For my part, I believe that the fresh astonishment of that persecuted and despairing woman there was actually unfounded, or stemmed from almost nothing — just as I, too, from early on and to this day, though less often, and less and less frequently, in my often damnably askew and sometimes accursedly worthless life, occasionally see, newly astonished and astonished anew, an immense, powerful, unshakably peaceful world flash by, which I cannot be dissuaded from considering the actual one — more will be said here later about the rather despised word “actual”—and such a world never appears to me in the form of the sun or of pure light, but only in rather dim, flickering, twilight-gray flashes resembling distant heat lightning, as the most inconspicuous of the inconspicuous: for instance as a rusted nail seen years earlier on a dusty road in the place of my birth; as a curb seen one time on the Peloponnesus; as the shadow of a child in Oklahoma; as the boat gangplanks in Cappadocia. And I, too — and with me my “actual world”—are threatened with the loss of images, or has it already taken place, irreversibly? And since it is a question of my life, and not of a film plot, my astonishment was also never able to play a decisive role.
Her first experience of the surprisingly populated mountain depression matched to a T the way her eyes had been opened to the world in the scene she had played at the end of her film. The world one experienced in Hondareda was virginal and bridal, yet equally, as one sensed the first time one gazed down into that camp in the hollow, a lost cause, or perhaps not? (For this sentence she again insisted on “one,” and when the author, who had long since left his father- and motherland for his village in La Mancha, hesitantly asked whether “bridal” and “virginal” were terms still used in German and suitable, she told him that what mattered was the adjectives’ relationship to the nouns, and in this case: yes!)
By the way, she said, her story would have to return later to that upside-down hour, with the outbreak of insanity, that had occurred during her first journey through the Sierra de Gredos; for that had also become the hour of her guilt, and the fact that now, on this last, or perhaps not last? crossing, she had made up her mind, and, in the worst moments, intensely imagined, that she would speak of it at long last, had kept her from giving up and just letting herself fall, or perhaps not?
On her previous adventurous journeys, she had encountered that virginal world not so infrequently — and again she interrupted the author and ordered him occasionally to replace “adventure” and “journey” with “roaming.” Almost every time it manifested itself, it had been when the roamer, or, in Spanish, la andariega or andarina, from andar, “to walk,” had stretched out somewhere in the open and fallen asleep, just as had happened in the film with the heroine she had played.
Unlike in the film, she slept there, on the bank of a brook, in the steppe grass, under an overhanging cliff, only very briefly, usually for just a few breaths. And the falling asleep occurred in broad daylight. And it was never preceded by sorrow or despair, at most by a certain weariness from walking, a listlessness.
Awakening from such a slumber, always accompanied by the rushing of water, the whistling of wind, and several times the more or less distant roar of a highway: not an easy awakening: as if poked by the forehead of an animal watching over her or some friendly creature. And also each time a scenery that, although unchanged, now seemed thoroughly unfamiliar and above all incomprehensible, without north and south, noon and afternoon — if any time, then morning, if any land, a land in the Orient.
What freshness wafted toward one from this indecipherable setting. Except that it soon gave way to the tried-and-true familiar, and already the rejuvenation and the brideliness were wilted and dissipated. But in her Hondareda period this was not the case. She had never experienced anything similar.
But then something comparable did come to mind. As a young woman she had often taken the train from her university town home to see her grandparents and her brother, still quite little, in the Sorbian-Arab village. Although the village lay in an almost flat landscape, before arriving at the railroad station, located a short distance from the village, the train went through a real tunnel. That got one’s attention, and not only the first time but every time, and even more remarkable was the length of the tunnel. Each time it seemed as though it would never end. What a long journey, with darkness to right and left, and in a tunnel on almost level terrain, too!
When she traveled home this way, it was always evening already, if not night. And often she was tired, from being in the city or just in general. And as time went by, she would fall asleep in the tunnel, more and more often, and eventually every single time. And she fell asleep there even when she was not tired. The train had hardly entered the tunnel, at which it always more than doubled its speed, and its rattling and banging turned into a high-pitched whirring and whining, when her eyes would close and she, her body and her consciousness, and everything and everyone in the car with her, would drift along, while the iron wheels and rails took on a stronger and seemingly hardened rhythm between the very narrow tunnel walls, deep in the wide, hollowed-out belly of the dugout of the grander time. And: in the tunnel one man raped her. One? One for all.
At the end of the tunnel, with the train’s sound now more distant again and softer, while the train slowed before reaching the station, she awoke. And every time, and with every repetition of the trip just as powerfully as in a fairy tale, she had the transformed-world experience. And unlike the times when she awoke as a vagabond with the sky above her, the awakening in and after the tunnel was lasting and reliable and above all valid. As a result of the tunnel, momentary, everyday experience, the mere present, was transformed and elevated into something of epic proportions. When one’s eyes closed in the tunnel, one saw afterward with much bigger eyes.
And just as later, when she was in upside-down, downside-up Hondareda, surrounded by the summit plain of the Sierra walls, she had thought back then, at the sight of the entirely unadorned village, which, however, seemed after her tunnel sleep to be decked out as for a festivaclass="underline" “What has-beens, how superfluous we are. How played-out we are. What dream merchants and castle-in-the-air-builders we are. How lonely and lost we are.”
And just as after the tunnel sleep her former home had seemed incomprehensible, so the Hondareda world seemed incomprehensible to her now, and from beginning to end: which did not mean that she was looking to comprehend it. For, just as when she awoke under the open sky after the tunnel, this not-comprehending-anymore was basically invigorating, and despite all one’s awareness of being a lost soul among lost souls, it gave one confidence, of a very strange sort. What? Was she, the boss, a lost soul? That, too, the story will touch upon later. And besides, she had long ago ceased to be a boss. Or perhaps not? Or all the more?
There was almost nothing ordinary about the “mead of Hondareda,” one of the names as numerous as flower petals that had been coined for the glacial basin. So she stood there, and stands there, and will have stood there, one day looking at a sundial painted on a granite slab. It was not merely that it had no hands, and behind the shadow-dial nothing but a landscape in circular form, a miniature of the region: the sundial was located at a spot in the settlement that the sun seldom reached, and then only for moments, and besides, a granite cliff stood in the way of the sun’s rays: so that the sundial’s indicator cast its time-revealing shadow at most for a couple of moments.