Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

11

Toward evening, traffic on the carretera swelled. It was not only from both directions that the number of cars increased. Vehicles also came lumbering onto the road from the previously empty fields, steppes, and semideserts, fewer tractors than trucks, many of them with flapping tarpaulins, all grayish yellow like the earth, a sort of camouflage, and now and then convoys of tanks and armored personnel carriers, as if returning from maneuvers, and likewise ordinary automobiles, not only those made for rocky slopes but also many sporty little cars more suited to city traffic, hobbling along oddly from the trackless savannahs.

And all these vehicles, most of them, like her Santana, heading south, merged onto the highway, which continued almost straight as an arrow. And still no village in sight, let alone a city. Beautiful old Segovia at most a felt presence, as a strip of haze above the seemingly infinite mesa, to the east, at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama (not her destination), which was white down to a fairly low altitude — suggesting that the considerably higher Sierra de Gredos was even whiter? Or was this whiteness the result in part of the craggy massifs in the distance, lit up by the rays of the sun?

And then, just as abruptly, planes in the sky, flying quite low, not sport or private planes but dark, quite massive wide-bodied four-propeller bombers, zooming in from the south, seemingly springing up out of the ground, flying even lower as they approached and slowing to a speed that almost matched that of the stream of vehicles directly below them, and with their flaps set almost perpendicularly, describing a sort of landing curve, a broad ellipse, heading for which airport? the one at “Nuova Segóvia,” nearby according to the highway sign, yet out of sight, despite the roar of planes landing in quick succession, on the otherwise still apparently uninhabited mesa; and bombers like these returning to their base, each with its nose almost touching the tail of the one in front of it, each with the same sound, something between droning, rumbling, growling, and clattering, maneuvers inextricable from war, unlike those of tanks.

And now the shattering of her windshield, as if simply from the sound waves; glass shards in the car, also on her; not a single remnant of glass left in the frame there in front of her. And then the sign “Deviación,” detour. And was this possible: In the middle of the seemingly endless high plateau, almost unvarying except for the occasional rock outcropping, suddenly a “straits”? The road a cut through an outcropping, from a distance hardly distinguishable, yet from close up clearly higher than all the other outcroppings and also infinitely longer, crossing the entire countryside, forming a natural barrier, traversable only at this one notch, which had been carved out deeper for the carretera, forming a “straits,” or an estrecho, like the straits or estrecho of Gibraltar between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.

And there, with walls of rock on both sides, the road did in fact narrow. Two vehicles could barely pass one another. For a truck, the vehicle approaching from the opposite direction had to stop to let it go by. A pedestrian would have had to flatten himself against the cliff (if that was even possible), and not only during the evening rush hour, as now. “Estrecho del Nuevo Bazar”—that, according to the sign, was the name of this pass. And, again according to a sign, it was more than a thousand meters above sea level. That meant that the meseta, to all appearances completely flat since the beginning of her drive, had imperceptibly gained about four hundred meters in altitude.

Immediately after the straits, after the cordillere, came the detour; the carretera blocked with steel chevaux-de-frise, a type of barricade now known almost exclusively from early war films and old newsreels, spirals of barbed wire wound through metal spikes. The highway sign, with “Ávila — Sierra de Gredos” crossed out with a thick line, barely legible, and further obscured by splashes of tar and bullet holes. The names of these places no longer occurring after the detour arrow, except for “Nuevo Bazar,” phosphorescent, and not only from the deep-yellow evening sun.

The straits was familiar to her from many previous trips. The settlement known as “El Nuevo Bazar” had also existed for years. She had spent the night there, in one of the many new hotels. And yet she no longer knew where she was, sitting in the line of vehicles, now moving at a snail’s pace, on the turnoff with which she was supposedly familiar. After the straits, had this huge hollow or basin in the landscape been there the last time? Was she on the right road? Was this even a road? With all the cars, bumper-to-bumper and rearview-mirror-in-rearview-mirror, and with the constant rumbling and pounding from the stones underneath, with dust flying at her, as well as thistles, steppe grasses, wild bees, and the occasional hornet — what, in the middle of winter? — even that was soon no longer a certainty.

