A Hundred Million Years and a Day

by Jean-Baptiste Andrea

  The rain falls incessantly, deep into the night. The treetops glimmer and vanish. The storm remodels the landscape with electric slashes under a bruise-coloured sky. I think about the kid who got lost nearly eighty years before, running away from a storm just like this one. I imagine him discovering a gigantic fossil, a tail as long as the street where he was born, a neck that could reach to the clouds. He can barely breathe, he has never been so scared in his life. So he calls the creature ‘dragon’, because even a dragon is better than nothingness. Now they can talk to each other, tell their stories. The rain will stop falling eventually.

  This boy does not yet know that one day he will leave his village, his family, his friends, that he will wander for a long time, like me. Nor does he know that he will die far from his loved ones, that he will close his eyes for the last time in a room that smells of drains, in a city so hard that he could leave no imprint on it. He doesn’t know any of this and it’s better that way.

  The dawn shakes me gently, in my tent sagging under the weight of condensation. What happened? There is something inside me that wasn’t there before. A calm certainty, a tingling in my fingertips. I sense now, with that intuition too clear to be merely human, that we are close to our goal. I had told the others I felt no doubt, but I confess now that this is not true. I was just putting a brave face on my fear.

  The air is as clear as water. At the end of the plateau, the rising sun lacquers the glacier like a racing car, rosso corsa under a bleu de France sky. My brook, which had dried up, has now reappeared. It is a real little stream now, an adolescent. Its voice is deeper, even if it still tinkles childishly sometimes when it splashes against a stone. I surrender my face for an instant to its joyous welcome, and then – without bothering to dry myself – run to wake my friends.

  The next time the dawn shakes me, I will not open my eyes. It’s a trap. The dawn lies to the people it wakes – to the businessman, to the lover, to the student, to the prisoner on death row and, yes, to the palaeontologist too. It fills us with hope only so it can disappoint us more thoroughly. The dusk, older and wiser by a day, taught me this lesson: I was naïve ever to believe the dawn’s promises.

  Ten hours. That’s how long it took us, today, to complete our search. There is no cave in this combe. No dragon either. Just as there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, nor any affection in the hearts of fathers. Nothing but feet stumbling at the end of dead legs. We walk back to the camp in single file for the last time. Gio has gone ahead to light the fire; night is already falling.

  As soon as we reach the base of the glacier, Peter comes up alongside me. If he has come to apologise for the other night, there is no point. When he picks up his doll, Peter sometimes loses himself, is sucked back into his childhood. I can’t criticise him; I almost drowned in mine. It abandoned me, half dead, fighting to breathe, at the edge of adulthood.

  ‘About Yuri …’

  ‘Forget it, Peter.’

  ‘I met him at the seminary.’

  Peter has not come to apologise.

  ‘You would have liked him. Yuri always said that man’s destiny was to leave. That those who never leave never find the treasure. And that’s what he ended up doing. He was crazy … He was crazy and he was my friend.’

  I take a deep breath, letting the night enter my lungs before slowly sending it back to itself.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Es ist nür eine Geschichte. It’s just a story.’

  All is calm.

  ‘What made you leave the seminary?’

  ‘I wanted a change.’

  ‘Peter. About the other night … I overreacted.’

  ‘Ich verstehe. Yuri can be annoying sometimes. The real one was too.’

  Peter vanishes, absorbed by the darkness. Behind me, my companions’ footsteps scrape on the schist. Far ahead there is a spark; it wavers, grows, becomes a flame and meets another; they dance, get married, create a large yellow family, reassuring, with many children. Gio has started our fire.

  Man’s destiny is to leave. If only it were so simple. I could have told Yuri that some men leave and do not find any treasure. Not everyone is like the Capolungo cousin. Not everyone can make it in Hollywood. Not everyone can discover a dragon.

  The immediate disappointment is one thing. But my sadness comes from further back. It comes from the boy who, one day, decided to become a palaeontologist. Not for the chance of adventure. Not for fame or glory – although I’d have settled for those. Not for the recognition of my peers. Not even for wealth. No, I became a palaeontologist because I love stories. To tell them, to myself and to others.

