Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

32

When the author in his spot in La Mancha (and mancha already meant “spot”), far from the world but not world-forsaken, set to work later on her, and his, book, several versions of her crossing the Sierra de Gredos had already reached his ears, and they all had to do with the sojourn of that roaming woman, andariega, in the Hondareda-Camarca region.

Although by nature, or for whatever reason, he was a gullible person, it seemed to him that what was “attested to” and “recounted”—such things were always particularly emphasized in the preambles — was not merely false but also falsified. For these falsifying narrators, who furthermore never identified themselves and claimed to “require anonymity as a shield against predictable acts of revenge,” were plainly intent, and this was revealed by their very first sentence, in the choice of words and even more in the grammar and sentence rhythm, on first selling their story and second maligning their subject, with the latter motive, at least in their opinion, the absolute prerequisite for the former.

But actually they were attempting, in content as well as in form, to accomplish something far worse than mere character assassination, which could have produced exactly the opposite effect on various people in the market they were targeting: the little folks of Hondareda had to be portrayed from A to Z, and from the first adjective to the last verb, as the new Gothamites, dragging sunlight in bushel baskets from outside into their windowless houses or cellar holes, and so on. By treating the life of these settlers, who had made their way to the mountain basin from all over the world, as the stuff of fables and legends, they meant to render it harmless and, yes, unreal.

And these anonymous and apocryphal narrators thought that a particularly clever way to undermine the Hondarederos and those enthusiastic about their existential experiment, to render them ridiculous and insignificant, was to ascribe to them a belief in utopia, which everywhere else on the planet had become the butt of ridicule, and thus had great commercial potential as a humor-product.

The basic feature of all the apocryphal stories: that a first commandment of the H-people was “to be good and nothing but good.” Which suggested never doing good intentionally; it was enough to be good, with whatever flowed from that. And a variation on such a first commandment in that remote world was allegedly “not to do good but to behave well.”

What followed in the individual false fables, narrated in an exaggerated pseudo-legend style, was, for instance, that one of the new settlers, intent only on being good and behaving well, out of the clear blue sky fell upon a fellow citizen he happened to encounter and almost killed him, with the explanation that those responsible for the misery and wretchedness of the current era, his own as well as everyone else’s — and they existed in the flesh, if also hardly in blood — were so inaccessible and so beyond his reach, and anyone’s, that he, “good as he was” (apocryphal irony), could not help taking out his impotent rage against all those absentees on the next person who crossed his path … (Typical also of the apocryphal narrators: that they suggested to the imagined reader simply by means of those three dots what he was supposed to think about a subject.)

The local residents were also shunted off into the nonserious realm of the fable by these narrators, under the guise of seriousness, when they asserted that “the citizens of Hondareda” had, by their own testimony, revived a long-dormant tradition of the region, according to which, if one of them had to be the decision-maker—“for heaven’s sake, not a leader or master”—he had to exercise this authority not like an Old Testament or even cannibalistic father but “as a brother” (this was the resurrected traditional phrase) — which gave rise to tall tales describing a series of “brother presidents,” whose despotic regimes were not so much intentionally brutal as clumsy, but, because they appeared in “brotherly” guise, turned out to be especially brutal.

And then the author found at least partially believable what he learned from the apocryphal legends: that many of those who had moved to Hondareda from the most distant parts of the globe had gone well beyond borrowing for their new houses here just a few features from the indigenous architecture of their lands of origin: the multiracial person from Colorado who had returned here to the land of his distant ancestors had added onto the existing cavern in a granite cliff a perfect replica of one of the sandstone dwellings familiar to him from the Navajos back in Colorado (he himself also their descendant …); another had built on a ledge extending far into the mountain lagoon the spitting image of one of the limestone saltworks houses from the distant land of his birth, such as he had inhabited in Dubrovnik, in the former Yugoslavia, with mounds of raw salt stored in the windowless ground floor; a third had used boards and sticks and broom branches to hammer together a lean-to that represented a copy, if a poor one, of a field hut in his “motherland, Styria, New Austria” …

What made these versions credible in the author’s eyes: one detail or another was indubitably true, a date here, a place description there, even an occasional rhythm — which he dubbed “oscillating truth”—: many individual elements were true and effective — had the effect of making the whole thing, the whole story, ring true. But what was ultimately false and falsified, the essence of falsification, was the way in which the apocryphal narrators strung together the accurate details — the swindle resided in the linkages; denying the Hondareda folk any right to exist in the present by transporting their lives into the realm of legend, and thereby reducing them — who was being despotic here? — to manifestations of infantile, self-pitying homesickness. “Does no one notice?” the author shouted (and in his writing shed alternately pounded the table and struck himself on the head).

And at the same time it was precisely the circumstance that he had already heard the story told numerous times, one way or the other — was familiar with it from hearsay and still more hearsay, and discovered that it was constantly being offered to him again — that tempted him to commit it finally to paper in his own way.

