Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

22

She stayed up all night.

The others were sleeping in their tent compartments at the back of the big tent, or at least were lying there in their beds. She cleared the table as usual, washed up, put things in order, stacked the dishes. Then she sat alone for a while at the bare table — the lightbulbs out at last; no more roaring of the generators — in a shimmer of light that came from the mica cliffs outside.

Later she sat in her tent, almost without light, and later still she made the rounds of the other tents, going from one to the other. She kept watch. But it is also possible that as she sat there, her eyes open, she occasionally dozed off.

And all night long, whether she was awake or dozing for a moment, a pain was gnawing inside her (“an ache,” she told the author), which, if it were to continue, would break her heart. Not only her more or less random entourage, but all of Pedrada, the entire population of the innermost Sierra, was asleep or lying in bed.

At one point she felt cold, in a way that otherwise only a person abandoned by God and the world can feel cold. She was freezing, wretchedly, from inside out. Had she been abandoned by God and the world? “No.” Little by little, the inhabitants of the village came to mind. Although she had seen them for only a few seconds, upon the bus’s nighttime arrival, on the way to the parking lot in the orchard and to the Milano Real, an image had remained with her. And as she thought of the images, she felt warm again.

She had been in Pedrada several times before. Each time there had been some small change or other. But this time almost everything seemed new, and not merely the tent colony at the confluence of the various tributaries of the Tormes. In the crowd of nocturnal roamers outdoors, the natives were clearly in the minority. For one thing, most of them, as quasi-mountain-dwellers, were unaccustomed to a corso and had long since withdrawn into the few ancestral stone houses. And then, since her last sojourn here, the last stop before any crossing of the Sierra, the population had evidently increased considerably. A mighty influx had occurred.

And the new residents were apparently all still up and about, despite the lateness of the hour, outside the tents, which in general had long since ceased to be provisional housing. And what was special about all this bustle: though elbow to elbow, cheek by jowl with the others, each person seemed entirely alone. This movement also no longer had anything in common with a corso. Not that those walking side by side and those coming toward them paid each other no mind: it was a given that for all the individuals, there were no others, or, rather, he or she, that particular man or this particular woman, existed for and mattered to no one but him- or herself (and even that was questionable).

Each person in the crowd was making his own circuit? — and at the same time followed attentively in the tracks of the person just ahead of him; paid attention to the space between those next to him and behind him. Every one of them must have moved to Pedrada from a different place, an entirely different place. And every one of them was afraid of all the others who had moved there from entirely different places. Here he was far more foreign to them than they to him. He could not allow himself, or could not allow himself yet, to be intimate with any of them, no matter whom.

And so each person, when it happened, as it repeatedly did, that someone made eye contact, would instantly look away from the other, as if he had just done something improper, something that he, of all people, had no right to do. So when one person bumped into another, as was inevitable with all the shuffling and shoving, each jerked back as if a crime had been committed, by him, one of the untouchables. Yet no one in the hordes of people who had moved to Pedrada since her last time here resembled in the slightest a pariah, or a refugee, or an expellee. Each had come voluntarily to this area, and also to the new groups of people here, and more than merely voluntarily: of his own free will; had made the decision almost confidently or proudly.

The tents were no refugee tents. (So what was the source of the mutual timidity?) The garment of each of the new arrivals was not merely appropriate, without defects, neither too new nor threadbare, but also seemingly made to measure, his alone, so that it was less his suit that seemed elegant than the person. And they were all dressed very differently, by no means in the latest styles, their clothes suggesting ever so subtly, almost imperceptibly, all the parts of the world from which they might have set out for this region: America, Africa, Arabia, Israel, China, India, Russia, but neither were they wearing the traditional dress or costumes of those places.

And although each of them moved through the mountain village completely alone, by himself, stumbling, shyly brushing past the others, and although each of them looked so unique, in his clothing as well as his hair color, the form of his eyes and skull, and although each of them obviously also thought of himself as infinitely alone and unbridgeably different from all the others, nonetheless in that crowd they all expressed the same thing, both in the gestures and grimaces with which one and all talked to themselves or to some invisible, absent third person, and in their actual subdued, constant conversations with themselves, which often coincided word for word — for by now they all spoke the Sierra vernacular — with the murmuring of those in front of and behind them: “Never to be alone again, never to lock a door behind oneself,” and so on. So in the image these newcomers generated they belonged together as much as any of the established residents. (But how did they get themselves into the image?)