  I really thought this would be a good story.

  My companions eat in silence. Peter has enough tact not to invite our expedition’s phantom fifth member; Yuri remains at the bottom of his bag. The young German looks thoughtful. I push the words through the night.

  ‘We’ll break camp tomorrow.’

  Nobody reacts. Gio pokes the fire, his eyes in the flames. His life is here, in the country of nothing. For him, whether we go back tomorrow or in ten years, it hardly matters. Umberto remains impassive, but several times during the last three weeks I have seen him stealing glances at the photograph of his fiancée. I think he is impatient to see her again, if that adjective can really be applied to a palaeontologist.

  Only Peter moves. An incongruous detail: his beard is the only one not to have grown. While our faces have become forests of hair, his faint orange down provoked a barbed remark from Yuri the previous week: ‘I’ve known women with more hair on their butts!’

  Peter chews his lips. His head sways from right to left.

  ‘Unless,’ he declares suddenly.

  Normally this type of comment ends on an open note, three little dots that tickle the listener into asking a question. Unless what? But Peter’s sentence ended with a full stop, brutal and conclusive, as if he were reluctant to say anything else. For the first time since I have known him, his expression of permanent exaltation has given way to anxiety.

  ‘Unless our glacier is a statistical aberration,’ he says after a long minute of silence.

  ‘In what way?’ Umberto asks in a pedantic tone that reminds me he is Peter’s thesis supervisor.

  ‘What if – and this is just a hypothesis – what if this glacier evolved in the opposite way to the norm for the period? What if, instead of stagnating or even moving backwards, it continued to grow?’

  With a stick, Peter starts to draw in the layer of ashes that surrounds our fire.

  ‘This is the split in the glacier, where we ended our search. This rift could be due to the conjunction of heavy precipitation and the orientation of the slope. A succession of particularly rough winters would have quickly advanced the glacial line of equilibrium. And hot summers, which often follow cold winters, would have delayed the close-off.’

  ‘And in layman’s language?’

  Geology and glaciology have always bored me, even though they are essential to my job. What I love are living things. Even if those things have been dead for a hundred million years.

  Peter starts talking as if to a child: ‘Imagine that our glacier advanced much further than we thought. So quickly that it broke under its own weight, because the lower layers did not have time to solidify. That would mean …’

  ‘That we were searching too low down. Eighty years ago, the glacier would have been much higher than today! Of course!’

  I strangle Peter in a hug; he reacts with embarrassed laughter and the stiff limbs of a scarecrow.

  ‘Once again, I would remind you that this is a working hypothesis based on the possibility of a statistical aberration. In other words, it’s probably madness. But as the weather should be fine for another two or three weeks …’

  What do the others think? Umberto? His big head nods like a rock about to fall from a mountainside. Gio? He shrugs. Even though I have never heard him speak a word of Italian or French, he seems to understand every
thing we say. I raise an imaginary glass, because the kid deserves it – and because we finished the plum eau de vie two days ago.

  ‘To madness, then. And to Peter!’

  I take a shot of pure air and the German blushes with pleasure. I’m not naïve: our chances are still slim to none. But I am grateful for this respite, the firing squad lowering their rifles after a last-minute reprieve that everyone knows will later be withdrawn. Who can blame the condemned man for wanting to spend a few days longer in his cell?

  And perhaps this was what needed to happen. Perhaps my dream had to flicker, had to almost go out, before something big could occur.

  A childhood memory. An old sheet, salvaged from the scrapheap, hung between the table and the chairs in the living room: my fairy-tale castle, an impenetrable fortress at the top of the world. The essential thing was to believe in it.

  Believe in it. But first we had to scale the blue cliff that gave access to the upper part of the glacier, thirty metres above. Fate was smiling upon us: the wall on which the ice was leaning was, at the point where it had broken, sculpted into natural steps. We carried ice axes and ropes as a precaution.

