Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

19

Remarkable how, with the adventurer at the wheel now, the passengers relaxed; likewise the sick driver, lying next to the enormous dog and only a short while ago still fighting for breath. After surviving these moments of mortal dread and loud, premature lamenting, the two of them were enjoying a sleep as sound as it was deep; snoring and wheezing. Yet she was driving considerably more briskly than her predecessor, and not merely because they were heading down the mountain (the serpentines on the southern side of these last foothills had even more extended loops, as if that were possible, and in the Sierra, going downhill usually meant: slow down).

Along the entire stretch, zigzagging across mountain meadows sparsely punctuated with dwarf firs, the arrayed peaks of the Gredos remained clearly in view, as if all at the same distance, on the upper periphery of one’s field of vision, no longer hidden by any range in between.

Also not another trace, except behind them, up on the Black Rock Pass, of a puff of mist or cloud. A clear winter-evening sky, although it remains uncertain whether the darkness forming the basis of the blue — no longer the “blueing” of that morning or afternoon — stems from the blackness of outer space, already perceptible in the high mountains, or from the impending night. No more smell of smoke, it having been drawn out of the bus up in the thinner, or finer, atmosphere; but also no more freezing and shivering.

On the sloping meadows, in contrast to the grazing places somewhat farther down, which tended to be deserted, there are herds of cattle almost everywhere, as well as scattered families of horses, the horses, like the cattle (many bulls), with coats so short that they look like a skin stretched taut over their bodies, for the most part as dark as coal: so a portion of the livestock from the mountains are not driven over the Sierra to spend the winter months in the much warmer and always snowless southern region, the valleys of the río Tiétar and the río Tajo beyond?

“Was it always like this up here?” wondered the driver, she who knew the Sierra inside out. “Yes, every time I came through here in wintertime, there were animals grazing, and only in the pastures here in the central region — but in no other year as many as are here now, and also — this, too, is new — as carefully and strictly guarded: around every herd and tribe a small team of herders with walkie-talkies—, as if in case of an accident.”

From the pass up above, she had still seen some of the mountain pastures on the southern flank below bathed in sunlight, a field of rays that visibly gave way to pitch-darkness — with an afterglow lasting but the twinkling of an eye — until only a single cow, separated from the rest of the herd in a dip below a ridge, had a yellow gleam on its flank, or was that part of its coat?

After sunset, a similar yellow, then reddish, then yellow-red-blue gleam on the clustered peaks of the Sierra de Gredos, far off against the sky. These might have been the central European Alps now, with the all too famous alpenglow on the snowy expanses in the background; and, to complete the picture, the clanging of the bells belonging to the cows and the bellwethers in the foreground and the veil of frost over the high valley carved out below, already shrouded in darkness, from which the thinly scattered lights of houses stood out, clearly nowhere dense enough to signal the presence of a larger village or town.

What was it that brought her back, time after time, as on the current evening, to this Sierra de Gredos, hardly distinguishable, especially now in wintertime, from the Swiss mountain ranges along the Italian and French borders, and whose highest peak, even the Almanzor, was hardly more than half as high as Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, or the Matterhorn?

What in the world was she seeking or expecting in this mountain range without ski slopes or ski lifts, a range completely unknown outside the tableland area, known even in its own country only from hearsay as one got farther away from it, a destination at most for the inhabitants of the region, and perhaps also for those from Madrid? Weren’t even its principal types of rock, the granites, gneisses, and mica schists, the same as in the far more rugged Alps, which seemed to beckon with very different sorts of thrilling adventures, the only variation being that the Sierra ridges were older by so and so many millions of years, though not old in the sense of “phenomenal,” “rare,” “record-breaking,” or even “venerable,” but rather in the sense of “worn down,” “crumbling,” “cast off,” “written off,” in short, “aged,” in contrast to the still youthful Alps, in whose substrate something continued to stir, mountains that rose up year after year, pushed higher and expanded, while the Sierra de Gredos was steadily diminishing, eroding, shrinking, not quite perceptibly, but measurably, and someday, millions of days from now, would be hardly more than a somewhat elevated table in the tableland?

