by James Salter
He thought of her the next day at the baths. The water poured over him, gleaming on his limbs. Here he was more confident, unencumbered. He dreamed of possessing her, gratifying dreams. Her hands were banging on the wall, he was wading in cries …
The woman in her flowered wrap asked him, “Vous êtes anglais, monsieur?”
When she found he was not, she confided in him. The English were very dirty, she said. Even the Arabs were cleaner. Had he been to England? No. Unexpectedly she smiled.
This woman at the Douches Municipales, Remy Giro, an infrequent stranger—there were not many he talked to. There was a teller at the Banque Payot who glanced at him in a certain way. She was about thirty, with a narrow face that had something hidden in it, like a woman who has ruined herself for love. He watched her boredom and absence of expression as she counted thickets of hundred-franc notes for a young businessman. When Rand stepped forward she raised her eyes for a moment. He was prepared for it. It was as if he had caught her by the arm. Sometimes he saw her from the street through the iron-barred window. She was married, he knew. He had seen the gold band on her finger.
The days grew colder, the first snows fell. It was beautiful, even glamorous, with the darkness settling and snow drifting down. He felt he would journey through the winter easily, but as weeks passed he began to see how much he had been mistaken. He had ventured too far. It was like a drive across desolate country in a tiny car. The ice was on the windshield, the horizon white. If the engine failed, if he somehow happened to run off the road …
He had not counted on the loneliness, the terrible cold. He felt he had made a desperate error. He was stranded. The shutters of the houses were closed at night. The room was unheated, he was never really warm. Over the radio came announcements of girls who had disappeared from home—these were among the first things he was able to understand. …Seize ans, mince, longeur un metre quatre-vingt, yeux verts, cheveux longs, châtains. Téléphonez 53.36.39,etc. Sometimes he caught a few words of the news.
It was as if the battle had moved on and he had somehow been left behind in a foreign town. Everyone had gone, the camp was abandoned, he was wintering alone.
He found some illegal work—he had no permit—sweeping up in a machine shop on the road toward Geneva. It was behind the Hôtel Roma, the lighted windows and parked cars taunted him as he passed in the evening on the way home.
He thought almost every day of Louise. Yes, come, come at once, he wrote sitting in a bare café filling sheet after sheet of paper. He read them over slowly and sent a postcard instead. On and on came tremendous snowfalls, mountains gleaming above the town and ragged ten-franc notes received on Saturdays as pay. There is no easy way into another world.
One night on a corner he saw the teller from the bank reading the movie posters. She was alone. His heart jumped. He stood beside her.
“Bonsoir.”
She did not answer. She turned and looked at him as if judging him coldly.
The first time she had seen him she felt herself tremble. She was susceptible to certain men, she handed her life over to them. His eyes, his burnished face—he was the type she threw everything away for, she had already done it twice.
He did not know this. He could hardly speak to her because of the language, and she seemed reluctant to talk. She had a bare, defiant face. Her husband was away somewhere visiting his parents. She had a child.
They walked by the river, the water was rattling past. He felt an almost physical pain being near her, the desire was so great. He wanted to look at her, regard her openly, see her smoke a cigarette, remove her stockings.
He managed to kiss her in a doorway. She would not tell him where she lived. She stood as if she had taken her last step on crippling heels. She put her face against his chest and allowed him to touch her breasts.
He saw her in the bank the next morning. She was not the sort of woman to smile. He didn’t know how to proceed—he couldn’t come in every day. Also her husband was coming back. They had exchanged a passionate signal, but as it turned out he was not able to meet her again. Her name was Nicole Vix.
The winter passed. It was difficult to remember what became of the days, they faded like those of school, the first year, the hardest. You could not tell from looking at him that he had been lonely, that he had stood at society’s edge envying its light and warmth, wanting to be part of it, determined not to be; none of this was in his face.
Above, the aiguilles glittered. The mountains were asleep, the glaciers hidden in snow.
11
THERE WAS A SINGLE tent in the meadow. From far off it looked like the first arrival, from closer, the last survivor. Within, it had been made comfortable, some books arranged on a flat stone, an alcohol lamp, a few curled photos taped to the pole.
The grass was already knee-high, the early flowers scattered about. It was May. Huge slugs the size of fingers drifted slowly across the stones. Below was the narrow road that became the path to Montenvers, although no one took it at this time of year. Above, the blue sky of France. A van had stopped on the road, tilted slightly as if in a rut.
A lone figure came up through the grass walking purposelessly, sometimes eccentrically turning around. Rand was watching. The winter was over but he was strangely inanimate, tired of himself and the solitude that had been pressing down on him. There seemed nothing that could end it. He was lying alone among his few possessions as if wounded when suddenly he felt an overwhelming joy, like a castaway seeing a naval lieutenant in whites step onto the beach. The blond hair was shining in the sun.
“My God,” he said.
“Hello, buddy.” It was Cabot.
“I can’t believe it. How’d you find me?”
“It wasn’t hard.” He looked for a place to sit. “Everybody in town seemed to know where you were.”
“I’ve made a lot of friends,” Rand said.
“I bet you have.” He looked at him closely. “Tell me, how’ve you been?”
