So was the narrow, rigid gaze of the property owner therefore preferable to the threat of such dire confusion? The halfway-safe “What’s mine is mine”?
“It is true,” she then told the author in his village in La Mancha: “Even far from my earthly possessions, on my way to you, I allowed myself to be influenced, incidentally and not even all that reluctantly, by one of my belongings, as if that could keep me from being thrown off course. Yes, among other things, while crossing the Sierra this time I was guided by the thought that in a bush or somewhere I would come upon a certain object I had lost on another crossing, nothing special, nothing valuable, some small thing, insignificant in itself, but linked with a memory. I am repeating myself? As I should. You should repeat it as well, author of mine.”—The author: “A scarf? A glove? A pocketknife?”—She: “A scarf. I was constantly on the lookout for the black scarf I lost maybe ten years ago, one summer, in the Sierra.”
The author: “So that means a yes, within limits, to owning such personal items? But not real estate, not house and land? When it comes to the latter, your story should say the exact opposite of your immortal predecessor’s, in which house and patience are named in one breath: ‘He abandoned his house and his patience.’ So instead: ‘She abandoned the house and impatience’; ‘She abandoned the house and intolerance’; ‘She set out for distant parts and patience’; ‘She set out for foreign parts and tolerance’?”—She: “Yes, something along those lines.”
Despite all the measures and precautions taken, the moment nonetheless came when up again turned into down, houses became cliffs, cliffs became lodgings, and chaos took hold.
Except that this soon lost its power to terrify. For the first time now it was right and proper. It started — so the story goes — with her pausing on one of the outer shelves of the main Sierra ridge that were staggered in an even rhythm all the way to the horizon and looking back into the high valley of the río Tormes and its headwaters, where she had begun her ascent that morning.
She saw Pedrada lying below, the stone-thrower village. But was this still her Pedrada? Weren’t the tents she recalled actually a cluster of those conical and pyramid-shaped haystacks typical of the Sierra de Gredos, far from any settlement, fenced off from the mountain wilderness by stone walls, which surrounded the stacks, always in a circle? And these hay cones, precisely in the middle of the otherwise empty stone enclosures — no cattle or sheep in sight — looked as if they had long since been abandoned there, blackened with age, stacked perhaps years, if not decades, earlier, the hay unusable, the tarpaulins covering them tattered to shreds.
Her, and our, Pedrada no longer existed; the stone buildings were blocks of granite heaved out of the ground; “Pedrada” a mere name, with no village to go with it, similar to the way in which, on the route ahead of her, the Puerto de Candeleda had long since ceased to be a pass or a crossing and merely bore the name, with not even the suggestion of a notch there at the top of the ridge.
And she did not see that phantasmagorical Pedrada at her feet, far below; rather the tent-shaped haystacks and the boulders, strewn about as if by an explosion, appeared as if high above her; although she had been climbing for all those hours, they now seemed to be above eye level — just as in the game German children call “Heaven and Hell” the players see themselves rolling along the ground through an undulating landscape bisected by furrows, down into one furrow and ditch, then up, then down again, and up again, until in the end below becomes above, heaven above becomes hell below, and vice versa again.
But unlike what had happened during her first time in the Sierra, this time one experienced such reversals as part of a game involving the terrain or region, the result of the particular sequence and rhythm in which one experienced this mountainous area as one walked, climbed, descended, and ascended again, and this time the constant transformation of earth-low into sky-high did not produce dread (yes, dread, horror) but contentment, not unlike that of children tumbling and rolling over hummocks — a sense of lightheartedness and levity at finding that for once “heaven” was “hell” and “hell” was now “heaven.”
And likewise, when we turned toward our destination, the crest, we saw it, along with the still merely imaginary Candeleda Pass, not at the level of our brow or crown, but sunken, hardly reaching our beltline, as if the shelf where we had paused were already the main ridge up above.
And here between our feet and the crest of the Sierra (hardly a stone’s throw and birds’ or electric pylons’ swoop away?), over there where the mountain range actually should have presented a landscape of peaks, reaching for outer space: a gigantic hollow, hemmed in to the west and the east, toward sunrise and sunset, by the steep cliffs of the “summit plain,” which formed a fragmentary half-circle around the hollow; hollow? more like an area of collapse or a depression, and all this up sky-high, with the bottom of this depression having the appearance of a mammoth arena.
And although it was not her first time here, she did not recognize this arena. The dark spot at the bottom was a forest, if only a small one, and it had not been there earlier. But the pool at the bottom of the depression — or was it a lake, if only a very small one? — was not new to her; it was the Laguna Grande de Gredos, a lake! Except that its water was not even frozen, and had clouds drifting over it, of frost? smoke? haze?
Familiar to her from before were, likewise, the tumbled boulders, both on the floor of the arena and — even more helter-skelter, fractured, and varied — on the slopes or “tiers” of the natural amphitheater, in which ten times ten theaters the size of the already enormous one at Epidauros would have fit easily. She knew that the entire hell-deep depression there had once been filled to the rim with glacial ice, and that it was the glacier that had left the boulders, towers, and fragments all higgledy-piggledy, leaning against each other, crashed on top of each other, some seemingly standing on their heads (or on their hands, or on only one hand)? Yes, in bygone times, chaos had reigned clear across the Sierra arena, hour after hour, day after day, and for thousands of years, an incessant crashing, smashing, splitting, pounding, with sparks flying. But then, once the ice had melted and was no longer eternal, the chaos had died down. Now it was recalled only on maps, in mountaineering books, in the guide to the “Dangers of the Sierra de Gredos”: “El caos de Hondoneda” (or “Hondareda”), the Chaos of Hondoneda (hondo, deep); “chaos” was the name used the world over for all the areas formerly chewed up by the glacier — nothing quieter than a “chaos” like this, and even the rock formations that seemed to be resting on only one hand were stable for the duration (the duration?).
But no: the smoke or haze in the depths of Hondoneda or Hondareda, high up in the Sierra, did not emanate, or not exclusively, from the “laguna”—where the glacier had sliced most deeply — but rose from one of the chaos-boulders, no, from several, from all of them.
These were lived in, were human habitations. It was the smoke from fires — wood smoke, root smoke — that we smelled all the way up here. Of course we knew from earlier crossings that down there in Hondareda, the most remote part of the Sierra, lived a hermit. But these people were no hermits anymore: so close together, and also so many crowded into one place. We had already noticed earlier, as we crossed the trackless wastes, in addition to the innumerable footprints, the mussel shells amid the granite, in the sand and in the crevices.