Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

23

But then the new day after all. The feeder brooks once more audible. The tent crowd holding a brief farewell meeting, out of doors in the morning mountain air in front of the Milano Real of Pedrada.

Each person also drank his coffee or whatever outdoors, from porcelain cups, yogurt containers, toothbrush glasses. She, the heroine, adventurer, or vagabond, had her Blue Mountain Coffee from Jamaica with her as always, which she shared with one person or another: a rich black oily gleam, that mirrored the summit plain of the Sierra. It was wrong to be stingy with these most precious of beans: if you used too few of them, the coffee would turn out more bitter and weak than any other coffee.

No one ate. Although it was allegedly winter and, according to the thermometer, a chilly morning, no clouds of breath showed in front of people’s mouths, just as in certain films where snow and a wintry landscape are a mere backdrop; only the beverages were steaming.

Now everyone here would set out by himself, or remain on the spot, or take the early bus, already waiting in the orchard, back to the plains and the cities.

Despite the bright daylight, not a single inhabitant of Pedrada was to be seen; the tents closed up tightly, as were the gray wooden shutters on the ancient granite-block houses: yet a living, breathing stillness (in his report, the observer, sent by the World Council, or whomever, who now burst out of his observer’s tent for his morning run, five to ten times around the colony, would characterize it as “hopeless,” “unmotivated,” “apathetic,” “eccentric”).

No one spoke at first. That night of dying and being dead had apparently had a good effect on the emperador, emperor, king, or the historical reenactor playing that role — perhaps a local historian from the provinces here, in his civilian profession a savings-bank employee who thought he would gain insight into the past through this role-playing: he decided not to continue the journey in the litter; would cover on foot the rest of the way to the retreat of Charles V and I, without the real or artificial ermine cloak, together with his four colleagues from the Caja de Ahorros (= savings bank) in Piedrahita or elsewhere, who would no longer have to carry him.

The medieval stonemason and the young woman no longer on the lookout for anyone’s story but her own — never again would she blush — stood with their arms around each other, as if since they first touched one another that night they had not been a finger’s breadth or a hairsbreadth apart, when sitting, then falling down, then lying, later getting up, and now stepping outside: not a chink between these two Siamese bodies. How would it end? Well, there was enough for the stone man to do here in Pedrada (= place of stones), and her simultaneous and parallel activity could at least cause no harm.

And the terribly young couple? Overnight they had become adults, he broad-shouldered, with a suitable hat, she visibly also larger, with a proud womanly face and wider pelvis, from which her stomach already protruded a little with their second child, while in the morning light the firstborn now appeared to have grown out of his diapers, having become a year or more older during the night, now able to stand on both legs, walk, hop over one of the feeder brooks of the río Tormes; and if his mouth did not yet produce any recognizable words, his eyes were already speaking, taking in everything that happened, could have said things about the others that they themselves did not even guess or know. Soon he would board the bus with his parents and sit between them during the entire trip and remain to the end, come what might, surrounded by these parents of his.

In the moment of parting they finally spoke. A strangely animated farewell for a group that had come together by chance, and so fleetingly. How full of enthusiasm each person there seemed, for himself, for the path ahead, as well as for the others and their very different paths. And hadn’t they all been enthusiastic at one time, when? through and through, about nothing in particular, without a particular destination or adventure, simply enthusiastic, about nothing, nothing at all? When? As infants? Yes, as infants, long ago, in their time. Yes, in their time — but when was that? — hadn’t all of us new arrivals in the world presented ourselves as enthusiastic? Wasn’t there a time or a story in which everyone was born enthusiastic, with an enthusiasm meant for the long haul? But why did it seem now as though these people, coming into the world enthusiastic, the enthusiastic newborns, were the rarest of the rare? And what has become of all those who were enthusiastic in their day, those destined to remain youthful even as they aged, and all the more so, people to whom the adjective “young” applied as to no others?

But even if a hint or spirit of continuity was nowhere to be found anymore, at least there was the sporadic or episodic enthusiasm of parting. Every person thanked every other one, just like that, for nothing in particular. And each asked every other one to say hello for him to the place for which he was setting out, even if the place was unfamiliar to the person sending greetings.