Yet they also came together now and then outside of the image: it happened whenever something like a transaction, an offer, an inquiry, an exchange, a purchase developed between two of them, serendipitously, as they were pushing past each other: they would then stand still for a moment, and although they hardly opened their mouths to negotiate, for that moment things were pretty lively between the seller and the buyer. And only then the actual exchanging, step by step, of wares and money (for anything but cash was out of the question here): a relieved smile on both sides, without reservations and suspicion, openhearted and at the same time with a reserved ceremoniousness, with almost more pleasure at handing over the money than at receiving it, mutual agreement and affection brought about by the money, the bills and coins, which made her recall why she, of all people, with her village childhood, had once wanted to study the manifestations — rather than the so-called laws — of commerce and economic activity.

And she, too, wanted to lay in cash for the following day and the rest of the journey. Was the way in which the new people of Pedrada had revealed themselves to her that night in the Sierra a fact, or was it only her gaze that made them appear so? Only? Only her gaze? A gaze could create (and destroy, and declare null and void). The gaze, hers — that was how she wanted it to be for the book — created something.

She kept watch until daybreak. Or did she merely stay awake? No, she kept watch. She kept watch over the whole area, over those who were sleeping there. Although she remained alone, she felt as though someone were watching with her and keeping her company, invisible but no less palpable, all night long.

For a while she also read again, in the glow of her flashlight, in her vanished daughter’s Arabic book. “It is all right to read,” she told herself, “all right to read on.” And then, in the middle of reading: “She is alive. My child is alive! And tomorrow I will inquire about her here. And I will receive information.”

She also watched over herself. If she were to lie down — this was her thought — she would die then and there.

Not until she made her rounds through the hostel did she enter the sleeping tent of the youthful parents. The infant was sleeping quietly between the two of them. They were turned toward him, and each had placed a hand on him, one on top of the other. At the same time they were talking to the sleeping baby, their eyes closed, an almost incomprehensible murmuring and muttering that merged into a stammered duet, without a single distinct word, and finally into a twofold whimpering, as when in a dream one is supposed to speak a magic word and cannot get it out, no matter how one tries.

The one who was sleeping deeply and peacefully was the infant. His sleeping penetrated the dream lamentations of his adolescent parents and finally silenced them. The entire tent filled with the breathing of the three sleepers, peaceful at last, and a scent wafted forth, only from the tiny child, the niño, the tifl (without any effort on her part the Arabic word came to her): the child’s unique, intensified sleep scent. A perfume unlike any that had been produced and marketed anywhere. What a coup that would be. How such a perfume would stimulate the senses — she told herself — sharpening all the senses into one; into the most sensual of the sensual.

She kept watch out of love, or the urge or thirst for love, and that was why, if she lay down now, she would not be able to avoid expiring at that very moment? How great, how enormous was her longing, almost always — no, not that “almost” again. “Is my longing too great for my time? Is my longing too great for all time?”—Where was the one she loved? Why did that wretch not realize of his own accord where she was, and come looking for her? Why was that no-good wandering far away along the main road, his trousers eternally flapping in the breeze, not away from her, but also not “back this way”? “Clueless idiot! Phony adventurer? Lazybones!” And the sounds of the tributaries of the río Tormes rushed into the sleeping tent, each of them audible discretely, as an undertone, overtone, background tone, with only the dominant missing; or was it missing?

In the next tent-room—“Guess its color!” she said at the end of the journey to the author — lay her brother, lay the stonemason or building-smasher, or whatever he was, and the Mexican or Armenian woman, or whatever she was, the one who did not want to collect any more strangers’ stories. They lay in each other’s arms, utterly motionless, even their half-open eyes motionless. No sound either, not a peep from these two, holding their breath and completely united, motionlessly united, and that for a long, long time.

