Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

38

With the first light of morning, pale as distant daylight inside a cave, she set out, heading for the valley. She was almost in a hurry to get out of the Sierra de Gredos. Although outwardly she still had time, she no longer felt as though she did: Was it necessary for the fact of having time to be joined by the feeling, if one was to be able to benefit from having time?

Did she lack for anything? Nothing, except that she was thirsty, and with a vengeance. For the first time on her journey she was almost driven. She rushed; walked as if being rushed. Yet she had long since left behind the overgrown stretch of forest and was passing through an unexpectedly day-bright section. This revealed itself as a transitional area, no longer in the midst of the Sierra yet still without signs of the foothills region, the plain as well as the peaks hidden from view by the belt of trees; also no sounds of civilization, neither honking nor cars passing each other, sounds that otherwise penetrated from the lowlands into the most remote reaches of the mountains. The area was devoid of trees, scruffy, with hardly any rocks, but the ferns were impressive, constituting the main vegetation here, their fronds overlapping, way over her head, a kind of fern forest.

There was, however, one sign of human habitation: a road, or actually more of a footpath, leading diagonally down through the fern forest, with snapped fronds on either side. So she was no longer a pathless one, an asendereada. And what name did she give herself now? “La aventurera,” she said, “the adventurer.” Hadn’t she already been called that earlier in the story? That was her name again now, on the final stretch, with even more justification. She, such an orderly person, an adventurer? Yes, for she was at once orderly and bold, an orderly adventurer.

Instead of in S-curves, the path now led straight down, but quite gradually, which suited her at the moment; the steep stretches of the Sierra lay behind her. And among the ferns she then also found something to quench her thirst: ground blackberries, whose runners crisscrossed the floor of the fern forest. Many of the berries were shriveled, or still green, or not yet formed, in bloom — all this again in a delightful confusion — and a few already ripe, altogether very few, “to be counted on the fingers of one hand.” Yet what a gift even one of these zarzamoras was. Gift? “Yes, at the sight of them I literally said: ‘a gift!’” she explained. What an ability this little ball of fruit, no bigger than a rabbit dropping, had to magically banish her parching thirst.

The thirst had grown so fierce that one had, so to speak, to shut down one’s mouth, together with one’s tongue and throat, avoiding any movement, such as the tongue’s bumping against the palate, swallowing, taking a deep breath, for fear that with the slightest contact between parts of the mouth — if the tongue even brushed the gums — the need for water, water, water would turn one inside out. Now one tiny little blackberry was enough, and the burning in one’s gullet was a thing of the past.

Unimaginable thirst? Yes, impossible to imagine that one had been thirsty just now. Besides: with the instantaneous relief, practically salvation, a sense of pleasure. The pure deliciousness, all-pervasive — and from such a tiny thing — made one open not only one’s mouth but also one’s eyes and ears.

When she then ordered her author to come up with a hymn in praise of the Sierra blackberries, the man with the assignment replied that in his life as a writer he had already praised enough things, occasionally even one person or another — actually more “another,” and then he gave in, as usual: “If you insist — but only a short paragraph.”

That she ran through the fern forest — she, who otherwise never ran; in her village no one ran — and finally even raced, was not, however, the doing of the couple of blackberries or the energy they gave her. The quick succession of world settings was still darting through her, passing faster than a heartbeat, and also no longer, as earlier, in a rhythm that coincided with the beating of the heart and reinforced it. (Anyone running or racing in her Sorbian-Arab village had to be a refugee or someone being pursued.)

There was no longer any rhythm at all. A setting from her own experience, or increasingly from a universal human past in which she had not participated personally, would come suddenly, while the next would flash by so rapidly, overlapping it and getting tangled in it so that it made one dizzy. One could no longer speak of sequence and regularity; instead of a lovely jumble, an increasingly hopeless one.

For the first time, no, not for the first time, in her life, the aventurera felt close to madness. Madness? “Going crazy — and I would have preferred hellish thirst to that.” It seemed appropriate that in one of the places or settings that came flying to her she saw herself as the former queen, shut up in the tower of Tordesillas in the sixteenth century, that queen whom history had dubbed Juana la Loca, Crazy Joan (she, too, had not gone mad, but, worse or maybe better, simply crazy). The crazy woman’s eyes were mirrored in the río Duero, the bright river, at which she stared down, unseeing — as if all that remained of her eyes were the whites. And the monk painted by Zurbarán fleeing past her into the darkness, after his vision had shown him, where he had thought to find a light glowing, a whitish, desiccated, scabby tongue dotted with congealed blood, like the tongue of an animal run over on the road.

That was the last of the settings, places, objects, fragments, in the overlapping, swirling series. The adventurer stumbled head over heels down the not very steep path, trying now to steer toward something like a port between the menacing shoals — like the people of Hondareda, she was now thinking in nautical terms. After the disappearance and obliteration of the río Duero, of the queen’s eyes, of the monk’s robe in the darkness, nothing more — no square, no place, no figure, no tongue.

