But the pain didn’t come, and I opened one eye. It wasn’t a boar, but an eagle, caught in a bramble. Wings outspread, crucified in mid-air by the vicious thorns, it hovered two metres above the ground, an apparition feathered in gold by the setting sun. Cathedrals had been erected for less than this.
With the aid of my penknife, I cut the creepers that were tangled around its wings. The bird’s beak drew blood from my eyebrow, its claws tore at my hands. I ignored the pain and worked with the desperate determination that I should have used to save Pépin. The eagle contracted its body, gathered the last of its strength and, with the beat of one heavy wing, escaped the clutches of the forest.
I collapsed in an odour of iron, dark earth and mushrooms. I felt the call of the meadows rushing under my belly, their breath of hay, the panic of rodents as my shadow passed over them, and for the first time I saw a way of leaving this valley. All I had to do was to fly, to fly towards the sun.
I came to on a carpet of leaves. The Commander was splitting logs as I staggered towards the farm. I could hear each blow echo in the hills. He stood up tall when he saw his son covered in blood. As I walked past him, he smiled proudly and slapped me hard on the back.
‘Well done, my boy.’
He imagined that I’d been in a fight at school, and I didn’t set him straight. It was something, a father’s pride. You could carry it under your jacket and take it with you into the classroom. It was invisible, and it would keep you going all day.
The third week of September. The weather is good and I allow myself a modicum of optimism, just enough not to bring me bad luck. Yes, I’m superstitious. There are still about two metres to go, perhaps a little less, perhaps a little more. We can only estimate the precise distance separating us from the cave. But we are almost there.
When we returned to the camp this evening, Gio was there, rekindling the fire so he could prepare our dinner. He had come back, feet heavy with his duty as a guide. We sat beside him and ate in silence. There was anger in his eyes, maybe even fear, for the first time, though he didn’t say a word.
We have worked for two more days. Our fatigue has evaporated, but Gio warns us: it is still there, crouching inside our muscles. It is the mistake of a moment, the kingdom of inattention, the joyful laugh of the void that takes advantage and closes around its prey. Calculate every movement. Question every decision.
We are now only a metre or a metre and a half from the cave. We suffered a small disappointment yesterday: the pale stain that I’d glimpsed inside the cavity was merely a piece of wood, rubbed smooth by water. You can see it very clearly now. I am not discouraged. The darkness behind it is rich with promise. The snow has almost melted and the grass stands tall again, greener than ever. Even Gio has relaxed and so has the atmosphere around him.
Troubled sleep. I wake at dawn, trembling with cold and impatience. If we work twice as hard, one of us could enter the cave today. Tomorrow, at the latest. I push against the flaps of my tent – they don’t move. Only then do I notice the murky light of dawn, the muffled song of the mountain.
I am buried.
We all emerge from our tents at the same time. The snow is up to our chests. It’s a strange sight, like a polar morning in Pompei: our torsos floating on an ocean of powder, statues lost at sea. In a single night, the white lava flow has submerged our camp in feline silence. The sky has the texture of chrome.
This time, nobody tries to convince me to go home. Each man is here of his own free will. Each can leave whenever he likes. And as is sometimes the case with mountains, the only way out is up. Not a word is spoken as we equip ourselves for an ordinary day’s work and start our journey towards the glacier. Instead of the usual ten minutes, it takes us an hour and a half to get there. Somehow we uncover the rope that guides us there every day, and follow it to its end.
Our tunnel has vanished. And I thought we’d been wounding the mountain! Now I understand how presumptuous that was. The mountain tolerated us the way we might tolerate a mosquito. In the night, it yawned; it had had enough of these stinging little bites.
Gio barks orders. The mechanism is engaged; it runs smoothly. We rope up, we sweep away the snow. Reopen the wound, until it bleeds. The layer of grime reappears, then the edges of the tunnel. The snow has formed a bridge over it, so the hole has not been filled. We drop down to the edge, breathing fast. We have left the oil at the camp, and none of us has enough strength to go back and fetch it. Tomorrow. We will start work again tomorrow. Our dragon has waited several million years; it can wait another day.
