Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

21

The bus driver or hotelier drummed the guests together for the mountain supper. In point of fact, he did not actually bang on a drum, nor did he blow one of the trumpets; he merely ran a bow over that one stringed instrument, over its single string, thickly plaited out of horsehair or whatever, moving the bow back and forth, forth and back, without stopping: a bellowing sound, in which the woman who alternately blushed and went pale heard a “sobbing,” while the other woman heard “an animal in heat,” a third person heard “the opening measures of a long ballad, which will accompany us through the meal and after that into sleep”—a narrative song that then did not materialize after all.

It was not only the three of them but almost a dozen who came, a few at a time, to the table under the dome of that high tent or barn, most of them from the cloth chambers, but also some from the outside.

It was also from the outside that the innkeeper brought in the food. There were several courses. What they consisted of in particular — as she indicated later to the author — was of no relevance to the story. “I contributed only a couple handfuls of the chestnuts I had brought along from the riverport city, a rare delicacy in the northern Sierra — strangely enough, some of them were already starting to sprout.”

But what did matter: that the dishes were brought in each time from the outside. One sensed, smelled, and tasted that they had been cooked in the open air, on outdoor fires; that local water had been used, from all those tributary brooks, one of them right behind The Red Kite, and the river they converged to form; and that the dishes were served almost the instant they were ready. Did not one row of tents in the village, the one directly on the Tormes, consist of fishermen’s tents, open on the side facing the water?

“Served”? No, they were wheeled in — by the chauffeur, aka innkeeper, who moved with the light-footedness found perhaps only in someone who but a short while ago had been lying there as if weighed down with stones — wheeled in on a four-wheeled serving cart similar to those that at one time — this story was taking place in an entirely different time — had been standard equipment in the state-operated hotels and restaurants of the communist states or countries of various stripes: the familiar squealing of the wheels, seemingly a thing of the past, even more piercing indoors on the carpets, on which the vehicle repeatedly got hung up, than outside in the alleys between the tents, but always audible there from almost infinitely far off as it approached the diners, creaking around innumerable corners, in that respect, too, a throwback to the achievements of the Eastern bloc or some other bloc that had hurtled into the pit of time.

Unlike the usual waitstaff in those days, the man steering the cart today hopped from one foot to the other as if in a surfeit of high spirits, dancing from guest to guest and serving each one with heartwarming delight.

And one’s heart needed warming. As in the glass bus during the day, throughout Pedrada, despite the tents, a persistent menace, growing from one second to the next, could be detected.

The fact that it was night, that no more low-flying planes and big-bellied helicopters were to be heard, nothing but a sporadic, almost outer-space-like, quasi-peaceful hum (could one still use the term “quasi”?), surely from an intercontinental aircraft, did nothing to assuage the almost universal feeling of defenselessness, of vulnerability, of teetering on the edge.

With the faltering of the generators, the lightbulbs kept going out and then coming on again with apparent difficulty (causing those dining beneath them to alternate between opening their eyes wide and squinting), which made for great uncertainty; the filaments in the bulbs, which they instinctively turned their heads to look at while engaged in the most enjoyable eating and most animated conversation (in spite of everything), appeared each time they met the eye as the fine, superfine, spiderweb-fine threads that they indeed were; which also suggests, however, that this sensation of being in danger was not the prevailing one and could be felt only on the edges of the group of diners.

From the very beginning, even before everyone had taken a seat at the table, a general exchange and mutual sharing sprang up in the center of the group, independent of the external uncertainty.

The emperador, or the actor playing the emperor in a historical film being shot just then in the Sierra, or whatever he was, had taken his place at the head of the table as one of the dinner guests. In spite of his ermine cloak, he was visibly shivering as he sat there surrounded by his bearers or fellow actors. His seat was an upside-down fruit crate, padded with an old automobile tire. His plate was of an alabaster- or quince-blossom-white porcelain, his cutlery, however, of plastic.

At the foot of the table, or the other head, the actual one, sat a small family, a very young father and even younger mother, barely even a teenager, and an infant with enormous blue eyes: their spoons, forks, and knives were of heavy silver, as if just fetched out of an old chest, while their plates consisted of fragments of earthenware held together with wire, and for drinking — the beverages also came from outside — the boy and girl, that is to say, the parents, had a single paper cup, with which they toasted the others, who raised their various coffee cups (with something other than coffee in them), crystal goblets, tin cups (like the drinking vessels in Westerns), athletic trophies, or entire bottles and the like to the youthful parents, he perching on a bus seat, still attached to its frame, while she lounged in a sort of choir stall, as if in a wing chair.

In similar fashion, the table, which took up the entire length of the hall, was not all of a piece. On closer inspection, one saw that it consisted of several tables, of varying heights and widths; here and there a door removed from its hinges, a plain board, even the roof of a car, all resting on sawhorses; a barrel, a chest-high library stepladder, a piece of a raft. This entire table was covered with empty fruit and potato sacks of a coarse material, true to a Pedrada tradition: as the innkeeper explained, this was supposed to assure good harvests in the coming year.

What, harvests at such an altitude? Yes, hadn’t they seen the apple orchards? And the fields of stubble near the Peña Negra Pass? And Navalperal de Tormes, the pear-growing village? And up here, where oats, rye, wheat, and even peaches grew (the latter in sheltered spots) amid the cliffs and boulders, didn’t other crops flourish even more reliably — the patatas, potatoes, also known as krompire, or, in the Arabic still alive in many expressions, batatas?

The story goes that during that evening meal no one spoke while others were speaking, or interrupted anyone else. Only one person spoke at a time, and all the rest, even those way down at the other end of the table, listened; apparently no one had to raise his voice, and the rattling of the generators outside actually served as a kind of sound carrier.

As the story tells us, the first to begin to speak was the former Friulian or Argentinian magazine writer. And at the same time it was clear that everyone would have a turn to address the others during the time they spent together. Without blushing, the young woman, instead of looking around while speaking, gazed directly at the person who had been the subject of her magazine piece years earlier.

