by James Salter
“But it’s true.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then I won’t tell it.”
“Go ahead,” Rand said.
Michel smiled.
“Go ahead.”
“Two weeks ago, on an easy climb, he fell to his death.”
“Why don’t you talk about something you know?” Françoise complained.
“I said I knew nothing. That’s what makes it fascinating. I’m interested in the psychology of it. It’s a story of someone completely unlike me. I don’t have courage. I don’t have the slightest bit. Intelligence, that’s all.”
“Too much intelligence and not enough of something else,” she said.
“Here is a man with courage.” He indicated Rand. “He doesn’t like me. Look.”
“Oh, you are boring!” Françoise cried.
“Look, he wants to fight. He wants to take his fists and smash what he doesn’t like. That’s the American spirit.”
“Will you shut up?”
“Why don’t you hit me?” he challenged.
Rand stared at him.
“What’s wrong? Can’t you speak?”
“Oh, stop it,” Françoise said.
“But the story was true!” he called out as he was leaving. “You know that, don’t you? You see? He knows.”
20
“MICHEL! MICHEL IS A pede and a drunk. You should have thrown him into the street,” Colette Roberts said. She was having a hurried coffee before opening her shop. In the morning her face had a visible weariness like the city itself. The flat, winter light, the drabness.
“Michel is not even French,” she said. “He’s a Polish Jew. Your hair, you know, looks like the rumpled tail of a big rooster.”
He felt handsome in her presence, alive. She was like a mirror in which he saw himself perfectly. She knew how to manage things; she was not an amateur in life.
“Where is Catherin?” she asked.
“She had to go to the bank.”
“Come by and have a drink this evening. I have a friend coming from Nice.” Someone entering the bar greeted her. She turned to them, smiled. “I’m late,” she suddenly realized. “Come at six.” She dropped some coins on the counter. She was a woman who would never be down for long.
In the mornings he read, sitting near the window, a copy of the Tribune a day or two old. In the afternoon they went out.
The tunnels of the Métro were filled with slogans. The talk in the cafés was always political, fierce. On the kiosks were posters of scandal, exposé. France was like a great, quarreling family, the Algerians, the old women with their dogs, the people in restaurants, the police—a huge, bickering family bound eternally by hatred and blood.
There were afternoons of emerging soft-eyed from movies and walking past the gray vaults of the Montparnasse Cemetery, feet cold, to reach home. Afternoons when light snow was falling from nowhere and the city was blue as ice, the sound of traffic far off. Or in cafés, talking and watching the crowd. A woman in a green silk shirt sat alone at a nearby table. She was reading something taken from her handbag. A timetable. Suddenly her eyes opened wide. She was talking to herself, astonished. She rose, put on her coat, and ran out.
Secret afternoons, undisclosed. Silence sealing the windows. In the filtered light she seemed mythic, gleaming, as if for the first time the marvel of a body was revealed. She was wearing only her underpants. The blood was beating slowly in his neck. Samurai hours. The shutter of a camera clicked.
“Will they develop these?”
“Of course,” she said.
“I doubt it.”
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed when he came out of the bath, lazily playing solitaire. The kings and queens had names, the jacks were Hector, Lahire. He lay beside her, watching.
“Is this what they mean by wasting your life?”
“You’re joking,” she said.
Great as it was, the city could not sustain him. Faint in its streets, its chill, winter passages, came a lonely, haunting sound, small, incessant, something being chipped away bit by bit. The pale sky only made it louder. It was the sound of an ice ax, Cabot’s. It would not stop.
At four in the morning he woke. The sky, the streets were absolutely silent. Somewhere, half in dream, the dark wedge of the Eiger loomed in an empty sky. It had snowed in the mountains. The roads were white, the valleys blanketed. A strong wind was blowing. Snow poured down the face in streams.
He had entered a room where Cabot lay dying. He could not believe it, he was numb, but when he saw the coffin and the face within it, the sealed eyes, the fine hair, suddenly he was felled by grief, knocked to his knees. He was weeping unashamedly.
Catherin was trying to wake him.
“What is it?” she said. He could not answer. “What happened? You were crying out.”
He lay there with his arms around her. Neither of them could sleep.
21
THE EIGER IS THE great wall of Europe. It exists in a class by itself. Six thousand feet high, twice the height of the Dru, and more treacherous. It is black except for the snow which in winter clings everywhere, hiding the fields of ice. The climbing is difficult, the danger from storm and falling rock extreme.
The first attempts were all fatal though they forged the way. Men fell or froze to death, their bodies remaining on the face, grotesquely, for long periods of time. In 1938 it was finally climbed.
There is an old hotel, the Kleine Scheidegg, not far from the base. The rooms are comfortable, the downstairs is filled with photographs of those who have made the climb. Above, so immense that it cannot be seen, the mountain rises.
They were all staying at the hotel—Cabot had gotten five climbers, he was trying to find a sixth. Early in the morning, before dawn, they would leave for the foot of the wall, trudging across frozen fields. At night they would return exhausted.
