“And this is the way enthusiasm sets in, right? or returns, usually with thinking or becoming aware — not of pain, of course, but rather of an object that should actually be present, but, strange to say, is not. Long ago in the village, and not only then — let us say, in my fruit-stealing days, which are not over yet — often, very often the mere name of a fruit would come to me—‘apple,’ ‘wild plum,’ ‘cherry,’ or ‘quince’—with nothing of the sort far and wide, and why should there have been, and then a few steps or roads or farm paths farther on: there was the thing, the object, the tree of early apples, or the good Louise of Avranches, conjured up by the name, as it were; no, not as it were, and at any rate, simply thinking constantly of the names, the names, and again the names had put me on the trail of the apples, pears, quinces, plums.
“And so one day in Hondareda, for example, I thought about the word ‘children’: yes, where are the children here? Are there no children here? — and with the conscious thought, my asking, listening, and raising my head at the same time, they promptly revealed themselves, if at first only in a brief clattering of feet on the smooth, natural glacial rock surface, which echoed louder than any man-made paving — a clattering that had long since been in her ear but had been mistaken for hands clapping. And then the cries of infants from more and more rock huts. And then immediately, upon the repetition of the word, a screeching of many voices, seemingly unending, such as could come only from a school playground …
“And enthusiasm, at least enthusiasm for the objects, places, and living beings in the depression of Hondareda, meant that in each word or name that added something to those that were already there, pain was all the more certain to be present, a pain that exceeded my own and was inescapably bound up with the things there, the things here; see the expression for being dead that had soon established itself in the region, without prior discussion: ‘No longer being on earth.’ And this enthusiasm, which makes things appear, brings them to light, with or without the concomitant pain, is something you should insert into my story again and again! It should provide the accent, the accent of plenitude and at the same time of dearth — that certain accent that all the inhabitants of the Pedrada-Hondareda region actually have when they speak.” Thereupon the author: “As you do as well here.”
32
When the author in his spot in La Mancha (and mancha already meant “spot”), far from the world but not world-forsaken, set to work later on her, and his, book, several versions of her crossing the Sierra de Gredos had already reached his ears, and they all had to do with the sojourn of that roaming woman, andariega, in the Hondareda-Camarca region.
Although by nature, or for whatever reason, he was a gullible person, it seemed to him that what was “attested to” and “recounted”—such things were always particularly emphasized in the preambles — was not merely false but also falsified. For these falsifying narrators, who furthermore never identified themselves and claimed to “require anonymity as a shield against predictable acts of revenge,” were plainly intent, and this was revealed by their very first sentence, in the choice of words and even more in the grammar and sentence rhythm, on first selling their story and second maligning their subject, with the latter motive, at least in their opinion, the absolute prerequisite for the former.
But actually they were attempting, in content as well as in form, to accomplish something far worse than mere character assassination, which could have produced exactly the opposite effect on various people in the market they were targeting: the little folks of Hondareda had to be portrayed from A to Z, and from the first adjective to the last verb, as the new Gothamites, dragging sunlight in bushel baskets from outside into their windowless houses or cellar holes, and so on. By treating the life of these settlers, who had made their way to the mountain basin from all over the world, as the stuff of fables and legends, they meant to render it harmless and, yes, unreal.
And these anonymous and apocryphal narrators thought that a particularly clever way to undermine the Hondarederos and those enthusiastic about their existential experiment, to render them ridiculous and insignificant, was to ascribe to them a belief in utopia, which everywhere else on the planet had become the butt of ridicule, and thus had great commercial potential as a humor-product.
The basic feature of all the apocryphal stories: that a first commandment of the H-people was “to be good and nothing but good.” Which suggested never doing good intentionally; it was enough to be good, with whatever flowed from that. And a variation on such a first commandment in that remote world was allegedly “not to do good but to behave well.”
What followed in the individual false fables, narrated in an exaggerated pseudo-legend style, was, for instance, that one of the new settlers, intent only on being good and behaving well, out of the clear blue sky fell upon a fellow citizen he happened to encounter and almost killed him, with the explanation that those responsible for the misery and wretchedness of the current era, his own as well as everyone else’s — and they existed in the flesh, if also hardly in blood — were so inaccessible and so beyond his reach, and anyone’s, that he, “good as he was” (apocryphal irony), could not help taking out his impotent rage against all those absentees on the next person who crossed his path … (Typical also of the apocryphal narrators: that they suggested to the imagined reader simply by means of those three dots what he was supposed to think about a subject.)
The local residents were also shunted off into the nonserious realm of the fable by these narrators, under the guise of seriousness, when they asserted that “the citizens of Hondareda” had, by their own testimony, revived a long-dormant tradition of the region, according to which, if one of them had to be the decision-maker—“for heaven’s sake, not a leader or master”—he had to exercise this authority not like an Old Testament or even cannibalistic father but “as a brother” (this was the resurrected traditional phrase) — which gave rise to tall tales describing a series of “brother presidents,” whose despotic regimes were not so much intentionally brutal as clumsy, but, because they appeared in “brotherly” guise, turned out to be especially brutal.
And then the author found at least partially believable what he learned from the apocryphal legends: that many of those who had moved to Hondareda from the most distant parts of the globe had gone well beyond borrowing for their new houses here just a few features from the indigenous architecture of their lands of origin: the multiracial person from Colorado who had returned here to the land of his distant ancestors had added onto the existing cavern in a granite cliff a perfect replica of one of the sandstone dwellings familiar to him from the Navajos back in Colorado (he himself also their descendant …); another had built on a ledge extending far into the mountain lagoon the spitting image of one of the limestone saltworks houses from the distant land of his birth, such as he had inhabited in Dubrovnik, in the former Yugoslavia, with mounds of raw salt stored in the windowless ground floor; a third had used boards and sticks and broom branches to hammer together a lean-to that represented a copy, if a poor one, of a field hut in his “motherland, Styria, New Austria” …