Precisely the fact that many versions of a story already existed had always motivated him to become its author far more than anything else, whether tragedy, comedy, unique occurrence, or whatever, and to him it was no contradiction that “author” means “originator”; when so much and so many different things were told about a topic, there must be something to it, something to mine from its “original” form.

And now every day there was a sort of Hondareda story in installments again — to the author the clearest indication that what was taking place, or had taken place, there represented a problem, in the sense that it gave him a push or rather got him moving, a subject, one that lit a fire under him. What troubled him this time was only that the story had been commissioned. But was the initial assignment still in force? When the once powerful woman from the northwestern riverport city arrived in his house on the edge of the steppe in La Mancha, after crossing the Sierra de Gredos, was she merely pretending to be his client, and then? not even pretending anymore?

Yes, it was true — thus her reply, which for a long time consisted only of a silent play of expressions, to the reporter from abroad up there on the granite outcropping — each of the new settlers of Hondareda lived primarily in isolation, at most sharing his time in the morning and evening with his young housemate, usually a grandson, often still a child.

And, yes, except for particular occasions, people there seemed to go out of their way to avoid each other. How skinny, how exaggeratedly skinny, they made themselves when they passed each other in the rocky alleys. What glassy eyes, almost rigid with fear, they had when they looked at each other, only at each other? no, also when they were walking by themselves, and the fear in that case was decidedly more noticeable, though at the same time related less to something in the present than to the lingering effect of an earlier experience, actually mitigated a bit by the encounter with a neighbor.

Yes, the way they had of giving each other the widest berth possible — even out on the open mountain tundra, even while swimming in the lake, with its patches of bog-warm water — a way of backing off and wheeling to go in the opposite direction, and if a person turned to look at another after all, he would then walk backward, backward as if rigid with fear.

And there was some truth to the observation, made in Hondareda by her opposite number up there on the rock outcropping, that the neighbors spied on one another. True: the extraordinary technical skills the new settlers all possessed were used primarily for finding out what the neighbors were up to. Yes, they had things like peri-periscopes, more sophisticated than those in submarines, in every one of their dwellings, which from the outside seemed to be shielded, or, you could say, armored, and with these devices one person could see around a thousand and one corners into another’s cooking pots and books, under lamps and cap visors, even under eyelids, could see the top of another’s head, his hands, his mouth.

But, no, it is not that they want to spy on their neighbors so as to catch them doing something or corner them. Rather, they hope this spying will allow them to be in the company of others — to feel at one with them — to be with them. Ah, now my neighbor over there is running a bath for his grandchild. And now the other neighbor is sweeping out his workshop. And now my third neighbor is finally coming home, turning on the light in his glassed-in veranda — in the Hondareda enclave they have generally reintroduced rotary switches, likewise rotary dials on the telephones — and is pacing up and down, up and down — is he not feeling well? — is turning the light off again, sitting down, bowing his head, holding his head in his hands, rocking it, moving his lips, singing, yes, the grandfather over there is singing, and even though I cannot hear the song, I recognize it, I know it, and I am singing along over here.

And it is also correct that the Hondarederos, whenever they have time — and they almost always have time — post themselves on their property lines, each on the edge of his fairly narrow lot, and lie in wait for one another. But what we are lying in wait for, with ears cocked, hands poised, and knees and feet ready to break into a dash, perhaps for instance toward a shirt blown by the wind over the wall marking the property line, a dress, a handkerchief: so that we can promptly hand it back to our neighbor, ladder to ladder against the wall, or it is a ball: if only it would fly by accident again onto my land, and I, in an elegant, utterly natural gesture, could kick it back, without a word, with sleight of foot, as if the child next door had sent it my way on purpose.

Or we intentionally lob our own ball over the property line and wait to see what will happen next. Or we lie in wait, with our whole body pressed against the wall, the impenetrable fence, the barrier of broom berries and intertwined roots, for a call for help from across the way, for sobs, for whimpers, not out of ordinary curiosity or malice, but in the sense in which we also lie in wait for a singing or humming — not random singing or humming — and also for simply a kind and gentle voice from next door.

We watch our neighbors from all sides in this fashion because we wish them only well, and because, for our part, we feel protected and reassured by whatever we see and hear them doing, just as we, for our part, allow something to blow, or throw something, over to their side, in the hope that it will be brought or thrown back.

Or we engage in small, tolerated violations of each other’s boundaries, and also of each other’s property, and thereby show that our neighbor’s land, what grows on it, and thus also our neighbor himself, attracts us and is dear to our hearts. There is no greater proof of our respect for him than for us to let him catch us — to make a point of letting him see us — as we enter his greenhouse (neither dwellings nor other buildings are locked here) and, as calmly as you please, go over to his apple, pear, or orange tree and let one, never more than one, fruit, just for our own consumption, drop into our hand, and promptly bite into it. (In Hondareda the word “let” is one of the most frequently used verbs.) And I am flattered and appeased in turn when my neighbor clambers into my yard.

