Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

7

It was almost night on the great plain of Valladolid. In the airport, the conveyor belt had clattered like a mill wheel. Next to the airfield a bonfire was burning. Tree roots from the steppe were being burned. The flames were small, whitish blue, and very hot. This fire had been going for several days. Soldiers were standing nearby, warming themselves. It was winter on the plateau, too. Valladolid: seven hundred meters above sea level. Other soldiers were standing in the small arrival lounge, which was also the departure lounge, keeping in the background, half in the shadows, and unarmed. She was the first to set foot outside the terminal; all the other passengers were still waiting for their luggage. There was no wind. A single bush, shudjaira in Arabic, was swaying violently next to several other bushes that were not moving at all. A very large, heavy bird had flown out of it just moments before. And the bush is still shaking and quaking.

And the stranger did not strike out in the direction of Valladolid. She is walking along the highway, tariq hamm, which branches off just past the airport into the desert, sahra, no, the steppe, into the grassland. And then someone ran after her, a man with a suitcase, one of the people from the plane. And she turned and smiled, but the smile was not meant for him. And she unlocked a vehicle parked, or standing, in the tall grass among a hundred and twelve wrecks, apparently ready to drive, a Landrover built in the year such-and-such, from the Santana Works in Linares, mud-colored like a military vehicle, but without any lettering.

And she had the man climb in next to her with his suitcase and drove off, heading almost due southwest, in the direction of Salamanca, Piedrahita, Milesevo, Sopochana, Nuevo Bazar, Sierra de Gredos. Above her the first stars were out. And next to her flowed the río Pisuerga, which soon merged with the great río Duero. And the road was increasingly free of traffic, because of a war? harb in Arabic, don’t know, don’t know what that is, either, a “war.” And the Arabic book in her knapsack did not smell of her, the stranger, not in the slightest.

All during the flight the heroine had expected that when she left the plane she would suddenly see her brother behind her. In her mind’s eye she pictured him initially striking out in the same direction as she had taken and sitting in the same aircraft, after changing planes. This image was so powerful that she assumed the shouting behind her was part of it, and only much later, when the shout was repeated over and over, did she turn to look. No, it did not come from her brother.

But the man who was calling to her was also no stranger. It was one of her former clients, once a major entrepreneur who had then gone bankrupt. (In the meantime there were hardly any entrepreneurs left, at most manufacturers and vendors of toys of all kinds — with almost every item, every product, the main selling point was no longer its usefulness or nutritional or some other value, but its value as a plaything, or as a brand, or as a pastime — and swarming around the leaders in the toy business were the hordes of game players and speculators.)

From a certain moment on, she had refused to extend him credit. And besides, he was already so deeply in debt to her bank that the bank seized all his company’s assets and then almost all his personal property. He viewed her, the head of the bank, as responsible for his failure. Against the background of all his faceless competitors, who had in fact collapsed even before he did, and more wretchedly, the victims of impersonal market forces, of an economic situation to which one could not attribute blame or malice, this woman was the only person, the only individual who now, embodying these incomprehensible forces, but also as a particular being, or beast, of flesh and blood, represented something he could identify as his adversary, his destroyer, his executioner. He hounded her for years, and not only with letters. He had to get revenge, but did not know exactly how. Revenge, that was almost his only thought during that entire time.

But no action to match the thought occurred to him. With this woman, there could be no question of killing or beating or rape, of setting her house on fire or — the only thing he had briefly considered — kidnapping her child. All that remained was to wait for her punishment to be carried out by someone else, someone who had also been plunged into misery, or perhaps by the gods, or, best of all, by her herself, for with the passage of time her guilt vis-à-vis him had to become unbearable; at the thought of the injustice she had done him, one day, and he hoped it would be soon, she would throw herself off the roof of her office building into the confluence of the two rivers or, an even more delicious prospect, go stark, raving mad.

For the time being he took satisfaction in seeing her — this woman who could sometimes be remarkably clumsy — stumble, lose a shoe, bump into a door frame, try to open a door by pulling it instead of pushing, or, conversely, pushing instead of pulling; he witnessed such incidents from time to time, if only from a distance, or even only on television. Village bumpkin! A village bumpkin has me on her conscience! And upon hearing the news of her (almost grown-up) daughter’s going missing and then disappearing altogether, he had had no thought at all, or at least none that he put in words. Everything had gone very still inside him, and from that moment on had remained so, as far as that “evil woman” was concerned. No more letters. Once, in the company of a former competitor, who had also been dropped by her and then began to spew hate and threats, the silence in which he listened to the other man was such that the latter felt compelled to interrupt his tirade and say, “But let us speak of something more pleasant!” In the meantime, however, he had finally launched a new company, producing toys for all ages, from the youngest to the most doddering.

