Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

28

She stayed in Hondareda, as it turned out, longer than more or less planned, consistent with a favorite greeting in the colony: “Let it be a surprise!”

How long? For hours? days? Time played no part in these events, or at least not the usual part. Just as the customary categories of place and space continued to exist but hardly applied to what took place, the hours, minutes, seconds, and such were, if not inoperative, at least units of measurement best left out of consideration during this particular period, and whenever they nonetheless popped up in the story, they proved disruptive and unnecessarily sobering.

Time did continue to have an influence in this highest inhabited spot in the Sierra, but its units were less calibrated to, and measurable by, any clock rhythms from the outside world.

Entirely different units of time were in effect during the Hondareda episode, units lacking a beat, as it were, powerfully concentrated, condensed, and yet prolonged, oscillating and, for that reason, even without the usual tick-tock, by no means less regular, continuing on and on.

When normal clock times sneaked in among these temporal spaces so different from the ones we customarily traverse (“sneaked”? yes)—“for just a second,” “two minutes later,” etc. — they weakened the temporal magic, which, according to the reporter, was “in any case questionable,” but, in the view of the woman who had commissioned this story, reinforced the realness and the nowness and gave the story fresh impetus. In contrast to the measures of distance that had spontaneously come into use in the hollow, units of measure from long ago as well as newly minted ones—“a stone’s throw away,” “at the distance of an ibex’s leap,” “at telescopic distance,” etc., — for the temporal units now in force no particular terms offered themselves; for instance, not “in a dozing-off moment,” or “after a second dream-night,” for it was not a question of a dream.

At most they might refer to “a wind-gust later” or “after another hammer blow” or “before the next page-turning,” or use a now clichéd expression, which, however, had acquired meaning again in Hondareda time, “in a jiffy” or “after a while.”

The time in effect during her crossing of the valley perhaps revealed itself to be most clearly distinct from chronometricized standard time — yet no less normal or natural? — in that she, lingering along the way, also walking in a circle, as if getting lost on purpose, later described it to the author not with the usual “then … and then … and then …,” but rather “and so on … and on … and on …”

In her eyes, a connection existed between those local time measurements, which eschewed any kind of precision, and the fact, “yes, the fact,” that the inhabitants of the Hondareda colony, in another regression? preferred to have their money, to the extent that any was in circulation among them, in the most archaic forms or incarnations possible, or in seemingly impossible shapes, such as lumps of rock crystal, or, preferably, sheets of mica, or, better still, clumps of droppings from the Sierra chamois, or, absolutely the best, hazelnuts — anyone who paid with empty shells was a counterfeiter! — and dried chestnuts, and the further fact that in the colony the units of weights and measures recognized the world over, the gram, hundredweight, ounce, pud, and ton, had not merely been eliminated but were also frowned upon, and this although the new settlers had arrived only recently and amid the confusion were busy setting up temporary housekeeping arrangements.

Anyone who slipped up and said that “in two hours” he had collected “ten liters of cranberries” or “twenty pounds of bovists in half an hour” or shot a “wild boar weighing half a ton” or had already harvested from his greenhouse “two hundredweight of potatoes, four bushels of barley, an ounce of tobacco, and eight grams of saffron” was punished with scorn.

In the depression, the only measures of quantity that counted — according to a law, unwritten, like all the others there (see “atavism”) — were ones such as “a handful,” “two palmsful,” “a bent armful,” “all pockets full,” “a back full,” and the like; although founded only a short time ago, the colony was already well stocked with customs and a sort of common law.

And the observer called this “simple and childish”; see currency transactions, see units of measure. He also asserted that Hondareda was less a “colony” than a “camp,” self-imposed and voluntary, an arrogant one. She understood the man (without particularly acknowledging that he was right — which he also did not expect, for he assumed in any case that he was).

