My burning lungs remind me of our first days here, an eternity ago. But we lack the enthusiasm that drove us then, and the proximity of the cave, in its sarcophagus of ice, does not make a difference. Instead of inspiring us, it makes us despair. I can feel it too, this despondency exhaled by the stone, which contaminates our souls. It is perhaps one of the mountain’s self-defence mechanisms. An aroma of melancholy to prevent men lingering here, like those flowers and insects with a smell so foul that predators are repelled. Unless it’s actually designed to protect us. Time to go home, guys. Or else.
Gio, Umberto and Peter are sitting close to the hole, shapeless figures. My swollen fingers unscrew the lid. Inside the cavity, our twenty-five litres spread and pool, a black sludge, thinned out to the point that it looks more like five litres. I glance at Umberto. We haven’t spoken since the previous night’s incident. He doesn’t smile.
I light a match. And drop it in the puddle of oil.
Victory! My method allowed us to melt fifty centimetres in a day, a result that might appear derisory, and yet it is five times faster than we managed with our ice axes. If we keep up this pace, we will reach the cave in twenty days. Maybe even sooner, if we can improve our technique. The problem is that the oil, as it burns, instantly creates a layer of water between itself and the bottom of the hole. This thin liquid barrier somehow seems to insulate the ice from the flames. Our burning oil floats on a cushion of water without attacking the glacier, and again I am struck by the strange impression of a beast that is protecting itself, adapting to new angles of attack. If we try to remove the water from above, it breaks up the coating of oil into little islands that end up going out, forcing us to waste fuel. By the end of the day, Peter has come up with an ingenious system of channels to drain the water from below. But we will have to constantly maintain it, blocking up the old siphons and creating new ones as the level descends, otherwise the burning oil will disappear down those channels. It’s a real conundrum.
The edges of the hole are now a black sludge, a mix of oil, melted ice, and the earth that we bring from the camp on the soles of our boots. When the oil burns, it gives off a thick, heavy, toxic smoke. I feel as if we are desecrating the mountain in pursuit of my prize, like those masters who, failing to inspire obedience in their dogs, resort to punishing them constantly instead of showing patience. Like the Commander. One day, Pépin almost bit his hand off after he punched the poor dog in the face.
I have punched the glacier in the face. I deserve to be bitten. But I don’t have a choice. None of this will matter, it will all be forgotten when we reach the cave and find the dragon. Even Umberto seems to have come round to my point of view. This evening, by the fire, I see him raise his flask in a silent toast.
The question does not even arise. We will keep going.
The glacier burns. It twists, it rumbles, it cracks angrily as we torture it. September. Our fire moves like a slow bullet through its body, sending a long smear of black blood towards the surface. The hole is five metres deep now. Its edges are a gangrenous wound, a suppurating circle with a ten-metre radius. We are halfway there. Day by day, we are descending into the dragon’s dreams.
Our task has become more complicated in recent days. As we dig, it becomes more and more difficult to remove the meltwater. It’s impossible to bail out from a layer of burning oil, so we are forced to take drastic measures: pouring in the smallest amount of oil possible, setting fire to it, and emptying it after barely fifteen minutes even if the oil is still burning. Then we start again. We have to do all this while holding on to large pitons that we have hammered into the wall to create a sort of makeshift ladder. To compensate for this slowdown, we have set up an intermediate camp closer to the glacier. A home-made sled allows us to transport the jerrycans.
Every evening, I carefully clean out the bottom of the hole. This ice haunts us, it is killing us, but my God it is beautiful! After a whole day of fire, all it takes is a few wipes and there it is again, that crystal transparency, just beneath the grime. In the light of the setting sun, I press my nose to the ice and today, for the first time, I saw the inside of the cave. I couldn’t see much – just a rock, lit up by a single adventurous beam of sunlight, and only for a second. It touched the stone the way you might tap a kid’s nose. But it happened: light penetrated the kingdom of death.
