Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

29

The reporter presumably replied to her as follows: “The Deep Enclosure? The Pleasant Plantation? We outside observers have another name for the basin of Hondareda: The Dark Clearing. And this is no paradox or play on words now; I do not want you to have sawn off my ponytail in vain. The term ‘Dark Clearing’ actually stems from an observation shared by all who were dispatched here: as a result of the belt of trees planted around the bottom of the basin or arena, the area it encircles has taken on the character of a classic clearing, a clarière, a tschistina, a claro—the expressions in all languages have to do with brightness. But in Hondareda, darkness mixes in with the brightness that remains trapped in the light, smooth rocks and rock dwellings, evident each time one looks, a gloom specific to the place. Contrary to the assertion that they live in a clearing, darkness prevails there. The interior of the surrounding dense conifer forests is an opaque black. And this black does not remain confined to the forest. It is constantly reaching for the open area. True: the mountain sun, together with its reflection in the glacial lake and its more colorful, varied, warm reflection in the indeed wondrously smooth granite hilltops — you see, I am not merely an observer! — provides a heightened light to the circle of the settlement, light such as I have never encountered in any other clearing in the world.

“This much is also true: when one sets foot in this space for the first time, one involuntarily says to oneself: How beautiful this is. What beauty. Where am I? One does not want to leave. One? I. Something has begun to happen. Something is beginning to happen. Something will begin to happen. I will begin to do something. My thinking will change — will become larger, wider — and correspondingly brighter. Warmhearted. Moved by love and intent on love.

“And on all subsequent occasions as well, when, after the long climb from the Tormes valley below and the descent to the bottom of the basin, I had the clearing before me, in the first tenth of a second something surged up in me — something like a moment of being airborne (which, now that we come here by helicopter rather than on foot, no longer happens — peace at last, thanks to objectivity).

“But even that first time, upon my stepping into the clearing, after five to eight paces toward its center, it became obvious that the special light there is an illusion. It is only a feeling. It does not count. What does count, and what in fact prevails, is the pitch blackness that confronts one in the middle of this allegedly new land, as it glows in the sun and all the colors of midday, the blackness emanating from the surrounding stand of trees, which has the character of a jungle-like primeval forest, although it was planted only a short while ago. The blackness, instead of perhaps softening the brightness, relativizing it, or, if you will, grounding it, cancels out the promise or the prophecy that seems initially to radiate from the local light, and makes my feeling null and void, and properly so. Dark Clearing.

“And as befits this kind of a dark clearing, those who have immigrated there, the objects of my observation, exist and conduct themselves according to its standards, under the spell of its darkness. In settling there they have certainly not struck out to find the light and the air of a different era, but are lying in wait, which is what the hunters and gatherers did in dark prehistoric times, and gloomily — more gloomy and numb than prehistoric people can possibly have been — otherwise they would hardly have evolved.

“I am speaking in paradoxes? This tribe of bumblers lives them. These folks produce nothing, not even contradictions, which would be a kind of productivity: they cling to the unproductive dream of an upside-down world. Even in their shadowy hunter-gatherer ways the signs have been reversed: gathering — listen to this! — is considered, and not only officially, by my dear Hondareda idiots, to be an activity that brutalizes the individual as well as the group and carries with it the danger of spiritual decadence, while hunting, on the other hand, is seen as an opportunity for achieving greater humanity.

“It, yes, hunting, first of all, hones one’s attention, and in a fundamentally different way from gathering: in contrast to the latter, hunting does not narrow one’s field of vision but rather widens it, literally to infinity. According to them, hunting, tracking, and the like involves the entire body, increases circumspection, makes one aware of the terrain — in distinction to the gatherer’s mere knowledge of the best places to find things — and in particular develops in those who practice it endless patience.

“But gathering threatens to cripple the body and the soul. It even interferes with and distorts the erect posture. And altogether, collecting is the province of impure ulterior motives and top-heaviness, the province of envy, greed, avarice, and other cardinal sins. More than hunting, gathering can degenerate into hostility, not so much the activity itself as the motives and sidelong looks associated with it. Gathering makes people small, in particular by shrinking all the others with and around the gatherer, not only because of his gaze, which is constantly focused on the ground, on crevices, on the underbrush, instead of scanning the sky or staying at normal eye level, and eventually makes them disappear and/or magnifies them into seeking-and-gathering rivals.

“And thus those who populate the dark clearing live in other respects, too, as prisoners of their paradoxes and of their upside-down and constantly backpedaling worlds. Listen to me. Not only do they live in shacks, caves, and dugouts like the first and last human beings. They speak more to their cattle than to each other, even to the most puny animals, and to objects. And they treat the objects and the livestock more attentively and tenderly than I ever observed them treating their next-door neighbor.

“Time and again during the year I have spent up here I have witnessed some person or other waving to an eagle swooping around the peak of the Almanzor, also to a mountain raven, a vulture, a marmot — whose whistling elicited a response, — an Alpine hare. Like certain mentally retarded people, they have the ability to find something that pleases them in literally everything, the most nondescript plant, the most shapeless and useless stone. And they show their true colors perhaps most distinctly in one custom they all share — although each goes his own way, they have developed what an outsider can recognize as shared customs — of tracing in the air with their hands or fingers the living beings and also the inanimate objects to which they address themselves all day long — that almost seems to be their chief occupation — while they are talking to them.