Why, if she was already taking a detour to seek out the author, did she not choose a more exciting one, especially one that would lead through sites of general interest or places where an audience was concentrated — whether the reading public or not — also a more contemporary area, that is to say, a more relevant, and, well, what the heck, a much, much longer detour than this one through the Sierra, which, properly speaking, was no detour at all — for instance, a detour in a great arc by way of North Africa to the author’s hole-in-the-wall in La Mancha, through the Mauritanian deserts, across the High Atlas in Morocco, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and heading inland across the Sierra Nevada, then the Sierra Morena, and finally the Sierra de Calatrava, the “Death’s Head Sierra”—all landscapes she had traveled and hiked at least two or three times, and where she had had almost exclusively good, heartening, happy, and life-enhancing experiences, unlike here in the Gredos massif?

“It is true,” she said, continuing to talk softly to herself at the wheel and turning in her thoughts to her so faraway author: “Whenever I think of my previous hikes through the Sierra de Gredos, unless the familiar images come to me unbidden, I usually find myself recalling a borderline situation, not seldom one between life and death, or at least something simply unpleasant and bad. And yet, since that first time, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I have set out to cross these mountains almost every year and sometimes twice in one year, far, far more often than I have made my way through all these parts of the world where I was consistently filled with ecstatic feelings — no, not with illusory ecstasy but rather with a state of love, yes, of love, and of which I have only fond memories afterward. Whereas one time when I was on my way through here I found myself in the middle of a driving snowstorm, with flakes so wet and heavy that I could hardly breathe and was afraid of suffocating. I almost died of exhaustion. That was in January, like now—”

She corrected herself again: “No, that January it was the torrential downpour. Or was it a different January? No, the lost shoes. The snowstorm was in May — in the Sierra I always get all mixed up about time, and that is partly the fault of the Sierra de Gredos itself. — I had just been walking in the mountains in the May sunlight. I was walking as light-footedly, even with my knapsack, mochila in Spanish, mihlatuz zahr in Arabic, as a person can walk. As always when I am going somewhere on foot, I assessed my condition, the moment and hour, and my relationship to the world or to life, by whether I involuntarily spun around myself at least once as I went along.

“And the spinning occurred there again and again, as if at regular, predetermined intervals. Likewise I encountered from time to time, amid the short grass, some of which was still a wintry gray, sorrel, always growing in clusters, all fresh and green, and I repeatedly plucked a leaf and munched on it, and soon it was not merely against thirst but just because, out of contentment, and as if to savor and enhance the contentment with the sourness.

“I was already so high up in the Sierra that there were no longer any ravines to get around. Up to a certain altitude, just below the tree line, let us say, the Sierra is transsected by deep, narrow ravines, yet from a distance it looks so smooth and accessible, at least on the northern side. Yet instead of climbing straight to the ridge — calling it mountain climbing in the technical sense would be something of an exaggeration, since on the northern slopes, unlike the southern slopes, it is seldom necessary — I dawdled across the mountain pastures, devoid of ditches and almost entirely without trees, and also no longer fenced in every few feet, going gradually uphill for a while, then downhill again when I felt like it, and instead of having to wear myself out scrambling over barbed wire every few steps, now, imagine, I had to wade through or simply jump across a little brook that had just welled up and ran almost level with the rocks and the grass, and would not dig itself in until farther down, and on this meandering route toward the Puerto del Pico, the crossing to the south I had chosen for that day, you know, one of these bubbling-up brooks after another, also the rushing of these brooks along the ground, similar to my periodic turning-in-circles yet continuing without pause, in a seemingly preestablished and — determined order.

“I need not tell you what’s up with the passes and crossings in the Sierra de Gredos. And the Puerto del Pico, the north — south crossing, approximately in the middle, between the eastern and central massifs, is carved infinitely deeper and especially more steeply out of the ancient rock than most of the other notches, and can be seen from far away as a deep trough in the mountain range, which is oriented along an east-west axis and falls off sharply from the Puerto on both sides. And if there is a clear and classic border between north and south anywhere, it is there on the crest of the Puerto del Pico, the classic kind of north and south you read about.