Instead, sounds from outside, most noticeable again those of the mountain torrents, which here in the love tent sounded as though they were coming from above; as if they were all cascading with a pounding noise right over the tent peak, rushing down the sides in all directions, streaming around the tent with a crackling sound, and sounds from much farther off entered as well, from the mountains, from the summit plain, the peak “cirque”—the local expression — way up in the Sierra, of the Mira, of the Galana, of the Galayos, of the Almanzor: a rockslide there; the crossing of a ridge by a heavy-bodied ibex, the fabled animal of the Sierra de Gredos, actually not extinct, not even rare, bursting with life for the moment — in the villages there statues of the ibex instead of famous human historical figures — a dull sound that carried far; the crash of stags’ antlers colliding, as if in a dream; a sound now like a whip, then like pizzicato on a gigantic bass string, caused by the expanding and contracting of the ice layer on the lake up there, on the arena floor, so to speak, of the cirque at the peak, called La Laguna Grande de Gredos — each sound of this sort, also those from the most distant background, drawn into the play or the sleep of the couple here in the tent, its walls serving to amplify and deepen each of the far-off spatial sounds, a membrane being made to resonate and vibrate — here, where the two bodies lie interlocked even more soundlessly, as if listening; and with each sound, no matter how reedy, penetrating and resonating from the nocturnal Sierra like a gong, a shared (“Is the word ‘conjoint’ still in use?”), an increasing shuddering, “or, more precisely, shudder going through them,” a boundless one, in the last analysis (was that expression still in use?). And will these two who once went astray have wept as a twosome then, silently?

Next she looked in on the litter-bearers, or whatever they were just then, of the abdicated emperor, or whatever he was just then, the four of them sleeping in the same tent-room, one in a child’s bed, one on the floor. They were all lying on their backs, probably because they were so exhausted from hauling their burden for days. And they were all sleeping in their clothes. Although they seemed to be wearing costumes from a bygone century, their faces, all pointing toward the roof, were thoroughly of the present time, part of this night; as only human faces, and particularly faces plunged so deeply and soundly into sleep, could be of the current time, the present, the embodied, tangible present.

Laila, night; bil-lail, at night; tonight, hadjihil-laila; present, hadjir; now, al-aana; face, wadj. Each of these words, spoken out loud, was a breath that brought the four sleepers closer to her and confirmed their presence. Now! — and she leaned over each one in turn and stroked their faces, swollen from exhaustion — not merely the lips, nose, and eyes beneath the visibly heavy lids swollen, but also their temples and their ears, even the earlobes. She kneaded the swellings without waking even one of the four. One bearer had a checkered skin, almost a chessboard pattern. A second had had a nosebleed before falling asleep — his nostrils darkly encrusted — and a handkerchief lay next to him, white, with the blood spots inscribed on it, little blackish-red, slightly indented circles evenly distributed over the cloth (where he had stuck one corner after the other into his bleeding nostril), the circles forming a pattern on the white surface like those on a die.

She stood then, and stood and stood, lost in contemplation of the die pattern. It reminded her of nothing and of everything. At this sight she felt her guilt, now free, however, of a guilty conscience, not as a burden, weighing on her, but rather as something unavoidable, and at the same time the state of being guilty as justified. There must be guilt! “Must”—and she laughed, or so it seemed to her. And it also seemed to her as if the nosebleed pattern were her own. And she considered stealing that handkerchief from the sleeper.

As a child, even as an adolescent in her Sorbian or Oriental village, she had been a chronic thief, though only of fruit — other thefts repelled her — and only of apples and pears. She had raided all her neighbors’ land, from the first moment of ripening. And even later, wherever she happened to be in the world, she could never pass a tree without stealing at least one piece of fruit. That would remain the case all her life! and she then in all seriousness suggested to the author that a possible title for their book might be The Fruit Thief.

Handkerchief theft: it did not go beyond the thought. Her hand, already reaching for the item, stopped a span before it (“span”: hadn’t that word gone out of use long ago?). She stared and stared at the reddish-black dots, more than just six, more than twice as many. Instead, as the story goes, another hand now approached her hesitating one, that of the sleeper, who was perhaps only feigning sleep?

Yet this stranger’s hand likewise stopped halfway: two hands, motionless in the air, without the hint of a tremor, in the glow of a flashlight. She, the fruit thief, was untouchable. She, too, an untouchable? Yes. Except that it was she who projected the sense that no one could touch her, no one anymore, no one yet. Her untouchableness was active. She made herself this way. It was like the film in which she had played the heroine: she herself did not fight, but whenever someone came storming at her, she held out a lance, a sword, or a stick in front of her, and that alone stopped or felled the other person, kept anyone who was not the right person at bay.

And if the right one happened to come along (that was how it should be in a film), the long-lost man? Obviously. But his appearing, his merely showing himself, and their standing opposite one another, face-to-face, that had already been the final scene in the film: “All my longing”—that was the final sentence she had to speak in her role—“had only one object: to have you there in front of me again and to see you again at long last.”

