Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

40

When, precisely, she traveled from Candeleda to the village in La Mancha, she told the author there, was of no significance for their tale. It was enough that it was long after Candlemas (= Candelaria) and the month of Ramadan and the festival of unleavened bread, and sometime between Sukkoth, the Buddhist Dugout Festival, and All Souls’ Day. “The angels of the night and the day follow upon one another and watch over you,” she read during the train trip in the Arabic book belonging to her vanished child.

The Sierra de Gredos had still been visible from Liubovia, then still from Navamoral (= Mulberry Hollow) de la Mata, and, finally, on the bus trip from Talavera de la Reina in the direction of Toledo and Ciudad Real: until long after Talavera and after the crossing of the río Tajo, whenever she turned around in her seat in the back of the bus, the blooming of the blue mountain to the north, far, far off, with white crags at the top: so, up on the summit plain the first snow had fallen again.

She had taken her time once more: spent the night in Talavera (= Cutting Edge)-of-the-Queen in the hotel by the bus station; in Toledo she had herself poled across the río Tajo in the one-man ferry, from the city to the rocky steppe, and, far out in the meadow on the other side of the river, tracked down the remote church dedicated to the patron saint of Toledo, who was unfamiliar to most residents, and from whom she had taken one of her daughter’s several names, along with Lubna, Salma, Ibna, etc.

The following night she spent in Orgaz, already deep in La Mancha, quite barren and also well above the altitude of the Tajo valley. And the next day she strolled through the capital of La Mancha, Ciudad Real, spent hours gazing at the prehistoric archeological finds there, and toward evening took the only bus to the spot where she was scheduled to meet the author.

The return to conventional time was not as distasteful to her as one might have assumed. She could still feel inside her the alternate time dispensation of her crossing of the Sierra, providing an additional impetus that would not leave her that soon. Also no brooding as to what the future held.

Since the loss of images, there was, to be sure, no more “and,” that sweet, duration-forging link between her steps. Yet on the other hand she had her story inside her, there to pass on to others. She took in current events as current events, and these brushed against her story without disrupting it — indeed, some news, world happenings, or historic events that had occurred in the meantime actually reinforced what she had experienced, precisely by way of contrast, lent her experiences colorful outlines and backgrounds.

While she had been crossing the Sierra de Gredos, the first manned spacecraft had landed on Mars. The highway signs throughout Europe and the rest of the world now indicated the hours, minutes, and seconds in neon lights. The final communiqué from a global presidents’ summit conference announced: “At last we all speak a single language.” The president of a poor country asked the Universal Bank for money, pledging that his country would “show itself worthy of the community of deal-makers.” A new pope again asked in the name of his Church for forgiveness for something for which there could be no forgiveness, at most dissolution of the Church. Africa was declared the “continent of peace” for the coming decade (and the black faces pictured in that connection made that seem almost credible, and, above all, possible). Belgrade, the other riverport city and sister city of hers in the northwest, had been recently, for the second or third time in its history, conquered by the Turks, and the victorious second-in-command, the author of a book called Jogging Through Turkey, stood in his jogging suit at the spot where the Save flows into the Danube, waving a bundle of money, and at the same time pissing into the confluence of the rivers. Aquileia had become the capital of Italy. Ancient Greek had again become a required subject in schools from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Dog owners proclaimed that anyone who was not a friend of animals was an enemy of mankind. And — no “and”—her favorite team — no, not the one from Valladolid — Football Club Numancia, had in the meantime beaten FC Barcelona and Real Madrid and become the Iberian champions: the Europe Cup game against Manchester United was about to take place. (To judge by that, wasn’t everything about which she cared passionately threatened with extinction after all?) And: Spain had abolished the upside-down question mark at the beginning of questions. ¿True?

Upon the bus’s arrival in the La Mancha village it was already night. The bus station was almost as big as a city terminal. The village itself, though only a hamlet, spread far out into the meseta. Centuries earlier it, not Ciudad Real, had been the capital of La Mancha. Nonetheless it had had in those days, as it did today, the air (yes, air) of a village, a pueblo. The author took her home with him for the night and the telling of her story; his house, as he told her at once, should help her feel at home, for it had been in the village’s days as the capital a sort of storehouse for goods and money, owned by her colleague and predecessor Jakob Fugger, a branch of his business in the middle of sixteenth-century Spain, turned over to the banking emperor by Emperor Charles as compensation for the imperial debt to the House of Fugger.

