by James Salter
“You don’t believe that.”
“Oh, yes.”
“It’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?” she said. “Oh, yes. He was only a little man, I mean compared to you, but he was loyal, he had a good heart. You could make him do anything. All you had to say was you didn’t think he could do it and do it he would. Well, you know that. I’ve seen you make him. So the rope broke and now he’s gone. Last night he was here. He stood right in front of that mirror. He was dead tired, but you’d never stop him because he was tired. Now, where is he? I don’t even know where he is.” She had begun to cry. “You’ll go on,” she said. “You’ll get to the top. You won’t even remember him.”
“That’s not so.”
“Oh, yes, it is,” she cried.
“Listen, Audrey, it’s hard to explain.” He paused for a moment. “I didn’t make him do anything, he did it for the same reason I did. The mountains make you do it. You do it because of yourself.”
She stood by the window staring out at the snow. She was hugging herself, her arms clasped beneath her breasts.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” she said wearily. The way she was holding herself, as if she could expect nothing more from life, the clothes and cosmetics on the dresser, the pale square of bed reflecting light, these seemed to be speaking for her. The room was warm. The silence was mounting, like a bill that would have to be paid.
“Come and have dinner. You don’t want to be alone tonight,” he said. “If you like, we’ll eat in the bar. I’ll ask them to serve us there.”
“I don’t want to go to the bar.”
“It’ll do you some good.”
“No, leave me alone.”
He put his arm around her.
“Audrey …” He tried to say something else, but said nothing.
She nodded, she didn’t know why. She’d begun to cry again, the tears running down her cheeks.
“What’s going to happen to me?” she said.
“You’ll go back to England.”
She looked at him.
“Is that all?” she said.
He made a vague gesture.
“Is that all?”
“I’ll meet you in five minutes,” he said.
She did not answer.
“Are you coming downstairs?”
“Yes,” she finally said.
“In a few minutes?”
“Yes.”
He did not move. He saw there was no need to. Instead he put his hand on her breast, he had been looking at it for weeks.
“Don’t,” she said. He felt her shudder. “Don’t.”
He turned her toward him.
It was as if they had spoken, as if it had always been agreed. The snow fell through the night.
There was a small item at the bottom of the page, CLIMBER KILLED IN FALL. His eye was skipping the words. The blood left his face, he tried to read calmly. Wengen, Jan. 24. Authorities identified today a 23-year-old English climber who fell 3,000 feet to his death on the Eiger yesterday …
It was Sunday in Paris and cold. Around him people were talking, the television was on. He felt as drained and colorless as the day. Suddenly everything was dreary. He was irritated by French being spoken, by the strangers around him, by the ignorance of the world. He thought of a little grinning man in a dirty jacket, small hands. Are you coming to England? We’ll work together, he said. The two of us. Side by side.
23
CATHERIN CAME DOWN THE stairway buttoning her coat. He was waiting outside.
They walked toward the center of town. There were people everywhere; Chamonix was filled with the last crowds of winter. Cars passed, spattered with mud.
“Well, what did he say?”
“It’s definite,” she said.
“Definite?”
“The test is positive.”
“I don’t understand it. How could that be?”
“It just is,” she said.
He was silent. He stared disinterestedly into shop windows as they walked.
“Would you like a coffee?” she asked.
They sat near the back, Rand slumped in his chair.
“Well, I see the news has thrilled you,” she remarked.
“It’s not that. It’s just …”
“What?”
“It’s just a surprise.”
“Well, I’m surprised, too.”
“It’s not exactly what I was planning on.”
“I see that.”
The waitress returned with the coffee.
“What are you planning on?” Catherin asked. She took three cubes of sugar and dropped them in the tiny cup.
“Not family life.”
She said nothing.
“I wouldn’t be a good father.”
“How do you know?” She was slowly stirring her coffee. “You’d be a very good father.”
“Don’t have it,” he finally said.
“It’s too late.”
“What do you mean, too late?”
“It’s sixteen weeks.”
The number meant nothing to him. He was sure she was lying. “I’d like to know how it happened,” he insisted. “How could it?”
“I don’t know. Something went wrong.”
“What?”
“Is this the investigation? Why didn’t you investigate before we started?”
“I can’t be a father,” he said.
She was silent.
“You don’t want to marry. Perhaps that’s what you mean.”
“Perhaps.”
“Yes. I understand.”
A terrible heaviness hung on him. He gazed around the room vaguely, as if for a different idea.
“Well, I don’t know what to do,” she complained.
“Catherin, you know what my life is like.”
“Ça veut dire quoi?” After a while she added, “Do you want to go on like you are?”
“You don’t go on like you are. A year from now, two years, I won’t be the same.”
“What will you be?”
“How should I know? I don’t want to be tied down.”
“You won’t be,” she said. “I promise. You can always do anything you like.”
The words thrilled him. He might have accepted them on the spot if she had not been so abject. Besides, she would forget what she was saying now, her instincts as a woman would come out. That was what always happened.
“You want me to get rid of it,” she said finally.
Yes, he thought, but for some reason said nothing. There is a moment when the knife must be pushed in coldly, otherwise the victim triumphs. He looked at her, aware that the moment was passing.
