Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

34

While the mistress of the story, la Señora de la historia, and the reporter conversed thus and gazed down from their rocky platform above the brush at the settlement in the hollow, twilight fell and the moment of departure drew near: for her last crossing of the Sierra de Gredos she had chosen this night, a clear one, to be sure, but one without moonlight, a new-moon night.

The granite outcroppings stretching as far as the eye could see — the normal unit of space in the Sierra — shimmered yellow-red-blue, almost sparkling, as if it were early morning, shortly before sunrise.

In Hondareda not a light was burning. From the giant hollow in which the town lay, its houses indistinguishable at the moment from the glacial chaos of boulders, a shot or explosion rang out — in fact, it was merely a heavy piece of firewood crashing from its pile onto the rocky ground, the bang amplified as it echoed through the mountain basin.

From innumerable chimneys the smoke from stoves and workshops had been rising, steadily and everywhere straight up in a column, and now, in the interval it took to close one’s eyes and open them again, the smoke seemed here and there to have suddenly ceased.

How shrunken the capital of the Sierra appeared. And what an indecipherable and bizarre pattern it continued to present. High up in the sky the sun was still shining, its rays visible in the jet contrails of a plane that was already out of sight, the trail ending abruptly, as if the plane had crashed or been shot down. In the shadow of the summit plain, the wheeling of a kite, above that the wheeling of a mountain eagle, still in the sun. The settlers appeared, seemingly in their best clothes, to bid her farewell, dressed as if for their last days on earth.

Now above the entire region, from this clear sky, came a rain of pamphlets, with the sound of falling leaves, and one of them also landed at their feet. They did not have to bend down to read it. Written in all the languages of the world was one sentence in bold type: “People of Hondareda! We have not forgotten you!” And that was not meant to be reassuring; that was a threat.

From the corner of her eye she saw what she had not noticed before — that the observer, Jakob Lebel, had swollen and reddened eyelids, and that he was wringing his hands, like a woman or a very old man.

The rattle of tank treads that reached them from the depression came from suitcase wheels: a few people were leaving the settlement with bag and baggage, dragging themselves along the newly rebuilt road up to the Puerto de Candeleda. And the rattling also came from the Venetian blinds being lowered in some windows, something that had previously not been customary anywhere in Hondareda in the evening (they were used otherwise only to keep out the sun).

On the other hand, she saw the shutters open, providing a framed image, as if brought close by a telescope, on the only residential building that during her entire time here had been locked up, as if permanently abandoned, and the iron pegs, which otherwise hung down on chains, were stuck into the sockets along the entire façade to fasten the wide-open shutters; and this one stone building, now that it was apparently inhabited at last, allowed them — simply because it was lived in? — to hear the beat of music (a kind that had never, and would never have, been heard in Hondareda otherwise, a music seemingly vanished and unknown).

And in this “blockhouse” the first light appeared, and there was singing, no, not there, somewhere. And no, it was not singing, merely humming. “If you’re going to sing, then sing so we can hear you!” Who said that? She and the man next to her shouted it in unison. And at this command someone, who? promptly sang, at top volume, the single line of a song that was immediately swallowed up by the increasing late-afternoon racket and the rumbling of the garbage trucks (a song which later, as the apocryphal storyteller, who chimed in again, reducing the story to a legend, would have it, was “supposed to become the anthem of the vanished region”). And this single line, audible through the din, went, “I know who you are!” and, unlike the sentence in the leaflet, this was an expression of trust and respect.

And the rumbling also came from the other members of the observation team, which included as many women as men, who were just running their final laps of the day around the settlement, eight to thirteen of them, shouting and at the same time exchanging incomprehensible small talk, while the rotors of the helicopter that was to bring them back to their lodgings on the other side of the Sierra ridge were already whirring (and another line of the song, not added until later, referred, according to the apocryphal narrator, to these runners in circles: “I do not know who you are!”).

Yet these runners from elsewhere were the only ones whose faces — primarily the nose and chin — became visible. A kind of artificial light lit them up, as if they were running for a movie. Their running kicked up dust, even when there was nothing on the bare rock to form dust. And compared to the incessant, loud slobber of words emanating from their mouths as they ran, the slobber of any animal would seem like a string of pearls. The population of Hondareda, or what remained of it, appeared on its pre-twilight corso, which resembled more a back-and-forth of individual residents, as mere outlines.

Although each of them had just stepped out of the nearby cave where he lived, the silhouettes there seemed to come from afar. And at the sight of the troop of runners they walked even more casually (“with provocative slowness,” as another observer’s report put it). As is customary everywhere, dogs accompanied them, of whom the false author then wrote that in H. they barked “as dogs nowhere else do, with sounds as strained, feeble, and soft as the voices of the people there.” And along with the Hondarederos strolled the local mountain goats, pack mules, a couple of pigs, and, “as legend has it,” even the silhouettes of some Sierra hedgehogs.

It was no invention, however, that, as she then told the rightful author, those strolling through the town were joined time and again by children who had already been put to bed and now came out of the houses and asked their foster or grandparents: “Did you call me?” And not a few of these children had gray hair, as she now saw upon taking leave of Hondareda. And the pairs of grandparents or foster parents all looked like twins who had grown old. And the young couples who stood in silence with their arms around each other, from the beginning to the end of the alleys and squares, were again the same from chaos boulder to chaos boulder, the first couple. Yes, there she had been among people she could understand.

