Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

27

Not that the great depression, or basin, or bowl, below the uppermost rocky crest was thickly settled. And yet, on what was for now Ablaha’s final crossing, it appeared to be full of people. And that impression did not stem merely from the fact that during her previous times up/down there in Hondareda not a soul had crossed her path, or at most one to three hermits.

Altogether, this place presented fundamentally different numerical conditions, or, to put it another way, perceptions of quantity. A scant dozen figures, moving about or merely expelling visible — at long last visible — puffs of breath in the otherwise motionless stony expanse at her feet, made the impression of being “numerous.”

Earlier she had received a similar impression from seeing the mountain goats in this high-altitude depression: even when it was only a single pair, grazing at a distance from one another, the peculiar nature of the location made it appear to her like a sizable flock. Or: whenever a pair of moths fluttered around each other, it looked like a whole swarm. Even the perception of space as one gazed down toward the floor of this supersized stadium, as well as around at the slopes or tiers, was unusual. The body of water at the bottom was at one moment a mere puddle, at the next a good-size lake. The dimensions of the lone building one encountered before the Puerto de Candeleda shifted between those of a vast mountain hotel, a half-collapsed little shelter, or a toolshed on the edge of the southerly access road (or was it nothing but a former glacial trough, full of light-colored scree?). And were those swaths of snow or trails of spilled flour?

She climbed down, down, down, for an hour? for two? for half a day? and yet had hardly come any closer to the first of the rock dwellings, which had at first seemed no farther away than a hop, skip, and a jump, or an ibex’s leap. Along with the confusing — confusing? no — numerical conditions in this Hondareda went measures of distance that at first seemed unconventional, then somewhat amusing, and finally familiar from long ago, becoming, the longer one was exposed to them, just as clear and self-explanatory as the commonly used meters, kilometers, miles, or, if you will, “leguas” or “versts.” As in earlier tales, she literally and figuratively — the path was heading downhill again, steeply — saw before her, after the treeless stretch, a dwarf conifer at a distance of “a stone’s throw,” then only a “chamois’s leap,” and then one member of the observation team, strangers to the area, at “crossbow-shot distance.”

A while later, she again had in her field of vision down below King Charles V / Emperor Charles I, or the man playing or replaying him, making his way without his litter and bearers, alone, hopping “over sticks and stones” with no sign of his gout, despite his almost sixty years, also with no signs of his king- or emperorship, his mouth open “as wide as a barn door,” as when he was a child and stood there “as if to catch Spanish flies,” at what distance from her? perhaps in “paper-airplane range.” And the abandoned litter tipped over among the broom branches, how far away? Approximately a “spear’s toss,” no, “a bowshot” away. So does this make it a tale from an earlier time, too? No, from now (and now, and now).

The observer dispatched from the outside world to the new settlers’ region of Hondareda — who had just jumped out of the barely landed helicopter down below, along with several others of his ilk — noted, however, in his later report that in fact it appeared that up here people had completely taken leave of the present, by even a few gloomy degrees more decisively than in Pedrada, halfway up; a regression was at work here that set them back not merely by decades but into the far-distant past, by centuries, perhaps millennia, actually an “atavism of an atavism.”

And his report bore the heading “The Has-Beens, or” (like contemporary headline-writers for newspapers and advertisements, he had a proclivity for verbal paradoxes and wordplay): “The Mountain Castaways.”

What was accurate in his report, or whatever his testymonial (pun!) was — which is not to say that it was “true”—was that the closer to the bottom of the depression, with its lake, the people there lived or “resided,” the more “down and out” they appeared. Observers, and not only the observation teams flown in, could not escape the impression that of the mixtures and crosses of all the human races (if that word was still appropriate), the ugliest and most profoundly neglected, as well as most savagely, unsalvageably, and hopelessly battered representatives, individually or in pairs, had dragged themselves to this spot in the high Sierra and had tumbled headfirst into this enormous, rocky, prehistoric glacial pit.

Yes, that was correct: the figures in the settlement down there at the bottom corresponded to the image one had, although one should know better, of humans from prehistoric times. Were they even human beings like us, today, in the present? Did they even possess consciousness, a mental awareness as sharp and alert as ours, and our richly developed modern emotional life? Or wasn’t the sight that met our eyes at the bottom of the depression actually something we had shaken off once and for all, a deposit, the “dregs”?—even the observer would probably have been appalled at such an expression?

Yet it was only from the threshold of the dwellings down there in the valley that the people of Hondareda appeared this way to her. (Yes, it was a valley, with meadows along the outflow of the lake, and a stretch of forest, although the trees were hardly as tall as a man, along one section of the lakeshore.)