Outside the Valladolid airport, the once and future business leader called after her, not because he was sure of having recognized her but because he was not sure it was she. Just as she was probably preoccupied at the moment with her recently released brother, he was preoccupied with her, and not only at that moment, but so much so that if she were to be suddenly standing before him, he would most likely assume she was a look-alike or a mere apparition. And indeed, each time one saw her, she looked so different that at first one took her for someone else altogether, someone completely unfamiliar; and each time, her appearance of the moment made such a deep impression that the next time, one again could not (and did not) associate her appearance with the earlier one.

She, however, had recognized him at once. And he identified her from the uncomplicated way she behaved toward him after that glance of recognition: as if he were still her client, and a good one, an important one actually. The friendly manner in which she invited him into the Landrover was not that of a powerful person or one of higher station but of one who was at his service; as if she still cared about managing his money, and, as his money manager, famous banker or not, were of course at his service as no one else was; as if this service were second nature to her by now, or had always been.

And of course she then proved to be fully informed about him and his business; she knew that he had a meeting the next day in Tordesillas, which was more or less on her route. If they had met anywhere else, at home in the riverport city, in an international airport, or in one of the well-known metropolises, he would have avoided her, even hidden from her, and, if forced to be in her presence, would have preserved an obstinate silence. But in this environment, far from the beaten path, it seemed curiously easy for them to deal with each other. And his speaking seemed to come of its own accord. It may be that the war impending not far from here did its part. (Except that by this time there were so many reports and such contradictory ones every day, and from all over the world, that we could hardly lend credence to yet another.)

He talked and talked, and almost all the while she listened in silence, as she chauffeured her once and perhaps future client across the plateau, deserted now that it was evening. Especially at this hour it became obvious, as at hardly any other, how ancient this region was; one could see it in the residual mountains, silhouetted against the very distant horizon and without exception bare of trees, in the residual hills, in the remnants of cliffs poking up from the earth, worn down and eroded over millions of years. And yet precisely this ancient land here seemed to have the strength to rejuvenate one. At least it rejuvenated them, the two new arrivals. At least it rejuvenated him.

His speaking was lighthearted, and in the course of the drive, over which night soon fell, it grew more lighthearted still. This was a period in which the atmosphere, the “ether,” was buzzing, humming, reverberating with dialogues. The word “dialogue” itself constantly crackled from all channels. According to the most cutting-edge dialogue research, a newly established scholarly discipline that promptly boasted of attracting a huge groundswell of interest, the term “dialogue” by now occurred more frequently — and not merely in the media, the interfaith synods, and philosophical treatises — than “I am,” “today,” “life” (or, alternately, “death”), “eye” (or “ear”), “mountain” (or “valley”), “bread” (or “wine”). Even among prisoners in the exercise yard, “dialogue” was registered with greater frequency than, for instance, “motherfucker,” “scumbag,” or “bitch”; and likewise “dialogue” was recorded ten times more often among the insane and the mentally retarded taking supervised walks in town or in the woods than expressions like “the man in the moon,” “apple” (or “pear”), “God” (or “Satan”), “fear” (or “meds”). Even the few remaining farmers, located at least a day’s journey from each other, were understood to be involved in ongoing dialogue, or at least they were shown again and again engaged in dialogue, and children were also shown dialoguing, even in the last picture in the children’s books approved for adoption as school texts.

But here and there a voice made itself heard, without being raised or seeking a public forum, asserting that in the meantime the truly authentic conversations were taking quite a different form, for instance that of the monologue — while the partner, who could also be many in number, an actual audience, was all eyes and ears — the form of telling a story and listening, listening and passing the story on, listening some more, and passing the story on and on. And the most intense conversation (which, to be sure, was not suitable, not suitable at all, for just any old audience) occurred nowadays, especially nowadays! without words, not in the silent exchange of glances but in the interplay of your sex and mine, not merely without words but if possible also almost without sound, but all the more eloquent and emphatic, in the course of which I transmit to you each of my conversational fragments with even more than all my senses, and in turn absorb each of your conversational fragments with more than all my senses? yes, absorb, and inscribe them on myself from A to Z: a conversation, or dialogue, if you will, more enduring than almost any other nowadays, or at the time when this adventure took place; a dialogue-narrative of which not one of the exchanges, however minute — toward the end of the telling, more and more intense in the pattern of question-response-response-question-response-response — will ever be forgotten; the most unforgettable of all the conversations in our lives; ineradicable from your and my memory; even if later we will become strangers to one another, or even enemies.

