As the two of them made their way to his storehouse in the village, the night was chilly. Altogether, on this last leg of her journey, even though she had been heading south all the while, it had become noticeably colder. The huge village square was strewn with sand, which crunched under their feet as only frozen sand could crunch. Not another soul was out on the village streets then, despite the rather early hour; no corso, no evening strolling by the population; yet the aldea so deep in the Iberian south.
The author’s almacén, or warehouse, lay on the edge of the village. It had no windows on the sides overlooking the street and alley. The windows it did have faced on the grass- and scree-covered steppe that surrounded all the rather sparse settlements in La Mancha, which were often half a day’s journey apart. The other village houses, as well as the astonishingly many churches, also seemed to be built on the edge of the savannah; one of the churches was even located far out in the grassland, and was dedicated to Santa María de las Nieves, Mary of the Snows; from the window of the guest room she could see this snow church — without snow — standing in the moonlight.
They had passed through a spacious, empty vestibule and entered the inner courtyard of the former warehouse, where a gallery running all around the one upper story — marble columns and shallow Moorish arches in a delicate, light-colored clay brick — gave the impression of a miniature palace, not a royal one but a rustic, peasant one. In the inner courtyard the giant seedpods of a baobab tree rustled in the night wind.
She had been shown up to her room and left there while her host put the finishing touches on the evening meal, for which he refused to accept her help. “My housekeeper has the day off”—these were his words.
In her room, again something between a chamber and a storeroom, she changed her clothes. The supposed chef ’s tunic that she had had with her the entire time in her pack was in actuality a dress, and it was also not white but revealed, when she had put it on, at least here and there, completely different colors, which flowed into each other as she moved, and for which there were no names — at least none recognized by the master of the house, who could distinguish about a thousand colors but hardly knew a name for one of them.
As she descended the broad brick steps — so broad because they had been used for moving goods to the storage areas — he also noticed that she was barefoot. Yes, since the loss of her shoes on that morning of leave-taking from the Sierra, she had gone barefoot, and he was the first to notice this, or rather, the first she allowed to notice; for she continued to have it in her power, if not to be invisible, then to be overlooked by the world around her.
They ate their evening meal in the hall or main storeroom, adjacent to the patio — crammed with junk, or at least stuff that looked like junk — with a glass door (no window in the room) looking out on the Mancha steppe. As befitted her, and their, story, and especially its last chapter, there was a fireplace by the table, quite a tiny one, and not only in proportion to the hall, and the fire in it smoldered more than it burned or blazed, and the author then allowed it to go out, intentionally, as he said: “For gazing into a fire has always tended to distract me; unlike running water, it puts me to sleep, hypnotizes me, pulls me away, in an unproductive sense, from the matter at hand, or what should be the matter at hand.” —“Me, too,” she replied. But they did not feel cold, and that was the result, among other things, of her telling and his listening.
While she told him the story of crossing the Sierra de Gredos and the loss of images, she noticed that the listener was increasingly usurping her story, the story. Usurping? Absorbing it? More the latter, if also in the sense that it, in turn, the story, was passed to him, and at times also literally entered him, like a demon? yes, but not an evil demon, rather one that one might almost wish would circulate inside one as long as possible, working its magic. The stooped author pulled himself together and sat up straight. To be sure, at moments this also caused him to sway.
And she, the storyteller? Time and again as she recounted her adventures, she was filled, in retrospect, with a horror of which there had been not so much as a hint at the moment of the experience. At one point, in the middle of a paragraph, she even found herself on the verge of breaking off the story — a child’s crib on the edge of a precipice, tipping (another image after all?) — and for good: the story would end there, would thus not even come into being. For she saw herself still lying in the fern hollow, helpless and unable to move, completely and utterly alone.
And wasn’t she in fact still lying there in the dark? Was in reality not here, safe and sound in human company? The retroactive trembling familiar from so many adventure stories came over her. But wasn’t this, on the other hand, the unmistakable sign of a proper adventure? Trembling and faltering, she and the author went on to the next sentence. In between they both shuddered. But without this shuddering the journey would not have deserved the name. That alone was what validated a journey.
Before the two of them, now calm and wide awake, discussed the loss of images, the author remarked, at the end of her tale — which, nota bene, was only the provisional end — perhaps not in complete seriousness, that he, as a man who had of necessity turned his back on the world, at least the social world, would have wished to hear more about money and banking. Her response: first of all, there was enough written about her as the powerful banker, a modern-day Jakob Fugger (“That was once upon a time”); and, second, there had been plenty said on the subject in the current story, directly and even more indirectly; and, third — this she now dictated to the author: “Yes, money is a mystery. But here more mysteries are at stake than the mystery of money or secret bank accounts.”
It goes without saying that the author, like all the earth’s inhabitants at the time of this story, had experienced the loss of images long before her, the heroine. Yet, nota bene again! the loss of images did not mean that images no longer flashed and flared through the world or that no one noticed and/or registered these flashing and flaring images at least now and then. And here began the nocturnal discussion between the adventurer and her author of the loss of images — which at the same time was a conversation of both parties with themselves — each one of their soliloquies was evoked by the other’s, and so forth.
“The image sparks, the will-o’-the-wisp images within us — no, these are no will-o’-the-wisps — continue to occur, flashing and flaring into our midst.”—“Except that they no longer have any effect. Or no: they could perhaps continue to have an effect. But I am no longer capable of taking them in and letting them affect me.”—“What affects me instead is the ready-made and prefabricated ones, images controlled from the outside and directed at will, and their effect is the opposite of the old ones.”—“These new images have destroyed those other images, the image per se, the source. Particularly in the century just past, the original sources and deposits of images were ruthlessly raided, in the end disastrously. The natural vein has been stripped, and people now cling to the synthetic, mass-produced, artificial images that have replaced the reality that was lost along with the original images, that pretend to be them, and even heighten the false impression, like drugs, as a drug.”
“But anyone who has recognized the loss of images in himself can at least say what the image and the images once meant to him.”—“Yes. The images, the instant they appeared, meant being alive, even if I was dying, and peace, even if war was raging all around; which makes it clear that an image of terror or horror is incompatible with the kind of images of which our story should speak.”—“Those images seemed, in the face of the transitoriness and destructibility of the body, indestructible. Even if only one came to me in a day, just a brief flash, I saw it as a sequel and continuation, as part of a whole: the images as the comet’s tail of the world’s survival, sweeping over the entire earth and revitalizing the smallest nooks and crannies.”