What she said, however, was not meant only for the ears of the powerful banker, or whatever she was, or had been. We are told that she probably fixed her eyes on this person because her face was the only one she recognized in the gathering, and even more because she believed, no, was convinced, that she would come to know this person, encountered unexpectedly and, what is more, in a decisive, yes, decisive location, set apart and remote from the places familiar to the two of them, in a decisively different way, yes, decisive from this day on, just as she, speaking here in a foreign setting and teetering on the edge, would show herself in an entirely different light to her former interviewee, as well as to the others and to herself.

As she spoke, she occasionally twisted a rusty tin can that stood in front of her, filled with a bouquet of dog-rose canes covered with fruit, red as only rose hips can be; while the speakers coming after her twirled in the same fashion rock crystal vases, jade goblets, old beakers missing their caps and handles, discarded baby bottles, ink wells, tin tea caddies, bronze mortars, and so on, while in each of these “vases” were the same bright rose-hip-red rose-hip bunches, which, according to the bus-driving tent-innkeeper, had been used for centuries in the Sierra de Gredos to ward off melancholy or to protect one against snow-blindness, a life-threatening danger especially for those crossing the mountains now in the winter months, and emphasized in the guide to local dangers. Like the rest of the company, the pale young woman had not changed for dinner. And likewise everyone’s hairdo had remained the same.

And nonetheless she looked, as did those next to her, as if she had not come there from the present, or rather, only from the present. Without being in costume or dressed up, with the possible exception of the “emperor” or “king” or whatever he was — but was that really a costume? — they sat there as if at a time boundary, on the one hand clearly in the current era, and on the other hand, in the next moment and breath, perhaps even more clearly and distinctly in a second era, from which a curtain had been suddenly raised behind one, not a bygone period, not a historical one, also not one at odds with the present or a merely imaginary one: no, a period as undefined as undefinable, one that existed in addition to the current one, a present offering expanding possibilities and all the more real or tangible.

This new era found its clearest image in the persons of the adolescent couple and their small child. They sat there, as one can sit there only now, in the moment, on a winter evening, quite high in the mountains, with flushed cheeks, tired yet intermittently wide awake (the woman who had commissioned the book rejected the expression “full of beans” proposed by the author): also very contemporary, she with yellow and green streaks in her hair, he with blue and silver streaks in his, both of them wearing their hair cropped short, both of them wearing an identical single tiny earring, of aluminum or some such — and the next moment this very up-to-date couple, moved as it were (“Strike ‘as it were’!”) into a new dimension, distant and deep, out of sight and at the same moment unexpectedly close—“something artificial and virtual images can simulate only feebly and deceivingly”—were vouchsafed an additional present, incomparably stronger and above all more durable than the previously mentioned presents, which nonetheless also remained in view, “and the durability of this image in comparison to a virtual one is like that of infinity to zero!”

She then tried to explain to the author that a splendid present like this, “beyond any doubt the most splendid possible,” in the image of the youthful couple, had its origins, among other things, in the distance between them as they sat there, a distance not entirely usual “nowadays”: “This distance between her and him was now, and more than simply now.”

And, as she explained, part of it was that both the boy and the girl held themselves remarkably erect, their torsos, necks, and heads, one the spitting image of the other, and likewise hardly turning toward each other, each of them constantly looking straight ahead, their eyes focused on the rearmost horizon of the tent hall, yet “not at all” fixedly, and their upright, erect sitting beside each other was remarkable not in the sense of “strange” or “weird,” but rather in the sense of “noteworthy” or “wondrous” or, yes, “moving”: “first re-presenting” that which was present.

Accordingly, she said, the young couple, together with the infant, who chewed alternately on his mother’s and his father’s finger with his first teeth — they allowed it without wincing — seemed to be inside yet another tent, an invisible one, not measurable but just as, yes, just as substantial as the one of mud and wood, as the ones of tent material or whatever.

She went on to mention that this scene suddenly brought to mind the only remaining photo of her parents, killed in an accident: the two of them likewise almost still children, long, long before her birth, during or shortly after the end of the war, side by side, ramrod straight, sitting on a felled tree trunk at the edge of a clearing near the village, and, in addition to their similar way of gazing into the distance, dressed almost exactly the same, as far as fabric, pattern, and cut went, as the couple here with their very trendy hairstyle and — color—“timeless”—neither urban nor rustic, and certainly not in folk costume (Sorbian or any other) — simply white and black — which had nothing to do with the fact that the photo was in black-and-white. And just as every time she envisioned her (future) parents as perching there together in a prewar period, contrary to the facts, now in the present she saw their two revenants (“not at all returned from any kingdom of the dead”) the same way.

And drawn into this present, perhaps preceding a war but on this night even more tangibly peaceful, was the “itinerant stonemason,” having seemingly drifted there like a ghost, previously on the carretera and then, upon entering the tent-inn, from some medieval period, and likewise the “first and last local and pan-European emperor,” as if on the way to a son-et-lumière spectacle, in the park at Aranjuez, let us say, conceived as the crowning event in the annual historical reenactment there, carried over the Sierra in his legendary litter to his final resting place, together with his entourage: all of them, though seemingly disguised and their bodies transported by their disguises to a distant, dusty, dilapidated past, which no living images could revive (they least of all), protruded from their earlier time — if they indeed came from some such — with their shoulders, necks, and heads, into a present as vivid as any, and next to this one the current present seemed dimmer than any allegedly dark past.

“Sometimes I have the same sensation,” the author is said to have replied, “when I see portraits of people from earlier centuries, paintings, copper engravings, woodcuts: initially the faces usually look not only remote in time, but also entirely foreign, alien, incomprehensible, belonging to a human type diametrically opposite to me, as a man of today, but as I gaze at them, they often come alive for me as wonderfully approachable, colorful, lively beings, such as are now revealed to me in my daily surroundings only at sacred, or rather blessed, times. Goodness gracious!”—Her reply: “That evening only one person was entirely rooted in the present, in nothing but today. But I do not want you to have him appear in our story until later.”—The author: “A photographer?”—She: “Yes, a photographer, among other things. But how do you know?”

