Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

13

Back to my woman from the northwestern riverport city. In contrast to her hired author in his village in La Mancha, she had no objection to the tendencies manifested by that would-be historian from whom we have heard in the interim. For during that night in Nuevo Bazar, a night as bright as day, she found his seemingly groundless assertions confirmed in some fundamental respects.

It was true that almost everyone on the streets strode along as his own king, and also expected anyone he encountered to make the appropriate obeisance. And because each individual used his personal sense of time to tyrannize over the person in whose company he happened to be, repeatedly the apparently peaceful bustle would experience from one moment to the next an audible and visible jolt: shouting, screaming, hitting, violence (which would then subside just as suddenly); among the faces that looked so similar, and so balanced, wherever one went there would be one, two, or several that in the twinkling of an eye could turn into grotesque masks, with teeth bared, tongues lolling or stuck out, and the well-tempered, almost overly civilized voices — which everywhere, even among the older children, could easily be mistaken in intonation and pacing for the sonorous tones of radio and television announcers — after an abrupt catching of the breath were transformed into the screeching, growling, and hissing of apes? hyenas? beasts of prey? no, of human beings turning savage, with a savagery utterly different from the putative primeval variety.

And immediately afterward — the grimaces and howling suppressed and silenced with such uncanny rapidity that the bared teeth and screeching seemed to have been a chimera — the earlier monolithic equanimity and radio-announcer sonorousness restored; except that now one increasingly suspected general pretense, masquerade, and playacting; as if it were already Carnival time here in Nuevo Bazar; except that each person, following his self-declared time-reckoning, was making his way to his very own celebration; intent upon appearing as the particular historical figure and assuming the particular role that had been reserved for him since birth.

Then she, too, felt almost infected by the constant oscillation between sonorous magic, shrill unmasking, remasking, and growing suspicion. She also noticed that the longer she stayed in Nuevo Bazar, the more she herself regarded people, and hence also the smallest phenomena, with suspicion, even at a distance and with gun cocked, as it were, no, not merely as it were. And she realized that suspicion and the proliferating mix-ups in the Zone went hand in hand — although in her case without the terrible consequences so common there.

“Mix-ups?”—“Yes, at first I mistook the heartbeat in my ear,” she told the author later, “—not surprisingly, after a long day of driving alone — for someone pounding on a steel door or the rumbling of a wrecking ball. But that was all. Or I more and more often mistook the books that quite a few people had in their hands for dog leashes. Or when someone raised his cane, I saw it as a gun pointed at me — except that I did not immediately pull my own trigger, as is said to have happened more than once in Nuevo Bazar.

“What continued to haunt me: the suspicion that every phenomenon in that place had been tampered with — and the sense of irreality. That became most clear to me at the time, at the time? when I, who usually derive my perceptions of real shapes and colors from a kind of tasting, tried to recall the evening meal I had eaten at the hostel: I simply could not remember what I had eaten there barely an hour or two earlier, and in particular I had not the slightest aftertaste.

“But,” she continued, “unlike the Zone historian’s, my gaze did not remain fixated. Or I used whatever I was fixated on as a point of departure. I willed it that way, for my story.”—The author: “Is that something a person can will?”—She: “Yes, it can be willed and resolved. I willed and resolved to push off from my fixations, and by means of them, and that came to pass. And thus it was that there, in the so-called Zone, I found my way back into my story and our book.

“That historiador and those who consider themselves his successors or disciples, the whole tribe of ‘friends of history,’ with their cultural continuity: all well and good. Yet our book has an even greater continuity as its subject, which should not preclude — on the contrary — the narration of equally brief, even the very briefest, moments, and the inclusion of various things that verge on dreams — though only verge—, in which time leaps, or is suspended, or piles up, becoming concentrated and even dense enough to touch, as occasionally happens in a Western; remember The Searchers, when the family waits in silence, alone on the prairie, for the Indians’ attack and for death; and the compressed time in Rio Bravo, where all night long the trumpet of death is played for the group under siege in the jail, and in the end it feels as though not just one night has passed but an epic year, an epically compressed eternity.