Once she had arrived and entered the settlement down there, the people became recognizable as close relatives of the unmistakably contemporary young people she had seen all over the steep slopes: their parents? More likely their grandparents, and not old at all, as well as uncles and aunts, all of whom had something foster-parent-like about them.

And if the goings-on, the doings among those dwellings, did seem odd for this day and age — again the observer had observed accurately — and were not entirely up-to-date, this hardly indicated that they had “turned their back on the present.”

It must be conceded that along with, or in addition to, the unusual surface and spatial conditions in Hondareda, something like a different kind of time was in effect. Yet it did not prevail or hold sway, but rather accompanied and undergirded normal time, as a melody and a rhythm — like everywhere else, when a person did not know what time it was by the clock, the next person would know.

The presence of a secondary type of time simply came from the fact that with every few steps down into the granite basin one encountered a different microclimate, a wind that was wintry, then warmer and vernally mild, then hot and summery, suddenly bitter cold again for a bit, until down at the bottom all these climate zones and winds were jumbled together.

And she acknowledged later that the reporter was right to some extent — when the two of them, since he, too, was out there all alone, crossed each other’s paths at some unspecified time in the wilderness beyond his observation post, close to the Candeleda Pass, and fell into conversation: it was not completely inaccurate to call the Hondareda population the “has-beens.”

The very ambiguity of the term has something to recommend it. Didn’t each of the new settlers remind one of an athlete whom an opposing player had sidelined once and for all, while this opponent had long since gone away, vanished, was no longer there to be challenged, continuing to play somewhere else? As if the has-been were not even benched but merely left shaking his fist impotently in the air?

But the inhabitants of Hondareda, as she urged the outside observer to consider at the end of her stay there, appeared to be has-beens even more, and infinitely more lastingly, in a different respect: as if of their own accord and free will they had decided, in rank and file (they who never lined up anywhere), not to play anymore, or at least not to play games in which one played, either openly or surreptitiously, primarily against another person or persons — not to play even a single one of those games known as “grown-up games.”

“So that means voluntarily renouncing all games with winners and losers, and certainly all games of annihilation? Forever? Such games are played out for good down in the pit?” (A playful question on the part of her partner in conversation.)

Her response: “Played out for the time being, in this period of transition, until perhaps, no, necessarily, a new and entirely different kind of play crops up. In this transitional period at least, your has-beens have decided to cultivate the greatest possible seriousness, each in his dealings with himself and likewise with his fellow settlers — which by no means manifests itself — why did you not see it that way as well? — in gravity but rather in a special gracefulness (‘Latinate words’). Where you may have observed, or rather wanted to observe, wild shaking of fists in the air, someone else might have noticed lunging and hopping steps, of a sort seen nowhere else, or maybe that peculiar clumsiness of someone dedicated to total seriousness, but what a lovely clumsiness, not all that different from floating.”

A question from her opponent: “The clumsy seriousness of the has-beens and castaways, in which the rudiments and elements of a new form of play can be discerned?”

She: “That is right. Yes. To be discerned and ferreted out. And there is another way, a third way, to read your ‘has-beens’: apparently they have lost all the images, ideas, ideals, rituals, dreams, laws, and, finally, also the first and last images that made it possible for them to picture a world, communal life on the planet, and prefigured it for them, prescribed it, lent it a rhythm, or perhaps merely feigned or conjured it up. And being stranded in this fashion is by no means voluntary. The loss of images is something that befell the people of Hondareda. The images, laws, rhythms, and so on that give the world meaning were violently destroyed for them, for each of them in his seemingly inherited place, by all sorts of external events — war, the death of loved ones, betrayal, crime, including crimes they committed themselves, and so on — generally at one blow.

“From one moment to the next, something ceased to mean anything at all to them: the image or the idea, for instance, that the Olympic flame is carried every four or however many years across the continents to the site of the next games, or the previously always valid rhythmic and predictable image of belonging to a country, a culture, even a people; or the images of Mars transmitted to Earth — and these are only the most harmless and tolerable losses of images. All the others — and the loss of images is total for those who found their way to Hondareda, or rather washed up there — are far more grave, infinitely more grave! A person stricken with such a loss can think only one thought: endgame! It is all up with me and with the world. Except that those who are affected, instead of drowning or hanging themselves or running amok against the rest of the world, have made their way here.

“To find a new image? Among this horde of castaways high in the mountains? To which you also belong? When you speak of the loss of images, are you speaking of yourself?”

