The Deadly Space Between

by Patricia Duncker

  An Alpine glacier is an ice stream that flows down a mountain valley from a catchment area or snowfield. They are to be found in every continent except Australia, mainly in high latitudes, but also in high mountains near the Equator. Some Alpine glaciers are quite thin and cover less than a square kilometre. Many large alpine glaciers are three hundred to nine thousand metres thick. I spent the following day roaming through the valley. I stood beside the sources of the Aveiron, which take their rise in a glacier, that with slow pace is advancing down from the summit of the hills to barricade the valley. The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy walls of the glacier overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. An area that has undergone Alpine glaciation shows a characteristic Alpine-type topography and may be called a fretted upland. The landscape becomes sharper and more rugged and has arêtes (sharp-crested ridges), cols (saddle-shaped depressions in ridge crests), horns and other prominences, and glacial troughs and cirques (deep, half bowl shaped basins).

  It is the anticyclone d’hiver, -14ºC at eight o’clock. The air is thick and still with frost. The front steps are equipped with rutted rubber treads like a Michelin tyre, but they are silk-smooth with ice and treacherous. I cling to the rails as I descend. The cars in the road lie like rigid dinosaurs, pickled in frost. I breathe slowly, for the whole world has solidified into cold. Then we are inside the cable car, clutching our boards and skis. The ski school vans litter the car park. I find myself reading the names painted on their doors: Evolution 2, Fresh Tracks and Chalet Snow-board. There are different styles among the ski uniforms. The snowboarders are more original, in baggier outfits with mad hats. They look like street rappers or breakdancers. Here is a group of them, feinting punches and all chewing gum. The skiers have svelte suits, more tightly clinging, in vivid colours. They are all white, powerful and young, like an alien race, too perfect and too beautiful to have been born in pain like the rest of us. The men and women look the same. Their hair is covered in oil; their faces are greasy. Rainbows flutter in their dark goggles. All the materials of their clothes are synthetic, light and wind-proof. The moniteur pushes us in together like animals in a freight car. Someone begins bleating piteously, everyone grins and takes up the chorus. The cable car lurches away from the concrete ledge.

  ALPINE OROGENY This is the name which we apply to the mountain-building event that affected a broad segment of Southern Europe and the Mediterranean region. The event occurred in Middle Tertiary time. This is the time which began 65,000,000 years ago and ended 2,500,000 years ago. The Alpine orogeny produced intense metamorphism of pre-existing rocks, crumpling of rock strata and uplift accompanied by both normal and thrust faulting. This is the immediate cause behind the height of the Alps as we see them and from which the name derives.

  We fall silent as the upper town drops suddenly away beneath the cable car. Here are the sheer precipices of snow and the tall pines, grappling for soil, which plummet past us. We rise rapidly. The world diminishes into littleness. My ears explode with the dramatic change in altitude. The light is transformed. From the murky gloom of dark frost in the shadowed valley we rise up through the flat bank of mist and find ourselves in sunlight, a brilliant white light charging the white slopes with an electric flare. The world is illuminated. We all cry out with pleasure, gluttonous for heat, light, the glitter of white crystals and the clean white sheets of fresh snow. And then I am perched on the summit of Le Brévent. The bank of clouds is now hundreds of feet below me. The peaks are in sunlight. Far away I see their rocky black backs arched and plunging in the white sea. I look across to the row of needle peaks in the Mont Blanc range and see the bland curved back of the final peak, simple, undramatic, cautious, presenting no challenge and no threat. I am dazzled by the bright white light and the liquid silence. For I can hear nothing. There is no one else on the terrace, no one else leaning over the barriers, no one else gazing out into the void. I peer at the slick rock precipices plunging into flaccid, empty banks of mist.

  Who has brought me to these high places? Why am I here, lonely and cold?

  The clue must be lodged in these vast deceptive distances, the frozen drama of waste spaces, the immensity of cobalt blue.

