Crossing the Sierra De Gredos by Peter Handke

Author:Peter Handke [Handke, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374281540
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 190830
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

21

The bus driver or hotelier drummed the guests together for the mountain supper. In point of fact, he did not actually bang on a drum, nor did he blow one of the trumpets; he merely ran a bow over that one stringed instrument, over its single string, thickly plaited out of horsehair or whatever, moving the bow back and forth, forth and back, without stopping: a bellowing sound, in which the woman who alternately blushed and went pale heard a “sobbing,” while the other woman heard “an animal in heat,” a third person heard “the opening measures of a long ballad, which will accompany us through the meal and after that into sleep”—a narrative song that then did not materialize after all.

It was not only the three of them but almost a dozen who came, a few at a time, to the table under the dome of that high tent or barn, most of them from the cloth chambers, but also some from the outside.

It was also from the outside that the innkeeper brought in the food. There were several courses. What they consisted of in particular—as she indicated later to the author—was of no relevance to the story. “I contributed only a couple handfuls of the chestnuts I had brought along from the riverport city, a rare delicacy in the northern Sierra—strangely enough, some of them were already starting to sprout.”

But what did matter: that the dishes were brought in each time from the outside. One sensed, smelled, and tasted that they had been cooked in the open air, on outdoor fires; that local water had been used, from all those tributary brooks, one of them right behind The Red Kite, and the river they converged to form; and that the dishes were served almost the instant they were ready. Did not one row of tents in the village, the one directly on the Tormes, consist of fishermen’s tents, open on the side facing the water?

“Served”? No, they were wheeled in—by the chauffeur, aka innkeeper, who moved with the light-footedness found perhaps only in someone who but a short while ago had been lying there as if weighed down with stones—wheeled in on a four-wheeled serving cart similar to those that at one time—this story was taking place in an entirely different time—had been standard equipment in the state-operated hotels and restaurants of the communist states or countries of various stripes: the familiar squealing of the wheels, seemingly a thing of the past, even more piercing indoors on the carpets, on which the vehicle repeatedly got hung up, than outside in the alleys between the tents, but always audible there from almost infinitely far off as it approached the diners, creaking around innumerable corners, in that respect, too, a throwback to the achievements of the Eastern bloc or some other bloc that had hurtled into the pit of time.

Unlike the usual waitstaff in those days, the man steering the cart today hopped from one foot to the other as

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