So, my son, how are you? Tell me about your life. I miss you. I was talking about you just yesterday.
‘You remember the Castaings boy? Well, he took over his father’s farm. They’re going to expand it. It’s going really well.’
I miss you too, Papa. You should clean up a bit. Maybe you should hire someone to help you. I’m going to visit more often.
‘I’m a university lecturer in Paris.’
I knew you’d go far, my boy. I’m proud of you.
‘And what does a university lecturer do, exactly?’
‘Research.’
‘What are you searching for that you couldn’t find here?’
Twenty years of silence, a silence as deep as an empty water trough in the middle of summer, and we had nothing to pour into it, not a single drop. The Commander pushed back his chair, grimacing, and took another bottle from the dresser. I started to move towards him and he yelled: ‘I don’t need help, for fuck’s sake!’
Suddenly he stopped being old, a wrinkled fogey in his grey sweater. When he sat down again, he was a giant with tree trunks for arms, a juggler of anvils, a brute capable of dancing with that strange delicacy that had seduced my mother under a sky full of fireworks one Bastille Day.
‘I sweated blood for years, you know, for you and the Spaniard. And how did you thank me?’
Second glass. I had never seen the Commander drunk. When he hit me, he was always sober.
‘Why couldn’t you be like everyone else, eh? With your feet planted in the good earth of home. A man who knows his place. And it is a good place, this earth …’ Third glass. ‘Where did you get all your fancy ideas about studying, as if we weren’t good enough for you? I’d have given you a different kind of education. I’d have told you the truth. Like with your mutt …’
‘Pépin? What about him?’
‘It was your mother who didn’t want you to know. I’d have told you the truth, man to man. That dog bit me once too often. And after what happened with the Castaings boy, I didn’t want any more trouble. You can’t keep an animal like that on a farm, it’s dangerous. It was the only thing to do. Behind the stable. Between the eyes. He didn’t suffer.’
My jaw trembled. My lips, my eyes, my teeth. I stood up slowly and headed towards the door. In the doorway I turned around for a final goodbye.
‘I only regret one thing. I wish I hadn’t missed, that night.’
He scratched his stubbly cheek. His skin was too big for him, as if his bones and muscles had shrunk inside it.
‘It was the recoil,’ he explained with a shrug.
I thought about their first meeting. I rubbed at my parents as if they were made of old copper, to remove the black stains. I lifted their heads, slimmed their bodies, lit up their eyes. They must have loved each other for a moment, when they danced under the paper lanterns on 14 July, unless they stood still while everything else danced around them. Your father was handsome, my mother had told me, and he was gentle, and he danced like a god. I have thought about their first meeting a thousand times, at night mostly, when I felt as if I were suffocating. They must have loved each other. If not, then what reason did I have to exist, to breathe, to take another’s place? But where had it gone, that love? I searched for it under my bed, in the cold walls, in the forest, in my mother’s eyes, and then in the eyes of other women, and in the end I realised that it had turned to stone. It must have rolled off somewhere, fallen through a hole in a pocket. They might even have searched for it themselves a little bit, but it’s so hard to find: one small stone in the rubble of the world.
At the station, waiting for the train to Paris, I was approached by a man whom I didn’t recognise at first. He was the former police captain, the one who hadn’t wanted to search for Pépin, the Commander’s friend. He was coming back from Bordeaux, he told me, where he’d had his gallstones removed. I didn’t even know what gallstones were, he said, and suddenly there I was being cut open to have them taken out! He laughed at this so loudly that the stationmaster, dozing at his counter, awoke with a start.
I didn’t feel like making conversation with this man, but I forced myself to be polite. Yes, I was a palaeontologist – the captain frowned: pay-lee-on-tol-oh-jist? – yes, that’s right, it’s a sort of doctor, if you like.
‘Well anyway, my boy, one thing’s for sure: you take after your old man,’ he said to me as we were about to separate.
‘Sorry?’
‘Oh yeah. Well, Henri and me, you know, we were at primary school together. Then he had to drop out of school to work on the farm, after what happened to your grandfather. You remember? Because of the Krauts and all that.’
‘I never knew my grandfather.’
‘Ah. Well, it was Christmas Eve 1870. The Germans sent him a brand-new grenade as a present. He tried to send it back, right, nein danke, and then … boom! It went off. He was lucky he only lost an arm. Anyway, when he got home, the teacher went to see your grandparents. She asked them not to take your father out of school: he was better at writing than any of the others, he’d go far, maybe even be a notary’s clerk when he grew up … That’s what I meant when I said you took after him. Henri should have stayed at school, if you want my opinion. Your grandmother thought so too, but your grandfather quickly reminded them that he was the one who wore the trousers. Even with one arm, he knew how to make people respect him. He needed help on the farm, and that was an end to it. Not like now, with all these machines. But Henri, he could have been an intellectual too. Maybe not at your level, but an intellectual for round here, if you know what I mean. The only difference between you and your father is that he was a fighter. And you … well, not so much.’