And thus a saying has come into use among us: even though we give each other a wide berth when we happen to meet, etc. — which does not mean the same thing it means elsewhere — sometimes the other person calls out to me, “I saw you!” which implies, however, neither a warning nor a threat, but the opposite, and along with “Not to worry!” and “Who’s counting!” is one of the greeting formulas regularly heard in the Hondareda region.

And besides, it is only superficially accurate to say that the immigrants hardly communicate with each other and at most utter a few empty phrases: precisely by means of these empty or coded formulas, which sound strange to an outsider, they convey a number of things to the other person, even beyond ordinary communication; in which case it is always the voice, yes, the voice of the fellow resident, that provides this additional element.

Nowhere else in the world had she, the adventurer, the roamer, heard voices like these here. They were not trained voices, not those of announcers or actors, such as various members of the observation team had. These immigrants’ voices took one by surprise. She understood the observer when he was put off by the inhabitants’ appearance, more vagabondish than hers by x rips in their clothing and y tangles in their hair and z scaly patches on their faces. Yes, they resembled a peculiar cross between knights and beggars.

But: once, long ago, on a street in Paris, or in Palermo, she had passed a similar figure that looked terminally scruffy, and had heard issuing from this seemingly abandoned heap of misery, which had long since lost any resemblance to a human being, a tremulous voice, God! what a voice! And in her mind, she/one had fallen on her/one’s knees at the sound of that tentative and pitiful but oh so vital voice — the voice of a living being if ever there was one — and in reality? one had stopped and listened to that voice, on and on, with one’s back to it, and was sure that the other person was conscious of establishing contact with his voice, at least getting through. How could she be so sure of that? She/one could taste it.

And this same surprising voice rang out, yes, rang out — despite the complete absence of tonality and resonance — from each of her people here in Hondareda.

Without exception they were broken voices, rough and hoarse even in the young people and children. The dying sometimes had such voices, when they were fully conscious — as no healthy person is or any person freed for the moment somehow of all limitations — when they saw their lives, and life in general, pass before them, and were at once filled with zest for life and acceptance of death; or survivors also; or people gratefully exhausted after some mighty task or effort.

These voices resonated for her like — as — no, neither “like” nor “as”: the voices resonated, that was all. (The author likes to slip in the word “resonate,” whether obsolete or not.)

No one else had such a voice nowadays. And besides, the people of Hondareda were not really shabby or ragged in the least — she almost shouted at the observer and scolded him — even the older ones went about in the finest fabrics, with the most elegant cuts, and there, under the mountain sky and close to the trails of wild animals, this seemed infinitely, to the nth power, more appropriate than on models on the catwalk and their imitators sashaying through the megalopolises with rolling shoulders and high-stepping legs — except it happened that the Hondarederos’ garments, which they wore everywhere, even on the spiny savannah and in the coniferous forests, had gradually acquired rips and tears, and in that region people even took pride in this, just look at me! and as far as mending, etc., went, they followed the example of that literary hero of many centuries ago, who left the rips in his garment unmended as a token of the adventures he had survived.

And how could this be: Were my people down there in the glacial trough unemployed, without regular occupations?

This much had again been observed accurately: none of them ever let himself be seen by outsiders engaged in any organized form of work. And, in particular, whatever the Hondarederos did, and especially what they left undone, never looked like work. Except that it was not enough to watch them during their days and nights. And besides, it was wrong to interrogate them about it, or about anything. The trick was to get them to talk by some other means. To get them to talk of their own accord!

In this manner, for example, you would have learned that they do things every day, make things, move things along — without any sign of working or toiling. Yes, they not only have no conventional occupations; they also reject separate professions, along with their labels. And yet, although this is not obvious with any one of them, each is many things in one: producer, manufacturer, tradesman, engineer, entrepreneur, dealer, processor, distributor, and also a knowledgeable customer (of the others). Every time they allowed me to watch them while they were doing something or intentionally leaving something undone, I thought to myself: These are my people, or: These are my kin — and every time — this shows how much I continue to live according to the rhythm of the profession I gave up — I misspoke in my thoughts and said: These are my clients!

And every time I entered their dwellings, even the sight of their shoes in the entryway, of a dog-eared book, of a few hazelnuts, slivers of mica, chunks of alabaster, juniper branches, a black boar ham hanging from the doorpost to cure, made the property seem well managed to me.

Did I just say “property,” rather than shack, grotto, bunker, hut, and so forth? Yes. Where from the outside you see nothing but windowless hovels, I, escorted with the proverbial “inconspicuous hospitality” into the interior, see, if not “crystal palaces,” at least spaces offering rich vistas of the outdoors, all the way to a variety of horizons, and that is no mere glorification, or my reaction against the palatial dwellings that I often perceive as worthless rubble, but also the eye of the trained manager: of a person who sniffs out value and makes sure it bears fruit.