The story goes that during that night in Pedrada the last tent she entered was that of the abdicated world ruler, “over whose empire (thanks to the addition of the empires of the exterminated American Indians) the sun never set,” and so on. The emperor or king, or her business partner or accomplice, or the one on the prowl for what had once been history, was lying in his ermine, stretched out on a bed as if on a bier, and seemed to be dead, more dead than any living being can appear, dead as only a dead person can seem.

The tent bed was the broadest imaginable, and she lay down beside him; stretched out like him. Except that although she lay there as still as he did, completely still, she did not seem dead at all. No greater contrast than between these two bodies, stretched out side by side, a hairsbreadth apart, yet not touching anywhere.

To the degree that the man had become emaciated, presenting an image of progressive wasting, the woman at his side now blossomed. As his cheeks shrank to the last shreds of skin still attached to his facial bones, sunken like those of a mummy, the woman’s cheeks swelled and took on the sheen of a freshly plucked apple, polished with a cloth. All of her forms expanded, grew taut, stretched. Altogether she acquired volume, grew larger and firmer, and at the same time became heavy and heavier — warmly heavy, beautifully heavy. While his forehead shriveled, acquiring creases and cracks “like the varnish on an old painting,” his eyes sucked in by their sockets, his lips drawn back over his teeth (which would never bite again), his legs transformed into cold sticks, she experienced, right there beside him, a generalized swelling, one which “in contrast to the four sleeping vassals had nothing at all to do with any kind of exhaustion.”

Her thighs, next to the wretched male quasi-skeleton, rose, curved, and filled out, as did her breasts; her mouth, the reverse of the man’s cadaver-like one, stood slightly open, showing the tip of her tongue, “the smile of the flesh and the woman victorious”; and above them the woman’s eyes now opened as wide as possible, with a gleam despite their blackness “that represented the triumph of life and survival, the triumph heightened by the man lying there next to her on the tent bed, so waxy and wan, from head to toe, body and soul, in his ermine. And how in that moment, during the night, this night, her hair gleamed, came loose, fell over the head of the bed, spread over the pillow and the bolsters, snaking toward the bald, deader-than-dead skull of her neighbor, of that witness to her aliveness, all the sweeter now, in this night!” In a film one would have seen the two of them from above, from the dome of the tent chamber, first in a long shot, then in a close-up.

In the course of her life she had become a ruler, for better or worse. “And this sort of ruler,” she then told the author, “is something I do not want to be anymore.” But the realm in which she had always been eager to reign was that of the sleepers, with her as the only one still awake, as during that night in Pedrada. From early childhood on, she had had the notion that sleepers were not bad people. Even evildoers and unkind people, she had thought as a child, and still thought, were harmless and peaceable when they slept, and not only for the moment, but for the entire period of sleep; by making use of their sleep, and in consideration of their sleep, one could certainly discover them as peace-loving, well-intentioned, indeed childlike folk.

Sleepers, she imagined, embodied their true being. And the true being of every individual, she had always thought, and still thought today, was good! This goodness came to light in a sleeper and could be studied. That was an area of study that had not yet been “exploited,” something like “dormant capital.” This notion, that all people, yes, all, when asleep became childlike and were good, and in the process embodied and even prefigured the best of all possible worlds, had perhaps been, she thought, one of the keys to her power over others: in the confrontations, indeed struggles, with even her presumably most ferocious adversaries, she had pictured them as sleepers, and that had at least contributed to turning one opponent or another into a partner and accomplice.

The author countered by asking how it happened, then, that she had incurred so much hostility, and he added that in his eyes, becoming “childlike” in sleep, and in general, did not at all mean being a good person, or an unsuspecting person, or a pure person, at least not in his experience of “contemporary children”; and then he told her that at one time he had had an opinion of sleepers not so different from her own. But over the years he had noticed, and specifically in himself, that in sleep the momentary surges of hate he experienced while awake, likewise the outbursts of anger and hostility, had not fallen silent as in his earlier years but had erupted even more forcefully.

And by now, he said, evil raged in him even more furiously at night, while he was sleeping, than during the day, when he had tried-and-true techniques for shooing it away whenever it showed its face: lacking any such technique as a sleeper — no matter how much he practiced before closing his eyes — he sometimes roared and bared his teeth, or did so at least in his dreams, all night long at someone he did not know, or darted into a crowd of strangers brandishing a knife, thus embodying only the worst of all possible worlds and in the end feeling nothing but relief at waking up. “It seems to me that today we sleepers are to be feared. Steer clear of sleepers, even those who seem peaceful and quiet! You no sooner bend over them than they will jump up and stab you.”

