6.08 A.M.
Firmly gripping the steering wheel of the car he was about to drive for four days and three nights to the highest part of the Bolivian Plateau, he felt the queasiness typical of that last moment in which it still seems possible to turn your back on something, although, deep down, you know you can’t because it was all decided and planned a long time ago. This useless hesitation was made even more uncomfortable by the pervasive six o’clock silence of this Saturday morning. Instead of turning the key in the ignition, he sat waiting for a sound, as if it might provide the finger-flick needed to propel him forward, make him start the car, drive to Renan’s place to pick him up at the agreed time, and set out on what promised to be the biggest adventure of his life. Adri had informed him the night before that she wouldn’t be getting up to see him off. So, from the moment the alarm on his mobile phone had begun to play The Addams Family theme song at 5.15 a.m., he had made as much noise as possible, peeing, washing his face, pulling on a pair of comfortable tracksuit bottoms, a polo shirt, running shoes and a cap with the clinic’s logo on it, fixing himself a bowl of full-fat yogurt with granola and a ridiculous amount of honey, brushing his teeth, deliberately bumping into the bed and the stool in the walk-in wardrobe, tuning into an AM radio station for the weather forecast at an unnecessarily high volume, wandering back into the master bedroom and quickly leaving again, opening Nara’s bedroom door, almost disturbing her toddler sleep in the hope that it might soften his wife’s heart, opening and closing the car boot to peer at the bags he had packed, organized and checked a zillion times the night before, going back inside for no reason and, finally, leaving, closing the garage for the last time and angrily slamming the car door. But despite his efforts, Adri had kept her promise. She was probably still pretending to be asleep, waiting for the brief electric squeal of the ignition to start the combustion cycles of the pistons in the Mitsubishi Montero. He finally decided to give her the satisfaction and turned the key, revving a few times in neutral for the pleasure of breaking the silence, fantasizing that at that very moment, lying in bed, realizing that he really was going, she was feeling mortally sorry that she hadn’t given him a goodbye kiss, even if only on the cheek, and wished him good luck. Backing the car slowly down the parallel strips of granite that ran across the neat front lawn, he decided to turn off his mobile as soon as he hit the highway and wait two or three days before calling to check in. With the city streets deserted, he hoped to make it to Renan’s property in Vila Nova in twenty-five minutes at the most. He kept the car windows closed, and the noise of the tyres on the irregular paving stones sounded faraway and soft, making him feel as if he were inside an aquarium, cut off from the world. He opened the driver’s window all the way and everything transformed, starting with the crunching sound of the tyres. The sun, no doubt rising behind a building, cast a hazy pinkish-yellow light over the houses, buildings, trees and cobblestones of Bela Vista’s side streets. The heroic stars lingered in the sky, which had ceased to be nocturnal about five, maximum ten, minutes earlier. The air was cool and saturated with oxygen. He drew it into his lungs through his nose, filling his alveoli to the brim, and held his breath for a few seconds. In a few days he and Renan would be 13,420 feet above sea level in a guesthouse in Potosí, which shared the title of the highest city on the planet with Lhasa, in Tibet, lying on bunk beds, resting up and ingesting large volumes of liquid until they were properly acclimatized, trying not to ruin everything at the outset with a pulmonary embolism. When he turned on to Carlos Trein Filho Street, which would take him to Nilo Peçanha Avenue, he remembered the question that Renan had asked out of the blue as they rested on the top of Cruz Rock, late on a Sunday afternoon in April, almost seven months earlier. They had just climbed the ‘Via Prosciutto Crudo’, as Renan had christened it. After a two-week climbing vacation in Sardinia, in August 2002, Renan had started giving his climbs random names in Italian. That was probably the best weekend they had spent in Minas do Camaquã, a ghostly village near a set of rocky formations that looked like a sequence of four giant waves of solid rock pushing up out of a landscape of rolling hills and rivers. Situated in Brazil’s deep south, the village dated back to the early twentieth century, when copper, gold and silver were discovered in the region. Mining had ceased when the reserves were depleted in the mid 1990s. The village was now inhabited by one or two hundred families, mostly retired miners, and its abandoned houses and streets, set in a landscape mutilated by mining, gave a charming end-of-the-world atmosphere to a place that was already naturally isolated. He, Renan and a small group of fellow gym members were among the first climbers to start visiting the region. They’d travel the 185 