“Your task is to describe not cultural continuity but the grander time, and it cannot happen, it is simply not permissible, for the future to appear as an impossibility, as is the case with the Zone archivist.”—The author: “Please accept my thanks for this lecture. But in my previous life as a writer have I not done quite a bit, or tried to, to develop a sense of this grander, or also merely different, time, and to make it strong enough to bear the weight of this long story and that, and this and this, and another and yet another?”—The woman from the riverport city: “What do you think induced me to select you, of all people, to write this particular book? Idiot.”—The author: “But why a man for this assignment? Wouldn’t a woman be more suitable, and also more appropriate to the spirit of the times, as the teller of your adventures?”—She: “Storytelling is storytelling is storytelling, whether a man or a woman tells the story. The minute you begin to tell a story, you are neither a man nor a woman anymore, but simply the storyteller, or, better still, you are the pure embodiment of storytelling. And by the way: be more sparing in your use of ‘so to speak’ and ‘as it were.’” —The author: “And should I assume that when someone’s story is told it does not matter whether the subject is a man or a woman?”

The riverport woman: “No, no, no. Our book must be about my story, a woman’s story if ever there was one.”—The author: “In what respect, for instance?”—She, gazing along the line of her shoulder to the distant horizon on that side: “To begin with, simply by virtue of telling a long story, a very long story, perhaps longer than all your previous ones. If a story is to be told about me, and in general, about a woman, it must be a long, long, long story — and something other than a woman’s novel or a chronicle of life at court. If suited to our times, then something of this sort. And simultaneously, my, and our, story should run counter to our age, as is appropriate for a book, or is it not? should circumvent it, transcend it, subvert it, no? And by the way, be more sparing in your use of ‘for instance’: it is obvious that every detail in our book suggests an example, no?”—The author: “A story as long as Gone with the Wind? And about a woman in finance, whose image as a woman is distorted or even destroyed by the image of money?”—The woman from the riverport city: “For all I care, equally long, or almost as long, or half as long — even that would be something — as Gone with the Wind, but in other respects with no resemblance to it. Or perhaps not, after all?”

And she continued to gaze along her shoulder, and said, after a long pause, “And besides, I have nothing to do with financial matters anymore. I am, so to speak, no longer a banking princess, as it were. I have changed professions.”—The author: “Since when?”—She: “Since last night. An eternity ago. Since my crossing of the Sierra de Gredos. Since the evening, night, and morning in the Zone of Nuevo Bazar.” And she gazed along the line of her shoulder, which swiveled gently as she did so, toward the far-off horizon, now at her back, and fell into a silence that lasted for some time and became more profound with every breath, eventually giving way to something like a pulsing, and gradually drawing in the author.

She had moved through Nuevo Bazar as if along a diagonal or the line formed by a cross section. The images she encountered, also in her pushing-off from the established “track” (the word supplied by the Zone archivist), with the omnipresent images of shopping, organized events, happenings, and other stimuli in the foreground (and in N.B. these foregrounds predominated), prevented even one of those images from poking her, images that, according to her conviction, represented and refreshed the world for her and for everyone, and were the main point of her book.

But that did not matter now. First of all, it had been her experience that in any case those world-conjuring images, whether here in Nuevo Bazar or at home in the riverport city, did not show up in the evening. They belonged to the morning; were part of the morning; brought with them and brought about what made the morning the real morning.

