And besides, it is only superficially accurate to say that the immigrants hardly communicate with each other and at most utter a few empty phrases: precisely by means of these empty or coded formulas, which sound strange to an outsider, they convey a number of things to the other person, even beyond ordinary communication; in which case it is always the voice, yes, the voice of the fellow resident, that provides this additional element.
Nowhere else in the world had she, the adventurer, the roamer, heard voices like these here. They were not trained voices, not those of announcers or actors, such as various members of the observation team had. These immigrants’ voices took one by surprise. She understood the observer when he was put off by the inhabitants’ appearance, more vagabondish than hers by x rips in their clothing and y tangles in their hair and z scaly patches on their faces. Yes, they resembled a peculiar cross between knights and beggars.
But: once, long ago, on a street in Paris, or in Palermo, she had passed a similar figure that looked terminally scruffy, and had heard issuing from this seemingly abandoned heap of misery, which had long since lost any resemblance to a human being, a tremulous voice, God! what a voice! And in her mind, she/one had fallen on her/one’s knees at the sound of that tentative and pitiful but oh so vital voice — the voice of a living being if ever there was one — and in reality? one had stopped and listened to that voice, on and on, with one’s back to it, and was sure that the other person was conscious of establishing contact with his voice, at least getting through. How could she be so sure of that? She/one could taste it.
And this same surprising voice rang out, yes, rang out — despite the complete absence of tonality and resonance — from each of her people here in Hondareda.
Without exception they were broken voices, rough and hoarse even in the young people and children. The dying sometimes had such voices, when they were fully conscious — as no healthy person is or any person freed for the moment somehow of all limitations — when they saw their lives, and life in general, pass before them, and were at once filled with zest for life and acceptance of death; or survivors also; or people gratefully exhausted after some mighty task or effort.
These voices resonated for her like — as — no, neither “like” nor “as”: the voices resonated, that was all. (The author likes to slip in the word “resonate,” whether obsolete or not.)
No one else had such a voice nowadays. And besides, the people of Hondareda were not really shabby or ragged in the least — she almost shouted at the observer and scolded him — even the older ones went about in the finest fabrics, with the most elegant cuts, and there, under the mountain sky and close to the trails of wild animals, this seemed infinitely, to the nth power, more appropriate than on models on the catwalk and their imitators sashaying through the megalopolises with rolling shoulders and high-stepping legs — except it happened that the Hondarederos’ garments, which they wore everywhere, even on the spiny savannah and in the coniferous forests, had gradually acquired rips and tears, and in that region people even took pride in this, just look at me! and as far as mending, etc., went, they followed the example of that literary hero of many centuries ago, who left the rips in his garment unmended as a token of the adventures he had survived.
And how could this be: Were my people down there in the glacial trough unemployed, without regular occupations?
This much had again been observed accurately: none of them ever let himself be seen by outsiders engaged in any organized form of work. And, in particular, whatever the Hondarederos did, and especially what they left undone, never looked like work. Except that it was not enough to watch them during their days and nights. And besides, it was wrong to interrogate them about it, or about anything. The trick was to get them to talk by some other means. To get them to talk of their own accord!
In this manner, for example, you would have learned that they do things every day, make things, move things along — without any sign of working or toiling. Yes, they not only have no conventional occupations; they also reject separate professions, along with their labels. And yet, although this is not obvious with any one of them, each is many things in one: producer, manufacturer, tradesman, engineer, entrepreneur, dealer, processor, distributor, and also a knowledgeable customer (of the others). Every time they allowed me to watch them while they were doing something or intentionally leaving something undone, I thought to myself: These are my people, or: These are my kin — and every time — this shows how much I continue to live according to the rhythm of the profession I gave up — I misspoke in my thoughts and said: These are my clients!
And every time I entered their dwellings, even the sight of their shoes in the entryway, of a dog-eared book, of a few hazelnuts, slivers of mica, chunks of alabaster, juniper branches, a black boar ham hanging from the doorpost to cure, made the property seem well managed to me.
Did I just say “property,” rather than shack, grotto, bunker, hut, and so forth? Yes. Where from the outside you see nothing but windowless hovels, I, escorted with the proverbial “inconspicuous hospitality” into the interior, see, if not “crystal palaces,” at least spaces offering rich vistas of the outdoors, all the way to a variety of horizons, and that is no mere glorification, or my reaction against the palatial dwellings that I often perceive as worthless rubble, but also the eye of the trained manager: of a person who sniffs out value and makes sure it bears fruit.
As was already stated: I have always felt driven to bring something to the others, “my kin,” not so much to help them as to help some undertaking along, to suggest ideas to them in conjunction with it — to speed them on their way. What all did I not bring back for my brother and then for my child, and in what direction did I not speed the one and the other? I? Yes, I.
But I came here to Hondareda empty-handed, with nothing but my gaze. And with it I saw, and let the people here see, just as they first let themselves be seen — a seeing, one move at a time, as in business negotiations, yet fundamentally different — that their actions as well as their inaction — apart from any impression of work, effort, strain, muscular exertion, brow-furrowing — prefigured, or sketched, a kind of management that had never before been practiced in just this way, of entrepreneurship, value creation, treasure extraction.
What was new about them was that they never approached their diverse forms of action and inaction (which included reading, looking, etc., as action? as inaction?) with a plan for the day, let alone the year: another unspoken principle shared without prior consultation by the Hondarederos, adopted from a loafer of the previous century, a Swiss loafer! according to whom it was incompatible with human dignity “to make preparations.”
Very often, when she was the guest of one of them, deep inside his house or in his hidden garden — how cordially she was welcomed every time — and observed him going about his day, it happened that the other person, male or female, just sat there for a while or squatted on his or her heels, alternately gazing into space and reading, reading and gazing into space, or likewise gazed into space and alternately tasted something, sipped something, or, in general, from the beginning and also in between, stared absentmindedly at the book, into the air, at the flowerbeds, into the trees, or into the cooking pots, as she had once observed among many inhabitants of her vanished Slavic-Arab village (for which the expression “He [she] is gazing into the idiot box again” was used, or also, borrowed from the game of chess, “the Slavic defense”).