Gio has forced us to take another day of rest. The glacier is there, within reach. All that is missing is black smoke in the air, reassuring me that we are close to our goal. The waiting drives me crazy, even if I can see – in the dark rings around Umberto’s eyes, in the clumsiness of our tired movements – that a break is necessary. Each time I hear the glacier crack, I feel as if it is taunting me. It is not a song any more, but the sound of mocking laughter as it regenerates its icy skin, centimetre by centimetre, in our absence.
But the real reason for my anxiety is that I can feel it: the smell of cold as we go to bed, the faint yowl of the beast climbing towards our cirque. Below, in the plain, a leaf has turned red. Nobody down there worries about this, of course. Autumn hunts in the mountains and we are its prey.
Three metres. There are only three metres left to dig. Luckily, the weather is perfect. I can now see the rock inside the cave when the sun lets me, and a pale stain a little further inside. All day long I have to keep cutting short my flights of fancy to concentrate on the work at hand.
With our beards and our black-stained faces, which we hardly even bother to wash any more, we look like miners. Our clothes are so stiff they are starting to crack. Our skin is like bark. Only our limbs remain flexible, lubricated by exercise. But our muscles are suffering, and more and more often they simply give way. We are approaching our limits.
Three metres.
Six days.
It’s all we need.
The closer we descend towards the cave, the more our evenings drag. Those hours seem pointless. It is dead time, which we must kill all over again. I went to find Umberto, just before dinner, to apologise. I shouldn’t have lied to him – my old friend – about the funding of this expedition. I had my reasons, some good, some less so. He responded graciously, but I found it hard to tell if something between us was broken. I asked him about his fiancée to cheer him up a little. It is painful for me to see how much he misses her. He was supposed to go back for an operation in September – was that why he was so reluctant to prolong our mission? Umberto turned red and admitted that it was a simple teeth-whitening procedure, a little-known technique performed by a dentist friend of his in Milan. He flashed me his piano smile, a little battered and out of tune, and the sight of it touched my heart.
Then it started to snow.
Autumn
Aimé was losing his mind.
Aimé the shepherd. When anyone in our village talked about ‘the shepherd’, it was always him they had in mind, even though there were also Martial, Jean and the others. Martial, Jean and the others didn’t mind this. Aimé was old, so old that he was already a shepherd when the Commander was born. That merited respect.
Aimé was losing his mind, people said. This idea terrified me almost as much as wolves. He would come before the summer to take our sheep to mountain pasture. Apparently it was quite a sight, one man surrounded by a white cloud that came up to his waist, slowly advancing up the hillside. But I had never seen it, because I hid whenever he came. At night, I tried to imagine what he might look like, with his brain slowly seeping out of his ears, bits of it blown away by the wind.
One day I felt unwell. Nobody knew what was wrong with me. When the village doctor asked me to describe my symptoms, I explained that there was an emptiness in the world, an absence where before there had been a presence. He stared at me for a long time, rubbing his beard and muttering, ‘I see, I see.’ Then he announced to my mother that I had a magnesium deficiency.
After a few days, I understood. I hadn’t seen Pépin in a long time. Too long.
My dog had disappeared.
We searched f
or him everywhere. Even the Commander joined in, grumbling. My mother forced him to accompany me to the police station, where we were informed that the authorities had better things to do than look for a dog. The Commander was furious. I told you, you cretin! You humiliated me in front of the captain!
My mother explained that Pépin had perhaps dissolved in the wind, that he had escaped his earthly body the way a prisoner escapes a prison. Never again have I felt as lonely as I did that day, not even the day my mother dissolved in the wind.
‘It was Mulat-Barbe who took your dog.’
I was sitting snivelling on a split log that served as a bench in front of the farm. I didn’t know the man who had spoken to me. He was so old, though, that I immediately realised he must be Aimé. Amid the trauma of Pépin’s disappearance, I had forgotten that he was coming to our house to pick up the sheep. I had forgotten to hide. But it turned out that people must have been lying: there was no sign of him losing his mind. Unless he’d already lost every single bit of it …
‘Who’s Mulabarb?’ I asked.