  Believe in it. The new search zone is barely a hundred metres long, if we wish to keep the three peaks in our field of vision. In this area, the glacier is not mixed up with the rock. It runs alongside it disdainfully, and any stone that dares to resist it is atomised into rock flour. It is a chaos of seracs, of blocks of ice as big as houses. Same glacier, but a different world. We become even more cautious.

  And still we believe.

  For five days.

  And all for nothing.

  Nothing but a threadbare dream.

  So let us surrender to realism. Time to give up. We must bow down to whatever is stronger than us; my trilobite taught me that. Time to curl up and sleep, for a long time, perhaps for ever. Leaning against the rock wall, I bite into a fresh apple. At this altitude, where everything is mineral, its flesh reminds me of a forgotten world of roundness, softness. For the first time, the prospect of going home does not strike me as unbearable. Even if it signifies failure, the mocking face of the university vice chancellor when I beg him to give me back my basement office, the great explorer with nothing to show for his adventure but hands splintered with rock. I close my eyes.

  ‘Attention! What do you think you’re doing, prrrrivate? Sleeping during guard duty? Thrrrrree days in solitary!’

  Yuri rolls his letters and his button eyes with disapproval. This is the first time he has appeared beyond the circle where we light the fire. Peter has brought the puppet along to raise morale. But today, even Umberto is gloomy. The German becomes embroiled in a whispered argument with his alter ego, in one last attempt to amuse us.

  ‘Can’t you see that you’re disturbing these eminent scientists during their lunch break, you idiot?’

  ‘Do I eat lunch?’

  ‘You don’t have a stomach, you moth-eaten dummy!’

  ‘Say that again …’

  The two start fighting. Yuri bites Peter’s nose; Peter pulls Yuri’s hair.

  Four adults halfway up a mountain, and one of them is fighting with a doll. Peter has a genius for the absurd.

  ‘Yuri’s earring! It fell!’

  Yuri wore a gold ring in his ear; I had only noticed this recently. Peter looks panic-stricken. And since he is digging without having taken Yuri off his left hand, the spectacle gives the surreal impression that human and marionette are searching together.

  ‘Got it! I found it … I found it …’

  Suddenly, Umberto pushes his assistant out of the way and begins digging in the same spot. For a second I wonder if the sun, beating down on us hour after hour, has not actually sent us insane. Umberto dusts off the snow with the same supernatural gentleness that characterised all his work, almost flake by flake. My old friend turns to me with a triumphant smile, a pianoforte keyboard with a note missing.

  And then I see it. Under the powder is a layer of smooth, transparent ice like a window, revealing, ten metres below the surface, a wide opening in the rock wall. Gio comes over to take a look and, with an unusual display of enthusiasm, scratches the corner of his eye.

  I see some kids sitting in a circle on the mildewed floor of a Parisian cellar, drinking in the words of a man who, without them, was nothing – nothing but the old caretaker who took out the rubbish. Now he becomes a magician, a master of shadows, transforming the sad walls into Cambrian landscapes. Old Leucio was a palaeontologist of genius.

  ‘It is a cave. But that doesn’t mean it’s ours.’

  Behind a startlingly transparent window of ice, we see a prism with a square base, shoved in there by the glacier to guard the entrance. According to Peter, this block should not be here. It is extremely dense, typical of the depths where the close-off takes place: the expulsion of oxygen bubbles from the ice. The only explanation for its presence, and for the glacier’s extraordinary vertical and horizontal movement, would be a seismic event. An earthquake, Umberto agrees, nodding. ‘Which would also explain the breaking of the glacier: the 1887 earthquake in Liguria. And if it’s not that one,’ the professore continues, ‘there are numerous, little-known rifts running through these valleys, which could easily shake the earth while men sleep.’

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ Peter says in a louder voice. ‘It’s a cave …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, they heard you all the way to Turin. Doesn’t mean it’s ours.’