“As they pass by a rocky hummock, a silver thistle, an ant heap, they one and all sketch the essential outlines of these things in the air and even run their fingertips over them, probably to regain their almost lost sense of touch. They draw a fish that has leaped out of the laguna or a bird that has whirred over them, following its lines in the air until they have registered them accurately; only then, according to the custom that in the meantime has acquired the force of law, are they allowed to turn their attention to something else.

“The astonishing part, however, is that the following happens with some of the animals they have thus portrayed in the air: the animals turn up again; the salmon or the trout leaps out of the water a second time, the kite that had whizzed behind a towering rock comes back and circles again, and so on. It is as if the creatures of the earth, water, and air now wanted to salute in turn the person who has just reproduced their structure, along with their specific leaping or flying motion, with his tender, yes, loving air-sketching.

“This salutation-like copying or modeling in the wind can, admittedly, even prove useful from time to time and have its good side. More than once I have observed an otherwise dangerous animal being calmed in this fashion, or at least stopped in its tracks for a few seconds, which, however, were life-saving seconds. A raging mountain bull, a wild sow hurtling toward a Hondaredero who has unintentionally cut her off from her young: the form of the bull or the sow drawn in large strokes — yes, always in large, swirling, harmonious strokes! — and at once the sow and bull stopped for an interval, shorter or longer, as if spellbound, and let the human being pass. Instead of cliff drawings, air drawings. The Dark Clearing.

“And besides, what hunters these people up here claim to be! To be sure, they lie in wait in the strip of forest from dawn till dusk with their thoroughly modern shotguns, and occasionally take aim and fire, too. But to this day I have not been able to discover what animals they are hunting. I think, no, I do not think, I am sure, that they have no intention of hunting down and killing anything. They are merely practicing. They are practicing hunting and being hunters for its own sake, not for some future emergency or for putting their skill to work. Practicing is enough for them.

“But what are they practicing? When I tried to research this question, I received the same answer, verbatim, from every single practice hunter, although they never compare notes with each other: I am practicing so as to become composed. — Composed for what? And here again all the answers were identical, though in all the different languages: Composed, without any why or wherefore. To gain composure. To acquire composure, not for any particular purpose, for everything and nothing. Composure is all.

“And not merely because this last dictum, spoken, what is more, in unison, has a sinister after-tone: talk like this again points to the regression syndrome of my new settlers, in the sense that in positing a vague, undefined, undefinable composure that defies rational documentation, it aims to smuggle back myth into this world of ours, which for centuries has had nothing more to say, interpret, and convey in this genre — the myth of one who went forth to gain composure, thereby propagating a new knighthood, one that in reality had long since become obsolete.

“The knights of the Dark Clearing! The world has never seen more unsightly knights, and that, now, is my last play on words (speaking to you, I realize that in my previous life I spent too much time as a headline-writer). They are a cross between would-be knights, clay-pit dwellers, and vagabonds, the ugliest cross possible.

“By birth they are all crossbreeds. Did you know that your ancestors all came from here in the Sierra de Gredos, from the mountain valleys and gullies along the río Tormes in the north, from the villages and towns down there at the southern base of the range, between the steep drop and the lowland of the río Tiétar, from San Martín de la Vega del Alberque, from Aliseda, from San Esteban del Valle, from Santa Cruz del Valle, from Mombeltrán, from Arenas de San Pedro, from Jarandilla de la Vera, from Jaraiz de la Vera, and, yes, from Candeleda? That your ancestors departed from the Sierra region centuries ago and emigrated, leaving Europe for all continents, often venturing to the borders of the known world of the time, which their travels then expanded?

“One such ancestor, for instance, comes from the town of El Barco de Ávila, the bark of Ávila, in the west, where the río Tormes flows out of the central massif, and he was the helmsman, el tripulante, of the ship on which Christopher Columbus discovered America, no, plural, the Americas, just as in those days it was not yet called ‘Spain,’ in the singular, La España, but Las Españas, and similarly not La Italia but Las Italias.

“A century later, another ancestor traveled as a missionary to China, there dropped out of his order, married a native, and established his crossbreed family. A third, long before that, at the time of the Crusades, fathered a child with an Arab woman, with whom he stayed. A forebear of yours settled at the far end of each of the gold, silver, platinum, silk, and spice routes and intermarried with Mongols, Indians, Jews, Slavs, blacks.

“And today, as if by prior arrangement, their descendants have come here from the most distant continents and islands to be together in this place, which they regard as their ancestral land, and not without justification — but for what purpose? to regain composure? and have they really come together when each keeps strictly to himself?

“That, too, presumably forms part of their would-be myth: a return to their ancestral land; even though, when asked, each one of them, all of them again in complete agreement, will insist that the Hondareda basin is neither the land of his fathers nor a homeland; the Pleasant Plantation — in truth, an almost felicitous expression, at least at times — remains foreign territory to them, so foreign that it could not appear more so to any human being, foreign root, branch, and sky — but not the kind of foreign territory described in a saying common in these parts, passed down from those ancestors who emigrated — not the foreign territory, not at all the kind of foreign territory ‘where the doors slam shut on your heels.’

