Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

16

Then to the north a group of people on foot came into view, and among them the litter with the gout-plagued abdicated emperor was carried past the venta and over the pass. The annual reenactment of the final journey of Charles V, which had taken place almost half a millennium earlier, over the Sierra de Gredos and down to its southern slopes, to Jarandilla de la Vera and to the final stage of his life in the Yuste monastery? Four young fellows, familiar with the area, in summery clothes, some of them barefoot, carried the old man on poles over their shoulders. Yet Emperador Carlos was not really that old—“about my age when I was hired by the banking queen to write the book” (the author)—, and was actually peering like a child from his litter, or perhaps like someone about to die, on the way to his place of burial.

As during all the years when the woman and the emperor had held meetings, she was bringing him a chest full of money, transported on a horse-drawn cart and now hauled up by her entourage (far more numerous than that of her business partner), but this time it was simply meant as a gift, no longer for financing one of his dozen or two wars and for paying his army of mercenaries scattered throughout war-torn Europe, and farther afield in North Africa, in South America. But the abdicated emperor, the dying man, merely waved it away; did not want the money; did not even wish to see it.

All he wanted or wished for was that she might let herself be carried in his litter, by his side, for a few paces, until just over the top of the pass; which was then done. There was ample room for both of them, and the bearers actually seemed to find the double load, that of the winter emperor and the winter queen, lighter, far, far lighter, and not only because after the long climb the road finally leveled out and then headed downhill. They almost ran, dancing and skipping, and the man marked for death, face-to-face with his unfamiliar-familiar friend-foe, bit his lip; but unlike the bus passengers in the previous episode, did so voluntarily.

A trained falcon perched on the emperor’s forearm, on the ermine sleeve of his robe; so much smaller than its mountain relatives wheeling in the air above, and looking not at all bird-of-prey-like or avid of the chase, but just as greatly in need of help and childlike in its beseeching manner as its litter-borne master. A flock of ravens, black as only ravens can be, caught up with the group, not cawing or screeching, but bawling, as if from one throat and one body, in bloodthirsty rage and murderous lust; and again the pinkish-white almond blossoms wafted past the solid raven-feather cloud now dispersed in all directions: against the sky-darkening raven blackness, spots of brightness never before seen in this way.

And among the innumerable colorless water droplets on the blades of grass, where was that one bronze-colored one from yesterday, or whenever, near Tordesillas, or wherever? There it was, at the feet of my adventurer, as she squatted in the circle of her traveling companions in the ruined inn, even if it was not melted hoarfrost as before, but a drop of melting snow, and instead of on a blade of grass on a folio volume poking out of the debris on the ground: a tiny but glowing bronze lamp just a bit above the earth, no larger than the head of a pin and all the more blinding, at least for a moment, just as, at night, also for moments, a single glowworm can be.

In a corner of the wall, overlooked until then, the wheel of a barouche, it, too, having followed her here from elsewhere, along with its tried-and-true twelve spokes, counted at one glance — but from where? from the hurricane-lashed garden behind her house in the riverport city, or from elsewhere. And on the interior walls of the ruin, inscriptions, familiar from long ago, even those in Hebrew, Cyrillic, Arabic, one or another of which she had already deciphered, again effortlessly and without any specific intention of reading them: “Here begins the land of the swine — death to the swine-eaters” (al chinzir, “the swine”), and: “Here ends the elephant kingdom and begins the donkey kingdom.”

One of the travelers found in the rubble an old, or perhaps not so old, wanted poster, as large as a movie advertisement: a search had been under way, or was still under way, for a band of bank and armored-car robbers; and the likeness of the only woman on the poster resembled her so much that for a while some of the travelers kept glancing back and forth between the photo and her; the children even pointed at her, and, as they did whenever they thought something was afoot, whatever it might be, waved and clapped.

For a while the entire group held their breath, then breathed all the more deeply; an audible puffing and expelling of air, pushing air out of the deepest recesses of the lungs, as if in a game; the clouds of breath thicker and whiter than ever before, eddying from the throats and floating away from each traveler’s mouth into the surrounding area and, entirely unlike the fire-spewing of dragons, marking the contours of all objects in their path, the rounded notches in the oak leaves, the half-buried folio pages, the snowflakes floating past the faces — how sharp their crystalline forms became in the expelled breath — the intermittent rays of the sun, the bundles of rays distinct enough to touch, like writing emerging from a plain background. And in the mountain air, the features of this person or that in the group took on sharp outlines from this playful blowing at one another from filled lungs, outlines at once alien and familiar: no mistake, no confusion of identity — I know you. The hissing and crackling of the fire in the open-air stove matched the general puffing and rattling expulsion of breath. Now someone or other was already opening his mouth to speak to someone else; then hesitated after all.

