And did they expect her to open up to them as well? Until the departure of the strange woman, “a considerable time,” “a moon,” several moons, later, no one among the inhabitants of the Sierra summit-plain valley knew who she was. For the first time on her journey she went unrecognized. But there was nothing left to recognize, not the queen of finance, or the film star, or anyone else, given how she had been making her way across the land and the continent for so long now, without a profession, without status, without a role.
They did not want to know anything about her, either; no name, no family, no previous life, no loved ones, no mother or father tongue, no land of origin, no destination — each person’s dealings with her took place as if in the absence of all feeling — and rightly so — rightly so? “The only thing the various individuals of this strange tribe lacking all tribal organization” (the reporter’s expression), of this “tribe of hermits” (ibid.), and all of them, wanted to ask of the beautiful stranger, “whose beauty meant nothing to this neoprimeval horde” (ibid.), and the very first thing they said after coming to trust her, their fellow in experience, each in his own idiom, different from that of the person next door, was: Which route had she taken through the Sierra de Gredos, to bring her up here / down here to Hondareda — which, among them, was absolutely not to be called “Hondareda,” but rather, exclusively, and each time with a different pronunciation, “the Pleasant Plantation.”
She had then omitted not a single detail in her recounting of the journey; in particular the deviations and detours aroused enthusiasm in listener after listener, or, to use another term, their solidarity, and so from way station to way station she invented more and more details for them. How gullible these “planters in stony acres” (the observer) were when it came to anything that involved storytelling — all that was needed was the appropriate wind-up, the sentence structure, the tone of voice, and the rhythm, and each of them was all ears, and their lips parted in astonishment — even when the contents offered nothing at all to be astonished at. (“What do you consider human?” she asked the author, and his reply: “To ask you the right questions and in that way get you to tell stories.” In that way? Yes. And here his use of the intimate form of “you” was just right.)
This was how she also discovered that her listeners, like her, the storyteller, were survivors in a particular sense. Was she, who had once, quite emotionlessly, made major decisions affecting banks and the money market, also gullible? Yes, and always had been, since her village childhood. “You could tell her anything!” (“Me, too!”—the author’s exclamation.)
Beyond storytelling, however, when it came to other utterances and events: just as among the people in this place — if not a villager’s caginess, certainly a fundamental skepticism (“basic,” the author’s suggestion); a probing and testing, or an insuperable incredulity, impervious to the most logical argument.
And common, furthermore, to them and to her, who had wafted in, was clumsiness; a clumsiness that in her case, as well as that of the individuals here, broke out only after a series of noticeably skillful, no, noticeably graceful, actions and movements (dexterities, kinesthetic harmonies, gravity-defying shifts in equilibrium, dancing hither and yon through the air almost acrobatically), and interrupted these round-dance-like movements that were seemingly executed with the greatest of ease.
And all the more noticeable, when they had been in control of themselves and of objects so long, this outbreak of clumsiness. All the more alarming. All the more “embarrassing” (the observer). All the more “disappointing and disillusioning” (ibid.). “The unexpected stumbles and trips, slips, blunders, misspeakings, confusions of up and down, steps into thin air, falls, heads bumping against rocks and trees, all went to show that the equanimity and superiority of which each individual in the Hondareda troop made such a show was nothing but dissembling. Their general clumsiness, as well as the way it manifested itself just before the completion of a sequence of actions, carried out, up to then, with remarkable delicacy, and destroyed the entire action, the work, the product, in the last or next-to-last second or even microsecond, reveals to us the swindle that the Hondarederos want to put over on us, and even more on themselves, with their plan for a New Life — which, by the way, has not been written down or finalized, yes, has barely been suggested, with not even the plan of a plan drawn up.”
And once more she agreed with the reporter. She even felt a kind of admiration for his observation regarding this most peculiar clumsiness. Except that she, the fellow survivor and sister in clumsiness, again also saw something that transcended this phenomenon. Where the reporter, with the perspective of a complete outsider, saw nothing funny in the sudden tumbles, collisions, and heaps of broken glass, nothing but further proof of the local life-lie, she, the eyewitness and kin to these people, first felt moved to laugh, and “after that” to cry.
Her own manifestations of clumsiness could never have brought tears to her eyes, unlike those of her people here, often heartrending reversals of the “last-minute saves” familiar from old-time films: falls just before a perfect ending or before a brilliant freestyle dismount. Was it because she saw in the others’ vicissitudes the course her own life was taking? “No.” Because she saw the world this way? “No. Actually, the truth is,” she told the author later in his village in La Mancha, “that I realized, upon seeing these repeated, apparently axiomatic, misfortunes that mirrored my own (often just minor ones, which, however, because they thwarted people on the verge of success, took on the dimensions of major accidents), that they for their part and I for mine, we survivors, had probably not survived that successfully after all.
“A part of us, of me and of these people, still lay knocked to the ground, close to death, in a hapless heap. And the other part of us, dancing its dance of survival on the lightest of feet, was always in danger, magnetically drawn by the overwhelming gravity of this heap, of stumbling off course and tumbling toward it.
“On the one hand, my people and I were the quintessential survivors: live wires, full of spark and spunk — and, on the other hand, since the moment of that great fall, survivors merely in appearance, dashed to the ground dying, dying.”
Yet in her view there was something positive after all in this precarious survivaclass="underline" of all the senses, the sense of taste had become the most acutely developed. True, the other senses seemed to have been refined as well. But there the result tended to be more in the nature of intensifica-tions, excesses, even deviations and aberrations.
The mistaken, if not panic-filled, sense of hearing has already been mentioned. Seeing, especially seeing that involved things beyond the safe thresholds of the new settlement, took place too much out of the corners of the eyes, and thus inanimate objects seemed to come alive, motionless things seemed to move, and so on. And their apparent motion always signified misfortune or calamity to the new settlers. Someone, a person in one’s care, a child, was hurtling off a steep cliff. Or a mortal enemy seemed to come tearing at one at full speed (yet it was merely one of the frequent sudden wind gusts whipping a solitary broom bush).