Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

But the inhabitants of Hondareda, as she urged the outside observer to consider at the end of her stay there, appeared to be has-beens even more, and infinitely more lastingly, in a different respect: as if of their own accord and free will they had decided, in rank and file (they who never lined up anywhere), not to play anymore, or at least not to play games in which one played, either openly or surreptitiously, primarily against another person or persons — not to play even a single one of those games known as “grown-up games.”

“So that means voluntarily renouncing all games with winners and losers, and certainly all games of annihilation? Forever? Such games are played out for good down in the pit?” (A playful question on the part of her partner in conversation.)

Her response: “Played out for the time being, in this period of transition, until perhaps, no, necessarily, a new and entirely different kind of play crops up. In this transitional period at least, your has-beens have decided to cultivate the greatest possible seriousness, each in his dealings with himself and likewise with his fellow settlers — which by no means manifests itself — why did you not see it that way as well? — in gravity but rather in a special gracefulness (‘Latinate words’). Where you may have observed, or rather wanted to observe, wild shaking of fists in the air, someone else might have noticed lunging and hopping steps, of a sort seen nowhere else, or maybe that peculiar clumsiness of someone dedicated to total seriousness, but what a lovely clumsiness, not all that different from floating.”

A question from her opponent: “The clumsy seriousness of the has-beens and castaways, in which the rudiments and elements of a new form of play can be discerned?”

She: “That is right. Yes. To be discerned and ferreted out. And there is another way, a third way, to read your ‘has-beens’: apparently they have lost all the images, ideas, ideals, rituals, dreams, laws, and, finally, also the first and last images that made it possible for them to picture a world, communal life on the planet, and prefigured it for them, prescribed it, lent it a rhythm, or perhaps merely feigned or conjured it up. And being stranded in this fashion is by no means voluntary. The loss of images is something that befell the people of Hondareda. The images, laws, rhythms, and so on that give the world meaning were violently destroyed for them, for each of them in his seemingly inherited place, by all sorts of external events — war, the death of loved ones, betrayal, crime, including crimes they committed themselves, and so on — generally at one blow.

“From one moment to the next, something ceased to mean anything at all to them: the image or the idea, for instance, that the Olympic flame is carried every four or however many years across the continents to the site of the next games, or the previously always valid rhythmic and predictable image of belonging to a country, a culture, even a people; or the images of Mars transmitted to Earth — and these are only the most harmless and tolerable losses of images. All the others — and the loss of images is total for those who found their way to Hondareda, or rather washed up there — are far more grave, infinitely more grave! A person stricken with such a loss can think only one thought: endgame! It is all up with me and with the world. Except that those who are affected, instead of drowning or hanging themselves or running amok against the rest of the world, have made their way here.

“To find a new image? Among this horde of castaways high in the mountains? To which you also belong? When you speak of the loss of images, are you speaking of yourself?”

While she, the adventurer, and he, the transcontinental observer, were thus engaged in conversation, they were standing, by now on the other side of the meanwhile legendary “Great Depression of Hondareda,” on an almost glass-smooth granite outcropping in the midst of the mountain wilderness, far from the colony down below, but also far from the newly graded Candeleda Pass road.

It was not unusual for her to deviate from the path on her crossing of the Sierra. For him, on the other hand, such a deviation was almost unheard of. This was the first time during his stay here that he had been thrust into an area devoid of human beings. At first he ventured only a few steps from the path, then a few more, and finally, without having made a conscious decision, he was already so far from his fellow observers that they, together with their top-volume communication and other devices, ended up out of his earshot, and even sooner out of his sight.

He was drawn more and more forcefully off the beaten track, and eventually he no longer hesitated to give in to the pull or undertow. He even hastened away from the others, no longer pulled but going of his own accord. And what did “off the beaten track” mean? How could a place to which he was going of his own accord, on his own recognizance, be off the beaten track?

And then, in what resembled the “eagle’s solitude,” as the area through which he was walking felt to him, alone beneath the blue, nearly black sky — he had unexpectedly come upon this other human being. Even before he so much as registered that it was a woman, the woman, he realized that he and this other person were acquainted with each other, and not in a good way. In the place where they had met previously, the two of them, if not declared enemies, had crossed swords.

But how? And where? And when? The reporter — no, at this hour and in this part of the world he was no longer that, nor was he an “observer” anymore — could not for the life of him remember, and from the moment he first caught sight of the other person there in this remote area beyond Hondareda-Comarca, it no longer mattered. To his immense astonishment, the moment he became aware of a second person, obviously out there roaming around as freely as he was, something inside him took a great leap, a joyful one, toward this fellow walker: it did not matter now how she had once crossed swords with him!

That he then contained his joy, and in their exchange continued to play the observer’s role, at least for a while, was another story — but it, too, no longer mattered to him, now that he was with this other person, who made him whole here in this half-lost condition.

So what did matter to him? For instance, that she had fulfilled a wish of his, of which he had not even been aware earlier: the wish to meet, in a remote place, as far as possible from the usual everyday and current happenings, someone he had once known all too well, or known in a bad sense, even in mortal enmity, appearing now as nothing more than a face, and thus to speak face-to-face as he had never spoken with anyone before; for instance, to experience in the flesh that the hostilities and dislikes of daily life were perhaps merely evil illusions, but all the more potent, despite being “neither conclusive nor inclusive” (his playful wording).

Mere wishful thinking? Yes. But how can one really object to wishful thinking? the observer asked himself, while he continued for the moment to play the role of the field researcher and reporter in his conversation with this former enemy, the lovely vagabond, or whatever she was, there on the glassy rock, surrounded by brush, scree, and ice: Hasn’t precisely my unconscious wishful thinking become awareness and possibility, which means I can, I should, I may make it a reality, as is perhaps the case with no other way of thinking? I may? I should? It is up to me.

To be sure, and this was not to be denied, that first moment of catching sight of his adversary up here in this remote spot had also created an acute conflict: on the one hand, there was that leap of joy inside him toward the other person, kept secret until now but irrepressible — but on the rebound, no, simultaneously with that leap or reconciliatory urge, another impulse shot through the observer there in this alien Sierra territory — to clear that repellent figure out of the way — to kill her — destroy her — this was his chance!