After a while the driver will have given the signal to resume the journey, swinging a hand bell, a rusty one that still clanged, also found in the rubble, from the inventory of the inn that had once stood there. The travelers will have risen from their squatting position. The children are promptly seated in the back of the bus. The driver’s son, whose head comes up only to the hips of the adults, has punched them in the stomach, an additional signal for departure. With some he also had to take a running leap to get at them; and that included the women as well as the men. Finally, for her, a particularly energetic, remarkably powerful blow, below the belt, for which he hurled himself at her.

She acted as if nothing were amiss; as if she did not even notice. As was so often the case, she continued eating, whereas all the others had long since finished their meal; she had postponed starting, as usual; had first sampled with her eyes and then eaten with provocative slowness; left not a shred, not a crumb; savored every morsel, as she now did the flakes, the kernels, even the bits of membrane in the cracked nut, until there was nothing left; let the aftertaste of every molecule linger on her tongue, not allowing herself to be disturbed or hurried.

The others had all been sitting in the Sierra bus for more than a while, some of them already asleep, others with their eyes closed, when she finally joined them. She simply had her own sense of time, and, when circumstances warranted, this sense also had to prevail over the people around her, who had always tacitly accepted being ruled by her casual attitude toward time; even bowed to it willingly and often full of curiosity and anticipation. Thus the passengers now sat there in the bus as if something were about to be offered to them; as if they were about to witness a special performance. Even the driver and his son waited in patient suspense, their dialogue interrupted.

Upon her joining them, the engine of the completely silent vehicle started up; and for the moment it sounded as if there were several engines. A blast on the horn rather like the steam whistle of an old paddleboat, halfway into the mountains, and now they were rolling along the old pass, on a road out of use since peace had come to the region, since the civil war, that is, heading down to where this road merged into the so-called new road, no longer all that new; enveloped all the way to the merge in a cloud of dust that matched the name of this intermediate stage of the bus trip, “Polvereda.”

They drove along for a while without any noteworthy events. If there was a village somewhere in the Polvereda region, hidden behind the lower ridges that accompanied the carretera and gradually closed in on it, no road sign pointed to one. The stretch of road they were traveling had no side roads branching off, and if there happened to be any, they soon ended at a mountain pasture, where, however, no cows or sheep or any other animals were standing, only here and there a solitary raven, no longer molting. The name “Polvereda” was still appropriate once they left the hard asphalt road; for, at even the slightest breath of wind, plumes of dust rose here and there and formed narrow funnels, swirling into the air.

They rode for a while beneath a sky where, whatever looks might suggest, no airplane had ever appeared, or Leonardo da Vinci’s flying man either. No jet contrails way up high; and if a cloud occasionally could be mistaken for one, none of the passengers made the association; not one of them saw anything other than a cloud. And no trucks came toward them. No electric poles. No pasture surrounded by wire fences; instead interlaced fieldstones, branches, and broom twigs. The colorful scraps in the bushes were not paper or plastic but cloth, fleeces, also skins.

The only vehicle approaching from the other direction: a bus in which not a soul was sitting but the driver, who, contrary to custom, did not wave to his colleague; also no engine sound, as if this other bus were rolling down this steep stretch of road with the engine off, coasting. And not a soul outside, except the hiker, the one from earlier, from some past era, still walking along the shoulder, with his knapsack, his pack, from which dangled, no, not a camera and binoculars but a mason’s hammer, chisel, square, and compasses, the latter two made of wood, monumental in size: the stopping of the bus, on her, the adventurer’s, command. The itinerant mason had then not climbed aboard the bus — had peremptorily waved the travelers on, without stopping or even raising his head. His gait, with long strides and arms swinging rhythmically, his hair fluttering behind, his sleeves and trousers flapping and whipping like sails, his tools — or hadatt, as she thought, not “tools”—bouncing around him, circling and swinging like the gondolas on a carousel: and all this happening for just the second — again she did not think “second” but thania—of the bus’s stopping and opening its door. And the hiker in close-up, chewing, as he walked, on a raisin, zabiba in Arabic.