Then the moment when she did not merely wonder, “Where am I?” but also, “Where is this place?” An area such as she had never encountered before. As if, with the passage of time, this familiar countryside had been transformed into something entirely different. As if it had been stood on its head; tipped over; turned upside down. As if this place, including the blueing sky and the greening patches (fields of winter rye dotting the fallow land), were ultimately not “here” anymore, but where? at the antipodes? on a distant star? As if this region, despite the bronze-glittering patches of water and the swaying dog rose bushes here and there — the little fruit capsules glowing reddish purple on the canes, arching against the evening sky — could not even be called “a country”; “a province”? (misleading); “a region”? (even more misleading); “a stretch”? (too innocuous); “an evil star”? (too pretentious).

And yet: as if one were nevertheless being ineluctably drawn in, breathing freely despite the dust, drawn into an atmosphere inimical to life, one that pulled the ground out from under one’s feet, now, now; that tipped one over or swallowed one up and let one tumble into a pit called “nowhereland,” into its non-name.

Time and again, often merely as a result of deviating from the beaten path a bit, she had landed in a sort of white hole. And after the initial blow to the head (literally), it had done her good, and now? “Don’t know,” she said to herself. “Who knows.” And still no sign of the “Nuevo Bazar,” announced, with each rotation of the wheels, along and above the road, also up in the sky, with banner in tow: no plantation or lone farm, not even a shed out in the fields. Instead billboards, one crowding and blocking the next, and then, out of nowhere, broad, smoothly paved sidewalks, with no one walking on them, accompanying the road, which meanwhile had become a distinctly good one, with electronic temperature displays on every light pole, the degrees differing markedly, not only because of sun and shade, as did the times flashing on the screens. Then floodlights, from a stadium? Suns infinitely more glaring than our familiar sun; the latter setting.

Finally, among the billboards — on which one often saw not merely a picture of the item offered for sale but the actual object, a house, a yacht, a car, an entire garden, a castle gate, in the original, on poles, suspended, on wheels for taking with one immediately (including the gate and even the garden) — a small, seemingly forgotten sign: a turnoff after all for “Ávila — Sierra de Gredos,” probably the last one. And this little sign was not crossed out, not blackened, was unharmed; and the road, albeit narrow, led in a curve, shimmering with emptiness, in the direction she wanted. The peak of one of the foothills of the Sierra already visible beyond the curve of the horizon. Yet she stayed in the pack with the others, on the road into Nuevo Bazar.

She shook off the shards of glass. Was that a bullet hole? She closed the roof of the car; when the sun went down, it got cold in this highland hollow. She put on makeup; she could do this while driving — still at a snail’s pace and hindered further by the traffic lights, increasingly frequent, yet without intersections, without any other sign of a settlement, the land to either side still lying fallow. She piled her hair on her head and wound it into a knot. She took the acacia branch, which had fallen into the Santana when the glass shattered, broke off the thorns one at a time, and stuck it diagonally through the knot of hair. She tied on a gauzy white cloth whose hem partially concealed her eyes. She turned on the car radio and set the dial to the station indicated on other roadside columns, now illuminated for the night, these columns, too, coming up at every rotation of the wheels, and, unlike the temperature and time indicators, always giving the same call numbers for the station.

She had been warned about Nuevo Bazar. From several quarters word had reached her that the place had changed recently (and the warnings had nothing to do with the current rumors of war); it was no longer a good place. The author of the most recent travel guide — whom, to be sure, one could not trust any more than most of the proliferating advice- and hot-tip-dispensers, assigners of plus or minus points, for all sorts of regions, no matter how out of the way — wrote: “Nuevo Bazar, a mixture of Andorra, Palermo, and Tirana. Every morning ten truckloads of blood-soaked sawdust to be disposed of. Mounds sprinkled with lime, growing daily, outside the city, which does not deserve the name of ‘ciudad’ but has become a death zone, popularly known now simply as ‘La Zona,’ and no longer Nuevo Bazar.”

But not a word about this on the radio. For a long time, local news briefs, and these dealing only with the weather, the water level, prices at the indoor market, the times of movie showings and church services. Not until almost the end did the word “war” occur, or rather a denial: “no war”; allegedly only scattered skirmishes were taking place, far off in the mountains to the south. And only at the very end, but then for a while, and repeated every few car lengths: “War!”—but somewhere else entirely, not merely in another country — in Africa; no rumors of sporadic slaughters of the mountain tribe in the Sierra, or of tribal members among themselves? no, “the” war was world news: and yet how involved the two announcers on Radio Nuevo Bazar, a man and a woman, both with unmistakably very young voices, seemed to be in this real, universally acknowledged war, as one could hear from their rapid-fire question-and-answer, and also reporting, game. The war over there in Africa — actually not that much farther than the Sierra—: that was the thing; that was it; that was where things were happening; and what are you people doing here, what are we young folks doing here, in this backwater?