  During periods of clear sunny weather, sun cups, cup-shaped hollows usually between 5 and 50 centimetres in depth, may develop. On very high-altitude, low-latitude snow and firn fields these may grow into spectacular narrow blades of ice, up to several metres high, called penitentes, or nieve penitentes. Rain falling on the snow surface or very high rates of melt may cause meltwater runnels, which are shallow grooves of water running down the slopes.

  I am wandering across the surface of the Mer de Glace. The glare is so blinding that I cannot judge the distances. The shifting scale has disoriented me completely. My jacket is not proof against a butchering wind, which is sweeping down from the Glacier Géant. There is a corridor of winds, gusts of ice-air that raise the snow in waist-high flurries before me. I am walking the dragon’s spine. There are no markers in the snow. To my left and right a muscle of rock is thrown up from the white flesh of this living thing moving beneath me. The creature is carefully, surreptitiously, flexing its length, white as a dove, subtle as a serpent. Its white hood is spread out before me. The skin of the glacier moves more swiftly than the braided ice far beneath. The thing moves at a metre a day, a cautious, invisible, diurnal creeping stealth that bristles with rocks and stones and trees. I sense the yawning gulfs of ice below and the terrible fragility of my steps.

  Crevasses are common to both the accumulation and ablation zones of mountain glaciers, as well as ice sheets and all other types of glaciers. Transverse crevasses, perpendicular to the flow direction along the centre line of valley glaciers, are caused by extending flow. Splaying crevasses, parallel to the flow in mid-channel, are caused by a transverse expansion of the flow. The drag of the valley walls produces marginal crevasses, which intersect the margin at 45º. Transverse and splaying crevasses curve around to become marginal crevasses near the edge of a valley glacier. Splaying and transverse crevasses may occur together, chopping the glacier surface into discrete blocks or towers, called seracs. Crevasses deepen until the rate of surface stretching is counterbalanced by the rate of plastic flow tending to close the crevasses at depth. Thus crevasse depths are a function of the rate of stretching and the temperature of the ice. Crevasses deeper than fifty metres are rare in temperate mountains, but crevasses up to one hundred metres or more in depth may occur in polar regions. Often the crevasses are concealed by a snow bridge, built by an accumulation of wind-blown snow.

  I see the world through her colours: cadmium yellow light, Paynes Gray and unbleached titanium. Suddenly I realize that I am seeing colours broken down into their chemical elements: titanium dioxide coated in iron oxide, complex sodium alumino-silicate containing sulphur, hydrated aluminium silicate and cobalt aluminium oxide. The peaks shudder in sunlight. The world separates from itself . . .

  * * *

  . . . then everything fuses again. I plunge into the liquid crystals, terrified, and hard boot the system. The computer screen burps, then fades into black. I lurch back into the safe wooden chair, sick with dizzy nausea from over-exposure in the lost peaks.

  What is this?

  I stagger to my feet and look into the bathroom mirror. My nose and cheeks are red and stinging, my eyes are bloodshot from the slick whip of the high cold air and the snow glare, which damages your eyes if you don’t wear dark glasses or the goggles that curve around your face. My hands were numb with cold and now they are painful and stinging in the central heating’s blast. I was not wearing the right
clothes. I cannot feel my feet.

  I slump back down in front of the evil screen, incredulous. All I had done was access an unknown Web site. It is dark outside and the house is quiet. The sinister, secret ministry of frost leaves its tracks upon the windowpanes. I sit still, blank and unmoving, for over an hour.

  Then I brush my teeth and climb into bed, shivering.

  Next morning Luce inspects me carefully over the bowls of milky coffee.

  ‘Toby! You must put more cream on your face when you go out. It’s madness not to take precautions. Have you looked at your nose? It’s bright red and peeling. Isobel will lynch me if you end up a victim of malignant melanoma. Now go upstairs and put some sunscreen on at once or I’ll throw a wobbly.’

  ‘Oh, God, is my nose peeling too?’ asks Liberty, alarmed. We have the same pale skin.

