The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  Yet for all the new blemishes created by the opening up of Aosta to the outside world—the Graian Alps formed a gigantic stockade of stone—an infamous old blemish disappeared: the goiter of cretinism. The curse of this condition especially plagued the isolated mountain villages of the radiating small valleys. The English traveler cited in chapter 1, who deplored the “hideous” appearance of the “crétins des Alpes,” was, in fact, writing of his experiences in the Aosta region. Caused by a lack of iodine and other minerals in the diet, cretinism—or congenital iodine deficiency syndrome—disappeared with the advent of the railroads, which opened up the fastnesses to different fare from other regions. Seafood, especially, rolled back the tide of cretinism. That is all but a bad memory now, a skeleton in Aosta’s closet.

  The town itself teems with other memories, many of them connected to its eponym, Augustus. An emperor-was-here triumphal arch greets the traveler entering Aosta’s old quarter, soon followed by the Porta Prætoria, a huge gray double Roman gateway consisting of six arches. The two central arches are broad and high, obviously designed for carriages and chariots. The four lateral arches are much smaller, destined for foot traffic. The Porta is a massive structure, its outsize blocks—made of a pebble conglomerate known as puddingstone—still a wonder of the builder’s art. Once clad in marble, the monument impresses by its size and solidity. Two towers, one distinctly Roman, flank its extremities, making it one of the mightiest remnants of Antiquity on the Italian peninsula. To walk through it is to walk in history. And once past the Porta and in the old town, there are preserved Roman fortifications, a multistoried Roman theater, Roman bridges. For the time traveler, Aosta amply supplies evocative locales for daydreaming.

  Of more recent note is the city’s rich Christian heritage, remnants of a time near the turn of the first millennium when Aosta, centuries before the Savoyards opened the Mont Cenis Pass to Susa, was the major staging ground for pilgrimages (and invasions) to the south. Ottonian churches, so named for the trio of Ottos to be Holy Roman Emperor around the year 1000, stand cheek by jowl with Aosta’s pagan monuments. The city’s most famous son, Anselm of Aosta (known more commonly as Anselm of Canterbury), is credited with ushering in the intellectual movement that came to be known as Scholasticism, an attempt to reconcile Reason with Revelation. Anselm has also bedeviled generations of undergraduates with his “ontological argument” for proof of the existence of God.‡

  Strolling Aosta’s animated streets—there is some sort of vintage car show in the main square—reveals that this Italian Alpine town could not be more different than its sister, Susa. The presence of French is everywhere. Historical plaques are in French only; signs in the shops betray a pronounced Gallic tendency. Evidently, the language of nearby Savoy and the Swiss canton of Valais has spilled over the Alps and come to stay. The Aosta Valley—officially called the Vallée d’Aoste / Valle d’Aosta—is defiantly bilingual, its status as Italy’s tiniest and least populous semiautonomous region wrested from the central government by local patriots following World War II.

  Not that their legal nationality is entirely ignored by the Aostans. Flat-screen televisions set up in squares and restaurants pointedly show that both paganism and Christianity have been supplanted by another form of popular religion: soccer. The ragazzi (boys) of Italy’s national team are playing their first World Cup football match, and their supporters, seemingly the entire town, raise a hullabaloo that echoes down the narrow streets and past the old ruins. As this is the Italian team, there is a lot of fakery of serious injury on the field. And, as this is the arm’s-length Italian region of Aosta, there is a lot of mockery of their fellow countrymen.

  When, as seems to happen every five minutes, one of the Italian players goes down in a fiery display of fraudulent agony, the air in Aosta is filled with derisive cries of è morto! è morto! (He’s dead! He’s dead!), accompanied by gales of laughter.

  IN A MATTER OF MINUTES after leaving Aosta, I am going up, toward the Great St. Bernard Pass. A restaurant flashes by, Le Lièvre Amoureux (The Amorous Hare). Then another sign: JAMBON DEPUIS 1789 (Ham since 1789). Clearly, the human geography around here is as unusual as its natural counterpart.

