Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

31

On her property — the former stagecoach relay station and orchard — at the edge of the riverport city, she had once had an experience that presaged her interlude in Hondareda, an experience with a quince tree, known to her in one of the few remaining Sorbian words in her vocabulary as dunja, along with kwita.

That year the quince, aka dunja, had bloomed, with its inimitable white blossoms, shaped like small, shallow bowls and gleaming from amid the dense, dull-green foliage, but then not one single fruit had developed. And nevertheless she went out to the tree every morning that summer, and then also in the fall, and looked to see whether there was not at least one quince, no, dunja. As time passed, here and there in the yard next door, so much smaller and more shaded, that ineffable dunja green, later yellow, appeared again, together with those rounded forms that surpassed any apple or other tree-borne fruit, and the shimmering fuzz on the surface. Only, in her orchard, no matter how often she climbed the ladder and poked through the leaves: nothing, and today again nothing.

And nevertheless she had not ceased to be on the lookout and to search. Was it not possible that in the fork of a bough or elsewhere, concealed from sight, a dunja might be hiding? Yes, one day it would present itself to her eyes, a body, a curve, a fruit — with weight, volume, and fragrance among all the flat, odorless, and weightless leaves, which here and there were rounded, mimicking a fruit. And her looking would contribute to the fruit’s taking shape and its eventual appearance; would help bring forth the quince, the one quince on the tree. And if not, she, the experienced fruit thief, would simply take one from next door and attach it by a string or something to her tree — exclamation point!

And then, one morning in late fall, when the foliage had become sparse, crinkled, and often blackened, with yellow spots like the special Almanzor salamander up here, from a distance her gaze, without being intent on anything for a change, unexpectedly—“out of the blue,” the author’s suggestion — behind, between, no, in front of, next to, and especially above the salamandrine spots, encountered a form, a ball no larger than a wild apple — which in that spot, on the previously so empty and barren tree, created a sphere in which the entire tree, without any wind, and with the dunja lancets at a standstill, strangely rigid in their wilting, at the moment when she caught sight of the quince (“So there!”) seemed to be turning. In this fashion a second and a third fruit then appeared, one more meager and nondescript than the next, and she left them all hanging on the tree, to shrivel and turn wintry black.

And looking as a form of intervening, contributing, and inducing manifested itself again during her time in Hondareda, going far beyond such influencing of a plant. The observer had observed correctly when he spoke of the shapelessness or homeliness or chaotic ugliness of both the entire settlement in its layout and the individual hovels, “sleeping crates,” “pre-Promethean holes in the ground,” “termite mounds without termite architecture.” And yet he had not looked long enough, or often enough?

Had he ever stepped over a threshold and eaten, lived, and so forth with the inhabitants in a sense fundamentally different from that in which some other, particularly assiduous, travel writers “participate in the natives’ lives”? Not once — although his reports do attest that everywhere entry had been silently refused to him, despite the absence of any visible, physical barrier-threshold in front of the living-holes; and as a result, he, together with the other members of his team, instead of crossing a threshold in Hondareda considerately and like a polite guest, had blindly forced his way in and remained blind to the spaces and conditions inside, or had he, or perhaps not?

She, on the other hand, the unmistakably foreign woman — which did not mean outsider — discovered in this new settlement high in the mountains — which was a place of transition, and not only because of its proximity to the Candeleda Pass — a painstakingly worked-out, precisely defined, and, in the last analysis, positively artistic system of thresholds, or, in the inhabitants’ water-dominated vocabulary, locks? And once one’s eyes and all one’s senses caught on to this system, the apparently chaotic image of the settlement, seemingly mimicking the postglacial chaos of boulders scattered around without plan or rhythm, as well as the human habitations, acquired form (and forms) and relevance.

True, it was a correct observation that each route into the colony took an inconvenient and seemingly illogical course, involving twists and turns, and going around bends that without apparent reason led one far from one’s destination; even a path or rocky trail to the neighbor’s place directly across the way followed a seemingly needlessly roundabout detour. But these detours had been there from the beginning, before the inhabitants settled in and constructed their dwellings, had been laid out after his arrival by one camper to the next: a sign and indication of the mutual commitment to preserving distance between oneself and others, a polite measure precisely in these cramped quarters, perhaps an even more distinct signal of giving one’s fellow immigrant a wide berth, intended as a salutation: “I mean well by you!”

And it was from these original detours, established without much ado (or actually with much ado) between the new arrivals — perhaps prefigured for all of them in the human circulatory system — from this kind of both external and internal pre-tracery, then, that without much further effort the entire seemingly pointless network of diverging and deviating streets, alleys, and passageways had developed in the village of Hondareda.

And with some variations the same was true of the individual buildings, or the natural features that had simply been adapted for living, storage, parking, cellaring: the caves, the holes and niches, the clay pits; and equally true of the now abandoned huts of the hermits, a succession of whom had followed each other to the basin over the centuries, huts that on closer inspection turned out to have been altered in all sorts of ways and only from above appeared to have caved in; and likewise true of the one-time “king’s refuge,” which only an outsider would perceive as a threatful (was that word still in use?) mountain fortress in ruins, and which, to be sure, continued to be marked on all maps of the Sierra by a small black triangle (= ruin), but in reality had meanwhile been rebuilt by the Hondarederos step by step as something else entirely, starting deep inside this obsolete castle, where, invisible to observers, a new cornerstone had been laid: as the seat of government of the — self-declared? nothing up there is declared, and precisely that is part of the international Hondareda problem — enclave, the seat of government hidden away in what still looks like a pile of stones and beams from the former royal refuge, and can be reached only with difficulty from the inhabited basin below: far, far removed from this government seat or center in the sky-high wilderness, at least sixty times sixty hammer throws or ten to thirteen sonic seconds away.

