And still, as had been the case ever since her departure from the settlement, pairs of cattle horns stared at her here and there from amid the broom or escoba bushes (otherwise there was hardly any taller vegetation, only scattered scrub pines, most of them long since dead and stripped of their bark); the horns were very wide and curved, almost always ending in a pointed, straight section, and occasionally one of the powerful, always anthracite-black bodies would loom up from amid the tangle of broom branches in the omnipresent chest-high thicket, the cow’s or bull’s eyes seemingly aimed and guided on both sides by the horns’ dagger tips; this time more Ávila cattle than usual were spending the winter high in the Sierra.
She walked without stopping, without changing pace; without in any way deviating from her pace. She did not stop even when she passed the corpses of the stonemason and the woman from Friuli or Lefkadia, lying side by side at a spot in the tundra, with gunshot wounds in their scalps, in their crowns, their eyes still open, hardly broken, in which she saw herself recognized, unlike in the ultramarinos shop earlier, and again this dead couple stood in for her parents, killed in an accident.
During earlier crossings of the Sierra de Gredos, whenever she came upon an animal, especially in open patches, she had headed straight for it, not in a hurry but speeding up a little, until she stood body to body with it, for a moment, “el trance,” as if grown together with it — in the same way in which she rendered potential human attackers defenseless by leaving them no surface to attack — and then briskly continued in her chosen direction, even if it might be the wrong direction at first.
With her walking, with her manner of walking, she protected herself, made herself invulnerable to attack. True, it was a kind of loafing. But because it had a rhythm, it had value. And furthermore, so she imagined, or was almost certain, she also protected others by walking, and by walking as she was walking now. With her walk and her walking now she was protecting her distant, absent brother. And in particular she was protecting him in this fashion from himself.
By walking this way through the Sierra, his sister was doing her part to make sure that he, who had previously committed violent acts only against objects, was restrained from his first outbreak of violence against a human being. Once he crossed this threshold, which had been calling to him or even drawing him magnetically for a long time—“ever since I became aware [his words] of my mother- and fatherlessness”—there would be no turning back. Her brother would then take aim at more and more people, at the whole human race, at life. As he had long fantasized to himself and also to her, he would run amok in a way precisely calculated and planned, and intended for the duration, with that treacherous glow in the corners of his eyes and mouth that women in particular saw as a kind of magical smile. And precisely on this day, at this hour, after another of his nocturnal wanderings, this time in an uninterrupted circle around an encampment of occupation troops in his chosen country, his ultimate (she to the author: “Occasionally it is all right to use a term of non-Germanic origin”) crossing of the line was imminent — his first murderous blow.
The air around her as she headed up the mountain was jolted, ah, how much more sharply and harshly than by the bulls’ horns, by her brother’s “Now I’m going to do it! Now! Now! Now!” And then all that helped was her walking. She walked. She walked with everything she had, with her soles, her kneecaps, her thighs, her vagina (yes), her stomach, her shoulders, with her mouth, nose, and eyes, and with all of them at once; all these things together had to walk, and had to walk together.
She walked with everything at her disposal, her thoughts, her memory, her desire, her will, her intentions. She walked exactly as she worked in her “business,” or had worked. Her way of walking, as a form of averting, bringing to safety, calming, clarifying, gaining perspective, preparing the ground and plowing, went beyond mere walking. Of course it was the movement of someone who had time, much free time, but simultaneously it was a form of action, which, because it includes, according to Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Schumpeter, or also Marx, Lenin, and Kardelj, that special kind of political, moral, and aesthetic action, can render unnecessary all those other overspecialized and thus destructive forms of action (no examples here): walking as comprehensive action — as (topic) stewardship (“of course only in Utopia”): as another invisible hand.
She walked with everything she encountered and came upon, with everything she saw, tasted, heard, and smelled.
And in particular she walked with the images, the images that flew to her from distant times and places in the course of her steady progress up the mountainside, which provided zones of protection and safety and prospects for the future entirely different from memories, thoughts, feelings, and sensory impressions.
These kinds of images assured continuity, and something above and beyond that. They made magic. With this walking, she imagined, and was almost certain, she was saving not only her brother, not only her own blood relative. Wasn’t that one of the reasons for her walking? Ah, keep everything in proportion, otherwise we are lost. She had not been lost for a long time, and the next time it happened, it would be for good. One false step and it would become evident how cut off one was, from everything and everyone.
Walking, healing, organizing, managing: magical walking? So had the foreign woman already been infected by the natives’ atavism? And her repeated deep sighs in the course of her seemingly so light-footed walking? Tahallul, rejoicing; tanassul, sighing.
Dear observer, first of all that need not be a contradiction, and second, this sighing is perhaps merely a family and tribal trait, “typically Sorbian-Oriental,” passed down to the present day from long, long ago. And when she asked the author later whether it wasn’t the same with him during long, steady walks, especially when he was crossing the mountains — all her experiences could only be universal ones — he replied, no, he was familiar with the concept of assuring continuity, keeping alive, lending a hand, in short, of “managing”—instead of setting out to write he actually used the term “setting out to manage” in his mind — solely from his own “doings” now and then, writing down, writing up, writing on, but that was no form of certainty, not even “approximately”—“or was it?”
One was walking up the mountain. (“One?”—One.) Walking was taking place. Walking will have taken place. Like the falcon: when one looked for it, it was no longer, yet still, in the spot where it had been when it had screeched. “Falcon, kite, drop a feather for me.” And it dropped one.
She had distributed the weight she was carrying in such a way that instead of slowing or hindering her walking it gave her a rhythm, like set sails. Thus, carrying in front her knapsack, mochila, michlatuz-zahr, which, as long ago with women travelers, was reminiscent of a bolster, almohada, michada, with the bare necessities and a bit more stuffed into it, and with other bulky items hooked onto her belt, and this thing or that swinging around her hips, she sailed up the Sierra, a solitary seafarer.
On earlier crossings she had sometimes set out without any baggage, with nothing in her hands, nothing to carry, thinking she would be freer and less encumbered that way. But she had soon noticed that the walking, climbing, scrambling, was not any easier as a result but rather the opposite. One needed, one had to have on one’s body, properly balanced loads, but especially the kind that balanced the bearer. They kept one alert, not as snakes did, but similarly, as one groped one’s way through the pathless, trackless waste, alert from top to toe, and thus prevented the sort of precipitous actions that could be fatal, especially to one walking alone; they constituted a sort of armor of mindfulness, guided one and blazed a trail on the middle path, the only viable one, at least in the Sierra, between gravity and free flight.