She, however, knew the Yuste Monastery, several days’ journey away, on the southern side, at the foot of the Sierra, below the lowest and easiest of the passes through the mountains, the Puerto de Tornavacas, and she gave the emperador this charge: “Say hello for me to the holm oaks, to the pool in the garden, to the giant palms, and especially to the sparrows, who are so absent from the northern Sierra, on the northern side of the djebel.”—He: “Also to the mausoleum and the sarcophagus?”—She: “No.” And laying her hand on his shoulder, she stole, without his noticing, the soft tiger-striped falcon’s feather from his ermine. And each person wished the other — a seemingly efficacious wishing — what he had secretly already wished for himself. Even if the stories they had launched together would not continue — so what? at least they had been launched.

This morning hardly anything suggested that the cones of mud and wood had served as an inn overnight; no sign, either “El Milano Real” or any other. By daylight the tent resembled all the others in Pedrada, except that it was somewhat larger. And by day it was only their (approximate) tent form that set apart all the new buildings that had appeared here since her last visit from the square houses that had been here before: all through the settlement the building materials, the mud, the blocks of wood, the granite ashlar, were the same, all the roofs here consisting of broom twigs and cork-tree bark, densely layered to make them rainproof and, with their stone weights, as storm-resistant as any roofing tiles — which were completely absent, both the flat ones of the north and the curved tiles of the south, as if Pedrada, and indeed the whole Sierra, no longer belonged to a specific geographical area.

The innkeeper of the previous night had been transformed into the bus driver again, who now drove over from the orchard and waited with his Cyclopean dog in front of the main tent for the passengers. And already these were coming from all parts of the seemingly fast-asleep village, long since ready for the trip, some of them also from beyond the tents and houses, from above, from the higher and apparently empty, treeless, and uninhabited elevations, loaded down with heavy bags, hanging every which way, dragging suitcases or, a bizarre sight on the trackless slopes with the ridges in the background, pulling them along on wheels.

And hardly any of those setting out on a long journey to town were unaccompanied. Although each was leaving the Sierra by himself, he was surrounded until he boarded the bus by a swarm of near and dear (who were perhaps not relatives at all, merely “near and dear” for the purpose of keeping him company).

It was still very early. Not a soul outside, except for the dense crowd of people saying their goodbyes around the windows of the bus, which because of the throng on all sides now seemed to be standing on a square disproportionately large for this mountain village. Despite the crowd, the scene was fairly quiet. Only now and then could a louder word be heard, and for the most part people’s lips merely moved, delivering silent messages, whether inside behind the glass or outside on the square.

The driver had meanwhile left the bus and disappeared somewhere; his seat the only one not occupied. Behind the bus, the crest of the mountain, with a cloud bank to the south, the bank stalled, a so-called barrier cloud — as one of the companions explained to the person he was accompanying, as if to distract him from their parting, as the latter stood hesitantly on the bus step.

These were special farewells, bearing no resemblance to the cheerful goodbyes among the members of the fortuitous group. The necessity of parting forever, or for an undetermined length of time, now hung over them, after they had been so close, which here in their Sierra had always been precarious. These people inside and outside of the bus, taking final leave of each other only with their eyes, wide open, without winking or blinking, had survived something together in this place, something so terrifying and incomprehensible that it surpassed any local epidemics, famines, or natural disasters, something every moment of which would remain indelibly imprinted on their collective memory; memory? the present, memory as a present that would continue to rage. And after a shared survival like this, the necessity of parting was all the more painful: from now on, this person here and that person there would have to survive alone, bitterly alone with his remembering, with this experience constantly before his eyes.

The bus driver’s return. The door closing. Pulling out. The accompanying friends rapidly disappearing. The square cleared. Along with the haze of bitterness, the square remaining filled with a powerful, lingering sense of intimacy or — equally heartrending — affection, which she, the fruit and feather thief, the last person left on the square, thought she could taste with her tongue and palate. “Really? Tasting a feeling?”—“Yes, feelings as sustenance! And what sustenance! It just depends on the feeling.” Above the square, on the mountain crest far in the background, still the thick wall of the barrier cloud. And an apple had been lying on the roof of the bus.