“Well, it seems to snow a lot here. A lot of people come. French mostly. Italians. I don’t know who they are. Am I glad to see you. Are you here alone?”
“No. Come on down to the van.”
Rand stood up. He still could not believe it. “Tell me, are you going to stay around for a while?” he said.
From the road, Carol Cabot saw them start down, her husband’s arm around the other’s shoulder, walking and suddenly running, not in a straight line but in great, drunken circles. She could hear shouting—it was Rand, he was making huge leaps and his arms flew about wildly. They came running up to her.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
“Here he is,” her husband said.
She knew Rand slightly but hardly recognized him. She tried to remember what he looked like. She had seen him only a few times and retained the image of someone tall, confident, someone with dirty hair and a kind of hidden energy. Now he was like an outlaw. He smelled of tree bark and smoke.
“Hello,” she said. “When Jack said you were over here somewhere, I thought we were going to have trouble finding you.”
She was an Arizona girl, easy and optimistic, finer than her husband in certain ways. When they walked along the streets of town, she was elegant, dreaming. Her bare arms were crossed, a hand clasped on each shoulder. She would stop to look in store windows while her husband and Rand walked on and then stroll unhurriedly after them. Cabot never turned to see where she had gone. He sometimes put his arm around her, continuing to talk, when she was near. She would stay then. Often it seemed she wasn’t listening.
Cabot had become stronger. He’d been working as a carpenter, framing with a heavy hammer. His forearms bulged.
“How’s your French?” he asked.
“Not too good.”
“What? Didn’t you have a French girl friend?”
“I didn’t have any kind.”
Cabot suddenly admired him immensely.
“I don’t believe it,” Carol said calmly.
He seemed to them despite his appearance—as if wearing the clothes of two or three vanished companions—to be particularly well. His eyes were shining. He was filled with life. They talked about it afterwards.
“He looks like some kind of holy man,” Carol said.
“More like Natty Bumppo.”
“Who?”
“The Deerslayer,” Cabot said.
“You know I’m stupid. Who is that?”
They took him to dinner at Le Choucas—perhaps it was her face or the happiness they represented, but the heads of passersby in the street turned. The next day they drove to Saint-Gervais and the valley beyond. Old farms with stones on the roof stood among the newer chalets. The mountains were huge and white.
“What sort of conditions do they have up there?”
“The snow’s still heavy,” Rand said, “but they say it’s firm. I heard them talking about it a few days ago. It isn’t how much snow they have but the condition of it.”
“There must be some climbs we can do. I’d like to start getting in shape.”
“You look all right.”
“I got very nervous being away from here. I began thinking about you, for instance. There are certain climbs I wouldn’t want you to do without me.”
“I think you’re safe.”
“Maybe for the moment, but I worry. There are climbs you just can’t stop thinking about. You can’t get your mind off them. Do you ever have that feeling?” He paused. “The problem is, there are other people who could do them. Keeps you awake at night.”
“So, tell me, what are you thinking of?”
“We’d have to be ready.”
“Come on,” Rand said.
Cabot was still evasive. “We’d have to be in very good shape.”
“For what?”
Cabot waited,
“The Dru,” he said.
A single granite face, gray and isolated, it almost seemed to shift forward in Rand’s mind, detach itself from the landscape and become even more distinct. Dark, with black lines weeping down it, a Babylonian temple smashed by centuries, its pillars and passages sheared away, the huge fragments floating through thousands of feet of air to explode on the lower slabs, legendary, un-climbable for decades: the Dru.
Rand looked at the ground. “The Dru …” He had a shy, almost embarrassed smile.
“Well?”
“Jack, I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.
The mountain is like an immense obelisk. It was first climbed by the easiest routes. The North Face, after years of attempts, was only conquered in 1935. The West, most difficult of all, survived until after the war. It was finally climbed in 1952.
This West Face seems pointed, towering. It is like a spire. It does not reveal, from in front, its full depth and power. From the valley—Les Tines—one sees it is not a mere finger but a powerful head, the head of a god.
The regular route begins to the right, up a steep couloir that is a channel for rockfall and where a number of climbers have died. From the top of the couloir a series of terraces brings one toward the center and from there the way goes up through more than fifteen hundred feet of implacable wall.
This route was of little interest to them.
There is climbing that is tedious and requires brutal effort; it is almost a kind of destruction. To climb without holds, without natural lines, to work against the inclination of the rock, as it were, is ugly though sometimes essential. The more elegant way is rarer, like perfect love. Here, the most hazardous attempt is made beautiful by its rightness, even if it means falling to one’s death. There are weaknesses in the rock, flaws by which its smoothness can be overcome. The discovery of these and linking of them is the way to the summit.
There are routes the boldness and logic of which are overwhelming. The purely vertical is, of course, the ideal. If one could follow, or nearly, the path that a pebble takes falling from the top and climb scarcely deviating to right or left, impossible as it may seem, one would leave behind something inextirpable, a line that led past a mere summit.
The name of that line is the direct.
