Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

25

She had crossed the Sierra de Gredos quite often, in every season, taking all the various passes, including passes that still bore that name but had been out of use for generations, either for the driving of cattle from north to south, the transhumancia, or for transports of any kind, and had meanwhile become almost impassable, even on foot.

And now the plan called for her to set out on another crossing, which she wished or wanted to be her last — did she really wish that? — by way of the so-called Puerto de Candeleda, a route from before the war, on today’s map merely a name — but wasn’t a name something, at least? — and recognizable by the complete absence of any indication of a road or even a footpath down the steep southern flank of the Sierra directly after the “pass,” more like a random spot up on the ridge.

And at the same time she was confident that by evening she would be down in Candeleda, at the foot of the southern flank, over fifteen hundred meters below the out-of-service pass named after the small town that did not belong to any meseta or plateau but, rather, lay on the edge of a lowland, surrounded by groves of palms, oranges, olives, and who knew what else. (She instructed the author to insert words like “confidence” and “confident” into her story, from way station to way station, from section to section, but to avoid expressions for “hope,” including the Spanish esperanza and even the Arabic hamal—“I do not want this word, and I will not learn it — any more than the word for ‘guilt,’ hithm!”—so she had learned these words after all?)

So in spite of the short winter day she was confident? Yes. Time and again, especially in the morning, as now, in the mountains, one (one?) was seized by the scruff of one’s neck, so to speak (so to speak?), by a confidence that was all the more powerful the more baseless and senseless it was, and hoisted into the air. And although she did not have much time, it seemed to her as if she had plenty of time. It seemed to her? She made up her mind again to have time, and it was so. “Plenty of time!” that was also the farewell used by the people of Pedrada — the farewell used by all those moving out of the region. And she heard another farewell, one introduced since the last time she had passed through, astonishing in light of what had happened in the region since then: “Have no fear!”

Everywhere in the spaces between the granite houses and the clay-and-wood tents, the ridgeline could be seen, and somewhere was the pass or crossing. No, every point was a possible crossing. And it seemed close by. It was a clear day. Or was it? (More than once, just such clear and promising days in the Sierra de Gredos had ended with a life-threatening storm or, if the clear weather persisted, with a no less dangerous loss of all sense of direction or a close call, perhaps simply the result of a slight misstep.)

In spite of the many snowy and icy patches, it was a day outside of any season, windless, and warm from the mountain sun. And it seemed to one as if it would be that way forever. When one placed one’s hand on a granite outcropping, on the yellow lichen there, or reached into a tuft of grass by a spring or one of the broom thickets, a quiet warmth, a heating warmth, penetrated one’s body to the bone, such as one had never felt so comfortingly in an actual calendrical summer — in the middle of the purported Sierra winter, a fullness of summery warmth experienced previously at most in a dream. “It is summer!”—and as one said that, it became summer, even if it was perhaps still late winter.

And at the same time the adventuress was of course thoroughly aware not of some specific danger or other but of the unidentifiable and yet by no means less serious danger. This danger simply had to be there, as already described, not that she particularly wanted to look for it. One could not manage without it, at least from time to time. This danger, whether connected with the Sierra or with something else, was the be-all and end-all. Without it, no story. Danger and the story were necessities — and again she saw herself in this respect as anything but alone.

Did anyone else intend to cross the Sierra de Gredos from north to south on foot that day? She posed the question not to the people of Pedrada, who were visibly relieved to be staying down below in the settlement, and understandably had no intention of undertaking long journeys into the unknown, but to one of the Internet screens in the village — it goes without saying that there were locations in the village for them, as for almost everything. No answer, or rather yes, there was one, from someone who wanted to make his way up into the Caucasus that same day, to the Sierra de Armenia there. So no one else was heading for the Puerto de Candeleda? Terrific. Gusto: for walking, climbing, tracking, cutting a trail.

