The harbor is deserted. The hurricane is approaching.
A mass of liquid wind, engulfed between the two towers, carries everything along with it.
The birds that cross from one wall to the next are sometimes assaulted by gusts that shut their wings with a sudden dry noise, hurling them and crushing them against a rock, where they remain until a higher and blacker wave comes to peel them off and wash them away.
The terns, the gulls—excellent sailors with voices so powerful they can hear each other through storms—have taken refuge high up in the green sky and remain silent.
Why do some of them dive down and pierce the smoking sea water that has now risen up in furious columns?
Why do they clamor and brush against the havoc of wind, dust, and foam—which they know is deadly?
Who urges this cruel-eyed animal to test himself against the storm?
One of them has almost managed to get through the forbidden passage on his back; the torrent pursues him and brings him down with a volley of hail.
Only one has made it. The gale has stripped off a few of his feathers, but he rejoins his companions, and they will make him their leader, crying out his victory until nightfall.
But he, the wire walker of the waves, knows that he was granted a miracle, and he remembers that moment with fear, for tomorrow he will be the one they discover stretched out on the seawall.
His dust feeds the wind that little by little wipes him away. Nothing is stronger than the wind. No one is stronger than the wind.
Not even the courageous bird.
The wind can make crossings on a bicycle or a unicycle extremely perilous. You must therefore use your biggest balancing pole.
As for working without a balancing pole in high winds: it is a descent into hell.
Falls
A fall from the wire, an accident up above, a failed exercise, a false step—all this comes from a lack of concentration, a badly placed foot, an exuberant overconfidence.
You must never forgive yourself.
The high-wire walker becomes the spectator of his own fall. With wide-open eyes he whirls around the wire—until he is caught by an arm or finds himself hanging by a knee. Without letting go of the balancing pole, he must take advantage of this motion to stand up again and continue the interrupted movement with rejuvenated energy.
More often than not, there will be applause. No one will understand what has happened.
The mistake is to leave without hope, without pride, to throw yourself into a routine you know will fail.
Every thought on the wire leads to a fall.
Accidents caused by equipment must not happen.
Many wire walkers have died in this way. It is stupid. But sometimes the wire slips away from you, because you have put yourself outside the law, outside the law of balance. At such moments, your survival depends on the strength of your instinct.
There are those who allow themselves to be carried away without a struggle. Let them fall!
Others continue to flail their arms and legs above the wire, to beg their eyes not to lose sight of their target. With an avid hand they latch onto the cable at the last instant. Have you ever made a leap of faith toward a distant rope, grabbed hold of a cavalletti in midair?
I waited for my first slip in public. It fortified me, it flooded me with a joyous pride, in the same way a solid clap on the shoulder encourages more than it hurts.
The second slip made me think; I found myself below the wire after completing a movement I had mastered long ago.
The third incident was terrifying: I almost fell.
Nevertheless, in my dreams I pursue legendary aerial escapes that will finally do me justice. I, who have everything to lose. For when a man begins to tremble for his life, he begins to lose it.
I demand to be allowed to end my life on the wire. I have the patience of those who have fallen once, and whenever someone tells me of a high-wire walker who fell to the ground and was crushed, I answer:
“He got what he deserved.”
For that is clearly the fate and the glory of the aerial acrobat.
Great crossings
For two weeks, the high-wire walker has been camping at the top of the mountain.
It is decided. Today he will determine the anchor points.
Eagles wheel around in the lukewarm air of the gorge. They can see this little character on the peak, pointing to a spot on the facing mountain.
An enormous roll of cable is on its way. The special convoy has reached the first steep curves. It will arrive tomorrow. A thousand meters of degreased, twenty-five-millimeter wire: discovered by miracle. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever touched. It weighs three tons. I am happy.
On one side I will encircle an outcrop of rock that stands as solid as a mill.
On the other side there is no protruberance. I will have to dig a hole and then pour a broad and deep column of concrete, around which the wire will be coiled and then fastened for safety to three large trees lined up behind it.
The reel has been solidly rooted to the ground.
A team of twenty men hauls up the wire, chanting as they pull. The cable advances a few inches each minute.
It snakes along the side of the mountain. It clears the road and passes over the telegraph lines. It must be taken across the lake by high-wire methods, for no motorboat would be strong enough to pull it from one shore to the other. If the cable touches bottom, you can forget about your crossing, since it will wedge in among the rocks and catch hold of the weeds so diligently that even the most powerful machines or the most expert divers will never be able to dislodge it. It is cruel for a high wire to drown. Eventually, it will be dragged down through the forest, where each tree is an obstacle; then it will climb, foot by foot, minute after minute, toward its anchor point. At last, everything is ready.
