Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

The glowing sky reflected in what looked like subterranean boats not yet completely surfaced and shot through with alabaster-white veins of quartz. Crossing these gentle, stadium-size rocky mounds as if one were all dressed up, even if one had not put on anything special for the journey (or had one?).

And nevertheless closest to the blue of the sky above the ridge, either lightning blue or in the next moment almost outer-space black, whenever one took in the sky not nakedly and directly but glimpsed through a shrub or a tree — so now and then there still was a tree, if only a dwarf one — a blue, merely as background. Merely?

Every long story, she later told the author, has a certain color, a predominant color. And the color she wanted for their book — just as its sound should be the steps of a solitary person walking through the granite sand of the otherwise silent, still Sierra — was that sky-blue shining intermittently through the mountain brush. It was the blue found in the background of medieval stained-glass windows, with the twigs, branches, evergreen leaves, needles, berries (juniper berries or rowanberries, for instance), fruit capsules (rose hips, for instance), and pods (of broom) as the figures against this background. Smoke-colored sky-blue. For the smoke color lent objects their sharpest contours.

No, when the blue glowed and shimmered through the slits, gaps, and holes in the Sierra vegetation, filling the smallest openings and being simply blue and still, it resembled the blue of work clothes hung out to dry as far as the eye could see. She knew that blue from her ancestral village, and not only from there: the blue of her neighbors’ work pants and jackets, seen through the foliage of bushes and fruit trees. And upon seeing that blue one thought simultaneously of “work” and “festivity.” The blue behind the leaves presented the image of work clothes that could also serve as party clothes, just as they were, without having to be altered in any fashion. It was the blue of patches, but also the blue of brides’ trains and scarves and flags — flags with this background-blue as their only color. It looked like cloth, as no other blue and no other color did; it had nothing heavenly or ethereal about it, but rather hung, stood, rested, waited for one in back there as a material, as something material.

Despite its being winter, some thickets of broom emitted a summery vanilla scent as one slipped through them. When one had painfully forced one’s way between two boulders, one’s hands had a singed smell, as after rubbing flints together. When we bit into the withered and blackened rowanberries, which hung in bunches from bare trees that were hardly taller than we were, seemingly frozen and long since dried out, our mouths, parched from the climb, were filled with the taste of the fresh berries and even their juice, both bitter as can be, but how refreshing! and promptly lengthening our stride — the rowanberries’ taste so evocative of midsummer that we saw before us the unique light red, the rowanberry red, of newly ripened bunches, in a way that we had never encountered during an actual summer, different from a mere daydream red.

Involuntarily we stuffed our pockets with the surprisingly weighty — but not “heavy”—clumps of berries. We would need them later, especially on the descent into the southern lowland, where, winter or not, we would feel hotter and hotter; as if for a weeklong expedition — one never knew — at the little island of trees amid the sea of cliffs and snow, we supplemented our provisions (the author suggested using the word “provender” occasionally, even if this term was no longer in use in his far-off linguistic homeland).

And now as we plucked more and more bunches of fruit, with the practiced motions of those who had been fruit thieves from childhood on, and finally stood on tiptoe to reach the clusters (yes, more “clusters” than “berries”), we finally understood why the common name for these berries was “bird berries”: for concealed behind them, completely hidden from view, perched the small birds so rare in the Sierra — mountain titmice, wrens, robins — behind the clusters but also in them, inconspicuously and silently pecking at them — and when you stood on tiptoe and reached for the berries, they whooshed out of the little rowan tree, not all at once, but each one just as its berries were about to be picked, each of them scolding and shrieking as the rightful owner of the bird-berry bunch, robbed by you of its due.

As the story went, there was once a time when the hunters of the Sierra, not those hunters whose story remains to be told here, even planted rowan trees hither and yon in the mountain wilderness, in order to lure the small birds that were prized as delicacies, and at any rate the rowan trees that often stand alone, as if artificially planted, in the Sierra de Gredos have a second name, along with “bird berry” also “hunter ash.” Bitter-as-can-be berries or clusters? Yes, bitter as can be. Not bitter as gall.

But as other fruits first tasted sweet and only later manifested their bitterness, deep within, a bitterness that caused the person eating them to spit them out suddenly, a bitterness that not only turned his stomach but “shook him up” (a village expression?), the rowanberries by contrast revealed to the palate, after the initial off-putting bitterness, a taste that was more than mere “sweetness”: an inwardness (did that exist, an “inward taste”?) all the more inward because the initial bitterness remained present in it. Ah, ow, oh — only no “ugh!”—the rowanberries in the rocky clefts of the Sierra de Gredos. (Was it appropriate for her, the heroine, to stand on tiptoe? Yes.)

During one period — which one, again, hardly matters for the current story — she had viewed possessions and property as a kind of “accomplishment” (though different from the accomplishment of “having a child,” in which she continued to believe, now even unwaveringly). And at the end of that period? She was no longer so sure.

And now, while crossing the Sierra? Was she happy to be as far as possible from her so-called possessions; to get through the day without ever thinking about or looking at things the way a property-owner would — in other words, to be rid of something that over time, rather than cushioning or liberating a person, tended to make one petty and rigid, which plagued and preoccupied one (and there was nothing positive in being thus “occupied”)?

What: Was she, a banker and economist, which she continued to be, in her apparently traditional fashion, an enemy of property?

Yes: at least as far as her personal existence was concerned. And besides, she saw here, too, a problem that was beautiful = worth describing, but not a contradiction. Even a few top people at the World and Universal Bank — before her journey, one could easily have pictured her as one of them — had recently come out in opposition to the position on property espoused by this super-powerful institution, which merely pretended to want to help the have-nots of the world and in reality was out to enhance its own power and prestige, and had left their posts with that institution to do something altogether different — something in opposition. And perhaps these people, one at a time, were also making their way through a similar moonlike region, devoid of human beings, relieved to be released for the time being from their eternal preoccupation with power and possessions, perhaps even contemplating an entirely new paradigm?

No, owning property could be an accomplishment for a while, but it was not one’s mission in life — which it seemed to have become in the current era. Money and possessions had become the be-all and end-all. The money-changers in the temple? No, the temple of money-changers — and it was the one temple that still counted. In the face of the silence, brightness, and sanctified aura of the money temple, everything else could not help degenerating into dark, agitatedly flailing, recidivist raging. But to her, and precisely to her, the formerly fruitful and liberating notion of property seemed exhausted once and for all, yes, a complete failure. Property no longer represented an ideal.