And it occurred to her then that she still lacked something important for the expedition: bread. In the whole of Pedrada she had not come upon a single bakery. How could that be, with the new mills downriver on the Tormes? But there had to be a panadería, and hastening up and down the yurt alleys and around corners, she said this word to herself, first under her breath, then out loud, as an exclamation, or merely “Bread!” “¡Pan!” and finally, involuntarily, in Arabic, “Chubs”: and almost in the same breath she smelled from around the corner the aroma of freshly baked bread, which she then followed — to be sure, it was still quite a distance to the bakery, halfway across the village. The precincts and geography of the bread aroma. Cozy oven fragrance in the midst of the far-flung, deserted rocky mountains.

The bakery was the smallest of the hundred shops in Pedrada, installed in a hut of worked stone that had perhaps once been a rabbit shed. And now it was one of the few buildings there (the tents were also “buildings,” of course) with a glass door and strings of metal beads in front of the opening. And as she entered, the glass door reflected for a moment her vanished child. A glance over her shoulder: no one there.

After the girl’s first disappearance, when they had found each other on the island in the Atlantic, after months of searching, near Los Llanos de Aridane, she, the mother, was then received with everything “from soup to nuts” by her daughter in the hut where she had taken refuge, no, her home, and she had been served, among other things, “homemade bread.” And now, buying bread in the Sierra bakery, she asked after the girl she had lost track of for the second time. Except that she did not manage to describe a single feature of the young woman, her own flesh and blood, not a single one. Yet she had an image of her, and such a distinct one. Name? What is the child’s name?

And at that she realized that she no longer even knew her name; in the course of their long separation, it had escaped her! So what was the vanished girl’s name? Only a moment ago she had felt strong enough to bring a mill wheel to a stop with one finger, and the next moment—

The liturgy of preservation continued as she left the settlement behind and climbed toward the summit plain of the Sierra. For as she departed, she was convinced she was seeing the Pedrada region for the last time. Because she, the visitor, would not be around much longer? Because she would never pass this way again, would never set out again for anywhere? No. It seemed to her rather that in the fairly near future the entire tent- or yurt-town, together with the village’s old stone houses, would vanish from the face of the earth, perhaps already after the snowmelt, perhaps with the emergence of the summery swarms of flies.

Back home in the riverport city she would stock up on images from all the possible channels, images of the clean-swept mountain and feeder-brook landscape, aerial photographs of leveled ground, where even the granite outcroppings had been flattened; the former tent sites, like the footprints of the houses, recognizable only from fragmentary dark patches here and there in the churned-up ground, portions of circles and rectangles, as from a plane one can see in a plowed field below the darker lines among the otherwise evenly light-colored furrows that indicate where buildings once stood, decades, centuries, millennia earlier, and were cleared away or sank into the ground, and the meandering courses of brooks and rivers that may have disappeared, dried up, or flowed in entirely different directions as much as a million years ago: thus — and certainly worried about herself, “Do not worry!”—she took leave of Pedrada.

A pregnant little dog with piglike bristles (“dog,” kalb in Arabic) and a belly whose teats dragged on the sand and stones accompanied her well beyond the upper limits of the town and then even much farther, deep into the mountain steppe; at times remained standing some distance behind her, as if to turn back, but was then beside her again, gazing up expectantly.

And then who had claimed that in the Pedrada region even the children had forgotten how to play? Not that she saw any of them playing — school was still in session — or any proper toys, but at every step of the way, far up into the wilderness, she saw signs of play. While still in the village, where the bedrock had been eroded, forming sandy patches, she saw rows of little craters, like sand and dust baths for small birds, sparrows? (So there were sparrows after all at this elevation? Yes. And as previously mentioned: it is not necessary to avoid a contradiction here and there in her story.) And these bathing hollows, as was clearly recognizable from the markings, were alternately used by the children, or by whom else? for shooting marbles. Likewise she came upon signs of ninepin games, with wooden sticks set up as the pins, now fallen every which way, and among them, serving as the bowling balls, more or less round fieldstones.

“Or did I merely imagine these Sierra children’s games? Did my Sorbian-Arab village interpose its image again? Or, even more likely, my long-ago film set in the Middle Ages, in which the children had to play typical medieval games, with marbles and ninepins?”

