents — she, too, looked familiar; wasn’t she that neighbor from the Sorbian village who had once reported her to the police for a stolen apple? — and, her teeth bared, bashed her over the head with a heavy handbag, seemingly filled with rocks, and darted off down another alley. And children sprayed her with ice-cold water from one of the feeder brooks that ran in a canal between the houses, not in play but in earnest, with glaring, unchildlike expressions.

And finally, at one end of Pedrada, where only tumbledown field huts and abandoned beehives stood, just before the mountain wilderness took over, she was pelted from all sides with stones, the invisible throwers far away. The hail of stones around her refused to stop, as if she were supposed to be kept spellbound in this circle of missiles. Pedrada, the stone-casting village: So the ancient tradition of stoning intruders was still in force here? And none of the throwers showed his face or let out a peep. If they had revealed themselves, she would have known what to do. As it was, the only solution was for her to break out of the magic circle and get back to the center of the village, where she arrived with blood on her forehead.

Again that image from the Orient came to her aid. One time there she had found herself in a part of town with no other women (or they were hidden away in their houses). Nothing but men on the street, not a step without encountering a cluster of men. The street was actually an alley, so narrow that it offered hardly any room for walking and getting past those who were sitting and standing around. Wherever she appeared, each of these otherwise peaceable gatherings and groupings turned into a mob. They hissed, groped, jostled, grabbed, spat, and this was not playful but rather menacing, hostile, on the verge of violence, and the threat persisted at every step of the way, without any prospect of her getting through. The alley, narrow as it was, seemed endless, and the side alleys were, if possible, even more crowded with bodies, and were also, without exception, cul-de-sacs.

So she did what had worked for her since childhood. In her youth she had often gone about alone and repeatedly found herself the target of hordes of boys from neighboring villages. Whenever these hordes descended on her, the child, and later the adolescent, did not run away but instead stood her ground; turned and advanced toward her persecutors; plunged into their midst as though nothing were happening, and indeed nothing did happen; the rabble dissolved into individuals, and sometimes the individuals even became well disposed toward her — or at least she, the girl, became invisible as far as the boys were concerned.

A decade later she had similarly made herself invisible to the male fiends in the Arab casbah; from one minute to the next she turned aside from the gauntlet and headed into the midst of the men who formed it, sat down among them on a stool at a table belonging to the terrace of an eatery that narrowed the passage to almost nothing; like them she drank tea, mint, or whatever (to go so far as to suck on a waterpipe would have been excessive); like them, she did no more than sit there and gaze into the alley with eyes as wide open as possible: and thus it was out of the question for even one of the men to turn and stare at her, or reach for her, or pull her hair; she had hardly ever been left as much in peace as she was by these Arab men; and then, among them, precisely among these men who moments earlier had made her situation a living hell, she experienced a peace such as she had seldom felt — a profound peace, peace as the most all-encompassing sensation.

In the same fashion she decided that morning in Pedrada not to duck the hostility anymore. Instead she plunged straight into it. And the knife-throwers made her a present of the knives? Yes. One did, at least — it was a very tiny knife, by the way, with a blade hardly longer than a thumbnail. And the stone-throwers ceased to throw stones? Yes, when she threw stones herself, one of which collided in midair with a stone tossed by one of her presumptive enemies. What a sound, and what a peaceful silence after that.