True Summit

by David Roberts

  A year after Gaston’s death, Françoise began to write a memoir about her life with her husband. Still unfinished, never published, it nonetheless contains passages of heartbreaking pathos, as well as bearing witness to a rapport as complete as any married couple may have ever had. By addressing her lost husband as “you,” she achieves a kind of hallucinatory intensity.

  “June? 1986,” Françoise writes atop the first page. “It is now one year since you left me.” The memoir opens with a “radiant memory” of the couple’s first meeting at the salon de thé in Chamonix, where the young fashion student hoped to encounter a mountain guide. Yet by the second page, she has plunged into the ordeal of Gaston’s degeneration.

  Those last four years, we lived thinking only about your survival.

  We existed, but in another identity. The characters left the stage, giving way to others who walked into a new novel that was too short, the ending already written, menacing like a cataclysm that was in the air. . . .

  That last week of May, the issue was there, perceptible. It infested the air, making it hard for us to breathe.

  I sensed the time that was inexorably abandoning you, without appeal. Our happiness slipped through our fingers . . . the cancer charged ahead. Silently, from the bottom of my soul, I pleaded with you to live. I could no longer do anything to make you live, the hemorrhaging of your vigor was operating in me also. Yet up until the last moments, I tried to communicate to you those waves of love that could work miracles, perhaps even help the medicine.

  The losses accumulated, one by one. One of the bitterest came the day Rébuffat, after long deliberation, asked the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix, of which he had been a member since 1942, to take him off the list of active guides. As Françoise understood, that step “already signified death, a first death.”

  Other losses were more intimate, manifesting themselves in scenes that Françoise later vividly recaptured:

  The last night that we had dinner at our daughter’s apartment, at the moment of leaving you didn’t have the strength to go home. There was no bed available for me.

  No one offered to accompany me home. I left by taxi, alone, in despair. Thus I understood the full horror of what awaited me. The next morning, you told me of your distress at seeing me go away.

  The night before you entered the hospital, you were exhausted, there was nothing you desired. You got up in the morning, wracked by the pain in your bones, reeling with weakness, but you wanted to go out all the same. For the first time I had to help you to get dressed. You cried, you held me in your arms and said, “I can’t take it any more. I’m holding on only for you.”

  In the hospital, Françoise discovered her husband on his deathbed:

  I found you alone in a vast, cold, repellent room. I had been authorized only a one-hour visit. How could the medical corps . . . so lack common humanity as to tear one of us away from the other, two beings who were never meant to be separated?

  You did not seem to be conscious. You lay there inert. Did you smell my scent? Your lips were slack and loose, as if in a smile. Your pupils were half open, but your sight was gone—it had already left us.

  I was petrified.

  You were so cold, your body no longer breathed, but in that extreme moment, by a reflex of will, you raised your arm to pass your hand through my hair. From the light touch of your fingers, I understood that you wanted me to bring my face near to yours and embrace you. That stroke of your hand in contact with my skin, that kiss, that gesture—I keep that as your final gift.

  Rébuffat died on June 1, 1985. In the months that followed, Françoise was haunted not so much by his absence as by a feeling that he was still there: “I write to you, as though you were simply away on a voyage. I continue to wait for you.” And yet, “The monotony of my days grows heavier and heavier.” Still, “In the darkness, our complicity goes on. There is no decision that I make without asking you about it. . . . Love has its excuses, it ought to be unconditional, and sometimes it persists only through an absence of logic.

  “In return, I sense that wherever you are, you hear me and pardon me.”

  Rébuffat lies buried on a hill near the side of the old Chamonix cemetery, surrounded by other guides. For his epitaph, Françoise chose an epigram from Rébuffat’s most poetic book, Les Horizons Gagnés, that defines the essence of mountaineering: “Conduire son corps là où un jour ses yeux ont regardé”—“To transport one’s body to the place where once the eyes first gazed.”

  EIGHT

  The Silence of Lachenal

  UPON HIS RETURN TO FRANCE, Louis Lachenal entered the hospital in Chamonix. Like Herzog, he would undergo painful operations on his feet—sixteen of them over five years—as well as many difficult skin grafts.