miles from Porto Alegre to Minas do Camaquã early on the Saturday morning, spend the day climbing and the night barbecuing, climb a little more on the Sunday, and return that night, Renan to the indoor climbing walls of Condor, the gym he owned, and he to his practice and the operating rooms of Mãe de Deus Hospital. To him, climbing had always been a way to test his physical and mental limits, an enjoyable exercise in muscular resistance and concentration, practised with discipline and regularity. It had become an integral part of his daily life, but when he managed to take a break from his patients and join the group from Condor for a weekend outing, it became something more, a set of parentheses in the more or less predictable flow of his professional and family life. To Renan, on the other hand, climbing was his routine. When he wasn’t working as instructor and managing partner at Condor or teaching rock climbing to private groups and institutions, he was somewhere in Brazil, Latin America or the world, on climbs with difficulty ratings of 9 or 10 on the Brazilian scale, amassing gigabytes in digital photographs to record his considerable climbing feats, like when he free-climbed the Massa Crítica, in Rio, in record time, and what he called the ‘Francobolo’, currently considered the most difficult route in Brazil’s south, a 10b climb that involved walking across the ceiling of Terceira Légua Cave, in Caxias do Sul, with explosive-sounding footsteps. Although the relationship between their egos and climbing was somewhat different, he and Renan had been fast friends ever since they’d met at Condor, and whenever their agendas coincided they’d go away for weekend climbs, on an average of ten times a year over the last three years. They’d been to Itacolomi, Torres, Cotiporã, Salto Ventoso, Pico da Canastra and Ivoti. But their favourite destination was Minas do Camaquã, where camping on the Saturday night was so much fun, with bonfires and conversations that stretched into the night, that on one occasion he’d convinced Adri to leave Nara with his parents and go with him, despite the fear she felt when she saw other human beings dangling from great heights, a fear he had jokingly defined as ‘vicarious acrophobia’, which Renan had described as ‘just plain shitting herself’. She had fallen in love with the natural beauty of the place, asked what the snap hooks, figure eights and magnesium were for, wanted to know how long the ropes were and how they attached the bolts to the rock. She had even climbed some fourteen or fifteen feet before starting to scream in panic. That night she’d smoked a lot of marijuana, drunk a lot of wine and joined in teasing him about the fact that he didn’t drink or smoke. She and Keyla, Renan’s girlfriend and pupil, had hit it off and spent a good hour deep in hushed conversation. Seeing how quickly their partners had become friendly, Renan had started to mumble in his ear. Most of it was unintelligible, but he made out the word ‘swing’, which was typical of Renan. That night Adri was petulant, incoherent and merry, she had her drunk face on, and he was happy to see her like that. But that was the first and last time she had gone climbing with him. She simply lost interest, as if she’d exhausted every possibility for enjoyment in a single trip. He and Renan had kept going, however. More and more, he needed the endorphins, the adrenaline and the almost meditative mental state of rock climbing. Renan needed to keep on doing what he did best: rising to new challenges on rock faces with the grace of a dancing spider, braving new routes that would be repeated and respected by countless other climbers. And that April d
ay, while resting and admiring the view from the top of Cruz Rock, Renan had asked, without taking his eyes off the landscape, ‘Wanna try something totally Heart of Darkness?’ Still on a high from the climb, he’d been watching a hawk perched on the enormous white cross that gave the place its name. The hawk had just taken flight, flapping its wings against an orange sky streaked with white cloud. ‘Try what?’ he asked, wrenched out of his daydream. Instead of paying attention to Renan, he began to visualize the descent, which would have to be soon, before it got too dark. Rappelling down was always the part that made him the most nervous. Just as most car accidents take place less than five minutes from the driver’s destination, the descent is the part in which a climber is most relaxed, hurried and distracted. Renan waited a few seconds before speaking again. ‘Ever thought about ice climbing?’ He knew Renan had taken a course in Bariloche and had climbed a few snowy mountains in the Argentinean Andes, which is why he thought he had something in that region in mind. ‘I’ve never thought about it, but it sounds interesting.’ ‘There’s this idea I can’t shake, man, a project I can’t get out of my head.’ ‘You want to climb the Aconcagua with your hands tied behind your back?’ He expected Renan to laugh, but instead his friend interlaced his fingers and used his right hand to crack the metacarpophalangeal joints of his left, which popped like the little air capsules in bubble wrap. ‘I need a partner for a trip, an expedition, actually. Someone who’s got the time and is game to invest in some gear, drive for several days, trek out into the middle of nowhere and spend some time on a mountain. Reckon you’re up to something like that?’ His question seemed to anticipate a negative response and was a subtle challenge, which was common between the two friends when it came to climbing, since Renan was better at the sport in every way and his main motivation was bettering records and feats, preferably other people’s. ‘Where?’ ‘The Andes.’ ‘OK, but have you got a specific mountain in mind?’ Renan stopped staring at the horizon and turned to face him. ‘Ever heard of Cerro Bonete?’ A few neurons sparked in his head, because yes, he had heard of the mountain, in an article in the Canadian magazine Gripped, if he wasn’t mistaken. A volcanic peak whose summit was some twenty-two thousand feet above sea level, near the Aconcagua in north-eastern Argentina. ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of it,’ he replied smugly, feeling like a specialist. ‘Isn’t it a volcano in Argentina?’ ‘Yes, well, there’s that Cerro Bonete, which is near the Aconcagua, in the province of La Rioja. It’s twenty-two thousand, one hundred and something feet high and climbers used to turn their noses up at it, but it’s become more popular recently. But that’s not the one I’m talking about.’ Renan feigned nonchalance as he spoke, but he was going somewhere, he obviously wanted to talk about something that had been an object of fascination to him for some time. He paused to create an air of suspense, forcing him to ask, ‘So there’s another Cerro Bonete, then?’ ‘There are at least three or four, as far as I know. “Bonete” means some kind of hat in Spanish, and there’s a shitload of mountains with the name in the Andes. But the Bonete I’m talking about is special. To begin with, it’s in Bolivia. In the south, almost on the Argentinean border.’ ‘OK. So what’s so special about it?’ ‘It’s hard to say, ’cause no one’s ever climbed it. It appears on a few maps and in satellite pictures, but its exact height isn’t known. I found a page on the net that says it’s eighteen thousand, two hundred and forty feet.’ ‘Not one of the tallest.’ ‘What matters is that it’s unknown. Hardly anything about the region has been documented. There are no roads, no towns, fuck all. The motherfucker is on the edge of a volcanic crater with a three- or four-mile diameter. You should see the aerial photos. There are some on the net. It’s awesome.’ He knew Renan was serious. Climbing the highest peaks on each continent was already banal to him. Not that they were easy, but lots of people had done them before. He liked to say ‘There are package tours to the top of Everest’ to illustrate his theory that the true challenges in mountain climbing today were on the most difficult rock faces and on the planet’s few mountains that still had a peak or face untouched by ice axes and crampons. An unknown, mysterious mountain would certainly motivate him to leave the comfort of his home and invest in an expedition. Something that hadn’t been done before and that deserved to be recorded. His eyes shone as he spoke. He blinked several times in quick succession then held his eyes open for a long time. ‘Well? Whadya reckon? Haven’t you ever wanted to do something as fucked up as this? It’s possible, man, perfectly possible. But it’ll take time, money and the right mindset. And balls. I’m just not sure you’ve got those,’ he said, half joking, half serious. ‘It’s something to think about,’ he replied. It seemed like such a crazy idea at the time that he didn’t take it seriously. But the following Monday he opened his email at home and found half a dozen messages from Renan full of images of Cerro Bonete and links. The information was sparse and the images were poor-quality satellite photographs taken from obscure geological websites and government reports. One email contained a pair of coordinates and a link to download the program Google Earth. Following the instructions in the email, he installed it, typed in the latitude 21º45'0.00"S and the longitude 66º29'0.00"W, and hit ‘Enter’. The three-dimensional globe began to spin slowly as the screen zoomed in on South America and Bolivia, picking up speed as it went. After a few seconds of data transfer, the clear image of a snow-capped peak on the edge of an inactive volcano appeared. His first impression was that he was looking at a map in a very old computer game, but he slowly understood that it was a legitimate satellite image, with colour and detail, of an incredibly inhospitable stretch of the Earth’s surface. Seen from above, the texture of the cordillera was like the bark of an old araucaria tree and the Earth’s crust looked like the crust of a cake, almost palpable on the computer screen. And that was when the idea of the hare-brained expedition took root in him. Whatever Renan’s reasons were, he now had his own: he needed to go there. He needed that exact part of the planet to become a place where he’d set foot, he needed his presence there to be real. The picture