“This place where they are living, as each of them asserts, uninfluenced by neighbors and houses next door, is the foreign place visualized and reserved by them for the duration and for good — though precisely not the kind of foreign place of which a poet’s description was passed down from their forefathers: a foreign place where, when music from afar reached a person’s ears, the sound rent his heart, because it made him realize: Never shall I return to my home. But if music from afar was heard here in the Pleasant Plantation, it ‘heartened’ one and strengthened one in one’s resolve to stick it out in these foreign parts and never to reinterpret them or transform them into something other than what they essentially were and — another of those unwritten laws — should remain: foreign, foreign, foreign.

“Foreign land: another topos of these seekers after a new myth. They see themselves, and again that means each by himself, as people without a country, as stateless people, yet they are also proud of their country- and statelessness.

“We could let this pass, were it not associated with the aforementioned ugliness. To us, in contrast to those down below, beauty is the overarching law in the following sense: What is ugly cannot be good; the ugly is evil and bad, and it must not be allowed to stand.

“And my knightly vagabonds of the Dark Clearing are of an interminable ugliness, even when one considers only their weapons and their bivouacs, an ugliness that is an insult to human dignity and makes a mockery of existence. Does not the aesthetic world order, the law of the beautiful, include the ethical as well, the distinction between good and not good, right and wrong, or am I mistaken? How the appalling ugliness of these crossbreeds — their clothing, their hovels, their rocky gardens, fields, and stables, their greenhouses, their tools, their materials — has pierced me to the quick from the outset, preventing me from living and breathing freely.

“Not that they constantly go barefoot. But why do they always wear unmatched socks, as if on principle and out of malicious, ugly defiance, and possibly unmatched shoes as well, on the left foot a black oxford and on the right foot a yellow pigskin boot? There is nothing they are, have, or do that is not breathtakingly ugly. Even the way these denizens of the Dark Clearing move: where elsewhere people thrust themselves into the foreground, these people, each separately and yet all of them together forming a mass, huddle in the background, as if by prior arrangement.

“The ugly and the bad aspects of those who thrust themselves into the foreground are almost tolerable by comparison, allowing one at least to sense the presence of gaps and the horizon; while the masses huddling in the background block the view, the light, and the sun, and thereby any possibility of seeing the big picture, and once this is thwarted, the ugly crowd, there, and there, and back there, appears doubly ugly, ugly to the second power, ugly to the nth power.

“Whenever I go looking for them and approach them — for that is my mission here, after all — they skulk, hide, huddle in the background. Whether I want to track them down in their hovels or sheep pens or solar collectors or radio shacks, they are always way in the back. And I can never get at them there. They have installed threshold after threshold between us as obstacles, often what may not even be intentional thresholds, consisting of infinite uglinesses in the form of sights, sounds, and smells — and that seems to me the most criminal aspect of their criminal ugliness: that it makes these ugly people of mine even more inaccessible to me. Their ugliness means inaccessibility. Ugliness and inaccessibility, or unapproachableness, grievously sad, and are they not ultimately one and the same after all?

“To this day I have not succeeded in crossing these insurmountable thresholds of ugliness to get to my dear Hondarederos. How ugly even their voices are from a distance. Ravens’ cawing, blue jays’ screeching, and wildcats’ hissing are the most mellifluous harmonies by comparison. It must pierce the heart of every natural enemy of ugliness and make his blood boil when these voices assault him, amplified by the cliffs around here and this vast natural mountain amphitheater.

“And every word spoken, as if spat out, coughed out, vomited from the deepest and most distant background, strikes one’s ear like a giant fist. I am forced to hear distinctly even their most faraway speech in all its ugliness, word for word. Although each of them by now talks almost exclusively to himself, he always expresses himself in a hideous jargon, which, adding to the ugliness, they all use, unwittingly, albeit in the most varied languages — and are not jargon, ugliness, exclusivity, and inaccessibility in the final analysis one and the same?

“And listen: this jargon echoing from the fissures in the rock consists for the most part of obsolete expressions, drawn chiefly from the language of seafarers, as if these re-immigrants wanted to recapitulate and claim for themselves the linguistic formulations of those ancestors who left the Comarca centuries ago to sail the oceans.

“How presumptuous of them to refer to their huddling here in this out-of-the-way mountainous area as ‘lying at anchor’ and their various movements as ‘sailing’; to shout, upon seeing a trout, hardly as long as an arm, leaping out of a glacial pond, ‘Dolphin ahoy!’ or, upon chewing a juniper berry or dipping their toes into the icy water or moistening their eyes with the admittedly special dew of the Pleasant Plantation, to screech, bark, scold, shriek into the granite wasteland: ‘Je suis embarqué! I have embarked! I am on the high seas! I will remain on the high seas! No land in sight! No, no land in sight! Oh joy: no, no, no land in sight!’”

Here the reporter on the rocky island amid the wilderness of broom paused for an eighth to a half a second and then continued in a voice even more shrill, if possible: “After all, our assignment here goes beyond mere observing. We are supposed to investigate the causes of and the reasons for things. For what reason do the people shipwrecked here no longer have a language? Why have they tossed the laws and rules of beauty overboard? Why are they bobbing here in their Dead Sea of inaccessibility?