While she, the adventurer, and he, the transcontinental observer, were thus engaged in conversation, they were standing, by now on the other side of the meanwhile legendary “Great Depression of Hondareda,” on an almost glass-smooth granite outcropping in the midst of the mountain wilderness, far from the colony down below, but also far from the newly graded Candeleda Pass road.

It was not unusual for her to deviate from the path on her crossing of the Sierra. For him, on the other hand, such a deviation was almost unheard of. This was the first time during his stay here that he had been thrust into an area devoid of human beings. At first he ventured only a few steps from the path, then a few more, and finally, without having made a conscious decision, he was already so far from his fellow observers that they, together with their top-volume communication and other devices, ended up out of his earshot, and even sooner out of his sight.

He was drawn more and more forcefully off the beaten track, and eventually he no longer hesitated to give in to the pull or undertow. He even hastened away from the others, no longer pulled but going of his own accord. And what did “off the beaten track” mean? How could a place to which he was going of his own accord, on his own recognizance, be off the beaten track?

And then, in what resembled the “eagle’s solitude,” as the area through which he was walking felt to him, alone beneath the blue, nearly black sky — he had unexpectedly come upon this other human being. Even before he so much as registered that it was a woman, the woman, he realized that he and this other person were acquainted with each other, and not in a good way. In the place where they had met previously, the two of them, if not declared enemies, had crossed swords.

But how? And where? And when? The reporter — no, at this hour and in this part of the world he was no longer that, nor was he an “observer” anymore — could not for the life of him remember, and from the moment he first caught sight of the other person there in this remote area beyond Hondareda-Comarca, it no longer mattered. To his immense astonishment, the moment he became aware of a second person, obviously out there roaming around as freely as he was, something inside him took a great leap, a joyful one, toward this fellow walker: it did not matter now how she had once crossed swords with him!

That he then contained his joy, and in their exchange continued to play the observer’s role, at least for a while, was another story — but it, too, no longer mattered to him, now that he was with this other person, who made him whole here in this half-lost condition.

So what did matter to him? For instance, that she had fulfilled a wish of his, of which he had not even been aware earlier: the wish to meet, in a remote place, as far as possible from the usual everyday and current happenings, someone he had once known all too well, or known in a bad sense, even in mortal enmity, appearing now as nothing more than a face, and thus to speak face-to-face as he had never spoken with anyone before; for instance, to experience in the flesh that the hostilities and dislikes of daily life were perhaps merely evil illusions, but all the more potent, despite being “neither conclusive nor inclusive” (his playful wording).

Mere wishful thinking? Yes. But how can one really object to wishful thinking? the observer asked himself, while he continued for the moment to play the role of the field researcher and reporter in his conversation with this former enemy, the lovely vagabond, or whatever she was, there on the glassy rock, surrounded by brush, scree, and ice: Hasn’t precisely my unconscious wishful thinking become awareness and possibility, which means I can, I should, I may make it a reality, as is perhaps the case with no other way of thinking? I may? I should? It is up to me.

To be sure, and this was not to be denied, that first moment of catching sight of his adversary up here in this remote spot had also created an acute conflict: on the one hand, there was that leap of joy inside him toward the other person, kept secret until now but irrepressible — but on the rebound, no, simultaneously with that leap or reconciliatory urge, another impulse shot through the observer there in this alien Sierra territory — to clear that repellent figure out of the way — to kill her — destroy her — this was his chance!

And the other person, too, that was certain, had the same impulse in the first moment, was conflicted as he was: Jumping for joy or (a play on words) about to jump into a life-or-death duel?

And nonetheless, during that conversation on the stone outcropping, with both of them just playing at arguing, his amazement when in the part quoted above (“When you speak of the loss of images, are you speaking of yourself?”) the mountain vagabond seized him, the official outside observer, by his ponytail — some of his colleagues on the team also wore their hair tied back this way — and hacked it off, lickety-split, with her pocketknife and tossed it into the stony waste.

And it is this action by which he recognizes the woman: she was the one who gave him a kick the previous evening, or a few weeks ago, or when had that been? Except that now this cutting of his hair is no hostile act. What is it? “A new ritual? A new image?” And in this spirit the two of them will continue for a while to discuss the nature of images and the loss of images.

But we have not yet reached that point. One thing at a time — the episode or way station described just now was a case of our getting ahead of ourselves: first the story must deal more thoroughly with the wanderer and her encounter with the people in the pit of Hondareda up by the summit plain.