The bus station was a barracks in the middle of the otherwise empty square (“not to be confused with the Plaza Mayor, the main square”), housing both the ticket counter and a bar. At first she did not recognize the author; took him for a labrador, a land or field worker, a rather haggard and ragged one.

Yet he, too, looked right past her as she got off the bus with the last passengers. Had she changed that much? It was true: it had not been possible to cover the scrapes and scabs with makeup. Yet her face always remained the same!: so it was probably the fault of the author, who was often uncertain about precisely those people of whom he had a clear mental image when they, whom he was expecting, suddenly stood before him.

So for the moment she let him go on hunting for her and behind his back ordered something to drink at the bar (her thirst from the Sierra was still with her). Only then did she come up behind the man and grab him under the arms, and at last he recognized her. And he seemed familiar to her now, as if not from their first encounter but from somewhere else entirely.

As the two of them made their way to his storehouse in the village, the night was chilly. Altogether, on this last leg of her journey, even though she had been heading south all the while, it had become noticeably colder. The huge village square was strewn with sand, which crunched under their feet as only frozen sand could crunch. Not another soul was out on the village streets then, despite the rather early hour; no corso, no evening strolling by the population; yet the aldea so deep in the Iberian south.

The author’s almacén, or warehouse, lay on the edge of the village. It had no windows on the sides overlooking the street and alley. The windows it did have faced on the grass- and scree-covered steppe that surrounded all the rather sparse settlements in La Mancha, which were often half a day’s journey apart. The other village houses, as well as the astonishingly many churches, also seemed to be built on the edge of the savannah; one of the churches was even located far out in the grassland, and was dedicated to Santa María de las Nieves, Mary of the Snows; from the window of the guest room she could see this snow church — without snow — standing in the moonlight.

They had passed through a spacious, empty vestibule and entered the inner courtyard of the former warehouse, where a gallery running all around the one upper story — marble columns and shallow Moorish arches in a delicate, light-colored clay brick — gave the impression of a miniature palace, not a royal one but a rustic, peasant one. In the inner courtyard the giant seedpods of a baobab tree rustled in the night wind.

She had been shown up to her room and left there while her host put the finishing touches on the evening meal, for which he refused to accept her help. “My housekeeper has the day off”—these were his words.

In her room, again something between a chamber and a storeroom, she changed her clothes. The supposed chef ’s tunic that she had had with her the entire time in her pack was in actuality a dress, and it was also not white but revealed, when she had put it on, at least here and there, completely different colors, which flowed into each other as she moved, and for which there were no names — at least none recognized by the master of the house, who could distinguish about a thousand colors but hardly knew a name for one of them.

As she descended the broad brick steps — so broad because they had been used for moving goods to the storage areas — he also noticed that she was barefoot. Yes, since the loss of her shoes on that morning of leave-taking from the Sierra, she had gone barefoot, and he was the first to notice this, or rather, the first she allowed to notice; for she continued to have it in her power, if not to be invisible, then to be overlooked by the world around her.

They ate their evening meal in the hall or main storeroom, adjacent to the patio — crammed with junk, or at least stuff that looked like junk — with a glass door (no window in the room) looking out on the Mancha steppe. As befitted her, and their, story, and especially its last chapter, there was a fireplace by the table, quite a tiny one, and not only in proportion to the hall, and the fire in it smoldered more than it burned or blazed, and the author then allowed it to go out, intentionally, as he said: “For gazing into a fire has always tended to distract me; unlike running water, it puts me to sleep, hypnotizes me, pulls me away, in an unproductive sense, from the matter at hand, or what should be the matter at hand.” —“Me, too,” she replied. But they did not feel cold, and that was the result, among other things, of her telling and his listening.

While she told him the story of crossing the Sierra de Gredos and the loss of images, she noticed that the listener was increasingly usurping her story, the story. Usurping? Absorbing it? More the latter, if also in the sense that it, in turn, the story, was passed to him, and at times also literally entered him, like a demon? yes, but not an evil demon, rather one that one might almost wish would circulate inside one as long as possible, working its magic. The stooped author pulled himself together and sat up straight. To be sure, at moments this also caused him to sway.

