‘You know, Stan, in the army, I knew lots of senior officers.’
Yuri looks me up and down, stuck on top of Peter’s left hand. I will never know how the German manages to give his puppet such a variety of expressions. With one three-fingered hand, Yuri scratches his cheek while continuing to examine me thoughtfully. His high-pitched voice rises from his little body while Peter’s lips remain perfectly immobile.
‘And I have to admit – even if we don’t always see eye to eye, you and I – that you make an excellent general.’
I have turned away, but now I look back at the marionette, thrown off balance by this compliment.
‘A model general, oh yes. The foot soldiers do all the fighting and you collect the medals.’
This is the moment when I make my mistake, the one Gio has been warning us about for a long time. I could try to pin the blame for this on exhaustion, the chemistry of our bodies, or some evil spirit prowling around the edges of the fire, but really it makes no difference. The net result is that I jump to my feet and charge at Peter.
He gets up too. He stumbles as he takes a step back, but catches himself. On his face I see a child’s terror, an unfathomable dread that stops me in my tracks. Then, as has often been the case in recent days, there is a glimmer of defiance in his eyes. He raises his trembling fists, his childish fists that weren’t ready for an adult adventure and were too afraid to say so.
I can’t hit him. So in my anger I tear Yuri off his left hand and throw him in the fire.
The puppet lands in the middle of the flames. Peter cries out like a wounded animal. He tries to throw himself after it, but Gio and Umberto hold him back. We are burning oil tonight, not wood, and the flames would stick to his skin if he got too close. The marionette immediately goes up in a ball of fire. I see Yuri’s eyes run, his hair transformed to an incandescent halo that quickly spreads to his body. He is gone in less than a minute.
Gio and Umberto let go of Peter. He stares at each of us in turn, with so much emotion that I can no longer tell if he is in shock or filled with hate. His gaze rests on me and I tense, ready to fight.
Then he breaks down in tears. He cries and cries. I have never seen anyone cry like that in my life, not even my mother: snot gushing, shoulders convulsing. His suffering silences the night. He kneels down close to the fire and lifts his head to look at me, his birdlike head that weighs a ton.
‘I didn’t leave the seminary …’
‘Sorry?’
‘They sent us away … Yuri and me.’
‘Peter …’
‘You’re just like them. You burn what you don’t understand.’
I dare not look at the others. I go to my tent, blowing as hard as I can on the embers of my anger. Peter pushed me too far. He deserved it. Right?
It takes me a long time to fall asleep. Outside, the cold creaks, attempting to insinuate itself inside through the smallest of openings. In the middle of the night, a cotton-wool silence falls. It is snowing. For once, this news makes me feel relieved. There’s nothing like fresh snow to wipe the slate clean, to erase our clumsy drawings and our chalk smears, our miscalculations and our dunce’s caps. When day breaks, we will be able to start again.
Peter is not at breakfast when I leave my tent the next morning. Umberto is bent over his tea, Gio is smoking near the fire. With a movement of his chin, Umberto replies to my silent question. Out there on the glacier, still wet with fresh sunlight, a black dot is moving. Peter went to work without us. He is following the rope, alone, through a metre of snow. No easy task.
‘Better not,’ says Umberto, when I start getting ready. ‘You stay here. I’ll talk to him.’
Talking won’t change anything, I want to reply. It’s just something priests do to fill the oak silence of confession. But instead I say nothing and put down my bag.
Gio and I have finished the preparations for our departure. We have unwound and rewound the ropes, then done it again because I got mine in a tangle. We have checked the moorings of the tents that will stay here until our return next spring. The time is close. Turning towards the glacier, I look out for a clue, a sign that the cave is finally open, that the last few centimetres of ice have given way at last beneath our ice axes.
Umberto! He is hurtling along the rope. He slips, disappears into the whiteness, then gets up again and runs towards us, waving his arms. I can’t breathe. My feet, heavy with snow and anxiety, refuse to move. Finally, Umberto’s voice adds sound to his gesticulating silhouette, to this giant figure that for once appears tiny. Aiuto. Aiuto.
