And it was even unclear whether they were watching him or something else altogether, for instance a trail of ants crossing the rocks or an invisible joust taking place behind him, fought with lances and swords by two men on horseback, their faces hidden in their visors; who said that the remote playing field there could not just as well have been the lists? Wasn’t this the place and the time to approach the solitary player, so that he could accompany her, at least for part of the way? “Not here yet, not now.”
In the telephone booth, up there way beyond the outskirts of Pedrada, surrounded by brambles and honeysuckle vines that formed a sort of lane, she dialed her own number, that of her property on the edge of the riverport city. She had entered the booth without any particular intention, desire, or decision, and had picked up the receiver. In this region there was still, or permanently, no service for her hand telephone.
The booth was far from everything, she later told the author, but besides, it was the one from which she had always called her daughter when crossing the Sierra de Gredos on foot; usually her daughter had stayed home alone (the girl was independent at an early age, or at least wanted to be). “Everything all right?”—“Yes.”—“Not too lonely?”—“No, no.” And so on. And now? On the first ring, the telephone was picked up, and she had her child’s voice in her ear.
And now she also knew her name; it popped out, her only word. But then the voice said, “I am not your daughter. I am the boy from next door, the son of your neighbor in the porter’s lodge. I am taking care of your house until you get back.”
And it remained the voice of her vanished child nonetheless, and it continued: “It is my wish that you not be too lonely on your journey. Here everything is all right. I have set the alarm and turned up the heat. The house is warm. The morning sun is shining in. Ah, behind the quinces there I can see the idiot of the outskirts going by. He is rowing with his arms and whistling. And now a train is blowing its whistle. And a few ship’s horns are blaring from down on the two rivers, several, many! When are you coming back? You have been gone so long already, such a long time. At night your admirer still circles the property. And each time he leaves a letter in the box for you. I have burned them all, but read them first and committed them to memory — in case you want to hear them. I am not reading a newspaper anymore — no longer need to. Ah, and now it is starting to snow, even though the sun is shining. One letter had no return address; I did not read it. The stamp had mountain peaks, the Sierra de Gredos. No one has asked for you. A hedgehog is going through the orchard right now, slaloming past the trees; shouldn’t he be hibernating? A ladder has tipped over. An outdoor table has collapsed. A statue, the one in back by the beech, is missing its head. Your bed looks used. The toys in Salma’s or Lubna’s room are lying all over the place. Otherwise everything is fine. Ah, now the fireplace screen is rattling. I have made a fire. And the oak roots in the forest that were ripped out of the ground by the storm are more and more matted, and hard as rock.”
She had hung up without a word and had continued on up the mountainside, with her daughter’s voice in her ear, even if it had broken now and then like that of a teenage boy whose voice was changing — with nothing but the voice, not a moment’s thought for the news it had imparted. It was still the voice of a child, which, although it articulated every word carefully, spoke as if only in vowels. The vowels shaped every one of the words, and the sentences, too.
In this sense, that voice had had nothing Arabic about it, a language in which even children’s speech consisted almost entirely of hissing, fricative, throaty, coughing, and choking sounds? Or maybe not? The vowels carried the words, transported them, breathed soul into them, lent them wings. They had come from afar and at the same time from an abundant source and had set more than just her hearing to vibrating. These gently wafting vowels, forming an acoustic garland, created in the listener a sound chamber that made him able to reply in the same trusting, candid tone, and so on, back and forth, forth and back.
In the mountain telephone booth she had not answered, yet the voice continued to resonate in her long afterward, so she now made up for that. As she climbed, she spun around, and now gave her replies: “Here it is warm, too. Or does it only seem that way to me? Ah, a lizard, look. Show yourself. Do not hide. You do not know how to hide, my child. You never knew how to hide. When you played hide-and-seek with the others, you were always the one who could be seen right away, even more clearly than before the game began. You can play anything else and turn anything into a game, but not hiding. Ah, look, the first eagle. And oh my, here the wild boars have rooted up the grass. Ahoy!”
In the immortal old books that had preceded her own story, this stretch would probably have been one of those that were described thus: “He [the hero, for it could only have been a ‘he’?] walked, rode, sailed [so and so many] miles and hours without encountering anything worth telling [or even ‘worthy of telling’].”
But of course her story was supposed to take place in a time when it was less the purely external surprising, astonishing, and unusual happenings that provided material — a time when mere actions as a source for the plot seemed to have been exhausted long since — than the astonishing and unusual juxtapositions of external and internal, the interactions and indeed the resonances, thus also appropriate to the time or era of her story, or even “lighting the way” (like the rose in the old poem)? Or lighting her way home, or around the corner?
And accordingly she then emphasized in a conversation with her designated author that the aforementioned stretch was an episode worthy of telling, even if nothing happened other than her climbing up the mountain, the wafting of the air, and the blueing of the sky.
And again her wrath, almost an outburst of rage, and this from her, the financial manager, the expert on money and numbers, when the author had the audacity to ask how and with what she, traveling without cash, had paid for the hotel and her provisions that morning in Pedrada, etc.: No: that was of no relevance or reality when it came to their book, at least in this part. “That is not it. That is not how it is.” The question was “completely idiotic” and gave reason to fear that he, the author, had not yet understood what she had in mind for the book. “Or are you merely trying to provoke me?” There were already hundreds of articles about her, crammed with banking and money matters. “Don’t tell me, and us, every little thing.”
She actually did ride part of the way, bareback on a Sierra horse, long-legged, gleaming brownish-black, which was waiting, as if just for her, under an overhanging cliff, as was the rounded rock on the ground from which she swung herself onto the horse’s back; both ready for her as if for the repetition of a scene in her old film.
She could have ridden up to the ridges (the precipitous southern slopes were too much for even a native horse); the animal carried her as if she were nothing, or as if she were no one. But very soon she dismounted from its rather narrow back and continued her journey on foot. And again, when she turned and looked back from higher up, the horse was standing under an overhanging rock, but now with others, of the same color, in a row, as if at an abandoned hack stand; on each horse sat an even darker Sierra jackdaw, picking something out of the horse’s coat and mane and teeth and nostrils.