Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

What a happy feeling to know that one’s neighbors were home again when they had been away — a rare occurrence in these parts — or on vacation — an even greater rarity, to see their vehicles in their parking spaces, their colors all matching the gray of the granite and the silver of the mica and the yellow and white of the broom, and then, in the evening, the glow of lights from the tent-houses across the way, shining through the cracks, and the familiar voices, after all these days and weeks of darkness and silence. How only an hour ago a neighbor thought to have vanished had turned up, and he and the speaker had fallen into each other’s arms and even hoisted each other into the air, and how the absent one had not only been in the best of moods but had also brought his neighbor a gift, along with gifts for his own wife and children, and not some bauble, either, no, a most valuable and beautiful gift, for him, the neighbor, the speaker.

No wonder, the reporter wrote, that in a social order like Pedrada’s, restricted in this way to glorification of neighborliness and good repute — and this was the most worrisome feature of all — a kind of smugness had taken hold among the settlers there that did not pertain to neighbors and those telling stories about each other but increasingly became a menace, a danger to areas outside the narrow confines of the region, a true public menace.

And in his report he made it very clear that precisely the ominous hospitality rules of the Sierra, allegedly the third pillar of the prevailing system of justice, the buttress, so to speak, that made for apparent equilibrium, apparently also intended for those on the outside, was merely the presentable face, only feigning friendliness, of the lurking public menace.

It was true that he, who had come flying and rolling in from afar, experienced within his field of observation the kind of reception that a guest could only wish for, and such as “one finds out in the world only as a ghostly presence in legends of ancient tribes or primitive peoples, stricken in bygone times from the book of human progress.”

But this hospitality was also all there was. Beyond that, nothing. Not a word. Not a look. Wherever he went, he was served, assigned the best seat, tucked into the warmest bed. And at the same time, from his first day to his last, the people of Pedrada were completely indifferent to him. No one took any interest in this man who came from the hubs of the planet, or in anything he could have conveyed to them from there or from anywhere else on the outside. No one cared about him — where he came from, what he planned to accomplish here, or where he wanted to go.

Such indifference toward him, a man belonging to the great outside world, struck him as barbarous. It impressed him as a particularly brutal form of aggression, and turned the region under observation into a blot on the world map, which was finally meeting contemporary standards everywhere else.

And in his report he compared this indifference to the emphasis on mandatory niceness in this place, whose all the more ugly underside was that when one spoke of a neighbor one could not say a word about his illnesses, his lying on his deathbed, the death of his wife, of his children. Not a word about the other person’s misery, misfortune, sorrows.

Yes, not a soul, not a man, child, and certainly not a woman in Pedrada cared about him. Not even an animal cared about him, the foreigner, no dog and no cat. The bulls ignored him. The kites and mountain jackdaws fell silent in his presence. The dragonflies zigged and zagged away from him. The trout, when he waded into the río Tormes in his researcher’s hip boots, acted as though he did not exist, but the moment he reached for them they slipped through his fingers.

The lovely yellow lichens on the granite boulders also manifested the malevolent indifference characteristic of the area, causing him to slip and fall repeatedly. Even the coarse grass stalks were standoffish and hostile like all the Sierra folk, cutting into his skin. Damned thistles. Damned brambles, malditas zarzamoras (wasn’t he in the process, just for his studies here, of learning the local language — which then no one admitted to understanding?!). Damned cow flops, foxholes, and wild-boar trails. And curses, too, on the infants here, who — where else in the world did this happen? didn’t little ones everywhere intently seek the eyes of others, of adults? — looked right through him.

Yes, did these most backward inhabitants of the world think they were something special? Did they imagine that their shit was better than his? What were they so proud of? What gave them the right to be so standoffish? Why, whenever he urged them to tell him about themselves and this place, about the suffering, atrocities, murders, storms, catastrophic winters and summers, did each of them simply turn his back on him and not want his story told, absolutely not? At the very most, one of them would spit, as if to say, “All right, I’ll tell my story — but not to you. Have my story told, but, by God and all the saints, not by you.”

Yes, didn’t the inhabitants of this mountain enclave, the old-timers as well as the new settlers, know that continued resistance was pointless — their current resistance to observing and being observed (objectively) just as much as their earlier resistance to the unfortunately necessary use of arms against them by outsiders? Why couldn’t they grasp that they had lost, and, furthermore, were lost, defending here a cause long since lost in what merely seemed to be their own country but in actuality was not a bright mountain summit but a dark crevasse? Why did each of them, confined to the tiny corner that had been graciously left him here, without the slightest elbow room — instead of looking this fact in the eye — behave as though he were free to roam his kingdom, or a kingdom altogether?

Didn’t it move the reporter almost, almost to tears one evening when he was in the main tent, The Red Kite, and observed the people of the Pedrada and Hondareda Region (that was its full official name) engaged in what was, at least at that time, their nightly dancing? How they hopped and stamped, hoofed it and whirled, dressed festively, even splendidly, until the first glint of morning entered the barnlike hall. How they clung, if not to each other, then at least to their dance, which incidentally was a fairly chaotic wheeling, combining elements of American square dance from the Wild West, rock and roll, flamenco, and an old-fashioned round dance that seemed a bit rancid, in which often one dancer or a couple would abruptly move from one figure into the next, with constant backward movements being most characteristic! How clueless these dancers were, in reality despised and shunned by all of modern enlightened civilization — it was not merely as if they still belonged to civilization and had a right to enjoy themselves like the rest of us today; some of them even let out more or less primitive shouts of joy, tahallul! in the new settlers’ idiom, a variant on “hallelujah”?—but also as if, instead of being the damned and accursed of the earth, they were something like an avant-garde, an elite, the elect, the new and only salt of the earth!

These dancing idiots had not the slightest suspicion (no, not “suspicion,” but “realization”) of how far off the mark they were, how played out and danced out they were, how the scenario had been continuing without them for a long time — how it was all over for them, for good, till the end of time — how their dancing and, accordingly, all their actions, their entire life and their obstinate survival, even their death, had become meaningless, devoid of content, and, along with their rejoicing, foot-stamping, and round-dancing, was headed for the void.