If “Gredos” came from the word greda, meaning clay, or potter’s earth, or scree, or grit, the steep southern slopes of the Sierra deserved the name more than the northern ones, which consisted almost entirely of solid rock: for her descent repeatedly took her across stretches of soft, almost muddy earth, also slate scree and gravel, where she sometimes slid more than walked; a sliding which, because she was always prepared for it, instead of carrying the risk of slipping and falling, was used by her for making more rapid progress, a sort of riding down the mountain.
The rucksack also helped her maintain her balance. The expression she used later in conversation with the author was that it was “nice and heavy,” for one thing from the fruit she had pilfered before setting out — her own form of superstition? — and then somewhat less from the almost feather-light bread than from the olive oil that had proved its worth on all her previous crossings, and the large container of salt: the salty air that had unexpectedly reached her nostrils up on the crest along with the suddenly mild southerly wind — did it emanate from the salt that her body, heated from the climb, caused to steam? Or did the salty cloud come from her body itself? The only other provender she had — yes, she assured the author, he could be so bold as to use this word — were the mountain walnuts, the hazelnuts, the chestnuts, and dried rowan and juniper berries, which she constantly jiggled in her various pant and jacket pockets, making them click and jingle.
“Time is money?” she said out loud in the darkness, which grew denser as she descended: “Yes, but not the way most people think. No one has established yet what wealth one can acquire by means of time. I have time now, and nothing else has ever made me feel freer or wealthier. Yes, and having time is definitely a feeling and has nothing to do with leisure or a sense of leisure. It comes from inside and is added onto whatever I am engaged in at the moment, and it alone provides a sense of completeness and meaning or specialness. Listen: having time is the overarching? no, the basic feeling that first makes possible the other feelings, the specific and also the grander feelings, that is to say, the more warmhearted feelings and life on a grand scale.”
Talking to herself in the dark: Was she afraid on this solitary descent? Forget that question — anything resembling fear was out of the question for the asendereada and her story; and besides, where she was at the moment, far above the tree line, it was not pitch-dark, for the spatially pliable chiaroscuro still held sway, in which she even descended backward at times, with her eyes fixed on the Sierra mountaintop, which was noticeably receding from her — while, strangely enough, the lowlands and the plain below were also receding, even though she was nearing them, step by step, probably also receding because the only lights, those of Candeleda, had soon been swallowed up by the foothills and low ridges, leaving not even a pale shimmer in the sky.
But if no fear, what about the skittishness typical of her tribe or village or ethnic group? “That was out of the question during this nocturnal crossing,” she told the author. “Besides, it had never reared its head on all my previous solitary crossings of the Sierra. Was it the evenness, the rhythm, or the constant state of alertness? At any rate, when an entire forest of bushes, which a moment ago had been completely motionless, began to sway, advancing toward me like a huge black wave, I stepped out of its path as if nothing were wrong, and in fact it was only a herd of cattle, of the deep-black Ávila breed, which had been sleeping in the patch of bushes and had all stood up at once.
“And time and again, when I slid past snakes at a thumb’s and a throat’s distance, after slipping, which happened to me more often in broad daylight than in the dusk, I merely observed them wide-eyed, like the sharp horns of the bulls poking out of the foliage, and my only thought was: Well, well, aha.
“The startle response that comes when one trips and almost falls, or falls off something, is entirely different. I experienced that constantly during all my crossings of the Gredos massif, except during the last one, when I actually would have welcomed it after a while: for the shock that goes through one when one thinks one is losing the ground under one’s feet merely affects the body, and puts it on a particular kind of alert: afterward one sees more clearly, hears more distinctly, and, most important, a person who has been ‘pulled up short’ this way, as our village expression has it, at once shakes off any brooding or self-absorption.”
In the previously mentioned “Guide to the Dangers of the Sierra de Gredos”—which she knew almost by heart, as if she had literally written it herself, the descent from the ridges at the summit to Candeleda, at the edge of the valley of the río Tiétar, was described as “extremely challenging.” One was advised not to try it alone, or at night. On the other hand, the descent was said not to take more than “approximately six hours,” and “as the crow flies” it was a “mere fifteen kilometers.”
Yet she found the descent to be not challenging at all, or at least that was not the proper word for this journey on foot. Nevertheless, the asendereada needed not six hours for the descent to Candeleda but the entire night, and the entire following day, and another night? and when she finally reached the fig and olive trees on the edge of the small town, in the darkness before dawn, or after dusk? she had lost more than just a day and a night. Lost? Really?
In his youth the author had occasionally read one of his attempts at epic literature — he had always been intent on achieving epic breadth, without being familiar with the term itself — aloud to a friend, male or female: and the first thing he always asked was whether it had been “exciting” (although even in those days, if the answer was yes, he was oddly disappointed, as if he had hoped to hear some adjective other than “exciting” applied to his creation).
A similar mechanism was still at work now, when it came to the episode of the crossing of the mountain range, and he felt tempted to resort to the sort of dramatic style that he had eschewed all his life as a feature that would distract one from what was really happening. (That author who was apocryphal in this or some other respect, that twister of words and facts, who made things either better or worse than they were: that could also have been him at any number of junctures.)
In a dramatic account, during that first night, shortly after reaching the tree line below and plunging into the pitch-dark, yes, pitch-dark first belt of woodland, the heroine of the story would have encountered a hermit and been raped by him. On the following day, as she lay, more dead than alive, in a thicket of ferns, giant toads would have crawled over her, spewing venom in her face. And the next night, as she stumbled around, half-blinded, she would have been attacked by a wild bull, which, had she not seized him by the horns, and in that position — with her hands gripping the horns! — hurled the story of her life at the bull’s head and into the bull’s eyes, would have fallen upon her in an entirely different way from the hermit monk of the night before.
And like the heroine of a nineteenth-century English novel, for example, she would have taken refuge that second night in a hole in the ground, surrounded by so-called fairy circles of mushrooms, to her mind always the most uncanny of plants, enormous, black-gilled mushrooms that glowed in the dark and beamed their disgusting odor of decay at her in the middle of the circle, their giant umbrellas having the form of black suns. And there was lightning and thunder. And an avalanche — in the southern gullies of the Sierra it was early spring, with a constant danger of avalanches, especially when the mild winds blew from the south — roared by so close to her that she felt its draft for a long time, like an ice-cold spray on her flushed face.