And besides, she had always trusted sleep and the revitalization it could be expected to bring. Nor did it disturb her that the glimpses through the few gaps, actually mere cracks, into the background of the settlement revealed images of desolation, of despair, or of sheer nonsense; that just kept her more awake. From the beginning to the end of the diagonal line, there was no building on the right or the left whose ground floor did not have a shop window. These shop windows usually took up the width of the entire ground floor, and often the entire façade as well, from the street level up to the top floor, the fifth, sixth, seventh. Quite a few of the façades had no front doors, suggesting that the rooms behind them, from bottom to top, were merely display spaces? Next to them almost identical shops, all just as brightly illuminated, the wares laid out in exactly the same way, except that automatic doors let one enter and buy, the stores still open at this late hour, the clerks lit up like statues and as motionless as the solitary mannequins in the neighboring buildings. Each showcase façade showing only one type of item, from bottom to top, but in multiples, masses of them, so that next to one display with thousands of fur coats came another with equally many suitcases, and next to that, one with ten thousand wall clocks, and so forth.

The sensation of moving between two stationary railroad trains, with multiple decks entirely of glass, or are the trains gradually beginning to move after all?; the sensation further reinforced by the music, which remains the same from car to car, from the six hundred thirteen garden chairs stacked up in one, to the three thousand four hundred bicycles symmetrically arranged on stands up to the roof in the next, and the thirty thousand wine bottles in yet another.

And the gaps and backgrounds in this cross section: What is going on with them? They exist, though perhaps not every time in the literal sense. One of the stores, depots, showcase buildings, annexes, although as glaringly lit as all the others, is empty, white walls without shelves; not a clothes hanger nor carton nor even thumbtack to be seen, not merely cleared out and awaiting a new shipment, also not newly erected and therefore standing empty until the following day or the following week, but empty this way for a long time already, and for the duration, yet in its emptiness, even without a sign, or the name of a company, or a street number, in business, like the other stores along the diagonal, or at least ready to go into business.

For first of all there is the usual automatic glass door, opening and inviting even someone passing at a distance to enter; and then in the background (yes, background) of this store that has always been empty, one person, obviously the manager, in a three-piece suit and tie, on a chair, low and extremely narrow, at a very small but immaculately polished table, on which he has placed both hands, his fingers extended, spread wide, his nails rounded and manicured as only a salesman’s or businessman’s would be, while he sits there very erect, keeping his eye on the door — in contrast to the clerks in the neighboring compartments (most of them constantly talking to each other, some of them apparently distracted) — the epitome of presence of mind, without a trace of an item for sale, without a catalogue, without a computer, without a telephone, without paper and pencil, without toothpicks, without a Jew’s harp, without an ammunition belt.

Another such gap and background is formed when, for a change, the stores along the diagonal of Nuevo Bazar are not constructed in an unbroken line but leave between them a crack to slip into, not large enough to slip through — for that there is not enough room. In one of these very rare niches one’s eye then encounters, as elsewhere the metal shopping carts that have been left standing, pushed away, allowed to crash into each other, similarly overturned baby carriages, which seem to have careened off course, a pile of similarly rusted lower and upper frames, the fabric long since gone, the wheels sticking up, as if these conveyances, like the pushcarts, had been merely borrowed (and simply left standing after use, or shoved out of the way).

And yet another background image of this sort came from the duplicate posters pasted on every display window, photos or artists’ renderings of children and adolescents who had gone missing here in the Zone — there were dozens of these posters — and dozens upon dozens of the equally many wanted terrorists: and since the children had often been missing for so long that their photos had been altered to make them recognizable at an older age, and, conversely, because often the only available portraits of the long-sought perpetrators of violence were from their youth, the posters, which all had the same size and the same format, resembled each other to the point of being indistinguishable.