How strange at least the inmates of that high-altitude depression could appear when looked at in a certain way and from a certain angle. Weren’t they in fact prisoners, of themselves or whomever, or refugees who had not adjusted to their refugee existence in the slightest; still acutely in flight with every step they took up here, where they were seemingly safe, or maybe not? So in contrast to their descendants, those young people up on the bright, rocky slopes, who had perhaps not been old enough to remember much of the flight, and crossed paths with the strange woman without suspicion, enjoying complete peace of mind, as she made her way to the settlement at the bottom, passing through the chaos boulders, the members of the older generations, who seemed to be in detention there, almost all shied away in alarm.

What had looked from a distance, from the valley’s upper rim, like people waving to her: wasn’t it rather a communal shooing-away, in unison, so to speak, of the intruder? The people of Hondareda recoiled, each in his own place, at the appearance of this unknown person among the inhabited blocks of stone, as from an enemy, who, having pursued them here from the place they had fled, was threatening their lives; the people of Hondareda existed in a permanent state of war, if not in their conscious minds or their unconscious, at least on the surface of their bodies, in their nerves, their skin, and their hair; and the enemy, even in the singular, like this woman now, had a crushing power advantage over them, just like the enemy from an earlier time and a great distance away; even when armed, all they could do when face-to-face with this enemy was cringe defenselessly and squeeze their eyes shut — pretend to be blind, as they had done from time immemorial, as if that made them invisible.

This is how the new arrival encountered the population of the hollow, though only at first, and briefly. A while later, a few eagles’ circles, mountain jackdaw flocks’ caws, under-ice chords from the half-frozen lake later, it became clear to her that a general and persistent recoiling, cringing, and shying away was typical of this place; not merely at the sight of her, or of outsiders (in the twinkling of an eye she was no longer viewed as such) but also at mere nothings — if the sudden shadow of a bird or a cloud overhead and an equally unexpected sound were nothings.

The noises in particular, also the most distant and tiny ones, which took on a ghostly, oversized presence down there in the huge stone amphitheater, leaping from cliff to cliff, exploding now on the left, now on the right, now in front, now in back of me, made me and the person next to me, my fellow hermit right around the corner, my neighbor in the next chaos-alley over, duck involuntarily or even throw myself flat on the ground or to one side.

The reporter commented that these behaviors stemmed from typical hearing damage, which affected not only the people in the Hondareda enclave but by now almost the entire earth’s population: this phenomenon could be observed nowadays wherever civilization’s noise no longer physically assailed people at its source but instead took on other forms, like phantom sounds, beyond the ordinary sounds, tones, and signals characteristic of civilization, and in these phantom forms jumped us from behind in precisely those places assumed to be isolated: in nature, in places without machines and devices and crowds, assaulting our organism more ruthlessly than the original racket in the inhabited hubs of our civilized planet.

“Take, for example, the solitary hiker, who thinks he has put behind him all the so-called curses of civilization, tramping, say, through a semidesert in Arizona or a full-fledged desert in Mongolia: a hissing of wind behind him, and he, his ears deceiving him, jumps to one side in confusion to avoid what he thinks is a horde of bicyclists descending on him — while at home on the city outskirts he would have calmly let real ones pedal past him. Then a chirping of crickets is heard all across the silent steppe, and he perceives it as the ticking of thousands of office clocks, more piercingly tormenting there than they ever were in his actual office. The softest bird’s peeping in a briar bush — and he hears it as a telephone ringing, so harsh, so deadly to daydreams, and so hostile that he has hardly ever heard its like in reality.

“So we can observe precisely in the — admittedly peaceable — sectarians of Hondareda that there is no escaping our civilization — and why would there be? That it catches up with anyone who flees it — and only then, in catching up with him, as a phantom, becomes the actual evil that he earlier merely imagined!”

She, on the other hand, saw in the Hondarederos neither refugees from the world nor victims of civilization. Both as far as they were concerned personally, and in the name of the story to be told here: they were survivors. They — with the exception of the young ones — had all, each alone and in his own way, crossed the valley of the shadow of death. They were all equally timid and tremulous, also those for whom the crossing had taken place quite long ago.

