She kept watch out of love, or the urge or thirst for love, and that was why, if she lay down now, she would not be able to avoid expiring at that very moment? How great, how enormous was her longing, almost always — no, not that “almost” again. “Is my longing too great for my time? Is my longing too great for all time?”—Where was the one she loved? Why did that wretch not realize of his own accord where she was, and come looking for her? Why was that no-good wandering far away along the main road, his trousers eternally flapping in the breeze, not away from her, but also not “back this way”? “Clueless idiot! Phony adventurer? Lazybones!” And the sounds of the tributaries of the río Tormes rushed into the sleeping tent, each of them audible discretely, as an undertone, overtone, background tone, with only the dominant missing; or was it missing?
In the next tent-room—“Guess its color!” she said at the end of the journey to the author — lay her brother, lay the stonemason or building-smasher, or whatever he was, and the Mexican or Armenian woman, or whatever she was, the one who did not want to collect any more strangers’ stories. They lay in each other’s arms, utterly motionless, even their half-open eyes motionless. No sound either, not a peep from these two, holding their breath and completely united, motionlessly united, and that for a long, long time.
Instead, sounds from outside, most noticeable again those of the mountain torrents, which here in the love tent sounded as though they were coming from above; as if they were all cascading with a pounding noise right over the tent peak, rushing down the sides in all directions, streaming around the tent with a crackling sound, and sounds from much farther off entered as well, from the mountains, from the summit plain, the peak “cirque”—the local expression — way up in the Sierra, of the Mira, of the Galana, of the Galayos, of the Almanzor: a rockslide there; the crossing of a ridge by a heavy-bodied ibex, the fabled animal of the Sierra de Gredos, actually not extinct, not even rare, bursting with life for the moment — in the villages there statues of the ibex instead of famous human historical figures — a dull sound that carried far; the crash of stags’ antlers colliding, as if in a dream; a sound now like a whip, then like pizzicato on a gigantic bass string, caused by the expanding and contracting of the ice layer on the lake up there, on the arena floor, so to speak, of the cirque at the peak, called La Laguna Grande de Gredos — each sound of this sort, also those from the most distant background, drawn into the play or the sleep of the couple here in the tent, its walls serving to amplify and deepen each of the far-off spatial sounds, a membrane being made to resonate and vibrate — here, where the two bodies lie interlocked even more soundlessly, as if listening; and with each sound, no matter how reedy, penetrating and resonating from the nocturnal Sierra like a gong, a shared (“Is the word ‘conjoint’ still in use?”), an increasing shuddering, “or, more precisely, shudder going through them,” a boundless one, in the last analysis (was that expression still in use?). And will these two who once went astray have wept as a twosome then, silently?
Next she looked in on the litter-bearers, or whatever they were just then, of the abdicated emperor, or whatever he was just then, the four of them sleeping in the same tent-room, one in a child’s bed, one on the floor. They were all lying on their backs, probably because they were so exhausted from hauling their burden for days. And they were all sleeping in their clothes. Although they seemed to be wearing costumes from a bygone century, their faces, all pointing toward the roof, were thoroughly of the present time, part of this night; as only human faces, and particularly faces plunged so deeply and soundly into sleep, could be of the current time, the present, the embodied, tangible present.
Laila, night; bil-lail, at night; tonight, hadjihil-laila; present, hadjir; now, al-aana; face, wadj. Each of these words, spoken out loud, was a breath that brought the four sleepers closer to her and confirmed their presence. Now! — and she leaned over each one in turn and stroked their faces, swollen from exhaustion — not merely the lips, nose, and eyes beneath the visibly heavy lids swollen, but also their temples and their ears, even the earlobes. She kneaded the swellings without waking even one of the four. One bearer had a checkered skin, almost a chessboard pattern. A second had had a nosebleed before falling asleep — his nostrils darkly encrusted — and a handkerchief lay next to him, white, with the blood spots inscribed on it, little blackish-red, slightly indented circles evenly distributed over the cloth (where he had stuck one corner after the other into his bleeding nostril), the circles forming a pattern on the white surface like those on a die.
She stood then, and stood and stood, lost in contemplation of the die pattern. It reminded her of nothing and of everything. At this sight she felt her guilt, now free, however, of a guilty conscience, not as a burden, weighing on her, but rather as something unavoidable, and at the same time the state of being guilty as justified. There must be guilt! “Must”—and she laughed, or so it seemed to her. And it also seemed to her as if the nosebleed pattern were her own. And she considered stealing that handkerchief from the sleeper.
As a child, even as an adolescent in her Sorbian or Oriental village, she had been a chronic thief, though only of fruit — other thefts repelled her — and only of apples and pears. She had raided all her neighbors’ land, from the first moment of ripening. And even later, wherever she happened to be in the world, she could never pass a tree without stealing at least one piece of fruit. That would remain the case all her life! and she then in all seriousness suggested to the author that a possible title for their book might be The Fruit Thief.
Handkerchief theft: it did not go beyond the thought. Her hand, already reaching for the item, stopped a span before it (“span”: hadn’t that word gone out of use long ago?). She stared and stared at the reddish-black dots, more than just six, more than twice as many. Instead, as the story goes, another hand now approached her hesitating one, that of the sleeper, who was perhaps only feigning sleep?
Yet this stranger’s hand likewise stopped halfway: two hands, motionless in the air, without the hint of a tremor, in the glow of a flashlight. She, the fruit thief, was untouchable. She, too, an untouchable? Yes. Except that it was she who projected the sense that no one could touch her, no one anymore, no one yet. Her untouchableness was active. She made herself this way. It was like the film in which she had played the heroine: she herself did not fight, but whenever someone came storming at her, she held out a lance, a sword, or a stick in front of her, and that alone stopped or felled the other person, kept anyone who was not the right person at bay.
And if the right one happened to come along (that was how it should be in a film), the long-lost man? Obviously. But his appearing, his merely showing himself, and their standing opposite one another, face-to-face, that had already been the final scene in the film: “All my longing”—that was the final sentence she had to speak in her role—“had only one object: to have you there in front of me again and to see you again at long last.”
The story goes that during that night in Pedrada the last tent she entered was that of the abdicated world ruler, “over whose empire (thanks to the addition of the empires of the exterminated American Indians) the sun never set,” and so on. The emperor or king, or her business partner or accomplice, or the one on the prowl for what had once been history, was lying in his ermine, stretched out on a bed as if on a bier, and seemed to be dead, more dead than any living being can appear, dead as only a dead person can seem.