Crossing the Sierra De Gredos Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sometimes the silence resembled the calm just before or after a war. But usually the silent yet well-lit landscape of the outskirts radiated a breath of peace. Credit was due to various longtime inhabitants. Often they were tradesmen, and often they were still practicing their trades long past retirement age—a shoemaker of seventy, a mason of seventy-five, a gardener of eighty. Younger, more up-to-date practitioners of these trades advertised in all the papers. But because their companies were almost always located elsewhere, the old folks just kept on working here, especially on small jobs. They also did better work, and they were more reliable—not because they were older and more experienced but because they had their shops and houses here in the area, one street away or around the corner from the job or the client; they could not allow themselves to mess up or do shoddy work.
    Whether tradesmen or others: these older residents, even when they did not open their mouths, were walking tales of adventure, or tales that
had almost merged with the fruit trees’ interlaced branches, the shoe leather, the shovels yellow with caked-on clay. Once they began to speak, the whole world became the topic. Nothing wrong with collecting the dream narratives and ghost stories of Tibet or the desert Tuaregs’ nomadic songs: But why did no one pay any heed to the epics and chanted tales of these old-time residents of the outskirts, or those who had once migrated or fled here from other lands with their parents? Camera, film, video, microphones for them, too. For their numbers were visibly dwindling: the hand that closed the shutters there last week will have closed them for the last time; lost legend, lost lament, lost song of love; even the loss of a mere intimation—what a loss.
    As time passed, she also picked up some information on the newer residents, no matter how they barricaded themselves in their houses. It always happened inadvertently, in passing. And it was precisely their shadowy outward existence that provided the background. These people were bound and determined not to betray themselves. There should be no hint of who they were, what they did, what their names were, where they came from. With them a new era began. If a piano could be heard once from behind closed windows, it always broke off immediately. No laundry was hung out to dry anywhere, or if it was, then only behind dense hedges, out of sight. Even the vehicles disappeared deep underground, into garages located beneath the basements.
    And yet their stories did not remain entirely hidden. From time to time, and always without warning, fragments or particles of them would pierce the walls of silence. A single elementary particle, whizzing in from an often indefinable distance, was enough for a situation to leave a scorch mark. A situation? An entire story, more distinct and convincing than if it had been narrated from A to Z.
    Such things occurred more at night and most often in the depths of the night, in the hours after midnight. One might be awakened by terrible wailing. Or what sounded at first like angry shouting, someone ranting and raving out on the street, turned to wailing. It was a woman’s voice, with a brief response now and then from a man’s voice, soothing or trying to be soothing. And something more serious than an ordinary quarrel was taking place. Something was drawing to an end; these were, or gradually became, sounds of dying. Eventually the wailing, impossible to resolve into individual words, became positively tender. Nowhere, not even in an opera, had she ever heard such an intense lament. The man’s voice, still
quiet and controlled, was no longer answering but providing a soft accompaniment to parts of the song; and finally it vanished altogether from the tonal image. A pause. A car door slamming. An engine starting up. Silence. And the lament resuming, at the same time fading away, as if coming from someone