As was already stated: I have always felt driven to bring something to the others, “my kin,” not so much to help them as to help some undertaking along, to suggest ideas to them in conjunction with it — to speed them on their way. What all did I not bring back for my brother and then for my child, and in what direction did I not speed the one and the other? I? Yes, I.

But I came here to Hondareda empty-handed, with nothing but my gaze. And with it I saw, and let the people here see, just as they first let themselves be seen — a seeing, one move at a time, as in business negotiations, yet fundamentally different — that their actions as well as their inaction — apart from any impression of work, effort, strain, muscular exertion, brow-furrowing — prefigured, or sketched, a kind of management that had never before been practiced in just this way, of entrepreneurship, value creation, treasure extraction.

What was new about them was that they never approached their diverse forms of action and inaction (which included reading, looking, etc., as action? as inaction?) with a plan for the day, let alone the year: another unspoken principle shared without prior consultation by the Hondarederos, adopted from a loafer of the previous century, a Swiss loafer! according to whom it was incompatible with human dignity “to make preparations.”

Very often, when she was the guest of one of them, deep inside his house or in his hidden garden — how cordially she was welcomed every time — and observed him going about his day, it happened that the other person, male or female, just sat there for a while or squatted on his or her heels, alternately gazing into space and reading, reading and gazing into space, or likewise gazed into space and alternately tasted something, sipped something, or, in general, from the beginning and also in between, stared absentmindedly at the book, into the air, at the flowerbeds, into the trees, or into the cooking pots, as she had once observed among many inhabitants of her vanished Slavic-Arab village (for which the expression “He [she] is gazing into the idiot box again” was used, or also, borrowed from the game of chess, “the Slavic defense”).

But then suddenly, with a light-footedness very different from the sluggishness and groaning of her fellow villagers back home, who were worn out at an early age, her host would get up from his place, silently and swiftly, and perform some operation on a piece of work in a distant corner of a room or the orchard, write something at the desk in an even more distant room, push a tub containing a fruit-bearing plant into the light in a third room fathoms away, hang out a piece of wash to dry in the wind on the line above the boundary wall, and was already back in his place, reading, tasting, doing nothing, as if he had not moved at all and had accomplished everything only with his fingertips.

And she was even tempted, in the presence of such effortless managing — entailing nothing but looking at things, combined with finger dexterity — to come up with one of those wordplays of which the observer next to her was so fond: a new form of brilliance was coming to light.

In any case, this was no longer the contemporary economy, in which the forecasting and bringing to fruition she saw as appropriate to her profession had been displaced by sleazy, greedy speculation. In the new economy here — her silent speech almost became audible at this point — instead of such dangerous, fantastical notions, something else was at work, in operation, and in effect: that incomparably more productive and constructive form of imagination that represented a value in and of itself and deserved that designation, which, again according to the Swiss loafer, is “warming-up,” illumination, revelation “of that which exists.”

Yes, in the Pedrada-Hondareda area economic activity consisted of imagining, and lighting a fire under, and putting in the right light, that which already existed. And a corollary was that letting things go and leaving things alone for now was more fruitful than action; and that in the case of such an innovative economy, the word “inspiration” applied first and foremost to things that it was both good and necessary to leave alone. What a boost leaving things alone gave in the direction of even better things. How I would have contributed to their economy if I had not arrived too late; or if only theirs had not been a lost cause from the outset here in the former glacial hollow — and not because of the glacial hollow.

Yes, indeed, if she had not arrived too late and if they had not been a bunch of losers from the moment they immigrated here, and a lost people (and here the observer threw her a glance, as if he understood what she was saying, although her speech to him continued to be silent), she would have established, together with them down there, a type of economy never before attempted. For such an economy was sorely needed, and all over the world.

Together with the founding fathers of Hondareda she would have taken the elements that were available there so plentifully and so full of promise and developed a new system of use and consumption, of saving and spending, of storage and distribution.

Nothing usable would have been thrown away anymore, even the smallest fragments: use, expend, buy, employ, yes, time and again, in a constant and stimulating cycle and in invigorating variation — but for heaven’s and the earth’s sake, not an iota, a flake, a drop, a knife-tip, a tea-or tablespoon, a smidgen (detergent, fruit-tree fertilizer, pepper, salt), not a grain (pill, sugar, flour), not a crumb, screw, nail, scrap of firewood, match, soap bubble, fingertip, not a dozen, three, two, or even just one of any item of use and consumption over and above what was strictly necessary — although in this new economic system the very strictness would have had a liberating effect, and how!

