This morning hardly anything suggested that the cones of mud and wood had served as an inn overnight; no sign, either “El Milano Real” or any other. By daylight the tent resembled all the others in Pedrada, except that it was somewhat larger. And by day it was only their (approximate) tent form that set apart all the new buildings that had appeared here since her last visit from the square houses that had been here before: all through the settlement the building materials, the mud, the blocks of wood, the granite ashlar, were the same, all the roofs here consisting of broom twigs and cork-tree bark, densely layered to make them rainproof and, with their stone weights, as storm-resistant as any roofing tiles — which were completely absent, both the flat ones of the north and the curved tiles of the south, as if Pedrada, and indeed the whole Sierra, no longer belonged to a specific geographical area.
The innkeeper of the previous night had been transformed into the bus driver again, who now drove over from the orchard and waited with his Cyclopean dog in front of the main tent for the passengers. And already these were coming from all parts of the seemingly fast-asleep village, long since ready for the trip, some of them also from beyond the tents and houses, from above, from the higher and apparently empty, treeless, and uninhabited elevations, loaded down with heavy bags, hanging every which way, dragging suitcases or, a bizarre sight on the trackless slopes with the ridges in the background, pulling them along on wheels.
And hardly any of those setting out on a long journey to town were unaccompanied. Although each was leaving the Sierra by himself, he was surrounded until he boarded the bus by a swarm of near and dear (who were perhaps not relatives at all, merely “near and dear” for the purpose of keeping him company).
It was still very early. Not a soul outside, except for the dense crowd of people saying their goodbyes around the windows of the bus, which because of the throng on all sides now seemed to be standing on a square disproportionately large for this mountain village. Despite the crowd, the scene was fairly quiet. Only now and then could a louder word be heard, and for the most part people’s lips merely moved, delivering silent messages, whether inside behind the glass or outside on the square.
The driver had meanwhile left the bus and disappeared somewhere; his seat the only one not occupied. Behind the bus, the crest of the mountain, with a cloud bank to the south, the bank stalled, a so-called barrier cloud — as one of the companions explained to the person he was accompanying, as if to distract him from their parting, as the latter stood hesitantly on the bus step.
These were special farewells, bearing no resemblance to the cheerful goodbyes among the members of the fortuitous group. The necessity of parting forever, or for an undetermined length of time, now hung over them, after they had been so close, which here in their Sierra had always been precarious. These people inside and outside of the bus, taking final leave of each other only with their eyes, wide open, without winking or blinking, had survived something together in this place, something so terrifying and incomprehensible that it surpassed any local epidemics, famines, or natural disasters, something every moment of which would remain indelibly imprinted on their collective memory; memory? the present, memory as a present that would continue to rage. And after a shared survival like this, the necessity of parting was all the more painfuclass="underline" from now on, this person here and that person there would have to survive alone, bitterly alone with his remembering, with this experience constantly before his eyes.
The bus driver’s return. The door closing. Pulling out. The accompanying friends rapidly disappearing. The square cleared. Along with the haze of bitterness, the square remaining filled with a powerful, lingering sense of intimacy or — equally heartrending — affection, which she, the fruit and feather thief, the last person left on the square, thought she could taste with her tongue and palate. “Really? Tasting a feeling?”—“Yes, feelings as sustenance! And what sustenance! It just depends on the feeling.” Above the square, on the mountain crest far in the background, still the thick wall of the barrier cloud. And an apple had been lying on the roof of the bus.
Later, during her visit to the author in his village in La Mancha, she proposed another title for their book: The Liturgy of Preservation. Even very early in her life, it had pained her to leave a place that meant something to her. Not so much her village or one of the other places where she had spent time, but some way station or other, where, for a brief moment, “life had appeared” (didn’t that phrase occur in one of the Gospels?), or where for a moment one had felt a breath of something, if only from a wind-tossed tree outside the window.
She had experienced pain, not for herself, the one who now had to leave the place, but for the place itself, “in person.” She sensed, she thought, the place needed her and her attention, her scrutiny, her involvement in and appreciation for as many particulars as possible — something that went beyond recording, posting, and adding. That was how it should be, for the place deserved recognition, as well as gratitude; that was fitting (“Do people still say that?”—the author).
And thus every time she set out from such a “coach stage,” she felt she must — observe again her smile at this “I must”—record the place visually, one look at a time and at every step. Wherever she went, or, as now, stood still, she impressed upon herself one spot and one thing (such as a person) after another; she noted the number of steps leading up to a front door here, the creaking of a wooden staircase there; took in the color of a rock, the shape of a door handle, the smell from a sewer grating, and so on: a consistent process despite the marked differences among the objects “entrusted” to her, which lent a coherence and a rhythm to the way station she was about to leave, a process she referred to as the “liturgy of preservation,” and which she wanted the author to translate into images and sentences, into the coherence and rhythms of prose, so that it might endure as long as possible. “Yes, I am seeking whatever eternity is possible for human beings,” she told the author, who replied, “And I want to be transitory,” whereupon she could be heard to say, “That is not a difference or a contradiction.”
Accordingly, that morning she surveyed Pedrada, the stone-casting settlement. She must not make a sound; must not wake anyone. Downriver on the Tormes, mill wheels were turning, new ones, which had nothing to do with the mills from previous centuries, in ruins now, overgrown with brush. Electrical pylons marched in from the opening of the valley, far off to the west, where the town of El Barco de Ávila lay, making their way up here, likewise new, as if installed overnight.
On the other side of the village stood a telephone booth, already partway out into the snow-dotted rocky wilderness, empty, with the rising sun shining through it, showing the impressions of the users’ hair, forehead, and fingers on the glass. The feeder brooks still had no fish, as did the first stretch of the river, where they converged — but past a certain spot, right after the first bridge, suddenly the lengthwise flashing of hundreds of trout through the water, tiny little finned bodies, but masses of them, water-colored, almost transparent, and not a trout in these dense swarms would have passed an invisible line on its way upstream, even if it was swimming ahead of the others, as if this line straight across the río Tormes barricaded its source area, reserved for frogs and dragonflies and off-limits to any kind of fish: their sudden hesitation there, hovering for a while motionless on the riverbed and then slowly turning and whipping back downstream.