Gio describes the signs to us. He lines us up like schoolchildren and explains everything. With this much snow, the rules have changed. Evil lurks, watching us. It could pounce at any moment. More insidious than an avalanche, and just as deadly.
Hypothermia. First stage: peripheral vasoconstriction. Blood drains from your extremities, converging on the organs to protect them from the cold. Symptom: shivering. Who would suspect a little shiver? Second stage: the pulse slows, the supply of oxygen to the brain is reduced. Your judgement is altered; you become confused, sleepy. As soon as we start to feel drowsy, we must call for help, Gio tells us. And the third stage …
‘You won’t even be aware of the third stage. So there’s no point scaring you with that. We’ve wasted enough time.’
Four days pass under a bright mercury sky. It hasn’t snowed again, but our progress has slowed even more. We are infuriatingly close to the cave, but we cannot use the oil to melt the ice any more. It has become too difficult to remove it. The tunnel is now so deep that anyone who went down there would suffocate when the oil burned. And as there is only one jerrycan left, our guide forbids us to use it. We must keep it in case of an emergency. As he gives this order, the old Italian stares at me threateningly with his eyes as green as a mountain lake. Disobedience is not an option.
On our knees at the bottom of the hole, we take turns scraping away with the ice axe. Almost ten metres below the surface of the ice, the cold is piercing, breathtaking. A diamond-pure cold. Despite our layers and layers of clothing, despite our hats and gloves, we have to go back up to the sunlight every thirty minutes. While one man digs, another stays on the edge of the hole to keep watch – Gio’s strict orders. If the man below stops moving at any point, the watcher must call his name. It’s uncomfortable down there: the tunnel is so narrow that it is difficult to crouch. Umberto can no longer descend because he is too big and suffers from sciatica.
We are flotsam, broken shells beached in mid-air. Our bones and muscles and veins all ache. Every time we wake in the morning, we move through the stages of evolution: crawling, slowly rising, holding on to a rock and groaning as we stretch our curved spine. By the time the water for our tea is boiling, we are Homo erectus, but to become Homo sapiens we must wait a little longer. We struggle to sleep despite our exhaustion. Tempers fray; the tension is constant. Peter, in particular, worries me. He has changed since our return. Several times, he has answered coldly when I have asked him innocuous questions. And when Umberto rebuked his assistant for the loss of one of our ice axes, clumsily dropped into a crevasse, Peter replied that at least he could use an ice axe. The German is nervous. He jumps at the glacier’s slightest movement. There are no more puppet shows by the fire.
September is fading away. A thick, unbreakable coating of ice now covers the upper bars of the via ferrata. While the other three might be capable of descending it with the aid of pitons and ropes, it would be very difficult for me. I don’t worry about it, not tonight. All my thoughts are focused on the fifty or sixty centimetres of ice still separating us from the dragon of dusk. Because, as I was finishing my shift at the bottom of the tunnel, I felt sure I could see the beast! The earth moved, the sun sent a shaft of light a little deeper inside the cave, and in that moment I glimpsed it, for less than a second: a beautiful white head with patient eyes.
Dozing in the living room, his rifle slung across his lap, so insignificant that he barely showed a
t the surface of the world, sat the Commander, my father. That night, the wolves had left me in peace and I had gone downstairs to drink from the pump. Or perhaps I was no longer afraid of them.
I approached in silence. A bouquet of flowers was rotting on the sideboard behind him; it had taken my mother’s death for him to give her flowers, and he hadn’t even thought to put them in water. The room smelled of wine, beef terrine, a hint of sweat. His sun-darkened arms poked out of a wool sweater, those arms that could lift an axe the way I could a pen. His hands hung limply, but I couldn’t trust appearances. They were dangerous.
This was one of his habits: cleaning his rifle at night when he came home from the bar. He had been there a lot recently. He said it was out of grief, but he was lying. I had looked the word up in the dictionary at school: profound distress caused by the loss of a loved one. I had looked up distress: emotional pain. Nowhere in the definitions was there anything about laughing loudly with one’s hunting friends at the bar.
