Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

In the center of the stone-casting village, where she went into a shop-tent that also housed a bar, she promptly elbowed her way to the spot most crowded with potential attackers, and, after a critical moment (for which there was a special word in that region, trance ), during which the faces grew more savage by several degrees — the eyes blazing like nests of dragons — hands reached for her from all sides, tugging, plucking, pulling, stroking her hair, her cheeks, her shoulders.

Yes, the people of Pedrada reached for her this way out of joy. What had appeared to be hatred and rage in their faces had in actuality been distrust, and not born merely of the current situation — a seemingly chronic disappointment vis-à-vis the rest of the world. She was the one walking around this village with evil in mind, she who had come from elsewhere, the stranger. The settlers in Pedrada expected nothing but the worst from those who came from elsewhere. And no sooner was she standing among them, no sooner did she look around her, than instead of beating her, they plucked, scratched, and jostled her, shouted and spit-sprayed her, out of sheer excitement, eagerness to talk, cordiality and hospitality. Disarming people simply by looking around? Yes. And yet she did not look at anyone in particular. No one felt personally targeted by her gaze. Her gaze merely brushed each one.

It was quite rare, by the way, for her to look someone in the eye. And it happened most rarely with a man. But when it did! Once in a lifetime! Woe unto me. What a lucky man I am! There was that one time when he was pierced by her wrathful gaze, from the depths of a wound that cut into him like his own. No, not a wrathful gaze — rather a pure and simple opening of the eyes, not so much aimed at the man as dedicated to him and intended for him; that blackest of full gazes with which she surrenders entirely and at the same time calls on the man, me, me? for help, silently, and at the same time, with the same widening of her eyes, places trust in me as in no one else, or am I deceiving myself? a trust to which to the end of my days I shall do more than merely be equal, for which I will be the rock. But did I manage to be that?

And now no help for it but to return to the episode in the bar-shop with her and the Sierra folk. By looking around, the stranger had mollified these people, who generally felt passed over and despised, and made them whole; with her in their midst, they no longer felt marginalized. Although she, this beautiful and well-intentioned guest — at long last such a guest — merely glanced or looked sideways at us natives or settlers, reputed to be obstinate and backward, and who therefore actually were this way at times — her idiosyncrasy, to turn her profile toward each of us as she looked — or even looked us up and down, which, since the days when Homer’s single combatants faced each other before wielding their weapons, has signified disrespect and arrogance, or merely glanced fleetingly around, her eyes invisible behind a veil (afterward each of us will have imagined a different eye color for her), we knew our value had been raised by her scrutiny. No, we were not the way the observers portrayed us, and beneath the gaze of our dear guest we were no longer forced to play that role. For once we could be high-spirited. And in this high-spiritedness, which to our regret lasted far too short a time, we recognized that this was no exception but rather one of the most valid and exemplary things we deserved, part of our worth, part of our tradition. Under the gaze of this particular person, we were no longer shriveled nonentities, but each of us lived in his own space and breathed his innate and indigenous time.

The story tells us that the people of Pedrada did not want to let their guest depart. And we are told that at the parting one person hung around her neck a medallion with the white angel (but wasn’t that her own?). And the story tells of a couple of others who bickered high-spiritedly over which of them would escort the stranger up to the crest of the Sierra (yet of those who wanted to climb up there with her, none had yet ventured to the peaks, in this respect more strangers to the mountains than the guest, and when they finally set out, she, the new one here, was repeatedly asked for directions, even before they left the center of the village, even just to get around the corner). And the story tells of local children, who, unlike big-city street children nowadays, did not budge from the woman’s side as she eventually set out alone, but gazed at her expectantly, hand in hand with her (children from the very horde that had previously pelted her with stones?). And she, according to the story, continued to recognize in each of her hosts someone she had met in another part of the world, primarily those from the northwestern riverport city, here the outskirts idiot, there her would-be lover (and she remarked to herself that moving to the air and light of these remote inner regions of the Sierra de Gredos had not done them any harm).

And here is the place to insert the reporter’s account of his visit to the Pedrada region. Enough glorification, which, as he wrote in the introduction, amounted to the same thing as obfuscation. It had been his assignment, he wrote, simply to observe, rather than to glorify and prematurely pave the way for a conciliatory attitude toward these people, which might actually make things worse.

In his reporting, he said, he had been guided exclusively by the recognized and accepted rules of rational thought. To be sure, now and then feelings had slipped in among the sober observations — indeed, it had sometimes been almost impossible to “ward off” feelings — but there was no place for them in a purely rational account, not even as a “makeshift device.” No feelings. Or at least not allowing oneself to be [mis]led by them. They merely distorted the given facts, disfiguring them and destroying their structure.

Similarly he had avoided in his report all evocations of atmosphere. To place particular emphasis on the atmosphere of a region under analysis would falsify the actual circumstances and veil the causes of local problems. Atmospherics were fine for the soccer field and the circus, “or, as far as I am concerned, for a Western or an adventure story, but not a research project intended to elicit facts or establish the truth.” Feelings, like atmosphere, were incompatible with the urgently needed information on the Pedrada region, from which almost nothing but rumors reached the outside world. And likewise any fleeting images or scraps of words picked up in the course of a day did not constitute hard facts.

Incidentals and details unrelated to the main point: dozens of these had come to his attention during his stay in Pedrada. He had repeatedly been at risk of being distracted by them from his assignment, which called for capturing the essentials, had been at risk of ascribing to insignificant factors and small incidental images a meaning that they by no means possessed and above all were “not allowed to have,” as far as the problem of Pedrada and the Sierra de Gredos was concerned.

Even now, as he was compiling his report, the reporter admitted, images were constantly breaking or barging their way in among the rational statements, “in veritable toadlike fashion,” “and likewise in dark swarms,” not only inappropriate, deviant, and confused, but also illogical or at least intent on keeping him from staying on track, images “like will-o’-the-wisps or demons!” And such images, intermittently flashing and flickering, were not information, and certainly not the information that was called for. The facts and “the disjointed interior worlds of images” were “mortal enemies.”

The same was true, he wrote, of knowledge and intuition. In his report, his assignment was to transmit what he knew to be proven, documented, witnessed, and certified as far as the Pedrada population was concerned. Anything intuited had to be omitted, “alas.” Yes, he wrote “alas”: for quite a few of the intuitions that had come to him while he shared his life with the Sierra folk had impressed him at least as powerfully as all his accumulated factual knowledge; these “intuitions that unexpectedly came flying to me” had from time to time been even more convincing than the known facts, in defiance of the laws of rational thought. Intuitions “like eagles’ shadows, or at least the shadows of raptors, which threatened to darken my reason.” Above all, no making things up out of thin air. Both feet on the ground.