  For Lachenal, in his anguish, there was no “new life,” no mystical discovery of a higher purpose his suffering had revealed. Only one thing mattered: would he be able to climb again? And if so, would he ever again approach the transcendent level at which he had climbed when he and Terray had stormed up the hardest routes in the Alps in the late 1940s?

  From the moment he had frozen his feet, Lachenal’s thoughts had focused on the similar plight of his friend the great Swiss climber Raymond Lambert. After a survival ordeal in winter on the Aiguilles du Diable, Lambert had lost all his toes to frostbite. Yet he had come back to climb at an exceptional level. His triumphant moment was also the sternest test of his rehabilitation, when in 1952 he reached 28,200 feet on the South Col route on Everest, higher than anyone before him had ever climbed. (Lambert, who reached that record height with Tenzing Norgay, missed stealing the next year’s first ascent from Sir Edmund Hillary by a mere 800 feet.)

  In September 1951, Lambert made a surprise visit to Lachenal in the hospital. Herzog, receiving special treatments in Chamonix, lay in the neighboring bed. In L’Autre Annapurna, he recaptures that meeting as a joshing exchange:

  “So, Raymond,” says Lachenal, “have we joined the club?”

  “Wait a minute, you haven’t been enthroned yet.”

  “The proof is here,” returns Lachenal, showing Lambert his feet covered with bandages. “Do we have to get down on our knees?”

  “No, en pointe. Like a dancer.”

  To the invalids’ astonishment, Lambert takes off his shoes and socks and begins to dance on the tips of his amputated stumps. “Listen, Biscante, the day you can do the same, then you join the club. Not before.”

  The dialogue, as usual, has been invented by Herzog, recalling an episode forty-seven years in the past. But there is no reason to doubt the tenor and substance of that meeting. It would have been very like Lachenal to use black humor as a screen to cover his fears about his future. In any event, Lachenal’s son, Jean-Claude, who was eight in 1951, remembers Lambert’s visit. “My father was very low at the time,” he says. “Lambert came to the foot of the bed and showed him that he could still climb without toes. He was joking, dancing, kicking a soccer ball.”

  That same month, both Herzog and Lachenal were awarded the Legion of Honor. Terray and Rébuffat were passed over.

  For two years after Annapurna, Lachenal was unable to make a single ascent. The Compagnie des Guides, which had received their comrade as a hero, kept him busy with administrative jobs. Meanwhile he undertook his first timid promenades in the foothills with Jean-Claude and with the young daughter of a fellow guide. Alone in his bedroom, he walked barefoot, trying out some of the maneuvers Lambert had showed off in the hospital; but the pain quickly curtailed his experiments. As months passed with little improvement, he lapsed into discouragement.

  The testimonies about Lachenal’s mental state during these years vary greatly. According to Herzog (In L’Autre Annapurna), Lachenal was inconsolable about his loss, and “ceaselessly bewailed” the fact that he might never climb or ski again.

  If that testimony is suspect—Herzog would forever portray himself as the uncomplaining survivor, Lachenal as the hypochondriac—so too may be the more s
anguine witness of some of Lachenal’s closest Chamonix friends, who were at pains to emphasize the positive. Jean-Pierre Payot, fellow guide and climber, remembers that Lachenal “was not so terribly anguished. We laughed all the time together.” According to Mauricette Couttet, widow of one of Lachenal’s best friends, “He joked a lot about losing his feet.” Payot recalls Lachenal returning a pair of special shoes he had commissioned, sneering at the shoemaker, “These are good only for spreading manure.” Several friends testify that Lachenal plunged himself into town meetings, conferences, and guides’ affairs.

  Yet Terray, who knew him as well as anyone, later wrote of these years:

  In the end he recovered sufficiently to work as a mountaineering instructor, but he could never recover his genius. This curtailment profoundly changed his character. Once he had seemed magically immune from the ordinary clumsiness and weight of humankind, and the contrast was like wearing a ball and chain.

  Too poor to own a car, Lachenal had never learned to drive. As a surprise present, late in 1950 Adèle bought him a Citroën 2 CV. A shaky driver herself, she taught her husband how to operate an automobile. (On the driver’s license Lachenal received in January 1951, an official has written across the top, “Amputation of all the toes of the 2 feet.”)