It was true that in their confrontations with strangers or even those with whom they had no connection, these people seemed reduced almost entirely to reactions or even naked reflexes. Yet in such reactions and reflexes, only the first and entirely superficial layer of the body or being of these survivors found expression. Below — behind? — beside? in the middle of? everywhere else, in body and soul, she, the interloper, sensed, as only in certain survivors, an enthusiasm, a joy in existence, and gratitude, if still concealed and not (yet) capable of being expressed freely.

How she sensed that? She herself was a survivor. And when their turn came, it took only a brief exchange of glances, after the initial head-tossing, for the “handful” of people down at the bottom of the valley, the core of the new settlers there, to recognize that she was one, too. And then they opened up to her, without further ado, though not collectively — Hondareda also lacked anything resembling a village square or any other sort of communal gathering place — but each one individually; each in his hideaway, which appeared to turn its back on his neighbor’s, and was also seemingly as different from it as possible, on purpose.

And did they expect her to open up to them as well? Until the departure of the strange woman, “a considerable time,” “a moon,” several moons, later, no one among the inhabitants of the Sierra summit-plain valley knew who she was. For the first time on her journey she went unrecognized. But there was nothing left to recognize, not the queen of finance, or the film star, or anyone else, given how she had been making her way across the land and the continent for so long now, without a profession, without status, without a role.

They did not want to know anything about her, either; no name, no family, no previous life, no loved ones, no mother or father tongue, no land of origin, no destination — each person’s dealings with her took place as if in the absence of all feeling — and rightly so — rightly so? “The only thing the various individuals of this strange tribe lacking all tribal organization” (the reporter’s expression), of this “tribe of hermits” (ibid.), and all of them, wanted to ask of the beautiful stranger, “whose beauty meant nothing to this neoprimeval horde” (ibid.), and the very first thing they said after coming to trust her, their fellow in experience, each in his own idiom, different from that of the person next door, was: Which route had she taken through the Sierra de Gredos, to bring her up here / down here to Hondareda — which, among them, was absolutely not to be called “Hondareda,” but rather, exclusively, and each time with a different pronunciation, “the Pleasant Plantation.”

She had then omitted not a single detail in her recounting of the journey; in particular the deviations and detours aroused enthusiasm in listener after listener, or, to use another term, their solidarity, and so from way station to way station she invented more and more details for them. How gullible these “planters in stony acres” (the observer) were when it came to anything that involved storytelling — all that was needed was the appropriate wind-up, the sentence structure, the tone of voice, and the rhythm, and each of them was all ears, and their lips parted in astonishment — even when the contents offered nothing at all to be astonished at. (“What do you consider human?” she asked the author, and his reply: “To ask you the right questions and in that way get you to tell stories.” In that way? Yes. And here his use of the intimate form of “you” was just right.)

This was how she also discovered that her listeners, like her, the storyteller, were survivors in a particular sense. Was she, who had once, quite emotionlessly, made major decisions affecting banks and the money market, also gullible? Yes, and always had been, since her village childhood. “You could tell her anything!” (“Me, too!”—the author’s exclamation.)

Beyond storytelling, however, when it came to other utterances and events: just as among the people in this place — if not a villager’s caginess, certainly a fundamental skepticism (“basic,” the author’s suggestion); a probing and testing, or an insuperable incredulity, impervious to the most logical argument.

And common, furthermore, to them and to her, who had wafted in, was clumsiness; a clumsiness that in her case, as well as that of the individuals here, broke out only after a series of noticeably skillful, no, noticeably graceful, actions and movements (dexterities, kinesthetic harmonies, gravity-defying shifts in equilibrium, dancing hither and yon through the air almost acrobatically), and interrupted these round-dance-like movements that were seemingly executed with the greatest of ease.