And another such background forms precisely in conjunction with these other images, the prevailing, conspicuous ones — from which one pushes off or allows one’s gaze to be propelled like an arrow from a special bow: for instance (there it is again, “for instance”), up high, on the seventh and top floor, the attic of a bookstore, all of whose floors up to that one are chock-full of piles, in the form of temples, pyramids, pile dwellings, from level two to level seven the same title, all the millions of copies equally thick, with the same colors on the dust jackets, with identical spines; but under the roof one book that apparently slipped through the cracks and was hung, facedown, its pages open, on some rope or in a fishnet used as decoration, of a thickness different from the others’, without its dust jacket, obviously already partially read, so that, if one had a good telescope handy — which one does — in whose sight the book and its individual lines could be brought as close as certain figures on the cornice of a medieval tower could be brought to an observer on the ground, from whose naked eye they were far, far away, they would allow themselves to be deciphered thus: “In a village in La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall, there lived not long ago …”

Despite the winter night and the icy cold, which blew in all the more piercingly because the settlement itself was heated by the banks of electrical coils, for a long time you could not see anyone’s breath in the crowd; but suddenly there was one breath cloud here, and then another there, literal billows of fog in front of their faces; and finally one of the nocturnal passersby completely shrouded in a ball of white vapor, having just stepped out of a walk-in refrigerator? or from out there on the crackling-cold dark steppe on the mesa?

And now the lone farmer’s vehicle on the diagonal street, a small delivery van, the back filled with sacks of potatoes and fruit, the vehicle and its load evenly covered with a thin layer of snow, which, regardless of the heaters, remains frozen solid, the snow reproducing the wind out on the savannah, in ridges, ripples, small mounds like dunes.

And the lone pedestrian now, who surprisingly looks unlike the others, otherwise so similar to one another, and in general stands out, more staggering than walking, not because he is drunk, but rather out of seemingly terminal despair, his eyes crisscrossed by it as if by ceaselessly scratching and scraping razor blades, in his hands on either side two knives at the ready, no, not yet at the ready, not yet snapped open, and why not? why not yet? when will he brandish them? what is holding him back? and how does he even manage to place one foot in front of the other, to hold himself halfway upright, to avoid collisions?; extraordinary that he can make his way alive from one curb to the other without being torn apart halfway across by wretchedness and howling misery, which dribbles from his lips in the form of thick spittle and from his nose as snot, and bursts from his thorax as a howl (mistaken by the passersby for the roar of a distant Formula One engine as it accelerates on the final lap). Yes, when and where will this kind of despair finally tear this citizen of Nuevo Bazar to pieces? with a violence so terrible that it will have to tear each and every one of his fellow citizens and neighbors to pieces as well?

And if the crowd of people along the diagonal, gradually thinning out and becoming sparse and no longer constituting a corso for quite a while now, moves along in procession as if on an invisible line, this happens out of uncertainty and fear: stay out of the wind and in the shadow of the person ahead of you at all costs! shielded by him as much as possible, as by the person behind you; eyes on the ground, so that you will be able to say with a clear conscience that you saw nothing of the explosions, the flames, the bloody tangles; and likewise blocking out the sound of the bombers droning high above this dome of artificial and warming daylight at midnight; talking at the very top of your voice, to yourself? on a satellite phone?; each person in the single-file procession uttering sounds with wide-open mouth that are neither Catalan nor Asturian nor Navarrian: a new language that has no adjectives, and especially no verbs, but only nouns; and these exclusively in abbreviations, such as MZ for manzana, apple; SDD for soledad, solitude; DS for dolores, pain; MC for merced, mercy; GRR for guerra, war; CBL for caballo, horse; SRR for sierra; CHN for chesnia, longing; and so forth; almost exclusively consonants; a vowel a rarity, a chance to take a breath; and all of these abbreviations or chopped-off words following each other in crazily quick succession, at the same time issuing from the throats as drawlingly, sloppily, and indistinctly as if this language were not being spoken by local residents, Spaniards or speakers of Romance languages; as if it were not a language at all but a mere intonation; and that of a very different language, borrowed from another language family entirely; outdoing even that people’s exaggerations and puffed-up, self-assured way of speaking, including the use of abbreviations and consonants, as if this ostentatious style helped them, in their solitary rushing along behind one another, banish their nocturnal fears by stalking along boastfully and giving them additional cover and protection.