“When I was young, I was full of enthusiasm,” the entrepreneur told her during that drive, on which after a while they were the only ones on the road. In the fallow fields, nocturnal bonfires were burning here and there, with the silhouettes of feral dogs flitting by, no humans in sight. She drove very fast, as if through enemy territory (but she always drove that way).

“In all the pictures of me as a boy I have glowing eyes. My enthusiasm mystified children of my own age. It even put them off and made me an outsider, also a figure of fun. But older children appreciated me all the more, and adults still more — some of them, not all. Even as a very small child I was always bouncing with enthusiasm; in my baby pictures I already had that glowing look, always turned toward a sun and not blinded by it. My original enthusiasm was completely unfocused, it seems to me. And at the same time I — or how should I refer to that earlier being — was completely caught up in my enthusiasm; possessed by it as by a demon, though a thoroughly benevolent and lovable one; that entire newborn body a bundle of unfocused enthusiasm.

“As I got older, it remained unfocused for a long time. Except that after a while it no longer emanated from the center of my body, radiating from there to all my limbs — making it seem as if I had nine times nine arms — but became concentrated in my head: my eyes, my ears, and especially my tongue. I would talk a blue streak, until there was a rushing in my ears, my eyes bugged out, and my skull felt as if it were about to burst (as is happening again now, by the way).

“On other occasions, when my enthusiasm did have a focal point for a change, it was always a human being, always an adult, to be specific. I felt enthusiasm for some adult or other. How I could venerate him then, send my thoughts in his direction, summon him in a dream, believe in this person, yes, believe in him! An adult who could elicit my enthusiasm in this fashion was never my father or my mother — or was it? search your heart — but rather, for instance, a distant relative or a teacher (usually in a so-called minor subject, who perhaps came to our classroom only once a week), but it could also be a businessman, a soccer player (perhaps merely a local celebrity, or precisely such a person), and, strange to say, especially a person who, according to hearsay, for instance my parents’ stories, had been stricken with misfortune. Ah, once you were filled with enthusiasm for the unfortunate — not the unfortunate of your own age, but the unfortunate adults! And then you yourself became an adult, neither unfortunate nor fortunate, but bent on success, and very soon successful, and how.

“If only I could recall when I lost my enthusiasm, and why. The energy remained, or a sort of thrust, always stirring, or ready to leap into action. Yet you no longer radiated light. Instead of your head’s glowing and your tongue’s shooting sparks, after a while all your doings, your entire existence, came more and more only from the back of your head, and finally withered into mere calculation. Instead of enthusiasm, nothing but alertness, and alertness was eventually crowded out by hypervigilance. Instead of your childlike enthusiasm, drives and a sense of being driven.

“And with your business failure, signed and sealed by the beautiful lady banker, came hate, your period of enthusiastic hate. Does such a thing exist, my friend, enthusiastic hate? No, it does not exist. Hate is no form of enthusiasm. This hate, in any case, insinuated itself into my days even before my collapse. Time and again, even in the period of hypervigilance, you would wake up in the morning under a vast, clear sky feeling inspired, inspired? yes, inspired with your indeterminate enthusiasm. Only it usually became twisted, with the first wave of thought, into a quiver of at least a dozen arrows of hate, ready to be shot at this man or that, at this woman or that. You wanted to kill? Perhaps even worse: see someone dead. You wanted to destroy? See someone destroyed. Force someone to the ground? See him on the ground.

“And suddenly you yourself were on the ground, primarily thanks to her. Thanks? Yes. For after the period of sheer hate came my period of gratitude; and with it my enthusiasm returned, now no longer childlike but mature, and this period continues to this day and will not end until my life does. Gratitude and ideas: only ideas of this sort deserve the name. She who caused your ruin reminded you. Reminded you of what? Just reminded, without a whom or a what. Reminded you unspecifically and all the more tellingly. And thus, thanks to her, you also discovered for the first time, after an interlude of impotent and inactive hate (more and more directed against yourself), what it means to work.

“Yes, I realized that up to my fall I had never worked, had merely made money. Thanks to her, I learned to work, first under duress, later voluntarily. And eventually you worked enthusiastically, as a baker, a stonemason, a truck driver on the narrowest and most winding dirt roads through the mountains. And not once were you out for profit, old boy. Yes, I wanted nothing but to do my work, slowly and methodically, as well as possible, and that now became my kind of success.

