‘Did you hear that?’
‘Ja. Wölfe.’
‘There are wolves here?’
‘Ja. Either that or really big marmots.’
The others guffaw. Not me.
‘There are wolves here and you think it’s funny?’
Umberto’s voice overlaps Gio’s reassuring Venetian drone.
‘The shepherds aren’t afraid of them. Just one of their dogs can stand up to several wolves. Attacks are rare.’
‘And up there? We won’t have any dogs with us.’
I have history when it comes to wolves. As a little kid, I would hear them running in silent hordes down the slopes to the north of the farm, their eyes flashing inside my cupboard, under my chest of drawers; they would slip between the cracks, wherever the night existed, and our house was full of both: cracks and the night. And I couldn’t escape to the safety of my mama’s bed because the Commander had decreed that, at six years old, such solace was forbidden. Sleeping in your mama’s bed was enough to make a boy a pansy. Or, worse, a queer.
Gio starts laughing. Loe no in é, agnoche son drio a ’sì. There are no wolves where we’re headed, he explains, unless they’ve grown hands so they can climb a via ferrata. Or unless they’ve found a path that we don’t know about. The old guide leans down, picks up a piece of schist, and holds it up to me.
‘You want to be afraid of something? Be afraid of this. It’ll smash your skull. It’ll break loose in your hands. It’ll split you in two, it’ll bury you, it’ll skin you alive. Here, stone is more dangerous than any wolf.’
Walk without thinking.
We have left colour behind. Everything is grey, even the green of the lichen. The path, bordered by slopes running with stones, climbs from the bottom of an immense furrow. If the mountain wanted to lure us into a trap, this is exactly how it would go about it.
Or think about something other than tiredness.
The rock sings, it chimes like crystal at each footstep. Sometimes it slips away like liquid beneath your feet, and the next thing you know you are on your knees, your hand cut open by a sharp ridge.
In 1879, Charles Marsh discovers a species that he names brontosaurus.
A shape emerges from the nothingness, a grey presence on the horizon. Suddenly there it is. A rocky face where winds and birds crash, a roar of stone thrusting towards the sky, three hundred metres above.
Marsh’s colleagues – I know them well because they are just like mine – emphasise that the fossil’s missing head makes it impossible to identify it officially. They declare that the skeleton is merely the adult version of a young apatosaurus discovered by Marsh himself two years earlier, not a new species. They shake hands and come to an agreement: the brontosaurus does not exist.
The villager releases the mules, which almost immediately set off in the opposite direction.
The brontosaurus does not exist … until someone proves that it does. Any palaeontologist would sell his parents to find one. In any case, I would sell my father, without hesitation. But to find one, I must…
Climb the via ferrata: sharp metal bars like staples in the granite, horizontal rods marking a lateral path still visible from where we stand. Thousands of pairs of feet have shaped this path before ours, this vertiginous passage where salt, tobacco, oil have been carried by men, hired dirt-cheap for the season by the salt makers of Aigues-Mortes.
You are going to die here. This is no place for the weak. You are going to die in the void with your smuggler’s dreams. And if the void doesn’t kill you, the wolves will.
Peter, Umberto and Gio are harnessed. The guide checks the equipment of the other two before taking care of me. He works without looking at me. The rope spurts like a snake between his fingers, encircling my waist, my groin, my waist again.
Tell them to go to hell. You can’t climb that.
‘You okay, Stan-eh? You’re white as a sheet.’
‘Just a bit out of breath.’
‘We’re leaving the oil cans here. Gio will come back to get them while we’re working.’
‘Welch eine unglaubliche Landschaft! What an incredible landscape! I can’t wait for Yuri to see this.’
Scent of oxide. The first steps of the via ferrata are cold as ice and I do not yet know that there will be a fifth member of our expedition.
The Valley of Hell. The Devil’s Horn. This region is full of infernal names and I am beginning to understand why. With each step, with each bar that I climb, breathing in rust, my body doubles in weight. Fear steels my neck and shoulders.