Later, during her visit to the author in his village in La Mancha, she proposed another title for their book: The Liturgy of Preservation. Even very early in her life, it had pained her to leave a place that meant something to her. Not so much her village or one of the other places where she had spent time, but some way station or other, where, for a brief moment, “life had appeared” (didn’t that phrase occur in one of the Gospels?), or where for a moment one had felt a breath of something, if only from a wind-tossed tree outside the window.

She had experienced pain, not for herself, the one who now had to leave the place, but for the place itself, “in person.” She sensed, she thought, the place needed her and her attention, her scrutiny, her involvement in and appreciation for as many particulars as possible — something that went beyond recording, posting, and adding. That was how it should be, for the place deserved recognition, as well as gratitude; that was fitting (“Do people still say that?”—the author).

And thus every time she set out from such a “coach stage,” she felt she must — observe again her smile at this “I must”—record the place visually, one look at a time and at every step. Wherever she went, or, as now, stood still, she impressed upon herself one spot and one thing (such as a person) after another; she noted the number of steps leading up to a front door here, the creaking of a wooden staircase there; took in the color of a rock, the shape of a door handle, the smell from a sewer grating, and so on: a consistent process despite the marked differences among the objects “entrusted” to her, which lent a coherence and a rhythm to the way station she was about to leave, a process she referred to as the “liturgy of preservation,” and which she wanted the author to translate into images and sentences, into the coherence and rhythms of prose, so that it might endure as long as possible. “Yes, I am seeking whatever eternity is possible for human beings,” she told the author, who replied, “And I want to be transitory,” whereupon she could be heard to say, “That is not a difference or a contradiction.”

Accordingly, that morning she surveyed Pedrada, the stone-casting settlement. She must not make a sound; must not wake anyone. Downriver on the Tormes, mill wheels were turning, new ones, which had nothing to do with the mills from previous centuries, in ruins now, overgrown with brush. Electrical pylons marched in from the opening of the valley, far off to the west, where the town of El Barco de Ávila lay, making their way up here, likewise new, as if installed overnight.

On the other side of the village stood a telephone booth, already partway out into the snow-dotted rocky wilderness, empty, with the rising sun shining through it, showing the impressions of the users’ hair, forehead, and fingers on the glass. The feeder brooks still had no fish, as did the first stretch of the river, where they converged — but past a certain spot, right after the first bridge, suddenly the lengthwise flashing of hundreds of trout through the water, tiny little finned bodies, but masses of them, water-colored, almost transparent, and not a trout in these dense swarms would have passed an invisible line on its way upstream, even if it was swimming ahead of the others, as if this line straight across the río Tormes barricaded its source area, reserved for frogs and dragonflies and off-limits to any kind of fish: their sudden hesitation there, hovering for a while motionless on the riverbed and then slowly turning and whipping back downstream.

At last she had bestirred herself and was zigzagging through the late-sleepers’ village, treading as lightly as possible. The notion that the items included in such a liturgy of preservation would also constitute a sort of letter, addressed to someone or other who was already waiting for it far away, and at the very moment when she was still engaged here in looking and listening, the letter was in the hands of its recipient; actually writing a letter was thus superfluous.

But could one really use the term “liturgy” for this kind of organizing, connecting, coordinating, rhythmicizing, setting in motion, loading the givens with the energy to reach a distant vanishing point? Wasn’t it more a sort of strategy? A strategy that was the very essence of the professional activity she had allegedly given up? Wasn’t it rather the case that even here, in the high Sierra, after she had, by her own admission, voluntarily withdrawn from the contemporary banking world, she could not resist looking for the “value” in objects, the element of value that could not be left to gather dust but had to be put into circulation, in combination with as many other such elements as possible, into constant, fruitful circulation?