The cable is fastened on each peak. That takes a day. It runs along the valley floor, imprinting its weight on dead leaves, drawing an almost invisible boundary. This becomes alarming at the edges of the lake. You see the black serpent dive into the water and find it hard to imagine that it will emerge on the other side, coming up into the grass and continuing on its way, marking this corner of earth with the disagreeable stamp of its metal skin. Like an immense trap, waiting to snap.
You begin to pull, aided by the largest hoist in the world—or several strategically placed pulleys—and you see a long gray line lift itself from the ground and rise up, swaying. The wire suddenly stops. A small branch somewhere is blocking it.
When you have moved the branch aside with your hand, the cable will jerk up violently another five yards. Everything will go well until the next incident. If you must go through a pine forest, you can expect an additional ten days of installation work. You will have to bend back every branch of every tree the wire gets tangled in.
Finally, the cable is over the valley. It rises up in stages. You must load the motorcycle-trapeze with two thousand pounds of cavallettis and put them astride the cable one by one, while the wire sways back and forth over a radius of ten meters.
“Tighten it to death,” your ears open to every sound. Then collect your thoughts.
On the day of the crossing, you will assign each volunteer his rope—which he will have to hold and pull on with all his strength when you are above him, and which he cannot release until you have come to the next cavalletti.
Even so, the cable will move so much that you will see undulations up ahead of you in the distance. You will have to wait for each one of them to come to you before going on with your walk: feet planted, on the alert.
The sun will draw the grease out of the cable.
The wind will pick up the moment you begin.
You will have forgotten to bring socks for the end of the walk, and so you
will have to go barefoot, trying to complete the crossing by grasping the wire between your first two toes at every step.
But you will not be aware of anything that is happening. You will be completely engrossed in your crossing.
Only a man who is a high-wire walker to his very bones would dare to do this.
Once on your way, you are becoming the Man of the Wire, the Magician of High Altitudes: the length of your path will be sacred to you.
When you are above the lake, do not look at the surface of the water, for the movement of the waves will make you lose your balance.
If you manage to succeed, don’t boast of it. What you have done is enough in itself.
Perfection
Attention! You own the wire, that’s true. But the essential thing is to etch movements in the sky, movements so still they leave no trace. The essential thing is simplicity.
That is why the long path to perfection is horizontal.
Its principles are the following:
If you want the High Wire to transform you into a high-wire walker, you must rediscover the classic purity of this game. But first you must master its technique. Too bad for the one who turns it into a chore.
Above the crowd on your wire you will pass. Pass above and no more. You will be forgotten.
You must not hesitate. Nor should you be conscious of the ground. That is both stupid and dangerous.
The feet are placed in the direction of the wire, the eyes set themselves on the horizon.
The horizon is not a point, it is a continent.
In walking, it is the wire that pushes you. You offer your balancing pole to the wire, perfectly horizontal, arms spread wide apart.
Like a bird, a man perches on the wire; he does not lean forward, ready to fall. On the contrary, he must make himself comfortable.
Learn your body: the movement of your arms, the breathing of your fingers, the tension of your toes, the position of your chin, the weight of your elbows. Leave nothing to chance. Chance is a thief that never gets caught.
Eliminate cumbersome exercises. Keep those that transfigure you.
Triumph by seeking out the most subtle difficulties. Reach victory through solitude.
The high-wire walker must rest in the way I have described—and fight in that same way.
Never break the rhythm of a crossing. The cable would start to tremble. For high-wire walking does not mean breathing in unison with the rope, but making sure that this joint breathing does not hinder the breath of the one or the palpitation of the other.
Finally: never fail to attend the performances of high-wire walkers.
Make up your own symbol of perfection. For me, it is throwing away the balancing pole.
With a long and endless gesture, the high-wire walker throws his metal pole far across the sky so that it will not strike the wire, and finds himself alone and helpless, richer and more naked, on a cable made to his own measure. With humility, he now knows he is invincible.
A red velvet wire will be unrolled for him in his dreams. He will move along it brandishing his coat of arms.
In the cities you travel to, always remember to visit the highest monument.
Remain at the top for many hours, looking into the void.
You are a high-wire walker. You cannot go for long without visiting the sky.
Fear
A void like this is terrifying.
Prisoner of a morsel of space, you will struggle desperately against occult elements: the absence of matter, the smell of balance, vertigo from all sides, and the dark desire to return to the ground, even to fall.
This dizziness is the drama of the rope dance, but that is not what I am afraid of.
After long hours of training, the moment comes when there are no more difficulties. Everything is possible, everything becomes easy. It is at this moment that many have perished. But that, no, that is not at all what I am afraid of.