“So you’ve become an entrepreneur again? Yes, but without intending to and without ulterior motives. As an entrepreneur, now, I have come to see myself not as a moneymaker but as someone who works, slowly and methodically, one step at a time, one word at a time, as carefully as possible. And thus I live as if my losses were profits, and am certain of this much: when I lose, I win; when I am enthusiastic or happy, I am enriched and loved. Just as one of the ancient cities here on the plateau has the motto Sueño y trabajo, dream and work, the logo of my new enterprise bears the motto: ‘Enthusiasm and Work.’

“But then, too — oh, dear, we enthusiasts of today! In contrast to the enthusiasts of earlier times, each enthusiast today remains solitary, no longer joins forces with the others. — Yet, for the time being, for this transitional period, isn’t that the way it ought to be?”

At this point in his speech he is supposed to have suddenly bent over his chauffeuse’s hand on the wheel, which she held like reins, and brushed it with his lips, or even touched it? if so, even more softly than with a veil, and he allegedly added, “Your child will turn out not to have vanished for good; your sweetheart will not be absent for many more years; your brother will not have been detained long at the border.”

During this drive she toyed with an inexplicable notion, and not for the first time, a notion somewhat reminiscent of her sensation in the airplane of being filmed: what was taking place just then in the present, as the present moment, was being narrated at the same time as something long since past, or perhaps not long since past but certainly not of the present moment. And besides, it was not she who toyed with the notion that the two of them were traveling — no, not simultaneously, but rather exclusively, in a narrative: the notion acted itself out for her, without any involvement on her part. And since she had been on the lookout for signs from the time she set out, she took this, too, as a sign. And to see and feel herself being narrated was something she considered a good sign. It gave her a sense of security. In the notion of being narrated she felt protected, along with her passenger.

A sort of shelteredness had already made itself felt simply in the act of listening. The man had conducted his monologue in the form of a conversation with himself, instead of directing it at her. And pricking up her ears for such conversations turned out to be much easier than having to play the role of the person being addressed. Long ago, in the village schoolhouse, she had absorbed her teacher’s lessons most effortlessly when he stood by the window, for instance, and murmured into space, or seemed to confide the material casually to a treetop. Being addressed head-on, however, often rendered her deaf, even when she was an anonymous member of a large audience, and thus shielded from the speaker’s direct gaze.

The road shrouded in darkness. By now she must have long since passed the village of Simancas, located on a river, where the archives of the old kingdom and sometime empire were housed; archives with holdings richer than those of Naples or Palermo, archives that even held the records of the 1532 grain harvest in her Sorbian village and the rate of infant mortality between 1550 and 1570. All that had been visible of Simancas as they drove by was a tent city near the mouth of the río Pisuerga, where it flowed into the río Duero, domed tents, all the same size, reddish in the light of the rising moon above this residual territory, in her daughter’s Arabic book a fragment of text pertaining to this phenomenon, “red tents, love tents.” The one hitchhiker on the carretera had not been her brother.

And shortly before Tordesillas, with mad Queen Juana de Castilla in her tower, a dialogue had sprung up between the two travelers after all. The passenger pointed to a medallion attached to the windshield and asked, “Who is the white figure in that image?”—She: “The white angel.” —The passenger: “Which white angel?”—She: “The white angel of Milesevo.”—The passenger: “Where is Milesevo?”—She: “Milesevo is a village in the Sierra de Gredos. And the white angel is all that is left of a medieval fresco there.”—He: “What is the angel pointing to?”—She: “The angel is pointing to an empty grave.”—He: “What confident pointing. Never have I seen a finger extended so energetically.”

They were not expecting him in Tordesillas on this particular evening. He had not reserved a hotel room. Since his first business failure he had given up making special preparations for the future. For his trips, including business trips, he planned only what was absolutely necessary. More than one appointment was out of the question. And this appointment he did not allow others to schedule. He was the one who decided on the time; and it was never to last more than an hour. For the time beforehand and afterward he remained in charge.

If he planned anything else for his travels, it was the uncertainties, and any number of them: missing this connection or that, failing to meet a possible business partner, or perhaps not recognizing him, or better still: not revealing himself to him, remaining unseen as he watched the other person scan the restaurant, the hotel lobby, the railroad platform, for the important stranger; and more than once he had let the person he was supposed to meet simply depart again, and not out of dislike or distaste but for some reason he could not explain to himself — held spellbound in his hiding place by a sort of magnetic effect, yet all the while filled with pleasure and a sense of adventure — and afterward he would spend an enjoyable day or evening alone.