And then came the loss of images. (Not until this point was the author allowed to use this expression.) Loss of images? For the time being? No, once and for all. Personal loss of images? Her own? No, general. Universal. A general, universal loss of images. Who said that? How could one say such a thing? The story said it. Hers and mine, our story said it. It, the story, wanted it this way. This was how the story had visualized it.

And it was in her, this adventurer as orderly as she was bold, that there, in the fern forest far below the summit plain of the Sierra de Gredos, the story wanted the general loss of images to be consummated.

This was, to be sure, a problem of this period in history, and the loss of images, and of the image, took place in each person only gradually, not as suddenly as in her case now (which is perhaps partly an invention, yet not an untruth). But according to the story, the problem had to be described in conjunction with her, the solitary and isolated individual. According to the story, the adventurer was the last one who, while the loss of images had already taken hold of and infected people in general, was still in the picture, living among and from images. And maybe now I, the current author, am more the right one to tell the story of the loss of images than her Miguel (de Cervantes Saavedra, or whatever his name was), for whom this problem or topic would have been inconceivable? Or perhaps not?

The stumbling became a tripping. The tripping became a fall. The fall became a general capsizing. The adventurer tumbled head over heels into the fern forest, which was full of holes and hollows not mentioned in the “Guide to the Dangers of the Sierra de Gredos”: no reason to fault it, for these depressions were all rather shallow and quite well padded with the fallen and rotting fern fronds from the past, and thus, in the terms of the “Guía de peligros,” no real danger, and certainly not in comparison to the actually dangerous neveros, or snow holes, where, on a seemingly smooth surface, one could sink from one step to the next up to one’s neck, and deeper, into an apparently harmless patch of snow.

The danger here in the fern forest was of an essentially different kind. Her fall, caused by the abrupt loss of images, was a small fall on the outside and a large fall on the inside. Yes, first came the loss of images, and only then did she get tangled in her own feet, which caused her to tip sideways, fall, and roll over and over, although she had not fallen from much of a height. What the images, the image, and the loss of images mean and bring about: that will be the subject of the epilogue — her conversation with the author in the village in La Mancha.

For the moment she lay on the ground surrounded by ferns, invisible from the outside as well as from above, on her stomach, motionless. In a close-up her torso would have been heaving violently yet almost inaudibly as she breathed, like that of a sheep sleeping. Just so, people with severe injuries, even if they were fully conscious and felt no pain, instead of trying to get up, would instinctively remain lying on the spot without moving, as if simply to raise their head or bend a toe would mean the end of them. So was she injured? No, it was worse: felled by the extinguishing flash marking the loss of images, coming on the heels of the hopelessly jumbled series of image flashes, and now visited on her and the world, she was going through death, as it were (without “as it were”). That was how the story wanted it to be. That was the story (which is neither a fable nor a legend, and also no fairy tale).

And she accepted the idea of perishing. Hadn’t she, hadn’t one, foundered long since, in existence, in life, in relationships, and didn’t that now finally become obvious in the loss of images, brought on almost intentionally? The sweetness of acceptance. To disappear from the face of the earth: as it should be.

On the other hand, acceptance did not mean wanting to die. She had never felt anything like a longing for death, and certainly did not now. How incomprehensible she found the sentence “I look forward to dying.” True, even before the crossing of the Sierra, she had counted on perishing. But if she were close to it, one thing was clear: she would fight for her life to the last. For her life? For life.

And so now she girded herself to resist, at first only inwardly, yet where else would one begin? And as had always been the case with her, this taking action, like all her doings, was a form of management — and didn’t one say, instead of “I must find a way out,” “I must manage to get out of this situation”? While she lay there, not moving a finger, her thoughts were already focused on managing again: budgeting, measuring, calculating, ordering, surveying, projecting, taking precautions, planning. Except that no plan for forging ahead presented itself, or, in her words: no managerial opportunity. For in her terms, rather than “It’s all over,” the conclusion was “There is nothing more to manage!”

It was of her own free will that she then decided to remain lying this way in the ferns, in the death zone, for the day and one night, el día y una noche.

At least she had one thing in common with the hero of her Miguel’s story: she looked for adventures where there were none to undergo, at least no external, visible ones. And accordingly he, that good-for-nothing, that inept soldier and galley slave, that one-armed son of a quack, would have been the right one to tell her story after all, the only one? But this man Cervantes never did narrate primarily internal adventures such as hers? Or did he? Was it not true that his adventure stories, too, no less than that of the loss-of-images-and-how-one-can-manage-one’s-way-out-of-it, belonged primarily to an interior world, and were for that very reason universal?