Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

30

Not merely one phenomenon or another: from the outset, to her, the very rhythm in the Hondareda basin that carried, connected, and indeed first generated the phenomena and allowed them to appear was fundamentally contrary to that of the red-cheeked, red-haired man. And this rhythm had established itself, after the climb from Pedrada, when she first caught sight of the amazingly deep mountain basin, and of this settlement at the bottom and on the slopes that was entirely new to her, and it had provided the beat for the next phase in her one-woman expedition.

Precisely because of the depth of the cavity at her feet and the massive dimensions and extent of the granite depression, which quietly exploded all usual expectations, the individual features, both near and far, appeared as if through a lens that sharpened them and lent particular emphasis to their contours; and furthermore the contours thus emphasized revealed themselves to be in harmony with one another: in fact part and parcel of the special prevailing rhythm that manifested itself in a flash.

The scattered boulders, the dwellings, the hayricks, the lake (laguna), its outflow, the herds, the people, the entire high-altitude lowland instantaneously took on the appearance of a script, complete with links connecting the individual features or letters, and likewise spaces, paragraphs, or punctuation marks, but in a clearly organized and, at least to her, lovely regularity (see rhythm, above).

And also worth mentioning: that to her the writing looked Arabic, with the identical squiggles of the dwarf bushes everywhere, the repeated and often parallel loose ends, splits, similar curved fissures in cliff after cliff, the dots, points, waves, accents, breathing marks of lichens and mosses on the rock, an Arabic script that she also, involuntarily, “read” from right to left.

And the rhythm of the phenomena in the sprawl of Hondareda went approximately as follows: A swarm of wild doves rattled. A family of grouse ran, hustled, flitted. A snowflake fell. The sky was blue. A rock was a dinosaur egg. A gust of wind hissed. A cloud of dust was yellow. An old man had freckles. The pattern in the dried mud was pentagonal or hexagonal. My grandfather sang in the distance. A flint gave off a singed smell. In the conifer forest the light-colored cones glowed and were cone-shaped, and the raven that flew by was raven-black.

And continuing in the Hondareda rhythm: In the sheltered spots behind the hawthorns the sun shone summery-warm as in summer, and in the leafless rowan trees no birds were sitting, and the bunches of berries were shriveled, and in the middle of winter or fall or May the crickets began to chirp, and I let them wind up my heart anew, and the grass quivered, and a stick was snakeskin gray.

And in the glacial lagoon the water smoked where it was free of ice, and reflected, and the dark part in this reflection was the steep peak of the Almanzor, so steep that precisely this highest peak among the peaks of the Sierra was the only one without snow, and al-mansûr, yes, clear as day now, means “the place” in Arabic, and kathib means “dune,” and behind a stone fortification actually appeared, as if conjured up by the word, a dune, sand from weathered rock that had been blown there, yellow like the feet of bees, and another man was red-haired, and on a mountain acacia the thorns were pointed like sharks’ fins, and all joys and sorrows of the world were gathered in one place, and there was a grove of chestnut trees the size of a small orchard, distributed over two terraces, and a single leaf there was whistling, and a few burst fruit husks hung there, empty and showing off their spines, and I leaped over the stone wall and snatched the forgotten chestnuts from the ground, and from an overhanging ledge hung icicles.

And the smoke in the settlement smelled like the smoke in Tiflis, in Stavanger, and in Montana, and next to the Almanzor the mountain water now mirrored the façade of my office building at the confluence of the two rivers in my riverport city, and farther to the left there was a clattering in an oak gall, and in the black broom pods the seeds rattled, yes, rattled, and way over to the left, down at the end of the lines, stood bint, Arabic for “girl,” and another word for daughter was ibna, and someone actually was standing there, and everything was all right again, and nothing was all right again, and everything and nothing was again as it had been, and in a dormer window a candle was burning, and my brother tossed a hand grenade, and one was filled with bliss, with a desire to help, with helplessness, and with a general lostness and neediness, as never before and as always, and the flock of wild doves rustled, and the phoenix rose flaming from its ashes, and one was swept across the first threshold one happened upon, in the first house one happened upon on the floor of the basin.

Long ago, during her first time in the Sierra de Gredos, with the child in her womb, when the child’s father, her one and only, had disappeared on the way into the mountains (a disappearing that was characteristic of his tribe?), and when the world before her, at her feet, had suddenly turned upside down, had been stood on its head and acted insane, she herself, in the face of that spectacle, had gone insane, not just almost, but from top to toe.