The earlier writer of the magazine story, constantly turning toward her earlier heroine, began to speak and revealed herself as follows: “Once I was a friend of other people’s stories. Fui una vez amiga de historias ajenas. At least I played that role, or wanted to play it, or had to play it. Now I know nothing of others anymore, and have no desire to know anything, and above all do not pretend to know anything about this person or that or about you. No sé nada. I know nothing.

“And I am no longer a friend of knowing about others’ lives. No soy amiga de saber vidas ajenas. How alien, cold and abruptly alien, clearly alien for all time, every person, in truth, appeared to me from the outset, men as well as women, also children, closer relatives as well as much more distant ones, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, once to three times removed. Especially the aunts and uncles, the nephews and nieces. How incomprehensible people appeared to me, and how little I understood how anyone could describe another person, tease out traits, characteristics, and idiosyncrasies, and knit them into an ostensibly recognizable figure. What I perceived instead was a cloth doll. Even when someone did this only in the presence of one other person, even when I recognized the person being described, or thought I recognized him, it seemed to me that the whole thing was a swindle, and that even a — what is the term? — lifelike description of a person was simply not right, was indecent, presumptuous.

“Just as there is a prohibition on images that is rooted in our consciousness, or in instinct, above all in respect to the human face, it seemed to me that there was also a sort of prohibition on description, again where the human face was concerned.

“And all the more so when the describing no longer occurred only in the presence of one other person but in society! And all the more so when it became public! And all the more so when it was done in writing, in an article or even a book! And why did it have to be me to whom all the individual strangers became even more alien, if possible, in descriptions, or ceased to exist altogether! — the pseudo-descriptions and imitations, especially those considered most successful, had the most devastating effect — why did it have to be me who came upon or stumbled into a profession or business whose stock in trade was public description, captured in black-and-white, of individuals, of ‘people’!

“If it had at least been a question of capturing a nation, or of people in the aggregate. Human masses and crowds were alien to me, too, but alien in a different way, at least sometimes, not as indescribably foreign as all the nine hundred ninety-nine individuals whom I pried loose and nailed to the page, from the color of their eyes, to their gums, to their shoe size, to their way of walking, shaking hands, brushing the hair back from their forehead, their voices, the shape of their ears, the shape of their chins, their shoulders, their furniture, their pets, their gardens, their vehicles, their preferences, their recurring dreams, their perfume, their failed suicide attempts, their hidden guilt, their forbidden love, their secret ambition in life.

“And even when all the details were correct, and as a rule they were, I knew that my descriptions, my descriptions of people and persons, were nothing but a deception and a distortion. How did I know that? I just knew it. I knew it if for no other reason than that every detail had to be striking. There was no demand for a detail that was not striking. I knew it? My disgust knew it, my disgust at describing your lips, your skin, your nostrils, your way of driving a car, your way of crossing your legs, or not, as the case might be, of opening the door for others, of keeping your eyes closed for a long time, of remaining constantly attentive, of reading people’s lips and eyes, of suddenly clenching your fists, of striking your head with your fist. My disgust at describing, and then at you and at me.

“But now that I no longer need to find anything striking about my subjects, now that I do not need to publish such things, these people have become a tad less alien to me, and above all alien in a different way. Now that I no longer pretend to be a friend of others’ lives, to understand them, to write and put in circulation true stories about them, I have begun to discover a new world. Now that I do not need to know anything about you — now that I no longer have to focus on someone as the subject or object of a story that must be written, I know that I can be more open with you, with him—” (turning toward the stonemason) “before him—” (turning toward Carlos Primero, alias Charles V) “before all of you—” (opening her eyes and taking in all the others at the table at a glance) “more open in general.” (With each gaze now, and now, and now, a blushing deeper than ever before, as if on the verge of a great anger or some other powerful emotion.)

“Only now, with my fundamental ignorance, my ignorance as my foundation — heaven knows, facile paradoxes and plays on words still crop up from my story period! — instead of writing about you, I could write you up, write you off, write around you.

“And I was never as frank as tonight in Pedrada, here in the innermost Sierra. I sense, I know, that today I could discover you, you and you, and all of you, instead of revealing this or that about you, guessing, and putting it into a false context. During the bus ride, with the first rotation of the wheels, everything I had known about you earlier was already canceled — no previous life, no roles, no position, and in its place the desire to discover you, to tell your story again in discovery mode, the very opposite of the scoop that was once my first commandment.

“Except that now I no longer write, not out of disgust at writing, at writing implements, at paper, at the computer. My not-writing-anymore comes from a sort of lightheartedness; giving up writing has left me more light of heart and friendly. And now that I keep my hands off anything remotely connected with script and texts, I see that I am, in fact, yes, fact! a friend of others’ lives. The more alien your life, your lives, the more open I am to them.

“And how strange our story seems to me, precisely here; ¡Soy amiga de vidas ajenas! ¡Soy amiga de historias ajenisimas! Mi emperador, let us see a few moments of your unknown story. And you, you are not really the banking empress I once had to interview across three continents, are you? Or you are no longer that? Ah, goodness gracious, I still have all these questions. But at least they are only spoken and are not intended for publication.”

Now the response of the woman to whom these remarks were primarily directed: “And you ask different questions now. For I recall how in the old days you talked almost constantly, always in the same soft, childlike voice. But simultaneously, gazing into my eyes with your own large eyes, you were ready to pounce. You were intent on trapping, catching, pinning down — not necessarily me as a person but a predetermined, predictable, printable — what was the word I used at the time? — scenario, extending beyond me to a situation, a state of affairs, a current issue. You also talked constantly about your own stories, worries, dreams, adventures, including your adventures in love, perhaps not entirely made up on the spur of the moment — for the purpose of worming corresponding confessions out of strangers.

“Not even for a brief second were you free of suspicion. The suspicion implicit in your questions was the very foundation, the basis of your profession, and once your suspicions were confirmed in one way or another, you stripped me, and all the others, of my, and their, little and not-so-little secrets and then left us there, the way a pickpocket, or rather a nest-robber, leaves his victims, even if the word ‘victim’ is not entirely appropriate? No, it is. And what are you living on these days? How are you earning your living now that you have given up describing people?”