“You know anyone else we could get?” he asked Bray.
“I know someone in Paris.”
Cabot glanced at him. “Is there anyone you know in England?”
Bray said, “Not for this.”
It was like war, a city besieged. All day they fought furiously. At night they slept in their beds.
Carol was there; she was the leading woman. Audrey, who came in January, was pale beside her. In the evening, if no one was back, they ate together, sometimes with the television crew. A chain-smoking man named Peter Barrington was the producer.
“Huh! Damned cold today,” he said, batting together his mittened hands. “Glad I’m not up there. Where’s our pilot this morning?”
He’d made films on architecture and English poets. Then he’d gone to Nepal, which made him the expert on mountaineering, he said with a captious air. He knew all the jargon, however. He used it freely. Cabot, he secretly called “The Strangler.” Much of his time was spent in the bar at a table with an overflowing ashtray—he was waiting for certain equipment, for the weather to improve, for a call from London.
“Good morning, Mr. Barrington,” they would say.
“Beautiful morning, isn’t it? What do you suppose we should do today? Take a few more pictures of the mountain?”
“We could do that.”
“What are they up to today?”
It had been slow going. Cabot had broken his thumb in a twenty-foot fall. It hadn’t stopped him; he kept at it, doing as much as anyone, even more. He was the only one who believed they would reach the top. The others, in a sense, were automatons.
The face was completely frozen. There was no rockfall to speak of but the cold was intense. Avalanches were frequent. Slowly, with unwavering determination, a route, completely new, was being pushed up. Fixed ropes were left in place so that going up and down could be managed quickly. The focus of effort was always the highest point.
By mid-January they were halfway up the wall. Two well-stocked bivouacs dug out of snow had been established, bunkers Cabot called them. They had to find a third. The fixed ropes would the
n be taken down and, starting from the bottom, one man would attempt the climb. That had not been the original idea—it had come to him as time went on. From the third bunker it would be one sustained push, carrying food and equipment with him. He would climb to the summit alone.
But the third bunker defied them. They were on a very steep part of the face. There was no snow, only solid ice that had to be chipped away inch by inch. Their hands were frozen, their feet. Three hundred feet above was a place where it looked slightly better.
There’s going to be no third bloody bivouac, Bray was thinking. There’s going to be nothing. He was exhausted, his fingers were burning with cold. He could feel nothing in his feet. He was afraid of losing his toes, having them freeze, but it did no good to think of it. He hated the clear, cold weather that had come two days before. He hated Cabot. Ten more, he muttered to himself as he chopped at the ice. Small slivers shot off like spray. Every other blow did nothing. All right, then, another ten, he vowed.
“How are you doing up there?”
Cabot was almost directly below. Bray could see the top of his head. He didn’t answer.
“How’s it going?” Cabot called.
“I can’t do it,” Bray muttered.
“What?”
“My hands are freezing.”
After a while he came down.
“How far did you get?”
“Not very far. It’s like cutting steel.”
“Let me try.”
Cabot went up using the jumars—devices with one-way ratchets in them. Pushed up alternately, they had long, nylon loops to stand in. He went up smoothly, spinning around slowly on the taut rope. Soon there was the distant, rhythmic sound of his ax. It was ten in the morning. They’d been at work since dawn.
“They’re predicting good weather. They expect it to last through the week,” Barrington said. “It’s coming from the east.”
They had come back to the hotel. It was too cold to stay on the face and not that much time was lost in going up the ropes. It could be done in darkness.
“Incredible cold. I don’t know how you do it,” Barrington said. “Can you see a place for the last bunker?”
“Not yet,” Cabot said. “Don’t worry.”
Carol had gone to Munich to talk to some television people. The curtain had not risen for the final act but it would not be long. Something had been sacrificed in the way it all was arranged. The climb was not classic—it was, in a sense, corrupt. The conquest of heights by any means and for whatever purpose is questionable. Of course, this was never brought up. The involvement was too great and Cabot was too compelling a figure. He was the kind of man who did not conform to standards, he created them.
“It’s just that if we could take advantage of the good weather …,” Barrington said.
“We’re trying.”
“Because afterwards, it could be …difficult.”
“Look, would you like to go up there yourself?” Cabot said.
Barrington reddened. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t accomplish much.”
“No.” Cabot suddenly changed his tone—the soup was being served, he drew the plate toward him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get it. It’s just a little farther.”
Bray was two chairs away, hunched over, eating in silence.
“There’s the man who’s going to do it.”
It fell on the ears of a sullen acolyte with blistered lips, weary of it all.
“He’ll do it. And gentlemen in England now a-bed will think themselves accurs’d they were not here, right?”
Bray continued eating as if he hadn’t heard. Later Audrey came down. They’d been married in the fall. They hadn’t taken a honeymoon, two days in Brighton, that was all.
“You’ve eaten,” she said. “I thought you were going to wait for me.” She sat down. “What did you have?”
“I think it was a cutlet.”
“God, your face.”
“What, this?” He touched his lip.