The only person she really saw playing, on an athletic field carved out of a wasteland of stones, actually the mere suggestion of one, was the observer from abroad (she passed him unobserved): he was playing basketball by himself, at his knees a cluster of quite small children, not yet old enough for school. The basket, with mere shreds of a net, was bolted to a cliff, high up, and the reporter repeatedly jumped up to it with the ball for a “slam dunk.” He was playing in the sweat of his brow, cheering himself and the children on. They were supposed to join in and get the ball away from him. They were supposed to participate. They were supposed to play, please, please. He almost pleaded with them to play with him. But it was true after all, they did not play. They did not want to play — they were incapable of playing. All these children of Pedrada knew how to do was look on.

And it was even unclear whether they were watching him or something else altogether, for instance a trail of ants crossing the rocks or an invisible joust taking place behind him, fought with lances and swords by two men on horseback, their faces hidden in their visors; who said that the remote playing field there could not just as well have been the lists? Wasn’t this the place and the time to approach the solitary player, so that he could accompany her, at least for part of the way? “Not here yet, not now.”

In the telephone booth, up there way beyond the outskirts of Pedrada, surrounded by brambles and honeysuckle vines that formed a sort of lane, she dialed her own number, that of her property on the edge of the riverport city. She had entered the booth without any particular intention, desire, or decision, and had picked up the receiver. In this region there was still, or permanently, no service for her hand telephone.

The booth was far from everything, she later told the author, but besides, it was the one from which she had always called her daughter when crossing the Sierra de Gredos on foot; usually her daughter had stayed home alone (the girl was independent at an early age, or at least wanted to be). “Everything all right?”—“Yes.”—“Not too lonely?”—“No, no.” And so on. And now? On the first ring, the telephone was picked up, and she had her child’s voice in her ear.

And now she also knew her name; it popped out, her only word. But then the voice said, “I am not your daughter. I am the boy from next door, the son of your neighbor in the porter’s lodge. I am taking care of your house until you get back.”

And it remained the voice of her vanished child nonetheless, and it continued: “It is my wish that you not be too lonely on your journey. Here everything is all right. I have set the alarm and turned up the heat. The house is warm. The morning sun is shining in. Ah, behind the quinces there I can see the idiot of the outskirts going by. He is rowing with his arms and whistling. And now a train is blowing its whistle. And a few ship’s horns are blaring from down on the two rivers, several, many! When are you coming back? You have been gone so long already, such a long time. At night your admirer still circles the property. And each time he leaves a letter in the box for you. I have burned them all, but read them first and committed them to memory — in case you want to hear them. I am not reading a newspaper anymore — no longer need to. Ah, and now it is starting to snow, even though the sun is shining. One letter had no return address; I did not read it. The stamp had mountain peaks, the Sierra de Gredos. No one has asked for you. A hedgehog is going through the orchard right now, slaloming past the trees; shouldn’t he be hibernating? A ladder has tipped over. An outdoor table has collapsed. A statue, the one in back by the beech, is missing its head. Your bed looks used. The toys in Salma’s or Lubna’s room are lying all over the place. Otherwise everything is fine. Ah, now the fireplace screen is rattling. I have made a fire. And the oak roots in the forest that were ripped out of the ground by the storm are more and more matted, and hard as rock.”

She had hung up without a word and had continued on up the mountainside, with her daughter’s voice in her ear, even if it had broken now and then like that of a teenage boy whose voice was changing — with nothing but the voice, not a moment’s thought for the news it had imparted. It was still the voice of a child, which, although it articulated every word carefully, spoke as if only in vowels. The vowels shaped every one of the words, and the sentences, too.

In this sense, that voice had had nothing Arabic about it, a language in which even children’s speech consisted almost entirely of hissing, fricative, throaty, coughing, and choking sounds? Or maybe not? The vowels carried the words, transported them, breathed soul into them, lent them wings. They had come from afar and at the same time from an abundant source and had set more than just her hearing to vibrating. These gently wafting vowels, forming an acoustic garland, created in the listener a sound chamber that made him able to reply in the same trusting, candid tone, and so on, back and forth, forth and back.