“So hear me out: the source of this Robinson crew’s terminal ugliness can be traced to the loss of images. And the additional assignment with which my team was sent up here is as follows: to cure, or at least contain, this new image-loss disease, dangerous because it is epidemic or even pandemic. Quarantine hand in hand with therapy. Curing these ominously ugly folk, but how, and by what means? By delivering images, importing images, injecting images, without let-up. Produce, transport, and deliver an image to a person, and his soul will regain its health, his language will be revitalized, his voice will become hearty and his eye clear, accessible, and beautiful.

“For a year or more we have been struggling to steer these denizens of darkness back into the bright world of images. To stop the leakage of images. But how, you ask. Why do you not ask? — First of all we wired the enclave of Hondareda, ran underground cables, set up reflectors all around, and installed image-producing machines every few feet, at a density ten to fourteen times greater than that of the traffic lights in Frankfurt, Paris, New York, or Hong Kong: machines that reproduce images not only from external and outside sources, from civilization, but, above all, images of those Hondarederos who wander into their reception and broadcast area, images of the inside of their bodies, projecting onto this bit of cliff the heart cavity of a passerby, onto the next the inside of the head, onto a third the genital and abdominal region.

“These image-producing devices function as mirrors, reflecting not the person’s face but what lies behind it. Except that none of the immigrants so much as glances at the images, whether external or internal. From the outset, the people up here did not even look away from the images we supplied; they simply ignored them. And yet we had introduced a process by which even the shadows, instead of showing mere outlines, took on shape and color: shadows with the mouth, nose, and eyes clearly inscribed in the shadow of a face, along with the eye color, even richer than in the actual face that cast the shadow, also more glowing and beautiful — the very image of beauty.

“And our equipment provided the image-loss folk with similar shadows of trees, rocks, clouds, airplanes: leaves, needles, limbs, lichens, sheets of mica, veins of quartz, strands of alabaster, strips of sunlight, blue holes, aluminum, etc., shimmered in the shadow images of these objects of the air or ground, in colors more brilliant or pure white than the objects themselves ever displayed. And did the people we were treating so much as mention these miraculous works? Why will you not hazard a guess?

“That even the moving images of films failed to make a dent on these people robbed of their image sense is superfluous to report. Neither the classic series of twenty-four images per second nor accelerated image-bombardment more in tune with the contemporary way of seeing could straighten things out. No penetration occurs when the image receptors have been removed, you understand. Why do you not understand?

“Yet we set up an open-air cinema for them, probably more lovely than ever existed anywhere and at any time — films projected without a screen onto the smooth rock faces of the Sierra. But even the young people who moved there with the core population are already completely image-resistant, or have become so in this place.

“Even the young people, who can otherwise be distracted by any little liver spot on someone else’s face and any speck of color in a dewdrop, however small, simply let the images be images — or, rather, categorically refuse to let the images be images, that is to say, they categorically refuse to let images, no matter which, pry open access to the world of today and, instead of leaving them as hostages to their parents and grandparents, connect them with their own kind, wherever they may be, beyond the mountains, no matter where — everywhere.

“Granted, my people here in the Dark Clearing do not represent a new generation of iconoclasts. Not once have our image-projecting devices, which hardly allow them to choose to look in directions we have not populated with images, been attacked or vandalized by them. It is as if their eyes simply veered past the walls of images erected on all sides, seeking the narrow, imageless strip along the horizon, as once the Israelites during their exodus from bondage in Egypt moved through the passage that opened up for them through the Dead, no, the Red, Sea.

“Each of them avers that he has not suffered a loss of images, but rather that he has sworn off images. Each claims that no image, not a single one, exists or is valid, at least during this transitional period, and not merely for him, but in general. But what matters to him, precisely in this transitional period, is perception. Along with his life in the place from which he emigrated, he has lost not the images, whether natural or created, dreamed or lived, external or internal; what he has lost, or what at least is threatened, is the ability to perceive.

“And, he says, what he misses more and more painfully in the world, and in this world, is seeing. And regaining the ability to see is what motivates him up here, on the ‘Isthmus of the Transitional Period’—such an appropriate term — in the Pleasant Plantation or the Deep Enclosure, the Mojada Honda, and not for the sake of one image or another, no, simply for the sake of seeing, conflict-resolving, existence-justifying, ‘world-anchoring,’ dignifying, renewing, connecting, seeing. As Goethe says, ‘Born to look, appointed to see … thus the world is pleasing to me,’ thus the world is created for me, thus the world coalesces for me, or something like that.

“And accordingly the primary activity of each individual and solitary person here, independent of his neighbor and next-door property owner, is seeing, on the strips or isthmuses, wherever in their view there is something to see, no matter what. Daybreak and seeing. Deep night and more seeing, for instance of the trees’ shadows on the rock faces (in the image-free strips or passages). ‘To see and let appear’—the settlement’s motto, similar to ‘Dream and work.’ Or is it a form of working? Or of leisure? Impossible to tell the difference.

“What do you think? Why do you say nothing? This is what the returnees believe at any rate, as always in complete unanimity, without prior consultation with one another: images are certainly essential; without them no transmission of the world and no sense of life. But in the previous century in particular, images were overexploited as never before. As a result, the world of images has dried up — has, without exception, become blind, mute, and stale — incapable of being refreshed by any science. And thus, in this transitional period, all that is possible is seeing — in which, by the way, all science is included, and out of which science must develop, one step at a time. The Hondareda idiots consider themselves scientists!