She was keeping watch. Was she keeping watch? She sat up. She stood up. She walked up and down inside the main tent. Not a sound from the Sierra. Even the tributaries of the río Tormes had fallen silent, as if switched off, or as if they no longer reached her ears.

In her early days back there in the riverport city, at night she had heard every train, no matter how distant, and every steamer’s whistle blowing at night — and after a few months, after a few years, nothing.

So she had been in the innermost reaches of the Sierra that long already? Eyes wide open, for true dreaming! (“Avoid the word ‘true,’” she dictated to the author, “instead use ‘comprehensive.’”) So eyes wide open for comprehensive dreaming. It was the last hour of the night, and as so often she had the notion that a final decision was about to be made, something good or something terrible, a decision affecting not her alone but indeed the entire planet. It was also the hour when the earth always became most perceptible to her as a planet, a newborn one — dependent on its solar system and yet alone in the universe, as alone as anything can be, vulnerable, perilously vulnerable: precisely in this hour it would tip, not, as usual, toward day but into so-called eternal night. Decision? Turning point? Eyes open. Among the constellations of the northern hemisphere — Orion, the Pleiades, the Great Bear — the Southern Cross, actually not visible in these parts, inserted itself, as if gently slipped in.

That snake, no longer than her forearm, as narrow as her little finger, patterned in yellow and black like a salamander, which she had encountered during one of her previous crossings of the Sierra de Gredos, when she stumbled yet again in the trackless wilderness without being able to brake herself, at this moment slithered away in a leisurely fashion — no raising of its head or darting of its tongue at her — and, as she tumbled downhill, let her slide by in the scree, stepped aside (“Can one say of a snake that it stepped?”) ahead of her, leisurely and gracefully.

Poisonous though it was, the snake had not frightened her when she fell toward it: that moment with the viper had even been a helpful one during that crazy hike through the Sierra: with the help of the snake she had achieved equanimity where previously she had been almost too cocksure, also hasty and not always mindful while walking or beating her way forward, and from the viper moment on, she maintained her composure, step after step, even if later she briefly lost her footing time and again. She had borrowed from her snake the rhythm she needed to wend her way out of the rocky maze, which, when one found oneself in it, sometimes seemed to offer no escape. And long after the crossing she drew on or called up the image of the snake to stay on top of certain situations, or simply to remain focused and to follow through on something, intensely and calmly, not allowing herself to be deflected from her course, yet concentrating entirely on the moment, on the now, now, now …

And once again from far, far away in the eastern village the image came to her of herself, the older sister, pushing the baby carriage with her summer-naked brother in it, still a nursling (nursing at whose breasts now, after the accidental death of their mother?), and losing her grip on the carriage, which plunged off the path and tipped over the bank, into the jungle-like thicket of tall stinging nettles there, and again she plunged after the vanished brother-bundle into the dark-green, hairy nettle flames.

And once more she plucked at the unknown love of her life, lying facedown in the damp steppe grass, then stepped over his body, again and again, back and forth, back and forth, and asked him why he was so afraid that she would suck out his blood.

And on her estate, the former stagecoach relay station, on the edge of the riverport city, long since left behind by her, sparks from horseshoes pierced the darkness, the piles of pots in the kitchen shifted, the quinces, the kwite, the dunje, the safardzali, rolled among the piles of laundry, no letter lay on the bare table, no one played with the toys set up in her vanished child’s nursery.

And out here, among the dozens of brooks, rose thousands of mossy mounds, apparent islands, the turbari, softer than soft, which, when someone stepped on them, slowly twisted and sank, now, now, into the depths, into the bogginess, into the bog.

And the author in his village in La Mancha, in the chamber with the narrow cot, against the windowless wall, he, too, on his stomach, his hand over his eyes in his sleep, as if the night were not yet dark enough for him, him of all people.

“I have nothing to do with banking anymore, at least not as it is today,” she told him later. “And yet I am preoccupied with the idea of founding a new kind of bank — an image bank, a worldwide one, for the exchange, use, and investment of all my, your, and our images—” But when the author urged her to expand upon her project a little, as so often, she broke off her flight of fancy when it had hardly got off the ground.