Did she need help? No. She stretched out, on her back. Even once her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, the earth and the world around her remained invisible; not a thing could be made out in the light of a star here or there, no leaf, no cluster of needles; what could be made out was only the darkness — but it could be made out after all — which took on shape, became a form, provided companionship. A bit earlier she had been walking along a brook at the bottom of a gorge that turned out to have no outlet, and thus for a while she had had to go uphill again, winding back and forth: from the water far below now barely a distant rushing. Otherwise, all around her not a sound to be heard.
Not the slightest wind was blowing now, either. All night long, no breeze. Neither cold nor warm, no breath of coolness or mildness. In the total darkness the air stood still, could not even be felt as an element. Occasionally, astonishment that one had no trouble breathing. Involuntary sitting up and leaning back — was this a tree? Yes, it was, and to judge by the pattern of its bark, an oak. That meant one had already covered half the distance, from the heights above the tree line and through the belt of conifers. I have hardly ever seen this woman lean on anything, certainly not on a person. And now she sat on the bare ground and leaned back, and how.
Then there were noises after all, sporadic ones, at intervals, and always the same: something hitting the forest floor, small yet very hard and heavy, after falling from a considerable height. And these were acorns, and they fell all night long, now farther away, now very close to her, now on the right, now on the left, now up on the mountain, now toward the valley. Was fall already around the corner, then? No, she had experienced just such a falling of acorns before, during a very different night spent out of doors, in a different part of the world. And during that Sierra night she heard it again inside her, and thus it deserved its moment in her story.
The falling acorns, for all their distinct clinking, clanging, and eventually veritable “cymbaling,” produced mysterious sounds like those otherwise made by a single leaf or twig in a barely perceptible wind. At first they were joined by the last airplanes, at great altitudes, on the threshold of audibility, the planes on long-distance flights to overseas destinations, having taken off around midnight. Then came the night after midnight, and nothing but the tinkling of the acorns and the acorn xylophone, more and more also an acorn vibraphone; yes, the darkness vibrated with the sound of falling acorns.
For a time she dug into her provisions: “How groping for something to eat enhanced its taste — the greatly intensified quintessential bitterness of the rowanberries!” For a while also mere lying and resting. For a while sitting and taking notes, for me. What? writing in tunnel-like darkness, forming letters and words? Yes, and precisely under these circumstances with a particular presence of mind.
And all the while, even though she now lacked the even rhythm of walking, there continued — except that by this time it was at an almost dizzying speed — the carousel of places and settings, darting, hot on each other’s heels, into the middle of whatever she was doing, and shooting through her; eventually also more like a cable or valley railroad.
And in the meantime the series included places and things that did not belong to her in particular and did not originate in her own experience. Yes, that spot along the brook now, under the ash by the cow pasture, in the autumn rain that sounded so entirely different in the wilted, fallen, brittle foliage than in summer, that spot had also been hers at one time.
But the hand that she saw next, a hand writing in the glow of an oil lamp, writing and writing and writing — in a rhythm she had never seen before — with a steel pen and black India ink, that was not her hand, or any hand from her own century, and the shoulders and profile of the writer that swept in along with the hand had transported her for a millisecond into the company of a man who, did he not belong to an era long past, would have been the author she dreamt of for her story? And I, the contemporary author in the village in La Mancha? What was I in comparison but a sort of stopgap?
And how had he come to appear to her on that mountain-crossing night, her ideal writer for this commission, her Miguel de Cervantes? “As Miguel wrote and writes and will have written in a certain way, one felt in one’s own body, in one’s own shoulders, one’s own profile, one’s arms, one’s hips, one’s legs, how oneself and one’s story was, and could have been, and was being, traced by the moving writing instrument, and underlined, underlined and emphasized, emphasized and clad in beauty, clad in beauty and rendered truthful.”
And yes, now, brushing past her like a falling star, the abandoned railroad spur, breaking off at a road through the fields, complete with rusty warning signs in the grass, that was part of her life again, her era, and she could have told me the name of the place, and where to locate it. But then: a woman as foreign to her as she was familiar, driven off course onto a new continent, in an odyssey never before told: How had the lightning flashing through her shown her this stranger? — Odysseus in the shape of a woman, and not alone on her odyssey, but with her child, and this odyssey, according to the information accompanying the flash, would have been the contemporary equivalent of Homer’s, the odyssey of a mother with her child! What a double-edged sword these flashes of places and constellations were: on the one hand confirming one’s existence, on the other hand — well, double-edged.
38
With the first light of morning, pale as distant daylight inside a cave, she set out, heading for the valley. She was almost in a hurry to get out of the Sierra de Gredos. Although outwardly she still had time, she no longer felt as though she did: Was it necessary for the fact of having time to be joined by the feeling, if one was to be able to benefit from having time?
Did she lack for anything? Nothing, except that she was thirsty, and with a vengeance. For the first time on her journey she was almost driven. She rushed; walked as if being rushed. Yet she had long since left behind the overgrown stretch of forest and was passing through an unexpectedly day-bright section. This revealed itself as a transitional area, no longer in the midst of the Sierra yet still without signs of the foothills region, the plain as well as the peaks hidden from view by the belt of trees; also no sounds of civilization, neither honking nor cars passing each other, sounds that otherwise penetrated from the lowlands into the most remote reaches of the mountains. The area was devoid of trees, scruffy, with hardly any rocks, but the ferns were impressive, constituting the main vegetation here, their fronds overlapping, way over her head, a kind of fern forest.
There was, however, one sign of human habitation: a road, or actually more of a footpath, leading diagonally down through the fern forest, with snapped fronds on either side. So she was no longer a pathless one, an asendereada. And what name did she give herself now? “La aventurera,” she said, “the adventurer.” Hadn’t she already been called that earlier in the story? That was her name again now, on the final stretch, with even more justification. She, such an orderly person, an adventurer? Yes, for she was at once orderly and bold, an orderly adventurer.
Instead of in S-curves, the path now led straight down, but quite gradually, which suited her at the moment; the steep stretches of the Sierra lay behind her. And among the ferns she then also found something to quench her thirst: ground blackberries, whose runners crisscrossed the floor of the fern forest. Many of the berries were shriveled, or still green, or not yet formed, in bloom — all this again in a delightful confusion — and a few already ripe, altogether very few, “to be counted on the fingers of one hand.” Yet what a gift even one of these zarzamoras was. Gift? “Yes, at the sight of them I literally said: ‘a gift!’” she explained. What an ability this little ball of fruit, no bigger than a rabbit dropping, had to magically banish her parching thirst.