And all the more noticeable, when they had been in control of themselves and of objects so long, this outbreak of clumsiness. All the more alarming. All the more “embarrassing” (the observer). All the more “disappointing and disillusioning” (ibid.). “The unexpected stumbles and trips, slips, blunders, misspeakings, confusions of up and down, steps into thin air, falls, heads bumping against rocks and trees, all went to show that the equanimity and superiority of which each individual in the Hondareda troop made such a show was nothing but dissembling. Their general clumsiness, as well as the way it manifested itself just before the completion of a sequence of actions, carried out, up to then, with remarkable delicacy, and destroyed the entire action, the work, the product, in the last or next-to-last second or even microsecond, reveals to us the swindle that the Hondarederos want to put over on us, and even more on themselves, with their plan for a New Life — which, by the way, has not been written down or finalized, yes, has barely been suggested, with not even the plan of a plan drawn up.”

And once more she agreed with the reporter. She even felt a kind of admiration for his observation regarding this most peculiar clumsiness. Except that she, the fellow survivor and sister in clumsiness, again also saw something that transcended this phenomenon. Where the reporter, with the perspective of a complete outsider, saw nothing funny in the sudden tumbles, collisions, and heaps of broken glass, nothing but further proof of the local life-lie, she, the eyewitness and kin to these people, first felt moved to laugh, and “after that” to cry.

Her own manifestations of clumsiness could never have brought tears to her eyes, unlike those of her people here, often heartrending reversals of the “last-minute saves” familiar from old-time films: falls just before a perfect ending or before a brilliant freestyle dismount. Was it because she saw in the others’ vicissitudes the course her own life was taking? “No.” Because she saw the world this way? “No. Actually, the truth is,” she told the author later in his village in La Mancha, “that I realized, upon seeing these repeated, apparently axiomatic, misfortunes that mirrored my own (often just minor ones, which, however, because they thwarted people on the verge of success, took on the dimensions of major accidents), that they for their part and I for mine, we survivors, had probably not survived that successfully after all.

“A part of us, of me and of these people, still lay knocked to the ground, close to death, in a hapless heap. And the other part of us, dancing its dance of survival on the lightest of feet, was always in danger, magnetically drawn by the overwhelming gravity of this heap, of stumbling off course and tumbling toward it.

“On the one hand, my people and I were the quintessential survivors: live wires, full of spark and spunk — and, on the other hand, since the moment of that great fall, survivors merely in appearance, dashed to the ground dying, dying.”

Yet in her view there was something positive after all in this precarious survival: of all the senses, the sense of taste had become the most acutely developed. True, the other senses seemed to have been refined as well. But there the result tended to be more in the nature of intensifica-tions, excesses, even deviations and aberrations.

The mistaken, if not panic-filled, sense of hearing has already been mentioned. Seeing, especially seeing that involved things beyond the safe thresholds of the new settlement, took place too much out of the corners of the eyes, and thus inanimate objects seemed to come alive, motionless things seemed to move, and so on. And their apparent motion always signified misfortune or calamity to the new settlers. Someone, a person in one’s care, a child, was hurtling off a steep cliff. Or a mortal enemy seemed to come tearing at one at full speed (yet it was merely one of the frequent sudden wind gusts whipping a solitary broom bush).

Similarly subject to mistaken perception was the survivors’ sense of smell. There was not a single lovely scent — and what scents one could sniff in the high Sierra, where even the pure air had a delicious smell to it — that could not suddenly acquire the reek of decay.

The sense of touch, or skin sense, however, turned out to be atrophied among the Hondareda population, hardly present anymore, at least among the “squad” (her term) or the “band” (his) of original settlers down there; and that was hardly a function (here the two outsiders were again in agreement) of the more advanced age of all of them.