Yet the two announcers were for the most part reporting only what was being reported over there in the African war-torn area. “Reported,” that was a word that occurred in every sentence in their accounts, and when an incident, always having to do with mass death and destruction, was introduced with that word, the incident was considered proven; “reported” meant, as far as the war was concerned: this way and no other way; uncertainty impossible; “confirmed”—the usual conclusion of the report; “allegedly” or “probably,” as in the case of the “vague rumors” from the Sierra: out of the question.

And the height of unimpeachability was achieved when one also gave the person doing the “reporting” the status of eyewitness (“one”? the reporter? the war itself?): “According to eyewitness reports …”—no greater truth was knowable. And such reporting, the definitive evidence, could only go hand in hand with the horrific?; reporting and horror were inseparable, and not solely on the news? also in books? or had this always been the case? reporting without horror was not really reporting? commanded no attention? was not heard? no longer heard? was not taken seriously? reporting-and-war-and-atrocities: only that was taken seriously?

Without turning off the radio, leafing at random through her vanished daughter’s Arabic booklet, then even reading bits here and there (that was possible during the stop-and-go drive into Nuevo Bazar): “Al-Halba was a place in Baghdad …” “in the presence of this sheik one felt as if one were in a garden …” No matter how this New Bazaar might have changed since her last trip, from one moment to the next she suddenly had time for the place, at least for this night — time? yes, and not only for the place.

And so what if Nuevo Bazar represented a threat or an obstacle, according to the guidebook? That was all right: after all, danger — not to be confused with “war”—was her element. And the infamous masses of people in the “Zone”? Even there she caught a whiff of value, and certainly not out of nobility on her part (the very notion of catching a whiff contradicted that), but out of animal instinct: an instinct that did not derive from her profession, her managerial activities, but rather had brought her to them in the first place? Without a whiff of value, no adventures that extended beyond conventional banking and benefited business undertakings, and not only these? One of the few sentences the author underlined in the hundreds of articles he was reading in preparation for his book on her: “The secret of this businesswoman: in almost everything, even unfavorable circumstances, she catches a whiff of value. Not a gambler but an adventurer.”

The story, and she as well, wanted my adventurer to remain unseen on the evening of that drive into Nuevo Bazar. Despite the shattered windshield, not one gaze from all the thousands she encountered came to rest on her. And that had to do not only with her partial disguise and the cloth over her eyes. She simply willed people not to register her presence, and so it was.

The author of one of the earlier articles, who had been allowed to shadow her during a workday at the bank and then also accompany her through her riverport city in the evening, had noticed this ability she had, and had ascribed it to a special feature of her office: she sat there alone, inaccessible, closed off, visible to no one, behind a door that could be opened only by a button on her desk; and at the same time she had before her, in the same wall as the door, a pane as large as a shop window that provided a view, not of the outdoors but of the office space, with the cubicles where the bank officers sat and received their clients or whomever; through this pane she could keep her eye on everything happening out there, while those on the other side saw only their own reflections in the matte, silvery, foil-like surface.

The author of another feature on her, who had also written a soccer novel, explained the phenomenon of her not being seen (or the non-phenomenon) by saying that her way of looking past others toward something in the distance, a vanishing point or goal, and of tracing with her eyes a possible passage between the people around her, was reminiscent of the “divinely talented Libero,” who, with the ball on his foot, having glimpsed an opening among the opposing players, would distract and mesmerize them into position, thereby preserving the gaps his eyes had detected, after which he, Libero, now invisible to those who had been thus magnetized and blinded, would kick the ball as he wished, past the other team’s players, or over them, and usually score.

Whatever the case: that evening she did not want to be seen, and no one saw her. Everybody looked away from her; at most someone might follow her gaze: for the way she focused on the horizon suggested that something remarkable must be going on there. But there was nothing to see, not even a horizon.

Suddenly, after stopping, starting, then stopping again, one was in Nuevo Bazar and surrounded by buildings, tall ones, as if already in the center of town. No actual center: every street corner could be central, also a side street, a passageway, a stone staircase with four or five steps. Because the town was located in a hollow, which unexpectedly dropped off even more and at the same time formed a curve, perhaps following the meanders of one of the rivers that had at one time been numerous on the mesa, it remained hidden up to the last moment, until one turned onto the steeply descending curve, where, instead of the barren, wide steppe, one was instantly surrounded by façades close enough to touch, and instead of the uninterrupted highland sky saw narrow ribbons of sky following the configuration of the streets below.