And she, the storyteller? Time and again as she recounted her adventures, she was filled, in retrospect, with a horror of which there had been not so much as a hint at the moment of the experience. At one point, in the middle of a paragraph, she even found herself on the verge of breaking off the story — a child’s crib on the edge of a precipice, tipping (another image after all?) — and for good: the story would end there, would thus not even come into being. For she saw herself still lying in the fern hollow, helpless and unable to move, completely and utterly alone.

And wasn’t she in fact still lying there in the dark? Was in reality not here, safe and sound in human company? The retroactive trembling familiar from so many adventure stories came over her. But wasn’t this, on the other hand, the unmistakable sign of a proper adventure? Trembling and faltering, she and the author went on to the next sentence. In between they both shuddered. But without this shuddering the journey would not have deserved the name. That alone was what validated a journey.

Before the two of them, now calm and wide awake, discussed the loss of images, the author remarked, at the end of her tale — which, nota bene, was only the provisional end — perhaps not in complete seriousness, that he, as a man who had of necessity turned his back on the world, at least the social world, would have wished to hear more about money and banking. Her response: first of all, there was enough written about her as the powerful banker, a modern-day Jakob Fugger (“That was once upon a time”); and, second, there had been plenty said on the subject in the current story, directly and even more indirectly; and, third — this she now dictated to the author: “Yes, money is a mystery. But here more mysteries are at stake than the mystery of money or secret bank accounts.”

It goes without saying that the author, like all the earth’s inhabitants at the time of this story, had experienced the loss of images long before her, the heroine. Yet, nota bene again! the loss of images did not mean that images no longer flashed and flared through the world or that no one noticed and/or registered these flashing and flaring images at least now and then. And here began the nocturnal discussion between the adventurer and her author of the loss of images — which at the same time was a conversation of both parties with themselves — each one of their soliloquies was evoked by the other’s, and so forth.

“The image sparks, the will-o’-the-wisp images within us — no, these are no will-o’-the-wisps — continue to occur, flashing and flaring into our midst.”—“Except that they no longer have any effect. Or no: they could perhaps continue to have an effect. But I am no longer capable of taking them in and letting them affect me.”—“What affects me instead is the ready-made and prefabricated ones, images controlled from the outside and directed at will, and their effect is the opposite of the old ones.”—“These new images have destroyed those other images, the image per se, the source. Particularly in the century just past, the original sources and deposits of images were ruthlessly raided, in the end disastrously. The natural vein has been stripped, and people now cling to the synthetic, mass-produced, artificial images that have replaced the reality that was lost along with the original images, that pretend to be them, and even heighten the false impression, like drugs, as a drug.”

“But anyone who has recognized the loss of images in himself can at least say what the image and the images once meant to him.”—“Yes. The images, the instant they appeared, meant being alive, even if I was dying, and peace, even if war was raging all around; which makes it clear that an image of terror or horror is incompatible with the kind of images of which our story should speak.”—“Those images seemed, in the face of the transitoriness and destructibility of the body, indestructible. Even if only one came to me in a day, just a brief flash, I saw it as a sequel and continuation, as part of a whole: the images as the comet’s tail of the world’s survival, sweeping over the entire earth and revitalizing the smallest nooks and crannies.”

“A single image spark from any place whatsoever — strange that its name always accompanied the flash as well — allowed one to see the entire globe — what used to be called the ecumene, the inhabited world, and reinforced the conviction that we all belong together; made sure that one was face-to-face with the world, including the world of the future, which accordingly seemed eternal, and could exclaim, in all seriousness: Oh happy day!”—“The images were epiphanies. They were epiphanies in the sense in which people used to say: I have had an epiphany. True, they were always the briefest of the brief. But who is to say that the other ones, the reported epiphanies, lasted any longer? And before the loss of images: who said that there were no more epiphanies? Perhaps there has never been anything more than our suddenly appearing and promptly vanishing lightning images?”—“The images were the last inspirations.”