“And the childish things on which they spend their time in their Dark Clearing are, for them — even if they use entirely different terms, as for almost everything, old-fashioned and obsolete ones—‘sight-enhancing measures.’ That includes not only their posing as hunters, their acting as though they were stalking, taking aim, and so on: time and again one sees them walking backward, more often than forward; that kind of thing, they assert, enhances seeing as much as their constant squatting, close to the ground (whereas standing on tiptoes is prohibited — their standard dictum: ‘Standing on tiptoes is no standing’).

“When they unexpectedly whirl like dervishes, one person in the background turning to the east, then, without any connection to him, another in back to the west, it is of course no dance, either; the people of the Pedrada-Hondareda region have neither games nor dances, and that includes the young ones — but rather, well, you already know this, or do you? — an exercise in seeing!

“Instead of putting things where they belong or filing them away like adults, these people of the depression are also constantly tossing things into place, and from as far away as possible, and, furthermore, not straightaway and forthwith — now I am using such obsolete expressions myself — but always in an arc, and one that is as high as possible, and to what end? You know this. To facilitate seeing, seeing, nothing but seeing.

“If only such exercises, measures, and exertions led to something: to moldability (ah, another word from horse-and-buggy days); to mobility; to awareness of another person — I don’t necessarily mean of me — to neighborliness, or at least a hint of everyday togetherness. But as I have observed for one year, three days, and five to nine hours, each of these Hondareda desperados is holed up, stiff as a board, deep inside his hovel, shack, and barbed-wire enclosure, immobile and immovable, having taken leave for good of the present.

“While in the meantime we have lit up even the North and South Pole, as well as the peak of Everest and the Aconcagua, only the Hondareda region persists in its self-imposed darkness. The only semblance of a joint activity I have been able to observe in my subjects here is that whenever one of them thinks he has spotted something for which he has long been searching, or something precious, or simply something beautiful — precisely in their ugliness they are obsessed with beauty, or, as they express it, with the ‘uncommonly beautiful’—but then realizes that he was mistaken — as he was every other time, by the way — that he was thoroughly mistaken and rashly pounced on what he mistook for a treasure or something uncommonly beautiful, but which turned out to be worthless, ordinary, or nothing at all, the person experiencing such a disappointment, and that is what can be astonishing, at the moment when he realizes he was deluded, turns out to be not bitter in the slightest, but rather, without any premeditation, cheerfully disappointed. Disappointment fills the person in question, no matter who in this glacial basin, with cheerfulness.

“And in this state of cheerful disappointment, and only in this state, the individual at the same time always gains the ability to turn to the others in the settlement. At the moment when he is fixated on the deceptive object there, in a rock crevice, the crook of a tree, a fissure in the ground, he calls, whistles, and drums together the entire core population of the Dark Clearing. And the others promptly cluster around him. And he tells them what value, or rarity, or uncommon beauty he allowed himself to project onto this thing or stuff or trifle or garbage or piece of junk.

“And as they stand there with him and inspect the spot or the mess or the nothing-at-all from every side, they share his disillusionment, but likewise, by virtue of the enduring effect of imagination, his cheerfulness. How they all perk up. And these are the only occasions up to now on which I have heard them laugh. Otherwise they cannot laugh, you see, either at others or at themselves — at anything at all. To be sure, disappointments like this and the resulting shared amusement are everyday occurrences down there.

“And the contemplation of mistakes and disappointments, and of absent treasures or treasures they missed again, or other objects of longing, represents for them the acme of seeing, constitutes their way of celebrating, their kind of celebration. These poor, aloof Hondarederitos — have you noticed that I even have a term of endearment for this tribe of new savages! Their dangerous solipsism: What unspeakable war, unlike any that ever took place, are they hatching? — for there is no doubt that they are on a war footing with people like us. Why will not a single one of them look at me? And why will not a single one of them speak a word to me?

“Just as you, foreign lady, have not looked me in the eye once in all this time. Why not? Not for a single micromillisecond during the year or decade of my observing and recording up here in the high Sierra have human eyes looked at me. And what about your fellow observers, you ask. (Why do you not ask?) Not a word about them. Except this: that they are not intentionally mean nor behave as if they were — their mere presence and hanging around is mischief enough. I say that? Yes, I do. In the course of time, I have even tried to meet the eyes of the animals here, the ibex, the Capra hispanica, the snakes, the bulls, the vultures, the dragonflies on the laguna, the wagtails — by the way, the only time I was eyed affectionately, it was by the latter, from a broom bush, from a boulder in a glacial brook.

“In the Pleasant Plantation not one pair of human eyes has ever met mine. Here in the Deep Enclosure not a brown or blue or green or gray or any other color of eye has ever taken me in. Not a single person sees me. On the other hand, I am not kindly ignored by anyone, except perhaps by my co-observers.

“I cannot take a single step unobserved. But what a manner of being observed. Yes, it is different from being observed reproachfully. Yet there is no doubt that these gazes are meant to punish me, if any ever were. No, these gazes are not meant to kill. Instead they declare me dead. In their eyes, I, their observer and reporter, have already been dead for a long time. The way their gaze scans me, they doubtless see a cadaver in their field of vision, or a living corpse — which does not count in this field, however — what does count there? you ask; what counts in their field of vision: light, wind, gaps, sand, also flies, spiders, and Sierra beetles. In contrast to the apathy and fatigue they exhibit toward me, what their eyes manifest at the mere glimpse of a wild boar’s droppings or a snowflake can be described as a glow.

