“Never again,” she had then sworn to herself, “will I hike over the Sierra de Gredos without something suitable on my back and on my tummy”—how could she call her flat, muscular stomach a “tummy”?!
She, the solitary seafarer, all alone far and wide. Astonishing, almost incomprehensible, that there were no others scaling these sky-high heights at the same time, perhaps nicely dispersed across the northern flanks that sloped gently skyward. What in the world was everyone doing? How could they stand moping around at home, down in the lowlands, in those gloomy cities that made them narrow-minded (to say nothing of the contemporary “villages”)? How did it happen that she never ran into a single one of her thousand and three enemies in these remote, lonely, sheltered, quiet, and expansive spaces that generated harmony, but only in places where, with the best will in the world, one could not help remaining enemies?
Why didn’t her mortal enemy (for she had one, or imagined one, as almost everyone did at the time of her story) suddenly appear around a granite cliff, three thousand six hundred miles from Wall Street and the Ginza, and the two of them look at each other wide-eyed, laugh, for the moment completely forgetting or losing track of the fact that they were mortal enemies, and realize they had to hang on to the moment or do something constructive with it?
But it was not actually true that on this day she was walking through the Sierra alone. Soon she saw ahead of her human footprints in the stretches of granite sand that often simulated a path through the broom and juniper thicket, and in the increasingly frequent patches of snow: fresh tracks, as if from that very morning, and not single ones but many, then innumerable ones, close together and behind each other and finally overlapping. Except that she did not get to see the people they belonged to, although she could feel, smell, and taste their presence — did not see them for such a long time that she forgot them again.
One was walking. Walking was taking place. The inimitable sound of the granite sand underfoot, less a crunching than a grinding and rustling of the coarse particles, which at the same time massaged one’s feet: the most prominent walking sound on the Iberian peninsula — even if one might encounter a similar sound during a crossing of the Alps, or in the Andes, or, for all she cared, in the Himalayas (“The highest peaks are not for me,” akin to: “We have no business going into outer space”).
More and more stretches bare of all vegetation, without a bush, without a blade of grass, even without those lichens, an ornamental smear of the most varied yellows, greens, and reds that resembled geographical maps and were also named after them: “geography lichens”; yet also no wastelands of scree and stones, but often glass-smooth, slightly rounded rocky plateaus, polished long ago by the Sierra glaciers, slippery smooth not only where they were snow-covered but just as much in the dry patches.
The glowing sky reflected in what looked like subterranean boats not yet completely surfaced and shot through with alabaster-white veins of quartz. Crossing these gentle, stadium-size rocky mounds as if one were all dressed up, even if one had not put on anything special for the journey (or had one?).
And nevertheless closest to the blue of the sky above the ridge, either lightning blue or in the next moment almost outer-space black, whenever one took in the sky not nakedly and directly but glimpsed through a shrub or a tree — so now and then there still was a tree, if only a dwarf one — a blue, merely as background. Merely?
Every long story, she later told the author, has a certain color, a predominant color. And the color she wanted for their book — just as its sound should be the steps of a solitary person walking through the granite sand of the otherwise silent, still Sierra — was that sky-blue shining intermittently through the mountain brush. It was the blue found in the background of medieval stained-glass windows, with the twigs, branches, evergreen leaves, needles, berries (juniper berries or rowanberries, for instance), fruit capsules (rose hips, for instance), and pods (of broom) as the figures against this background. Smoke-colored sky-blue. For the smoke color lent objects their sharpest contours.
No, when the blue glowed and shimmered through the slits, gaps, and holes in the Sierra vegetation, filling the smallest openings and being simply blue and still, it resembled the blue of work clothes hung out to dry as far as the eye could see. She knew that blue from her ancestral village, and not only from there: the blue of her neighbors’ work pants and jackets, seen through the foliage of bushes and fruit trees. And upon seeing that blue one thought simultaneously of “work” and “festivity.” The blue behind the leaves presented the image of work clothes that could also serve as party clothes, just as they were, without having to be altered in any fashion. It was the blue of patches, but also the blue of brides’ trains and scarves and flags — flags with this background-blue as their only color. It looked like cloth, as no other blue and no other color did; it had nothing heavenly or ethereal about it, but rather hung, stood, rested, waited for one in back there as a material, as something material.
Despite its being winter, some thickets of broom emitted a summery vanilla scent as one slipped through them. When one had painfully forced one’s way between two boulders, one’s hands had a singed smell, as after rubbing flints together. When we bit into the withered and blackened rowanberries, which hung in bunches from bare trees that were hardly taller than we were, seemingly frozen and long since dried out, our mouths, parched from the climb, were filled with the taste of the fresh berries and even their juice, both bitter as can be, but how refreshing! and promptly lengthening our stride — the rowanberries’ taste so evocative of midsummer that we saw before us the unique light red, the rowanberry red, of newly ripened bunches, in a way that we had never encountered during an actual summer, different from a mere daydream red.
Involuntarily we stuffed our pockets with the surprisingly weighty — but not “heavy”—clumps of berries. We would need them later, especially on the descent into the southern lowland, where, winter or not, we would feel hotter and hotter; as if for a weeklong expedition — one never knew — at the little island of trees amid the sea of cliffs and snow, we supplemented our provisions (the author suggested using the word “provender” occasionally, even if this term was no longer in use in his far-off linguistic homeland).
And now as we plucked more and more bunches of fruit, with the practiced motions of those who had been fruit thieves from childhood on, and finally stood on tiptoe to reach the clusters (yes, more “clusters” than “berries”), we finally understood why the common name for these berries was “bird berries”: for concealed behind them, completely hidden from view, perched the small birds so rare in the Sierra — mountain titmice, wrens, robins — behind the clusters but also in them, inconspicuously and silently pecking at them — and when you stood on tiptoe and reached for the berries, they whooshed out of the little rowan tree, not all at once, but each one just as its berries were about to be picked, each of them scolding and shrieking as the rightful owner of the bird-berry bunch, robbed by you of its due.