In the mountain telephone booth she had not answered, yet the voice continued to resonate in her long afterward, so she now made up for that. As she climbed, she spun around, and now gave her replies: “Here it is warm, too. Or does it only seem that way to me? Ah, a lizard, look. Show yourself. Do not hide. You do not know how to hide, my child. You never knew how to hide. When you played hide-and-seek with the others, you were always the one who could be seen right away, even more clearly than before the game began. You can play anything else and turn anything into a game, but not hiding. Ah, look, the first eagle. And oh my, here the wild boars have rooted up the grass. Ahoy!”

In the immortal old books that had preceded her own story, this stretch would probably have been one of those that were described thus: “He [the hero, for it could only have been a ‘he’?] walked, rode, sailed [so and so many] miles and hours without encountering anything worth telling [or even ‘worthy of telling’].”

But of course her story was supposed to take place in a time when it was less the purely external surprising, astonishing, and unusual happenings that provided material — a time when mere actions as a source for the plot seemed to have been exhausted long since — than the astonishing and unusual juxtapositions of external and internal, the interactions and indeed the resonances, thus also appropriate to the time or era of her story, or even “lighting the way” (like the rose in the old poem)? Or lighting her way home, or around the corner?

And accordingly she then emphasized in a conversation with her designated author that the aforementioned stretch was an episode worthy of telling, even if nothing happened other than her climbing up the mountain, the wafting of the air, and the blueing of the sky.

And again her wrath, almost an outburst of rage, and this from her, the financial manager, the expert on money and numbers, when the author had the audacity to ask how and with what she, traveling without cash, had paid for the hotel and her provisions that morning in Pedrada, etc.: No: that was of no relevance or reality when it came to their book, at least in this part. “That is not it. That is not how it is.” The question was “completely idiotic” and gave reason to fear that he, the author, had not yet understood what she had in mind for the book. “Or are you merely trying to provoke me?” There were already hundreds of articles about her, crammed with banking and money matters. “Don’t tell me, and us, every little thing.”

She actually did ride part of the way, bareback on a Sierra horse, long-legged, gleaming brownish-black, which was waiting, as if just for her, under an overhanging cliff, as was the rounded rock on the ground from which she swung herself onto the horse’s back; both ready for her as if for the repetition of a scene in her old film.

She could have ridden up to the ridges (the precipitous southern slopes were too much for even a native horse); the animal carried her as if she were nothing, or as if she were no one. But very soon she dismounted from its rather narrow back and continued her journey on foot. And again, when she turned and looked back from higher up, the horse was standing under an overhanging rock, but now with others, of the same color, in a row, as if at an abandoned hack stand; on each horse sat an even darker Sierra jackdaw, picking something out of the horse’s coat and mane and teeth and nostrils.

And still, as had been the case ever since her departure from the settlement, pairs of cattle horns stared at her here and there from amid the broom or escoba bushes (otherwise there was hardly any taller vegetation, only scattered scrub pines, most of them long since dead and stripped of their bark); the horns were very wide and curved, almost always ending in a pointed, straight section, and occasionally one of the powerful, always anthracite-black bodies would loom up from amid the tangle of broom branches in the omnipresent chest-high thicket, the cow’s or bull’s eyes seemingly aimed and guided on both sides by the horns’ dagger tips; this time more Ávila cattle than usual were spending the winter high in the Sierra.

She walked without stopping, without changing pace; without in any way deviating from her pace. She did not stop even when she passed the corpses of the stonemason and the woman from Friuli or Lefkadia, lying side by side at a spot in the tundra, with gunshot wounds in their scalps, in their crowns, their eyes still open, hardly broken, in which she saw herself recognized, unlike in the ultramarinos shop earlier, and again this dead couple stood in for her parents, killed in an accident.

During earlier crossings of the Sierra de Gredos, whenever she came upon an animal, especially in open patches, she had headed straight for it, not in a hurry but speeding up a little, until she stood body to body with it, for a moment, “el trance,” as if grown together with it — in the same way in which she rendered potential human attackers defenseless by leaving them no surface to attack — and then briskly continued in her chosen direction, even if it might be the wrong direction at first.