“Everywhere in today’s world, the borders have long since been eliminated. This regressive crew, however, has reintroduced all the old barriers in this crisis-ridden region. Not only against those of us coming from the outside, but also among themselves — another result of the loss of images: they have created the most dense network imaginable of not only old and ancient boundary lines but also previously unthought-of, inconceivable ones: actual ones in the form of thresholds, barriers, and beams, and likewise imaginary ones, which are often even more effective.

“Women, and men as well, go around shrouded and veiled, or do you think I merely have that impression? That it looks that way to me — but doesn’t that say something, too? Not only their houses are barred, off limits to people like us, as well as to their nearest neighbor, and besides completely out of sight; also around his garden — for there is no cramped cave and hut that lacks a large garden — every one of the resettlers has erected a wall made of clay, tarpaper, tin, manure, and the like, unless the beds and fruit trees are already shielded from prying eyes by the enormous boulders broken off from the cliffs or moved there. This wall is higher than any I have seen around a garden anywhere, as high as a prison wall.

“Even the graves are strictly separated from one another — during my time here, nine to thirteen of them have already been dug or hewn out of the granite: there is no such thing as community cemeteries; rather each planter unit or monad has its own grave, each clearly isolated from the other, miles away, somewhere way out in the mountain wastes.

“The living observe an equally strict distance: when two or three of them happened to come together, I hardly ever saw one of them as close as arm’s length or closer to his fellow resident, and it is even more frowned upon here to follow close behind someone, on his heels; and whereas, in a crowd, we contemporaries romp along freely next to each other, having often just eliminated the last barriers, in this desolate spot all it takes is for a second person to appear in a deserted area for me to feel I have no room to breathe!

“Borders upon borders here, one more grotesque than the next. And most grotesque of all is perhaps the fact that they communicate with each other primarily in writing, that is to say, in letters — orally or over the telephone only in the most extreme emergencies — otherwise that is frowned upon: if a person so much as addresses another person coming toward him, out of the blue, the others go out of their way to avoid him, and he is left standing there alone. Nothing happens here that does not involve drawing boundaries, putting things in bounds and out of bounds.

“Man is a stranger to man, and a stranger he must remain: that is one of the fundamental decrees in this loners’ corral. And so it goes in their crazy, upside-down world, wherever one turns: as a stateless person, each acts only on his own behalf, as if that were part and parcel of his loner’s consciousness, and at the same time, between one and three thousand consistent rules, norms, and unwritten authoritarian edicts have found their way into this loners’ outpost.

“Of late I even see a communal flag waving above the rocky crest in the middle of the glacial lake, which is just about the precise center of the Hondareda colony, although otherwise not a soul goes there, a flag with the peak of the Almanzor woven into it, and to the right and left of it, as the heraldic animals, the almost black, hardly spotted Almanzor salamander and, no, neither the red kite nor the Hispanic chamois, but the extraordinarily small Sierra hedgehog, which one might mistake for a silver thistle. Thistle or hedgehog? What can you make out at this distance? You have better eyes than I, who am myopic, farsighted, and astigmatic to boot.

“And although they are all intent on preserving a veritably mythic namelessness and nobodyness, bit by bit names have been adopted for the most nondescript places and wretched spots in their hardship post, official and mandatory names. And although they have beyond any doubt said goodbye forever, good night, and fare thee well to history, the present, and the light of logic, these names for the most part refer to time, light, reason, and presentness.

“A patch of meadow, for instance, with nothing but a few granite outcroppings and arching wild rose canes, is called, God only knows why, ‘The Meadow of Reason,’ ‘El Prado de la Razón’; a beaten track that zigzags among the randomly situated living cubes — not even a real path or walkway, a mere system of gaps, where time and again one must flatten oneself to slip through, almost labyrinthine — is called ‘Passage of Things to Come,’ ‘Passage de l’Avenir’; and the rocky island in the laguna? — ‘Corso of the Third Era,’ ‘Corso di Terzo Tempo,’ corso because it is approximately circular and level — but a corso on which the likes of us have never yet seen a single Hondaredero strolling? either in the evening or at any other time? let alone the entire population of the town, as would be the case on a normal corso?

“Altogether, although these people have obviously left the great cities behind them, all their placeless and faceless urban features carry names like ‘Plaza …,’ ‘Avenida …,’ ‘Boulevard …,’ ‘Rambla …,’ ‘New Square,’ also ‘Esplanade …,’ ‘Promenade …,’ ‘Quai …,’ and the like.

“And I see the world most grotesquely turned upside down in a cult of dew in which my Hondarederos indulge — yes, you heard me right: dew, nadan, rosée, rocio—which, besides the wetness from the clear sky, is, here on the Iberian peninsula, also a lovely woman’s name, without doubt the most lovely.

“Just think: in their crazed eyes it is not a cult but a science: the science of dew, and they view themselves as the dew scientists of the Pleasant Plantation, located in the central massif of the Sierra de Gredos, like the nuclear or microchip or macro-hard scientists of Silicon or Micomicon or Peppermint Valley.

