Crossing the Sierra De Gredos Read Free

president himself. “And he promptly went to get it!”
    The author, without a new book now in a decade, was, at the same time, almost to his own regret—“almost”—by no means forgotten. Without being anywhere near wealthy, he did not suffer from a lack of money. He knew nothing at all about her and her worldwide legendary reputation as a banker and financial expert until her proposal reached him, sped to his garden gate by an authorized courier, and his ignorance was not the result of his isolated life in a village in La Mancha (where did such a thing still exist, a voluntarily isolated life?).
    And he, too, an explorer of forms and man of rhythms, and otherwise quite inept socially, or perhaps reluctant, and also growing old, complied with her summons at once. In the village’s one tienda he purchased a telephone card, and from the village’s only phone booth he announced his arrival for the next morning in the riverport city (even though he had half a day’s journey to the nearest airport). And then the meeting in her penthouse office: “I will write your book. For as long as I can remember, money has been one of the great mysteries to me. And now I want to get to the bottom of that mystery. And besides, I have always hoped for a commission like this: not a work but a product to deliver. An order.” A man of rhythms? What kind of rhythms? “Above all the rhythm of understanding, that most inclusive of feelings, hand in hand with the rhythm of remaining silent, and leaving things unspoken.”
    She had seen photographs of the author when he was much younger. But his face seemed hardly changed. Only his body was smaller than she had imagined, wizened, as if desiccated, prickly, like something blown in from the meseta . At the same time, he immediately looked familiar, as only one villager can to another; familiar as one villager could be to another
especially in a different setting, whether in the nearest town, or, as happened more and more often, in a country where they were both strangers: for these days it seemed increasingly common for the inhabitants of villages and towns—these especially—to be scattered all over the world, less as tourists than as residents, working, married into the most faraway places, dragging the children they had had with Japanese natives or blacks down a side street in Osaka or Djibouti.
    Yet the sense of familiarity did not persist. As the author stood there before her—he refused to have a seat—he soon became uncanny to her. Uncanny as only a person could be whom one had promptly wanted to take in one’s arms, only to encounter an invisible wall of glass with the first step toward him.
    There was nothing in her realm—and her realm was wherever she happened to be—to which she paid closer attention than proper distance. But the distance this man preserved toward her (and, as she later observed: not only toward her) was a kind of affront. There were people who positioned themselves practically in your face, no matter what the conversation was about, as if for a film close-up. He, on the other hand, for the duration of their discussion stayed at least one step farther back than was customary for people engaged in negotiations or conferring with each other; if she inadvertently stepped toward him in mid-sentence, he immediately backed away, acting all the while as if nothing had happened. People like this were boors, just as much as those who practically rubbed bellies with you. And at the same time: once he was standing there calmly, he seemed rooted in her office as if in his own soil (farmers had long since ceased to stand that way), legs spread, hands on hips—the picture would have been complete if he had gone into a straddle, the way some soldiers marked their terrain. And all the while he looked past her or gazed at the sky visible above her head through the skylight, or stared at her, or smiled suddenly,