And not every building on the diagonal artery is exclusively a store or a warehouse; at least here and there some floors are occupied, especially basements, with awning windows high up on the walls, at street level; and every two dozen or so paces one hears a kind of music issuing from these semicellars into the loop being constantly repeated along the entire diagonal, always solitary drumming; but this, too, always the same from basement to basement, the same rhythm, the same volume; the drum always tuned to the same note, struck as if by the same youngster home alone — his parents gone, on vacation, or vanished, never to be seen again; all the boys, and not a few girls among them, pounding on their instruments in the same monotone, whether with their fists or drumsticks, in a devil-, or whoever-, may-care fashion.

And once, for a moment, for hardly as much as a measure, a third kind of music: suddenly chiming in and then immediately inaudible again; darting in from an unidentifiable direction, the instrument also hard to identify, a guitar? perhaps a lute? a gusla? a Jew’s harp? or maybe just a voice, after all? or, yes! a voice and an instrument, hovering in the air for a measure before falling silent, coming together, merging, melding; a single moment during the night along the diagonal line, when, out of the very meager backgrounds, instead of hopelessness and blind indignation, that sheltered preserve of the grander time came into focus, if only to the ear? precisely to the ear! insistently audible; two or three notes from afar and at the same time from just around the corner and heart-piercing, like a stiletto or a scalpel; stabbing as deep as possible, but not lethally.

At last she turned off, to the side, to the outside. What? in Nuevo Bazar, where any and every spot represented the center, there was an outside? Yes, in the sense that all her life, whenever she had been in a place where she could not find her way out of the center, but was trapped there, encircled by foregrounds, superficial images, and other such provocations, she had made a point of hurling herself at the center; instead of darting to the side to escape, she had headed straight for the middle of the center; just as in a bazaar (and not only an Oriental one), assailed on all sides (and not merely by hissing Oriental voices), one could find peace and a space of one’s own by resolutely heading in the direction of the (not only Oriental) disturbers of the peace and taking a seat in their midst, as if one were one of them — which one was, after all, wasn’t one?

And in this spirit, my, our, adventurer suddenly turned aside, that is to say strode straight toward a tent-shaped structure, the same height as the others, which, according to its neon sign, was apparently called LSC, or “Lone Star Café,” and took a seat at a small round table that seemed to be waiting for her in the middle of the tent. But why did she not go home to her venta, where the bunk was waiting for her in the same way, yet entirely differently? — First of all, she had forgotten how to get to the hostel, and in particular it was out of the question for her to capitulate in the face of such centrality, all-encompassing and devastating to any alternative sense of place and time. There was an adventure to undergo here. Even here, in this off-putting realm, there had to be something worth telling. But do the things that happened subsequently in the Lone Star Café fit the spirit of our book? “They do.” (She to the author.)

In the middle of the night, on the tent site at the heart of the center of Nuevo Bazar, a familiar face finally crossed her path (though hadn’t it been the morning of that same day that she had been in the company of the businessman she had ruined and the cook?).

It was as if all those who had not yet found their way home, local residents and new arrivals, had gathered in the Lone Star Café. Much jostling at the hundreds of glass-topped tables, even among those who were already seated. If one was not at home — wherever that might be — at least here in the tent, which, like the tables, chairs, and counters, was of glass, one had to stake a claim to one’s place and one’s seat.

And amid the pushing and shoving (especially when a seat became free, as in the subway during rush hour), suddenly at a distant table she saw the face of a woman with whom she was almost friends—“almost”; for she did not have any women friends; and the situation with her vanished daughter entailed something altogether different.

