Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

20

To the accompaniment of these and other conversations with herself, she drove her fellow passengers, including the incapacitated driver and his dog, toward the late-evening bus’s destination, the village of Pedrada.

Pedrada, which can be translated as “stone toss,” or “rain of stones,” or “hail of stones”—“siege of stones” would also be possible — is located in the innermost reaches of the Sierra region, or, as it says in that book set there many centuries ago, “in the bowels of the Sierra de Gredos.” And this Pedrada is one of the few villages at the headwaters of the río Tormes that lie right on the banks of the river and not, like Navarredonda (“Round Hollow”), Hoyos del Espino (“Thorn Hole”), Hoyos del Collado (“Hill Hole”), Navacepeda (“Vine Hollow”), and Navalperal (“Pear Hollow”), at a safe distance from the floodplain of the river, which here near its beginnings is not regulated anywhere. The houses of Pedrada are scattered through the river’s far-flung source area, slotted in between several streams and also mere rivulets, which singly and collectively, as they snake along from various sides, from the gentle slopes, flanks, and mostly treeless high plateaus, are referred to as the río Tormes.

The sparse settlement lies among these almost innumerable, still narrow watercourses, which often meander through mountain-grass meadows, and it becomes a bit more prepossessing only at one spot, where the thousands of tributaries have gradually converged to form one river that quickly and unimpededly shoots over rapids and cascades, finally deserving of the name.

The road that branches off toward Pedrada in Navarredonda de Gredos was a dead-end spur terminating in the village. From there no passable route continued; there were only livestock trails, and for a long time now there had been no paths for crossing the mountain chain to the south; those that had once existed were overgrown with broom, which by now had spread everywhere, forming a thicket as dense as a jungle, or, closer to the ridge, the path had been blocked by scree and boulders; the only exception the partially preserved path, or cordel, still used for driving the cattle caravans down to the flatlands in late fall or back into the mountains in spring.

The author, not given to enthusiasm for such things, or simply lazy, had commissioned someone else to do research on that cordel, and on the transhumancia (= cattle-driving), “just as”—thus his excuse—“Flaubert did not snoop around himself at agricultural fairs or whatever for his Madame B. or whomever, but had an acquaintance describe such things for him in letters”: that trail, that cordel, or whatever, ran on the other side of Pedrada more or less from west to east, from El Barco de Ávila toward the deep trough of the Puerto del Pico, to spare the animals’ hooves the mountains with their razor-sharp wind gaps, and this route, with its bomb-crater-deep gullies and washouts, coming one after the other and taking up the entire stretch, had been impassable for decades to even the most heavy-duty vehicle or conveyance, whether with four-wheel or all-wheel drive. Even a hundred-wheel tank would have tipped over there sooner or later; not to mention a bus, and especially this one, driving through the night, even when driven by this stranger, this woman to whom the region around my Pedrada seems to be more familiar than to me, almost a native of the area, and under whose care — how nice and straight she sits at the wheel, her arms extended like oars, hardly moving the wheel — so does it turn itself on the curves? — I would like to stay on the road as far as the last stable of Pedrada and even up to the ridge of the Sierra, and then on and on forever.

Almost all the passengers then got off the bus before its final destination. Each time they made their way to the front, stood beside the driver, and placed their hand on her shoulder shortly before the desired stop. Each was loaded down, as if returning from a long journey. Each turned in the open door once more to say thank you and goodbye to her, each using the same words but in an entirely different accent; and each, before he or she opened his or her mouth, cleared his or her throat and then said, “Thank you, good night, see you next time,” in the same raspy voice, as if he or she had not spoken for at least the entire day.

All those who got off went on their way alone, immediately heading downhill from the dead-end road, never toward a house, at least not one that was visible, lit up; were promptly swallowed up by the darkness, in which at most an open fire burned, isolated and a long way off, from which now and then pitch-laden smoke wafted through the bus.

When the bus reached the sign saying “Pedrada,” the only people left besides her were the driver, his dog, and the other woman who had helped her with the two of them. She noticed a new sign that announced PEDRADA in several other languages and scripts. And where was the familiar old hotel at the entrance to the village, at the spot where all the tributaries came together to form the río Tormes? What, the inn El Milano Real, “The Red Kite” (named after the bird of prey most common in the Sierra), no longer existed?

In its place, between the streams, at the wellspring of the river, a tent, no, more like a colony of tents, a sort of tent village. And there were no streetlights any longer. Or had there ever been any? Yet in spite of the moonless night — hadn’t it been a full moon here not long ago? or was it too early for the moon to have risen? — all of Pedrada, or what was left of it, could be made out clearly.

