At last she had bestirred herself and was zigzagging through the late-sleepers’ village, treading as lightly as possible. The notion that the items included in such a liturgy of preservation would also constitute a sort of letter, addressed to someone or other who was already waiting for it far away, and at the very moment when she was still engaged here in looking and listening, the letter was in the hands of its recipient; actually writing a letter was thus superfluous.
But could one really use the term “liturgy” for this kind of organizing, connecting, coordinating, rhythmicizing, setting in motion, loading the givens with the energy to reach a distant vanishing point? Wasn’t it more a sort of strategy? A strategy that was the very essence of the professional activity she had allegedly given up? Wasn’t it rather the case that even here, in the high Sierra, after she had, by her own admission, voluntarily withdrawn from the contemporary banking world, she could not resist looking for the “value” in objects, the element of value that could not be left to gather dust but had to be put into circulation, in combination with as many other such elements as possible, into constant, fruitful circulation?
Liturgy of preservation? Liturgy of accrual, with objects as capital? “That is true,” she replied, “insofar as on that morning in Pedrada it disturbed me to see that the only bank branch there, a very small one established at one time by my bank, had been converted into a sheep shed, and also chiefly because that bank building was perhaps one of the most remarkable in the entire world: the last cottage in the village and at the highest point, directly behind it ravines and the jungle of broom, hardly even a building, simply a hollow boulder used for money transactions, the one and only banking facility in a natural cavern: a block of granite equipped with a counter and a vault, the stone head or stone brain, so to speak, above stony Pedrada, the most remote branch of the twenty-story plate-glass headquarters situated by the mouth of the two northwestern rivers.
“And it is also true that I am looking for the capital in the givens. And I should like never to give up this search. And on that morning in Pedrada, too, I was looking for the one bronze dewdrop among the other water-clear ones. But there was no dew. Instead I found, here and there, baked into the granite outcroppings, a little chip of mica, which for moments in the sun became dark bronze among all the others that merely glittered. And from a number of tent-houses hung black mourning bunting, faded and torn, many years old. And several of those leaving the village and those accompanying them had worn similarly quite faded mourning bands on their arms.”
The morning’s seeing and listening, her liturgy of preservation, was then interrupted by a sound such as she had never heard in the Sierra or in any village, not even in the village of her childhood: a siren. It sounded less like an alarm than like a factory whistle. And a few blinks later the mountainous horizon was filled with a dull roar, and a heavy, dark airplane approached, very slowly for an aircraft, so close to the ground that it almost grazed the rounded cliff tops with its fat fuselage, despite the even whirring of its four propellers — she had always had an eye for numbers, seeing the number of objects along with the objects themselves — the wings teetering constantly in the air, hardly a rope ladder’s length above the roofs of the settlement, which almost seemed to sway sympathetically.
The airplane, blackish, and appearing from the ground, and probably from the same altitude as well, to consist of a thick, opaque metal envelope, more massive and powerful than even the largest of the centuries-old granite buildings below, did not remain alone. It was followed by a twelve-plane squadron — she involuntarily counted again. One warplane (they did not have to be bombers) after the other crossed the horizon, a ridge of the Sierra facing the sunrise, which thus took on some of the character of a rampart, and each plane then wobbled over the village, almost within hand’s reach, and seeming to set Pedrada in motion.
But none of the twelve followed the one ahead. Each flew breathtakingly close to the ground — as was intended — but then chose its own course over the houses and tents, having appeared from the same point on the horizon. And this course was painstakingly plotted: no spot, no bark-covered roof, no chimney, no satellite dish, no fruit stand — no corner in Pedrada without one — no root cellar, no structure occupied in any way, was to remain untouched and undarkened by “the rest of us” and the shadows of our air-supreme force (which, according to the external observer in his report, first and foremost gave the old and the new settlers a sense of being protected).
Before people even had a chance to get a good look, the morning flyover ended. The twelfth plane had flown its course over the village, then had gone shooting off to the common point on the next horizon, of which there was one after the other in the Sierra, and had promptly been swallowed up by it, along with the hearing-loss-like sudden cessation of the dull roar; only an echo, as if from a dozen distant waterfalls; or were those actual cascades?
With the siren and the flyover, the village of Pedrada in the remotest and innermost Sierra had finally emerged from its slumber, which, as time passed, had come to resemble hibernation (as if the residents had turned overnight into dormice). Village? Quite a few large iron shutters, not very village-like, were raised. A garbage truck — and not only one — thundered along, and here and there on the paved roads urban street sweepers turned up. One man stepping out of a tent-house was wearing a necktie, and he did not remain the only one. Convoys of delivery vans were forging their way across the farflung mountain region, almost the only vehicles in the area, except for the very similar ones belonging to hunters. Other than in size, their vans differed from the delivery vans only in that their contents — if there were any — remained out of sight (barely even a trace of blood in back on a loading door). The goods being brought in and shipped out remained in equilibrium, and among the goods that were, so to speak, exported, local crops and products — venison, fish, honey, fruit — did not particularly predominate, and among the goods imported, those unique to cities or industrial areas similarly tended to be in the minority.
Now, although around Pedrada there were droves and droves of rather small white mountain pigs running around loose, whole truckloads of different pigs were arriving, those enormous black-bristled ones with black hooves, fattened up with acorns from the plains of Extremadura to produce that famous flavorful meat, now destined to be processed — winter, pig-slaughtering time — in the Sierra factory up here.
And, likewise, the square in front of the local oil press, to whose existence nothing had previously called attention, was unexpectedly darkened for a while, in a way that differed from the shadow of the air squadron, by the trucks uninterruptedly rolling up, filled to the top with blue-black olives from the “sunny sides” of the Sierra: winter, olive-harvest time. And among the goods — the usual herbs, cheese wheels, juniper berries, rowanberry schnapps, etc. — which moved in the opposite direction, out to the rest of the country — were equal numbers of refrigerators, washing machines, flashlights, knives.
In this respect, too, the place had become quite different since her last visit. And there was a local school again (all the previous times it had been closed, as if for good). The odd thing was that the teachers seemed to be in the majority — until she realized that these adults, although without book bags on their backs, were going to school just like the children, pupils among pupils. Such things occurred otherwise only in nightmares. But this was nothing of the sort.