Hop to it! Do something. Help. Reach out. Serve. Serve? Yes, serve. Do good? No, be good. Lend a hand. Mediate? No, we know about you mediators and intermediaries rushing blindly to serve as go-betweens and thereby merely hastening a truly disastrous disaster. For heaven’s sake, do not mediate! Participate and be there — and in this way mediate after all, or rather facilitate something, even if only with your eyes, what? The image? No, that is not possible: not the image but an intuition of it; that is sufficient.
And thus, for instance, the financial powerhouse, the adventurer, the former film actress, or whatever she is, sews on a button early that morning near Tordesillas, or wherever, for the toy manufacturer, or whatever he is, in the citadel, or dive. And the man takes it for granted and does not even object, sitting next to her again at the same small table by the window hardly the size of a loophole. And she also darns a glove for him: for it is bitter cold on the southern plateau, colder than in the northwestern riverport city, according to the radio. And for their departure she then fetches his suitcase from his room. And the suitcase weighs her down, even her, this inconspicuously strong woman with the large hands; that is how heavy toys are these days. A toy market in the vicinity of an impending war?
With that the woman has finished serving him. From now on he must make his way alone, and if perhaps not alone, then at least without her. With the help of her images she has given him a push, and that must be sufficient. But why does he look at her in the hostel courtyard as if he still lacked something?
And so the two of them fall into another dialogue like the one they conducted the previous night in the car. She: “Did you find the light switch in your room?”—He: “Yes.”—She: “Was the bed wide enough?”—He: “Yes.”—She: “Did you see the lightning after midnight?”—He: “Yes.”—She: “Will you stay in Tordesillas?”—He: “No. Today I am heading west already, along the río Duero. And without the suitcase.”—She: “On the old pilgrims’ route, to Santiago de Compostela?”—He: “Heaven forbid. Not on any pilgrims’ route, and certainly not an old one.”
And if the man still lacks something, now he is resigned to lacking it; even strengthened by it? Their voices seem to be amplified by the walls of the various little sheds built in a circle around the main structure. And just as she placed her hand on his shoulder in parting the night before, now, for this morning’s parting, she strikes him in the throat, making him stagger backward. And so he goes, looking over his shoulder at her, as if a third parting were still in the offing, not right away — the culmination of their partings. And then, already on the carretera, the highway, the cesta, the tariq hamm, he pauses briefly, sets down the suitcase, and tosses a handful of pebbles in her direction, so violently that several skitter all the way to her feet. She has retained the almost unblinking gaze of her childhood. Except that it has nothing childlike about it. Perhaps it did not have that even long ago.
The man heading toward the Atlantic. And the woman toward the Mediterranean? On this morning the sky above the meseta was blue. The highland plain of grass, stone, and sand extending in all directions from the hostel was green, brown, red, and silvery gray (the silvery color from the flecks of argentine mica in the weathered granite sand). By daylight, the hostel, with its gaping chimney, its roof sprouting thistles, its crumbling stucco, and its empty window frames, where black jackdaws with yellow beaks constantly flew in and out, uttering their hoarse cries, now had only the silhouette of a castillo, or castle, and was almost as black as the jackdaws, black without the sheen of their feathers. Then the jet contrails — it was an era of black jet contrails — even a shade blacker than a black background as they passed in front of the sun, at which moments it became palpably colder, as during a total eclipse.
All colors seemed to be gathered here, and the objects also revealed a new color — which had existed nowhere in the world until this morning — which had never before been seen by a human eye — and for which there was also no name and never would be — and rightly so. Was the unknown new color purely a wish? A wish awakened at the sight of the slowly wandering line separating sun and shadow, between the area of rigid white hoarfrost and the glistening, seemingly windblown thawing area in the steppe-grass-filled courtyard of the hostel? At the sight of the thawing grass, whose tips stirred not from the wind but rather from the steady melting of the layers of hoarfrost, which accumulated in droplets, causing one stalk after another to sway?
Yes, a wish — a wish that sprang up at the sight of that one dewdrop in the sun which, in contrast to the myriad glass-clear, transparent, white-flashing droplets, stood out from the dewdrop field as a bronze sphere, not glistening and flashing but glowing, shimmering, shining; no mere glittering dot but a sphere, a dome, challenging one to discover — not some unknown planet but the old familiar one, the earth here, challenging one to engage in unceasing daily discovery that led to no specific outcome, nothing that could be exploited, unless perhaps for keeping possibilities open — discovery as a way of keeping possibilities open?
A wish for a new color on, in, with the earth, a wish that became even more intense with the discovery that simply by looking, and without stirring from the spot, without stretching out one’s hand, one could generate and also multiply this one bronze-colored — no, nameless-colored dew-globe — how monumental it appeared among all the other merely glittering droplets: with nothing but a slight movement of one’s head, back and forth, up and down, with one’s eyes as wide open as possible: suddenly in the thawing field an entire aisle or loop of new shades scintillating between bronze, ruby, crystal, turquoise, amber, siena, lapis lazuli, and especially the unnamed color.
Why was there no legend, like the legend of the ancient giant whose strength drained away as soon as he lost contact with the earth and returned the moment he touched the earth again, of someone who found his strength, an entirely different kind of gigantic strength, to be sure, by simply looking down at the ground? Wish-color, wish-strength. But didn’t a letter from her brother, the enemy of mankind, contain the diametrically opposite wish?: “Were it not for the children, I would wish that the final world war might break out and that those of us here now would be wiped out, one and all.”
No one must know that she wanted to make her way through the Sierra de Gredos. Neither the people at her bank, her banks, nor the author, nor anyone else, not even her old acquaintance here, the hostel-owner and chef. (Only with her daughter would she of course have shared her intention at once—) Were anyone to learn of her plan, it would be — so she thought—“as if my secret came to light, and that would mean humiliation, whereas unrevealed it remains a source of riches.”