Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

17

To the accompaniment of these and similar exchanges between the bus driver and his son, the travelers reached the village, which, like most of the small settlements in the Sierra — not one city, not even a very small one, in that whole large area — lay hidden in a basin between high cliffs.

From the main road, which, as usual, passed the village at some distance, there was hardly a tumbledown stone barn to be seen; but then — this, too, no particular surprise by now — as they made their way past the first houses, a succession of several distinct districts, and each time they rounded a building, a section of the village that was clearly larger, covering more space than the charming one they had just passed, would lie there spread out before the windshield, until finally the bus rolled into a central square that in no way resembled that of a village, but not that of a town either, and indeed defied all comparisons: with colonnades, a well (half fountain, half drinking trough), and a covered market, unpaved, sandy, intended to serve also as a bullfighting arena; here, too, eddies of dust, though unlike those out on the vast, empty high plateau, en miniature.

And like most of the pueblos situated north of the crest of the Sierra, alias sela, also known as qurjas, Polvereda — the village — lay just below the tree line. The Plaza Mayor or arena—didn’t arena mean “sand”?—was deserted, although at this late-afternoon hour one would have expected strollers, even in the villages, even up in the mountains, albeit exclusively elderly ones here. Only behind the windows of the Plaza Bar, far into the otherwise seemingly empty interior, could one see, picked out in the dusk by the slanting rays of the winter sun, at one of the occupied tables, the hands (rather old) of card players, and at the other table the hands of dice players.

The bus stopped by the livestock trough, which had ice around the edges, also a beard of icicles hanging from its wooden spout; in the middle of the square, which was surrounded by buildings, constructed of massive blocks of worked stone, that nonetheless left the sky visible (one of them the rectory, the other the town hall, the third a stable, another a ruin), the square that formed the village within the village in the village of Polvereda.

All the passengers got off except the children way back in the rear, who at first did stand up like the rest but then sat down shoulder-to-shoulder on a barrier now lowered in front of the library in the bus’s midsection. As they stood up, it became apparent that some of these children were already adolescents. Today was their library day; their school had sent them out to become acquainted with the northern foreland of the Sierra, and particularly, in that connection, to familiarize themselves with borrowing books, with the people lending them, and likewise with the books themselves, with locating titles and authors, with books as artifacts and articles of value.

At almost the same time as the bus, a tractor-trailer had pulled into the square, announcing itself at a distance, from the houses on the outskirts of the village, which suddenly seemed quite far away, by a rhythmic honking that continued here on the square, like that of a car carrying newlyweds. In contrast to the entirely transparent bus, the truck consisted of a white metal box, completely sealed except for slits in the front for seeing through, until the moment when the driver opened the back of the container and transformed his vehicle into a market booth, slightly raised above the square, its shelves and crates stocked with products that were to be found nowhere else in the mountain village, which, like most of the others, had not had a general store for a long time; in addition to bananas, oranges, and cleaning agents, also bread, ham, and cheese (despite the fact that close to the village, in the hollow, stretched fields with wheat stubble, and before that, after the great expanse of wasteland, goats and also cattle and black-hoofed swine had been nibbling at the sparse grass).

In response to the honking, people flocked to the square; less the rural housewives one would have expected, “aprons and black kerchiefs,” than more urban figures, such as one would find in the capital; the older ones among them were also bareheaded, often in long coats and shawls, with freshly polished street shoes; the female contingent, at first in the majority, seemed to have come directly from the beauty parlor and swayed their hips, even those who were not so young; shoes with extremely high heels no rarity.

The truck driver, metamorphosed into a vendor in the vehicle metamorphosed into a shop, had lowered a running board for these customers, with steps leading up to it. But not everyone came to buy, at least not at first. At the library bus’s open door, one of the children or adolescents had sounded the aforementioned hand bell simultaneously with the honking of the cross-country supermarket, as a sort of reply, but in a different rhythm. A few of the Polvereda folk, and not only women, made a beeline for the bookshelves. More of them, however, hesitated, first doing their shopping and approaching the lending library only afterward, if at all.