If an exercise resists me during rehearsal, and if it continues to do so a little more each day, to the point of becoming untenable, I prepare a substitute exercise—in case panic grabs me by the throat during a performance. I approach it with more and more reluctance, come to it slyly, surreptitiously. But I always want to persist, to feel the pride of conquering it. In spite of that, I sometimes give up the struggle. But without any fear. I am never afraid on the wire. I am too busy.
But you are afraid of something. I can hear it in your voice. What is it?
Sometimes the sky grows dark around the wire, the wind rises, the cable gets cold, the audience becomes worried. At those moments I hear screams within myself. The wire has stopped breathing. I, too. It is a prelude to catastrophe—like a drumroll announcing the most difficult exercise. In waiting to fall in this way, I have sometimes cursed the wire, but it has never made me afraid.
I know, however, that one day, standing at the edge of the platform, this anguish will appear. One hideous day it will be waiting for me at the foot of the rope ladder. It will be useless for me to shake myself, to joke about it. The next day it will be in my dressing room as I am putting on my costume, and my hands will be wet with horror. Then it will join me in my sleep. I will be crushed a thousand times, rebounding in slow motion in a circus ring, absolutely weightless. When I wake up, it will be stuck to me, indelible, never to leave me again.
And of that, dear heaven, I have a terrible fear.
To imagine that one evening I will have to give up the wire in the same way that so many bullfighters have given up the ring and disappeared into life; that I will have to say, “I was afraid, I met Holy Fear, it invaded me and sucked my blood”—I who hope to give the greatest gift a high-wire walker can give: to die on my wire, leaving to men the insult of a smiling death mask; I who shouted to others on their ropes: “Remember that life is short! What could be better than a happy man in flight, in midair? Think of all the things you’ve never done!”; I, the fragile walker of wires, the tiniest of men, I will turn away to hide my tears—and yes, how afraid I am.
Vary, France, winter 1972
afterthought
When I was a child, at the dinner table I was often told:
“Behave! Imagine you are at the King’s table!”
I, to recapture ardor between my first rehearsals on the wire, always whispered to myself:
“Imagine Fellini is out there hiding, watching you!”
Moments before they are called to the printer, I gather these pages and run away like a thief, to “my cathedral.” Past the great brass doors, a refreshing darkness tastes of timelessness. I spiral up the sixty-seven steps to my study, fortress in deep stone. Inside, the lattice of narrow lancets crowning the balcony is coated with a glimmer smoothing the foliage of the capitals. On the old pine board I use as a desk, on the walls, a work in progress stands guard: my pencil drawings of the blocks carved with medieval tools by the cathedral builders in the stoneyard.
Like some predator carrying its take to a higher branch to devour it peacefully, I had to flee the still heat of New York summer to read the book before you do.
I did.
Something is missing.
Not in the text written twelve years ago. Around it.
Away from the core of those ropes and cables, what inhabits my heart today?
A darker shade of gray gradually distorts the contour of each column. The ribs of the vault, above, become barely visible.
An army of clouds must be battling outside. The stained-glass windows are losing their features.
As an adolescent, sleeping on the top of an armoire, I could not understand the rarity of my amorous conquests. A friend suggested I bring the mattress down to the floor and the liaisons proved more numerous. But my sleeping became less felicitous.
Later I decided to dig a tunnel in secret under my parents�
� country house. My only tools were a teaspoon and my fingernails. I hoped to pass beneath the entire village until I lost the spoon in a cave-in, my nails on the dry earth.
As for the art of magic, I practiced constantly. Being expelled from five different schools made it easier.
I learned to hide, to be on the alert. A street juggler, I broke camp and left no trace.
Then I caught the incurable disease, Excess of Passion: rock climbing, chess, foreign languages, bullfighting, writing, printing, drawing, horseback riding, the theater, motion pictures . . .
I had stolen from the trees the art of Balance. In no time and decidedly alone.
My impatience grew into the desire to avenge myself upon those who slowed me down, who prevented me from writing in the sky, upon the objects which would not bend fast enough under my determination. This is how I learned to juggle—with wrongly turned clubs sold to me by an unscrupulous performer—out of rage and gourmandise.
I kept attacking pyramids. Each time finding the way blocked by a portal called Mediocrity, Jealousy, Intrigue.
Compromise being the key.
I preferred to lockpick them, climb around them, dynamite them.
Not necessarily in that order.
Around my cell, opposing the vehemence of my thoughts, shadows quietly invade every cold vertical line. The glass again becomes luminous. The monument reveals its hundreds of moldings and bosses. The transept receives green, gold, gray, and purple. I witness, like a page being turned, the coming of a new season. The clouds outside have been defeated.
Inside as well.
Why should I think I will never see my wire crossing Niagara Falls?
Or the Sydney Cove?
Never share a stage with Baryshnikov and Menuhin?
On the High Wire Page 6