Gently I took hold of the gun. The Commander sniffed, moved in his chair, and then started snoring again. The rifle was a beautiful Darne 1906, the apple of his eye. I opened the breech block, picked up two of the twelve cartridges lying next to the soup bowls, loaded the gun, snapped it shut. I knew each step by heart, because he had forced me to learn them. I caressed the metal arabesques, the chocolate-brown wood, the handsome blue barrel – the same blue as my Pépin. So much beauty to cause such destruction. I lifted the rifle. Lined up the rear and front sights on the lower part of his forehead, between the prominent eyebrows and the thick hairline. I did not tremble, or not too much anyway. At the other end of the barrel, the Commander mumbled in his sleep, unsuspecting.
I could tell you that I put the gun down and went back to bed. That would be a lie. I squeezed the trigger. The gun went off and the window behind the Commander exploded. He jumped to his feet and grabbed the rifle from my hands, what the hell are you doing, blinking furiously, his eyes red and black from anger and wine. Sorry, Papa, I just wanted to put it away, I could see that you were asleep, I didn’t want to wake you, it went off on its own.
The Commander eyed me doubtfully. He sat down slowly, shrugged, and went back to sleep.
It’s hard to kill a man. I know because I tried. Next time, I will steel myself for the recoil.
I’d said it to Umberto – Peter is strange – even if that was not exactly what I believed. With the camp’s lack of privacy, I was bound to see him. It was inevitable.
I was coming back from the storeroom. He was rubbing himself with snow behind his tent. He was bare-chested. His arms and his gaunt torso were marked with curved pink and white lines, scars that mapped old terrors. Self-inflicted violence, our family doctor would have diagnosed, rubbing his beard. I see, I see … Peter has a magnesium deficiency. But there is no such thing as self-inflicted violence. It always comes from afar, from outside, no matter whose hand holds the blade in those last few centimetres, until it is touching the skin. I didn’t know what demons Peter had tried to exorcise. I could have told him that it was pointless. I knew that all too well. To prove her point that our family had sadness in its veins, my mother slit hers open one day, to let the sadness out. It didn’t work. The sadness remained.
Peter froze. He didn’t cover up. I continued looking him in the eye. I wanted to say something, to share my own scars with him. To admit to him that, at fifty-two, I still sewed name labels into my sweaters because my mother had once told me that, if I did that, she would always be able to find me.
But, for once, I followed the Commander’s advice, repeated every year at every holiday meal, and I kept my big mouth shut. Peter started rubbing himself again, and I walked on.
*
After a long absence, Yuri reappears. Without his moustache. The fashion is for clean-shaven men now, he explains, before recommending that we follow his example. We smile, aware that our faces are being consumed by hair which we hardly even bother to trim any more. Very soon, the sarcastic remarks begin again. He attacks Umberto first. His fiancée must be wondering where he is, doesn’t he think? Isn’t he scared that she will marry someone else, someone younger and better-looking than him? Someone smaller and lighter, someone less likely to flatten her if he turns over in bed. Umberto laughs, but I can tell that each remark is eroding his good, big, stone soul.
I hadn’t thought about this: we have no way of communicating with the outside world, and we should be home by now. Is Berti’s beloved biting her nails, worrying about his absence now that the horizon is white? Not once has he complained about this, or even mentioned it.
This is the essence of Yuri’s genius. Deep down, it is me he is attacking now, relentlessly: this expedition, my vision, my stubbornness. Look carefully, Stan. Look at our faces and our hands. Look in our eyes and our hearts. You don’t see anything? Exactly. And it’s all your fault.
The woollen monster is right. We have been living on top of one another, twenty-four hours a day, for almost two months. As in the army, there is no privacy or modesty here. Yet I don’t feel as if I deserve such persecution. High on self-importance, Yuri has stopped paying attention to his audience. He no longer listens out for the shadow of anger in the laughter he provokes, is no longer aware of the lines he is crossing.