But since the book borrowers over here needed considerably more time than the shoppers over there, they were soon lined up in the aisle; and the line in the meantime stretched partway into the arena, whereas to the shop on wheels — which, in a curious optical illusion, had attracted a much larger crowd than the bookmobile — only an occasional latecomer hurried; and in the end the traveling shopkeeper closed up his store and, before he headed for a quick stop at the bar, took up a position in the line of borrowers, by now quite short again.

The lending itself went quickly: the child librarians did the finding, stamping, recording in a jiffy, and the borrowers, some of them the same age but others much older and elderly, almost always knew what they wanted. They were slow only to turn away and leave; skimmed their books while standing next to someone still waiting in line — but avoided showing what they had picked out, covering the titles with their hands or with a videocassette they had also borrowed, seemingly ashamed of what they had borrowed as they trotted back to the square in the reverse line, which moved almost as deliberately as the parallel line of waiting borrowers — or was it shyness rather than shame? — and then one or the other disappeared among the houses with an embarrassed grin and downcast eyes, as if he had just made a fool of himself before the assembled community; “at the same time,” she continued, “you could hear some people’s mouths watering, and not just the young people’s, as they went on their way! A couple of them tossed their books to each other at some distance from the bus, back and forth, like handball players in training, or jugglers.

“I was squatting on my heels again, like my fellow travelers, by the frozen-over drinking trough, or fountain, and then looked up from below, past the glass-sided bus, with the silhouettes of the librarians, the books, and the borrowers, and saw for the first time above the one-story roofs of Polvereda — no curved roof tiles as in the south, indeed, nothing characteristic of the south here — the entire central array of peaks belonging to the Sierra de Gredos in miniature and all the clearer, as if viewed through a reversed telescope, the peak of the Mira, of the Galana, of the pointed Three Little Brothers, and, approximately in the middle, a peak so jagged that, at least to all appearances, it alone, of all the peaks, did not lie under the otherwise unbroken blanket of shimmering snow: Almanzor, ‘The Outlook.’”

The author: “Is it correct if I add to the description of the book borrowers that they also hid the books among their purchases, their heads of lettuce, their rolls and detergent?”—She: “Yes, if you mention that at the same time they did not remove their hands, or their one free hand, from the books hidden there and constantly bent over them as they were leaving and stuck their heads way down into their plastic bags and emerged with their noses looking dusty.”

The author: “During one period in my life, I, too, did not want to be seen with a book anymore, and if I were, I wanted no one to be able to read the book’s title. In the meantime, of late, I make a point of leaving my house, or my residence, my almacén, with a book, and have it with me and visible everywhere, and if someone tries to peek at it, I promptly move it into the light — in case the light is not already shining on it! — so that anyone who has eyes to see it can do so. Another aspect of this is that in the meantime — unless there is real urgency, as with you and your heart’s desire, your story — after a period of using the most speedy means of communication, if I cannot talk directly face-to-face with a person, I send a letter, and by the classic form of mail, too, perhaps destined to disappear soon, and by the least rapid delivery. An airmail letter, even if it is in transit for two or three days, reaches the recipient too fast for my taste, and I choose regular delivery”—“Barran” (she, inadvertently)—“and not, as my mailwoman in La Mancha thinks, because that is ‘cheaper’—or, in the case of letters going overseas, surface mail.

“This is not intended to be praise of slowness or anything of the sort. No: for me it is appropriate for the lines I have addressed to various people — of whom there are only a few left, and only a few letters, and a few lines — that they have time to wend their way to the recipients. In my imagination—”—“So we are back to the imagination again—” (she, interrupting him inadvertently)—“—not to say anything against imagination, if it broadens instead of narrowing — well, in my imagination, precisely this kind of long or ‘leisurely’ traveling on the part of a letter adds to the words I have written something they would have lacked if they had been hustled along electronically or whatever. Of course my letter must also be conceived and executed for this manner of transportation, almost quaint nowadays. An angry letter, for instance, is out of the question. So is, obviously, a business letter—”—“Obviously?” (she, inadvertently)—“or, on the contrary, yes, perhaps precisely certain business letters.