“In the image, internal and external seemed to be fused into a third element, greater and more lasting. The images represented the value to end all values. They were our seemingly safest form of capital. Mankind’s last treasure.” (Three guesses as to which of the two said that.)—“With the images I plunged into the maternal world.” (Three guesses as to who …)—“It was perhaps not my man, but rather merely — merely? — the image inside me that binds me to him forever, and it was my man after all, the one I wanted, body and soul!” (But that, too, came from her!)

“Whenever an image allowed me to see it, it was the answer to an unconscious prayer, a prayer I was not aware was on its way. In the image I was redeemed every day, and opened up, but not for any religion. In the daily image I became a different person, but not for an ideology, not for a mass movement.”—“In the images appeared what was beautiful and what was right, but not the way they appear in any philosophy, sociology, theology, economics — simply appearing, instead of being asserted, thought, or proclaimed. And they were also different from memories, including the so-called collective ones.”—“The image manifested itself outside of legend and myth. The image — how marvelously myth-free it was — just the image, both the switchboard and switch.”—“Physicists: instead of smashing atoms, etc.: map a physics of the images!”

“The loss of images is the most painful of losses.”—“It means the loss of the world. It means: there is no more seeing. It means: one’s perception slides off every possible constellation. It means: there is no longer any constellation.” —“We will have to live without the image for the time being.” —“For the time being. But isn’t precisely such a loss accompanied by energy, even if this energy is undirected for the time being?”—“Cuerpo del mundo. Body of the world. We, the banished, full of passion.”

The author then said, among other things: “How appalled I am at myself that the images that once meant everything to me have been shattered. A leaf had only to move, and I would become a player in the widest world. A scrap of blue morning sky in the blue night sky. A train passing in the dark with all its windows lit up. The eyes of people in a crowd, the eyes especially! The stubbly beard of the man condemned to death. The mountains of shoes from those who were gassed. The thistle silk blown in little balls by the wind across the savannah. In the image I embraced the world, you, us. Images, refuges, dark sheltering niches. Nothing meant more to me than the image. And now — and you?”

The images he had evoked there: Were those, after all, not the sort she meant? Had she been mistaken in the author? Was he the wrong one? But then he launched into the following litany, which reassured her: “Images, you world-arrows. Images, you world-encompassers. Images, do not let me be orphaned. Image, you grounded perception. Imagen, mi norte (= guide) y mi luz. Images, let life appear to us. Image, word in the universal language. Image, as light as a shed snakeskin. Image, most lasting of all afterimages. Images, you capital realities. Image, give me the world, and let me forget the world. Image, acknowledgment of what has been lived, impetus for what is yet to be lived. In the image the hospitable and enduringly hospitable globe. Image, you who indicate to me that I am still on the right path. Images, you pure opposite number. O image, my life spirit: show me the space where you are hiding.”

And she: “Perhaps I will found an image bank, a new, different world bank, on the basis of the science of images, which, as I picture it, will create a sweetness and prove fruitful like hardly any science before it. A science that will encompass all the others. Or I will act in a film again.”

For a while they then laughed together, silently and from ear to ear. And finally the author made a speech about today’s pencils, which were utterly worthless; above all, the leads, often enclosed in two halves made of different kinds of wood, kept breaking off during sharpening; wood and graphite — if they still were wood and graphite — no longer had any “smell and taste,” in the sense of musk, in which, according to the old Arabs, “smell and taste combine”; also the sound of pencil on paper was no longer the same as before, and the cracking, grinding, and squeaking when one sharpened them and held one’s ear to the sharpener, or vice versa, was outrageous; just putting the finally sharpened lead to paper was a game of chance; even the good old Cumberlands now had low-quality wood and were badly glued; only his “school pencil” had not left him completely in the lurch when it came to managing; down with modern pencils! (His activity, too, was “managing.”) Or not so after all! His favorite pencil bore the inscription EAN, which means “let” in Greek. And she saw that the cuffs of his pants were full of pencil shavings.

That night they alternated among languages. In every language, the two of them had a similar accent: that of villagers, of aldeanos. Like her, the author came from a village, and she and he had met here in a third village.