With her walking, with her manner of walking, she protected herself, made herself invulnerable to attack. True, it was a kind of loafing. But because it had a rhythm, it had value. And furthermore, so she imagined, or was almost certain, she also protected others by walking, and by walking as she was walking now. With her walk and her walking now she was protecting her distant, absent brother. And in particular she was protecting him in this fashion from himself.

By walking this way through the Sierra, his sister was doing her part to make sure that he, who had previously committed violent acts only against objects, was restrained from his first outbreak of violence against a human being. Once he crossed this threshold, which had been calling to him or even drawing him magnetically for a long time—“ever since I became aware [his words] of my mother- and fatherlessness”—there would be no turning back. Her brother would then take aim at more and more people, at the whole human race, at life. As he had long fantasized to himself and also to her, he would run amok in a way precisely calculated and planned, and intended for the duration, with that treacherous glow in the corners of his eyes and mouth that women in particular saw as a kind of magical smile. And precisely on this day, at this hour, after another of his nocturnal wanderings, this time in an uninterrupted circle around an encampment of occupation troops in his chosen country, his ultimate (she to the author: “Occasionally it is all right to use a term of non-Germanic origin”) crossing of the line was imminent — his first murderous blow.

The air around her as she headed up the mountain was jolted, ah, how much more sharply and harshly than by the bulls’ horns, by her brother’s “Now I’m going to do it! Now! Now! Now!” And then all that helped was her walking. She walked. She walked with everything she had, with her soles, her kneecaps, her thighs, her vagina (yes), her stomach, her shoulders, with her mouth, nose, and eyes, and with all of them at once; all these things together had to walk, and had to walk together.

She walked with everything at her disposal, her thoughts, her memory, her desire, her will, her intentions. She walked exactly as she worked in her “business,” or had worked. Her way of walking, as a form of averting, bringing to safety, calming, clarifying, gaining perspective, preparing the ground and plowing, went beyond mere walking. Of course it was the movement of someone who had time, much free time, but simultaneously it was a form of action, which, because it includes, according to Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Schumpeter, or also Marx, Lenin, and Kardelj, that special kind of political, moral, and aesthetic action, can render unnecessary all those other overspecialized and thus destructive forms of action (no examples here): walking as comprehensive action — as (topic) stewardship (“of course only in Utopia”): as another invisible hand.

She walked with everything she encountered and came upon, with everything she saw, tasted, heard, and smelled.

And in particular she walked with the images, the images that flew to her from distant times and places in the course of her steady progress up the mountainside, which provided zones of protection and safety and prospects for the future entirely different from memories, thoughts, feelings, and sensory impressions.

These kinds of images assured continuity, and something above and beyond that. They made magic. With this walking, she imagined, and was almost certain, she was saving not only her brother, not only her own blood relative. Wasn’t that one of the reasons for her walking? Ah, keep everything in proportion, otherwise we are lost. She had not been lost for a long time, and the next time it happened, it would be for good. One false step and it would become evident how cut off one was, from everything and everyone.

Walking, healing, organizing, managing: magical walking? So had the foreign woman already been infected by the natives’ atavism? And her repeated deep sighs in the course of her seemingly so light-footed walking? Tahallul, rejoicing; tanassul, sighing.

Dear observer, first of all that need not be a contradiction, and second, this sighing is perhaps merely a family and tribal trait, “typically Sorbian-Oriental,” passed down to the present day from long, long ago. And when she asked the author later whether it wasn’t the same with him during long, steady walks, especially when he was crossing the mountains — all her experiences could only be universal ones — he replied, no, he was familiar with the concept of assuring continuity, keeping alive, lending a hand, in short, of “managing”—instead of setting out to write he actually used the term “setting out to manage” in his mind — solely from his own “doings” now and then, writing down, writing up, writing on, but that was no form of certainty, not even “approximately”—“or was it?”

One was walking up the mountain. (“One?”—One.) Walking was taking place. Walking will have taken place. Like the falcon: when one looked for it, it was no longer, yet still, in the spot where it had been when it had screeched. “Falcon, kite, drop a feather for me.” And it dropped one.

