Crossing the Sierra De Gredos by Peter Handke Page A

station still the same as when I moved here a decade and a half ago, still showing the wrong time, five hours fast, or seven hours slow.’”
    The author: “But what will happen to the message of your book?” —She: “What message?”—The author: “For instance the one about the new or recaptured ways of life.”—She: “Well, have you ever had a message?” —The author: “Yes, messages and more messages. But only the kind my book unexpectedly presented to me.”—She: “Happy messages?” —The author: “Up to now, almost exclusively happy ones.”
    With scratched forehead and muddy boots, her, and our, arrival at the terminal. So much fresh air earlier, and now, from one step to the next, in a different element. Element? Almost exclusively revolving doors now, holding back the world outside. But even where an old-style door stood open for a bit, no breath of air made its way into the hall. On the gleaming floor no footprints but hers. Nothing but scrape marks from suitcase wheels and luggage carts. Not a speck of free space; every inch of the airport floor occupied by people walking, standing, queueing up, running—each sticking to the beeline to which he or she had laid claim. Many talking loudly to themselves—no, they were shouting at people who were not there. But not every one with a hand to one ear was holding a so-called mobile telephone: here and there amid the racket a person simply cupped his hand over his ear and kept silent.
    In one place there were drops of what looked like a nosebleed, in a dice pattern: one of the passengers, of whom there were not a few, had walked into an interior glass wall, perhaps seeing a reflection of the outside and thinking he was outdoors? On all sides, illuminated maps of the world and globes rotating as if four-dimensionally—was this the atlas of distant places from her childhood? Or is the atlas of distant places instead the view from my window here? Where are you all trying to get to, with destinations you have been talked into or forced to choose, at times, on days, and for a length of time over which you also have no control, that you must allow others to determine, and all of which—destination, departure and arrival time, duration—have nothing to do with your former and perhaps persisting love of travel, as well as your still possible spontaneous longing to set out, rendered impossible, however, by this dictatorship of money and the computer? Didn’t the current restrictions on travel conflict with the right to freedom of choice, one of the fundamental rights
enumerated in democratic constitutions, and the need for spontaneity—the pleasure of surprising oneself and others? (“End of message”)
    Wild dove feathers on a conveyor belt, and one person or another also picked them up and pocketed them. Some people dressed in black, about to take off to attend a village funeral. A family sleeping on a bench off to one side, even the parents barefoot. An army of deep, gleaming reflections that catch our eye and make us turn our heads, but nowhere an image, a live one? A child, staring straight ahead, ignoring the motley scene, and thus also ignoring it for me.
    Single raindrops on the dusty road. Walking up a creosoted plank, as wide and thick as a door, from the wharf to the ship. Where had she seen this plank before? In the maritime museum in Madrid, in a display of the equipment with which the sailors of the Spanish-Austrian empire had sailed across the seas, especially the western ones, to “West India,” Venezuela, Mexico. The board was so thick, and it was seated so firmly on both ends, that it did not sway or bounce once under her feet, all the way to the railing. So when was that? In the sixteenth century, around 1556, to be precise, shortly after the abdication of the emperador , the emperor Charles the Fifth, and at the time of his crossing, in a