The other woman was in the same profession as hers, in a similar key position, but less visible. At the global “monetary experts’ conferences,” at that time not yet and no longer held under police protection, the two of them had repeatedly interacted and had grown closer. Why? Because they had both studied economics (to the extent this subject could be taught and learned)? — No. There was no more bitter rivalry, despite their putting a good face on a bad situation, than between businessmen, and especially businesswomen. Each expected to be stabbed in the back by the other man, and especially the other woman. Why, then? Because both of them had found their way into banking and finance more or less by accident, because it had just “turned out” that way, and both of them, the minute they left their workplaces and business hours, at the drop of a hat, in the twinkling of an eye, when the lock snapped shut behind them, forgot their jobs: not merely refraining for the time being from mentioning the money markets and the power of money, but also not giving the matter a second thought, and each time setting out for a completely different life?

Almost all our tycoons — and this has been confirmed by more or less thorough surveys conducted by the author — landed in their profession without plan or purpose; when they were students, if they had any goal in mind, it was certainly not “that kind of thing.” And once in the profession, they had no sooner stepped out of their temples than they metamorphosed in a fraction of a second into carefree mountain climbers, kayakers, gardeners, lovers (source: the author).

Because both women’s ancestors had had nothing to do with the business in which their descendants were now involved, because they were both descended from villagers, though from different countries, and both had been born and had grown up in a transitional period, when, at least in a village, goods and barter played a greater role than money, and in the villages “money” was not yet automatically associated with “bank”? Because both of them had lost their parents early? Because both of them, without otherwise resembling each other in figure or facial features, radiated a similar beauty, when the moment was right?: a twinlike beauty, that of a very rare type of twins, able to be mistaken for each other only at certain moments, but then what a beauty! a rustic beauty, which was certainly quietly aware of itself yet did not thrust itself into the foreground or make much of itself, and could, in the next moment, turn into homeliness or even repulsiveness, or simpleminded, idiotic, no, moronic, ugliness — because both of them were in every sense noncompetitively beautiful, also of an “old-fashioned,” no, “timeless,” beauty, no, of a beauty belonging to a different time — which did not mean, did it, that the two women stood outside of current reality; did not help shape this reality; had no power?

Because that other woman, before she landed by accident in her current field, had, in her youth, just like the woman here, been a star for a year or so, the woman here by playing the lead in a film, her only one, the woman there on the strength of a song, a soft ballad, which in the middle suddenly erupted in cries for help and cries of rage and then returned to its starting point: a song still often broadcast today, at least in her country (portions of it also used in tourism promotions), which had been imitated, in contrast to the film role of her current “colleague,” by several other songs, performed in a provocatively similar style, in the same rhythm, and with a melodic line that hardly differed from hers?

Or, on the contrary, had it not contributed to the vague attraction between the two of them that our heroine, often without identifiable reasons, found herself suddenly confronted by people with hostile intentions toward her: acquaintances, who up to then had been the soul of considerateness, or at least had displayed unfeigned respect, and now suddenly bared their teeth, and likewise strangers, men as well as women, repeatedly smearing her out of the blue, as the one person responsible for all misfortune, including their own — while the other woman, her occasional twin, had the reputation of having never had an enemy; of being incapable of speaking a single unkind word or making a face; of being unable to raise her voice, let alone utter a scream as in her hit song long ago (indeed, so her almost-friend told the author later, “I never heard anyone with a gentler voice, a voice that came more from the heart, and consistently so, without fluctuation, in the work setting as well as outside, and no contradiction between her business dealings and her voice”)?

And now, in the depths of that night, in the Lone Star Café, she saw her almost-friend make a face, and then another. The other woman, the former singer, was not alone at her table. Across from her sat the man who, it was said, had been the love of her youth, and had then become her husband, and at the same time, at least up to now, had remained all the more the love of her youth. If the woman witnessing the scene had been asked to name one couple among her contemporaries one could have faith in, only these two would have come to mind. To put it more emphatically: to the extent that one could have faith in this couple, no, had to, one could have faith in something else, something that transcended these particular two people and their particular case.