In such an economy, instead of the brutal distinction between sinister winners and wretched losers, equilibrium would have finally prevailed and, as could be observed at times between vendors and customers in public markets, a general cheerfulness; to paraphrase the saying that God loves the cheerful giver, spending, saving, storing, paying, taking money, producing, trading, consuming, would have gone hand in hand, all intensely cheerful.

Simply in the way the individuals in Hondareda allowed themselves to be seen in their daily life, this possible economy was prefigured, she thought: in the way each living space in their dwellings was simultaneously a studio and workshop and storeroom and shed and laboratory and library, and so forth.

For if I had not arrived too late and if the people of Hondareda had been a little more open to outsiders, their pattern of action and inaction could also have helped shape a new way of life, as is fitting for an economy. I could use such a new way of life. And so could you, my observer. And now enough of this talk of a different world order. Let us leave the question open. This is a story, and it should remain open.

Just one last comment on the money economy: there is no other realm in which God’s will and the work of the devil seem to lie so close together. And: when it came to money matters, one could not help making a hash of things. And: in the meantime, money was causing more pain than gain. And yet: engaging in economic activity as a sort of salvation, “I have kept the faith — I have engaged in economic activity.” And then again: “So much money!” just as one might say in disgust, “So many people!” And then again: Perhaps the power of money was the least cutthroat, in that it did not hide behind religious dogma? Managing economic activity was bringing things together?

Why, during your entire time here, did you remain the reporter on the outside? Your guiding principle, “No, I will not go inside, for no one is there!” may be accurate in most situations, but not in the case of this high-altitude hollow, which may be stripped of its future as early as tomorrow.

It remains true: no video- and no audiotape could capture what I experienced in Hondareda. And no film could tell the story of the Hondarederos. They are not a subject for a newspaper feature, nor does their story fit into a film, not even one set in the Middle Ages or whenever. For all that exists of their story is internal images: it takes place primarily inside: inside the garden and house walls, and in general indoors. For if you, my freckled observer, had entered even one time and had let yourself enter in, once inside you would have recognized from the interior images that the people here, in contrast to the externals you observed, are by no means incapable of playing, or played-out. There is sometimes a playing and dancing inside them that is a joy to behold.

The same thing applies when, as often happens, their head is in danger of dropping from exhaustion: whereas elsewhere people nowadays deny tiredness as something shameful, the people here try to resist it by transforming it into a game, recognizable as such only to themselves.

One of the most common games here: in a crowd and in narrow passageways, to avoid each other, squeezing into the most confined space and making oneself thin, thinner, thinnest. Altogether, these games or dances take place in the most confining space and often for no more than the twinkling of an eye — and are therefore also utterly inconspicuous and altogether invisible from the outside. But how much composure they gain from a dance like this, lasting only a second.

All their internal games and dances consist of these avoiding and skirting and countering motions, a balancing of contradictions: and in addition to recaptured composure, they give them fresh strength and a new outlook, contribute to conversions: of tiredness into alertness, of timid recoiling into calm gazing around, of getting out of the way into discovery of new ways, of getting lost into finding one’s way to some other destination entirely. These are transformative games and dances that produce a reversal, growing precisely out of failures and false starts. One could thus, with more justification, characterize the dancers of Hondareda as “transformers” than as scientists, engineers, planters, animal husbandmen, bakers, shoemakers, shepherds, hunters, gatherers (yes, really), readers, writers, technicians, carpenters, breadwinners, gardeners, merchants.

They transform the bustle in the streets and town squares — after all, up here in the mountains they are not out of this world — into a dance of haste: by slowing down inwardly, not outwardly, they transform slavish haste into briskness. And they accomplish all those actions and operations that are otherwise inevitably accompanied by annoying sounds and noise either by merging the sounds into a sequence, like relaxing dance music, or, when the person nearby, a grandson, a neighbor, a person entrusted to them, is sleeping or ill, by becoming quieter and quieter in their actions, a special art, which, entirely unlike a disturbing complete absence of noise, fans the person sleeping or sick in bed in the next room or next building with relief and rocks him to sleep. A dance and a ballet like this quieting dance is something you, my observer, have never seen, and you will never see it anywhere else, and you will not see it here anymore, because with my departure it will no longer be here to be seen.

And you, my Herr Cox or Jakob Lebel, you reporters sent here from elsewhere, suspect these players and dancers of the internal world of being the evil enemies, the mortal enemies, of those who sent you on this mission, and therefore also your enemies. And the chief reason for your suspicion: the contrariness among the new settlers here, culminating in their relationship to numbers and, a critical element in the remote-controlled furor against the new settlers, above all their relationship to time.

And it is true: you outsiders have a way of experiencing and measuring time that strikes the Hondarederos as harmful to reality. Not that they would have the temerity to throw myths at you and charge that in your attitude toward time you are repeating the murder of the first of the gods, the god of time, progenitor of all the other gods. But they do accuse you — and see you in turn as their enemies — of stripping time of its reality, humiliating and desecrating it, with your way of measuring, dividing, manhandling it; instead of letting time play an active role in life, actually enlivening life, time as the life of life, even if one does not see anything supernatural or divine in it.