And after a long day on the road, often fraught with uncertainty, that could be a blessing. It could be pleasantly stimulating; stimulating and calming at the same time; welcoming without a welcome sign. And like an evening corso in a southern city, the sidewalks, earlier completely unpopulated, once one reached the first cornerstone of a building, were black, white, colorful with pushing, crowding, or merely standing and leaning pedestrians (as in a corso), the unwritten law being that they could not venture one step beyond the boundary of the prescribed evening promenade, in this case the edge of the settlement, and if an individual by mistake violated this law, he had to turn around immediately.

As a result of this welcome, a surge of appetite: a desire to taste this town for an evening. And what had the author of that travel guide meant by that reference to daily tons of blood-soaked sawdust in Nuevo Bazar? Certainly it was not to be taken literally, but there was also not the slightest indication that the image was supposed to be interpreted metaphorically. The pedestrians, and likewise the people in cars, driving by very slowly, had nothing evil in mind and simply wanted to enjoy the moment. As a group, they even made an unusually carefree impression; and that had to do with the convertible tops, open in spite of the January evening at this altitude, the rolled-up sleeves and sleeveless blouses: an innovative feature was the streetlamps, which not only produced light but also heated the air. The streets, including the side streets, were as bright as day, and that, too, in marked contrast to the area before the entrance to the town, already shrouded in night: light coming from the many floodlights on poles towering above the town, whose gleam, even when one looked straight up, remained mild instead of blinding; reminiscent of a veiled sun on a morning just before the onset of spring.

And listen: even a few cicadas could be heard, as loud as in summertime, a grating and warbling, though not from actual live insects but rather from deceptively good imitations of them, dear little machines in the shape of cicadas, attached way up on the streetlamps here and there, even programmed to make artful pauses, so that no chorus of shrill sounds resulted; just sporadic bursts of sound, which then continued in a casual, even rhythm. And look: olive trees in cask-sized pots, and feel: genuine, proper, olive-green fans of leaves that one could break off, and even ripe, genuinely bitter fruit.

Should she make her way to her bank’s branch in Nuevo Bazar, where, as at each of the branches throughout the world, above the lobby a visitor’s apartment was maintained for her use, to be accessed by means of a series of codes, stored in her hand telephone, for the four or five doors? This time that was out of the question. After all, this journey had to do with something other than an article or a feature: with a, the, her, our, book. Spending the night in such a comfortable, and, what is more, familiar apartment did not belong in the book; and besides, she was not traveling on business. The story forbade that, and consequently she forbade it to herself.

She did not even have to make a point of forbidding herself. It went without saying that she must hunt down a place for the night. (Smile.) The bank apartment “did not count.” And besides, for a while, “or for good?” she thought, she was more than merely “not in service”; for the book she had to be someone other than her everyday role — not necessarily someone different: someone in addition, who could, to be sure, provide service if necessary. The book, the adventure, required that she be a stranger here, a nobody. And at this thought a hand was placed on her shoulder. Katib was Arabic for shoulder, and kitab was the book.

Searching for a bed for the night provided a foretaste of the pending adventure. The many hotels, at least three times as many as the last time she had been here, were all full, or, conversely, were empty: “Waiting for the Refugees,” as the vacancy sign outside announced. But at first she did not even inquire about a room. That was as it should be. Parking the car on what was apparently the only lot in the entire settlement not yet built up, and setting out on foot. A sort of happy anticipation of a night without a bed, among the glass shards in the car, or elsewhere. Easy does it: in the course of events that will not fail to come about.

Eventually she found a room in a place that was neither a pension nor a private home, and, in spite of the first impression, also not a shelter for the homeless. Crammed in among dozens of identical buildings, it called itself a venta, even though it was in the middle of the town (as everything in Nuevo Bazar suggested the middle), venta like a hostel out along the highway, standing alone, the only building far and wide, at a crossroads that had been important centuries ago, but in the meantime was no longer important, and perhaps not even a crossroads anymore.

