Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

And it went without saying — thus he ended the introduction to his report — that in the following compilation of data and statistics, geared toward ease of understanding and general applicability or usefulness, dreams had no place—“although it must be admitted here that during my assignment in the innermost Sierra, probably as a result of the altitude, I dreamed as nowhere else (although my life as a reporter has taken me to the most remote and dream-stricken corners of our planet): dreams that pursued and persecuted me all day during my fieldwork, and often thoroughly muddled this work, along with the data and facts. But it is also out of the question that these dreams — what an unfamiliar pounding of my heart they caused, and still cause — should be considered straightforward information that leads to the heart of the matter.”

According to the reporter’s account, the life of the Pedrada settlers was primarily characterized by regression to forms of civilization thought to have been long since left behind. “Among the population, one can observe a degree of atavism unequaled anywhere else, not merely in Europe, but in the entire modern world, now well advanced into the twenty-first century.”

This atavism, he wrote, was evident already in the fact that none of the inhabitants cared what was happening outside the borders of his region. The local station, whether radio or television, carried almost exclusively local news. The satellite dishes, as numerous here as elsewhere, served only to receive broadcasts of old movies. People were uninformed, either about the shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean, or the floods in Alaska, or the bombing of the Eiffel Tower. There was no newspaper, and if one happened to find its way to the village from elsewhere, brought, for instance, by a bus passenger, it went unread. The few announcements were disseminated orally, as in much earlier times, on Sundays after mass, after the Shabbat service, after Friday prayers in the mosque.

Further evidence of regression was the rejection of cashless financial transactions and indeed any kind of banking. All that prevented the reintroduction of piggy banks and money chests was the fact that no one saved, let alone hoarded valuables: the money in the region was in constant circulation, with uninterrupted buying and selling, in the course of which objects and money passed from hand to hand without anyone’s thinking to amass capital with which to undertake some long-term project or gain a substantial advantage over others.

The atavism was such that even the old-fangled barter system was sending forth its sickly tendrils on the entire northern side of the Sierra de Gredos, which in any case suffered from sun deprivation. More childishly than children, the Pedrada population would spend hours haggling over barters, which exchanges, once they were concluded, were so crazy and pointless that merchants from the outside world — though none came — would have had an easier time of it with these ninnies than Columbus with the West Indians, Pizarro with the Incas, or Cortés with the Mayas or the Aztecs. One person bartered a gold pocket watch for a chess piece made not even of ivory or crystal but of wood. The one who had received the gold watch promptly exchanged it for a glass marble, for which he was offered by the next person a bench, a first edition of Don Quixote , or a crate of apples allegedly blessed by one of the hermits up on the crest of the Sierra, and so it went in the local bartering frenzy.

What was more worrisome was that the inhabitants of Pedrada and its surroundings still lived as people had before the discovery of play. True, in their daily dealings and in their evening leisure activities they displayed something oddly playful — every head movement was playful, likewise every placement of their feet, every blink, every exchange of objects, even the words that they literally sent flying back and forth among themselves — but beyond that they never played an actual game, and apparently knew of and were acquainted with none (the chess piece, like a ball, a deck of poker cards, a Ping-Pong paddle, was merely an object of exchange).

And “since they never played particular games — or if they did perhaps play, without any rules — the people of Pedrada seemed imprisoned in their own countries, not deflected for a moment from their separate and isolated existences, in which, without any social games, they had no opportunity to escape from themselves even for a while, or, by way of the much-needed detour provided by regulated play, to interact with their fellow human beings freely and uninhibitedly, and the result was that they — a serious regression — had all mutated into those ‘idiots,’ which might be translated literally as ‘go-it-aloners’ or ‘odd ducks,’ for whom the first progressive society, the Greek polis, had had no room within its system”—by which the reporter meant to suggest that membership in contemporary societies, whose model “of course had to be the polis,” was out of the question for the entire population of P., a straggling horde of obsolete idiots, too stupid to play.

Even more worrisome, the outside reporter continued, was that the legal and judicial system in the Comarca of Pedrada was no longer based on the world or universal convention that had finally been adopted everywhere else, but that these people — certainly at the behest of precisely those who had moved here from the most advanced civilizations! — had reverted to a concept of neighborhood justice, for the regulation and enforcement of “local coexistence,” that had allegedly held sway in the mountains in olden times and had been preserved there: a system not even captured in writing and codified, but merely passed down from one generation to the next in some obscure fashion.

In the Sierra de Gredos, according to the report, respect for one’s neighborhood, for the other person’s, the neighbor’s, space, had become the starting point for all decisions as to what was allowed and what was prohibited — and that among these idiots, who skittishly kept to themselves! — a principle now almost “sacred” to these people, like the law of hospitality and the law of “niceness” (!) (as if they wanted to turn their backs in willful defiance on the present and take refuge in a dark, gloomy past).

Yes, in this remote world an unwritten law was in effect, in all seriousness: when it came to one’s neighbor, good repute — or none at all — or complete silence about the person; but in particular: not a word about a foreigner, no matter how unwelcome. Wherever Pedradeños (they had another name for themselves, but they guarded it jealously) came together, as usual looking past one another, over each other’s shoulders, into space, their topic was generally those who were absent, their neighbors from the upper, middle, or lower feeder brooks of the río Tormes, and the murmuring, whispering, and growling, accentuated by the hissing, guttural, fricative, and spitting sounds characteristic of the Sierra, had as its subject, if not various legendary heroes or other whimsies, the positive and lovable features of various fellow residents, as well as their lovable defects and mistakes — apparently only the lovable kind could be mentioned.

How well these others all came off in such conversations, how seemingly human and as if without negative qualities — anyone listening without preconceptions, and without the blinders of an obsolete, narrow, artificially revived law based on custom and tradition, had to be filled with doubt from the outset — when the reporter was privy to such obstinately favorable comments on others, he almost felt like bursting out laughing, almost. How beautifully white XY’s hair had turned over the past year. How he and his wife still loved each other after a quarter of a century, still held hands and opened doors for each other. How so-and-so’s children were even more beautiful than their mother, who was a beauty herself, what a beauty. How forever young this woman looked, like women in medieval epics. How what’s-his-name was always so punctual about pruning his fruit trees. How kindly he had left a bottle of sparkling cider outside the speaker’s window yesterday. How attractive the new color of his window shutters was. How reassuring it was to hear the man next door banging the garage door shut every evening, or to pass every day the large family’s laundry just hung out to dry, with the rips and holes in the clothing and socks — this morning only single stockings, all missing their mates! What a pleasure to hear the voice of a newborn behind the fence, to see the freshly polished shoes in the attic window across the way, to smell the eldest daughter’s perfume through the wild broom, to find, upon coming home, yet another ball in one’s own tent garden or courtyard and to be able to toss it back into the garden next door.