In June, after three weeks of lesser climbs, they walked up to Montenvers on the steep path through the forest. From here the classic outline of the Dru was visible, somewhat shadowed by the mountains behind it, distant, remote. They descended to the glacier which lay like a winter river below the station and hotel.
The glacier is dangerous only when covered with snow. That year it had melted early. The surface was gray with pulverized rock and carried granite blocks of all sizes. They passed two other people, a man and woman, both deaf—they were signing to each other as they moved in silence. From the blue of crevasses came a chill breath and the sound of trickling water. On the far side they climbed the steep bank and started along the faint track that winds up through scrub and small pines. It was warm. They walked without speaking. The Dru, visible from the glacier, had vanished behind intervening ridges. Looking up now, they saw it again, only the tip like the highest mast of a ship, then gradually the rest. They continued the long, uphill walk. It had already been three hours. The trees and undergrowth ended, there were patches of snow. At last they reached the outcrop that stood like an island in the snowfields at the foot of the Dru, the rognon, it was called.
It was noon. The sky was clear, the air seemed still. Above them the mythic face soared as if leaning slightly backward. The light was streaming across the top. There was snow in the great couloir, snow on the high ledges. The rock was pale in places, almost rusted. There were huge sheets like this, gilded with age. From somewhere came a faint whispering and then a roar. It was off to the right. They watched a graceful flow of rock come down the face, the snow streaming ahead of it and bursting like the sea. The sound slowly died. There was silence. The air was cold. Rand took off his pack. He stared upward.
“That is some piece of rock.”
Cabot nodded. In the dank shadow it was somehow as if they had swum to this place and surfaced. The chill in the air was like spray, their faces dim.
They sat down to examine it closely. They rejected the couloir. It was off to the side as well as being the start of the normal route, but the rest was one vast apron filled with overhangs and downward-facing slabs. Almost in front of them, however, there seemed to be a slanting fault that led to a group of arches. They would come out on a sort of ledge five hundred feet up.
“Then there’s a series of cracks,” Cabot remarked. They were faint, vertical lines; in places they almost disappeared. It was difficult to tell if they really faded to nothing. There might be a way to link them.
Cabot was looking through binoculars—their field was small, the image unsteady and jerking. On up to an overhanging wall above which was wedged an enormous block, a well-known feature, the bloc coincé. Past that and up. They would be joining the end of the regular route which would take them the rest of the way.
For hours they examined it, noting every detail. Rand was writing it down with the stub of a pencil. The sun, coming over the left side, hit the face as they finished, flooding it with a vast, supernal light.
“That’s about it,” said Cabot finally.
Rand took the glasses for a while before they started down. He was silent. He felt a certain solemnity.
A great mountain is serious. It demands everything of a climber, absolutely all. It must be difficult and also beautiful, it must lie in the memory like the image of an unforgettable woman. It must be unsoiled.
“How long do you think it’s going to take?”
“Two days, maybe three,” Cabot said.
“How many pitons?”
“I think everything we’ve got.”
“Weight’s going to be a problem.”
Cabot didn’t answer. “That’s a terrific line,” he said, his eye ascending one last time. “It could take us right to the top, you know?”
“Or farther.”
12
HE WAS SWIMMING, FAR out to sea. Something was out there, a person, the air was ringing with faint, fading cries. His arms were heavy, the swells were becoming deeper. He tried to call out himself, his cries were borne away. Someone was drowning, he hadn’t the courage to reach them. He was giving up. His heart was leaden. Suddenly he woke. He had been dreaming. It was two in the morning.
There followed hours of the same thoughts repeated again and again. The dark face of the mountain filled not only sleeplessness but the entire world. Its coldness, its hidden terrors would be revealed only at certain times. Long before dawn he lay, victim to these fears. The iron hours before the assault. His eyes were already wearied by images of what was to come, the miraculous had drained from his palms.
The weather had not been good. The delay was eating at his nerves. Each morning they woke to overcast skies or the sound of rain. Everything was ready, ropes, pitons, supplies. Every day they sat in idleness.
Weather is critical in the Alps. The sudden storms are the cause of most disasters. The casual arrival of clouds, a shifting of wind, things which might seem of little consequence can be dangerous. The sun, moreover, melts the ice and snow at higher altitudes, and rocks, sometimes of unbelievable size, break loose and fall. This happens usually in the afternoon.
One must know the mountains. Speed and judgment are essential. The classic decision is always the same, whether to retreat or go on. There comes a time when it is easier to continue upward, when the summit, in fact, is the only way out. At such a moment one must still have strength.
It cleared at last. They walked to the station. Their packs were huge, they weighed at least fifty pounds. Ropes slung over their shoulders, when they moved there was a muted clanking like the sound of armor.
His chest felt empty, his hands weightless. He felt a lack of density, the strength to cling to existence, to remain on earth, as if he were already a kind of husk that could blow away.
This great morning, this morning he would never forget. Carol was standing among the tourists. A group of schoolchildren had arrived with their teachers for an excursion to the Mer de Glace. Rand stood near a pillar that supported the roof. The sun was warm on his legs. His clothing, different from theirs, the loaves of bread sticking out of his pack, the equipment, set him apart. A kind of distinction surrounded him, of being marked for a different life. That distinction meant everything.