He turned his cataract eyes southwards. ‘A shepherd, like me. He’s a thousand years old, less a day. He was the first shepherd. He took your dog.’
‘Why did he do that?’
‘Because times change. One world dies and another is born.’
It wasn’t this Mulat-Barbe who had taken Pépin. But even if shepherds are crazy, there was some truth in what the old man told me.
About ten years after our first meeting, I came across Aimé again. I was prospecting, a skinny, pimply teenager, in a ravine where I had found a magnificent Cenoceras lineatum the previous month. Aimé hadn’t changed. That day, I finally understood why people said that he was losing his mind. He didn’t know who I was, and neither my name nor my father’s sparked the faintest recognition. He just said to me: ‘Listen to the mountain.’ Then he called his sheep and moved away with them.
Except that there were no sheep. He was alone. For thirty years, the local farmers had pretended to hand over their animals to him and watched him climb up to the mountain pasture. Not encircled by a cloud of wool, as in the old days, back in a time that nobody remembered, but surrounded by nothingness, an absence.
Gio walks ahead, straight into the sun. The narrow path leads us up towards the summit. It only snowed for an hour last night, but I barely recognise the landscape where I have just exhausted six weeks of my life. All the contours have softened. Just a ghost of green shows through when a sun-drenched rock manages to melt the snow. The combe seems less craggy than before, the stone less forbidding: we are leaving this place just as it appears more welcoming. But it’s pure illusion. The sun is shining this morning, but the temperature had fallen about fifteen degrees when we woke. Autumn slit summer’s throat during the night. Nobody except Gio suspected that it could have crept so close to the camp without raising the alarm.
The expedition is over. I pledged my allegiance to Gio, as did the others. I don’t want to pressure them to allow me another reprieve, even if it seems to me that we were so close to succeeding. The sun has burned their eyes and their hands are blistered. They have given me enough.
With the assured rhythm of experienced mountaineers, we zigzag in long slants amid fallen rocks. Two hours later, we reach the peak, the very place where we entered this cirque a month and a half before. Dizziness. This time, though, it is not caused by the abyss beneath our feet, the via ferrata vanishing into the void. No, I have changed without realising it. My vertigo is no longer vertical, it is horizontal. I am like the prisoner who is suddenly set free, panicked by the absence of corridors and walls. My gaze, instead of bumping against a barrier of stone, reaches out into infinity. Down there, I see the mountain pass leading to the shepherds’ lands, a few clusters of sheep like giant peonies. A dark forest blots the horizon. My imagination takes over, already hurtling down the path that we took to come up here; it rushes along, carried by its momentum, leaping from stone to stone, from root to root, and then there we are at the log bridge, among pines, and then it’s the village. And finally the bus, the bus with its pistons clacking, that will take us to the sea, to flat ground, in an odour of grease and old red leather.
A small stream bursts from the rock now and splashes over the bars of the ladder with silver laughter. It is tiny, teasing, tinkling. It wouldn’t scare anybody. But it should. It is a glacier waiting to happen. It will end up freezing, Umberto explains, then it will swallow up the via ferrata and transform it into a waterfall of ice. Impassable.
‘That’s why we have to leave. Adesso. Now.’
He turns to me with a compassionate look, and at last I recognise my old friend.
‘We’ll come back in the spring. I think I can get us some loans in Turin.’
‘Thank you, Berti.’
Now that it is all over, now that I have finally accepted my fate and stopped struggling against it, I am at peace. I put my harness on, and I wait for Gio to set foot on the first bar before I tell them the news.
I have decided to stay.
Silence. Stupefaction. Then words are battling, overlapping. Gloves dance furiously in a pantomime of panic. Everyone has something to say, an opinion to share. Their words will change nothing, and I suspect that they know this. So they grow even angrier.
