Again that image from the Orient came to her aid. One time there she had found herself in a part of town with no other women (or they were hidden away in their houses). Nothing but men on the street, not a step without encountering a cluster of men. The street was actually an alley, so narrow that it offered hardly any room for walking and getting past those who were sitting and standing around. Wherever she appeared, each of these otherwise peaceable gatherings and groupings turned into a mob. They hissed, groped, jostled, grabbed, spat, and this was not playful but rather menacing, hostile, on the verge of violence, and the threat persisted at every step of the way, without any prospect of her getting through. The alley, narrow as it was, seemed endless, and the side alleys were, if possible, even more crowded with bodies, and were also, without exception, cul-de-sacs.
So she did what had worked for her since childhood. In her youth she had often gone about alone and repeatedly found herself the target of hordes of boys from neighboring villages. Whenever these hordes descended on her, the child, and later the adolescent, did not run away but instead stood her ground; turned and advanced toward her persecutors; plunged into their midst as though nothing were happening, and indeed nothing did happen; the rabble dissolved into individuals, and sometimes the individuals even became well disposed toward her — or at least she, the girl, became invisible as far as the boys were concerned.
A decade later she had similarly made herself invisible to the male fiends in the Arab casbah; from one minute to the next she turned aside from the gauntlet and headed into the midst of the men who formed it, sat down among them on a stool at a table belonging to the terrace of an eatery that narrowed the passage to almost nothing; like them she drank tea, mint, or whatever (to go so far as to suck on a waterpipe would have been excessive); like them, she did no more than sit there and gaze into the alley with eyes as wide open as possible: and thus it was out of the question for even one of the men to turn and stare at her, or reach for her, or pull her hair; she had hardly ever been left as much in peace as she was by these Arab men; and then, among them, precisely among these men who moments earlier had made her situation a living hell, she experienced a peace such as she had seldom felt — a profound peace, peace as the most all-encompassing sensation.
In the same fashion she decided that morning in Pedrada not to duck the hostility anymore. Instead she plunged straight into it. And the knife-throwers made her a present of the knives? Yes. One did, at least — it was a very tiny knife, by the way, with a blade hardly longer than a thumbnail. And the stone-throwers ceased to throw stones? Yes, when she threw stones herself, one of which collided in midair with a stone tossed by one of her presumptive enemies. What a sound, and what a peaceful silence after that.
In the center of the stone-casting village, where she went into a shop-tent that also housed a bar, she promptly elbowed her way to the spot most crowded with potential attackers, and, after a critical moment (for which there was a special word in that region, trance), during which the faces grew more savage by several degrees — the eyes blazing like nests of dragons — hands reached for her from all sides, tugging, plucking, pulling, stroking her hair, her cheeks, her shoulders.
Yes, the people of Pedrada reached for her this way out of joy. What had appeared to be hatred and rage in their faces had in actuality been distrust, and not born merely of the current situation — a seemingly chronic disappointment vis-à-vis the rest of the world. She was the one walking around this village with evil in mind, she who had come from elsewhere, the stranger. The settlers in Pedrada expected nothing but the worst from those who came from elsewhere. And no sooner was she standing among them, no sooner did she look around her, than instead of beating her, they plucked, scratched, and jostled her, shouted and spit-sprayed her, out of sheer excitement, eagerness to talk, cordiality and hospitality. Disarming people simply by looking around? Yes. And yet she did not look at anyone in particular. No one felt personally targeted by her gaze. Her gaze merely brushed each one.
It was quite rare, by the way, for her to look someone in the eye. And it happened most rarely with a man. But when it did! Once in a lifetime! Woe unto me. What a lucky man I am! There was that one time when he was pierced by her wrathful gaze, from the depths of a wound that cut into him like his own. No, not a wrathful gaze — rather a pure and simple opening of the eyes, not so much aimed at the man as dedicated to him and intended for him; that blackest of full gazes with which she surrenders entirely and at the same time calls on the man, me, me? for help, silently, and at the same time, with the same widening of her eyes, places trust in me as in no one else, or am I deceiving myself? a trust to which to the end of my days I shall do more than merely be equal, for which I will be the rock. But did I manage to be that?
And now no help for it but to return to the episode in the bar-shop with her and the Sierra folk. By looking around, the stranger had mollified these people, who generally felt passed over and despised, and made them whole; with her in their midst, they no longer felt marginalized. Although she, this beautiful and well-intentioned guest — at long last such a guest — merely glanced or looked sideways at us natives or settlers, reputed to be obstinate and backward, and who therefore actually were this way at times — her idiosyncrasy, to turn her profile toward each of us as she looked — or even looked us up and down, which, since the days when Homer’s single combatants faced each other before wielding their weapons, has signified disrespect and arrogance, or merely glanced fleetingly around, her eyes invisible behind a veil (afterward each of us will have imagined a different eye color for her), we knew our value had been raised by her scrutiny. No, we were not the way the observers portrayed us, and beneath the gaze of our dear guest we were no longer forced to play that role. For once we could be high-spirited. And in this high-spiritedness, which to our regret lasted far too short a time, we recognized that this was no exception but rather one of the most valid and exemplary things we deserved, part of our worth, part of our tradition. Under the gaze of this particular person, we were no longer shriveled nonentities, but each of us lived in his own space and breathed his innate and indigenous time.
The story tells us that the people of Pedrada did not want to let their guest depart. And we are told that at the parting one person hung around her neck a medallion with the white angel (but wasn’t that her own?). And the story tells of a couple of others who bickered high-spiritedly over which of them would escort the stranger up to the crest of the Sierra (yet of those who wanted to climb up there with her, none had yet ventured to the peaks, in this respect more strangers to the mountains than the guest, and when they finally set out, she, the new one here, was repeatedly asked for directions, even before they left the center of the village, even just to get around the corner). And the story tells of local children, who, unlike big-city street children nowadays, did not budge from the woman’s side as she eventually set out alone, but gazed at her expectantly, hand in hand with her (children from the very horde that had previously pelted her with stones?). And she, according to the story, continued to recognize in each of her hosts someone she had met in another part of the world, primarily those from the northwestern riverport city, here the outskirts idiot, there her would-be lover (and she remarked to herself that moving to the air and light of these remote inner regions of the Sierra de Gredos had not done them any harm).
And here is the place to insert the reporter’s account of his visit to the Pedrada region. Enough glorification, which, as he wrote in the introduction, amounted to the same thing as obfuscation. It had been his assignment, he wrote, simply to observe, rather than to glorify and prematurely pave the way for a conciliatory attitude toward these people, which might actually make things worse.