She had distributed the weight she was carrying in such a way that instead of slowing or hindering her walking it gave her a rhythm, like set sails. Thus, carrying in front her knapsack, mochila, michlatuz-zahr, which, as long ago with women travelers, was reminiscent of a bolster, almohada, michada, with the bare necessities and a bit more stuffed into it, and with other bulky items hooked onto her belt, and this thing or that swinging around her hips, she sailed up the Sierra, a solitary seafarer.

On earlier crossings she had sometimes set out without any baggage, with nothing in her hands, nothing to carry, thinking she would be freer and less encumbered that way. But she had soon noticed that the walking, climbing, scrambling, was not any easier as a result but rather the opposite. One needed, one had to have on one’s body, properly balanced loads, but especially the kind that balanced the bearer. They kept one alert, not as snakes did, but similarly, as one groped one’s way through the pathless, trackless waste, alert from top to toe, and thus prevented the sort of precipitous actions that could be fatal, especially to one walking alone; they constituted a sort of armor of mindfulness, guided one and blazed a trail on the middle path, the only viable one, at least in the Sierra, between gravity and free flight.

“Never again,” she had then sworn to herself, “will I hike over the Sierra de Gredos without something suitable on my back and on my tummy”—how could she call her flat, muscular stomach a “tummy”?!

She, the solitary seafarer, all alone far and wide. Astonishing, almost incomprehensible, that there were no others scaling these sky-high heights at the same time, perhaps nicely dispersed across the northern flanks that sloped gently skyward. What in the world was everyone doing? How could they stand moping around at home, down in the lowlands, in those gloomy cities that made them narrow-minded (to say nothing of the contemporary “villages”)? How did it happen that she never ran into a single one of her thousand and three enemies in these remote, lonely, sheltered, quiet, and expansive spaces that generated harmony, but only in places where, with the best will in the world, one could not help remaining enemies?

Why didn’t her mortal enemy (for she had one, or imagined one, as almost everyone did at the time of her story) suddenly appear around a granite cliff, three thousand six hundred miles from Wall Street and the Ginza, and the two of them look at each other wide-eyed, laugh, for the moment completely forgetting or losing track of the fact that they were mortal enemies, and realize they had to hang on to the moment or do something constructive with it?

But it was not actually true that on this day she was walking through the Sierra alone. Soon she saw ahead of her human footprints in the stretches of granite sand that often simulated a path through the broom and juniper thicket, and in the increasingly frequent patches of snow: fresh tracks, as if from that very morning, and not single ones but many, then innumerable ones, close together and behind each other and finally overlapping. Except that she did not get to see the people they belonged to, although she could feel, smell, and taste their presence — did not see them for such a long time that she forgot them again.

One was walking. Walking was taking place. The inimitable sound of the granite sand underfoot, less a crunching than a grinding and rustling of the coarse particles, which at the same time massaged one’s feet: the most prominent walking sound on the Iberian peninsula — even if one might encounter a similar sound during a crossing of the Alps, or in the Andes, or, for all she cared, in the Himalayas (“The highest peaks are not for me,” akin to: “We have no business going into outer space”).

More and more stretches bare of all vegetation, without a bush, without a blade of grass, even without those lichens, an ornamental smear of the most varied yellows, greens, and reds that resembled geographical maps and were also named after them: “geography lichens”; yet also no wastelands of scree and stones, but often glass-smooth, slightly rounded rocky plateaus, polished long ago by the Sierra glaciers, slippery smooth not only where they were snow-covered but just as much in the dry patches.

The glowing sky reflected in what looked like subterranean boats not yet completely surfaced and shot through with alabaster-white veins of quartz. Crossing these gentle, stadium-size rocky mounds as if one were all dressed up, even if one had not put on anything special for the journey (or had one?).

And nevertheless closest to the blue of the sky above the ridge, either lightning blue or in the next moment almost outer-space black, whenever one took in the sky not nakedly and directly but glimpsed through a shrub or a tree — so now and then there still was a tree, if only a dwarf one — a blue, merely as background. Merely?