Finally they were no longer speaking. The light in the hall or storeroom, consisting in any case merely of a few bare bulbs, was switched off. Through the glass door, the moonlit steppe; darkness inside the almacén. The author poured her another glass of steppe wine and left the room. The quince, safurdzul, dunja, from the other tree in the inner courtyard, lightly steamed, that he brought her as dessert, was doubled by the one she had earlier secretly plucked herself. Perhaps thinking that in him, the author, all the threads had to come together, he also brought her the telephone, for a nocturnal call to her property on the outskirts of the distant riverport city.

As she placed the call, out of the corner of her eye she saw on the glass door a single leaf of ivy, or whatever, moving, and taking on the form of someone long awaited. On the telephone: the half-grown neighbor boy from the porter’s lodge. A Spanish proverb occurred to her: “Wipe the neighbor boy’s nose and put him in your house.” And she spoke to him as the guardian of her house. That morning, he told her, the idiot of the outskirts had come toward him, carrying heavy loads in both hands, and while still far off had shifted the load to his left hand, so as to offer the boy his right. And now the idiot was making his rounds, singing and yelling through the empty streets, as reliable as the local night watchman.

But then she heard him say: “I would like to go to my room now.”—“Where is your room?” she asked. — His reply: “Where all the toys are.”

And only then did she recognize that she was speaking not with the neighbor boy but with her vanished daughter. In her absence, her child had come home. Lubna. Salma. Ibna. Alexia. After all the news, this was the greatest news. “A favorable wind for the homeward journey”—who said that?

The two women remained silent. One as well as the other — yes, in Arabic there was a dual! — they pursued their thoughts in silence, each in her distant place: enough of being apart. Stay together, whatever it takes. That was what the story called for. So it was only a story? Only?

Then all this time her vanished child had been near her house, her home? Was that possible? And did the expression “my home” still exist? Vanished within eyeshot. And in a flash of thought it seemed possible to her that the half-grown boy from the porter’s lodge really was her own child, with a slightly altered appearance. Was that possible? Well, well, well! And at the end of their wordless conversation the aventurera felt herself to be absolved by her child: on the one hand because the girl was alive and well; and then by the simple fact of the child’s existence, that she had a child. Never again to feel she had to do something special for her. Just to be with her. The doing would happen by itself.

Was guilt rearing its head again? I would have expected a woman, and a woman’s story, to spare us and me, the author, who sees himself first and last as a reader, a reminder of our eternal guilt, or original sin. Adam and Eve were innocent. Oedipus or whoever was innocent. Enough guilt stories. Mystery, not guilt.

And in the end the aventurera and asendereada, “the pathless yet undeterred one,” had opened her mouth after all and recounted to her child, named after the patron saint of Toledo or somewhere, how a man had introduced himself to her as she made her way through the Sierra: “I live with my wife, my children, and my friends.”

And in the following parágrafo of the last chapter of the tale of the loss of images, the woman in the warehouse palace opened the large glass back door to the Mancha steppe: “door” and “chapter” were the same word in Arabic, bab. She raised her arm to throw the book, her child’s property, which had accompanied her on the entire journey, far out into the night, in Arabic laila.

One second before she let it go, it occurred to her, however, how every time she had thrown something — she had a passion for throwing, and almost always hit her target — her daughter had been horrified and hurt by the sight of the thrower, just as by the sight of her mother as a victor. “Don’t throw, Mother!” And so she laid the book on the ground instead, in the steppe grass, which glistened in the moonlight with dewdrops, some of them already hard, frozen. At that moment, on the horizon, ufuq in Arabic, perhaps precisely because she had broken off her throw, a feathered spear flew past the doorstep at eye level and would never fall to the ground.

The Mancha village, although many of its inhabitants had moved to the cities, turned out to be not so terribly deserted after all. From the solitary church out there on the steppe a small nocturnal procession emerged, with a baldachin borne on ahead, under which was the statue of Our Lady of the Snows: after spending the summer in the hermitage there, she was being moved, as every year, for the approaching winter, to another church in the heart of the village. That was how long the hike through the Sierra de Gredos had taken. It was October, and it was starting to get cold for our Señora de las Nieves out there on the savannah.

But the person who by contrast was not cold in the slightest was the ablaha there, the beautiful idiot. Barefoot, she went out into the scree of the old old Mancha. The many dark, symmetrical parts of her dress, rippling rhythmically as she walked, corresponded to the dark cavities and craters up there on the moon. And then she even ran, sprinted; hurled herself into the moonlit darkness.