They are aware, of course, that they do not stand a chance against you and your kind of time, and therefore they will never foment a war against you, contrary to what one hears. Instead they sometimes — though very seldom — feud with one another, to the point of hurling insults and even beating each other up, which occurs when one of them uses your sense of time in conversation with a neighbor: “It was a year and three days ago that I moved here and began a new life.”—Don’t say that! “Those lovely minutes four and a half months ago on the peak of Almanzor.” —Be still, you blasphemer, you are committing a sin against time!

Not that the people of Hondareda have no calendars and clocks. They have the most modern clocks here — and use these time-counters and measuring devices wherever they are useful, in the workshop, the laboratory, the studio, in the wine, cider, or olive cellar. Such things are abhorred, in the sense of being proscribed and banned from the entire settlement area, only outside of normal, or mechanical, arithmetic, practical time. The many curses directed at the prevailing time here: in the form of deep sighs.

The time that is supposed to come into play now is by no means each person’s subjective, emotive, internal time. Yet time as experienced by me, you, my neighbors, by all of us neighbors, is supposed to contribute to the project of a different time system, one that would have nothing to do with calculation — a system in which time, instead of merely ticking to count things off and count them out, would commence to dance, as the friend of life — a dance like all the dances in the Hondareda region: internal, momentary yet also more lasting in its effects.

A project? Yes, a new form of time like this would have been the Grand Project, invisibly inscribed here on the horizons, in which all the new settlers’ fragmentary basic impulses — a new form of time must be found for you, for me, for him, for us, for them — could have come together. New verb tenses, time-grammars, a new way of thinking and speaking of time: accompanying existence, yes, escorting our being, illuminating it, lighting the way for it.

To date, however, tentative efforts at best have been made, and today every Hondaredero is left to his own devices in his attempt to achieve the grander time in concert with his neighbors, and all of these efforts are again negative dances, in sentence form: “Not like this! Not like this! and also not like this way of thinking and speaking of your time here on earth!”

Hasn’t every individual in the depression of Hondareda cursed himself over and over, also scratched his own face and bitten his hands, whenever he has contemplated his life, past, present, and future, and found that the numbers and norms of clock and calendrical time have converted what had been lived, was being lived, and would be lived into a mere calculation of before, now, and later; rendered even the most piquant of life’s images flat and tasteless; stripped memory’s richness and potency of its reality and value; covered the precious Now! with rust; and metronomically deprived the longing for day or night of its body and soul.

“Not to destroy my experience yet again by adding the thought that I met my first and last love nineteen years ago; that today, at my departure, it is eleven o’clock on the second of February.”

But did not my, your, and our story demand and require for its completion that we add the notion of a time element? Yes, with the mental addition of a time element, the “three minutes” last night and the “microseconds” this morning would be transformed into the continuity that historians otherwise attribute only to centuries or millennia. What kind of time should we thus think of in conjunction with our life, our story — for here, in Hondareda at least, every person can think: “My life! My story! I exist!” Who else can say that?

So, what tenses? what images of time? what time-styles and time-rhythms, time-signs, time-words, or also merely temporal arabesques, should be added to our existence to make it shine forth beyond the boundaries of our existence and life? — And that, in a rough outline, would have been the time-reconceptualization project up here, for which, however, from the beginning it was no longer, or not yet, the time.

I know, too, observer, that for once you would agree with me, if here, on this granite outcropping under the mottled black high Sierra sky, I were to say to you that the Hondareda region is particularly suited for outlining and integrating forms and sequences of time that are less wedded to numbers.

Even just the stratospheric sky here — and not only on those nights when there seems to be not a single patch of sky without stars, and when the most distant and closest planets’ orbits are crossing, with the sparkling of their innumerable reflections in the mica, quartz, and alabaster at your feet: a different universal time from the one posted elsewhere in airports, banks, and also here and there in the remaining no-man’s-lands.

And this region is also favorable for the construction, yes, construction, of a new sense of time free of the compulsion to count, favorable precisely because of the “chaos” created and left behind by the giant glacier, the granite boulders, towers, arches, and outcroppings scattered over the broad bottom of the basin where the settlers live. It is true: all over the earth there are no longer distinct seasons for blossoming, ripening, and lying fallow. But down there in the summit-plain depression, this constant shifting of the seasons is particularly noticeable. And what is also true: those who have migrated here have helped the effect along through technical measures. But summer and winter, fall and spring, are also all mixed up naturally, with abrupt switches from windy to windless in the rocky chaos, from sunny to cloudy; it can be freezing cold in the cavernous alleys, yet hardly a step farther on, without the actual presence of the sun, merely from the heat radiating from the granite boulders standing, leaning, and lying there in a favorable spot, shone on previously by the sun: a warmth tangible like the warmth that sometimes wafts over one from a field of grain, or the warmth that streams from ears of corn being shucked, even in late fall — a silo warmth, no, an oven warmth, a broody warmth. And similar conditions in the lake in the chaos, where the ankle-freezing still water suddenly gives way to smoothing, caressing warm currents, followed by almost scalding whirlpools.