I saw pity in his eyes. Pity for someone incapable of fighting. Then my train arrived. The whistle blew. The 3.14 to Paris is about to depart, ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats …
Call me snow: I am no longer anything else. It is everywhere. On the mountains and in the hollows, a flat line covering the peaks. Inside my collar, my shoes, my gloves. In my lungs, my mouth and my eyes. On my eyelashes, in my beard, in my tent. I am nothing but snow now.
The first few weeks were difficult. First there was the euphoria. The euphoria of realising that our provisions of meat and dried fruit, enough for an army, would allow me to survive the winter. Gio had set up the camp in a safe place: there was no danger of being buried under an avalanche. As for the cold, it was bearable. I had almost fifty litres of oil, which I used to light a small fire every evening, burning it sparingly, log by log. I lit it as close to the tent as I dared, and when it started to die down I would go inside and curl myself into a ball around its warmth.
I quickly realised that, in these circumstances, it is the mind that is most in peril. With nothing to distract it, your brain will turn inwards and slowly devour itself. So, every day, I go over my studies, as if revising for an exam. I list the geological periods – Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, all the way to the Quaternary – then I divide them into eras (Palaeocene, Eocene, Oligocene) and I date them, juggle the figures, going back and forth, remaking the universe in my head: I create the sun, I shape the Earth, I invent the weather, I give life to the oceans, I separate the continents – Asia here, America there – I cover them with monsters like the one I was looking for, I extinguish them, I walk bent over, I stand straighter, I discover fire, I forge metal, I build cities, I walk along a yellow corridor to my basement office, I sit down there and fall asleep, exhausted. The next day, I do it all again.
The most difficult thing is the silence. It has snowed, several times. I no longer hear the glacier crack. I no longer hear any birds. There is only the wind, whose rare visits I greet with joy. When it blows from the south, from the lowlands, I close my eyes and reach out with my senses, striving to capture and savour everything that it has brought with it: snatches of conversation, lovers’ sighs, store signs creaking, the smell of tar, the ring of a bicycle bell and a Christmas cantata, anything that my imagination can dream up
.
I sing a little too, but I avoid talking to myself out loud. I’ve seen too many sad cases, early in the morning on my way to work, unkempt and muttering incomprehensibly to themselves, wandering around in their own world of snow. I may not look very different from those men, but I refuse to imitate them. I cling to what remains of my dignity.
I often think about Umberto and Gio. Did they make it home safe and sound? Yes, they left before the big storms. Umberto is probably smiling at his fiancée with his big white teeth right now. Perhaps they are already married? The calendar that I keep in a notebook tells me that it’s mid-November. For a whole week, every evening inside my tent, I go to his wedding, a party that lasts for ever. In clement weather, on the shores of an Italian lake, we help ourselves to simple dishes, the thought of which makes me salivate: fresh fruit, grilled fish, brioche. Especially the brioche, perhaps with some of the Commander’s jam spread on it. That jam is the only thing that might yet save the old man from an eternity in hell. The small amount of kindness that existed within him was exhausted in those jam-making sessions long ago, in a fury of quince, apples and sugar.
I have not returned to the glacier. The way there is too exposed, and several avalanches have already – before my very eyes – swept away our usual path. Besides, what’s the point? Our hole has been filled in, our traces erased. Did they even exist, the glacier wonders, or did I just dream about those idiots?
Another day dawns and I reconstruct the world again in order to stay sane.
A blizzard tries to kill me. For two days, the snow is blown across the landscape in whirlwinds, leaving this place unrecognisable. It is impossible to sleep more than three hours in a row without being buried alive. Allowing myself only snatches of sleep, I fight against this circling enemy, this lying dervish that pauses only for the pleasure of starting again. Whatever I do, I must not think about the months that separate me from springtime. I survive one minute. Then the next. Open wide, Nino, another one, just one more spoonful. It’s good for you;your body doesn’t have enough magnesium. I must pinch my nose, swallow the minutes, keep going just a little longer.
My hands are frozen. By some miracle, I managed to light a fire, taking advantage of a lull in the storm. It used up a significant amount of oil. In the light of the flames I checked my fingers, fearfully searching for the black spots of frostbite. I had wrapped strips of cloth around my gloves – they saved my life.
After three days, I collapsed in my tent, too exhausted to struggle any more. I knew that death would be painless. Then the blizzard decided to torment another valley, another country, and I opened my eyes to a sunny morning.
At the bottom of my bag, inside the toiletry bag that I brought with me from Paris, I find a small, broken mirror. It has been several weeks since I have opened it.
I glimpse my reflection. November has whitened my face. No, it’s not a face, it’s a frosty landscape, broken only by a brown nose and two burning eyes, trapped between an upturned jacket collar and a wool hat pulled down low. My lips are invisible. The cloud stuck to my beard is the only sign of life in this forest, the only suggestion that a man is breathing somewhere deep within it.
According to my calculations, tomorrow will be 1 December. And even if I am wrong by a day or two, it hardly matters. I’m still here, alive. Not bad for a femneta, a guy who can’t fight, a pansy.
