“And thus those who populate the dark clearing live in other respects, too, as prisoners of their paradoxes and of their upside-down and constantly backpedaling worlds. Listen to me. Not only do they live in shacks, caves, and dugouts like the first and last human beings. They speak more to their cattle than to each other, even to the most puny animals, and to objects. And they treat the objects and the livestock more attentively and tenderly than I ever observed them treating their next-door neighbor.
“Time and again during the year I have spent up here I have witnessed some person or other waving to an eagle swooping around the peak of the Almanzor, also to a mountain raven, a vulture, a marmot — whose whistling elicited a response, — an Alpine hare. Like certain mentally retarded people, they have the ability to find something that pleases them in literally everything, the most nondescript plant, the most shapeless and useless stone. And they show their true colors perhaps most distinctly in one custom they all share — although each goes his own way, they have developed what an outsider can recognize as shared customs — of tracing in the air with their hands or fingers the living beings and also the inanimate objects to which they address themselves all day long — that almost seems to be their chief occupation — while they are talking to them.
“As they pass by a rocky hummock, a silver thistle, an ant heap, they one and all sketch the essential outlines of these things in the air and even run their fingertips over them, probably to regain their almost lost sense of touch. They draw a fish that has leaped out of the laguna or a bird that has whirred over them, following its lines in the air until they have registered them accurately; only then, according to the custom that in the meantime has acquired the force of law, are they allowed to turn their attention to something else.
“The astonishing part, however, is that the following happens with some of the animals they have thus portrayed in the air: the animals turn up again; the salmon or the trout leaps out of the water a second time, the kite that had whizzed behind a towering rock comes back and circles again, and so on. It is as if the creatures of the earth, water, and air now wanted to salute in turn the person who has just reproduced their structure, along with their specific leaping or flying motion, with his tender, yes, loving air-sketching.
“This salutation-like copying or modeling in the wind can, admittedly, even prove useful from time to time and have its good side. More than once I have observed an otherwise dangerous animal being calmed in this fashion, or at least stopped in its tracks for a few seconds, which, however, were life-saving seconds. A raging mountain bull, a wild sow hurtling toward a Hondaredero who has unintentionally cut her off from her young: the form of the bull or the sow drawn in large strokes — yes, always in large, swirling, harmonious strokes! — and at once the sow and bull stopped for an interval, shorter or longer, as if spellbound, and let the human being pass. Instead of cliff drawings, air drawings. The Dark Clearing.
“And besides, what hunters these people up here claim to be! To be sure, they lie in wait in the strip of forest from dawn till dusk with their thoroughly modern shotguns, and occasionally take aim and fire, too. But to this day I have not been able to discover what animals they are hunting. I think, no, I do not think, I am sure, that they have no intention of hunting down and killing anything. They are merely practicing. They are practicing hunting and being hunters for its own sake, not for some future emergency or for putting their skill to work. Practicing is enough for them.
“But what are they practicing? When I tried to research this question, I received the same answer, verbatim, from every single practice hunter, although they never compare notes with each other: I am practicing so as to become composed. — Composed for what? And here again all the answers were identical, though in all the different languages: Composed, without any why or wherefore. To gain composure. To acquire composure, not for any particular purpose, for everything and nothing. Composure is all.
“And not merely because this last dictum, spoken, what is more, in unison, has a sinister after-tone: talk like this again points to the regression syndrome of my new settlers, in the sense that in positing a vague, undefined, undefinable composure that defies rational documentation, it aims to smuggle back myth into this world of ours, which for centuries has had nothing more to say, interpret, and convey in this genre — the myth of one who went forth to gain composure, thereby propagating a new knighthood, one that in reality had long since become obsolete.
“The knights of the Dark Clearing! The world has never seen more unsightly knights, and that, now, is my last play on words (speaking to you, I realize that in my previous life I spent too much time as a headline-writer). They are a cross between would-be knights, clay-pit dwellers, and vagabonds, the ugliest cross possible.
“By birth they are all crossbreeds. Did you know that your ancestors all came from here in the Sierra de Gredos, from the mountain valleys and gullies along the río Tormes in the north, from the villages and towns down there at the southern base of the range, between the steep drop and the lowland of the río Tiétar, from San Martín de la Vega del Alberque, from Aliseda, from San Esteban del Valle, from Santa Cruz del Valle, from Mombeltrán, from Arenas de San Pedro, from Jarandilla de la Vera, from Jaraiz de la Vera, and, yes, from Candeleda? That your ancestors departed from the Sierra region centuries ago and emigrated, leaving Europe for all continents, often venturing to the borders of the known world of the time, which their travels then expanded?
“One such ancestor, for instance, comes from the town of El Barco de Ávila, the bark of Ávila, in the west, where the río Tormes flows out of the central massif, and he was the helmsman, el tripulante, of the ship on which Christopher Columbus discovered America, no, plural, the Americas, just as in those days it was not yet called ‘Spain,’ in the singular, La España, but Las Españas, and similarly not La Italia but Las Italias.
“A century later, another ancestor traveled as a missionary to China, there dropped out of his order, married a native, and established his crossbreed family. A third, long before that, at the time of the Crusades, fathered a child with an Arab woman, with whom he stayed. A forebear of yours settled at the far end of each of the gold, silver, platinum, silk, and spice routes and intermarried with Mongols, Indians, Jews, Slavs, blacks.
“And today, as if by prior arrangement, their descendants have come here from the most distant continents and islands to be together in this place, which they regard as their ancestral land, and not without justification — but for what purpose? to regain composure? and have they really come together when each keeps strictly to himself?
“That, too, presumably forms part of their would-be myth: a return to their ancestral land; even though, when asked, each one of them, all of them again in complete agreement, will insist that the Hondareda basin is neither the land of his fathers nor a homeland; the Pleasant Plantation — in truth, an almost felicitous expression, at least at times — remains foreign territory to them, so foreign that it could not appear more so to any human being, foreign root, branch, and sky — but not the kind of foreign territory described in a saying common in these parts, passed down from those ancestors who emigrated — not the foreign territory, not at all the kind of foreign territory ‘where the doors slam shut on your heels.’