An interminable wrench from the grips of gravity. This ascent is not so different from my childhood, in fact. When I told my parents that I wanted to become a palaeontologist, the Commander gave me a slap that made my ears ring until evening and told me to stop putting on airs. I would take over the family business, and that was the end of it. I confessed my scientific ambitions to Abbé Lavernhe, but God’s representative in our parish was more concerned with training the local soccer team than with science. Any answers a man might need were to be found in the Bible or in the sports section of La Dépêche, and it was pointless to ‘m’espoumper la cape de mul de craques pour bestiou’ – to cram my head full of twaddle for morons.
One day, I wanted to know why the Commander didn’t like fossils. My mother explained, in a serious voice, that you had to be beautiful to see them, to really see them. She gave me distant errands to run, errands that allowed me to search the surrounding fields. I hid my findings in the linen closet and we would admire them together by moonlight. It’s true that she was beautiful.
Another step, and another. Letting go of the main ladder to grab a handrail and follow a ledge no wider than your foot. The worst moment, the one that makes my vision flash red, the one that I must suffer through again and again, is when I unfasten the snap hook that connects me to life so I can attach it to another rope or another bar. In that instant, vertigo engulfs me, it slips between my body and the rock wall and tries to push me into the void. Below me, Peter sings as he climbs. Whatever you do, don’t close your eyes. One long blink and it’ll all be over.
Here we go, another step.
Stuck. So close to the top that it’s laughable. Only one more ladder, ten metres, and I’m at the summit. But if I lift a single finger, I will die. For an hour, Umberto and Peter have taken turns coming back down to encourage me, excoriate me, reason with me: I can’t fall. Even if I did fall, the snap hook would hold me in place. A rope doesn’t break – or ‘very rarely’, Peter specifies with a scientific rigour that makes me want to kill him. Gio smokes on the crest, legs dangling in the void. Say what you like, but I’m not the craziest man on this expedition.
Ten metres above me, the three men confer. Gio comes down, bouncing around at the end of a rope, the remains of his cigar between his teeth. He stops next to me, inhales a puff of smoke, then abandons it to the wind. For once, I can understand his mutterings without Umberto’s help.
‘Take your time. But we’re going on.’
He disappears upwards as quickly as he came down, sucked into the sky. I am alone.
I know Gio well enough by now to understand that he is sincere. He is ready to leave me here, to come and get me later, after I’ve fallen asleep or fainted, hanging at the end of my rope like a suicidal spider. This man, like all mountaineers, is insane, I am sure of it. I start climbing.
Twenty-fourth of July. Below me is the place I have spent months imagining. It is an elongated plateau, the courtyard of a fortress whose walls we have just scaled. The interior slopes are steep but negotiable, the bottom covered with short and dazzlingly green grass. The shape of the cirque, Peter theorises, must attract storms and encourage rain. I use words like ‘cirque’, ‘courtyard’ and ‘plateau’ because I am constructing a legend and these words seem more evocative to me than ‘a combe in an anticlinal fold’, the technical name for this particular geological formation.
If my instincts are correct, if Leucio wasn’t a big fat
liar, all it will take is a phone call to an English colleague to set the machine in motion. The scientific articles, the admiration, the society events that I will no longer despise. Farewell to the yellow office in the obscurity of a French university. Farewell to the trousers with the left leg longer than the right, to the people looking through me, turning away from me. I will take Madame Mitzler to see Deller at the opera house, then we will go to a chic restaurant, the Tour d’Argent perhaps, and when I ask if they are still serving, because it will be late by then, they will say: of course, monsieur, for a customer like you. I will burn candles for my mother, all night, all day, in every church in the world, until the world runs out of wax.
The setting sun glints off the glacier that encloses the opposite side of the combe, our ultimate objective. Gio has already started descending the succession of sloping ledges. Peter follows him. Umberto gives me a jowly nod and goes after them. I stand still, deeply moved. I have just seen an eagle fly past …
… and I had to look down to watch it.