“Most suitable, it is true, for this kind of slow and steady progress, keeping close to the ground or the earth’s surface and wending its way to the addressee, are letters of friendship and love—”—“Friendship? love? you?” (she, inadvertently)—“—for whatever resonates in them in the way of friendship or love (which need not be explicitly mentioned) is enhanced, as I imagine it, by their particular journey over land or sea; and not merely enhanced, but furthermore validated, given validity in a way different from a photogram—”—“Fax” (she, or a third person?)—“—or a u-mail—”—“e-” (she, or who?).

The author: “Simply the thought that my envelope will sit in the village mailbox for a while, even overnight or over the weekend, with all its little words. The mailbox rumbled when I tossed in the letter, that’s how empty it was! And then the letter being driven to the railroad station beyond the seven plains of La Mancha. Resting in the mailbag during the train’s umpteen stops, day and night, at stations or along open stretches in the various countries it traversed. Being sorted at the junction. Being transferred to a postal bus, and so on.

“And with every additional leg of the journey, I imagine, my letter becomes more believable, and each of its sentences gains effectiveness and truthfulness, or validity, becomes valid in a way it would not have if I had conveyed its contents over the telephone or even here, face-to-face. Only in this fashion can my few words, launched into the distance, become credible to you, clearly coming from my heart, or at least that general vicinity.

“Which brings us back — (some) letters are like (some) books — to books. You and I have in common a village childhood, if in very different villages — or so I picture it. And thus I take the liberty of speaking in passing of my native village’s lending library, long since dissolved into dust. It is evening now, and as happens from time to time on the evenings when I am not alone, my tongue is finally loosened, and I feel an urge to tell stories, and more and more they are stories from long, long ago that are, so to speak — yes, so to speak — of no import.

“That library was located in the schoolhouse and did not have its own room; it was simply a glass-fronted cabinet against a wall in the one room that housed all the grades. At the time I had a sort of terror of cabinets in the village’s houses; also of those in my own home. They were all armoires, crammed full of clothing, most of it old, often worn out and moth-eaten, some of it going back to our forebears and the forebears of our forebears, or the Sunday best of a son who did not return from some war or other; just about every house had one or two such keepsakes.

“And my terror became acute whenever such a cabinet was not locked, as repeatedly happened, but was left half-open, probably to air out the contents, and I was alone in the house and in the room where it stood. The doors would open gradually, one jerk at a time, often without a sound, and behind the rows of clothing hanging in the back of the cabinet — I still cannot get used to using the proper word, ‘armoire’—there would be a concentration of energy, something poised to pounce, soon scraps would be flying, and not only scraps of cloth. On the other hand, whenever the lending-library cabinet was opened, once a week, before my eyes in the classroom—”

Like his heroine or business partner, the author frequently interrupted his narrative in mid-sentence and began to pose questions as usual: “And your image of libraries? Your images? Surely no books ever turn up in these images, as you understand them and want to see them conveyed in our book? Usually nothing but places, landscapes, and if sheets of paper, then without writing, no? Surely you do not want to tell me that you were ever tapped on the shoulder by an image in which something like a library flashed?” And again, as he not infrequently did, the author tried to provoke the woman into talking, which he did not by saying, “Tell me a story!” but rather by coming out with “Do not tell me anything!”

His guest, the client, gazed awhile along the line of her shoulder, focusing on some distant vanishing point, and then raised? or rather lowered, her voice: “Yes, no image, no images of various national libraries where we spent a short or a long time, and if the image of one that burned, then not the library in Alexandria but one from a house fire long ago in the village, the remains of books all mixed up with shattered windowpanes, and apples roasted by the heat lying in the grass under a tree, far from the actual site of the fire.

