Everywhere in the spaces between the granite houses and the clay-and-wood tents, the ridgeline could be seen, and somewhere was the pass or crossing. No, every point was a possible crossing. And it seemed close by. It was a clear day. Or was it? (More than once, just such clear and promising days in the Sierra de Gredos had ended with a life-threatening storm or, if the clear weather persisted, with a no less dangerous loss of all sense of direction or a close call, perhaps simply the result of a slight misstep.)
In spite of the many snowy and icy patches, it was a day outside of any season, windless, and warm from the mountain sun. And it seemed to one as if it would be that way forever. When one placed one’s hand on a granite outcropping, on the yellow lichen there, or reached into a tuft of grass by a spring or one of the broom thickets, a quiet warmth, a heating warmth, penetrated one’s body to the bone, such as one had never felt so comfortingly in an actual calendrical summer — in the middle of the purported Sierra winter, a fullness of summery warmth experienced previously at most in a dream. “It is summer!”—and as one said that, it became summer, even if it was perhaps still late winter.
And at the same time the adventuress was of course thoroughly aware not of some specific danger or other but of the unidentifiable and yet by no means less serious danger. This danger simply had to be there, as already described, not that she particularly wanted to look for it. One could not manage without it, at least from time to time. This danger, whether connected with the Sierra or with something else, was the be-all and end-all. Without it, no story. Danger and the story were necessities — and again she saw herself in this respect as anything but alone.
Did anyone else intend to cross the Sierra de Gredos from north to south on foot that day? She posed the question not to the people of Pedrada, who were visibly relieved to be staying down below in the settlement, and understandably had no intention of undertaking long journeys into the unknown, but to one of the Internet screens in the village — it goes without saying that there were locations in the village for them, as for almost everything. No answer, or rather yes, there was one, from someone who wanted to make his way up into the Caucasus that same day, to the Sierra de Armenia there. So no one else was heading for the Puerto de Candeleda? Terrific. Gusto: for walking, climbing, tracking, cutting a trail.
And it occurred to her then that she still lacked something important for the expedition: bread. In the whole of Pedrada she had not come upon a single bakery. How could that be, with the new mills downriver on the Tormes? But there had to be a panadería, and hastening up and down the yurt alleys and around corners, she said this word to herself, first under her breath, then out loud, as an exclamation, or merely “Bread!” “¡Pan!” and finally, involuntarily, in Arabic, “Chubs”: and almost in the same breath she smelled from around the corner the aroma of freshly baked bread, which she then followed — to be sure, it was still quite a distance to the bakery, halfway across the village. The precincts and geography of the bread aroma. Cozy oven fragrance in the midst of the far-flung, deserted rocky mountains.
The bakery was the smallest of the hundred shops in Pedrada, installed in a hut of worked stone that had perhaps once been a rabbit shed. And now it was one of the few buildings there (the tents were also “buildings,” of course) with a glass door and strings of metal beads in front of the opening. And as she entered, the glass door reflected for a moment her vanished child. A glance over her shoulder: no one there.
After the girl’s first disappearance, when they had found each other on the island in the Atlantic, after months of searching, near Los Llanos de Aridane, she, the mother, was then received with everything “from soup to nuts” by her daughter in the hut where she had taken refuge, no, her home, and she had been served, among other things, “homemade bread.” And now, buying bread in the Sierra bakery, she asked after the girl she had lost track of for the second time. Except that she did not manage to describe a single feature of the young woman, her own flesh and blood, not a single one. Yet she had an image of her, and such a distinct one. Name? What is the child’s name?
And at that she realized that she no longer even knew her name; in the course of their long separation, it had escaped her! So what was the vanished girl’s name? Only a moment ago she had felt strong enough to bring a mill wheel to a stop with one finger, and the next moment—
The liturgy of preservation continued as she left the settlement behind and climbed toward the summit plain of the Sierra. For as she departed, she was convinced she was seeing the Pedrada region for the last time. Because she, the visitor, would not be around much longer? Because she would never pass this way again, would never set out again for anywhere? No. It seemed to her rather that in the fairly near future the entire tent- or yurt-town, together with the village’s old stone houses, would vanish from the face of the earth, perhaps already after the snowmelt, perhaps with the emergence of the summery swarms of flies.
Back home in the riverport city she would stock up on images from all the possible channels, images of the clean-swept mountain and feeder-brook landscape, aerial photographs of leveled ground, where even the granite outcroppings had been flattened; the former tent sites, like the footprints of the houses, recognizable only from fragmentary dark patches here and there in the churned-up ground, portions of circles and rectangles, as from a plane one can see in a plowed field below the darker lines among the otherwise evenly light-colored furrows that indicate where buildings once stood, decades, centuries, millennia earlier, and were cleared away or sank into the ground, and the meandering courses of brooks and rivers that may have disappeared, dried up, or flowed in entirely different directions as much as a million years ago: thus — and certainly worried about herself, “Do not worry!”—she took leave of Pedrada.
A pregnant little dog with piglike bristles (“dog,” kalb in Arabic) and a belly whose teats dragged on the sand and stones accompanied her well beyond the upper limits of the town and then even much farther, deep into the mountain steppe; at times remained standing some distance behind her, as if to turn back, but was then beside her again, gazing up expectantly.
And then who had claimed that in the Pedrada region even the children had forgotten how to play? Not that she saw any of them playing — school was still in session — or any proper toys, but at every step of the way, far up into the wilderness, she saw signs of play. While still in the village, where the bedrock had been eroded, forming sandy patches, she saw rows of little craters, like sand and dust baths for small birds, sparrows? (So there were sparrows after all at this elevation? Yes. And as previously mentioned: it is not necessary to avoid a contradiction here and there in her story.) And these bathing hollows, as was clearly recognizable from the markings, were alternately used by the children, or by whom else? for shooting marbles. Likewise she came upon signs of ninepin games, with wooden sticks set up as the pins, now fallen every which way, and among them, serving as the bowling balls, more or less round fieldstones.
“Or did I merely imagine these Sierra children’s games? Did my Sorbian-Arab village interpose its image again? Or, even more likely, my long-ago film set in the Middle Ages, in which the children had to play typical medieval games, with marbles and ninepins?”
The only person she really saw playing, on an athletic field carved out of a wasteland of stones, actually the mere suggestion of one, was the observer from abroad (she passed him unobserved): he was playing basketball by himself, at his knees a cluster of quite small children, not yet old enough for school. The basket, with mere shreds of a net, was bolted to a cliff, high up, and the reporter repeatedly jumped up to it with the ball for a “slam dunk.” He was playing in the sweat of his brow, cheering himself and the children on. They were supposed to join in and get the ball away from him. They were supposed to participate. They were supposed to play, please, please. He almost pleaded with them to play with him. But it was true after all, they did not play. They did not want to play — they were incapable of playing. All these children of Pedrada knew how to do was look on.