Yes, did these most backward inhabitants of the world think they were something special? Did they imagine that their shit was better than his? What were they so proud of? What gave them the right to be so standoffish? Why, whenever he urged them to tell him about themselves and this place, about the suffering, atrocities, murders, storms, catastrophic winters and summers, did each of them simply turn his back on him and not want his story told, absolutely not? At the very most, one of them would spit, as if to say, “All right, I’ll tell my story — but not to you. Have my story told, but, by God and all the saints, not by you.”
Yes, didn’t the inhabitants of this mountain enclave, the old-timers as well as the new settlers, know that continued resistance was pointless — their current resistance to observing and being observed (objectively) just as much as their earlier resistance to the unfortunately necessary use of arms against them by outsiders? Why couldn’t they grasp that they had lost, and, furthermore, were lost, defending here a cause long since lost in what merely seemed to be their own country but in actuality was not a bright mountain summit but a dark crevasse? Why did each of them, confined to the tiny corner that had been graciously left him here, without the slightest elbow room — instead of looking this fact in the eye — behave as though he were free to roam his kingdom, or a kingdom altogether?
Didn’t it move the reporter almost, almost to tears one evening when he was in the main tent, The Red Kite, and observed the people of the Pedrada and Hondareda Region (that was its full official name) engaged in what was, at least at that time, their nightly dancing? How they hopped and stamped, hoofed it and whirled, dressed festively, even splendidly, until the first glint of morning entered the barnlike hall. How they clung, if not to each other, then at least to their dance, which incidentally was a fairly chaotic wheeling, combining elements of American square dance from the Wild West, rock and roll, flamenco, and an old-fashioned round dance that seemed a bit rancid, in which often one dancer or a couple would abruptly move from one figure into the next, with constant backward movements being most characteristic! How clueless these dancers were, in reality despised and shunned by all of modern enlightened civilization — it was not merely as if they still belonged to civilization and had a right to enjoy themselves like the rest of us today; some of them even let out more or less primitive shouts of joy, tahallul! in the new settlers’ idiom, a variant on “hallelujah”?—but also as if, instead of being the damned and accursed of the earth, they were something like an avant-garde, an elite, the elect, the new and only salt of the earth!
These dancing idiots had not the slightest suspicion (no, not “suspicion,” but “realization”) of how far off the mark they were, how played out and danced out they were, how the scenario had been continuing without them for a long time — how it was all over for them, for good, till the end of time — how their dancing and, accordingly, all their actions, their entire life and their obstinate survival, even their death, had become meaningless, devoid of content, and, along with their rejoicing, foot-stamping, and round-dancing, was headed for the void.
And it was then that tears almost came into the eyes of the traveling observer. As a man trained as a social scientist, whose research specialty was anxiety and fear, he was familiar with the phenomenon whereby an individual who was profoundly frightened by something would later make involuntarily “empty chewing movements,” with nothing in his mouth, so to speak, but the breath that had been dammed up by fear: and, as he now recognized, the dances, like the other manifestations of life among the people of the region, were similar empty chewing movements. Empty chewing movements caused by nothing but terrible fear, which also explained their recourse, or, more precisely, regression and reversion, to long since faded regional legends, myths, and sagas.
Empty chewing movements: that atavistic fiddling, often merely on an instrument with a single string, and the plucking of a Jew’s harp, which he observed with particular frequency. Empty chewing movements: the constant looking away from each other, the abrupt, rude, almost dismissive behavior of the sexes here, the men and women toward each other — in his report he wrote of the “absence of any culture of eroticism,” of the “disheveled art of wooing,” of the “complete lack,” at least in public, “of mutual displays of affection”—and at this he almost, almost jumped up, either to shout at one of the dancers or another, or to take one by the hand, or to throw his arms around one, and only the fact that as a child, when he had run toward others to touch them, to embrace them, he had always been pushed away or ignored, as an intruder, a superfluous and ridiculous extra wheel, restrained him, at the last moment, fortunately for him and his report.
Accursed Pedrada. Confounded Sierra de Gredos y de Caponica.
25
She had crossed the Sierra de Gredos quite often, in every season, taking all the various passes, including passes that still bore that name but had been out of use for generations, either for the driving of cattle from north to south, the transhumancia, or for transports of any kind, and had meanwhile become almost impassable, even on foot.
And now the plan called for her to set out on another crossing, which she wished or wanted to be her last — did she really wish that? — by way of the so-called Puerto de Candeleda, a route from before the war, on today’s map merely a name — but wasn’t a name something, at least? — and recognizable by the complete absence of any indication of a road or even a footpath down the steep southern flank of the Sierra directly after the “pass,” more like a random spot up on the ridge.
And at the same time she was confident that by evening she would be down in Candeleda, at the foot of the southern flank, over fifteen hundred meters below the out-of-service pass named after the small town that did not belong to any meseta or plateau but, rather, lay on the edge of a lowland, surrounded by groves of palms, oranges, olives, and who knew what else. (She instructed the author to insert words like “confidence” and “confident” into her story, from way station to way station, from section to section, but to avoid expressions for “hope,” including the Spanish esperanza and even the Arabic hamal—“I do not want this word, and I will not learn it — any more than the word for ‘guilt,’ hithm!”—so she had learned these words after all?)
So in spite of the short winter day she was confident? Yes. Time and again, especially in the morning, as now, in the mountains, one (one?) was seized by the scruff of one’s neck, so to speak (so to speak?), by a confidence that was all the more powerful the more baseless and senseless it was, and hoisted into the air. And although she did not have much time, it seemed to her as if she had plenty of time. It seemed to her? She made up her mind again to have time, and it was so. “Plenty of time!” that was also the farewell used by the people of Pedrada — the farewell used by all those moving out of the region. And she heard another farewell, one introduced since the last time she had passed through, astonishing in light of what had happened in the region since then: “Have no fear!”