Gio serves us some plum eau de vie to reward us for our efforts. My hand trembles as I hold the metal flask. It’s the aftershock. My mind has finally understood the scale of what my body just did and it is making me pay.
There is nothing we can do now, except to wait. Around us, the combe is a solid block of obsidian. The silence is absolute; it fills our mouths, sticks to our teeth. We are the sole trace of life in a world of prayer. Even our fire burns silently, out of respect.
The main tent, the one with our food supplies stored inside, has been erected in a spot sheltered from rockslides in summer and from avalanches in winter; it is far from those countless edges, invisible to the untrained eye, along which lightning likes to run its burning fingers. We have enough provisions to last us an eternity – mostly meat and dried fruit. Every three days, a villager will leave some fresh produce, which Gio will descend the via ferrata to collect. Our equipment – ice axes, mallets, burins, and other metal objects – is stored in another area, under large oiled tarps. Each of us has his own tent, and they are shaped like nothing I have ever seen before. The hoops, made from hazel wood by Gio, are curved. The wind cannot get a grip on them, he explained to us. Ma canche tira vento, tegnìve dura ra vostra anema. But when the wind blows, hold on to your soul.
The glacier is an hour’s walk. If our dragon wanted to play hide-and-seek with us, I wouldn’t mind at all. After counting for so long, one arm over my eyes, it would be anticlimactic to find it right away, its tail poking out of a cupboard.
My hand is less shaky now. The fire has fallen asleep, lulled by its own crackling. Gio kicks it back into life, feeds it with a half-log. The flames jump – okay, okay, we’re awake – and dance the tarantella from one piece of wood to the other. Umberto’s hand goes to his pocket, hesitates, then finally takes out a photograph which is passed around the fire until it reaches me. A black-and-white picture of a young girl with slightly heavy features and bright eyes, a rustic beauty.
‘My fiancée.’
I’m stunned. The world teeters on its axis.
‘Your fiancée.’
‘Sì. I’m getting married this winter.’
‘You’re in love?’
‘Sì.’
‘You? Umberto? The guy who wanted to know God’s shoe size?’
‘Laura told me God’s shoe size.’
Laura works with Umberto at the University of Turin. I never imagined that he would get married one day, although it is hard for me to explain why. The long hours spent in the laboratory? Many of our colleagues work similar hours and have a perfectly normal family life: wife, children, mistress. I was married myself once, an ill-fated collision of existences that is not worth mentioning. But Umberto? Umberto is a mountain. It’s as if Mount Everest fell in love with Audrey Hepburn.
Peter starts singing a guttural hymn. Gio reacts with the most joyful expression I have ever seen on his face: a slight crease around the eyes and a twitch of the lips, as if his mouth wanted to smile but didn’t know how. He pours us some more eau de vie.
Umberto, in love.
Well, why not? Who says mountains don’t have feelings? The sunrise makes them blush, after all.
A glacier, close up.
It’s something that everyone should see at least once in their life: the Earth sticking out an enormous, cracked tongue, licking itself in curiosity, catching if it can any mountaineers who dare to venture there. How many lives have ended there, in a giant blue crunch, in the hard silence of this fishless sea?
The moraine gives way beneath our feet, two steps forward, one step back. We’re out of breath when we reach the ice. We sit down and put on crampons – it’s impossible to go on without them.
‘There!’
We saw it at the same time as Peter: the black opening in the wall, about three hundred metres away. I start to move, but Gio holds me back. With his foot he tests the snow spread out before us, soft and white as a quilt, and it collapses with a sigh. Below, the glacier opens its greedy mouth, shading from azure to aquamarine, and it’s so beautiful that I almost want to throw myself in anyway. Gio saved my life.
Roped together now, using ice axes, we advance. Cheeks burning, the skin on our fingers cracking like an old glove, each step is exhausting. This is real snow, not the friendly powder that Pépin and I used to love disturbing; this is the snow of glaciation, of eternal winters. One hour later, the cave hasn’t moved – it looks the same distance from us as it did before. My three companions move like the mules that accompanied us from the village, their heads nodding slowly as they advance.