Liturgy of preservation? Liturgy of accrual, with objects as capital? “That is true,” she replied, “insofar as on that morning in Pedrada it disturbed me to see that the only bank branch there, a very small one established at one time by my bank, had been converted into a sheep shed, and also chiefly because that bank building was perhaps one of the most remarkable in the entire world: the last cottage in the village and at the highest point, directly behind it ravines and the jungle of broom, hardly even a building, simply a hollow boulder used for money transactions, the one and only banking facility in a natural cavern: a block of granite equipped with a counter and a vault, the stone head or stone brain, so to speak, above stony Pedrada, the most remote branch of the twenty-story plate-glass headquarters situated by the mouth of the two northwestern rivers.

“And it is also true that I am looking for the capital in the givens. And I should like never to give up this search. And on that morning in Pedrada, too, I was looking for the one bronze dewdrop among the other water-clear ones. But there was no dew. Instead I found, here and there, baked into the granite outcroppings, a little chip of mica, which for moments in the sun became dark bronze among all the others that merely glittered. And from a number of tent-houses hung black mourning bunting, faded and torn, many years old. And several of those leaving the village and those accompanying them had worn similarly quite faded mourning bands on their arms.”

The morning’s seeing and listening, her liturgy of preservation, was then interrupted by a sound such as she had never heard in the Sierra or in any village, not even in the village of her childhood: a siren. It sounded less like an alarm than like a factory whistle. And a few blinks later the mountainous horizon was filled with a dull roar, and a heavy, dark airplane approached, very slowly for an aircraft, so close to the ground that it almost grazed the rounded cliff tops with its fat fuselage, despite the even whirring of its four propellers — she had always had an eye for numbers, seeing the number of objects along with the objects themselves — the wings teetering constantly in the air, hardly a rope ladder’s length above the roofs of the settlement, which almost seemed to sway sympathetically.

The airplane, blackish, and appearing from the ground, and probably from the same altitude as well, to consist of a thick, opaque metal envelope, more massive and powerful than even the largest of the centuries-old granite buildings below, did not remain alone. It was followed by a twelve-plane squadron — she involuntarily counted again. One warplane (they did not have to be bombers) after the other crossed the horizon, a ridge of the Sierra facing the sunrise, which thus took on some of the character of a rampart, and each plane then wobbled over the village, almost within hand’s reach, and seeming to set Pedrada in motion.

But none of the twelve followed the one ahead. Each flew breathtakingly close to the ground — as was intended — but then chose its own course over the houses and tents, having appeared from the same point on the horizon. And this course was painstakingly plotted: no spot, no bark-covered roof, no chimney, no satellite dish, no fruit stand — no corner in Pedrada without one — no root cellar, no structure occupied in any way, was to remain untouched and undarkened by “the rest of us” and the shadows of our air-supreme force (which, according to the external observer in his report, first and foremost gave the old and the new settlers a sense of being protected).

Before people even had a chance to get a good look, the morning flyover ended. The twelfth plane had flown its course over the village, then had gone shooting off to the common point on the next horizon, of which there was one after the other in the Sierra, and had promptly been swallowed up by it, along with the hearing-loss-like sudden cessation of the dull roar; only an echo, as if from a dozen distant waterfalls; or were those actual cascades?

With the siren and the flyover, the village of Pedrada in the remotest and innermost Sierra had finally emerged from its slumber, which, as time passed, had come to resemble hibernation (as if the residents had turned overnight into dormice). Village? Quite a few large iron shutters, not very village-like, were raised. A garbage truck — and not only one — thundered along, and here and there on the paved roads urban street sweepers turned up. One man stepping out of a tent-house was wearing a necktie, and he did not remain the only one. Convoys of delivery vans were forging their way across the farflung mountain region, almost the only vehicles in the area, except for the very similar ones belonging to hunters. Other than in size, their vans differed from the delivery vans only in that their contents — if there were any — remained out of sight (barely even a trace of blood in back on a loading door). The goods being brought in and shipped out remained in equilibrium, and among the goods that were, so to speak, exported, local crops and products — venison, fish, honey, fruit — did not particularly predominate, and among the goods imported, those unique to cities or industrial areas similarly tended to be in the minority.

