Another of the transitional travelers, after he had beckoned her into his cottage, no doubt told her that the reason for his being here, if indeed there was a reason, was the light. Another: here at long last he did not understand a word, no longer had to hear his own language, its sounds and accent. And one person explained that he had left his country not because, as was often said, it was too limiting or insignificant or trivial, but actually the opposite, for at least to outward appearances, with its natural resources and especially its economic power, which gave rise to other forms of power, it had suddenly no longer been so limiting and insignificant, and then had become so powerful and finally even more powerful than in its glory days. And one person said he had set out for this region as a reader, as the reader of a long, long story that was set here in the Sierra, about a woman and her vanished lover.
And one day in Hondareda she also came upon her own would-be lover from the riverport city: as she now wanted it to be for her story, he had forgotten her, or had he? and he was thriving. And in the course of time she saw yet another person from home: the idiot of the outskirts — and the change of locale to the high Sierra seemed to have done him good likewise. His idiocy, which when expressed day in, day out, on the outskirts, with their identical curbs and the front lawns all mowed to exactly the same height, wore thin, flourished up here near the stratosphere, among the lichen-covered cliffs, got a second wind — was that expression still in use? — and adapted to the doings of the others.
And finally the story wanted the andariega to see in one of the new settlers her brother, recently released from prison, who she thought was in an entirely different country, committing his first act of violence directed not at things but at human beings, from which there would be no turning back.
And the person who appeared to her as her surviving brother — although outwardly there was little similarity to discover — or out of whom the supposedly lost brother spoke, said, as they shared an evening meal, at an hour unusually early for the Iberian Peninsula, in his living shed/storeroom /warehouse, approximately the following:
“I could already feel killing in my upper arms and my fingertips. Now! I said to myself one morning when I woke up lying next to yet another stranger, a woman who had called to me on the street the previous night as I was heading for yet another railroad station: ‘Wait for me!’ The woman claimed to have known me for a long time. And my absence, to quote her verbatim, had lasted ‘for centuries.’ How rough and at the same time tender her sex was. I had never encountered anything so rough yet so soft before. And as with all the other women, I never saw this stranger again. And with the passage of time I became her admirer. If you meet her, give her my best. I adore her. And I am sure she knows it, even if she will never hear me say it. And perhaps she will read in your story that we met not here and not there but in a third country that was at war.
“And I was in that country because of the war. I wanted to be in the war to take part in the killing. So there would be at least one less of these mindless and soulless two-legged creatures who are everywhere and nowhere nowadays, taking up space and even being paid handsomely for it! And that morning the moment had finally arrived! Off to clear the decks! And even though I was armed, I would do it with my bare hands, or with a stick — the whole combat zone was strewn with sticks and stones. And I would not kill an adversary or an enemy — I considered those of us on the two warring sides to be not enemies but woeful comrades in arms or whatever — but rather someone who was not directly involved, one of those bystanders who, as has become customary or fitting in wars in third countries, instead of trying to prevent war actually incite and whip it up, at the same time turning it into a business opportunity, or rather the sidewalk superintendents and kibitzers with whom the place was swarming.
“My grandfather was in the first world conflict and my father in the second, and both of them told me that it never crossed their minds to want to shoot at a so-called enemy, and to the very end they made a special effort to aim so as to miss. In contrast, however: death and destruction to those on both sides who had sent them off to fight one another and turned the killing and dying into a spectacle — except that neither my grandfather nor my father ever had a chance to look these ‘devils’ or ‘charlatans, ’ as both of them called those responsible, in the eye or lay hands on them.
“On that day in my war I was assigned to a unit that was actually deployed to keep a fire-free zone open, secure a transit route, provide safe conduct. With a few others I was posted along a river in the mountains, at a ford where the road crossed the river at a shallow spot. At some point during the day, I saw, way off down the road on the other side of the river, a man walking alone, making his way through the bushes that had grown far into the travel lane since the war began. He was obviously not native to the area — although the civilian natives in the war zone had long since lost any native characteristics, by which I mean any sense of time and place, and were constantly mistaking yesterday for today, or for a day in the previous year, and constantly losing their way in their own village and even in their own house and grounds. No, that is not the one I am going to do away with, I thought, not yet. But the next one, from the Third Column, that of the sightless ones, in the armored personnel carriers with nineteen times nineteen banners waving!
“The lone pedestrian came to the ford. And at the same moment a vehicle actually appeared behind him, not armored, true, but instead seemingly disguised, and the car stopped, and a few actually masked men jumped out, some of the ones who were waging their own special, uncontrollable, and also, thanks to the masks, absolutely ruthless war-within-a-war. And one of the masked men, all of whom were wearing long, dust-colored greatcoats as if to be ready for being filmed, promptly took aim at the man who was wading through the ford with his pant legs rolled up. With the rushing of the water it was almost inaudible at first. But then I heard nothing but gunfire.
“And the gunfire — in the parents’ cries here in Hondareda I hear the pow-pow-pow again — continued even after the corpse was already floating downstream. The masked man at the ford went on shooting at the dead man while his masked comrades kept us pinned down. I opened my eyes wide. Can one even say that of oneself? Yes, I, I opened my eyes wide. And my eyes were opened. And above the murdered man I saw the open sky. And I, I was innocent. I am innocent, I thought. And never, never will I kill anyone. And altogether: an end to revenge!
“And I was almost, almost grateful to that killer, grateful that he had saved me, saved me from my chief obsession, my obsession with murdering people. How tender was the sex of that woman who had called to me from behind that night on the street leading to the railroad station. Clasping me tenderly. And how noble. Noble and dark and wide, and above all special. And it was not only we who were together there in the night. Outside her apartment window stood a birch tree. A kind of millrace flowed past the house. And in the next room her child was sleeping.”
The evening on which she saw the person out of whom she heard her brother speaking was bright, with spring just around the corner, and outside on the mountain steppe a few of the reporters were running to their helicopter. And at the sight of them her host involuntarily made a gesture like aiming a machine gun at the string of runners, pressing the trigger and spraying them with bullets.