Nonetheless, the reporter then promptly called into question the comment made by his interlocutor, the strange yet familiar adventurer, to the effect that these people’s fingertips had grown numb and dulled this way in the hour of their near death. “How do you know that?”—She: “I know it from experience.”—“Knowledge from experience does not count in our case.”—She: “‘He (or she) knew from experience’: you find that in the most ancient books, in all the early written languages, and from the beginning this formula has always been valid.”

For him, however, such knowledge had not a whisper of probative value. A fact, demonstrated with reproducible data, researched by a representative number of “contemporary survivors,” was their “positively superb” sense of taste. No normal person could taste food and drink as such survivors could, foretasting and aftertasting, salivating, letting them melt on the tongue, rolling them between the lips and the palate, and, as if without swallowing, without any detour by way of digestion and circulation, solely by virtue of a consummate tasting that went on and on, letting them flash from the eye, transformed into living atoms, letting them spark from the ears, puff from the nostrils, glow from every pore of the skin, but primarily from the cheeks, foreheads, and, most especially, the temples.

On the other hand, what was supposed to be positive about this? It was no secret, after all, that the Hondarederos, no matter how shabby and stranded they appeared, were certainly not poverty-stricken. Even if they had not exactly accumulated fortunes in their previous lives, they had by no means been without means (pun), something they perhaps had even more in common than survival.

And although here in the Sierra depression they were not seen with money, that did not mean that they had renounced property and possessions: in the valleys beyond the mountain crests, and beyond those all the way to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and likewise across the oceans, these self-appointed repeaters of a vita nuova enjoyed unlimited credit, each and every one of them. World champions in tasting, true — thanks to the trinity of survival, the mountain air, and, above all, a life of luxury. After all, hadn’t these folks, after they had become has-beens everywhere else, made their way here more to indulge themselves in peace in good eating and drinking — see the oyster shells scattered about?

As the two of them conversed in this fashion, standing on the porcelain-smooth granite outcropping in the remote area just below the Puerto de Candeleda, she, in her time among the new settlers of the Sierra, had already been invited several times to dinner — in each case, only the host and she at the table, each meal accompanied by a monologue spoken by the host and chef — and now she offered more or less the following reply to the observer:

First of all — she demanded of the author that he reproduce her part of the conversation with the observer in indirect discourse — the oyster shells were not left over from the inhabitants’ cooking but had been left there by transcontinental drifters, or, as they called themselves, “novo-nomads” (a temporary phenomenon long since passé) when they had visited the glacial basin that had become a greening, grain-yellow, and water-blue valley and thus an attraction: an oyster picnic in the mountains had been as much in vogue among them as a chamois-sausage afternoon snack in their desert bivouac and penguin-in-pastry-shell on a trans-Antarctic excursion train.

And furthermore, her people did allow themselves the occasional luxury, but none that consisted of anything extra, or of imported ingredients. Every luxury came from substances extracted from the most hidden and, at the same time, magically fruitful — a natural magic, following the laws of nature — crevices and deposits in the area. These were the usual products and plants from such altitudes, as scarce and scanty as anywhere, items like juniper berries, bilberries, rowanberries, rose hips, acorns, Sierra olives, and so forth. Except that, because of the warming climate, the sun heated the rocks in such a way that, in all these fruits, in their classic miniature mountain forms, their pure essence was concentrated.

So there were no apples or grapes of the size found in the Garden of Eden or the Land of Canaan; but the few one could detect with the naked eye — for that reason alone they constituted a luxury, no, a treasure — were, whether added as garnish to ordinary meals or eaten separately, a whole meal in themselves, a delicacy, something for which the word delicatesse would be appropriate for once.