  Peter is right. Natural phenomena such as this are so violent that the layman can hardly even comprehend them; they are beyond the human mind’s scope, like geological time or astral distances. Our cave is just a small tear in the fabric pulled back and forth by giants fighting over the planet. All the same, the cavity is there, more or less where we hoped to find it, and while it is impossible to be certain that it’s the right one, it is equally impossible to be certain that it isn’t.

  But the question of access remains. Back at the camp, a check of our equipment confirms that we do not have the necessary tools to dig to such a depth. We have only one real pickaxe, so we will have to use ice axes. We will drill a vertical tunnel, one metre wide and about ten metres deep, directly above the entrance. This will enable us to slide into the cave, presuming that the cave itself is not filled with ice. According to Peter again, this is improbable. The block of ice that has closed the entrance has surely prevented it filling up. In fact, from the surface, its opening appears completely black and empty.

  To our surprise, Gio stands up. Usually our guide speaks without any preliminaries, not even a simple throat-clearing, saying what he has to say as soon as there is a brief pause in the conversation, before Umberto once again starts holding forth. I ready myself for a Gio special, one of those maxims so often parodied by Yuri, delivered in his wonderful patois, which seems to imbue his every word with some ancestral wisdom. Instead, in a hard voice, he announces: ‘Doa setemanes.’

  Two weeks. September is approaching, and we all know what Gio means. Beyond those two weeks, it is impossible to predict what the weather will be like. On this quiet night, I understand. Autumn is prowling at the edge of the plateau. Gio can sense it. He knows that the coming season has sniffed out our presence here. I feel as if I can perceive its cold breath, a hint of snow in the soft texture of summer, touching us lightly, sizing us up. The countdown has begun. Because autumn, at this altitude, is nothing like autumn down in the plains. It is not a simple narrowing of summer, a gentle curve into slowly shortened days and duvets retrieved from cupboards. Here, autumn is a beast of flesh and claws. As for winter … well, nobody knows what winter is like in this theatre of stone. Anyone who might have come here to witness it never returned, or else they kept the secret.

  Umberto and Gio converse in low voices for a while, and then my friend translates: ‘We have about a fortnight. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. At the first sign of snow, we will leave. Gio will give the order and we will obey without argument. Our bags have to be
kept packed, ready to go at any moment. The camp will stay here and we can use it again next year if we have to come back, or it will be taken down as soon as the plateau is accessible again at the end of spring. Understood?’

  We are at the nexus where the winds meet, Umberto explained to me just before we went to bed. That is what makes this region so volatile, its storms so fearsome. At the start of autumn, the Greek (our name for the tramontane wind) crashes into the sides of the mistral. The mistral is not the fastest learner, and somehow it is always taken by surprise. This year, as every year, its reaction is the same: it rears up with a roar like a wounded animal and bites the Greek on the neck, then pins it to the ground to punish it for its impudence. Drawn against their will into this battle, the seasons become confused. Sometimes summer lazes around until October; sometimes it snows in August.

  I have a better understanding of Gio’s tension now. Umberto has just told me that he lost his son fifteen years ago in a neighbouring valley, on the Italian side. Carlo was guiding a group of English climbers when the snow surprised them. One of the Englishmen went back down the mountain. The others, convinced that it was just a meteorological blip, insisted on continuing. Refusing to abandon his clients, Carlo went with them, and they vanished without trace. They belong to the mountain now, like so many others before them. Is that why Gio spends his life here? Is this some endless pilgrimage for his lost son? Or does he secretly hope that the mountains will one day return his son’s body to him? That an early thaw will deposit him by the side of a path, asleep on his side in his outmoded clothes?

  Umberto walks away to relieve himself in the night. I turn my back on him and examine the camp. Gio is bent over the fire, his head tilted slightly to one side, as if listening. Can he hear, in the crackling of the wood, the voices of oracles to which I am deaf? The more time I spend with this man, the more he impresses me. He is full of an absence of desire. I wish my sleep could be like his, a dead slumber from which I would arise resuscitated every morning in time for breakfast. Unless I’m idealising him, of course. Perhaps his dreams are peopled with the face of his son, sleeping softly in the Giotto gold of dawn, a handful of minutes from the life-saving sun.