Now, although around Pedrada there were droves and droves of rather small white mountain pigs running around loose, whole truckloads of different pigs were arriving, those enormous black-bristled ones with black hooves, fattened up with acorns from the plains of Extremadura to produce that famous flavorful meat, now destined to be processed — winter, pig-slaughtering time — in the Sierra factory up here.

And, likewise, the square in front of the local oil press, to whose existence nothing had previously called attention, was unexpectedly darkened for a while, in a way that differed from the shadow of the air squadron, by the trucks uninterruptedly rolling up, filled to the top with blue-black olives from the “sunny sides” of the Sierra: winter, olive-harvest time. And among the goods — the usual herbs, cheese wheels, juniper berries, rowanberry schnapps, etc. — which moved in the opposite direction, out to the rest of the country — were equal numbers of refrigerators, washing machines, flashlights, knives.

In this respect, too, the place had become quite different since her last visit. And there was a local school again (all the previous times it had been closed, as if for good). The odd thing was that the teachers seemed to be in the majority — until she realized that these adults, although without book bags on their backs, were going to school just like the children, pupils among pupils. Such things occurred otherwise only in nightmares. But this was nothing of the sort.

Had all of Pedrada in fact lain in a deep slumber until now? The not infrequent columns of smoke from the stone chimneys had spoken against such an assumption, and in particular the silence, less dozing than breathing. And then when the grilles, the curtains, the doors to the stores — every third tent-house was a store, a stand, a business — and the cafés opened — every ninth tent an eatery — an image presented itself to her such as she had never seen or experienced before, either in the Sierra de Gredos or anywhere else in the world: in all the interior spaces of the village, the day had long since been under way or going full blast.

The activities inside the stores were not just beginning or being prepared for. Nowhere were the goings-on in these places taking place in expectation of the first morning customers: the hairdresser, for instance, was not straightening a pile of magazines (he was long since busy cutting hair); the jeweler was not taking items out of the safe and arranging them in his window (they were already there); the restaurant managers and waiters were not removing chairs from the tables (which were already set); the butchers were not spreading sawdust on the floor (it was already there, in many cases showing fresh footprints).

Wherever one looked, the daily routine was not just starting but rather was going on as before; not a new beginning but a continuation. Before this, after the opening of curtains and doors, turning out of lights, raising of shutters, opening of barriers, there had indeed been a moment when the stores and businesses of Pedrada had been not empty but at a standstill, which, if the paused images had not revealed an almost imperceptible swaying and quivering, one might have taken for paralysis or doll-like rigidity. The hairdresser and the woman under the dryer formed an almost motionless ensemble, the comb and scissors in the hairdresser’s hands suspended in midair, halfway to their destination. The already numerous diners in the small eating places, as if having a first coffee break, might here and there have their fingers wrapped around glasses and cups, but one did not see a single one of them drinking. The bicycle dealer, kneeling by a child’s bicycle, seemed to pause in the middle of pumping up the tire, next to him his customer, the child, with its hand motionless on the saddle.

The impression that this barely perceptible moment, when events were at a standstill, had been preceded by moons and entire years of the same. And that now, let us say, “ten years later,” all at once, let us say, at the boom of a gong or a blast on a whistle, the interrupted game resumed, as if nothing had happened, no multi-year interruption, not even a momentary one.

Wherever one looked in the village, suddenly a steady bustle of activity, as if it had never been interrupted, only much more audible now, a veritable racket — a great variety of sounds (reminiscent, in turn, of the coppersmiths’ street in Cairo, or elsewhere). The rushing, hissing, bubbling of coffee machines. The bone-hacking of butchers. Now even the snipping of the hairdresser’s scissors could be heard, the magazine-page-turning of the waiting customers, the thread-biting in the tailor’s shop.

And although these continued activities and busynesses on that morning high in the Sierra did not yield any story for the tabloids, one saw all the people in the village engaged in them telling their own stories through their activities. That something could tell its story in this fashion, without anything added, was a sign that in this place things were all right again, or still, something by no means to be taken for granted, but rather, today, or from time immemorial, well-nigh miraculous.