Every long story, she later told the author, has a certain color, a predominant color. And the color she wanted for their book — just as its sound should be the steps of a solitary person walking through the granite sand of the otherwise silent, still Sierra — was that sky-blue shining intermittently through the mountain brush. It was the blue found in the background of medieval stained-glass windows, with the twigs, branches, evergreen leaves, needles, berries (juniper berries or rowanberries, for instance), fruit capsules (rose hips, for instance), and pods (of broom) as the figures against this background. Smoke-colored sky-blue. For the smoke color lent objects their sharpest contours.

No, when the blue glowed and shimmered through the slits, gaps, and holes in the Sierra vegetation, filling the smallest openings and being simply blue and still, it resembled the blue of work clothes hung out to dry as far as the eye could see. She knew that blue from her ancestral village, and not only from there: the blue of her neighbors’ work pants and jackets, seen through the foliage of bushes and fruit trees. And upon seeing that blue one thought simultaneously of “work” and “festivity.” The blue behind the leaves presented the image of work clothes that could also serve as party clothes, just as they were, without having to be altered in any fashion. It was the blue of patches, but also the blue of brides’ trains and scarves and flags — flags with this background-blue as their only color. It looked like cloth, as no other blue and no other color did; it had nothing heavenly or ethereal about it, but rather hung, stood, rested, waited for one in back there as a material, as something material.

Despite its being winter, some thickets of broom emitted a summery vanilla scent as one slipped through them. When one had painfully forced one’s way between two boulders, one’s hands had a singed smell, as after rubbing flints together. When we bit into the withered and blackened rowanberries, which hung in bunches from bare trees that were hardly taller than we were, seemingly frozen and long since dried out, our mouths, parched from the climb, were filled with the taste of the fresh berries and even their juice, both bitter as can be, but how refreshing! and promptly lengthening our stride — the rowanberries’ taste so evocative of midsummer that we saw before us the unique light red, the rowanberry red, of newly ripened bunches, in a way that we had never encountered during an actual summer, different from a mere daydream red.

Involuntarily we stuffed our pockets with the surprisingly weighty — but not “heavy”—clumps of berries. We would need them later, especially on the descent into the southern lowland, where, winter or not, we would feel hotter and hotter; as if for a weeklong expedition — one never knew — at the little island of trees amid the sea of cliffs and snow, we supplemented our provisions (the author suggested using the word “provender” occasionally, even if this term was no longer in use in his far-off linguistic homeland).

And now as we plucked more and more bunches of fruit, with the practiced motions of those who had been fruit thieves from childhood on, and finally stood on tiptoe to reach the clusters (yes, more “clusters” than “berries”), we finally understood why the common name for these berries was “bird berries”: for concealed behind them, completely hidden from view, perched the small birds so rare in the Sierra — mountain titmice, wrens, robins — behind the clusters but also in them, inconspicuously and silently pecking at them — and when you stood on tiptoe and reached for the berries, they whooshed out of the little rowan tree, not all at once, but each one just as its berries were about to be picked, each of them scolding and shrieking as the rightful owner of the bird-berry bunch, robbed by you of its due.

As the story went, there was once a time when the hunters of the Sierra, not those hunters whose story remains to be told here, even planted rowan trees hither and yon in the mountain wilderness, in order to lure the small birds that were prized as delicacies, and at any rate the rowan trees that often stand alone, as if artificially planted, in the Sierra de Gredos have a second name, along with “bird berry” also “hunter ash.” Bitter-as-can-be berries or clusters? Yes, bitter as can be. Not bitter as gall.

But as other fruits first tasted sweet and only later manifested their bitterness, deep within, a bitterness that caused the person eating them to spit them out suddenly, a bitterness that not only turned his stomach but “shook him up” (a village expression?), the rowanberries by contrast revealed to the palate, after the initial off-putting bitterness, a taste that was more than mere “sweetness”: an inwardness (did that exist, an “inward taste”?) all the more inward because the initial bitterness remained present in it. Ah, ow, oh — only no “ugh!”—the rowanberries in the rocky clefts of the Sierra de Gredos. (Was it appropriate for her, the heroine, to stand on tiptoe? Yes.)