Read Online Crossing the Sierra De Gredos by Peter Handke - Free Book Online

(“Thou shalt find flower-strewn paths …”; “The dark and lowering sky will enrapture thee one night”) unfailingly ended with an unvarnished curse. She would lose what was most precious to her. She would never return. She would be done in. Let mountain lions devour her, her still quaking flesh!—When the author asked why she wanted to have this tale of
confusion included in her book, she said only, “The more confused the tale, the clearer the pain.”
    Where was her rejected suitor now, on the morning of her departure? Where was he standing, recording her final rounds? And what if this were indeed her last journey—something less to be wished for than to be feared? And at what moment had the owls stopped hooting amid the crescendo of morning sounds? And at what moment had the moon ceased to shine—casting light and shadow—as its disk sank silently into the sky, pale and without reflection? And at what moment did the last of the stars become invisible, leaving not the faintest flickering at the spot where it had just been shining on the horizon, already bright with day? And at what moment had the weather changed, the crisp, silent frost that had held the area in its grip for weeks now giving way, from one instant to the next, to a mild breeze?
    How exciting to experience, with disarmed senses, without instruments and machines, all these transitions occurring in a speck of time, and yet, even if one seemingly succeeded in doing so—“Look! Venus is still there, no, now, no, now, now, yes! all gone!”—the awareness afterward of having missed the critical moment again, and that it had always been that way, and would be that way to the end? Having missed even that modest moment when, after stepping into a forest, one grew conscious of oneself as a complete being, surrounded by forest?
    Unexpectedly, so the story goes, the “world champion of global finance” (as she had been dubbed in a magazine article) found herself whisked to the midst of the wooded slopes on the outskirts of the riverport city, borne through the morning air as if on the wings of the portion of the story that had already been told, and especially the portion that was yet to be told. And it was as if her journey had already begun; as if she were moving, as previously in the orchard on her property, in widening spirals, gathering impetus for setting out. No one but her in the forest that early, tremendously alone. And why was she alone? Where was her suitor? Was he asleep? He could not be sleeping through this, could he, missing her and this morning?
    As she mounted the slope, she repeatedly wound up to throw one of the chestnuts she had gathered along the way and stuffed into her pockets. (Maroni! Wouldn’t they give away her geographical location? No, by now these nuts grew almost everywhere, they were practically ubiquitous
on the continent.) She wound up without throwing. “Just the act of winding up and setting one’s sights on a target,” she told the author, “brings this target into view—a hole in a tree, a crack in a cliff—as an image, together with its surroundings. Winding up without throwing: another way of generating images from one’s own stock. But what is the point of such an image? With my target images I defend myself without defending myself—I attack without attacking—I wage war without having to wage war.”
    Marvelous walking: beneath her feet the hoarfrost, still sole-deep, crunching and crackling as no snow could ever crunch and crackle (not only much quieter but also much farther away, or more dreamlike)—and overhead in the crowns a new pliability and a transformation from hoarfrost-white to trickling-water-black in the gentle thawing breeze. And in the bare chestnut trees the spiky fruit husks, long since split open, but now and then releasing a chestnut that had been held there for months by the husk, a lighter