Until that nocturnal hour in Nuevo Bazar, she had thought that their love story had been pretold by the author for her book, if only in passing and as a prelude, and above all as a contrast to her own “harebrained and hair-raising” story (her words): how, even when separated, each of them remained so present to the other that when they came together again in person, after no matter how long a time, even after a month, a year, they without ado resumed a conversation from time out of mind, in the same tone, the most amiable tone imaginable, usually beginning with “And …” (“ … and how the ravens cawed …,” “ … and the plate is still warm …,”

“ … and then you clean my glasses for me …,” “ … and at Whitsuntide you eat the first strawberries from my palm …”; how, sitting across from one another, after a long silence they began without transition to speak again, and again in the most amiable of tones, and were promptly in the middle of the dialogue they had already been conducting in silence (“just as you say …,” “I see it the same way …,” “and where were you after that?” “and I you, too!” “and I you, since that day when you are sitting in the bus and are about to leave for boarding school, while I remain behind at the bus stop!”).

Altogether, up to then their entire life had been an unbroken conversation, continued during the intervals, often lasting for days, when they did not open their mouths, as well as during the even longer separations occasioned by their work; continued in their sleep, whether with dreams or without, and, so to speak — no, not “so to speak”—confirmed each time in the sexual union of their bodies, the eternal conversation, as it were — no, not “as it were”—raised in complete silence to the acme of physical and mental awareness, impressing itself on the memory with primeval force, so to speak — no, without “so to speak” and yes, “primeval force”—and utterly independent of time. (How does the witness know this? Or isn’t this a case of an author’s letting himself go — not the certified, authentic, legitimate author but rather one of those would-be authors, who hardly miss an opportunity to elbow their way into our joint story?)

It is true: the couple’s conversation took place outside of any time and remained unaffected by any ordinary sequence of time involving past, future, present; with their dialogue, the two of them had each other constantly present, in the past as well as in the future, from alpha to omega; for them there was no passage of time, and thus neither a beginning nor an end, no “Once upon a time” and no “It will come to pass,” only “You are,” “I have,” or vice versa; like children, perhaps, who, when one tells them that in the summer they will go swimming in the ocean, point out the window and reply, “But it’s snowing!” or, when an adult tells them that he was a child once, can laugh out loud at such an obviously nonsensical notion.

And now, in that midnight hour, the witness saw her almost-friend, after making a face at her husband, open her mouth and say — she read the words from her lips at a distance: “And I hate you. And I have always hated you. And I will hate you until after you are dead.” And having said that, she turned her head away from the man sitting across from her and looked up at one of the televisions playing everywhere in the place, each tuned to a different program. On the screen she looked up at, a squad of soldiers was just storming an enemy position, shooting everything in sight, including dogs, hens, and, with particular gusto, pigs. And then the former ballad-singer stood up, pulled out a knife, not a very long one, and plunged it straight into the heart of her husband and lover of many years. He did not even have a chance to close his eyes, and did not slump to one side, but remained seated right where he was, at first with wide-open, then with still half-open, eyes.

Why this murder? For in a contemporary book reasons must be given? there must be no unexplained elements? — One possible explanation can be found in the descriptions offered by the historian of the Zone. He expresses the opinion that the Zone creates states of mind, and compels them to manifest themselves in deeds, that never existed before, not even in secret, and not even unconsciously. According to him, the new arrivals in particular suffer from this phenomenon and make others suffer terribly in turn; and precisely those among the new people who are the soul of gentleness and never raised a finger to hurt anyone before.

He thought he could provide a graphic image of this mechanism with the example of the oxen — as if the word “gentle” were appropriate to them — who, no sooner than they had been driven from the open steppe of the mesa into the Zone, rushed at everything that moved, like fighting bulls. In the Zone, the sheep — who actually were more or less “gentle”—also knocked down children and even adults, and the sparrows dive-bombed passersby, bloodying their foreheads. In Nuevo Bazar, a sort of arch-enmity, arch-disgust, arch-rage, flared up out of the clear blue sky, directed at everything and everybody, more virulently at the familiar than the unfamiliar, without any particular cause, insisting on expression through violence; and directed primarily at the people closest to one, and most nakedly and fiercely at the person one loved most intimately: the Zone, at least in this initial and transitional period, could be fatal to love and conjugal life. In Nuevo Bazar, he said, one was two thousand light-years away from home and from love.