  Before me rise several green sentinel mountains, their conifer stands alternating with pastures, where the cows responsible for Aosta’s signature fontina cheese graze in peaceful oblivion to their picturesque surroundings. Off to the left, a particularly nasty spike of rock bullies its way through a few wispy clouds. Then a bend in the roadway, and the Mont Blanc massif rises in all its suborbital glory. The villa line is passed, then the tree line.

  This is a well-marked road—there are many red-bordered white triangular signs with an exclamation mark in the center. I take this to mean: You won’t believe what’s coming next! Or what’s coming from behind: I am forced to pull over as a Bulgarian in an Audi barrels past me at breakneck speed, in what seems to be an attempt to attain escape velocity and break the bonds of terrestrial gravity. On this road, we are both “going to Switzerland”—European shorthand for seeking assisted suicide—but I think this fellow doesn’t need any help.

  Mercifully, he quickly disappears from view. I look at my surroundings: to the right, solid guardrails, with hefty blocks of stone linked by sturdy metal poles; to the left, a tawny exposed rock face covered tightly in mesh. The excellent highway engineering cannot hide the fact that we have taken so many hairpins we could open a beauty salon. A pilsener of Czech bikers overtakes me, gunning up the steep pitch to the pass. I now cross a gorge where, thousands of feet up, I can see, sickeningly, where the road leads—into a zigzag of galleries up the flank of the slope, a terrifying Slinky drawn taut. It’s not that I’m afraid of heights, I just don’t like Slinkies. After that, the countryside becomes a mix of hostile gray rock and sullen green lichen. These heights look like slanting moors, windswept and dangerous. Suddenly, in the middle of one upland, there is a rock eminence at least two hundred meters in height from base to summit, looking like a thumb, poised, as if hitching a ride off the fearsome slope. The snow lies thick on the ground now.

  After rounding the hitchhiking rock, I reach the Great St. Bernard Pass. A small lake stretches out in the foreground. To my consternation, there are cars everywhere, most of them bearing Swiss or Italian license plates. Do the locals never tire of the pass? I find a place to park and begin walking to the head of the lake, where two eighteenth-century buildings straddle the roadway. From the one on the right comes the sound of liturgical singing; from the other, the barking of dogs. It is a strange canine and churchy call-and-response. My suspicions are confirmed when I see several people of middle age—the men in blue sweaters and overcoats, the women similarly attired, along with their carefully arranged Hermès scarves hiding any hint of flesh—scurrying toward the source of the hymns. These are most definitely bourgeois Euro-Catholics—the blue is a dead giveaway. Blue is the color normally associated with the Virgin Mary, and her cult is alive and well among European Catholics.

  I enter the hospice on the right and am immediately greeted by the sulfur of incense. The local mitered bishops are out in force. Today, as luck would have it, is the Feast of St. Bernard, the holy hotelier from Aosta who founded the travelers’ hospice in 1034. The mass finishes and the canons of the hospice process out of the baroque chapel, surrounded by ecstatic eucharistic groupies. A youngish Swiss bishop blesses me obligingly. Seeing a woman wearing a name badge, the same bishop takes her hands and squeezes them fondly, then moves off. She looks enraptured. I notice that her badge identifies her as an information officer, so I walk over and introduce myself. I ask her how long the Muslims held the pass before the arrival of St. Bernard. A famous incident of Muslim raiding from the pass occurred in 972, in a town on what is now the Swiss side of the pass. The rapture dies; she looks at me as if I’m furtively fingering her missal. “All kinds of people have come through here,” she says sternly, “since the dawn of time, monsieur.” With that, she stalks off, her blue cardiga
n disappearing into the blue crowd.

  She is right, of course. The pass has been crossed since well before the time of Augustus, and a rich store of archaeological artifacts is on display in the hospice’s handsome museum. The parade has been varied: kings, queens, emperors, saints, bishops, pilgrims, bandits—and countless merchants with their wares of fabrics, tools, arms, spices, metals, even horses. For at least the last thousand years or so, they have usually spent the night at the hospice, which can now house up to 180 visitors at any given time. Since the opening of the Great St. Bernard Road Tunnel under the mountain between Italy and Switzerland, leisure, not commerce, is the main occupation of these wayfarers.