Gio has already set off, a rope around his shoulders. He runs towards Umberto. Aiuto. Help. I follow him. Gio passes Umberto without slowing down and continues running towards the glacier. My friend falls to his knees in the snow, wheezing whitely. His teeth are bared to the air, trying to snatch oxygen, that rare silver dust that we share every day. He talks and talks in Italian. He doesn’t understand that I don’t understand. He just keeps jabbering away.
But the words don’t really matter. I know that expression. It’s the one reserved for disasters, the look on the face of the person who tells you about your mother, your beautiful blue dog, people that you love, or others that you don’t know but who were loved by someone.
Umberto does not know. Peter came out of the hole and walked a few steps to eat some dried fruit in the sun. They nodded to each other. A minute later, Peter had vanished, just like that. There was nothing left but a handful of fruit scattered over the ice at the edge of a crevasse: an apricot, a raisin, a glove, and that was all. Umberto has no idea what happened.
There was nothing Gio could do. He rappelled down the crevasse. He had to use pitons and add a length of rope to penetrate its depths, descending towards the centre of the world where blue turned to black. We waited on the surface in silence. When he came up, he shook his head. I yelled at him to go back down. We couldn’t abandon Peter like that, so easily. Perhaps he was waiting for us, like Pépin in a trap, like the eagle in that bramble, waiting for us to come and free him, waiting …
‘That’s enough.’
Umberto spoke without looking at me. The rift is too deep. The mountain has taken its revenge.
Peter is dead. There are not a thousand ways of saying it. In fact, there’s just one. The same banal, clichéd phrases, worn almost soft from being used so often, breathed over grey faces or in the doorways of rooms closed too long to the light of day. He died for his country. He died of this, he died of that. He died for no reason. Whatever. He’s definitely dead. We have to repeat these words. Even if we already know, we don’t believe it, because the reasons are never good enough. So I force myself to expel them, to spit them into the cold. Nobody listens but someone, somewhere, will need to believe them.
Peter is dead.
I blame all this whiteness, this snowy whiteness that drives us crazy and leads men and animals astray. Even though I know a prism would reveal the colours hiding within it, even though I tell myself repeatedly that this whiteness is a larval rainbow, I cannot forgive it. I am guilty. Yes, guilty of believing that we could stand up to it.
Sky burial, cremation, interment. Birds of prey, fire, earth. We are palaeontologists. We are aware of all these rituals invented by men to say farewell to their dead, to prevent the living from following them into the underworld.
In this country of bone and cold, in this no man’s land, how should we say farewell to Peter? Our minuscule population, our society of three, does not know the answer. In the absence of a past, we must invent everything. We are palaeontologists and that fact is no use to us at all any more.
We have gathered his belongings at the edge of the crevasse. Fragments of Mass come to my mind, Lavernhe’s soft pouting mouth spouting Latin phrases as if they were sports results at my mother’s funeral: mors stupebit et natura, Étoile de France won the French championship by beating Red Star, cum resurget creatura, by a score of three goals to one, stand straight for God’s sake, hisses the Commander,
smacking me on the back of the head because my legs are wobbling, but what do you expect, I’m nine and a half and I’ve been standing in this cold church for over an hour. Sorry, Mama, Peter, I’m sorry, look, I’m standing straight. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I tell myself that a thousand marionettes are burning in the world at this instant without a single ventriloquist dying, but it doesn’t help: I blame myself for spending two months with a man and knowing nothing about him, or knowing him too late, and that is why I implore the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the saints – and you too, my brothers – to pray for me, the Lord our God, amen.
Stan will now read from the Bible for his mama, announces Lavernhe. I look at Umberto: he’s just spoken, he’s asked me something. No, Father, I can’t read now, I just can’t. My head is full of Dies Iraes and Kyries, but I gasp silent clouds, strange dry sobs. My sadness is always the same – it hasn’t changed in forty years: a wounded animal tearing at my stomach in a blind panic, desperate to be free, but becoming more entangled as it writhes and convulses, preventing me from releasing it into the light of day that will kill it at last. Come on, the Commander says, blowing into his hands, enough of all this, lads, let’s have a drink to warm us up.