Ah, to get off the bus and go on foot, too; to walk like this stonemason, or whatever he was; to place one’s feet like him in the footsteps, deeply imprinted in the natural gravel along the roadside, of one who had passed that way before, which — and these, too, as also became clear in that one moment of the bus’s stopping — not those of a human being but rather of an animal, a hoofed animal, not a horse but an animal with smaller, more delicate hooves, evidently a long-legged one; ah, to stride through these seemingly oceanic spaces between mountain ranges with as much verve as that figure already disappearing in the distance; with ever new horizons or frames of vision; horizons entirely different from those visible from the vehicle, even if they were the same ones, stimulating appetite, creating desire, touching one’s lips, breast, and belly, even when, and precisely when, they were still a day’s journey away; even if the horizons were an illusion.

The bus drove for a long time through the Polvereda, from time immemorial a far-flung region of sand and dust clouds at the foot of the Sierra. Now and then little clouds and wisps of wood dust even came puffing out of the bark of the ancient trees, more and more isolated from one another. Almost all of these trees had broken crowns. Was it possible that the hurricane that had struck the riverport city, back home in the northwest, had also swept through these southern mountains? No, this destruction had occurred long ago. Furthermore, these beheaded trees displayed streaks of soot, although not all the way up the trunks (which would have indicated a forest fire), but only at the points of breakage or beheading; and unlike that of a lightning strike, the damage had come not from the top but from the side, had swept through horizontally, had split the trees’ necks without leaving traces of fire, the soot mark looking like a black ruff placed around the headless neck as it stuck up into midair.

It had been neither lightning nor storms nor forest fires. No, these trees, so crippled that they were no longer recognizable as oaks, birches, or mountain acacias, often not even as living things (they might just as well have been the ruins of pile dwellings or telephone poles), had been shot in two, and if not with full-sized rockets, then certainly not with mere pistol and rifle bullets either (these had turned every single road and advertising sign into a sieve, such that the holes, if one took the time to look at them, formed their own unique symbols, words, and outlines of images).

Here in the Polvereda region a battle had taken place; even, over the centuries, several battles; and the most recent one could have been fought a week ago or a dozen years ago already — the destruction seemed at first sight a thing of the distant past, but at second sight as if it had just now swept across the landscape with a single massive karate chop — the splintered wood so white, the fibers so fresh and marrow-moist.

And in old tales and books, this Polvereda here, this dust-cloud region, had already been mentioned as a perpetual theater of war. One of those old stories, however, suggested that this region, the comarca, the marches, merely presented travelers with phantom images of war and battles (see “dust clouds”). In that book, the Polvereda figures as a generator of hallucinations for any stranger; and since the region has always been largely uninhabited, it is almost only strangers who find their way there. The Polvereda as the “enchantress turned to dust,” “the deceiver”: and it deceives people also with respect to time: the stranger who goes astray and sees those mysterious dust clouds, now here, now there, experiences even things from the distant past, things that have become the stuff of legend, as very much of the present, all the more terrifying and unexpected.

And, inversely, the stranger is incapable, according to this book, of recognizing all the incidental occurrences, both large and small, of the current moment, of the day and hour in which he is crossing the region, as the actual, harmless, peaceful, vital present and letting them govern him: all the tiny birds whirring by — in the Polvereda, too, there are titmice, sparrows, and robins, for example — the rust-yellow lichens on the largely flat ledges that protrude everywhere from the upland savannah, the brooks that cross the road in various places, actually mere rivulets: all these the newcomer to the region sees and hears only in connection with the mirages of battles appearing to him momentarily from the depths of the decades and centuries, the armies clashing or the campaigns about to be waged. The sparrows are the harbingers of the cannonballs. The yellow lichens are artificial, camouflage for the tanks concealed under tarpaulins, not ledges. No matter how reassuring their gurgling sounds, the mountain brooks cascading so rapidly have a reddish cast that by no means comes only from the iron contained in the granite and quartz sand, which also hovers constantly over the brooks in a haze of weathered particles.

From their seats high up in the bus, now, in this hour, the passengers’ gaze as if sharpened by the slightly curved glass all around: clear across the Polvereda more and more wild dogs’ cadavers on the road; a bull’s head impaled on a thornbush, the eyes seeming to open and shut in the dusty wind; in a freshly dug ditch all along the road, the skull of a ram, not slaughtered, not separated from the — missing — rump with a knife, but as if torn from it with great muscular force, likewise the hooves and legs lying nearby, a single last puff of breath bursting from the encrusted nostrils after a blast of sand.