And since here, too, the historian had merely made assertions rather than providing explanations, at the end of his insinuations he threw in just one explanation, a single one, and one that seemed deliberately shoddy: a reason for the sudden switch from nonviolence to often lethal violence was the artificial daylight in the Zone. “Murder and manslaughter can be attributed to the light.” Yet he said not a word about the properties of this light or what there was about it that produced such effects. Only this: “Toward midnight the light suddenly begins to be too much, especially for those who are not accustomed to it.”

There was some truth to this, according to my heroine: the artificial light around the glass tent of the Lone Star Café seemed even a few degrees harsher, also more palpable, than the light elsewhere in Nuevo Bazar. Besides, it had a different coloration from the rest of the light, which was a hazy yellowish gray; it was pale violet, similar to the light after sunset over an ice-smooth glacier, and in this light, the bodies of objects, of the cars parking outside (apart from which there were no other objects there), and of people (only those sitting inside, no more pedestrians) acquired even sharper contours, yes, sharp edges, like sliced laboratory sections.

Midnight around the bar lit up by an ambulance and a police car? Perhaps: if the lights have stopped flashing and merely illuminate the space. But that, too, was not accurate, for the impression was deceptively like that of “day,” of a day that should long since have turned to night, and which simply refused to become night, “come hell or high water.”

And in this light the witness saw her almost-friend continue plunging in the knife, no longer into her husband and best beloved, who was long since dead, but indiscriminately into those seated at the next tables, with screams like those that had occurred in the middle of her successful ballad (or was I merely imagining this? Wasn’t she silent as she wielded the knife?): a woman’s attempt at running amok; as if she had jumped in to take the place of the person staggering along the diagonal street earlier — and now she was promptly stopped by a couple of policemen, or members of a military patrol? in plainclothes, with whom, as it now turned out, the glass tent was packed.

The moment in which the woman stood there handcuffed, waiting to be taken away (the image instantly appearing live on all the television screens): the essence of gentle beauty, as if transfigured. Next to her, in place of her husband, who had been taken away even faster, in a different way, sawdust strewn on the ground. And only now can one see: she is dressed like a woman wayfarer from a much earlier century, riding in a coach to one of the kings of the time, Charles the Fifth, Philip the Second, with a shipment of money to deliver, and she, the donor of the money, is equal in station to the queen. And aren’t the other guests also in costume? A midnight costume ball at the Lone Star Café in the center of Nuevo Bazar on the mesa? An incident or scenario that was actually a sort of placeholder for a prologue, such as she had in mind for her book?

Television off. Music off. Lights out, not only in the bar but also in the entire settlement. No more artificial day: a pitch-dark postmidnight hour; then the night light gradually creeping in, the night sky arching overhead. Everyone leaving, including her. And, now, in the night, no problem finding her way home to the hostel. With the flood heaters in the air over Nuevo Bazar turned off, the cold of the wintry steppe streaming in from all directions. A rushing in one’s ears, as if in the barrenness high overhead, in the pitch darkness, the crowns of trees were stirring. A return of the sense of taste, tasting of the air and the icy wind.

Not another person out and about, from one minute to the next, as was almost the rule in this southern part of Europe (although the region had nothing southerly about it). Only an idiot, astonishingly old, by the way, almost a graybeard, with a harelip, making his nocturnal rounds, seemingly as always, with a flashlight, shining it first on her, then on himself, and doffing his knitted cap as he passed: “Buenas noches, señora andante!; Buenas noches, señora de mi alma!” (Good night, lady out walking … lady of my soul!).