We push Peter’s belongings. They fall down the abyss without touching the sides and suddenly he is no longer there, no longer there at all.
Peter laughed. Peter irritated. Peter sang Marlene Dietrich.
Sag mir Adieu.
Their bags are ready. My friends have gone as far as they can. I don’t try to hold them back. They don’t ask me to accompany them.
Gio stands in front of me, putting on his harness in silence. He clips and unclips the snap hook on an imaginary rope: he is showing me the precise movements I must make when I find the rope that he will leave behind on the ice waterfall, enabling me to reach the uncovered part of the via ferrata.
Together, we walk to the edge of the slope. Heavy footsteps, slumped shoulders. We shake hands one last time. Umberto stops before starting the climb. One look is enough. You’re sure? You understand that if you can’t make it down on your own, no one will come to help you? That each day reduces your chances of survival?
Yes, Berti, I know.
They go up slowly, two black sticks of charcoal moving across the whiteness without leaving a mark upon it. They vanish behind a rise, then reappear, tiny on the summit. I imagine that Umberto waves to me and I do the same. Perhaps he imagines my wave. Then they flicker briefly and turn into sky.
I return to the glacier the next day and I dig and dig as if my life depends on it. Well, it’s true: my life does depend on it. I force myself to maintain the discipline of the previous days: to go back up every hour, before the fatal tiredness descends. On the first day, I pierce thirty centimetres of ice.
That night, loneliness grips me. The day Umberto and Gio left me, I was so tired when I got back to the camp that I fell asleep without eating. But now, in front of the fire, I become aware of what it is to be truly alone. A physical pressure. The air pushing down on me, crushing me. The entire universe conspiring to make me feel how useless and insignificant I am. A hand on my face, forcing me into silence, making it hard to breathe. You might tell me that it is possible to be lonely in a crowd, but you know nothing. I dream of crowds. People shoving me, treading on my toes, bodies packed together on rush-hour metro trains. I am surrounded by millions and millions of cubic metres, acres, tons of nothingness, void, absence. If I fall, nobody will pick me up. If I fall asleep, nobody will wake me. That is what it means to be alone.
I take refuge in my tent and pray for the sun to rise.
At dawn, I start work. I have to finish it, and get out of here. Is it October yet? I have stopped counting. I lift my eyes to the circle of dazzling sky, ten metres above my head. Noon. Only a few more blows with the ice axe. Deep inside my kingdom of cobalt, I hear the glacier sing more clearly than ever. It becomes mingled with Peter’s voice, Marlene in a dead body. I scrape, I hit, I sweep away the broken ice. A ghostly choir. Don’t listen. I hit and scrape and sweep again.
That’s it. I’ve done it. When I reach out with my hand, there is no longer any obstacle between the cave and me.
It takes me another two hours to clear a passage wide enough. In my excitement, I forget to go back up and I fall asleep. I owe my life to my ice axe: slipping from my fingers, it drops, point first, into my tibia. The pain wakes me and I hoist myself up, like a cotton worm in my soaked clothes, towards the light. Abbé Lavernhe was right – the light saves man when all seems lost – even if he said it on the day of the annual soccer game against Buzy, when the sun blinded their goalkeeper, allowing our team to score a last-minute equaliser.
But yes, the sun. It sets, just as I imagined it. I didn’t do it deliberately – it was a gift of chance. At this depth, though, its rays are no longer enough. I crawl, lamp first, towards that sanctuary I have sought for so long. My flame enlarges the cave. The orange light pushes back the darkness. There is a pile of driftwood near the entrance, enormous and white. I have the strange sensation that I am walking at the bottom of the ocean.
I stop suddenly. I am wasting this moment, searching this place as if it were a cellar and I was looking for a lost tool. I should do things properly. So I close my eyes and think of Leucio. I think of my mother and I think of Mathilde. I think of Pépin, of Madame Mitzler, of Marsh, of Deller, even of the Commander. Lastly, I think of the members of this expedition, the living and the dead.
When I open my eyes, I see it there, its empty sockets staring at me. Finally the shock wears off, and I burst out laughing.