And now the time had come to look for a place for the night. And besides, he was hungry. She, too? Yes. She knew the area and turned off the dark highway onto an even darker side road. Branches scraped the car windows. They had not seen the large city of Valladolid; almost nothing of little Simancas; and now there was nothing to see of medium-size or small Tordesillas but a glow on the underside of a single low-hanging cloud, or was that already another town, farther to the west, Toro or Zamora, or did it come from a wildfire?

But suddenly they had halted in the middle of the barren plateau in front of a castle-like structure, no, really and truly a castle; for wasn’t that the escutcheon of the former dynasty above the entrance portal? And the building and grounds were so vast that it could only be a royal castle, not merely an imitation or a dream of one.

No indication of a “hotel”: neither neon lights nor a sign; also no cars in the courtyard, not even one or two modest ones with local license plates that would show that although there were no guests, at least a few employees were there waiting for them. To be sure, although all the windows were dark, at the main gate a light was shining, in fact a pair of torches, one on either side, and as if they had been there a long time.

They got out of the car. A night breeze was blowing; “from the south-east, from the Sierra,” she said. A buzzing and rattling from the acacias that formed an avenue leading up to the entrance: the sound of the black, sickle-shaped seedpods, with which the bare trees were bursting (the rattling came from the dry seeds in the pods). On the ground of the avenue each of their footsteps caused a crackling in the fallen sickles. The chauffeuse stuck her index and middle finger in her mouth and blew; her whistle circled the entire castle. (In her Sorbian village such a whistle had been called for in the middle of the gentlest village song.) All the acacia branches, from the fork to the tip, had dagger-like, razor-sharp thorns, each thorn outlined against the star-bright Iberian winter sky, once the car’s headlights were turned off. Did that mighty rushing come from below, from the río Duero, here not so far from where it flowed into the Atlantic, and was the castle located on a bluff high above a broad valley? “No,” she said, as if he had asked: “No river, just a little brook down in a ravine.”

An answer like this was consistent with her viewing the imposing structure as a roadside hostel placed there to accommodate them. When her whistle drew no response, she clapped her hands as she stood there on the graveled circular drive, bordered by box shrubs, in front of the entrance. And to do so, she put down the suitcase. Which suitcase? Which would it be but the one belonging to her passenger, which she had lifted out of the car herself and carried this far.

Still no answer, so she bent down to pick up a pebble, just one, and aimed it at a certain window among the twenty-four on the second floor, dark like all the others. She hit it squarely in the middle: a sound not of glass, or at least not of modern glass, but of very old glass; less of glass than of soft stone or very hard wood.

As our newly minted enthusiast told it, the lord of the manor now opened the window. Lord of the manor? The epitome of one. And he was alone, as a lord of the manor must be nowadays. But she is said to have shouted up to him as if he were the bellhop and supposed to hop to it: “Two rooms!” And in no time: the lord of the manor was coming downstairs from his second floor to meet them, who by now were standing in the flickering light of the hall, having scrambled over the threshold, almost knee high. Before he was even close to them, he held out two keys, keys with bows as shiny as if they were made of crystal. And he smiled briefly, as if in greeting, as if he had been expecting the two, or at least her, the woman; but he spoke not a word, either then or in the hours that followed, as the traveling entrepreneur likewise kept silent from this moment on, as if he had nothing more to add to the long speech he had made during the nocturnal drive.

The lord wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie, as if he were simultaneously the hotel manager and the maître d’hôtel, in charge of the restaurant. The curved staircase looked as if it were of marble, and had steps so shallow and broad that one floated up it as if being carried. Their rooms, located in opposite directions, were as spacious as ballrooms, the bed in each case tucked into a corner, and they had floors of something like red brick, with uneven spots, dips and miniature valleys and chains of hills, which made her feel, as she told the author, as if she were walking back home in her garden; “the only thing missing was the swampy patches.”

And when she opened the casement windows and leaned out, gazing toward the south and the Sierra, it looked as if down below in the manor grounds, now brightly lit by the moon, “in my eyes a farmer’s pasture,” a hedgehog hobbled by, the same one as at home; with teeny glittering eyes, as if to say, “I am here already.” And in the castle pond, “in the village puddle,” the glaring reflection of the moon, now transected by the reflection of the familiar matitudinal bat. When, not until their last morning? And the bat mirrored in the still water with a clarity of contour never seen in reality.