Stan slips away in his handsome black suit. The world is kinder on the other side of the mirror. Hair slicked back, shoes polished. One step forward and everything will be forgotten. The men pacing around the living room, the hands messing up his hair, ruffling it up into spikes that he has to keep flattening. The oak box in the middle of the room – ‘Oak! You did things right,’ the Commander’s neighbour said. The boy from the mirror put his oldest fossil in there, while no one was looking, just before they closed the lid. A trilobite. Don’t just stand there staring at yourself in the mirror like a moron, we’ll be late for the church. They are strong, these men: they lift up the box as if it were empty. Maybe it is empty? The boy didn’t check. Maybe his mother has taken off into the hills; he wouldn’t blame her. He’d like to do the same, one step forward, for God’s sake, what’s wrong with the boy, he’s obsessed with that damn mirror! But he has to stay, he’s not big enough. He can’t go through it, not yet.
The child from the mirror turns and walks away. One day Stan will leave too. Patience …
December flays me. I have never been so cold in my entire life. Each breath is like a thousand white birds with blades for wings. I force myself to eat, methodically. A hunk of tough meat, a piece of dry fruit, a mouthful of water. Several times a day. Over and over again.
Is Umberto worried about me? Does he think I’m dead? I hope he doesn’t blame himself for having left me here. He had to go back, to save himself. The world is already far too full of situations where people die for others’ madness. And yet, sometimes I am overcome by an irrational rage: why don’t they come back and rescue me? What are the villagers doing? I know the answer, of course. I’m just pretending, because it reassures me that I can still get angry. The path that leads to the via ferrata is the kingdom of avalanches, and those people wouldn’t come even if one of their own had chosen to brave the elements here, to strand himself on these celestial shores. There is too much respect for madmen in these valleys, for the saints of tomorrow.
Merry Christmas, Nino!
Is that you, Mama? Hang on, I got you a present. It must be somewhere around here.
Here you are. This nice, round, very white snowball … I made it for you. And for tonight, I’ve prepared a special meal. Dried meat on a slice of dried fruit, followed by a slice of dried fruit on dried meat. And to drink … the purest spring water you have ever tasted, collected from the very mouth of the stone where it first emerges into the world. Then we will sing and dance and I will give you your real present. I will give you summer.
I don’t remember what I did yesterday. And today, I found myself waist-deep in the snow, at the bottom of the escarpment that leads up to the via ferrata. I don’t remember leaving the camp and I have no idea how I got there. All I recall is sweeping the snow outside my tent, as I do every morning, then closing my eyes … and when I opened them again I was several hundred metres away. It’s the shepherds’ disease, the one that old Aimé had. I am frightened.
The New Year has begun. I think I can smell a slight warming in the air, unless it’s just my imagination. When will the ice melt? When will I be able to climb down that ladder and leave my prison? I force myself to hope.
I
Will
Survive.
I keep my mind busy, day after day.
I list all the things I love. Dogs. Honey (the clear kind). Colour (any). Trains. September mornings. Mornings in months that don’t exist, but that I could invent and who would blame me? The chapels where nobody goes any more, the ones dug into the night by years of patience. Tunnels, and the light that laps at their end. Whales. Silences (plural). And America, of course.
I list all the things I don’t love. Silence (singular). The north wind. Cold indifference. Egg yolk. My second toe, which is longer than my first. Egg white. Being ten years old and not having a mother. Being eleven and not having a mother. Being twelve, thirteen, fifty-two … Time does not heal that wound.
I list the women I have loved … No, that’s enough lists for today.
Standing in the snow, not far from the via ferrata this time. I must have walked a good two hours to get here and I have no memory of it at all. More worryingly, the cold is back, even sharper than before. Its blue blade cuts through the air at the slightest movement. It slashes my tent, my clothes, effortlessly.
I have adopted a new routine to restrain my amnesiac ambulations. Every morning, I force myself to sweep the path that leads to the escarpment. If it doesn’t snow, I sweep the snow on the slope. If it snows during the night, I start again from the beginning. It is exhausting, thankless work, but this is the path I
will take to leave the combe. Every gesture is like a glimpse of the future.
I am losing weight. For several days, I am confined to my tent by a bad cough and a fever. It must be written, in a giant accounts book, that I have not yet served my time. I wake one morning with my lungs clear, as weak as a newborn baby. Cured.
February begins. And the cold – the real cold – arrives.
White-out. The phenomenon so feared by mountaineers: the world blown away. The landscape taken by the wind. No more shadows, no more contours, no up or down. Just this infinite white flatness in all directions, the nausea that pins you to the ground, hands clawing the air as you try to climb back to the surface. But the surface of what? Everything is the same, everything is white. Your body spins and whirls, falling endlessly through nothingness. You lie down. You don’t move. You wait. Wait for the end of the white-out.
Now I know. I know what winter in the mountains is like. It’s a train. A furious machine, a frenzy of sparks dancing on the rails, steel laughter on the horizon. It screams, it rears up, it bumps and jolts as it pulls its cast-iron cargo. Of course I am talking about pure winter, not the cuddly season that touches our existence in the plains and cities every year. I am talking about a voracious god whose anger planes mountaintops and emboldens glaciers. Perched on those peaks, it blows its contempt for all life. It is destruction. It is breathtaking beauty.
A Hundred Million Years and a Day Page 11