And also worth mentioning: that to her the writing looked Arabic, with the identical squiggles of the dwarf bushes everywhere, the repeated and often parallel loose ends, splits, similar curved fissures in cliff after cliff, the dots, points, waves, accents, breathing marks of lichens and mosses on the rock, an Arabic script that she also, involuntarily, “read” from right to left.
And the rhythm of the phenomena in the sprawl of Hondareda went approximately as follows: A swarm of wild doves rattled. A family of grouse ran, hustled, flitted. A snowflake fell. The sky was blue. A rock was a dinosaur egg. A gust of wind hissed. A cloud of dust was yellow. An old man had freckles. The pattern in the dried mud was pentagonal or hexagonal. My grandfather sang in the distance. A flint gave off a singed smell. In the conifer forest the light-colored cones glowed and were cone-shaped, and the raven that flew by was raven-black.
And continuing in the Hondareda rhythm: In the sheltered spots behind the hawthorns the sun shone summery-warm as in summer, and in the leafless rowan trees no birds were sitting, and the bunches of berries were shriveled, and in the middle of winter or fall or May the crickets began to chirp, and I let them wind up my heart anew, and the grass quivered, and a stick was snakeskin gray.
And in the glacial lagoon the water smoked where it was free of ice, and reflected, and the dark part in this reflection was the steep peak of the Almanzor, so steep that precisely this highest peak among the peaks of the Sierra was the only one without snow, and al-mansûr, yes, clear as day now, means “the place” in Arabic, and kathib means “dune,” and behind a stone fortification actually appeared, as if conjured up by the word, a dune, sand from weathered rock that had been blown there, yellow like the feet of bees, and another man was red-haired, and on a mountain acacia the thorns were pointed like sharks’ fins, and all joys and sorrows of the world were gathered in one place, and there was a grove of chestnut trees the size of a small orchard, distributed over two terraces, and a single leaf there was whistling, and a few burst fruit husks hung there, empty and showing off their spines, and I leaped over the stone wall and snatched the forgotten chestnuts from the ground, and from an overhanging ledge hung icicles.
And the smoke in the settlement smelled like the smoke in Tiflis, in Stavanger, and in Montana, and next to the Almanzor the mountain water now mirrored the façade of my office building at the confluence of the two rivers in my riverport city, and farther to the left there was a clattering in an oak gall, and in the black broom pods the seeds rattled, yes, rattled, and way over to the left, down at the end of the lines, stood bint, Arabic for “girl,” and another word for daughter was ibna, and someone actually was standing there, and everything was all right again, and nothing was all right again, and everything and nothing was again as it had been, and in a dormer window a candle was burning, and my brother tossed a hand grenade, and one was filled with bliss, with a desire to help, with helplessness, and with a general lostness and neediness, as never before and as always, and the flock of wild doves rustled, and the phoenix rose flaming from its ashes, and one was swept across the first threshold one happened upon, in the first house one happened upon on the floor of the basin.
Long ago, during her first time in the Sierra de Gredos, with the child in her womb, when the child’s father, her one and only, had disappeared on the way into the mountains (a disappearing that was characteristic of his tribe?), and when the world before her, at her feet, had suddenly turned upside down, had been stood on its head and acted insane, she herself, in the face of that spectacle, had gone insane, not just almost, but from top to toe.
For years she had denied it, she finally admitted, almost inaudibly, to the author, had denied it energetically and determinedly, and this energy had then been partly responsible for her “worldwide success”—a criminal energy, so to speak (no, not so to speak).
“Everyone has his own madness inside him,” she dictated later, when she had recovered her voice, to the author, “and this madness has already come to the surface once, or several times. Except that we all behave, or most of us do, as if nothing had been wrong.”
Now, however, at the sight of the depression of Hondareda, with its unexpected new settlement, which upon one’s approach looked positively urban, indeed metropolitan, head-down in the glacier-clear valley, a city as if under a glass bell, or altogether as if in a different, as yet unexplored and even undiscovered element, a scene replayed itself in her mind, one of the last before the somewhat happy ending of that film whose heroine she had portrayed long ago: fleeing from her mortal enemies, she found herself in an utterly dead landscape with nothing but volcanic ash, some of it still smoldering, at the edge of the world — as everywhere, such ends, edges, and precipices of the world could occur practically cheek by jowl with the apparent middles and centers — and she wandered, abandoned, half-blind, empty-handed, pleading to the invisible heavens, calling for her parents, her brothers and sisters, her homeland, cursing her fate and human existence altogether, through the scree and fallen rock, stumbled, fell, struggled to her feet, fell again, and finally remained lying facedown on the ground. The camera showed her in close-up, prostrate. Sparks of what looked like lava shot nightward past the figure lying stretched out there, in a coma or dead. A temporal leap. A change of lighting, with the close-up unaltered. The searchlights of the pursuers? No, daylight. The end of night. During the temporal leap, day had broken. Her head still in the smoking volcanic ash and basalt. Over? The end?
Yet gradually some movement, or is it merely the wind in the hair of the corpse? Slowly her head rises and is bathed in light, morning light. Her skin, also her brow, and especially her temples seem made for this light. (Of course the lighting man has done his part, with additional spots and reflectors on the sides and especially on the ground.)
The eyes opening: black, which at the beginning of the shot looks just as dull and veiled as the cratered landscape all around, but then begins to glow, and now, as the camera slowly pulls back, almost imperceptibly, from a close-up to a full shot, here and there the glassy humps of basalt also begin to glow, the fiery cataracts of all the long-ago volcanic eruptions now chilled, hardened like crystal, and heaped up in the wasteland of petrified ash.
It is a rather dark glow, almost scornful, or even, with all the hopelessness concentrated in her gaze, full of quiet rage, unlike her futile fleeing of the previous night, with hands and feet groping and tapping pointlessly in every direction. Then — although the camera remains focused for a full shot, I seem to recall seeing as a moviegoer a shot of only her mouth, just for a moment: the lips parting. Astonishment. Yes, astonishment. Not to be forgotten: her film was set in the Middle Ages, and the occasional astonishment expressed by the characters was not merely believable but was a basic trait. This astonishment of hers, however, exceeded the customary medieval astonishment, was an astonishment at nothing, nothing at all, and it was decisive.
For it saved her life. More than that: it gave her the strength to start a new life. That decisive astonishment in the moment of awakening after a night of despair enabled her to shake off her old story once and for all, and made room for a new scenario, one that was not merely a thousand times but infinitely more beautiful and true, and this story was now about to begin. (Except that the film did not show what happened next.)
At the time, several interpretations were put forward to explain that “decisive astonishment” on the part of the heroine: a dream, a predawn dream, of the sort that sometimes plays out in heavenly colors and tones? the light of morning shortly before sunrise, and the sky, again very medieval, as the domed firmament, and the lava earth, on which the woman lay outstretched, as the surface over which it arched? Or a prematitudinal dream of Paradise and the light and the air currents of the real or waking world intermingling with it?