The fellow passenger: “For a while it was an important piece of information in a story whether a person had money, and where it came from, and so on. But for this story of ours, this evening’s story, that has become irrelevant.” Did that mean that she was in on the undertaking?

And the lady banker, replying only now to the question posed at the beginning and showing her hand: “It is true. Or at least it is likely that my banking days are over, and not only since this evening. It seems to me that all of banking is in a bad way, and not only since today. Yet I know that the core of my profession remains sound. It embodies, and continues to be, an idea that is not merely useful but essential. And this idea is almost unique, in that it pertains entirely to others, my contemporaries, and it can be summed up thus: being a big wheel. Wheeling and dealing. The banker as a trustworthy driver, with both hands on the wheel, moving other people’s money. Showing forethought, foreseeing, forecasting, forestalling. Launching initiatives. Managing. And primarily seeing to it that you, my contemporaries, have time; that you do not waste your time worrying about money, hoping for profits and dreading losses.

“At present, however, a person in my profession manages less than he gambles. We gamble, and we gamble whether we want to or not. We are forced to gamble with money, with numbers, with products, with the markets. If our activity previously may have included an enjoyable element of play, in the form of an element of adventure — no, not of adventure, simply of entertainment — our work now consists of an excess of gaming; of gambling for profits, a compulsion to gamble for profits.

“And I reject this game. It is a misuse of the hands on the wheel, of the trusty driver’s role. It should be prohibited. But who would prohibit it — when it is entire countries and the powerful who are most deeply involved? It has become a game that not only does not get things moving or move things in the right direction, but actually destroys them. I myself do not enjoy playing games, have never really learned to play. Yet the form of play that has been required of me recently is even more evil, cold, and lethal than chess: it is true that its main moves continue to consist of exercising forethought, foreseeing, forecasting, and forestalling, but all this has acquired a profoundly different significance. Banking and the stock exchange have come to consist almost exclusively of a cold, ruthless gambling for profit that has nothing to do with my idea of how I should be working.

“Being forced to play the game leaves me hardly any room for free play. And those who have recently entered our profession, because, as natural gamblers, or whatever they are, they have come to expect of it, and rightly so, a life like a game, now live in constant fear, even when they assert the opposite to their paying public. For this game cannot be mastered by even the most skillful players. In their dreams, and perhaps all too soon in reality, they are devoured by it from head to toe. They do not want to play anymore. But once started …

“Anyone who starts this game has to play it through to the end, and that is its most damaging feature. Luckily for me, in this case at least, I do not know how to play, and thus never began …”

The former magazine writer: “In our interview you did not so much as hint at any of this. Nor did you want to answer any questions about your brother in prison, your vanished child, the child’s unknown father, and/or your lover at the time / at present. The only things you agreed to discuss were sturdy shoes, fruit trees — you favored me with a complete lecture on the particular white of quince blossoms—, chefs, seasonings (O saffron, O coriander), mountain-climbing techniques, the most remote island in the Atlantic, children’s toys in the Middle Ages, weight distribution while one is ascending and descending mountains, the fragrance of linden blossoms in June—‘the fragrance that seems to come from farthest away’—My Darling Clementine, and Westerns in general, hedgehogs, the beauties of night hiking, the best pencils, and so on, for days and nights on end.

“And now this brutal frankness — which would not have been suitable for the magazine anyway, or would it? And what will you do without your profession, without your wheeling and dealing? Establish a different kind of bank? An anti-gambling bank? Make a second film? Write a story about different types of pencils?”

She: “What I plan to do? Practice even more forethought. Do even more foreseeing and forecasting. Forestall even more usefully and necessarily. Make even more sure that along with me, now that I myself have time, plenty of time, this person or that also has time, plenty of time, time and more time. And perhaps learn to play at last. Not the profit game but a finder’s game. Or simply become playful. And find my daughter again, here in the Sierra de Gredos. And find, here or elsewhere, my unknown lover. For he is alive, and he exists, just so you know, just so all of you know. And speak with my brother, not as I did during the last few years from the visitors’ perch in the prison behind the dunes, where a dozen of us had to shout, and could not hear our own voices, let alone those of the people we were visiting. And perhaps also find the various small items I have lost here in the Sierra over the years, a scarf one time, a hair comb another time, a cap, a shawl — especially the shawl. Each time I was sure when I set out that along the road one of the objects from the previous year or the year before would gleam up at me, unharmed, in spite of storms, rain, and snow, and each time I ended up losing something else. But this time, just wait!

“And how in each of you here I see one of my near and dear. In you, dear interviewer, I see my daughter, whom I actually so often failed to recognize as my own child, even when she came through the door and stood before me. Ah, even on the day she was born, when she was brought to my room, I said to myself in that first moment: So who is this splendid newborn with this self-confident, seemingly cocky face, at the same time so vulnerable, looking ready to play? And later, when I was visiting a strange house with her, an unknown child unexpectedly came in the door from the garden or somewhere else, making not a sound, very pale — the pallor that you now display as well — and I thought to myself: Who in the world is this solemn, quiet child; never have I seen anyone so solemn, pale, and quiet in all my life — until it struck me that this was my own child, from whom I had been separated for less than a day. And even later, after her first disappearance — now that you are not interrogating me, I can reveal this to you — when I had hunted all summer, fall, and winter, always with her image in my head, and finally found her on the last island in the Atlantic, near the village of Los Llanos de Aridane, I want you all to know, and we were celebrating that evening, the two of us in the San Petronio restaurant — if you need these details — where I told her for the first time who her father was and that her father was alive: toward midnight, then, as today in the Milano Real Dos of Pedrada, when she had gone off for a little while, perhaps out to the street, to a boyfriend or someone, suddenly there was a young woman next to me, just as you are now, in profile, and I wondered, and not just for a moment, what this beautiful stranger was doing at my table; from what country she had washed up on this remote island; and how it happened that the stranger seemed so motherless and fatherless, or without any need of parents? And why, although it was not cold in the restaurant, a shiver kept running over her forearms, making the little hairs there stand on end?