  ‘No, dear. I coat you in a plaster varnish. It’s a wonder that you haven’t solidified into a statuette.’

  * * *

  The rhythm of January set in: getting up in the dark, humping wood and coal, mock-A-level exam preparation, difficult German prose translations, Luce battling with a sequence of atrocious colds, Iso’s students learning how to do frescoes, the smell of fresh plaster in the kitchen. The days marched past like a succession of grey praying penitents. I started regular driving lessons with a taciturn instructor who made it clear that as soon as his band became successful on the circuit he would give up teaching driving to become a rock star. He wore heavy golden rings. I found myself staring at his rings and remembering. I was filled with the sensation of perpetual expectancy. I was waiting.

  Something had begun to happen to me. It was as if the parameters of my world had become fluid and unstable. I had always been solitary, self-contained and independent. But I had been held in place by Isobel. We were like mercury in the porch thermometer; one rose and fell in balance with the other. Now she was absent, withdrawn, even when she was physically there. She had begun to spend more time in the studio. She was working towards another exhibition. She often disappeared at night, without notice, comment or explanation, and I assumed she was with Roehm. When she was not there, I slept badly, fitfully. There were fewer phone calls. I could no longer monitor their private arrangements. I took stock.

  I had set eyes upon Roehm precisely seven times in three months, and been continually in his presence three times. I began to imagine him, without choosing to do so. He filled my days, and my dreams. He waited, patient and inevitable, on the edges of my mind. I saw his heavy white face, the giant hands and wrists pale above the black gloves. I saw his fingers with the worn blurred circles of gold and the nails in which the cuticles spread to the tips. An eerie knowledge of his presence persisted in my daily life, no matter how little he was present in the flesh.

  When I returned from Chamonix I went back to using my old computer and shut the iBook down. I never accessed the Web site again. Yet I could not forget the uncanny sensation of entering that virtual world of ice. I risked looking up another Web site, which seemed innocent enough, but appeared to refer to the Alps.

  http://www.alpinoinfo.com

  But there were no mountains or glaciers. Instead there was a man whose life bore an uncanny symmetry.

  PROSPERO ALPINO born November 23rd 1553 in Marostica, Italy – died November 23rd 1616 in Padua.

  The information also suggested that he might have died on February 6th 1617. But this was not geometrically satisfying. So I ignored it.

  He was a physician and botanist who is said to have introduced Europe to coffee and bananas. He was medical adviser to Giorgio Emo, the Venetian Consul in Cairo, and reputed to be the first person to fertilize date palms. He became Professor of Botany at Padua in 1593 where he cultivated oriental plants, which are described in his De plantis Aegypti liber (1592). He also studied Egyptian diseases and his life’s work was a study of the signs of approaching death, De praesagienda vita et morte aegrotontium (1601) translated into English as The Presages of Life and Death in Diseases (1746).

  The pleasure of the Internet lies in its random connections. It is like reading an encyclopedia or a dictionary, turning pages at will, allowing the eye to settle like a wasp on anything that shimmers. But this version of the Net, which appeared beneath my fingers, was uncanny because of its coherence. Nothing appeared to be a coincidence. For Prospero Alpino sat upon the plains of Padua in the city where St Antony had preached, with the Alps crouching behind him, dreaming of the flooded Nile, the crumbling pyramids and the palm trees at sunset.

  I see a strange heavy figure seated on a stone bench in a garden. I stare at his huge, clean, white hands.

  As I glared at the microdot image of Prospero Alpino, based on a contemporary portrait, I felt an uncanny tingle of recognition. Why is this image so strange? Because it is lit with southern light. I have never seen Roehm in daylight. He has always come out of the dark.