For years she had denied it, she finally admitted, almost inaudibly, to the author, had denied it energetically and determinedly, and this energy had then been partly responsible for her “worldwide success”—a criminal energy, so to speak (no, not so to speak).

“Everyone has his own madness inside him,” she dictated later, when she had recovered her voice, to the author, “and this madness has already come to the surface once, or several times. Except that we all behave, or most of us do, as if nothing had been wrong.”

Now, however, at the sight of the depression of Hondareda, with its unexpected new settlement, which upon one’s approach looked positively urban, indeed metropolitan, head-down in the glacier-clear valley, a city as if under a glass bell, or altogether as if in a different, as yet unexplored and even undiscovered element, a scene replayed itself in her mind, one of the last before the somewhat happy ending of that film whose heroine she had portrayed long ago: fleeing from her mortal enemies, she found herself in an utterly dead landscape with nothing but volcanic ash, some of it still smoldering, at the edge of the world — as everywhere, such ends, edges, and precipices of the world could occur practically cheek by jowl with the apparent middles and centers — and she wandered, abandoned, half-blind, empty-handed, pleading to the invisible heavens, calling for her parents, her brothers and sisters, her homeland, cursing her fate and human existence altogether, through the scree and fallen rock, stumbled, fell, struggled to her feet, fell again, and finally remained lying facedown on the ground. The camera showed her in close-up, prostrate. Sparks of what looked like lava shot nightward past the figure lying stretched out there, in a coma or dead. A temporal leap. A change of lighting, with the close-up unaltered. The searchlights of the pursuers? No, daylight. The end of night. During the temporal leap, day had broken. Her head still in the smoking volcanic ash and basalt. Over? The end?

Yet gradually some movement, or is it merely the wind in the hair of the corpse? Slowly her head rises and is bathed in light, morning light. Her skin, also her brow, and especially her temples seem made for this light. (Of course the lighting man has done his part, with additional spots and reflectors on the sides and especially on the ground.)

The eyes opening: black, which at the beginning of the shot looks just as dull and veiled as the cratered landscape all around, but then begins to glow, and now, as the camera slowly pulls back, almost imperceptibly, from a close-up to a full shot, here and there the glassy humps of basalt also begin to glow, the fiery cataracts of all the long-ago volcanic eruptions now chilled, hardened like crystal, and heaped up in the wasteland of petrified ash.

It is a rather dark glow, almost scornful, or even, with all the hopelessness concentrated in her gaze, full of quiet rage, unlike her futile fleeing of the previous night, with hands and feet groping and tapping pointlessly in every direction. Then — although the camera remains focused for a full shot, I seem to recall seeing as a moviegoer a shot of only her mouth, just for a moment: the lips parting. Astonishment. Yes, astonishment. Not to be forgotten: her film was set in the Middle Ages, and the occasional astonishment expressed by the characters was not merely believable but was a basic trait. This astonishment of hers, however, exceeded the customary medieval astonishment, was an astonishment at nothing, nothing at all, and it was decisive.

For it saved her life. More than that: it gave her the strength to start a new life. That decisive astonishment in the moment of awakening after a night of despair enabled her to shake off her old story once and for all, and made room for a new scenario, one that was not merely a thousand times but infinitely more beautiful and true, and this story was now about to begin. (Except that the film did not show what happened next.)

At the time, several interpretations were put forward to explain that “decisive astonishment” on the part of the heroine: a dream, a predawn dream, of the sort that sometimes plays out in heavenly colors and tones? the light of morning shortly before sunrise, and the sky, again very medieval, as the domed firmament, and the lava earth, on which the woman lay outstretched, as the surface over which it arched? Or a prematitudinal dream of Paradise and the light and the air currents of the real or waking world intermingling with it?

For my part, I believe that the fresh astonishment of that persecuted and despairing woman there was actually unfounded, or stemmed from almost nothing — just as I, too, from early on and to this day, though less often, and less and less frequently, in my often damnably askew and sometimes accursedly worthless life, occasionally see, newly astonished and astonished anew, an immense, powerful, unshakably peaceful world flash by, which I cannot be dissuaded from considering the actual one — more will be said here later about the rather despised word “actual”—and such a world never appears to me in the form of the sun or of pure light, but only in rather dim, flickering, twilight-gray flashes resembling distant heat lightning, as the most inconspicuous of the inconspicuous: for instance as a rusted nail seen years earlier on a dusty road in the place of my birth; as a curb seen one time on the Peloponnesus; as the shadow of a child in Oklahoma; as the boat gangplanks in Cappadocia. And I, too — and with me my “actual world”—are threatened with the loss of images, or has it already taken place, irreversibly? And since it is a question of my life, and not of a film plot, my astonishment was also never able to play a decisive role.