“And turn your face to me now: Yes, she is the one. Yes, you are the one. And that man there in the ermine cloak, representing the abdicated king and emperor on the way to his final resting place on the southern flank of the Gredos, I greet as my grandfather from the village back home. He was a singer, but — if you want to know — not a singer of folk songs. Just like that old singer, you hold your head very high and will sing us something in a few minutes, with your high-pitched voice, as effortlessly and uninsistently as only an old singer can, nothing but pure voice, with at most a quarter of an eye on us. And just as with that singer in the last days of his life, together with your ermine and your gold-braided waistcoat, a strong odor emanates from you, almost a stench.”

“Do you walk in your sleep?” (Here a question interjected by the former feature-article author.) — She: “I always have. And I see the itinerant stonemason there, or whatever he represents, as my brother, on the verge of killing a person for the first time. At the moment it is still just a ghost of a notion in him. But as soon as he speaks it out loud, he will, willy-nilly, be held to it and veritably obliged to do the deed. It was already the same with your violence toward objects, which landed you in the penitentiary: for a long time destruction was only one of your thoughts among many — but as soon as you had put it in words to one person, then another, then everyone you knew, it had to happen someday; you had no choice; no sooner said than done; having said it meant having to do it.”

The stonemason, now revealing his feelings: “Never fear, sister. I will not say it, not tonight. But it is true: time and again I have been close to speaking the words, especially lately. Just a slip of the tongue, and the word would have been out there, with all the guards listening. And you, sister, made no small contribution to my destructive rage. Of course it is also true that in our village days you exercised forethought for me, foresaw for me, kindly forestalled things for me, forecast the coming day and the coming year, with my interests at heart.

“And it is also true that you never wanted anything for yourself, or at least not for yourself only. Everything you undertook was undertaken for the sake of someone else, also several someone elses, but primarily for the sake of me, the parentless child, the orphan. And although you were also an orphan, you did not see yourself as one, not once; as a child you were already self-sufficient, independent, the child of no one, the descendant of no ancestors, from the outset a person without any frame of reference: as little a villager as a person defined by the Slavic minority or the German nation, and then not someone from the economics department, either, or a person whose manner gave the slightest hint that she was a tycoon, just as you never behaved in a sisterly fashion, or as a lover — but that is something of which neither I nor anyone else has any knowledge, perhaps least of all your lover himself, if he in fact exists. You defied definition; you stood, moved, and acted solely and exclusively somewhere outside/on the periphery.

“Everything you did, as you conceived it, had to be done for someone else’s sake, and at the time this someone was above all me, the orphan. It was impossible for you simply to do, look for, collect something without the thought that it was for me. But that did not stem from goodness, or from any intention to be helpful and useful — you just were, and are, that way; that is your nature, and perhaps, I often thought, your need to do things for others, and the way you become incapable of lifting a finger when you lose the image of a person, or persons, is even a sort of defect — your own personal sickness. Even in the old days, whenever you had to buy something, it could not be for you, even if you needed the item; and not until the idea of buying something or other came to you in connection with me could you set out to make the purchase.

“To pick an apple hanging just outside your window and eat it was out of the question, out of the realm of possibility: but to scramble up to the most precarious treetop for some fruit or other, so long as it was for me — no hesitation! And out in the woods you never popped the wild strawberries, or whatever you were picking there, straight into your mouth, not a single one: no matter how luscious you found all the little fruits of the field, no matter how avid you always were for the fruit and berries — you were capable of picking, hunting, and gathering only when thinking of someone other than yourself. And how dispirited and unmotivated you became when it was a question of harvesting only for yourself! That is sick, sister.

“And just as it is said of some people that they ‘do not know how to share,’ you, with this sickness of yours, sister, had the opposite compulsion — to share all the time. You no sooner got something in your hand, somehow or other, than you were already offering it to me or someone else — everyone in your vicinity — so as to share it. This gesture was completely involuntary; you could not help yourself — you had to share. Sometimes I experienced your gesture of sharing as aggression — you pushed the thing to be shared in my face, thrusting your arm at me violently. It was as if you had to crush me, and, later, various other people, against your ribs—

“One time you told me how you pictured yourself dying: while saving someone else’s life. Ah, my poor sick sister. And you crushed me against your ribs in an entirely different way, too: by standing in for the father, not ours but one from the Old Testament. Just as the Old Testament fathers were ordered to beat their sons preemptively, again and again, so that evil would have no chance to take root in them, or would be nipped in the bud, you beat me in those days even before I did anything wrong, prophylactically.

“And I, and I, and I? How little I can say about myself, and then almost only what I am not. I am not like you — if for no other reason than that from the beginning I saw myself in relation to others, measured myself against others, compared myself with others, defined myself with reference to others. I was a villager if ever there was one. I was a Slav, or simply what was considered Slavic. I became a servant of God if ever an orphaned Slavic villager became one. And then, always a child of my time, or not of my time, and continuing to understand myself almost exclusively in relation to my contemporaries and in reaction to the spirit of the times, I became a destroyer.”

The stonemason or wanderer fell silent for a while, took a deep breath, and then resumed speaking: “For a very long time in my life I hardly lived from within myself. Whatever I did or failed to do, wherever I was: I was dependent on someone or something else. A few dependencies actually helped me stand on my own two feet and enriched me. These were more like safety nets, signposts, lifelines, reference points. But the majority of my dependencies did not strengthen me but diminished me. That was especially true of my dependency on people.

“I do not know why, when I found myself in the company of others, and perhaps not even reluctantly, I would instantly feel like their slave, or at least like a subordinate. In the twinkling of an eye I would be transformed into an appendage or accessory; did not exist on my own; just flailed at the end of the more or less imaginary leash that tied me to the other person, or was transfixed, in a bad sense, under the person’s spell, paralyzed.