Altogether, the Hondareda depression was in reality less disadvantaged and inimical to life than one would have concluded from the name, and not only from first appearances. All the rounded granite boulders that had emerged from the thawing ice, hundreds and thousands of them, scattered hither and yon across the valley and up to the summit plain, polished to a high sheen, veined with sparkling white bands of quartz, reflecting each other many times over, especially now in the cold season, with the sun at an oblique angle all day, represented a system of natural solar collectors, by no means weak, and radiating heat even at night, which were used by the settlers — in the village and throughout the village, even the clumsiest and most awkward of them having become in the twinkling of an eye technical experts and engineers — to heat their dwelling niches, carved out of the cliffs, as well as their patchlike plantations, easily mistaken for rockslides, and the occasional greenhouses (mistaken by the observer for piles of debris, with half-broken panes of glass, sheets of corrugated tin, cardboard, and splintered window frames, beneath which, in his eyes, poisonous green, sulphur-yellow, and moldy gray weeds flourished).

To that extent her people, the handful there in the Pleasant Plantation, were indeed creatures of luxury, hiding, whether intentionally or not, under the cloak of being cast adrift in this region and wretchedly eking out an existence; that side of their being, too, which the reporter accurately characterized as a “reversion to hunting and gathering,” was part of the luxury, if only because of the rarity and — not only for that reason — deliciousness of the wild animals they bagged.

Which brought her back to the Hondarederos’ sense of taste, far surpassing all the other senses. Not once had a meal to which she had been bidden borne the slightest resemblance to gluttony or carousing. Rather, these few meals, rare in every sense, had consisted of tasting, sampling, nibbling; yet they had been as filling and thirst-quenching as any food and drink could be. In the same way that the new settlers had of their own accord become technicians, repairmen, and inventors, without training or study, simply in response to local conditions, so, too, taking the fruits of the area and ennobling them, they had, without lessons or planning, transformed themselves into culinary artists.

And these chefs consumed what they themselves had prepared with an enthusiasm experienced hardly anywhere else. They — and the guest in their company — inhaled their dishes. If there had been no devouring, even in the presence of intense hunger, it had nothing to do with “good manners”: devouring the items, yes, “items,” had been absolutely out of the question.

In their sense of taste, all feeling for being alive and surviving had been concentrated. And the other senses, those affected by their near deaths, had become concentrated (“No, gathered,” she to the author) in such tasting. Seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting, or, to put it differently, all sensitivities, had been drawn into these meals and had either regained their rhythm or, in the sense of touch, their function.

This manner of eating had helped heal and unify the senses, and further more had never become routine. — “Unified senses, sensuousness?” —That, too; but the unified senses had had an even stronger effect on the thinking of the immigrants of Hondareda — whose nickname among them had been La Mojada Honda (The Deep Mountain Pasture, The Deep Enclosure); not so much on their abstract thinking as on the way they considered and contemplated a specific thing or problem.

Every mealtime in the village had also been a time of contemplation — not an intensified but rather a heightened and elevated contemplation — where external and internal reflection had gone hand in hand, accompanied by a cheerfulness otherwise rare in those parts; the result being a likewise uncommon loquacity, a speaking in tongues very different from ordinary table conversation, more like the conversations of the mute with themselves, going in circles; thus also close to exuberance and pure, hearty nonsense — as was generally the case when, after spending time in a death zone, people regained the air of life, and with it, language.

The eating and drinking had had an effect on those confused folk and their jumbled senses, thoughts, and words, an effect similar to that which a certain kind of reading had on other survivors, a reading that was neither skimming nor poking around nor devouring, but a reflective tracing, in places also spelling out and deciphering, and if ultimately it was a form of consuming after all, it was a kind of inhaling, a breathing in (and out). Such meals represented time saved in two ways, much as reading did, and also rhythmic (recreational) walking.

Like those survivor-readers glancing into a book, the survivor-eaters there had been impelled by tasting to look up and raise their heads for contemplation, some for release from themselves, some for relaxation, some for excitement, and finally some for the pleasure of communicating and sharing — as among the previously mentioned readers out of the desire to read aloud or even to act on something they had long ago resolved to do, an action postponed almost past the time for it — which only now, with reading, with tasting, became possible and accessible — even if such an action, in the presence of food, just as in the presence of books, should express itself merely in a seemingly meaningless hug given to a random stranger.