“The southern air here, you should know, where it wafts in freely from the lowland, unhindered by any foothills, blows considerably warmer than in the other Puertos, and also with far more force and energy between the steep walls of the trough; it moves — not constantly, but on certain, not infrequent, days, at a specific time, usually at noon — right along the line of the northerly air, which up to this point has tended to hover there and remain cold, or even turn colder and colder in the innermost reaches of the mountains, and slips under it, while the northern air by contrast falls upon the southern air, and the result, as you can see back there to the left at the Puerto del Pico, is no longer mere huffs and puffs of fog and clouds with scattered snowflakes, but thunder and lightning, along with cloudbursts that unceasingly and mercilessly dump cold water over the landscape, refusing to let up before nightfall, and, somewhat higher, around the steep escarpments, snowstorms and blizzards, a sudden hurricane of flakes like the one in which I reached the pass that time in May when I was on my hundred-brook and thousand-sorrel-leaf trek.

“One step and I was out of the May sunlight, with a vista eastward across the open and obvious void to the Escorial and likewise westward all the way to the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, if not straight into polar darkness, then into the prepolar contourless fading of the light on the wintry Bering Sea; no driving snow, but a kind of spewing, and soon no longer individual flakes but an almost solid, suffocating, spongy mass, being hurled at me again and again, soon not snowy white, but deepening the darkness, except when sporadic, almost welcome, flashes of lightning lit up the air for a moment.

“And strange, and stranger still, that this becomes clear to me only now as I am telling you this story: how quickly I, who had been so filled with joy in life, my own, and in all existence, imagining that there in the treeless waste I could smell the June linden blossoms, from one bend of the knee to the next, was on the verge of giving up and being dead. Soon it will be all over with me, I thought. Just a few more steps, and I will not be able to do anything but let myself fall. And once I have fallen, I will remain lying at that spot and will not get up.

“The clumps of wet snow plunked onto the ground. The ground was vernally warm and along the foot of the cliffs already summery warm. But soon the snow stopped melting. It accumulated. It grew deeper and deeper, as rapidly as a brook flooding in a storm. Soon it rose above my knees. Then it was above my belly. I stumbled. Then I fell, or almost. I scrabbled along. You can still see me creeping along for a stretch, on all fours, half blinded, panting, whimpering, dribbling spit — and then no more spit.”

She interrupted herself. “I see you are hardly listening to me anymore. Your mind is wandering. I know you, my listener, my author, I mean: that is because I am telling the story in short, dramatic sentences. A narrative style like that can drive you away. And the kind of adventure that goes hand in hand with such narration — no, not hand in hand at all — has no validity in your eyes. According to you, any external adventure counts, and can be narrated, and is worthy of being narrated, only if it also elicits an internal adventure: when thanks to what befalls you, you are surprised at yourself, startled at yourself, or puzzled by yourself, or simply find some aspect of yourself strange, and thus discover a problem and ponder this problem, and describe it as your problem, or, no, an existential problem, in connection, of course, with the external adventure, so that now the external and the internal actually do go hand in hand, literally and in reality.

“In the course of that snowstorm at the Puerto del Pico, I once again found myself in the realm of the pasture fences, of which only the top strands of wire and the tips of the fence posts were visible. To get over them seemed to drain my last strength, but these obstacles also served as my reference points and provided a rhythm that each time yielded a bit more strength.

“The moment of ‘It’s all over!’ did not hit me until I was standing in the noontime darkness in front of a seemingly insurmountable chainlink fence, as high as a house, that appeared to stretch forever in both directions, and when I then found the gate, it was secured with chains. Had I wandered through an invisible breach into the territory of an abandoned but otherwise intact mountain barracks that blocked any escape route, or a long since deserted Sierra prison (which in my case was again serving its original purpose)? Couldn’t I have turned around and crawled and crept back into the May sunlight?