“And each time this flailing or paralysis also made itself evident, too. Even when I was with strangers, on streets, in subways, in stadiums, I no longer acted but only reacted, magnetically attracted to the others, slavish, unfree. Even my way of walking, looking, standing, sitting, was determined entirely by my reaction to the walking, looking, standing, and so on of my fellow pedestrians, fellow onlookers, fellow travelers. Either I imitated them slavishly or I did the exact opposite, another form of slavish behavior: when they ran, I walked with exaggerated slowness; when they all looked into the arena, I pointedly looked away, at the sky or their faces, and so forth.

“Even in the presence of animals, especially that of pets, cats, dogs, cows, hens, rabbits, I fell into this kind of dependency and lost my freedom, fell under the spell of animal eyes, under the spell of animal movements. It was almost only in dealings with inanimate objects that I escaped from this flailing and paralysis under the yoke of others. Lacking any connection to others came to be the freedom that could replenish me. To create a frieze, consisting of the gazes of contemporaries! To be splendidly relieved of relationships, I thought, would mean to be ripe for what is real.

“As a stonemason I knew I was free of the community tether at least for the duration of my workday, yet not entirely alone. But soon even at work I fell into a kind of dependency, though one that for a while propped me up instead of crushing me: constantly stumbling in the others’ present, and in the present altogether, I decided, as a stonemason, and this time not slavishly but full of determination, of my own free will, to forge a relationship with the historical period that I saw as most suited to me, the Middle Ages.”

The mason paused. He took another deep breath. Not a soul interrupted him. He resumed his narrative, in a voice seemingly not emanating from him, with no visible movement of his lips, although in no way with the ghostly quality of a ventriloquist.

“I made up my mind not to be a person of the present day, to be someone not of today. I wanted to be, and then actually was, associated with the stone structures, and even more with the stone sculptures, from the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth European centuries. These faces, whose ears often stuck out, whose noses looked squashed, whose lips were thick, whose eyes protruded from their sockets, these were my people. They absolved me, and I, crisscrossing Europe for years, on one pilgrimage after another, from one extended family carved in stone to the other, absolved myself in their company, face-to-face, listened to them, let them infect me with that thick-lipped grinning, that way of listening while attending to what was going on inside one, with that imperturbable yet quietly empathetic gaze, which registered me and my background at once playfully and kindly.

“For whole days and years my sole contact, my exclusive communication, was with those stone dream-dancers, fortunately seldom hewn out of marble, mostly out of granite or a more friable stone. And, listen, all of you, I did not become eccentric as a result, but rather, through my daily involvement with them, I shook off any kind of eccentricity from earlier. And in silent conversation, face-to-face — yes, in their presence I felt my own blurry, slack face broaden, tighten, organize itself — I aired out my skull, into the farthest recesses of my brain, and then set out on my path with a clarity and energy such as I had rarely experienced, no, never experienced, in conversations with flesh-and-blood human beings.

“In the company of people from the Middle Ages, my chosen era, engaged day in, day out in dialogue, which was accompanied by tapping, sniffing, tracing their outlines, mimicking, in dialogue with my chosen people, which had long since ceased to be limited to those figures and works in stone, having expanded to include the heroic epics from that era, their plots continuing in me, as well as the illuminated initials in the old manuscripts and such, I envisioned spending the rest of my life in this period and passing my days on earth both peacefully and fruitfully, without ever again coming into contact, let alone collision, with present-day contemporaries, not a single one.”

And this was the moment when, out of the clear blue sky, the stonemason and wanderer spread his arms before the Argentinian or Sardinian woman sitting next to him, or whatever she was, and the pale young woman, with a blush engulfing her entire face, let herself fall against him. He hugged her. She threw her arms around him. The story tells us she embraced him. And he, as the story tells us further, locked his arms around her so tightly that she uttered a noise that sounded, though only in the first moment, like a wail. They held each other.

Or did the apparent wail actually come from him, or did it come from both of them? Or did it come from the male storyteller, or the female storyteller? And the story goes that the two of them remained in that position, eye to eye, as the wanderer and/or stonemason resumed his tale.

“But now it is all over with me and the Middle Ages. And the story of my involvement with the stone faces did not end only today — although perhaps it is not being fully recounted until today. The end of my relationship with them, and along with it that particular relationship to the world altogether, did not occur unexpectedly. These stone and painted and written models of composure, of fervent acceptance, of surrender, and of confident and sun-bright reason, which I saw as quintessentially medieval, inseparable from their hip angulation, faded only gradually, almost imperceptibly, did not leave me all at once, did not cease communication with me from one day to the next.

“Yet the way in which I found myself increasingly alone, almost imperceptibly yet steadily, struck me as all the more threatening. And finally I was left without them. They no longer said anything to me. I no longer said anything to them. I now had nothing to say or to give to anyone, to take from anyone, and likewise there was no longer anyone to say or give anything to me, to take anything from me. I no longer reacted to anything, either for good or for ill. I was alone. I was without a reference point. I am alone. I am lost.”

The woman at his side said, more affirming than interrupting: “I, too, am lost.”

The stonemason is said to have continued speaking, in an even deeper, more resonant voice: “But I am not giving up. My chosen era, the Middle Ages, is gone, once and for all. And so I must move to another period. I must find my way to others, against whom I can measure myself without shriveling up in their presence or letting myself be hemmed in and limited by them, or letting them clip all my antennae. I shall set out to find other people, people of now and today, in whose presence I can breathe a sigh of relief when I measure myself against them: people, living people, whose presence strengthens mine, as I do theirs. Such people must exist, even in the present. They do exist. It cannot be that I am lost and done for in the present. It cannot be that nowadays people like us have no choice but to perish.”

The woman at his side: “No, we are not lost and done for.”

They say the itinerant stonemason drew a deep breath, hit the table with one of his hammers, and picked up the thread again, addressing himself particularly to the woman who had commissioned the story: “In a transitional phase I was focused exclusively on destruction, just like your brother. I used these tools here no longer for constructing, shaping, laying stone upon stone, repairing, but for smashing, tipping, toppling, ruining. With my chisel I no longer struck shapes out of stone. I struck again and again, but not forms, and it was no longer only blocks of stone before me as earlier. With the mallet I split and smashed whatever lay in my path, anything that might have been used as a building block, let alone a cornerstone or a foundation. With my masonry saw I no longer sliced roofing slates and thresholds. With my masonry bit I drilled everything but friezes and ornaments, vents or drainage holes. With my level I measured everything but level surfaces. With my acetylene torch I cut everything but steel girders. Quite a few of the piles of rubble you encountered on your way through the Sierra were my doing.”

