It was not unusual for her to deviate from the path on her crossing of the Sierra. For him, on the other hand, such a deviation was almost unheard of. This was the first time during his stay here that he had been thrust into an area devoid of human beings. At first he ventured only a few steps from the path, then a few more, and finally, without having made a conscious decision, he was already so far from his fellow observers that they, together with their top-volume communication and other devices, ended up out of his earshot, and even sooner out of his sight.
He was drawn more and more forcefully off the beaten track, and eventually he no longer hesitated to give in to the pull or undertow. He even hastened away from the others, no longer pulled but going of his own accord. And what did “off the beaten track” mean? How could a place to which he was going of his own accord, on his own recognizance, be off the beaten track?
And then, in what resembled the “eagle’s solitude,” as the area through which he was walking felt to him, alone beneath the blue, nearly black sky — he had unexpectedly come upon this other human being. Even before he so much as registered that it was a woman, the woman, he realized that he and this other person were acquainted with each other, and not in a good way. In the place where they had met previously, the two of them, if not declared enemies, had crossed swords.
But how? And where? And when? The reporter — no, at this hour and in this part of the world he was no longer that, nor was he an “observer” anymore — could not for the life of him remember, and from the moment he first caught sight of the other person there in this remote area beyond Hondareda-Comarca, it no longer mattered. To his immense astonishment, the moment he became aware of a second person, obviously out there roaming around as freely as he was, something inside him took a great leap, a joyful one, toward this fellow walker: it did not matter now how she had once crossed swords with him!
That he then contained his joy, and in their exchange continued to play the observer’s role, at least for a while, was another story — but it, too, no longer mattered to him, now that he was with this other person, who made him whole here in this half-lost condition.
So what did matter to him? For instance, that she had fulfilled a wish of his, of which he had not even been aware earlier: the wish to meet, in a remote place, as far as possible from the usual everyday and current happenings, someone he had once known all too well, or known in a bad sense, even in mortal enmity, appearing now as nothing more than a face, and thus to speak face-to-face as he had never spoken with anyone before; for instance, to experience in the flesh that the hostilities and dislikes of daily life were perhaps merely evil illusions, but all the more potent, despite being “neither conclusive nor inclusive” (his playful wording).
Mere wishful thinking? Yes. But how can one really object to wishful thinking? the observer asked himself, while he continued for the moment to play the role of the field researcher and reporter in his conversation with this former enemy, the lovely vagabond, or whatever she was, there on the glassy rock, surrounded by brush, scree, and ice: Hasn’t precisely my unconscious wishful thinking become awareness and possibility, which means I can, I should, I may make it a reality, as is perhaps the case with no other way of thinking? I may? I should? It is up to me.
To be sure, and this was not to be denied, that first moment of catching sight of his adversary up here in this remote spot had also created an acute conflict: on the one hand, there was that leap of joy inside him toward the other person, kept secret until now but irrepressible — but on the rebound, no, simultaneously with that leap or reconciliatory urge, another impulse shot through the observer there in this alien Sierra territory — to clear that repellent figure out of the way — to kill her — destroy her — this was his chance!
And the other person, too, that was certain, had the same impulse in the first moment, was conflicted as he was: Jumping for joy or (a play on words) about to jump into a life-or-death duel?
And nonetheless, during that conversation on the stone outcropping, with both of them just playing at arguing, his amazement when in the part quoted above (“When you speak of the loss of images, are you speaking of yourself?”) the mountain vagabond seized him, the official outside observer, by his ponytail — some of his colleagues on the team also wore their hair tied back this way — and hacked it off, lickety-split, with her pocketknife and tossed it into the stony waste.
And it is this action by which he recognizes the woman: she was the one who gave him a kick the previous evening, or a few weeks ago, or when had that been? Except that now this cutting of his hair is no hostile act. What is it? “A new ritual? A new image?” And in this spirit the two of them will continue for a while to discuss the nature of images and the loss of images.
But we have not yet reached that point. One thing at a time — the episode or way station described just now was a case of our getting ahead of ourselves: first the story must deal more thoroughly with the wanderer and her encounter with the people in the pit of Hondareda up by the summit plain.
28
She stayed in Hondareda, as it turned out, longer than more or less planned, consistent with a favorite greeting in the colony: “Let it be a surprise!”
How long? For hours? days? Time played no part in these events, or at least not the usual part. Just as the customary categories of place and space continued to exist but hardly applied to what took place, the hours, minutes, seconds, and such were, if not inoperative, at least units of measurement best left out of consideration during this particular period, and whenever they nonetheless popped up in the story, they proved disruptive and unnecessarily sobering.
Time did continue to have an influence in this highest inhabited spot in the Sierra, but its units were less calibrated to, and measurable by, any clock rhythms from the outside world.
Entirely different units of time were in effect during the Hondareda episode, units lacking a beat, as it were, powerfully concentrated, condensed, and yet prolonged, oscillating and, for that reason, even without the usual tick-tock, by no means less regular, continuing on and on.
When normal clock times sneaked in among these temporal spaces so different from the ones we customarily traverse (“sneaked”? yes)—“for just a second,” “two minutes later,” etc. — they weakened the temporal magic, which, according to the reporter, was “in any case questionable,” but, in the view of the woman who had commissioned this story, reinforced the realness and the nowness and gave the story fresh impetus. In contrast to the measures of distance that had spontaneously come into use in the hollow, units of measure from long ago as well as newly minted ones—“a stone’s throw away,” “at the distance of an ibex’s leap,” “at telescopic distance,” etc., — for the temporal units now in force no particular terms offered themselves; for instance, not “in a dozing-off moment,” or “after a second dream-night,” for it was not a question of a dream.
At most they might refer to “a wind-gust later” or “after another hammer blow” or “before the next page-turning,” or use a now clichéd expression, which, however, had acquired meaning again in Hondareda time, “in a jiffy” or “after a while.”
The time in effect during her crossing of the valley perhaps revealed itself to be most clearly distinct from chronometricized standard time — yet no less normal or natural? — in that she, lingering along the way, also walking in a circle, as if getting lost on purpose, later described it to the author not with the usual “then … and then … and then …,” but rather “and so on … and on … and on …”