  Driving quickly became a consuming passion for Lachenal. Behind the wheel, his lost toes made little difference. Speed on the road took the place of his legendary speed on the cliff. He quickly taught himself all the maneuvers of a driver at Le Mans. Wrote Terray, “I have driven with quite a number of notorious drivers, and if some of them perhaps showed more judgment I have never known one to equal him for daring and natural skill.”

  There are many stories about Lachenal’s wild driving, with enough concurrence among the versions to keep them this side of the apocryphal. Jean-Pierre Payot was riding with his friend once when they came to a hazardous junction. A road sign warned: “Danger. Slow Down.” Instead, Lachenal sped up, explaining, “You have to accelerate to avoid the danger here.”

  On the highway, Lachenal would pass on blind corners, and even cut across fields to get the jump on poky traffic. In one persistent story, as he drove with Adèle, his foot grew weary holding down the pedal, so he insisted she floor the accelerator while he drove. After a stretch of driving thus, he abruptly stopped, got out of the car, and picked up a wayside brick. From then on, the brick held down the accelerator, to be nudged aside only in extremis.

  Speed gave Lachenal’s life momentary purpose again. He set out to break the unofficial records for long-distance jaunts in France, whittling his Paris–Chamonix time down to six hours and forty minutes. (Today’s best time, on the autoroutes that have changed the countryside, is still only five and a half hours.)

  Lachenal suffered a number of spectacular one-car accidents, rolling his vehicle more than once, yet emerging unscathed. Adèle was terrified of his driving from the start; soon no one else wanted to get in the car with him. Some witnesses insist that Lachenal was utterly scrupulous to avoid involving other vehicles in a crash. Yet another persistent tale has him driving back from Paris with Terray’s wife, Marianne, who was a great beauty. Jean-Pierre Payot recalls the aftermath: “Lachenal called me by phone. ‘Where are you?’ I asked. ‘Come to Geneva and pick me up,’ he said. ‘I missed a corner in Burgundy and the car rolled. I had to take a train to Geneva. As for Marianne—she’s had herself done over well.’

  “I wondered what he was talking about. When I picked him up, I found out. Marianne had been knocked out or fainted in the crash. He stopped a cattle truck and laid her down in the straw. He took advantage of her state to look at her breasts. Evidently she’d had plastic surgery. In the official version of the story, he only looked at her eyes.”

  In Conquistadors, Terray cogently analyzed the motivation behind Lachenal’s wild driving:

  Those who saw in it a taste for exhibitionism were quite mistaken. Lachenal’s passion for speed bore no relation to vanity. It was a drug to some imperious inner need of his nature. I have often seen him about to set out in his Dyna, and asked: “Where are you off to?” He would reply: “Nowhere. Just a drive.” Nobody ever heard of most of his exploits, which he indulged in for the sheer joy of the thing.

  In 1952, Lachenal traveled to the Belgian Congo with Adèle to present a number of slide shows on Annapurna. The heat debilitated him, but while there he seized upon the idea of climbing the highest peak in the snow-capped Ruwenzori—the “Mountains of the Moon.” A climbing friend from the Alps happened to be heading for the same range with a small team, so Lachenal joined forces with them. The mountain posed no real technical obstacles, but at 17,100 feet, it stood more than a thousand feet higher than Mont Blanc, and simply to get to the peak required a lengthy journey through forest and foothills.

  The climb was exhausting for Lachenal, but to his great joy he and a Swiss alpinist named Coquoz reached the summit. There, he discovered and retrieved an ice axe left by the legendary Duke of the Abruzzi (leader of the second expedition to attempt K2, in 1909), who had made the first ascent of the mountain forty-six years earlier. Lachenal became the first Frenchman to reach the highest point in the Ruwenzori.

  In a piece he wrote about the climb for a Lyon newspaper, Lachenal reveals a penchant for hijinks and whimsy of which Herzog gives no hint in Annapurna. In the jungle, the team meets a local man reputed to be a cannibal.

  We must not have seemed very appetizing to him. He let us photograph him like a regular chap on salary from the Tourism Office. So I asked him how we could meet tribes of true cannibals. I wanted to see them, to get to know them!