Three days after my friends’ departure, I climb up to the via ferrata. Behind the mountain peaks is a backdrop of purple clouds so thick and ominous that they look like a theatre set. It is madness to attempt the descent with such clouds in the sky. But waiting would be even madder.
I found Leucio’s dragon. I found it sleeping on an ocean of driftwood, looking a little sad. It was not a brontosaurus. It was not an apatosaurus or a diplodocus. It wasn’t a dinosaur at all, but a very big reindeer or moose. Ancient, undoubtedly, and proof that there really was life on this plateau, at least at the time of the last glaciation. I understood instantly how Leucio, a frightened kid with a fever, might have mistaken it for a dragon. The pile of white wood on which its head rested must have given him the impression of a gigantic skeleton. Poor Leucio, how scared he must have been. Poor Stan, what an idiot.
This caribou skull is from the end of the Pleistocene. It is perhaps ten thousand years old. For a layperson, it is a treasure. For a palaeontologist, no more than a curiosity. This type of discovery is not rare. It’s an amusing punchline, and one day I will laugh about it. A few decades from now.
Standing above the via ferrata, I harness myself, my mind elsewhere. One week ago, the view from this point floored me. The green, the brown, the red roof of a distant cabin lacerated my retinas after weeks of greyness. Today, all is white. The snow levels everything, erasing the differences of altitude with one grand autocratic sweep. My eyes whisper to my feet to take a step forward, promising them that an open plain stretches out ahead, that what they will meet is terra firma, not a 300-metre fall. Thankfully, Gio trained us well. Another Stan checks each gesture, each movement, keeping me alive.
Snap hook in hand, I am ready, when a wall of blackness strikes me down, a mental vertigo that throws me backwards into the snow. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do with this snap hook, with this rope that is steeped in the clouds. Yet I saw Gio showing me each action; I can see it all again, even now. The problem is that his hands are a blur. All I remember are his eyes, like mountain lakes.
Over, under … I try various combinations. I invent my own knots. It’s no good. I do not understand by what mysterious interlacing this hunk of metal and this length of hemp can be connected to keep a human being alive. Even less how I ever imagined I would be able to do – alone, without any experience – what others ta
ke years to learn.
On all fours in the snow, I crawl away from the edge and stare at the combe, which stretches out in front of me, the place from where I came. I have not wept in a long time. I did not weep when my mother died. Not because I didn’t want to: on the contrary, my head was full of burning water eager to spurt out of my eyes. But the Commander glared at me, and I didn’t want to act like a queer in front of him.
At last I weep for the immense waste that I have caused, for the kid taken by the glacier, for the friendship worn thin by the mountain, for those damn ropes and my useless hands. I weep for madness too, the madness that gripped me, for reasons that don’t really matter. I wanted to believe in a fairy tale. Well, now I’m trapped in one: I am going to have to live in a castle of ice until it melts and I am freed.
Winter
I wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for that thing with the inheritance: the papers I had to sign in person at the notary’s office, some story about a forgotten bank account in my mother’s homeland. I had to spend a night in the monster’s lair. I had to see the Commander again. This was ten years ago. It was our last meeting.
I hadn’t gone back since leaving the village. A farm doesn’t change, and I arrived during a white winter that looked just like all the other white winters I had known. I knocked at the door. No answer. The workshop was empty, and so was the barn. I pushed open the large wooden door.
‘Papa?’
The inside smelled of oldness. Old stones and old men. The house was as silent as a cold hearth. It stirred memories of soup and heartburn.
‘Papa?’
He was lying in the living room, an overturned pedestal table at his feet, surrounded by my mother’s collection of cherubs, all smashed to pieces. He pushed me away when I tried to help him up. My damn joints, he muttered. He didn’t say hello, and I didn’t ask him how long he had been lying there like that in his porcelain purgatory, his limbs stiff with gout and misplaced pride. He dragged himself over to the living-room table and sat down. The tablecloth was the same, but the ocean of red and white checks had become a puddle. Everything looked tiny, the ceiling loomed low. He poured himself a glass, smacked himself on the forehead, took a second glass and filled it to the brim before pushing it towards me.
A Hundred Million Years and a Day Page 10