In his reporting, he said, he had been guided exclusively by the recognized and accepted rules of rational thought. To be sure, now and then feelings had slipped in among the sober observations — indeed, it had sometimes been almost impossible to “ward off” feelings — but there was no place for them in a purely rational account, not even as a “makeshift device.” No feelings. Or at least not allowing oneself to be [mis]led by them. They merely distorted the given facts, disfiguring them and destroying their structure.
Similarly he had avoided in his report all evocations of atmosphere. To place particular emphasis on the atmosphere of a region under analysis would falsify the actual circumstances and veil the causes of local problems. Atmospherics were fine for the soccer field and the circus, “or, as far as I am concerned, for a Western or an adventure story, but not a research project intended to elicit facts or establish the truth.” Feelings, like atmosphere, were incompatible with the urgently needed information on the Pedrada region, from which almost nothing but rumors reached the outside world. And likewise any fleeting images or scraps of words picked up in the course of a day did not constitute hard facts.
Incidentals and details unrelated to the main point: dozens of these had come to his attention during his stay in Pedrada. He had repeatedly been at risk of being distracted by them from his assignment, which called for capturing the essentials, had been at risk of ascribing to insignificant factors and small incidental images a meaning that they by no means possessed and above all were “not allowed to have,” as far as the problem of Pedrada and the Sierra de Gredos was concerned.
Even now, as he was compiling his report, the reporter admitted, images were constantly breaking or barging their way in among the rational statements, “in veritable toadlike fashion,” “and likewise in dark swarms,” not only inappropriate, deviant, and confused, but also illogical or at least intent on keeping him from staying on track, images “like will-o’-the-wisps or demons!” And such images, intermittently flashing and flickering, were not information, and certainly not the information that was called for. The facts and “the disjointed interior worlds of images” were “mortal enemies.”
The same was true, he wrote, of knowledge and intuition. In his report, his assignment was to transmit what he knew to be proven, documented, witnessed, and certified as far as the Pedrada population was concerned. Anything intuited had to be omitted, “alas.” Yes, he wrote “alas”: for quite a few of the intuitions that had come to him while he shared his life with the Sierra folk had impressed him at least as powerfully as all his accumulated factual knowledge; these “intuitions that unexpectedly came flying to me” had from time to time been even more convincing than the known facts, in defiance of the laws of rational thought. Intuitions “like eagles’ shadows, or at least the shadows of raptors, which threatened to darken my reason.” Above all, no making things up out of thin air. Both feet on the ground.
And it went without saying — thus he ended the introduction to his report — that in the following compilation of data and statistics, geared toward ease of understanding and general applicability or usefulness, dreams had no place—“although it must be admitted here that during my assignment in the innermost Sierra, probably as a result of the altitude, I dreamed as nowhere else (although my life as a reporter has taken me to the most remote and dream-stricken corners of our planet): dreams that pursued and persecuted me all day during my fieldwork, and often thoroughly muddled this work, along with the data and facts. But it is also out of the question that these dreams — what an unfamiliar pounding of my heart they caused, and still cause — should be considered straightforward information that leads to the heart of the matter.”
According to the reporter’s account, the life of the Pedrada settlers was primarily characterized by regression to forms of civilization thought to have been long since left behind. “Among the population, one can observe a degree of atavism unequaled anywhere else, not merely in Europe, but in the entire modern world, now well advanced into the twenty-first century.”
This atavism, he wrote, was evident already in the fact that none of the inhabitants cared what was happening outside the borders of his region. The local station, whether radio or television, carried almost exclusively local news. The satellite dishes, as numerous here as elsewhere, served only to receive broadcasts of old movies. People were uninformed, either about the shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean, or the floods in Alaska, or the bombing of the Eiffel Tower. There was no newspaper, and if one happened to find its way to the village from elsewhere, brought, for instance, by a bus passenger, it went unread. The few announcements were disseminated orally, as in much earlier times, on Sundays after mass, after the Shabbat service, after Friday prayers in the mosque.
Further evidence of regression was the rejection of cashless financial transactions and indeed any kind of banking. All that prevented the reintroduction of piggy banks and money chests was the fact that no one saved, let alone hoarded valuables: the money in the region was in constant circulation, with uninterrupted buying and selling, in the course of which objects and money passed from hand to hand without anyone’s thinking to amass capital with which to undertake some long-term project or gain a substantial advantage over others.
The atavism was such that even the old-fangled barter system was sending forth its sickly tendrils on the entire northern side of the Sierra de Gredos, which in any case suffered from sun deprivation. More childishly than children, the Pedrada population would spend hours haggling over barters, which exchanges, once they were concluded, were so crazy and pointless that merchants from the outside world — though none came — would have had an easier time of it with these ninnies than Columbus with the West Indians, Pizarro with the Incas, or Cortés with the Mayas or the Aztecs. One person bartered a gold pocket watch for a chess piece made not even of ivory or crystal but of wood. The one who had received the gold watch promptly exchanged it for a glass marble, for which he was offered by the next person a bench, a first edition of Don Quixote, or a crate of apples allegedly blessed by one of the hermits up on the crest of the Sierra, and so it went in the local bartering frenzy.
What was more worrisome was that the inhabitants of Pedrada and its surroundings still lived as people had before the discovery of play. True, in their daily dealings and in their evening leisure activities they displayed something oddly playful — every head movement was playful, likewise every placement of their feet, every blink, every exchange of objects, even the words that they literally sent flying back and forth among themselves — but beyond that they never played an actual game, and apparently knew of and were acquainted with none (the chess piece, like a ball, a deck of poker cards, a Ping-Pong paddle, was merely an object of exchange).
And “since they never played particular games — or if they did perhaps play, without any rules — the people of Pedrada seemed imprisoned in their own countries, not deflected for a moment from their separate and isolated existences, in which, without any social games, they had no opportunity to escape from themselves even for a while, or, by way of the much-needed detour provided by regulated play, to interact with their fellow human beings freely and uninhibitedly, and the result was that they — a serious regression — had all mutated into those ‘idiots,’ which might be translated literally as ‘go-it-aloners’ or ‘odd ducks,’ for whom the first progressive society, the Greek polis, had had no room within its system”—by which the reporter meant to suggest that membership in contemporary societies, whose model “of course had to be the polis,” was out of the question for the entire population of P., a straggling horde of obsolete idiots, too stupid to play.