“Yet stranger still, any turning back was out of the question, just as during the previous times in the Sierra when I had fought for my life there — and not just for an hour in a blizzard but one time for almost a whole day, and once for a whole lovelong, yes, lovelong, night — I could still have turned back at a certain spot, before the snake clearing, before the burned forest, but it was simply impossible that I, that anyone, that we, should have turned back, strange, so strange. When I came upon that chainlink fence, at any rate, I knew this was my point of no return. But that was when the transformation occurred, strange, so strange, of me into my brother, far off behind the walls of the penitentiary in the dunes—”

In her usual way she broke off her tale here before reaching the end and turned to her invisible listener: “Ah, you were about to drift away from me again into your absentmindedness. And not until that little word ‘we,’ and with it my brother, came into play did you prick up your ears again, and did your eyes, which had gone dull, light up. And I also know why my snowstorm story has so little meaning for you, aside from the fact that it seems to you too mired in external adventure: you, my listener and my author, dislike stories that deal constantly with one person, and in which only one person, alone and unaccompanied, does things, experiences things, moves about, even when this solitary person is me, the woman — which really should appeal to you, in that it first presents a surprise — a heroine familiar from entirely different images, all by herself and prostrate in the deep snow — and then a problem worth telling about. No, in my, and our, book you want to see me experiencing things in some sort of company — rather than alone this way — and described accordingly.

“Yet except for my first trip through the Sierra de Gredos, every other time I was alone here. And even on that first trip I soon struck out on my own, accompanied only by the child in my belly, without her father. It is only since the current day and evening that I have not been journeying through the Sierra alone! So the story can move along the way you like it!”

And again she interrupted herself: “And it seems to me now, my listener and author, that the one commissioned to write the book is not you. It was not so much I who gave you the commission as you who gave it to me. I am the one you commissioned — at your service!” And as she momentarily took her hands off the wheel of the bus, she laughed; laughed out loud into the dark, silent bus. “How may I help you?”

What was the seemingly familiar stranger laughing about up front at the wheel, in the pitch-darkness, which was even more intense outside than inside; which made one think from time to time that one was no longer being driven on a road but over bumps and humps, where outside and inside, except for the sound of the bus’s engine (more a grinding than the calming hum of the sparkling glass bus earlier) and the screeching, groaning, and rattling of the whole, whole? bus, everything had become as silent as the grave?

The idiot at the wheel laughed, and did not stop laughing, and if she paused now and then, it was clear that she would immediately burst out laughing again, in the same hearty, childlike way, which after a while infected even the last and most resistant of the few remaining passengers and likewise the regular driver, apparently risen from the dead, if not entirely recovered and still lying there in back on his reclined seat, and made them laugh, too. The story goes that all the people in that night bus laughed out loud, at the same pitch as the woman at the wheel, although the bus then actually did make a detour over bumps and humps — when the road was partially buried by a rock slide — across a pasture, where cattle, looking in the dark like buffalo, scattered at a gallop; even the driver’s enormous dog showed his white teeth and seemed to laugh along, silently.

In a film, the vehicle now meandering over this hummocky grazing area would have been visible first from the side, apparition-like, with the equally apparition-like silhouettes of its occupants, and in the next shot would have been seen from above, with the camera moving higher and higher, until the bus could no longer be identified as such, a small object crawling over the earth’s curved surface, and the occupants’ laughter would have filled the theater as the only sound accompanying the image. “With the laughing idiot as our driver, we felt idiotically safe,” even when she fell silent, and even when the coach rumbled through a mountain torrent that cascaded for a moment over the coach’s roof: the bridge there smashed, and, as later became apparent, not only this one, as if dynamited.

Silently she resumed her conversation with herself, intended for the distant author: “Listen, just like my other landscapes scattered throughout the world, the Sierra de Gredos has come to represent for me, every time I am here, an example of something indestructible, in defiance of history and the present era, promising a life on earth that if not lasting an eternity will at least last half an eternity. Hear this, my listener and witness to my view of things: at some moments when I was on my way through the Sierra de Gredos—” (here she paused in her monologue) “—I have experienced this region as blessed, like many other parts of this planet, including cities, of course. But every single time, this Sierra de Gredos, offering a possible place where not only I but also we and those like us might live, has abruptly become a hostile, even deadly sphere, and each time I have counted myself incredibly lucky to have escaped with my life. Accursed Sierra!