Suddenly I hear it. Beneath our crampons, the glacier is singing. My comrades, with their educated ears, hear its music, follow its tempo. I am clumsier, treading on the planet’s toes. Little by little, my footsteps start to match theirs. My technique becomes smoother, my breathing more regular. I no longer look at the horizon, but down at my feet. They size up the mountain.
I admire Umberto even more than the others. Gio is short and wiry, and Peter is a young whippersnapper, so it’s no surprise to see those two progressing so easily. Umberto, though, is six foot five, a universe in himself, a watchtower that refuses to remain in position. And yet he has a grace that transcends all logic. His feet barely sink into the snow. The altitude must have gone to my head. Either that or Umberto has feet like snowshoes. No, there’s something else about him: I have the impression that he moves in several dimensions at the same time, dividing his weight between them. He barely makes a mark on our world.
Three hours after leaving the camp, we finally arrive at the cave. The opening is higher than I thought, a good ten metres above the ice. Gio takes more ropes and pitons from his bag.
Titanosaurus stanislasi. You’re not going to spare me anything, are you?
Four men huddle around a fire. The vast night sticks to their backs and pushes them towards the flames. The mountain guide is easily recognisable by his indifference, the dull way he has of simply being there, like the rock on which he sits. The others are intruders, grotesque figures, scientists. One of them is lying down, his foot resting on a bag.
The cave was not a cave, merely a rift filled with shade by the angle of the sun and with the promise of glory by our overheated minds. On the way back, Peter, ignoring our protests, insisted on climbing a rock wall with his bare hands to examine a vein of quartzite. When he reached it, he found himself face to face with a scorpion: a dead one, although Peter didn’t realise that and instantly let go. It’s not a particularly bad sprain – his ankle is yellow, with a pretty purple whirlwind around the bone – but he will be immobilised for a few days, incapable of helping us.
He can sense my anger. He doesn’t dare speak to me now. Even Umberto’s stony face shows annoyance. But in a place so far from the world, it is dangerous to add silence to the silence. It could become too heavy, could cave in and suffocate us. Gio passes around the plum alcohol, which loosens our tongues.
The next day, we will
mark out the search zone, vaguely defined by the only two constants we possess, thanks to Leucio. One: the cave is located at the base of the glacier. Two: from the entrance, you can see three pyramid-shaped peaks. We spotted them today, but they are visible from a larger zone than we imagined. All the same, they ought to allow us to limit our searches to a section about two hundred metres long, three hundred at worst. Beyond that, we come up against a cliff of ice, the trough of the glacier, too high to correspond to the clues we possess.
After another shot of eau de vie, Peter raises his hand, like a schoolboy asking permission to speak. He ran a simulation before we came here, and the news is good. This type of glacier – at this location, in this climate – should have seen little to no movement during the past century.
‘Natürlich, this is pure statistical speculation. This particular glacier might have behaved in a completely different way. And the forces required to move such a mass could easily have blocked the entrance to the cave.’
‘So, in fact,’ I say with a hint of annoyance, ‘you don’t know anything for sure.’
‘If I was sure of anything, I would be God.’
Suddenly I want to laugh. Peter, with his raised chin, makes me think of a kid from another age, and a red-and-white-checked tablecloth. It’s a shame I’m so shy, my friends. If I weren’t so shy, I would tell you that story.
I am sometimes clumsy. Surly, hurtful, even stupid. Reserved, cold, mistrustful. Awkward and hopeless. But I am not a bad man. I have the bumbling kindness of bees: sometimes, without meaning to, I sting the hand that approaches me, out of an instinctive fear that it is going to crush me. I would like you to know that.
‘We know that, Stan-eh. We know.’
Damn that eau de vie for loosening my tongue.
I was the last one to go to bed. I stayed for a moment outside my tent, comfortably enveloped in the same blackness as the previous night. I couldn’t see a thing and it was fine like that. There was nothing to see, in any case, nothing but the grey mountains that metalled the horizon.
A Hundred Million Years and a Day Page 4