Even more worrisome, the outside reporter continued, was that the legal and judicial system in the Comarca of Pedrada was no longer based on the world or universal convention that had finally been adopted everywhere else, but that these people — certainly at the behest of precisely those who had moved here from the most advanced civilizations! — had reverted to a concept of neighborhood justice, for the regulation and enforcement of “local coexistence,” that had allegedly held sway in the mountains in olden times and had been preserved there: a system not even captured in writing and codified, but merely passed down from one generation to the next in some obscure fashion.
In the Sierra de Gredos, according to the report, respect for one’s neighborhood, for the other person’s, the neighbor’s, space, had become the starting point for all decisions as to what was allowed and what was prohibited — and that among these idiots, who skittishly kept to themselves! — a principle now almost “sacred” to these people, like the law of hospitality and the law of “niceness” (!) (as if they wanted to turn their backs in willful defiance on the present and take refuge in a dark, gloomy past).
Yes, in this remote world an unwritten law was in effect, in all seriousness: when it came to one’s neighbor, good repute — or none at all — or complete silence about the person; but in particular: not a word about a foreigner, no matter how unwelcome. Wherever Pedradeños (they had another name for themselves, but they guarded it jealously) came together, as usual looking past one another, over each other’s shoulders, into space, their topic was generally those who were absent, their neighbors from the upper, middle, or lower feeder brooks of the río Tormes, and the murmuring, whispering, and growling, accentuated by the hissing, guttural, fricative, and spitting sounds characteristic of the Sierra, had as its subject, if not various legendary heroes or other whimsies, the positive and lovable features of various fellow residents, as well as their lovable defects and mistakes — apparently only the lovable kind could be mentioned.
How well these others all came off in such conversations, how seemingly human and as if without negative qualities — anyone listening without preconceptions, and without the blinders of an obsolete, narrow, artificially revived law based on custom and tradition, had to be filled with doubt from the outset — when the reporter was privy to such obstinately favorable comments on others, he almost felt like bursting out laughing, almost. How beautifully white XY’s hair had turned over the past year. How he and his wife still loved each other after a quarter of a century, still held hands and opened doors for each other. How so-and-so’s children were even more beautiful than their mother, who was a beauty herself, what a beauty. How forever young this woman looked, like women in medieval epics. How what’s-his-name was always so punctual about pruning his fruit trees. How kindly he had left a bottle of sparkling cider outside the speaker’s window yesterday. How attractive the new color of his window shutters was. How reassuring it was to hear the man next door banging the garage door shut every evening, or to pass every day the large family’s laundry just hung out to dry, with the rips and holes in the clothing and socks — this morning only single stockings, all missing their mates! What a pleasure to hear the voice of a newborn behind the fence, to see the freshly polished shoes in the attic window across the way, to smell the eldest daughter’s perfume through the wild broom, to find, upon coming home, yet another ball in one’s own tent garden or courtyard and to be able to toss it back into the garden next door.
What a happy feeling to know that one’s neighbors were home again when they had been away — a rare occurrence in these parts — or on vacation — an even greater rarity, to see their vehicles in their parking spaces, their colors all matching the gray of the granite and the silver of the mica and the yellow and white of the broom, and then, in the evening, the glow of lights from the tent-houses across the way, shining through the cracks, and the familiar voices, after all these days and weeks of darkness and silence. How only an hour ago a neighbor thought to have vanished had turned up, and he and the speaker had fallen into each other’s arms and even hoisted each other into the air, and how the absent one had not only been in the best of moods but had also brought his neighbor a gift, along with gifts for his own wife and children, and not some bauble, either, no, a most valuable and beautiful gift, for him, the neighbor, the speaker.
No wonder, the reporter wrote, that in a social order like Pedrada’s, restricted in this way to glorification of neighborliness and good repute — and this was the most worrisome feature of all — a kind of smugness had taken hold among the settlers there that did not pertain to neighbors and those telling stories about each other but increasingly became a menace, a danger to areas outside the narrow confines of the region, a true public menace.
And in his report he made it very clear that precisely the ominous hospitality rules of the Sierra, allegedly the third pillar of the prevailing system of justice, the buttress, so to speak, that made for apparent equilibrium, apparently also intended for those on the outside, was merely the presentable face, only feigning friendliness, of the lurking public menace.
It was true that he, who had come flying and rolling in from afar, experienced within his field of observation the kind of reception that a guest could only wish for, and such as “one finds out in the world only as a ghostly presence in legends of ancient tribes or primitive peoples, stricken in bygone times from the book of human progress.”
But this hospitality was also all there was. Beyond that, nothing. Not a word. Not a look. Wherever he went, he was served, assigned the best seat, tucked into the warmest bed. And at the same time, from his first day to his last, the people of Pedrada were completely indifferent to him. No one took any interest in this man who came from the hubs of the planet, or in anything he could have conveyed to them from there or from anywhere else on the outside. No one cared about him — where he came from, what he planned to accomplish here, or where he wanted to go.
Such indifference toward him, a man belonging to the great outside world, struck him as barbarous. It impressed him as a particularly brutal form of aggression, and turned the region under observation into a blot on the world map, which was finally meeting contemporary standards everywhere else.
And in his report he compared this indifference to the emphasis on mandatory niceness in this place, whose all the more ugly underside was that when one spoke of a neighbor one could not say a word about his illnesses, his lying on his deathbed, the death of his wife, of his children. Not a word about the other person’s misery, misfortune, sorrows.
Yes, not a soul, not a man, child, and certainly not a woman in Pedrada cared about him. Not even an animal cared about him, the foreigner, no dog and no cat. The bulls ignored him. The kites and mountain jackdaws fell silent in his presence. The dragonflies zigged and zagged away from him. The trout, when he waded into the río Tormes in his researcher’s hip boots, acted as though he did not exist, but the moment he reached for them they slipped through his fingers.
The lovely yellow lichens on the granite boulders also manifested the malevolent indifference characteristic of the area, causing him to slip and fall repeatedly. Even the coarse grass stalks were standoffish and hostile like all the Sierra folk, cutting into his skin. Damned thistles. Damned brambles, malditas zarzamoras (wasn’t he in the process, just for his studies here, of learning the local language — which then no one admitted to understanding?!). Damned cow flops, foxholes, and wild-boar trails. And curses, too, on the infants here, who — where else in the world did this happen? didn’t little ones everywhere intently seek the eyes of others, of adults? — looked right through him.