As he spoke, the mason, so the story goes, fell to gesticulating, more and more wildly and less and less in control of his movements, and in the end he was so tangled up in his fingers, arms, and legs — the fingers of one hand jammed between his knees, one leg wrapped around the other and as if bolted to it, his second hand caught in an armpit, incapable of moving backward or forward — that he crouched there completely immobilized, tied in his own straitjacket, violently scrunched up, and with every attempt to free himself from this position merely squeezing himself more hopelessly and painfully into his self-induced jam.

And subsequently, so the story goes, the other one, the pale young woman at his side, the former magazine-story girl, took charge of this almost grotesque figure, entangled in itself like a medieval gargoyle, as follows: one after the other, she unraveled, separated, loosened, freed the various limbs of the man beside her, with astonishing effortlessness in fact, just plucking at one hand, tapping the other, patting a knee, rubbing an ankle.

And then the woman did the final untangling by blowing on him from a slight distance, that, too, without straining, very delicately, a mere puff, which reached, however, not only his face, but the entire body of the stonemason and solitary wanderer, widened his eyes and nostrils, expanded his shoulders, arched his thorax, bumped out his hips, curved his buttocks, tightened his thighs.

And then, according to the story, a first kiss was exchanged between the woman and the man, before the eyes of all the others in the midnight clay-wood inn-tent of Pedrada, in the innermost reaches of the Sierra de Gredos, a kiss from mouth to mouth, again something that had become the rarest of the rare in the particular period in which this story takes place, especially with others looking on, and, as in this case, downright festive. At this time one had to earn something like this! And the two had earned it.

And furthermore: the two kissed each other without touching in any other way. They remained seated with a space between them. And their hands were completely uninvolved. They both kept their hands motionless, wherever they happened to be. Before this the woman had taken a swallow from her paper cup. And even this drinking had been done without the assistance of her hands, merely with her lips, which she allegedly dipped into the drink, with her head bent. And the two are said not to have closed their eyes. On the contrary, as the story goes, they kept their eyes fixed on each other, without blinking.

And subsequently, in the background of the barn or hall of the Milano Real, for a moment a long-legged animal flitted past the sleeping tents, a deer? a gazelle? an ostrich (in the meantime they were being raised even up there in the mountains)? a Great Dane? And after the long kiss, qubla in Arabic, which lasted past the stroke of midnight — impossible to tell whether their tongues were involved; that was apparently superfluous — the new couple leaned back with a laugh, a soundless one, supposed to have lasted almost as long as the main thing just now. It was chiefly the stonemason, or whatever he was, who laughed, and, according to the story, it was the longest laugh of his life up to then, also one unlike any he had laughed before. (“‘Laugh,’ djahika in Arabic,” the woman who had commissioned the story dictated to the author.)

That night he, like the woman, did not speak another word. But if he had said something, it might have been this, for example: “I once spoke twenty-four languages, and now I do not speak a single one. There: the spot of sunlight deep in the underbrush, by the ruins of the wall I knocked down: my departed mother!” Or he might perhaps have said: “From now on I shall give the widest possible berth to all the people of today who are not my type, and not our type, and no good for you and me — I know that immediately, do I know it? — give the widest berth to the overwhelming majority, I know that — how do I know that? — and shall pass outside the range of their seeing and hearing and reality, but no longer slavishly and constrained by them, but rather of my own free will and with verve, strengthened by their kind of being or reality, pushing myself off from that type, moving, with the help of their tyrannical omnipresence, away into a different, at least equally promising realm of reality, into a no less real reality, and thus, full of joy and in good spirits, staying as far as possible from those others, and at the same time, thanks to them, tracing or plotting the world around its edges, arc by arc, and this will be the world, this will yield a world; and those who are not my type, not our type, and not good for you and for me, and who fill me with the most profound disgust, will thus at least have been something for us; beyond the boundaries of their world, the world of my world will begin, the genesis of the world will come into view, the worlding of our world — but what does ‘my,’ what does ‘our’ mean?”

And the woman would have said, “You wonder whether I am all dressed up this way for a man? For whom else? To be nothing more than a body, entirely body, all body, a single body. To matter. And for whom else but a man?”

And then, so the story goes, sometime after midnight, the king, emperor, the one in costume, the actor or amateur player, or whatever he was, got up from his metal drum, or whatever it was, at the end of the table, or, more precisely, was heaved to his feet by his bearers or assistants, with considerable effort, and now began to sing, no longer supported by anyone, in an ageless voice, clear and almost too high: “No more journeys! And no more flies flying into my mouth. And no more battles, either in Tunis or in Mühldorf or in Pavia, either on water or on land. And no business transactions, no money chests, no more gold and silver routes. And no more popes, and no more of that alleged community of faith, which has long since become the greatest and most brutal of all sects. And no painter, and no paintings, and no more picture galleries.

“And no more summer residences. And no rivers, no río Guadalquivir in Seville, no río Guadiana in the Sierra Morena, no more río Tormes in the Sierra de Gredos. And no more love affairs, either in Regensburg or in Lodi or in Pedrada. And no more king and no more emperor. And no more music and no more fading of music into silence. And no more olive trees with roots like rocks. And no more reek of cadavers.

“And no more Flanders and no more Brabant. And no more godforsaken, seemingly insane mother. And no more sour milk. And no more woman and no more tears. And neither Turks nor French, neither Augs-burgers nor Würzburgers nor Innsbruckers, and neither marks nor talers, neither dollars nor escudos, neither maravedi nor gulden for my songs anymore. And no more ibexes. And no more Sierra, Almanzor, Mira, or Galana. And no more apple trees. And no more wooden ladders propped against the apple trees. And no more blue pickers’ tunics on the rungs of the ladders propped against the apple trees. And no patches on the blue tunics of the pickers on the rungs of the ladders propped against the apple trees.