No matter over which thresholds in the Hondareda region you step or let yourself be sluiced or carried into the center of the habitations, and not only the geometric center: everywhere you will find yourself enclosed by that sphere that categorically refused to be recognizable from the outside. Even in a mere shack, even in a culvert-like structure resembling a segment of a pipeline (which upon your entry turns out nonetheless to be heated and equipped with bull’s-eye windows like a cruise ship), you immediately encounter the quince, as it were, the dunja, both in the singular and the plural, the fruit; the flavor and color radiate from the living area into the other spaces, and out into the open.

One could also believe the observer, and it was not a question of ill will on his part, when, in his reports, he described the people of Hondareda as regressing to a much earlier time, something already perceptible in their living conditions. For even she had felt during her first period there as if she had been transported back to the storm-wracked forest beyond the outskirts of her home riverport city. For, to greet her, one Hondaredero or another clambered out of a trough not unlike those left behind when the huge trees were uprooted. (In fact, not a few of those root hollows, as her neighbor’s son from the porter’s lodge had told her over the telephone, were now being used as sleeping places by the increasing numbers of homeless in the region, made habitable with cardboard boxes, blankets, and animal skins, also valuable carpets, with people climbing in and out through the gaps between the earth and the up-ended rootwork, now situated vertically; later he, too, would spend the night in such a hole, and perhaps more than once.)

The holes in both places resembled each other in that they had come about as a result of a sort of upheaval of the earth’s surface: there the centuries-old oaks, chestnuts, and cedars had left behind hollows deeper than graves and wider than bomb craters, while here it was the granite boulders, left standing upright in the scree and debris of the former glacier, as tall as trees and with a diameter of at least ten tree trunks, that had lost their footing, without any help from a storm, simply as a result of the gradual sinking of the subsoil and eventually their own top-heaviness.

But, no again, my dear observer, these pits, the hollows left by what had previously anchored all the stone trees of the glacial-chaos forest, now tipped in all directions, were by no means evidence of an attempt to slip away from any sort of present day.

It was not even a question of pits, at least not inhabited pits. These numerous additional hollows, almost completely sheltered from wind and weather, within the larger Hondareda depression, served rather as trenches, among other things for the storage of firewood and for heating-oil tanks, and above all for marking — though not, as the observer thought, for blocking and complicating — access to the actual living quarters, which in this fashion were initially shielded from view: as passageways, or outworks, or, if you prefer the term, “connectors.”

And only after these passageways or outworks — why had this remained a mystery to the nearsighted, farsighted, and also astigmatic observer up to now? — the actual dwelling, both fortuitous and constructed (with ancient as well as contemporary materials), as modest and prepossessing, as run-down and at the same time elegant, as its inhabitant, hailing from Hong Kong, Mexico City, Haifa, Freetown, Adelaide, or Santa Fe, let us say. — Did this mean that she was enthusiastic about Hondareda and those who had moved there? — “Yes.”—And therefore predisposed toward them? — “Enthusiastic does not mean predisposed.”—But didn’t enthusiasm threaten to run away with one? — “If it is enthusiasm, never.”—But didn’t it add something to the object that was not naturally part of it? — “If it is enthusiasm, always.”—And what did it add? What did it do?—

“Yes, it does something. It makes something. It creates something.”—But how could one regain one’s lost enthusiasm? How did it make a new beginning possible? — “It seems to me, it begins as a great pain often begins, but then works in the opposite way. Are you familiar with that? After a long period of being free of pain, you suddenly think of the absent pain, in your head, in your soul, in your heart, in your stomach, in your intestines. Completely free of pain, you think of pain, here and now, or merely think of the word and the possible site of pain — and the next night, or an hour later, or immediately after your thinking of the word, pain breaks out in you, in the very spot you were thinking of, and with great intensity, and you think you will die of it this very instant.

“And this is the way enthusiasm sets in, right? or returns, usually with thinking or becoming aware — not of pain, of course, but rather of an object that should actually be present, but, strange to say, is not. Long ago in the village, and not only then — let us say, in my fruit-stealing days, which are not over yet — often, very often the mere name of a fruit would come to me—‘apple,’ ‘wild plum,’ ‘cherry,’ or ‘quince’—with nothing of the sort far and wide, and why should there have been, and then a few steps or roads or farm paths farther on: there was the thing, the object, the tree of early apples, or the good Louise of Avranches, conjured up by the name, as it were; no, not as it were, and at any rate, simply thinking constantly of the names, the names, and again the names had put me on the trail of the apples, pears, quinces, plums.

“And so one day in Hondareda, for example, I thought about the word ‘children’: yes, where are the children here? Are there no children here? — and with the conscious thought, my asking, listening, and raising my head at the same time, they promptly revealed themselves, if at first only in a brief clattering of feet on the smooth, natural glacial rock surface, which echoed louder than any man-made paving — a clattering that had long since been in her ear but had been mistaken for hands clapping. And then the cries of infants from more and more rock huts. And then immediately, upon the repetition of the word, a screeching of many voices, seemingly unending, such as could come only from a school playground …

“And enthusiasm, at least enthusiasm for the objects, places, and living beings in the depression of Hondareda, meant that in each word or name that added something to those that were already there, pain was all the more certain to be present, a pain that exceeded my own and was inescapably bound up with the things there, the things here; see the expression for being dead that had soon established itself in the region, without prior discussion: ‘No longer being on earth.’ And this enthusiasm, which makes things appear, brings them to light, with or without the concomitant pain, is something you should insert into my story again and again! It should provide the accent, the accent of plenitude and at the same time of dearth — that certain accent that all the inhabitants of the Pedrada-Hondareda region actually have when they speak.” Thereupon the author: “As you do as well here.”