Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

33

And at this moment, so the story goes, she, the mistress of her story, standing opposite the observer up there on the granite slab in the midst of the wilderness near the Candeleda Pass, suddenly switched from thinking to speaking out loud, and directly, and continued, clearly audible to the other person: “And your enthusiasm, my dear, and mine for the people up here come together in our recognition of their loss, of everything that gives an impression of abandonment and lostness.”

And the red-haired, freckled observer promptly replied: “Yes, that is how it is. I have already been dispatched to hundreds of places and battlefields. But to Hondareda, and back and forth through the Sierra de Gredos — this has been my first real journey, and if I am ever sent anywhere else, it will be only to places like this, just as painful and just as alive.”

And she repeated out loud, though in somewhat different words, what she had previously said in her thoughts: “This is a one-day people here, most definitely. Their time reckoning does not include a year, let alone a century, and even months and weeks: canceled. Not to mention halves and quarters: how they laughed at me when, after my arrival, I slipped up once: ‘I have been here for half a month now.’ Nothing more ludicrous in Hondareda than ‘a quarter of a year’ or, heaven forbid, ‘a trimester,’ ‘a semester.’ If there is any unit of time, it is nothing but a day, a whole day. This is a one-day people, and a twilight people, and the glacial floor down there is the arena or the dance floor for their twilight dance, which will not save this people and its day and its time, and will at most postpone the extinguishing of the lights for another rowanberry or rice-grain moment.”

And he: “And the old man who has been searching day and night since he came here for his son, who went missing somewhere else entirely, and if only he could find his bones, if only he could bury one small bone of his son at least!”

And she: “And the way the person who just died kept trying for a while afterward to form one word with his lips.”

And he: “And the unusual or perhaps not so unusual crying of the children here, sounding so unusual in this rocky basin because it carries everywhere, a crying without an a or an i or a u, without vowels, only in consonants, b, d, g; k, l, m; r, s, t. Or the crying in general here.”

And she: “And the way all their books are dog-eared, and the way they manhandle the books further before they read them, tossing them in the air, bending them almost to the point of breaking the spine, leaving them out in the open, exposed to rain, wind, dew, and snow, letting them be pounded by hail.”

And he: “And the way they have made a daily ritual of sniffing deadly poisons, together with their children and grandchildren, whether in mushrooms or flowers, many of which contain the same poisons as they do elsewhere, but in a more concentrated form up here.”

And she: “And the way they use one of their favorite words, a word that is rightfully or wrongfully shunned elsewhere, the word ‘actually,’ in a sense that expresses happy amazement at a characteristic, a condition, or a phenomenon thought to have disappeared long ago, to have been abolished, to have become no longer possible — their constant ‘That’s actually beautiful!’ instead of a mere ‘That’s beautiful,’ finding beautiful something of which one would no longer have thought that, of which one would not even have dreamt that — hence the astonishment.”

And he: “And the way, when, in exceptional cases, they involuntarily, spontaneously, turn to us, even to us observers flown in from elsewhere, because the matter itself calls for it, as it were, and exclaim simply, ‘Isn’t it beautiful up here in our Hondareda?!’ without any ‘actually’!”

And she: “And the public library there, with the books even more beat-up than those in the houses: transparent glass structures right on the edge of a cliff, with a view from the reading room and from the reading ladders into the still-open crevice at the end of the melted glacier.”

And he: “And in their disdain for gatherers they are not serious in the slightest; they themselves gather whatever they can, crouching down, crawling on their stomachs, on all fours. But they do not look like gatherers, or even grabbers, snatchers, on the one hand because while gathering, instead of becoming utterly immersed and absorbed in it, they broaden their outlook — precisely through their searching and gathering and ‘collecting,’ which somewhat resembles harvesting — and acquire a three-hundred-sixty-degree sense, a sense that has no specific focus but lets them become open to all sides, especially when, in contrast to contemporary gatherers, instead of doing their gathering in secret, shamefacedly, with a guilty conscience, they do it openly and proudly and thus relieve us of our gatherers’guilt — and among them the young people also gather cheerfully and with an infectious matter-of-factness, dressed in the latest styles from the cities and at ease with the latest technology!”

And she: “And have you heard how the children up here can launch into storytelling from one word to the next, and then do not want to stop, while elsewhere — or at least this is what is claimed — storytelling is dying out more and more, and hardly any children surprise the people around them with stories — yet how wonderful and redeeming it used to be to hear, and also see, one’s own child, or any child, unexpectedly turning up as a storyteller!”

And he, with an expression he had never used in his reports: “It is true: with my own eyes I have seen the way two butterflies up here, when they flutter around each other, amount, as the Hondarederos say, to more than a pair, and as they gyrate in the air defy being counted, in harmony with the principle here, that time ‘defies measurement.’” The expression he had never used before? “With my own eyes.”

And she: “And look: the water in the lake down below is flowing in a circle.”

And he, turning his head to look down into the basin: “And look, the untouched piles of freshly split firewood everywhere in the settlement, as if in Hondareda it were simultaneously winter and early spring and already summer again, or fall. And look, the branches bending under the weight of fruit there in the garden of the man who is dying. And I have experienced personally”—another new expression for the observer—“that walking the town squares and the streets of Hondareda, naturally paved with smooth-polished granite, is infinitely easier on the feet and more unimpeded than anywhere in the great cities, where even the most central squares and avenues have become so uneven, dangerously uneven, despite their general appearance, from the constant digging-up and repaving of small patches, that with one step I stub my toe on a bump, with the next stumble or go flying into the air, with the third slip and fall, and so on. And look over there, the frog in the crown of the tree. And there, a lost pizza-delivery man!”

And she, shouting at him: “Isn’t it beautiful in Hondareda? Couldn’t it have been beautiful?”