The mood shifts. His face crumpled, Yuri suddenly tells us the story of a group of lumberjacks who went to work in Siberia in the dead of winter. They didn’t come back that night, nor the next day. Vanished! Yuri moves his hands like a magician’s. Two weeks later, a rescue team found their naked corpses scattered around the remains of their camp. Some of them were mutilated. What demon had they enraged in the snowy forest? Yuri asks in a whisper, his flannel gaze moving from face to face.
Gio shakes his head and laughs mockingly. Peter puts his puppet down. He looks annoyed.
‘That’s a true story. It was in the papers. I’m not making this up.’
A shrug. A burst of patois.
Umberto: ‘It might be true, but it’s no mystery.’
‘Those guys were half naked in minus-forty temperatures!’
Yes, this is the third stage of hypothermia. The one that Gio spared us. Paradoxical undressing. The muscles relax and the blood is suddenly pumped towards the periphery of the body. A feeling of intense heat. Your temperature falls to twenty-eight degrees and you start stripping off. You are simultaneously burning up and dying of cold. Welcome to the kingdom of hallucinations, the great opium dreams of the comatose. By this point, it is already too late. The mind has drifted too far from itself to have any hope of returning.
‘And the mutilations? You’re not telling me that’s from the cold!’
‘Predators. Scavengers. Foxes, crows … Those are the only demons worth worrying about.’
That evening, Peter goes to bed without wishing us goodnight.
Our circumstances are difficult enough already without Yuri’s barbs or macabre stories. I try to reason with Peter, as calmly as I can, the next morning as we are heading towards the glacier.
‘Your knowledge is precious to us. And I appreciate your presence, truly … But we have to stay together. We need all our concentration, and I just feel that your marionette—’
‘I can’t control what Yuri says. Sorry.’
I’ve had enough of his eccentricities. ‘You think this is all some game?’
‘No. It’s hell. And given that I agreed to stay here to help you, my dear Stan, I think the least you can do is to be polite to Yuri.’
I stab a finger into his chest. Any harder and I would have knocked him over.
‘Nobody forced you to come back. Nobody forced you to stay.’
Peter opens his mouth and his gaze slides towards Umberto like a mechanical mouse. He shrugs.
‘No. Nobody.’
He lowers his head and drives forward into the cold air, step after step, along a never-ending path.
An argument with Peter, an argument with Umberto, both of them pointless. Stiff fingers t
hat drop tools, shaky legs and bodies that veer clumsily into other bodies, sorry, excuse me, just be careful for God’s sake, you spilled the water that took thirty minutes to boil, I told you I was sorry what else do you want me to say, okay okay everybody calm down I know we’re all tired but, damn right we’re tired, we’re tired of this wild goose chase you took us on, if it’s a wild goose chase why don’t you just leave, I’m not forcing you to stay here, no no I know, I didn’t mean it like that, and still Gio is silent; that’s all he ever is. We calm down a little bit, we ignore one another, we pass the ice axe with eyes averted, then after a while it starts again, it’s inevitable, be careful Jesus you got snow on my shoes, really you’re kidding there’s snow on a mountain? And on it goes, a northern funeral march accompanied by the creaks and snaps of the glacier.
I should have remembered that I was capable of killing.
Only two more days and we will enter the cave. Gio told me that the weather should remain fine, he’s sure of it. We will go back home happy or unhappy, rich or poor. But at least we will know.
Tonight our fire is a regular inferno, a farewell to the mountain. The intermediate camp has been taken down, and we are back at the base camp in readiness for our departure. Gio has spent the last two days hammering pitons and tying ropes down the waterfall of ice that covers the first bars of the via ferrata. With his help, I hope to be able to descend it. If not …
If not, nothing. There’s no point even thinking about it. Feeling distant, I try to remind myself how this all began. I can’t enter the cave without the enthusiasm that brought me here: that would be sacrilege, like walking naked into a cathedral. What was the name of the little girl who told me about Leucio’s dragon? I don’t even know if I can remember her name. Louise? Juliette? It was five years ago. A long time.
A Hundred Million Years and a Day Page 9