“What feeds their folly, to be sure, is the fact that in this mountain basin the dew falls more heavily than perhaps anywhere else, and that in the daytime sun, which does not dry it up but rather allows the dewdrops to flow into each other, the dew forms veritable torrents, brooks, and cataracts, falling with a strange softness and almost soundlessly over the smooth cliff walls — massive quantities of water from the merging of dewdrops, collecting in the natural basins created by the glacier on the granite floor of the valley, and also captured in specially installed ponds, from which the settlers draw the dew water directly or channel it through gutters and pipes, pipeline-like! to their houses.

“That they use it for drinking, washing, and cooking is actually almost a fine thing — after all, precisely in the mountains the rest of the water is contaminated by grazing animals, by airplanes, and in general, and thus unwholesome, even toxic; I, too, have grown used, over time, to drinking the special dewdrop liquid — I like the taste — and to washing with it every morning, even my hair, without shampoo, and how soft it comes out! but everything else they do with their dew up here already crosses the line of foolishness into the kingdom of fools — their dew-fools’ kingdom, which is also dangerous.

“Now listen to this: by now the entire region is dotted with dew wells, roofed over, fenced in, also strictly guarded, as are elsewhere drilling towers in the most productive oil fields. With the exception of a few pathetic little rock crystals, the entire Sierra de Gredos has almost no mineral resources, and accordingly the people here speak of their “air resources,” among which the dew is the primary one. They treat dew as their chief capital, and also intend, as I have observed, to exploit it commercially and market it.

“I know: my Hondaredians will bottle the dew water in flasks, spray cans, tubes, canisters, barrels, in order to sell it and to become powerful through the dew business. I can prove that you fellows are poised to sell your dew not only as drinking water but also as medicines to treat all imaginable deficiencies and disorders, for external and internal use: dew products for acne, insect bites, snakebites, eye problems, cellulite, as well as for heart palpitations, colic, chronic fatigue, nightmares, loss of appetite, obesity, and, finally, even for melancholy, loneliness, fear of death, murderous impulses, schizophrenia, hopelessness, malaise, inability to love in all its manifestations, or, more precisely, forms of atrophy and wasting. Dew water boosts your libido! — that is the slogan they plan to launch. And another: Dew from the Sierra de Gredos: the secret of a radiant skin!

“With a view to such a market, which you intend, not without justified optimism, to expand step by step into a worldwide market, you plan to manufacture your dew products in solid form as well, as powder, pastilles, pills, buffered with atomized mountain fruits, such as juniper berry, rowanberry, moss berry, and so on. If one of you actually happens to be a dew scientist, I must tell you that to me this science is by no means pure anymore — dew, schmew: as the scientist conducts his dew research in apparent innocence, examining the dew under a microscope, mixing it, assaying reactions, he has his eye fixed firmly on profits and a monopoly.

“I have obtained copies of all of your scientific papers, most of them lengthy and seemingly tedious, on topics such as ‘The Form of Dewdrops on Grasses in Contrast to Dew Formations on Stones, Sand, Gravel, and Glass,’ ‘Multiplicated Accumulation of Dew on Smooth Granite Surfaces as a Result of Increased Nocturnal Solar Radiation in the Mountains,’ ‘The Dew Sphere as Collecting Lens for the Color Spectrum,’ ‘Erroneous Flights of Sierra Moths to the Dew Meadows, or Simulation of Mating Invitations by Dew Glitter,’ ‘Varying Dew Phenomena on Oak Leaves, Larch Needles, Bird Feathers — in Particular on Jackdaws, Mountain Cocks, and Peregrine Falcons — and Further on Wild-Boar Bristles, Human Hair, and Animal Pelts, with Particular Attention to So-Called Dew-Licks and Dew-Spirals on Cows, Goats, and Sheepdogs,’ ‘The Riddle of Black Dew: An Attempt at an Explanation’: but not one of these dew deliriums did not have thrumming in the background your insane notion of achieving fame and fortune by means of this natural resource.

“Without a doubt it will be proved that you are seriously considering establishing a dew mafia and then using typical mafia methods to found a human-rights-flouting despotic state among the universal-rights states that have finally cleaned up their act since the last century. From economic to political power, and from political power to the new religion that you will impose on the rest of the world, as I need not demonstrate because it is the logical outcome.

“By now you already worship dew as your idol. I was not mistaken when I heard each of you singly, but all of you in exactly the same words, intoning veritable dew litanies: ‘O dew of the new moon! O dew of the solstice! O dew on the mountain apple! O dew in my shoes! O dew on my mother’s headstone! O dew that I drank from the lips of my beloved! O dew in the night as I lay dying! O dew on the cellophane from the crushed cigarette pack! O dew, my eyebrow pencil and my moisturizer! O dew that in the expressions of lands all over the earth maketh the meat, the vegetables, the wheat kernels, and the fruit soft and tender as only thou canst! O dew, by definition the fruit of the reflected rays of our earth! O dew, atom of truth and beauty! O dew of the night of pain and suffering! O dew of the hour of awakening! O dew on the eyelids of the white angel! O dew in the child’s cowlick! O dew on the pencil point! O dew on the blood spot! O puddle of dew, in which the sky with its jet contrails is mirrored! O dew that sprayeth in the colors of the rainbow and turneth a somersault when the ball rolls through the dewy grass! O dark crisscrossing trails in the dew of the savannah where the wild beasts have trod! O drop of dew, measure of measures! O dewdrop, fullness of being and of our brief sojourn in these parts, and not only in the hours of morning!’