And this is true as well: at present one can observe everywhere in the world that fruit-bearing plants in particular often bloom several times a year and produce fruit all year round, even in wintertime. Whether it be elderberries, rose hips, or strawberries: next to the dark-black, heavy, sweetly ripe bunches of elderberries, in fall or summer you have surely noticed, against a barn wall, at a crossroads, by an electric pylon, April-like cream-colored clusters of bloom or still unopened buds.

And the mountainous regions are even more favorable to this magical transformation of one season into another. And the village of Hondareda, with this chaos that does not merely create blockages or obstructions but also has a dynamic or propelling effect, enhances this phenomenon, acting like a glass bell in some places and spaces, independent of the seasons. The budding, blooming, fruit-setting, greening, darkening, and ripening, the shriveling and wilting of an elderberry cluster can be seen all at the same time on the bushes.

Thus Hondareda-Comarca is both the natural glacial chaos as well as a protected enclosure, used as such by the settlers and unobtrusively enlarged by them, sheltered from the surrounding mountain wastes, and if exposed, then primarily to the stratosphere above: perhaps more related to it than exposed.

All of this could have provided fertile ground for the time-economy project. At least there were some points of departure in the speaking style and sayings of Hondareda, which seemed extremely odd when one first heard them.

Thus a verb tense in current usage again was one that had disappeared almost everywhere else, the pre- or postfuture or future perfect tense: “We will have met each other. We will have exchanged clothing.” Or we often used the equally archaic prepositional phrase “at the time of”: “at the time of our evening meal,” “at the time of his life,” “at the time of your absence,” and we used this phrase more frequently than “with,” “before,” “after,” and “during,” and also in bizarre expressions such as “at blackberry time,” “at book time,” “at brother time,” “at grain-of-rice time,” “at the time of your lips,” “at night-wind time,” “at our deal-making time,” “at apple time,” “at grass-blowing time.”

Yet for the most part the project remained limited to this: in our thinking and speaking, our action and inaction, we rejected, often filled with anger at ourselves, the bad forms of time that had a destructive effect on being.

It was even more beautiful then, and an even more powerful reality, when, as happened all too rarely, one became aware of a time more in tune with existence, and one could finally give “time” full play as a noun: “sand-between-the-streetcar-tracks-time,” “sky-in-the-treetops-time,” “night-blindness-time,” “Orion-and-Pleiades-time,” “eye-color-time,” “steppe-roaming-time,” “baby-carriage-pushing-time,” “Death-and-the-Maiden-time,” “crumple-letters-in-the-fire-time.”

Time beyond counting and measuring? Yes, and also, in an expression found in the book that accompanied me on my journey, my vanished child’s Arabic anthology: time “beyond weighing.” Away with those ugly standard times that anger us, and distort reality — and bring on the uplifting, inspiring time beyond weighing.

Does this mean that the immigrants to the mountains despise numbers and figures? On the contrary: they worshipped numbers for their imperviousness to all dodges and tricks.

And naturally — in the sense of a law of nature — the group of new settlers in Hondareda must have aroused worldwide indignation with this new time-management plan? no, time-management initiative, like a dangerous sect? no, even more passionate indignation than the most notorious sect, engaged in abducting children, emptying bank accounts, and practicing human sacrifice. And yet those who sent you and the others here, my dear observer, will not even step forward to oppose the impending attack, intervention, or whatever up here in the Sierra de Gredos. They see nothing wrong with it. They also have nothing against the people here, and when they assert that, they are almost pure of heart.

They think nothing at all when the intervention, as they say without lying, “forces itself” on them. What will happen up here is completely independent of their thinking, their decisions, their will, their person. As far as they are concerned, and this is believable, the Hondarederos are not their enemies. That the Hondareda enclave must be wiped off the face of the earth has nothing to do with two different worldviews, economic systems, concepts of morality and aesthetics, but rather with the laws of nature. Hondareda must be eliminated simply on the basis of the laws of physics. Motion produces countermotion. Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.

A vacuum — and in the Hondareda region one of these voids that, as we know, are abhorred by nature, has developed, simply as a result of the negative thinking here, a widespread “not that!” “not that way,” “not him,” etc. — a vacuum provokes, attracts, and creates fullness, in this particular case a violent fullness, in the form of a natural pushing, penetrating, overturning, rushing from all sides into the vacuum created here, which brought on this purely physical violence by keeping this space open.