“Are you going up again tomorrow?”
“I suppose so. Ask him.”
She turned to Cabot.
“Are you?” She wasn’t sure why she disliked him—his cold determination, they all had some of that.
Cabot was tired, too. His face was scalded from the cold. His eyes were red. In the corridor, afterward, he stopped her.
“Don’t discourage him,” he said. “It’s been hard.”
There was music coming from the bar. Along the corridor over their heads passed the sound of someone running. Then laughter, again from the bar. White-aproned cooks were at work in the warmth of the kitchen. Guests sat in front of the television. In the office someone was totaling bills. On the face of the Eiger even the ropes were frozen. They dangled in darkness like strips of wood.
“Is John really tired?”
“Well, you know he doesn’t complain,” she said.
“I know.”
They sat for a while in the bar. Cabot’s blond, scattered hair seemed dull in the subdued light. He was like a derelict seen in the shadows, indistinct, something helpless about him. Perhaps he was asleep.
The next morning they went again. They had decided to stay on the face until they reached the snowfield that seemed to lie above. Bray went first. They had left the hotel in darkness and all the way across the icy fields, a way they had traveled many times, not a word was said. Once Cabot slipped and fell. Bray hadn’t turned around.
All day he bore the brunt. They were making their way up an ice-filled crack. It was twenty minutes’ work to move a foot. The crack slowly widened, he was braced against its sides. Bray felt he was there alone. A strange feeling came over him, a detachment, almost euphoria, as if he were nothing more than a photograph. The silence beneath him vanished, fear fell away. He kept on working upward. He was clinging to nothing, balanced there somehow. He felt his foot begin to slip. He tried to hold on.
“Tension!” he cried.
The rope tightened. It wasn’t enough.
“I’m coming off!” Three thousand feet above the valley he began to fall. He saw it all clearly, he deplored it, he hardly cared.
The rope caught him abruptly. Somehow his leg was entangled in it. He was hanging upside down, ten feet from Cabot.
“Are you all right?”
“I’ve lost my glove,” he said.
Cabot lowered him.
“What happened?”
“Couldn’t do it.” He was breathing hard, his bare hand thrust inside his jacket. “I couldn’t hold on.” It was far into the afternoon. The sun had passed its zenith. The sky seemed white. “Next year I’m going back to plastering,” he said.
“You sure you’re all right?”
Bray nodded. He looked down. Suddenly he felt frightened. His courage had gone. After a while, he asked, “Are you going up to try?”
“You only have one glove.”
“Anyway, look at the weather,” Bray said. Clouds had appeared in the distance.
He was spent, that much is certain. Late in the day the two figures which had been motionless for hours began to descend. Perhaps the rope had been worn against the ice. Perhaps a rock had cut it. No one would ever know. To those who were watching, a speck of color seemed to free itself and move very slowly, almost to float, down the face. And with it, the cry,
“Someone’s fallen!”
Audrey often passed her time in a sitting room where the guests had tea. There she would talk to people, write postcards and read. It was the most natural thing in the world, sitting there, drinking tea, receiving the curious glances of tourists and their identical questions. Where are they? they asked and she would point them out as well as she could.
“Oh, my.”
“How far up are they?”
“A long way.”
“Doesn’t it make you nervous?”
“I don’t think about it,” she said.
She had heard nothing. She saw people suddenly rising all along the veranda. There wa
s a crowd at the telescope.
“What is it? What’s happened?” she asked. She’d been reading. The book lay face down beside her. As she stood up, she felt frightened. She could not hear what they were saying, she could not hear anything. It was like a vacuum. In a moment the eyes of the crowd would turn toward her. She was certain of it. “Please. What’s happened?” she said.
22
THAT NIGHT IT BEGAN to snow. In the dusk it fell softly. People were talking at dinner. Waiters glided across the room. Some time after seven, Cabot, who had been out for hours at the foot of the wall, knocked on the partly open door.
“Come in.” It was Barrington’s voice. Audrey was sitting in a chair, a cardigan around her shoulders.
“Hello, Jack,” Barrington said. “Are they all back?”
Pieces of Bray’s equipment were scattered around, boots behind the door, socks drying on the radiator. Cabot sat down. He found it hard to speak.
“We got back a little while ago,” he said.
“Is it snowing hard?”
“Pretty hard. One thing that’s almost sure,” he said, not looking at Audrey, “he was unconscious the whole time.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know. I saw him hit his head, right at the start.”
“You saw that?”
“Yes, I should think so,” Barrington confirmed. “It’s very jagged there.”
The word was disturbing. “Jagged …”
“Lots of outcrops.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said.
They were silent. The immense length of the fall and the helplessness of the climber, falling, filled the room. After a while Barrington rose and left. He would look in later, he said.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Cabot finally managed—the shock had been great for him. “The rope …it must have caught on something. I can’t imagine. It’s …it could have happened to anyone.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
“It was just one of those impossible accidents.”
“No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t an accident. I knew you would kill him,” she said. “I knew it the first time I laid eyes on you.”