  The iconic St. Bernards, the famous rescue dogs, await inspection. The national dog of Switzerland, this canine gentle giant worked itself into Alpine folklore as a heroic first responder, digging its way through avalanches to extract unfortunate travelers. The big animal’s shaggy brown-and-white coat, and black snout, are familiar to dog lovers the world over. I pay a small admission fee to their kennel. This may be the only kennel in the world with a sign reading INTERDIT AUX CHIENS (No dogs allowed). The St. Bernards lounge in the sun, on the international border, in separate, spacious chain-link enclosures with name signs on them. From left to right are Easy, Karina, Xandy, Kosimo, Bounty, Thalia, Italix, Justin, Zoltan, Phybie, Wenda, Princesse Heidi, and Capons. Across from the kennel, a young woman whose sunglasses hide half her face is grooming a dog with a hairbrush.

  “You can pet her,” she says affectlessly.

  “I … I’m not crazy about dogs.”

  “Oh, too bad.”

  A silence falls between us, which I eventually fill with a question.

  “What’s her name?”

  The girl answers. I ask her to spell it out, which she does. Jill, a female name not often encountered in French-speaking countries. It is also the name of my ex-wife, the skier who frightened me out of my wits at Avoriaz so many years ago.

  I tell the dog attendant about the coincidence.

  A hand reaches up and removes the sunglasses. A smile.

  “Well, then, you have to caress her.”

  I comply and am rewarded by a wagging tongue. The attendant and I do likewise, falling into a pleasant conversation about her charges. When I ask her whether the small casks they wore on rescue missions carried beer or brandy—my guidebooks differ on the matter—she scoffs and says that such lore is a tale told to tourists. The dogs never carried casks. Can you imagine an animal bounding up and down in excitement in the snow? Do you think it could stop and offer a drink?

  Another day, another illusion shattered. I enter a dog exposition adjacent to the kennel. I learn that there is some mystery as to the origins of the St. Bernard. Some say they came from Upper Assyria thousands of years ago. I’m not in the mood to believe anything more on this day, but I jot it down anyway. More certain is that their first mention at the pass dates back only to 1709. And that the most famous St. Bernard was born in 1800. He has gone down in history as Barry I and is credited with saving more than forty lives during his tenure atop the pass. His heroics stirred public acclaim across Europe, and a statue of Barry I adorns the entrance to the dog cemetery at Asnières in suburban Paris. After his death, he was stuffed and placed in a museum in Switzerland.

  Barry I was succeeded by a brace of namesakes, numbered as solemnly as the kings of France, but his era may have been the dogs’ heyday. Over generations, the effects of inbreeding made inroads—again, as in any royal line—and by the end of the nineteenth century the animals had to be crossbred with long-haired Newfoundlands. In the twentieth century, they met even further indignity. With the advent of modern mountain rescue units, the rescue dogs became increasingly obsolete. To add insult to injury, they lost their places in rescue helicopters because they took up too much room. The lumbering St. Bernards were replaced by lighter and leaner Belgian and German shepherds. The Great St. Bernard Pass now houses, in fact, a cross between a petting zoo and a puppy farm.

  “Want to know where the story of their casks comes from?” The speaker is Jean-Michel, a retiree from the northern French department of Pas-de-Calais. He and his wife sold me the entry ticket to the kennel. They are Catholic volunteers; in exchange for room and board, they will man the holy sites of Christendom for no pay. Last summer they were in Rome; the summer before, Jerusalem. At each place they receive instruction so that they can double as docents. Jean-Michel has spied me taking notes, whetting his hearty appetite for sharing information.

  It seems that the cask fable arose in the nineteenth century, when Italian workmen were dispatched to Bern to restore a museum. The story goes that these men ate their lunch every day in a storeroom. In that storeroom stood the stuffed Barry I. But he was stuffed badly. There was an unsightly hole in his throat, putting the workmen off their food. One day one fellow finished his small cask of wine, and, instead of taking it back to his lodgings, he affixed it to Barry’s throat so that they wouldn’t have to stare at the damned hole any longer. In time, the workmen finished their job and returned to Italy, but the cask remained, as an open invitation to some anonymous fabulist to spread the boozy news.

  “At least that’s what I’ve been told,” Jean-Michel concludes.