In a film, that would have seemed like a flight. In the reality of the story I saw her run toward a group of gypsy musicians — was it still permissible to write “gypsy,” gitano? — that was accompanying the Madonna with flamenco tambourines, trumpets, and drums, and the cante hondo, the song from the depths, to the cathedral. Andalusia was not far from here in La Mancha.

In the following paragraph, one of the last in this last chapter, I saw the woman — the procession with the musicians now silent and gone with the wind — out on the Mancha steppe, going in circles, setting one foot deliberately in front of the other.

In a film that would have signalized danger. (Now and then, since I have been living abroad, away from my country and my people, I occasionally use such a foreign word.) But perhaps she simply liked walking here on that special Mancha earth, the best earth one could wish for, with firm, granular sand, scree, ash, slag, countless burned patches in the short grass, where the rain and dew puddles were just freezing, in the shape of arrows or giant feet, mirroring the night sky.

And suddenly I then saw her going backward, toward the Fugger warehouse with the glass door. In a film, that would have signalized “fear,” as if she had suddenly stumbled upon her place of execution. But now, already on the threshold, she hurtled forward again. So wasn’t she running toward something or someone instead? A film shot would have shown only her nocturnal eyes. All through the years she had run that way, and crossing the Sierra de Gredos had been her last running start. She flew forward, as only a female idiot in her idiot’s tale can fly toward a male idiot, who for his part flew toward her, could fly toward her. And that was as it was supposed to be. She released her hair net, black, longer than her long hair, as she flew forward.

Actually the song that she struck up as she ran in circles, after the disappearance of the procession and the gypsy band, should have been inserted into the previous paragraph. She sang it, not boomingly, like her singer-grandfather in his day, but almost inaudibly and, to my oversensitive ears, at times slightly off-key, but perhaps as it was supposed to be sung. And at first her singing appeared to imitate a child’s crying. And that song went more or less as follows:

I did not know what you were like

I did not know who your parents were

I did not know whether you had a child

I did not know where your country was

I did not know how many reals, maravedis, and dubloons you had

I did not know when you came into the world

I did not know what your intentions were

But I knew and knew and knew who you were

I knew the lines of your hand

I knew the length of your stride

I knew your scars

I knew your childhood diseases

I knew your passport number

I knew your voice

I knew your habits

I knew your tastes

I knew your circle of friends

I knew your rhythm

But I did not know, did not know you

I no longer knew the color of your skin

I no longer knew your shoe size

I no longer knew your neck size

I no longer knew your blood group

I no longer knew your favorite trees

I no longer knew your favorite animals

I no longer knew your preferences

I no longer knew your Zodiac sign

I no longer knew your name

I no longer knew your day- and night dreams

I no longer knew your direction

I no longer knew the day of your death

I no longer had an image of you

But I knew and knew and knew of you

What a young voice to go with her face, so ageless. And at last, in the middle of the song, she had found the pitch, and one time even uttered the shrill Sorbian-Oriental whistle. And the song was called: Guilt Was Healed. Healed and avenged. The song was called: Vengeance Is Mine. And that alone was the best revenge.

This tenth- or twelfth-from-last paragraph of our tale of the loss of images, as it is supposed to be told, on and on, for the centuries to come — for what else? and for whom else? — for him and her, and for all souls — was transsected by the gravel highway, in Arabic tariq hamm, where the aventurera, the asendereada and ablaha, paused in her running. Her footprints were erased by the hem of her dress. A single dwarf tree stood there, a little oak, let us say, from whose leaves the dew no longer merely dripped but showered, in a pelting downpour, while round about silence reigned. In the sky a false Milky Way from a plane’s jet contrail. The wind was blowing, but it had no strength to stir the tree’s leaves. Next to its dark form, the bright spot glowing in the exact shape of the tree: its nocturnal afterimage. (This sentence I stole from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. And the word “highway” reminds me that in an earlier time the inhabitants of the village in La Mancha, when one of their loved ones fell ill, had the habit of running out on the highway and begging one of the foreigners, who passed that way more often in those days, to come into the house of the sick man and heal him — but it had to be a total stranger!)