The light came from the sky above the source area, which was a sprawling, slightly concave, high plain, hollow and highland at the same time, the highest inhabited one in the Sierra? This sky seemed even bigger by night than by day, and twinkled or flashed with stars, in different colors, yellowish, bluish, red, white, green, and the light was collected on the ground and thrown back by the shiny deposits of quartz and mica, which seemed to be everywhere in this headwaters region, more so than anywhere else in the mountain range, reflecting the light of the firmament even from the clear bottom of the brooks and rivulets, though no higher than, let us say, the waistlines of the villagers, who were bustling about outside in astonishingly large numbers — their faces, and even more the space above the crowns of their heads, remaining in darkness.

So many more and unfamiliar stars were visible that instead of the usual constellations one saw entirely unfamiliar ones and wanted to give them new, entirely unheard-of names. And although the snow-covered expanses on the summit plain that seemed hardly a stone’s or a boulder’s throw away contributed to making the night brighter, these stars hardly suggested wintry images. Did that perhaps have to do with the fact that Pedrada, like a few other places in the northern Sierra, had a sort of microclimate, lying beneath a dome of relatively and only intermittently warm air?

Upon leaving the bus, one involuntarily splayed one’s fingers — that was how surprisingly mild the air was as it brushed one’s skin. Or did the warmth come from the open fires, even more numerous around the tents here in the heart of the village, especially the large fire, the size of several bonfires, glowing red-hot by the main tent, which looked taller than the vanished Milano Real? In Pedrada one could at first make sense of nothing. And one accepted that.

There was also artificial light in the village, of course, but only inside the tents, and hardly any of it penetrated to the outside. This light, produced by generators — every brook dotted with them — rendered the tents phosphorescent, as it were, or not only as it were, lent them a dimly glowing shape from within. Did that result from the hairline fissures and holes, invisible to the naked eye, in the tent walls? And likewise from the material of which the tents were made?

For the tents did not consist of the material commonly used today, either canvas or some other fabric or plastic. Each of the tents, including the central one, was a cone constructed of wooden poles, lashed together with branches and vines, and layered from bottom to top, or was one mistaken? with leaves, grass, and broom twigs, held together with clay — didn’t “Gredos” mean “clay”?—in which the myriad fragments of mica contributed to the phosphorescent effect?

So these were not light, easily transported tents but more like yurts, or what people imagine yurts to be? Earth-brown, clay-yellow hummocks, sprung up cheek by jowl from the earth like termite mounds (or what we imagine termite mounds to look like), into which the people here had needed only to hack a sort of narrow opening for a door, over which they then hung a pelt?

As far as she was concerned, this former lady banker and sometime coach-box lady: Hadn’t she, in that moment of getting off the bus in Pedrada, “my driving duties fulfilled,” seen the tents or yurts as those tree roots, ripped from the ground and tipped over to lie horizontally, in the hurricane-ravaged forests back home near the northwestern riverport city that she had visited the morning she set out? And hadn’t various things from home also followed her during the entire time of her journey? or traveled with her? or seemed to have got there ahead of her whenever she arrived?

Not one ordinary house still inhabited in Pedrada. Or did it merely look that way when one arrived by night? And all the houses, including the barns and stables, in ruins: another nocturnal-arrival apparition? And if ruins: Hadn’t those already been here the very first time she came?

What was certain at least was that except inside the tents no light was burning in a building. Across the entire high plateau the rattling of generators, but as if one of these sounds muffled the other, almost swallowing it up. And was that music in the tents? Were people singing? Or did the hubbub of voices outside, merging with the roaring and rumbling of the various watercourses, create the impression of voices and instruments sounding in unison?

In quick succession some surprising and unexpected aspects of Pedrada, seemingly so remote. Satellite dishes mounted on the tents? A paperboy making his way from tent to tent, with the next morning’s papers? An Asian, or also non-Asian, deliveryman heading at full speed with bouquets of roses toward the main tent, the converted inn called At the Sign of the Red Kite II? — Listen, let me tell you: no, no paperboy, but perhaps, yes, definitely, a pizza-delivery boy, younger than young, swerving out of the darkness on his motor scooter, zooming back and forth, still unsure of the address for his delivery, finally, in his confusion, asking for directions, and whom did he ask? whom else but her, just arrived in the village — every time she is the one, she of all people, whom local folk approach for information when she is in a strange place — and promptly sent on by her, buzzing off, only to come to a halt around the next nocturnal corner, utterly at a loss, with his pizza box strapped to the rack on the back of his scooter.