“And I will testify that you have developed an entire creation story or cosmogony that has its origin in dew: no big bang or whatever at some point or wherever — rather, the silent multiplication into infinitude of one dewdrop! Already, before you read a book, you first leave it out in the dew, open to the page you will be reading. And already I can observe how for you people dew literally functions as the measure of measures, as the basic standard. Instead of the basic metric: the basic dew.

“Every second word you utter is ‘dew’! Instead of ‘money,’ ‘dollar,’ ‘mark,’ ‘peseta,’ ‘real,’ ‘maravedi’: dew. Instead of ‘a kilometer from here,’ I hear ‘three dew fields from here,’ and you also calculate time according to the dew: instead of ‘after a night,’ ‘after a dewfall.’ Where others write or calculate in the air, you write in the dew — on an outdoor table, on a tree trunk, on a car’s fender. Where others sniff gasoline or drugs or other substances, you dew-fools sniff dew. Where elsewhere storms measure eight to eleven and earthquakes measure seven to ten, you measure Dew Strength One Hundred, using the dew gauge. And when I bring up all these things to you dangerous dew-fools, you look at me as though I were the fool.

“And you thereby embody beyond any doubt that divine utterance that hits the fool nail on the fool head, my dear Hondarederos and Hondarederitos and Hondaredians: you see the mote in your neighbor’s eye, but the beam in your own eye, as thick as a tree, you do not see, no, no, no!”

Thus the reporter standing on the ledge in the middle of the wilderness continued to speak for a long time. It was as if the dew, or the word, or speaking of the dew in the Hondareda region, had loosened his tongue — or several different tongues at once. His speaking sparkled with enthusiasm, independent of what he was saying. Had he not earlier, in time out of mind, been one of those classic enthusiasts who are supposed to figure prominently in our story?

And now, in this remote locale, far from his observer’s routine, in the presence of the woman, the stranger whose identity he had no desire to know, nor where she came from, nor where she was going — it was enough to be standing there with her — his former enthusiasm had caught up with him again, at last. He had flushed cheeks like an adolescent, and now and then he began to stammer, like one who for the first time in his life begins to say what he has long dreamed of saying.

Except that he also jumbled things up quite a bit. Did not enthusiasm have to be accompanied by clarity, the ability to make distinctions, and, if grounded in criticism, in self-criticism above all? On the other hand: didn’t such speaking, although this and that might be far-fetched, pulled out of the air, tossed out to test the waters, as people used to say, create a reality, which, unlike a merely observed and registered reality, simply through the rhythm of the speaking, suggested — narrated — proposed, a possible alternative world?

And the reporter, speaking so heatedly that despite the cold up here in the Sierra his astigmatic’s glasses fogged up, was astonished by, amazed at, all the things that enthusiasm made possible in the way of words and sentences, if one just let it have its way, parallel to the facts and the tangibles. And she, the stranger, the adventurer, or whatever she was? She remained silent.

The story tells us that she remained silent long after he had finished speaking and was waiting expectantly for her reply. A troop of chamois, no, a veritable herd, gazelle-like, filed past between the two of them, the younger animals leaping, and trotted down the steepest part of the ledge as if on a level surface tipped up vertically.

Later another member of the observation team passed them, running as always, storming along and stamping straight through the underbrush and around the piles of dead branches that increased in number toward the ridge but did not slow him down: before he came into sight, a squeaking and squawking that was his panting. He must have noticed the two of them, the temporary pair, on the crest, but seemed not to recognize his colleague. And the vagabond of the mountains that this woman was, to judge by the rips in her clothes and her hair blowing in all directions, received the most cursory of glances from the cross-country runner, not merely a greetingless and malevolent glance but a death-dealing one, reinforced further by being tossed over his shoulder. And at the same time he stuck out his tongue — what a thick tongue — and fired through the air at her with both index fingers.

Yes, there were also people like him, whose mind could not be changed by a fairy-tale-like encounter, who, even when they ran into another person up here, far from the usual world with its hostilities, did not promptly forget the unpleasantness that had arisen between them simply by virtue of their being opposite types or genders, but rather, in this third location, face-to-face with the image of an enemy — of which he had at least one to three thousand lurking inside him — found these images confirmed; and if the two of them had spotted each other on Jupiter or Venus, in the remotest corner of the universe, as the only surviving human beings: as far as he was concerned, such a thing would have merely sealed his hatred and his irreconcilability.

And the story goes on to say that the mountain-crossing woman persisted in her silence, although with a constant, ever more lively display of facial expressions, which the observer followed as intently as if he were reading the longed-for words from her lips. She, too, was astonished. She, too, was amazed at what the other person had said.

Yet she was not astonished at the same things as he was. She was astonished, rather, to realize that if she were to speak now, she would have something to say about the mountain basin and its inhabitants that would not merely contradict his observations and explanations but would negate them entirely. This although the man had already been in the high Sierra for a whole year or even far longer, while she had been here only—

And again she was astonished: for it suddenly seemed to her, who had come to the region so recently, as if she had lived in Hondareda a good deal longer than the reporter. “Yes, the time there,” she remarked to the author much later, as if long, long afterward, “seems to me in retrospect like a piece, a thing, an object, a mass of material; something spread out, spatial; spacious.”