Then her hand on her hip, which reminds me of two lovers who had agreed to meet after years of separation, and then unexpectedly passed each other on the road before the appointed time, and acted, or had to act, as though they did not see each other, and both thereupon betrayed the meeting and their love. But now they went into the house, and the story was over? Not yet.

Sitting inside in the dark. To be seen there, on a table in the back, the author’s pencils lying higgledy-piggledy, smeared with mud, clay, mica, as if he had dug in the ground with them. Next to them his collection of Jew’s harps, most of them rusty, each one propped up like a praying mantis; to strike one after the other supposedly added depth to the epic.

Was this really his own house, his warehouse or almacén? Or had he merely rented it for the night and filled it with props?

Sitting there created a connection and a link at the same time with what was happening out in the empty and now Madonna-less Mancha: one sat there, in the company of a yellowish, almost red, camel that was swaying along the tariq hamm; in the company of a child making its way home, pushing a twig ahead of it through the dust as a divining rod; in the company of the cloud dunes covering the moon, to which down on the residual earth a white, barely noticeable sand dune corresponded.

But were the windmills missing? No. They were turning on all the horizons; their old wooden vanes creaking. And still that thirst, a burning one. And still the obstacles, as there should be, and still the mutual storytelling, about what? “The pages tell their life, the knights their love” (again your Miguel). And in spite of the coolness of an October night in La Mancha, a warmth in the hands, there especially, as if they were sticking in sun-heated hay. Saghir-aisinn was the strangely long Arabic word for “young.” She, the mature youthful woman. Covet the body when it trembles.

Were their two bodies, then, not in such a hurry? No — because all that time they had been literally inscribed in one another. And compás was a Spanish expression for “rhythm.” Yes, he had been expecting it only from her, the woman, the aventurera, the asendereada, the ablaha, the aldeana. What? It.

Two falling stars, one with a long tail, one with a short one: Who was who? The castanet-like clicking in the deep pockets of her dress, what did it come from? From the last couple of chestnuts and hazelnuts, the last remains of her provisions, her survival rations. And still the last gulp of wine in her mouth, unswallowed.

This night was supposed to go on and on; no day and no additional sun were needed now.

Once she had dreamed a dream with nothing but taste in her mouth; in which the entire dream was nothing but tasting and taste. Hondareda! She would rename the settlement “La Nueva Numancia,” after Numancia, the original settlement in the meseta to which the Romans had laid siege far more than two thousand years ago and which they had eventually leveled completely. No one had ever lived, done things, worked, left things undone, like the people of Hondareda or Nueva Numancia, and never again would anyone live, do things, work, and leave things undone like the people of Hondareda or Nueva Numancia far off in the Sierra de Gredos — fortunately? unfortunately? Only a story? Imagination: the crown of reason. There was a form of searching in which the thing sought seemed to have been found already, far more real and potent than if it had really been found. And such searching was the searching on behalf of someone else and for others.

And finally, the bed made up with old linens, shimmering as white as snow, somewhere in a remote spot in the Fugger warehouse-palace, as if in another country (the author had situated it in the cellar, in the underground vault) — at last! And the great rush of blood toward the other person set in, at last. And the river of return flowed, unlike any other. And the in-between spaces glowed: one was ready for the other person. Twitching of lips. Stumbling along in the dark, as over the hummocks in a stalactite cave. All as it should be. Standing on tiptoe in the dark was not easy. And who held whom? And: that was still not it, not yet completely. But it came close, as close as it could.

And for the last series of sentences in the tale of the loss of images, the author for a change allowed something that he otherwise abhorred: that a story, instead of dealing with problems, asking questions, and taking detours, narrated itself, without problems, without questions, and without detours, so to speak — no, without “so to speak.” And he sensed that the story was true. And what made him sense that? (No questions!) He sensed it from its beginning or commencement — no, already before that (no detours!) — in his heart; and toward the end he felt it in his hair — no, in the roots of his hair, in his scalp (do not turn this into a problem!) — and especially in his legs.

And with that the story was done, and we went home. In the storytelling site the lights were turned off. On our way home, it started to snow. It was as if a garment were being draped over us. A bird flew through the flakes and played with them.

A vehicle halted at its destination, at the end of a long, long journey, and continued to sway after coming to a standstill. And this swaying did not end all that soon; will not have ended all that soon.