Now they are talking among themselves, too fast for me to understand, Umberto interrupting Gio, Peter wading in, nobody really listening to anybody else because, deep down, they all think the same thing; they just express it in different ways.
‘It’s madness. Pure madness. Another cold snap like that and you won’t be able to come down. Only an experienced mountaineer could get out of that combe, and even then it would be risky. It’s out of the question!’
‘I need six days, Berti. Maybe less. I’m going to take my chances. It’s my decision.’
‘It’s not sensible.’
‘I’ve been sensible all my life. Believe me, it’s pointless.’
Gio makes a weary gesture. He utters a few sad words, which Umberto translates: ‘Do what you want. Gio is going back down. His contract ends here.’
I understand him completely. The guide nods farewell and disappears into the void. I hold my hand out to Umberto.
‘Don’t worry. I’m not crazy. If the weather turns, I’ll be out of here like that.’ I snap my fingers. ‘I just want to be sure that I did everything I could. You understand?’
My friend shrugs. He knows me well enough to be certain that I won’t change my mind. And as I don’t like long goodbyes, I turn away and leave, just like I left my father’s house – without a word – to tattoo my youth upon the world.
Halfway down the slope, I turn around for the first time. I didn’t dare do it before this. Three hundred metres above me, Peter and Umberto are coming down after me. At least, now, it is their choice. Well, that’s what I tell myself anyway; I’m not sure I really believe it. They would follow me into the depths of hell, but could you truly call that a choice? I wait for them, blinking furiously in the sun, the damned sun that makes my eyes water, and then we walk on together, in silence. I want to thank them but I don’t know how. Nobody ever taught me. They are saying what they have to say with their feet, so why bother with words?
The snow is starting to melt. Hope is reborn. It is too late to work today. Out of habit, I go to the hole in the glacier while Umberto and Peter unpack their things in the intermediate camp. The end of the tunnel is covered by twenty centimetres of snow, already turning hard. I remove at least half of it.
Most astonishing of all is the effect produced by the night’s storm. It has covered up the black mire that surrounds our hole, erasing our insults and giving the impression that the glacier is healing. I feel sick at the thought that I must, the next day, restart our litany of fire, grease and putrid smoke, that I must deepen the wound. To my own surprise, I kneel and place my hand on the behemoth, as if to console it. Only a few more days, I promise. I hope that nobody has seen me.
; By the fire, Umberto and Peter eat in silence. The air is tense with fatalism, with their blaring resignation. We have done the calculations: we should have enough oil to reach the cave. In Gio’s absence, I have decided to take more risks: we will start work earlier and finish later. I am sure we can gain an extra day of work in this way. And at this time of year, that could be the difference between success and failure.
Eyes closed, I breathe in a big mouthful of night and flames, snowflakes and incense. I have not felt this good in a long time. I am at that pivotal moment in a man’s life, the cliff edge of insanity, when nobody else believes in him. He can step back from the brink, and everybody will praise him for his wisdom. Or he can make the leap, in the name of his convictions. If he is wrong, he will become a synonym for arrogance and blindness. He will for ever be the man who didn’t know when to stop. If he is right, the world will worship his genius and his courage in the face of adversity.
It is the crucial moment when you must no longer believe in anything, or believe in everything.
After school, I vanished into the forest. I was searching for Pépin, without admitting it to myself. I was afraid of finding his dried-out corpse, of discovering him caught in a trap, too late to save him. Perhaps he had called me, called again, long vertical howls that tore through the night like pillars of pain; perhaps, before everything came to an end, he had wondered, in his dog language, why nobody was answering him, why I wasn’t answering him, after he had done so much for me.
Suddenly I had the fright of my life. Against the dazzling sky, an enormous silhouette darkened the undergrowth. A wild boar. I saw myself dead, disembowelled, my mother weeping over my pale body stretched out on the marble slab, the rest of the world indifferent.
A Hundred Million Years and a Day Page 8