A venta without rooms: the floors above the ground level, where the taproom and dining room were located, consisting simply of four corridors that met at right angles, opening onto an inner courtyard, actually more like a shaft, at the bottom of which was an empty square of concrete, hardly as big as a Ping-Pong table, called the “patio.” Nothing but corridors, without doors to any rooms — so where to sleep? In the sleeping compartments along all the walls of the corridors or galleries: an unbroken succession of wooden sleeping cupboards or boxes or cabinets (the ceiling so low); looking very narrow from the outside, but inside halfway roomy, even if one’s head or feet bumped against the adjacent bed-cupboard; a heavy, dark curtain to close off the compartment; and these berths, suitable only for sleeping alone, like litters, stacked as in a litter storage shed, lined up around the four corridors, and almost all of them already booked for the night.

She (does the ventero even notice that she is a woman?) is given one of the last berths, one with a wall lamp, so that with the curtain closed she can do her usual after-midnight reading. And also, as usual for travelers, a key, in spite of the unlockable litter, in case she comes in late. And how small this key is in comparison to the one she had the other night, how light and inconspicuous, like the key to a mailbox or a bicycle.

After the evening meal in the venta I saw her outside, mingling with the passersby, whose numbers had at least doubled in the meantime. The drivers from earlier are among them; hardly anyone is driving now. And no one notices her; as if she were still invisible, or — this, too, a trait she displays occasionally — utterly nondescript.

As part of such casual strolling in a crowd, there is a common phenomenon, or natural occurrence: time and again, a face, a voice, even a mere gesture, reminds one of an acquaintance; usually someone from earlier in one’s life, a person one lost sight of long ago, often someone already dead. But here not one such an encounter. Instead the pedestrians all resemble each other, probably as a result of the artificial lighting from high above, like people hurrying, some in one direction, to a stadium for a game, and others in the opposite direction, toward a bullfighting arena or an open-air concert.

Many children in the crowd, as usual, and they, too, resemble one another, and not only one child resembling the other, but the children resembling the adults, and not as children resemble their parents, but rather as adults resemble adults; children with grown-up faces. No excessively loud voices; any talking is steady, subdued, as on the way to, or on the way back from, a so-called communal experience.

Gradually one was able to see that these masses, instead of forming a uniform procession, were moving back and forth in innumerable little groups, troops, clusters, and units, with gaps between one team (even as few as two could form a “team”) and the next, at first almost imperceptible, but after a while distinct. At the same time, from one group to the next, a great variety of languages, all spoken in the same subdued tones; not entirely different languages, as becomes clear when one listens carefully, in fact almost always from the same source, from the same language family, but pronounced, accented, aspirated, in entirely different ways, apparently intentionally, by the squads strolling by; and this most noticeably and emphatically in the case of mere dialects and patois, where each of the hundreds of little troops is showing off its own particular variant (of the written language shared by all of them) with the most extensive possible display of unique features; distinguishing itself in this manner from the next little unit, as if that group’s members spoke an incomprehensible Chinese or Siberian mumbo-jumbo, and only here, among us, could pure Castilian or Bazaranian be heard; and thus planting each entity like a standard, announcing, as it marches past, a newly declared language, as a challenge; which matches that image from earlier, during the evening drive, of the line of cars into Nuevo Bazar: the banners, flags, and pennants being frenetically waved from every car, with the windows and tops open, and each cloth bearing different colors and coats of arms.

And among these individual squads — hardly any impression of a corso and evening stroll anymore — none who have eyes for another person, behind them, in front of them, coming toward them, or indeed for any individual. People intentionally look away from one another; not out of scorn or hatred, but rather out of a new kind of reticence (in this respect, too, Nuevo Bazar has changed since the last time); these people have become timid toward and foreign to each other, and above all toward themselves. All of them have become afraid of strangers, even in their own country (perhaps it would be different in another country?). And tomorrow they will also turn their head away with a jerk when they are alone and encounter someone from the smaller or larger clan in whose company they are today.

And it is not only the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine faces that resemble each other — almost all of them wear their hair the same way, for instance the old and young men, who have one long, bleached strand of hair tucked into their belt in the back. And all these mortally shy, orphaned, abandoned, and/or widowed men are dressed in the same style, and their shoes or high heels have the same little metal plates tapping a chorus into the night. Night? And many push and bump into each other, unintentionally, in this crowd, so uniform and apparently timid, where no one any longer knows the fine art of stepping aside; and the response to the bumping is an expletive or a hastily drawn weapon here and there; the words and gesture initially not a hostile act but rather an expression of the irritability common to all in Nuevo Bazar, or even more of nervousness — as indeed one peal of a church or temple bell, actually melodious, now leaps out at one as a cold, dry clang, something between a threat and a warning tone, a sort of dog substitute, and makes one — one? many — recoil in alarm.