on the screen dredged up mental images of a range of locations that had sparked similar urges in him, as if they held some kind of revelation. He remembered a tiny island he’d seen while on a boat ride off the southern tip of Santa Catarina Island, in his first year of marriage. It was a rocky islet whose top half was covered in vegetation, like so many others along that coast, but on this one there were three or four wooden huts facing out to sea, completely isolated, hidden from the continent. He wondered who had built them, how they’d got there, if someone actually lived in those primitive dwellings or if they were just fishermen’s shacks used for storage and occasional shelter. Whatever they were, he wanted to be in one, on an island so removed from civilization. For an instant it had seemed simple and possible. What was so difficult about picking a deserted corner of the Earth, building a small house on it, and going there from time to time? Later, the idea transformed, revealing itself to be impractical, far less possible than it had first seemed, but letting it go had felt like giving up a valuable opportunity, even though he couldn’t define exactly what was so unique or revelatory about that specific place. On another occasion, driving down Highway BR-101 from Torres to Osório, he’d caught sight of a magnificent fig tree on a roadside property and had been gripped by the same feeling of urgency. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to pull over, park, and walk the half mile or so to the tree, sit with his back against the trunk and have some kind of epiphany within minutes of arriving, or merely allow the aura of that particular fig tree on that particular property on that particular highway to slowly fade, return to his car and continue on to Porto Alegre. He’d let that opportunity slip along with dozens of others. What the satellite image on the computer screen offered was another chance to pinpoint a moment in time and space, to the exclusion of all others. He had to go there. If he could have, he’d have beamed himself to the Bolivian Cerro Bonete that very instant. He wrote back to Renan, ‘Saw the pics. I’
m in (seriously).’
Bonobo
Night was falling on Esplanada. It was early in the new year, and the days still held a trace of the hopeful excitement – of which superstitions and resolutions are part and parcel – that marks the beginning of each new calendar. On the far side of the Guaíba, the red sun was poised to touch the hazy line of hills that was dissolving before his eyes into something like an ocean horizon: the Guaíba River becoming sea, tinged crimson by the setting sun. The weather had been dry and the beaten earth of the football pitch filled the air with a brown dust that hung there, apparently static, for minutes on end, refusing to accept the natural order of things and fall back to the ground. The sounds of players calling for the ball and barking warnings about the other team’s defence; of the girls watching the match and noisily making fun of the same guys they would later, face down in bed, cast as the leading men in elaborate sexual fantasies; of the envied scooter owners who revved their engines in exhibitionist duels; and of the children engrossed in their little war games and challenges on the playground equipment in the square – all these swirled together chaotically, the official soundtrack of late-summer-holiday afternoons. In the nearby 8th Mechanized Cavalry Squadron a horse was being broken in and it could be heard whinnying furiously. Behind Hermano was Police Hill, some eight hundred feet high, property of the Brazilian Army. Its partial deforestation had left a landscape of boulders, low-growing grasses, and bushes. Although it was off-limits, it was frequently invaded by adolescents from Esplanada and, less often, adults piggybacking small children. Access to the hill was through the Jungle, a strip of forest teeming with lianas, streams, lizards, snakes, opossums, porcupines and the occasional howler monkey. To Hermano’s right, the rest of the square sloped upwards in a series of long, low elevations, with a playground, a bocce court, a covered barbecue and a few concrete benches. Hermano saw no harmony in all these elements. They didn’t seem to belong to the same physical space – the main square of Esplanada, in this case, which was the name of a residential subdivision but which figured in its inhabitants’ psyches as something much grander, like the name of a real suburb. If Esplanada wasn’t yet a suburb in its own right, it would be one day. Late afternoon on the football pitch was like a dreamscape cobbled together without much concern for the reality from which it derived. An ocean sunset was impossible in this city, in this country even, but conditioning his eyes to erase the hills fading into the horizon and believe that it was actually happening, that the Guaíba River was the California sea, empowered Hermano’s imagination and held reality at bay. He enjoyed it. But reality regained the upper hand with a dirty blow, precise and devastating, when the ball slammed into his nuts at high speed.
The Shape of Bones Page 2