  * * *

  Her paintings began to change. This put me on the alert. For over two years she had worked on her ice giants, the huge grey and white monoliths in rich textured masses. They were built not in shapes, but in layers, monumental structures of white, strange thick blocks of paint. She used oils for the monoliths, so that there were always three or four in progress at any one time. She let them dry slowly, reworking the surfaces again and again. When she came back from Paris she set the great shapes aside in a reproachful looming stack at the far end of the studio. She spent one whole Sunday banging downstairs, stretching a sequence of smaller canvases, about four feet square. She shifted from oils to fast-drying acrylics. These were cheaper than oils and easier to use. She was beginning to cut corners. She wanted instant results. I watched her preparing the surfaces with a translucent eggshell sheen. The new colours assaulted my habit of white. They were luminous square blocks of red and green. She was no longer painting the pure high flanks of the mountain, but the intricate ambiguity of the forests.

  I began to spy on the changing colours in the studio. The surfaces were densely worked as usual, but there was a sharper, glassier finish to the edges. The textures no longer dissolved, whispering to one another. She erased more of the work than she usually did. Smeared blank canvases stood facing the wall, like stupid schoolchildren who had failed to get it right.

  She had always drawn figures, in charcoal, pencil, pastel; the nudes in her life-class, or even the self-portraits, which she drew often, staring at the mirror with an obsessive intensity. There were endless sketches of me; watching television, reading, peeling potatoes at the sink, painting the windowsills outside the studio, bending over the daffodils in the garden. But, outside her college projects, she had never, to my certain knowledge, painted figures before. Or at least not with such professional care, not as part of her own work, preparatory for exhibition. This was entirely new.

  Something was lurking in the dark blocks of green, a shadow, a hulking shape.

  I expected to decipher the massive contours of Roehm.

  But when the shape gradually solidified over a period of weeks, I made out, not the white and pale grey face of her lover, but the glowing red eye of the Demon Huntsman. It was Samiel. I did not like the new paintings. They were arresting, but tacky and sensational, like a horror comic. To me, they were simply bizarre. There was also an odd shadowy menace in the pictures which had been entirely absent in the opera. Samiel owned the forests, but he stayed there. If you were looking for trouble and satanic bullets, you could seek him out in the Wolf’s Glen. This demon figure was on the loose, wandering about, seeking whom he might devour. I scrubbed at the green and red stains in the sink in an ostentatious flurry of resentment.

  She gave me the first finished painting of the sequence in early February. I had cooked a large lasagne, which would do for two days, and was serving it up when I saw her coming through the studio door angling the painting carefully away from the door frame.

  ‘Here you are. If you like it, this one’s yours.’

  I had spent hours staring at the thing
on the previous evening before she came home. So I didn’t even bother to look up, I just went on spooning out the sauce.

  ‘I don’t like your new work.’

  She stood still for a moment and her angry disappointment hit me like a sudden gust of cold. She set the picture up against the fridge, facing away from us, so that all I could see were the wooden struts of the frame. Then she sat down at the table and pulled her plate towards her. After a while she said,

  ‘Why don’t you like them?’

  ‘I just don’t. I think they look cheap.’

  ‘Cheap?’ Her voice rose a bit.

  ‘Yes. Like a horror film. Cheap and scary.’

  We ate in silence. Then she said,

  ‘Well, it’s not as if I paint in my own blood like this year’s Turner Prize winner.’

  I said nothing. We smouldered at one another in a long champing silence. Then she pushed back her empty plate, stood up and stalked off upstairs. I heard the radio in the bathroom. The picture still leaned against the fridge. I ferried it back into the studio without looking at the image and trying not to touch the damp rim. Then I sat on the stairs with my head in my hands listening to her movements on the boards above me. I could not let the anger grow between us.

  I followed her upstairs. She had left the bathroom door ajar. She was running the bath and had turned up the radio.

  ‘Iso?’

  She didn’t hear me. I pushed the door slightly open in time to see her slipping her shirt carefully over her shoulders. She had her back to me. I caught my breath.

  All across the upper part of her back was a sequence of raised welts, forming a livid red pattern, like crosshatching. The skin was broken and oozing in places. The pattern was perfectly symmetrical, as if she had been sliced open with precision tools.