“And another image: that of a lending library on the outskirts of a metropolis situated by the ocean, installed in a former customs agent’s hut, between the path once used by the customs officials and the steep cliff nearby, the path widened into a promenade, and the hut a single room, rendered much brighter by the windows, which had been enlarged on all sides, and a view, past the people strolling along the customs path, far, far out over the surface of the water, and not a single reader in the image, nothing but the silhouettes of the books between the ocean in the background and the pedestrians, bicyclists, and roller skaters in the foreground, and that, day in, day out, year in, year out, always the same image before my eyes, or perhaps sometimes also an image of this library late at night; the silhouettes of the books and the salty deep way out there viewed together through the display-window-size panes in the near darkness, with not a soul in sight.”—“And in the reality-outside-this-image, this branch library has certainly long since been turned into a branch bank?” (the author) — She: “More likely converted into a customs-path museum.” —Both at the same time, inadvertently: “As it should be.”—The woman, the guest: “Which puts us back in the bus traveling into the Sierra de Gredos.”

Almost as often as she had crossed the Sierra she had also passed through the Polvereda, the dust-cloud region, and the village of the same name. And each time she had encountered almost the same people, evidently mountain-dwellers from way back, similarly dressed, all with a similar accent, similar mannerisms, and especially a similar skin tone.

But on the day described here, much appeared entirely different to her. True, the natives were walking and especially sitting — the older card and dice players indoors in the one bar, those who were too old to play outside in the sun, low in the sky — as if they had always been there. Except that now they no longer dominated the scene. They shopped and borrowed books from the bus in about the same proportion as those wearing big-city clothes, who likewise came from Polvereda, or at least were not strangers here. Yet between these two groups, involved in the same activities, was a third group, apparently a distinct minority, and this one constituted the new and noticeable element in the mountain village. Groups? No, none of the three different sets of people formed anything like a group, not the returnees or vacationers from the capital, not even the natives, and certainly not the last category; they all came and went independently of each other.

The third or last type seemed particularly separate from one another. Was that because each of them had a different skin color, if only in small but obvious variations, from deep black to bronze to reddish brown, from olive to peach to lemony to rich yellow, from quince yellow to yellowish gray to blue-green to snow-white, this last unusual precisely in this mountainous region? Earlier it would have been said that these individuals, one after the other, exemplified a “race” or its “variants” and “subvariants.” And now? At the time of this story the word “race” had long since disappeared, and was used, if at all, merely to designate external, superficial traits, such as skin tone, but preferably it was avoided altogether.

Or did these people with differently pigmented or overly white skin stand out so markedly because some of them turned up in garments and with headgear entirely unknown in the Sierra, and furthermore known nowadays only from archival pictures: so to speak, in tribal or native costumes (words like “tribe” or “native” also long since out of use, if not suspect and frowned upon), in “caftans” (?), “saris” (?), “burnooses” (?), with a “fez” (?), a “turban” (?), a “kaffiya,” or God only knows what they were all called?

Yet individuals of the third type were apparently not so unknown in the village after all; or no longer, and for a considerable time already. They moved across the Plaza Mayor as matter-of-factly as the others; spoke the language of the country halfway fluently, although each with an immediately recognizable, not seldom transnational, accent; except for that one ancient Chinese (the term “ancient” otherwise to be strictly avoided), wearing a visored cap and an all-blue tunic buttoned up to the neck, padding in silent cloth shoes with a sort of delicate shyness, such as had not been observed anywhere else in the country and thus striking to the eye — the eye was what mattered — and describing a monumental arc of courtesy, of “deference,” around everyone, even the dogs, and then, in the bus, pointing mutely but firmly to the one book for whose sake he had made his way to the library. It was the book in his language, with Chinese characters, stepladder-like.

And like the ancient Chinaman, others from the races, peoples, and tribes foreign to this region would borrow, along with a, let us say, domestic Spanish, Romance, Latin, or European book, one from their land of origin: obviously the one they asked for, whether requested ahead of time or not, was available in the traveling library. Initially amazed at this scene, she soon experienced no further amazement as she perched on the drinking trough and watched; or her amazement became so powerful and exclusive that it was no longer recognizable as such?