And right after that, on his way to the main tent, the daytime roamer, the stonemason, with his tools dangling from his belt, who back on the carretera did not board the bus but wanted to continue on and on, on foot: so he, the pedestrian, reached Pedrada before her with the bus, and slips into the tent ahead of her.

And already as they were pulling into the village, the regular driver, having regained his strength and, sitting upright in front next to her in a long, lightweight fur coat, seemingly whisked there by magic, holding his Labrador by the collar, inseparable from him, pointing out the parking lot to her, an orchard — so in the meantime such a thing existed even up here in the mountains — and later clearing a path to the inn-tent for her and the other woman through the nocturnal throng of pedestrians in the semidarkness, and once inside leading the two of them straight to the quarters assigned to them for the night, transformed from a bus driver, a role he was playing perhaps only for the day, into the administrator of the yurt village and the district.

And on the way from the bus, now parked in the orchard next to another that resembled it like a twin, the other woman traveler identified herself as someone who had accompanied her once before, and actually for a not inconsiderable length of time, for days, indeed — memory now chimed in — for weeks, not on a journey, but rather from workplace to workplace, from appointment to appointment, from outskirts to downtown and back again, to write the cover story on her for an Italian? Brazilian? magazine — the heroine of the feature no longer remembered which — but now, walking somewhat behind her and addressing her back, explained: she was traveling the Sierra on her own this time, not as an author, let alone as a journalist, which she had been, by the way, only for a while and for the purpose of earning a living, and she had intentionally not brought any of her professional tools with her on this journey, neither her computer (she said ordenador) nor her hand telephone (portable) — besides, there was “no service” for the Pedrada region, at least at the moment — not even a notepad and pencil; in fact, she had set out for the Sierra without any luggage, any encumbrance, so as to forget how to speak and in fact forget all her languages; whereupon a memory image of this former author finally came to the woman to whom she was speaking: the image of a terribly young woman always tottering along on high heels, constantly blushing, with tears forever welling up in the corners of her eyes for no apparent reason, the image most sharply focused on the wheel-less suitcases, weighing a ton, and the equally heavy gear bags dragging down both her shoulders, all of which she had hauled from a great distance, if not from far-off countries, to their fleeting rendezvous, and always without help, always “alone” (in the sense in which a woman in her land of origin, when company arrived unexpectedly or a telephone call came and she had a man with her, would say defensively, “I’m not alone just now”).

And on the basis of the image she turned to face the other woman, now following in her footsteps with hands completely free: how “terribly young” and “alone” the woman, the girl, still was, and yet how small, how tiny she appeared in the current surroundings, out in the orchard as well as inside the hotel tent, although today, too, she was wearing high-heeled shoes, but this time more sturdy ones: “My God, you’re so little!” said her former feature-article heroine, in a hoarse voice and clearing her throat, as if for her, too, this were the first time she had spoken out loud this day; and this exclamation, furthermore using the intimate form of “you,” uttered by her, who in the past had never exchanged a personal word with this writer, expressed a friendliness surprising even to the speaker herself — sounding entirely different from the way “My God, she’s so big!” would have sounded — conveying immediate affection, after which she grabbed her fellow traveler under the arms, as if to confirm that she was really walking along without luggage, with hands and arms free, this woman to whom she had extended only the tips of her fingers back in the days when they met in major cities.

Ultimately one was most surprised there in Pedrada, in the innermost reaches of the Sierra de Gredos, by oneself, above all by the way one interacted with others, for instance with this woman whom one knew more or less, or hardly at all, from the world outside: by the words and gestures that became possible when one met, words and gestures unthinkable “out there in the world,” and by how matter-of-factly they came out of one. Did these expressions, of which one would previously have considered oneself incapable, perhaps have to do with the so-called remoteness of this place? And also with a shared sense, perhaps imagined, of vulnerability? And what did “remote from the world” mean?

The individual sleeping quarters in the Milano Real II consisted of tents inside the tent, arranged more or less in a semicircle at the back, along the walls of the mother tent; not made of wood and clay like the big tent, but of classic tent material, though not of one in common use; each one — there were only a dozen such “tent rooms”—in another color of the spectrum, from which the little tent also got its name; and instead of being conical or pyramidal in form, cube-shaped, except for the concave back wall, which at the same time was part of the wall of the main structure.

She had never seen and touched a material like that of her tent chamber, dubbed “Orange,” or Burtuqal. Completely opaque from the outside, although a bedside lamp was lit, from the inside the material allowed one in some places to see the neighboring tents and especially the front part of the tent inn, which was left free of smaller tents and was several times larger than the sleeping area in the back.