“And no Lord have mercy, and no lift up your hearts, and no transubstantiation, and no more go in peace. And no more children’s voices. And no more fountainheads and deltas. And no more Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, Cheyenne, Sorbs, Wends, Sufis, and Athabasques. And no more salt mines. And my lonely-hunter heart no more. And no more white angel. And no more moons in my fingernails, and no more nails on my fingers, and no more fingers on my hands. And no more sun never setting over my empire. And no more empire. And no more feral dogs. And no more dirt on my comb. And no more mountain passes and mountain taverns. And no more wild strawberries.”

The singer, so the story goes, was carried back to his tent as soon as his song ended, as if to die. And in that night the last word belonged to that guest at the table who had barely been mentioned up to then (except that he seemed to be the only one “entirely of the present,” “unmistakably of today”). He set down his cutlery — he had been the first to start eating and now was the last to finish — and said, in a voice that sounded as if it had been trained for years in front of microphones, in radio studios, or elsewhere: “To an outsider such as myself, it immediately becomes apparent that your most frequently used expressions are ‘not,’ ‘no,’ ‘neither this nor that,’ ‘not he, not she, not that, but.’ You express yourselves chiefly in negations, evoke and define yourselves and your concerns almost exclusively ex negativo, by reference to something that you and your concerns are not, or are no longer, or are on the contrary or in contrast to. To judge by the words you use, your experiences in particular consist almost entirely of things you have not experienced, or at least not in the way that would be considered experiences elsewhere. To all of you, experience often means something diametrically opposite to what is commonly called ‘experience’ elsewhere. As a result, almost all of your so-called stories consist chiefly of negations. They are the stories of things that did not happen. You did not go to war. You did not cross the tracks. No one has read today’s paper. No one fired at you. You did not see anyone throwing stones. No black smoke billowed out of any window. No one placed the noose around someone’s neck.

“What kind of happenings do you have? What kind of stories are these, without observations and without images — at least without planned, balanced, and well-observed images; without recourse to anything a contemporary audience would consider eventful; without reference to the realities, either individual or even societal — which you people either proudly avoid or about which you sanguinely keep silent — as if the rest of us, nosotros, could guess them by ourselves or could figure them out.

“Stories like yours, which primarily tell about things someone does not do, and furthermore without any illustrations, without close-ups, without the camera’s viewfinder: to the rest of us, these without a doubt simply do not count as stories. They are actually a kind of stinginess. You stint with yourselves and your experiences. Instead of plunging into life in front of the rest of us, you hurl yourselves into thin air.

“Your way of eating and drinking conforms to that. I have been observing you all evening; I am here for purposeful observation, you know, not for pointless fantasizing: you leave not a single crumb, not a scrap, and not only on your plates. You pick up the tiniest morsel that has fallen to the ground and shove it into your mouths. Not a speck on the table or on your clothes that is not scraped off by you people and licked up. You people, vosotros, lick every bowl and suck every glass to the last blob and the last drop. That is what I have observed.

“No doubt about it: you all live in a state of inexpressible deprivation. You doubtless lack most of the basic things that create social bonds between people of today and make them contemporaries of the rest of us. You convey to us the image not merely of cardsharps but of possible criminals, capable of an appalling act of violence, which you perhaps committed long ago and keep secret here: which is no doubt also the reason for your non-stories, consisting primarily of evasions, distractions, avoidances, and deflections.”

The postmidnight speaker had delivered these remarks with that unwavering, pasted-on smile for which he was known throughout the civilized world at the time of this story, known from newspapers and even more from television, the smile that viewers of the day found “simpatico,” to use one of the terms fashionable at the time: according to contemporary viewers, his lips were always drawn back in a friendly expression, which created “dimples” in his cheeks and a steady “warm glow” in his “fawn-colored” eyes, or, as others would have it, “tawny eyes.”

And while speaking he had propped his legs on the table, “not as a provocation, but to show that in spite of everything he felt at home even here among them, even in the notorious region of Petrada, and to make the others less shy.” For the same reason he had slipped in the two little words in their native language mentioned above, even though nosotros and vosotros were all the Spanish, or Iberian, or whatever, that he knew.

Now he stood up and prepared to leave, still with his tried-and-true smile. Of course he did not pay: that would presumably be taken care of by the organization by which he had allowed himself to be sent out, since early in life, as an observer and reporter, and, after missions here and there, now into the Sierra? Unlike the other supper guests, he would not be spending the night in The Red Kite but “in modest private lodgings,” in one of the infinitely smaller and less comfortably appointed tent huts with a local family, as he always did, “to be as up-close and personal as possible to the pulse of the local happenings.” And according to his fellow observers, as he made his way out of the hall, in the flickering of the lightbulbs, his “boyish freckles and chubby cheeks” and his “eternally rebellious Irish-red hair” showed all the more distinctly.

Other eyewitnesses, however, did not see him leave on foot but rather on a low-slung wheeled chassis, as if drawn by invisible spirits, while he looked straight into a camera being pulled a slight distance ahead of him, whereupon his presence in the half-barbarian mountain hamlet was beamed simultaneously to all the civilized channels. The way in which he moved along just above the ground: was that not in fact a form of being driven, pushed, and pulled, in which he bestirred neither knees nor arms nor shoulders, unlike a person walking?

And now, when he had already reached the door, and stood there for a few seconds, as if expecting the door to the clay tent structure to open automatically, a woman got up from among the crowd of those other eyewitnesses, approached him with giant steps, and, forgetting her image, her office, and her feminine dignity, gave him a kick, only one, but a powerful one, sufficient to propel the reporter through the door, which, before it closed, briefly swung out again, like the door to a saloon.

The report on his stay among the people of Pedrada that he later published all over the world claimed not to be influenced in any way by this incident. Some of the observations captured in the report are supposed to be incorporated later by the book’s heroine into the book on the loss of images and on crossing the Sierra de Gredos; but this is not yet the place for that.