  “They certainly exist,” he answered.

  “But where?”

  “We don’t know. No one knows. But they’re nothing special. Nothing distinguishes them from other blacks.”

  “I want to eat a man. I want to know the taste. Oh, just to taste!”

  At the foot of the Stanley Glacier, the team approaches a sign. Writes Lachenal:

  The text ought to be pondered in France: “It is forbidden to venture onto the glacier or on the mountain without being accompanied by a guide.” Since that was what we were, we continued.

  On the mountain, Lachenal savors a unique experience: “Coquoz took the lead on the rope, and I found it marvelous to play for once at being the ‘client.’ ”

  By the end of the hike out, Lachenal’s feet were in excruciating pain. He had to be helped by the natives to stagger the last few yards to his hotel. Yet the success deeply heartened him: for the first time in two years, he began to think it possible to return to alpinism.

  Privately and alone, Lachenal began to hike up to the Col des Montets, where he soloed short cliffs, developing a technique appropriate to his abbreviated feet. Gradually his confidence blossomed. One day, leading a group of students in a beginner’s course with his friend André Contamine—one of the best climbers among his fellow Chamonix guides, himself a maverick individualist—Lachenal stunned the group by challenging Contamine to a race up the cliff. Arriving neck and neck at the top, the two guides gasped with the effort and laughed out loud with joy.

  Yet on another outing, Lachenal confessed his limitations to Contamine. “The skin grafts won’t stand up to a prolonged outing,” he said. “On the descent, the ends of my feet bang against the leather. Ah, Conta! Where are the days when we did the Caïman, the Croco, and the Peigne in the same day? Where are those days?”

  This vignette appears in the 1956 Carnets du Vertige, and it exemplifies an acute biographical problem. The chief source for Lachenal’s life after 1950 is that book, which—apart from the heavily censored Annapurna diary—is composed of third-person chapters written by Gérard Herzog. These passages are based on Lachenal’s notes, and on further notes composed by a journalist, Philippe Cornuau, whom Lachenal enlisted to help him with his book. For the most part, Gérard Herzog’s chapters follow the chief themes of Lachenal’s life post-Annapurna, as corroborated by still-living friends. Yet, as in
Annapurna, the Carnets abounds in invented dialogue. And it paints a portrait of Lachenal that blunts his arch-critical candor, his acerbic wit. There is a softening Herzog stamp throughout.

  Nowhere is the 1956 Carnets more unreliable than in its account of Lachenal’s relations with Maurice Herzog after 1950. Thus Gérard has Lachenal hear of Maurice’s plans to plunge, despite his amputations, back into alpinism with an ascent of the Matterhorn in 1952. “The obsession with being unequal to his ambitions,” writes Gérard, “made [Lachenal] turn down the chance to share this experience, despite Herzog’s advances.” (Nothing came of Herzog’s Matterhorn plans.)

  More unctuously, Gérard paints Lachenal responding to a friend’s entreaties to take up skiing again on an easy slope. “My feet are messed up,” complains Lachenal. “I would make a fool of myself.” Then he learns that Herzog is about to try to ski again, and that he hopes Lachenal will join him in the effort. Suddenly Lachenal changes his mind. “Ah! With Maurice,” Gérard quotes him, “that would be really great.”

  Lachenal was devoted to his two sons, and to Adèle, but he may also have been something of a ladies’ man. According to Mauricette Couttet, Lachenal found that his crippled state could charm women: “He had a different approach with young ladies [after Annapurna]. He was allowed things afterward that he wasn’t before.” Says Payot’s sister, Elisabeth, “He was a wonderful friend, but an odious husband. He either did all the housework, or emptied all the drawers and said to Adèle, You clean all this up.”

  By 1953, Lachenal had become ambitious in the mountains. That year, with Rébuffat, Payot, Contamine, and two other friends, he pulled off an extraordinary ascent of the south ridge of the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey, a long and serious route in the same class as the northeast face of the Piz Badile (one of Rébuffat’s six great north faces). Though Contamine led most of the pitches on Lachenal’s rope, the very fact that Lachenal could complete such a climb was proof that his genius had not altogether left him.