For a moment she thought she was at home in the riverport city, in her office, likewise located way at the back of the floor for top management, where, without having been visible herself, she had been able to follow the goings-on in the open-plan office outside through a wall of one-way plate glass instead of a cloth wall. (“Had been able to”? “having been visible”?: Did this mean that all that was a thing of the past? over and done with forever?)

The tent material somewhat resembled a patchwork, though without detectable seams; in one place it felt like brocade, in the next like jute, in the third like silk, and in another more like a man-made fiber, with what seemed like temporary patches here and there of plastic or even waxed paper. Although it would have been possible for her to look outside through the holes, tears, and slits that seemed to have been made intentionally in the rear wall of her night-tent, forming a sort of aperture and at the same time delicately chiseled ornamentation, she decided instead to survey the neighboring sleeping tents and the wide interior space under the dome of the main tent. After this day of being in constant motion, almost always with very distant horizons up ahead, she did not want to see any more of the world outside; did not want to have to see anything outside the walls of the inn; also did not want to set foot that night outside the curtain at the entrance to the tent.

But certainly to look through the cloth walls: at the likewise opaque tent walls to her right and left, which allow one to sense a forehead leaning against the material or a fist being clenched — this one called “Violet,” or Banafsadzi, the sleeping place of the former magazine writer, still blushing blood red; the other one, “Gray” or Aswad, where the hiker or stonemason who refused a ride is sleeping; and looking straight out at the great hall, as big as a barn, or the barn as big as a hall — the area in front of the semicircle of rooms is in fact something between the great room of an inn and a threshing floor — empty except for a long supper table, extending from one mud-and-wood wall to the other, set with dishes in some places, cleared in others, and in places crowded with useless stuff.

Nothing else but these many tables, pushed together along a ragged diagonal in the front portion of the lodging tent. And this area without any partitions: a single high, broad expanse, illuminated by lightbulbs dangling from the dome, which in the uneven flow of current from the generators sometimes glow, sometimes flicker, sometimes just splutter and intermittently go completely dark for a fraction of a second, and in this fashion give the impression of being constantly rocked back and forth by a draft (but aren’t the light fixtures actually rocking?).

No kitchen in the place; no sideboard; no heater; no reception desk (if El Milano Real Roman Numeral Two is even supposed to be a proper hotel); no credit-card stickers at the entrance or exit, or were there? that one, lone little sign there, a logo completely unfamiliar to her — and that was something — also faded and seemingly long since invalid, that particular card out of circulation, from a prehistoric credit-card era, so to speak, the emblem unrecognizable from a distance, even if she had eyes as sharp as the red kite.

The only place where the dining hall has other decoration is on the walls, at the same time forming the exterior walls of the structure. Hanging cheek by jowl on nails of all sizes, driven at random into the clay stucco and wooden ribs, on hooks, some of them bent downward, and on loops, are — not pots and pans but fire extinguishers (loose, not screwed to the wall), strikingly many of them; also guns (they, too, like the credit-card plaque, seemingly no longer current, but on the other hand no mere souvenirs, not decor, but ready for firing); first-aid kits and pouches (at least as numerous as the extinguishers); gas masks (these being the most numerous wall objects, from infant- to hydrocephalic-sized, a whole slew of them — was that expression still used? — a question thrown in by the Mancha-author, who had been away from the land of his mother tongue for a long time); and in between, there, and there! a stringed musical instrument, one unfamiliar to her, hanging by its strap, but for the most part wind instruments, trumpets and clarinets, and also an accordion.

And the floor of the inn-tent — only now does she take this in — is covered with carpets, some fairly shabby, partially covering a wild-strawberryred kilim or a peacock-blue Isfahan. And the man sitting motionless in one of the particularly dusky corners of the hall or barn or tent, seemingly waiting for the supper guests, in a collarless white shirt, ripped in places, and an all the more flawless waistcoat trimmed with silver braid under his ermine, is the same older man who was being carried in a litter over the old Puerto de Menga during the day, who reminded her of the emperador who centuries earlier was carried the same way to his place of retirement in the southern spurs of the Sierra de Gredos.

And the stocky dog lying at the threshold to the tent, on a particularly thick carpet, still belongs to its owner, the previous bus driver who is just now entering, but it is not stocky, but — only now will she have noticed this, through the wall of her chamber — pregnant (“One does not say ‘pregnant,’” she corrected her author, “one says ‘with young’”).