And the falcon, pursued through the air for ages by the army of ravens, has meanwhile landed in one of the shrapneled trees, on the stump of the sole remaining lower limb, and in the next moment all the ravens have fallen upon the sick or old, or perhaps in fact young, animal — here no enchantment by a whirl of dust was necessary; for a change, this was completely clear and up to the minute — a gigantic, dense black murder machine, with a sound exceeding that of any chorus of raving ravens, absorbing all possible sounds made by even the most powerfully destructive beings and, like a machine, leaving behind a rumbling, bashing, ramming, banging, stamping, and, finally, pounding.

And while this pitch-black execution machine’s pistons moved up and down, more and more regularly as time passed, its steel joints bending and extending, and its wheels sliding powerfully back and forth, there appeared once more, caught in its mechanism, the seemingly quiet gray of the falcon feathers, the yellow of an eye or talon, bit after bit, and then not the slightest bit anymore.

And in the bus, the driver and his little boy were still carrying on their conversation, if now no longer in such soft, dreamy voices. The child was even quaking from head to toe, to borrow a comparison in the tale from the Polvereda that had survived the centuries, “like quicksilver” (when this was still an important metal, used to extract gold and silver from less valuable substances), and this quaking also imparted itself to his speech.

And it thus became apparent that their earlier conversation had its roots in fear and terror. When the father and son talked to each other so unusually quietly and evenly, almost in a singsong, and uninterruptedly — anything to avoid a pause — it had been in order to keep the monster from awakening. — … The father: “Do you remember the time we saw the snake exhibit?”—The son: “Yes, that was before we went to the movies. And then I sat in the front seat next to you in the car for the first time.”—The father: “You never wanted to wear short pants.”—The son: “One time Mother left me alone all day in a clearing in the woods.”—The father: “When she came for you, it was already getting dark.”—The son: “But I was not scared even for a moment, or if so, only for her.”—The father: “You went on picking berries, even after the two buckets were full.” —The son: “One with blackberries, the other with firaulas, with strawberries. And Mother cried, but not because something bad had happened but from joy and amazement that I was still there.”—The father: “And at the very spot where she had left you that morning.”

Son: “And one time you were nowhere to be found, supposedly over in America.”—The father: “That was someone else, a brother of my grandfather’s, and besides, that was sometime in the last century.”—The son: “Yes, he emigrated, and we never heard from him again.”—The father: “Perhaps he became rich, and someday you will be the owner of a brewery in Milwaukee or Cincinnati.”—The son: “But poling through the reeds in a boat that time, that was you and me, wasn’t it?”—The father: “Yes, in the summer, long before sunrise, and one plank was leaky.” —The son: “And black water seeped through, or was that black stuff leeches, and click! they bit?”—“Our ancestors used to earn extra money with leeches. Those insects were exported to the northern countries, where they were coveted for medicinal purposes.”—“And even more coveted were our swine here; remember how your grandfather’s grandfather herded a hundred of them in night marches over hill and dale, crossing the border, sleeping by day with them in the oak underbrush, and sold the chinzires at the famous livestock markets of Toloso, Hajat, and San Antonio.

“How long we have been living in the Sierra de Gredos now!”—“Were you present when I was born?”—“Yes.”—“Did I laugh?”—“Yes.”—“Were you happy to have me?”—“Yes.”—“Did it snow that day?”—“Yes.”—“And do you remember that time when we were walking on the road through the fields when the first drops fell?”—“We sat down side by side on a milestone into which a king’s crest was incised.”—“Was there enough room?”—“Oh, yes.”—“And when the first drops carved deep craters in the thick dust, they were so heavy?”—“Yes, Son.”—“And how I did not need glasses anymore from that day on?”—“Yes, my son.”

“Where are we now, Father?”—“Still in the Polvereda, and we will turn off soon to the village of the same name there.”—“Will we stay in the Sierra all our lives, Father?”—“I probably will, you certainly not, Child.”—“Will I learn to ride soon?”—“Tomorrow, or next week.”—“What day is today?”—“Friday. Viernes. Jaum-al-dzumha.”—“Friday already! Will you let me drive again?”—“After the next stop, Child.”—“After Polvereda, Father?”—“After Polvereda, Child.”—“Have the ravens just done something to the falcon?”—“Which ravens? Which falcon? There have been no ravens here for centuries, dear child! …”