And if there is any physical mass here in the basin, it is almost negligible, and furthermore hardly moving and heterogeneous, while the mass all around, to the borders of the ecumene, as far as the Arctic and Antarctica, in the meantime seems completely homogeneous, thanks to its exclusively positive signs, “that way!” “precisely so!” “you, you, and you!” etc., a constantly moving and expanding mass, and above all one infinitely larger and more powerful than the one here.

As the laws of nature dictate, energy and matter — as you will soon be able to observe here — produce motion and force. To speak of aggression, therefore, of hostile actions, forays, violations, war, or even planned liquidation, in connection with what is in the offing for the people up here is inaccurate and inexcusable anthropomorphism in view of such purely physical processes. Sweeping Hondareda from the face of the earth will be neither an act of revenge nor a punitive operation. It is imposed by the laws of nature and inevitable.

In your reports, however, although you, the observer, may not have likened the immigrants of Hondareda to a sect, you have described them, particularly in the context of their attempt to achieve a different relationship to time, as “on their way to something like a new world religion.” According to you, the Hondarederos are in unspoken agreement that everything to be revealed, from A to Z, has already been revealed, once and for all, and captured in the writings of the most diverse peoples in the most diverse ways, yet always with the same meaning, where it can be read and used as a guide to life. In the settlers’ opinion, as your report will have it, no new revelations of any sort can be expected, and none are needed — for which reason this is no sect, according to your observations.

As far as any essential or thought-provoking contrary notion of time goes, they think that anything that needed to be revealed has been revealed, from Isaiah to Buddha, from Jesus to Muhammad. Except that what you call these “unintentional founders of a religion” distinguish between uncontested religious revelations, which they accept without reservation, and prophecies. Of all that is prophesied in the revealed religions, they believe that only the prophecy of a different kind of time is a promise that has gone unfulfilled — that indeed, in the current era it has perhaps even more prophetic force for each individual and solitary person than ever before, precisely because it does not aim to be extracted from one’s thinking, one’s innermost feelings, one’s self-awareness, and imposed on the external world, to conquer or achieve power over others. As your report puts it, “What for the Jews remains the promise of the Messiah, is for them, though quite different and above all different in focus, the promised time.”

And you continue: “To be once more, as before story became history, children of time, of the god Kronos, and also to behave like children of time, unlike the original time-god-murdering children: that is the prophecy, a sort of unplanned universal religion, according to which each individual in Hondareda wants to live, with such obscure watchwords as ‘to restore time’s veil,’ ‘back to veiled time,’ and the like.” Yes, I have studied your reports closely, by means of my own peri-periscope.

And in them, in the course of your assignment here, you have hinted more and more that you are drawn to the region and the immigrants here, even filled with enthusiasm, although of a sort that differs from mine. You, too, dear Jakob Lebel — the name of this old variety of apple, named for a farmer, suits you to a T — you, too, are, or at least once were, an enthusiast: except that your original enthusiasm emerges in reshaped and often peculiar forms as a result of your profession as observer.

Thus, in your reports, the way in which each of the Hondarederos, for himself in his cave and hideout, speaks of and rethinks time, day and night, in toneless monologues, you compare with people talking in their sleep, and furthermore not adults but children.

That impression on someone passing by outside stems primarily, you say, from the voices (which you could not hear as I could when I was inside as a guest) of those people talking to themselves in the dwellings: these sounds and syllables, seemingly uttered with great effort, which to your ears seldom resolved themselves into comprehensible words and even more seldom into an audible sentence, in fact have the ability, you write, “to transport an unprepared listener out of ordinary time and to suggest to him a subliminal time, a downright violently contrary time — an underground time” (later in the report you once use the verb “to murmur” pejoratively, as proof that you are immune to what is imputed to you, but on the other hand you note, in referring to yourself personally, that “in the meantime, however, I am more likely to prick up my ears whenever something is murmured to me, than in response to all the usual speaking in no uncertain terms, explaining, clarifying, intoning, and articulating”).

And, according to you, something uncanny emanates from the people talking to themselves in Hondareda, as elsewhere from people talking in their sleep. But in your report, where those who gave you your assignment would perhaps, for obvious reasons, like to see the word “threat,” you unexpectedly used the word “threatened.” Which brings us back to your comparison with children talking in their sleep: like them, you wrote, especially when they were lying alone somewhere, far away or separated forever from any kin, “utterly forsaken,” and stammered and stuttered into the nocturnal stillness, and finally could not produce one coherent sentence, the people up here “exuded with their entire existence, not only at night, but also on the brightest, sunniest day, an unparalleled sense of being threatened and exposed.”

And so, you conclude, they do not represent any danger to the world — simply because they would never, ever want to proclaim themselves an enclave in the valley they cultivate, and would never lay claim to property, either personal property or real estate — but on the contrary are themselves the ones who are threatened, yes, “lost and abandoned.”