  THE ROAD DOWN into Switzerland winds with majesty for a couple of breathtaking kilometers. The snow-covered peaks sway back and forth in the sky, a green valley can be seen on a distant horizon. This, alas, is succeeded by very long stretches of avalanche galleries, structures about as pleasing to the eye as Manhattan’s Lincoln Tunnel. After a few minutes, I pass a haggard pair of middle-aged hikers trudging up toward the pass. No doubt they had thought this would be a bucolic outing, never dreaming they were in for a bath of carbon monoxide.

  The galleries give way to a gentle valley in which the old village of Orsières nestles in a pastoral dream. Its roofs are red, its surroundings green. Up at the pass, I had asked about the Muslims of the Great St. Bernard because of what happened here. In Orsières in 972, Muslim brigands (or Saracens, as they were then called) abducted the most important churchman of the day, Mayeul, Abbot of Cluny, a prelate more influential than any pope or bishop of the tenth century. Some of the Saracens hustled this prize off to a cave, while others repaired to the safety of Fraxinet, their Mediterranean stronghold, near present-day St. Tropez. Christendom was scandalized, especially when the ransom demand was announced. It was unprecedented extortion, even by medieval standards, but Cluny, a monastery in Burgundy with many sister houses, was very rich—a state of affairs that no doubt spurred Mayeul’s raptors to action. Eventually, the fantastic sum of one thousand silver pounds was handed over and Mayeul was freed. The event soon led the fractious monarchs of the time to bury the hatchet and unite to drive the Muslims from what would become the Great St. Bernard Pass, where they are not fondly remembered. The informational brochure available at the hospice museum contains this less-than-diplomatic observation: “Once they [the Saracens] became masters of the [pass], these enemies of Christianity began worship of their own idolatrous gods….” Not a terribly accurate depiction of fellow monotheists and one whose intemperate language makes the passage of the 2009 Swiss referendum banning new minaret construction less of a surprise.

  Orsières seems forgetful of its medieval notoriety. If there’s a monument to Mayeul here, I do not see it. In fact, I do not see anyone. The village seems empty of humanity. Enlightenment arrives when a bell tolls dolefully. Across an old wooden bridge stands an ancient churchyard, filled with hundreds of people dressed in their Sunday best. A burial is taking place. I watch from a respectful distance, strangely moved. As the mourners disperse, I ask one friendly-looking woman the identity of the deceased.

  “Michel Darbellay,” she answers.

  “The alpinist?” I ask, stunned.

  “Yes.”

  On this day of coincidences—the dog’s name, the Feast of St. Bernard—­I have stumbled across the funeral of a man whose exploits I admire. The
greatest of these occurred in August 1963, when Darbellay made the first solo ascent of the fearsome north face of the Eiger, in central Switzerland. He told his mother that he was leaving for a few days “to collect apricots.” A mountain guide for forty years and a photographer of no small talent, Darbellay belongs in the pantheon of alpinists. I plan on being at the base of the Eiger in a couple of weeks; I shall keep this memory of him in mind when I first behold the famous peak.

  The staff at the tourist office, back from Darbellay’s funeral, are amused when I ask them about Mayeul of Cluny. They seem never to have heard of their town’s distant brush with infamy. Neither have two jolly fellows, Claude and yet another Jean-Michel, encountered a few minutes later on the terrace of a café. The earsplitting sounds of a jackhammer across the street do not deter them from ordering themselves repeated rounds of rosé.

  They explain to me that the terrifying pyramidal peak facing us from the west is Le Catogne, one of the great mountains of the Mont Blanc massif. Behind us rise the Pennine Alps, their tall, snow-covered Grand Combin mountain familiar to the well-heeled habitués of Verbier, the ski resort. Verbier is particularly prized by the British. Royal layabouts and masters of the universe from the City of London have taken the place by storm as of late, investing in posh chalets as if the area were some sort of Alpine Cotswolds. The Swiss government, alarmed by the crypto-­colonization of this corner of the Valais canton, imposed a quota system on foreign acquisition of properties there, proof that the creep of millions of pounds sterling had become a stampede. Naturally, local real estate developers were furious.