“So now you know the two reasons that spur me to set out whenever I can for this blessed/accursed Sierra de Gredos: on the one hand the world up here, which changes so abruptly, more powerfully and predictably than I have experienced in any other part of the world; and on the other hand, each time when I have escaped and am safe and sound again at home, the rendezvous every morning with images from here in the Sierra — peaceful ones, you understand — image and peace are ultimately one and the same—: images such as did not appear nearly so often and especially so comprehensively — the part for the whole — from those other regions where simply being there immediately filled one with hope.

“And listen as I tell you and repeat what ‘image-forming’ means and signifies: the world is still standing. It has not perished, contrary to my brother’s belief. And listen as I tell you also that earlier on, before my crossings of the Sierra, I liked to travel with others, and often did so, and that soon I will be traveling with others again, here in the Sierra de Gredos and elsewhere.”

Before the bus reached its destination, the route passed through several more watercourses. The bridges over them, too, destroyed. But the road swerved aside from the bridge and in the water became a ford, as it had probably been before any bridges were built, returning to asphalt on the other side. And during the traversing of these very shallow fords, in contrast to earlier in the mountain torrent, the water hardly rose and also did not wash over the sides of the bus; nothing but a splintering of ice floes along the banks.

It also happened that the elderly vehicle, which creaked at the slightest unevenness, rammed into a block of granite in one of the fords. But that did not make any of the travelers uneasy. With her as the driver, nothing troubled them anymore. The very fact that a woman was driving cradled them in a sense of security, and the repeated traversing of the fords added to the temporary state of dreamlike carefreeness. None of them even looked up when the alder branches hanging far into the water whipped against the windows, sweeping from left to right; and even if a falling boulder had hit the roof or a grenade had exploded in front of the bus, they would not have been startled out of their peaceful reveries.

The woman holding the reins up front on the coachman’s box also fell into a reflective daze, while remaining completely alert. Fording the brooks reminded her of the film in which she had played the youthful heroine. In that saga, set in the Middle Ages, she had also been constantly fording bodies of water, less brooks like these than rivers, often broad ones with deep spots, where the story required her, dressed in a kind of chain mail, to sink, fight for her life, and so on. Also a proper single combat, the final and decisive one — which, to be sure, was then broken off in the middle — between her and a, the, man, took place in just such a ford, complete with clashing swords, snorting steeds, and so on, the only variant being that, instead of slashing away silently at each other, they had to alternate shouting at one another, uttering tirades of insults that were by no means purely medieval and, in the course of the scene, gave way to an entirely different kind of speaking, and so on: cut, end of the film, man and woman up to their hips in the water of the ford, motionless, facing one another.

And driving along cautiously and briskly, at the same time deep in reflection, she then brought to a close on this final stretch her silent monologue addressed to the absent author: “Whenever I cast my mind back to myself in all my misadventures and not seldom life-threatening solitary passages through the Sierra, I experience it not as something from the past but as the most intense present, assailing me and piercing me infinitely more keenly than during the moments, hours, or entire days and nights when I hovered between life and death. If in that blizzard I just missed letting myself fall down in the snow for good, the moment I revisit the situation I am threatened even more by that ultimate surrender: with the snow already up to my chest, I take one last step and after that will let myself tumble into the depths, never to return. And from an even earlier point in time, yes, point, from that first time in the Sierra, with the child in my womb, when I unexpectedly found myself completely disoriented, found? I am still there in the blazing sun on the southern flank, and the next time I recall that hour I will die, along with my unborn child, of heat stroke and abandonment.

“But the images that come flying or flashing to me from the Sierra after the fact are also very much of the present. All such images — the only kind that matter to me for my, and our, story — not only those from the Sierra de Gredos, take place in the present. Yes, in contrast to my terrors and bad situations, the images become present to me playfully; the image itself as a game in which an entirely different present is in effect than my personal one. The images play out in an impersonal present, which is more, far more, than mine and yours; they take place in the grander time, and in a single tense, for which, when I consider them, the images, the term ‘present’ is not really appropriate — no, the images do not take place either in a grander or grand time, but in a time and in a tense for which no adjective, let alone a name, exists.

“And listen, look: are not the images therefore, is not ‘the image’ a thoroughly epic problem, material for Homeric tales by the dozen? Material for a different odyssey, whose action takes place both externally and internally?”