Her first experience of the surprisingly populated mountain depression matched to a T the way her eyes had been opened to the world in the scene she had played at the end of her film. The world one experienced in Hondareda was virginal and bridal, yet equally, as one sensed the first time one gazed down into that camp in the hollow, a lost cause, or perhaps not? (For this sentence she again insisted on “one,” and when the author, who had long since left his father- and motherland for his village in La Mancha, hesitantly asked whether “bridal” and “virginal” were terms still used in German and suitable, she told him that what mattered was the adjectives’ relationship to the nouns, and in this case: yes!)

By the way, she said, her story would have to return later to that upside-down hour, with the outbreak of insanity, that had occurred during her first journey through the Sierra de Gredos; for that had also become the hour of her guilt, and the fact that now, on this last, or perhaps not last? crossing, she had made up her mind, and, in the worst moments, intensely imagined, that she would speak of it at long last, had kept her from giving up and just letting herself fall, or perhaps not?

On her previous adventurous journeys, she had encountered that virginal world not so infrequently — and again she interrupted the author and ordered him occasionally to replace “adventure” and “journey” with “roaming.” Almost every time it manifested itself, it had been when the roamer, or, in Spanish, la andariega or andarina, from andar, “to walk,” had stretched out somewhere in the open and fallen asleep, just as had happened in the film with the heroine she had played.

Unlike in the film, she slept there, on the bank of a brook, in the steppe grass, under an overhanging cliff, only very briefly, usually for just a few breaths. And the falling asleep occurred in broad daylight. And it was never preceded by sorrow or despair, at most by a certain weariness from walking, a listlessness.

Awakening from such a slumber, always accompanied by the rushing of water, the whistling of wind, and several times the more or less distant roar of a highway: not an easy awakening: as if poked by the forehead of an animal watching over her or some friendly creature. And also each time a scenery that, although unchanged, now seemed thoroughly unfamiliar and above all incomprehensible, without north and south, noon and afternoon — if any time, then morning, if any land, a land in the Orient.

What freshness wafted toward one from this indecipherable setting. Except that it soon gave way to the tried-and-true familiar, and already the rejuvenation and the brideliness were wilted and dissipated. But in her Hondareda period this was not the case. She had never experienced anything similar.

But then something comparable did come to mind. As a young woman she had often taken the train from her university town home to see her grandparents and her brother, still quite little, in the Sorbian-Arab village. Although the village lay in an almost flat landscape, before arriving at the railroad station, located a short distance from the village, the train went through a real tunnel. That got one’s attention, and not only the first time but every time, and even more remarkable was the length of the tunnel. Each time it seemed as though it would never end. What a long journey, with darkness to right and left, and in a tunnel on almost level terrain, too!

When she traveled home this way, it was always evening already, if not night. And often she was tired, from being in the city or just in general. And as time went by, she would fall asleep in the tunnel, more and more often, and eventually every single time. And she fell asleep there even when she was not tired. The train had hardly entered the tunnel, at which it always more than doubled its speed, and its rattling and banging turned into a high-pitched whirring and whining, when her eyes would close and she, her body and her consciousness, and everything and everyone in the car with her, would drift along, while the iron wheels and rails took on a stronger and seemingly hardened rhythm between the very narrow tunnel walls, deep in the wide, hollowed-out belly of the dugout of the grander time. And: in the tunnel one man raped her. One? One for all.

At the end of the tunnel, with the train’s sound now more distant again and softer, while the train slowed before reaching the station, she awoke. And every time, and with every repetition of the trip just as powerfully as in a fairy tale, she had the transformed-world experience. And unlike the times when she awoke as a vagabond with the sky above her, the awakening in and after the tunnel was lasting and reliable and above all valid. As a result of the tunnel, momentary, everyday experience, the mere present, was transformed and elevated into something of epic proportions. When one’s eyes closed in the tunnel, one saw afterward with much bigger eyes.

And just as later, when she was in upside-down, downside-up Hondareda, surrounded by the summit plain of the Sierra walls, she had thought back then, at the sight of the entirely unadorned village, which, however, seemed after her tunnel sleep to be decked out as for a festival: “What has-beens, how superfluous we are. How played-out we are. What dream merchants and castle-in-the-air-builders we are. How lonely and lost we are.”