And one of the settlers — wasn’t it the town elder — had departed not on foot but by way of the freight cable car, without luggage, alone in the open gondola, from which only his head protruded. And one of the neighbors had secretly fertilized the plants in the greenhouse for another in his absence. And the signal earlier, marking the end of the workday in the glacial basin, had been like a temple gong, church bells, a minaret call, a shofar, a siren, a ship’s horn, a train’s whistle, and a school bell all at once. Finally a silence that rose from down there, a mighty and, to both their ears, precious and exquisite silence. What did the Hondarederos call themselves in private? Indios? — The name for people who had once emigrated and in some fashion or other become rich.

Now he, the observer, was the one who gazed sidelong at the woman next to him on the rocky outcropping. And she let him see her. No woman had ever let herself be seen by him this way. (The author, in his village in La Mancha, later suggested that at this point in the story the Spanish expression se dejó ver, “let oneself be seen,” be inserted.)

He had never encountered a female adventurer like this. There was also one woman or another on his observer team who called herself, officially, and listed as her profession on her passport, or for her regular appearances on television, “adventurer,” “aventurière,” “aventurera,” and had in fact crossed the Gobi Desert alone, swum the Channel, sailed across the Pacific, climbed the north face of Mount Eiger and a year later the south face of the Karakorum range, thinking, all the while, according to her published diaries, of her one to three children back home, whom her husband was taking care of, proud of his wife the adventurer.

But this adventurer here, even if she had an absent child like the others, belonged to another species, never before observed, let alone back home in the media. Jakob Lebel, or whatever his name was (certainly not Cox — that did not suit him), felt his heart pounding. While the woman let herself be seen by him, she looked at him.

He had never confronted such eyes before. Her gaze pierced him through and through. It was an open and disarmingly friendly gaze. (This rocky mound in the wilderness of broom had something special about it.) But there was another element at work in the gaze of the adventurer: and that was an almost boundless neediness and a delicacy of feeling of the same sort, and what seemed strangest to him was that it immediately became clear that her gaze did not apply to him, not to him, and it was quite sufficient for him that she let herself be seen by him.

Adventurer: that meant here that in her presence, in the presence of this stranger, he, the observer, was seized with the spirit of adventure, yes, spirit, and yes, seized. It would never have occurred to him that this creature, as straightforward as she was proud, as loving as she was in need of love, was a former film star or a current or former queen of the financial world — although such information would have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything from the moment: after all, nowadays it had become almost routine for people to shed their so-called professional roles from one moment to the next and, not perform other roles or leisure activities, but rather not perform at all anymore and simply become unrecognizable, unrecognizable and transparent in a lovely way, just letting themselves be seen without one’s having to think “doctor,” “architect,” “entrepreneur,” “artist,” only not as she was doing now, in which connection another factor was that the person offering and revealing herself so freely was a woman, and what a woman — one who, among other things, never felt cold, even her hair exuding warmth.

Jakob Lebel returned her gaze. Ah, to embrace her on the spot. But hadn’t that already happened, when she let herself be seen this way and he saw her this way? And her hand, which she held in front of her, bent upward, not cramped but loose, like a bowl, showing there, too, neediness. Ah, to take this hand. But hadn’t that already happened? That her hand let itself be seen this way was sufficient for him.

The light, too, the last of the day, added to the effect, a glow, the “alpenglow”? no, the Sierra glow, the glowing of the Sierra de Gredos, of the granite peaks far to the south — what kind of glow? go there and see for yourself.

“I must go,” the adventurer said with that smile she had smiled every time she used the word “must.” He debated for a moment whether he should give her his copy of the “Guide to the Dangers of the Sierra de Gredos” as a parting gift, but it was obvious that she did not want any advice for the journey.

He, too, had to go (without a smile, even inwardly). On this night he would not, this once at least, board the helicopter, but would stay in Hondareda, would stride decisively over someone’s threshold, going from one connector to another into the house proper. A wind arose, a wind from the south, a mild one, and the German word for gust, Windsbraut, bride of the wind, occurred spontaneously to Jakob Lebel as the two of them parted and he turned once more to watch her as she began to climb. How glad he would have been to go with her, as her page, her escudero.

The dew had already fallen and collected in a rocky basin, forming a little pool, and he moistened his temples with it. He had always been at the head of his class, in elementary school, then in high school and at the university, and now also on his team, yet he had never found his place, and would never find it?

And what was she doing and thinking in the meantime, the woman? Now, very close, a stone’s throw, from the Sierra ridge, she jingled something in her pockets, but it was not coins but hazelnuts, chestnuts, juniper berries, and who knows what else. And if she was thinking anything, perhaps it was something along the lines of the words to be found in the orchardist’s text that her brother had used during his training at vocational school, on the variety of apple called “Jakob Lebel”: “On its sun-facing side, Jakob Lebel is checkered and spotted … in the cellar its skin becomes waxy … slightly sour taste, without aroma … bears even at high, cold elevations … naturally lacks a straight habit of growth and must therefore be pruned frequently …. Back in the day when I was a fruit thief, the apples known as Jakob Lebel were my favorites. Jakob Lebel, you are not yet sufficiently lost …”

The last mountain crickets chirped, up above and down below. And upon hearing them, Jakob Lebel recalled that, after all, there was a kind of plan for the day in Hondareda, repeated time and again, and it went: “Go out and listen to the crickets!” And he wished that the crickets, with their incredibly tender voices, might perform for his burial here. Did he want to die, then, here in Hondareda? Yes. But first he wanted to live here.

“Jakob Lebel”? That simply could not be the name of an enemy.