And just as after the tunnel sleep her former home had seemed incomprehensible, so the Hondareda world seemed incomprehensible to her now, and from beginning to end: which did not mean that she was looking to comprehend it. For, just as when she awoke under the open sky after the tunnel, this not-comprehending-anymore was basically invigorating, and despite all one’s awareness of being a lost soul among lost souls, it gave one confidence, of a very strange sort. What? Was she, the boss, a lost soul? That, too, the story will touch upon later. And besides, she had long ago ceased to be a boss. Or perhaps not? Or all the more?

There was almost nothing ordinary about the “mead of Hondareda,” one of the names as numerous as flower petals that had been coined for the glacial basin. So she stood there, and stands there, and will have stood there, one day looking at a sundial painted on a granite slab. It was not merely that it had no hands, and behind the shadow-dial nothing but a landscape in circular form, a miniature of the region: the sundial was located at a spot in the settlement that the sun seldom reached, and then only for moments, and besides, a granite cliff stood in the way of the sun’s rays: so that the sundial’s indicator cast its time-revealing shadow at most for a couple of moments.

Similarly, right after her arrival there, beneath the mountain-blue sky, the zenith of whose great dome already hinted stormily at outer-space black, she had again been pelted, as earlier in Pedrada, from a broom thicket: except that this time, instead of stones it was almost weightless juniper berries, and, after another stretch, shiny red rose hips, not even as big as quail eggs, and, after a few more boulders, Sierra nuts, elderberries, and pine nuts. And it was not so much that she was pelted with these things but rather that they were thrown to her by persons who kept out of sight, in a high arc, as if she were supposed to catch them (which she then did).

Likewise a brand-new, shiny bulldozer was suddenly parked there, surrounded by quartz and alabaster cliffs so smooth that one’s hand could not gain a purchase. And on another day, somewhere else entirely, far from the settlement, from the grainlike tall steppe grass, among which actual blades of wheat could be found, emerged freshly sieved sand cones as high as houses, in each one a weather-beaten rusty shovel, as if left there long ago. And the first, or third, or last of the original inhabitants of Hondareda — the observer had observed correctly — a man visibly stricken with years, was busy day in, day out, transporting boards on a small ladder wagon, back and forth, forth and back, sometimes also in a circle, without unloading them anywhere.

Another Hondareda person clambered into the one crane in the place, which towered above all the rock spires on the floor of the basin, and stayed up there, motionless, in his cabin, sitting below the still arm of the crane, reading? watching? finally fumbling around, doing things with his hands that had no connection with the lifting apparatus, something like shaking a skillet, something like threading a needle, something like writing, with his nose close to the paper like a first-grader — writing with his entire hand, his fist, meanwhile rolling his shoulders, throwing his head back, swaying his torso, and thus involving his entire body, or was this actually lovemaking, with his “partner” shielded by the cabin’s screen, and look, now he is gazing quietly out his crane window again, not moving a muscle, look how far away he is, and how, at fingertip distance, his iris iridesces and his pupils pulsate.

And one day or night, or again and again, the roamer in the temporary Sierra capital must have pushed open one of the seemingly unoccupied wooden shacks, pushed aside the partition, and seen two lovers there, more real or in the flesh than anything one could imagine: there lay two people, very young, and the girl, the woman, was the most visible.

She did not react in the slightest to the intruder, who in fact immediately took one step backward, but then became a spectator, wordlessly asked and invited to do so by the woman. As glistening as the girl lying there naked was (where in the world was the source of light in the dim shack?), the epitome of pride and surrender in flesh and blood, but especially in flesh, she seemed even prouder when she knew herself observed, and her surrender, becoming hard to define, transcending the person to which it pertained, the boy or man, appeared to be not merely somewhat but infinitely greater and more self-aware — will have appeared thus, appears thus.

Enough of myths, this gaze said, this skin and this hair: enough of myths in which male gods descend on the woman in the shape of a cloud, a swan, a bull, a dragon, a billy goat, and the like; look at me: entirely different myths are in effect, and not only here and now, myths in which longing during absence and fulfillment during presence finally coalesce, and these myths are not made up out of whole cloth! A knothole in the shack opened into a spiral, and through the wide-open door the summit plain of the Sierra, peak after peak, the Mira, the Little Brothers, Los Hermanitos, the Little Knives, Los Cuchilleros, the Three Galayos, the Almanzor, the Galana, came riding in, one after the other. What were the two doing there? Was this even lovemaking? And the observer again understood nothing, nothing at all: and that was as it should be. Whatever the case: those two in the shack, copulating in such a creaturely way, majestically, displayed it to the world; displayed it to the universe.