“Oh, hell,” he muttered.
She knew that she had failed him. She felt helpless, in despair.
“Talk to me,” she pleaded.
He said nothing.
That spring he was seldom in Chamonix. He was up in one refuge hut or another, sometimes for days. It was early in the season. The sleeping rooms were empty, the mattresses side by side. After 9 P.M. Silence, commanded the signs.
Occasionally other climbers appeared. They rarely spoke. The huts were still cold from winter, with outdated tariffs pinned on the wall. It was difficult when he came back down. He came less often and stopped at the shop.
“Ça va?” he murmured awkwardly. Her shape did not seem to have changed.
“How was it up there?”
“Still a lot of snow.”
“So that’s where it is,” she said.
He failed to smile. As soon as he could, he left, somewhat sensitive to what she might say. He hated parting comments. There was a kind of agreement that they were still somehow together, at least the appearance was maintained. In a town as small as Chamonix things are found out quickly although, in the strictest sense, they were outsiders.
“I’m going up to Argentière,” he said one day. “If conditions aren’t too good, I might wait around for a while, you know what I mean.”
“
You don’t have to hurry back,” she said. “I’m not going to be here.”
It was like a sudden blow.
“Oh? Where are you going?”
There is a time when one says, I love you more than life itself, I will give you anything. Somehow the memory of that flickered before her—she was leaving, she had already decided—it was like a last glance back.
“I’m going to Paris,” she said.
“Well, I’ll see you when you come back.”
She did not answer. She was remembering his face for the last time. Her silence frightened him.
“Or will I?” he said. Suddenly he was desperate. He was tormented by her. He loved her and this love was choking him. He wanted her and was afraid of what it meant.
“No. I’m going to visit a friend,” she told him.
“Who?”
“What difference does it make?”
What difference? It was maddening. All the difference in the world, suddenly. He tried to convince her but she would not tell.
The friend was Henri Vigan. Catherin had once been his mistress—for two years—and left because he would not marry her. She went back to him. He accepted her willingly. If she wished, he said, he would consider the child as his own.
She settled in Izeaux—Vigan had his box factories near there—in an old house right on the street, built in the days when only an occasional carriage or cart passed by. The outside walls were plain, even drab, but the interior was warm and comfortable as only French country houses can be, with many doors giving onto the garden. There she was happy or at least freed from the difficulty of loving the wrong person. It would be wrong to say she did not think of him, but she did so with less and less frequency.
Vigan was kind and understanding. He was also flattered to have her back, doubly so since she had come from the arms of a younger, unconventional man. When she wanted to return to Chamonix to get her clothes, he forbade her.
“I’ll have someone collect them and take them up to my house. You can’t wear them now, anyway.”
He found her more beautiful, as pregnant women often are. Her appetite, her need for rest, and the return of her good humor filled him with a deep satisfaction. She was luminous with a contentment that is only hinted at in the wake of the sexual act. This was the fullest aspect of it and it was he who luxuriated in its warmth. The days before she came to Izeaux faded and were forgotten.
“I was really miserable,” she said. “I had the most depressing thoughts. I wanted to kill myself and have a gravestone like Dumas’ mistress with nothing but four dates, one in each corner: the date I met him, the date we first made love …”
It was early summer. The doors to the garden were open.
“As I remember, those were the same dates.”
“No.”
“I thought it was that memorable night you left the party together.”
“Was it that obvious?”
“You were absolutely stunned.”
“Please,” she said.
“I envied you.”
He was filled with a sense of well-being. In the light from the windows, late in the day, he looked no more than thirty-five. The clothes in his closet and bureau drawers were always neatly arranged, even the small shining scissors and various bottles on the bathroom shelf. Le Monde was on the entrance table with the letters, the bedclothes were fresh, the cook, a woman from the village, was good-natured and calm. His views on politics Catherin disagreed with, he was secretive about money, she would have preferred a younger man, but all in all she felt very disposed toward him, she felt they were bound together in a way that would not be undone. She liked the well-worn surfaces, the comfort of the house. She admired the details of his life.
Of Rand she thought only rarely. She received no letters from him, not even as the birth of her child drew near, but then, perhaps he did not know where to write.
24
HE DID THE NORTH Face of the Triolet and the éperon ridge of the Droites, alone. He could have found a companion, almost anyone would have jumped at the chance, but he left Chamonix by himself and for one reason or another began climbing that way.
The Triolet is steep, the ice that covers it never melts. It is climbed with crampons, a grid of spikes fastened to the boot. There are two that point straight ahead and can be kicked into the ice. The full weight goes on them.
He started early. The face was like a huge, descending river, steepening all the way. Its breath was cold. The sound of his crampons was crisp in the silence. He worked methodically, an ice ax in each hand. He became lost in the rhythm. The thought of slipping—he would have shot down the incline as if it were glass—first came to him only when he was far up, and it came in a strange way. He had paused for a moment to rest. The tips of his crampons were driven in a fraction, barely half an inch—that half-inch would not fail. A kind of bliss came over him as he realized this, a feeling of invulnerability unlike anything he had known. It was as if the mountain had ordained him; he did not refuse it.
He was happy, held there by the merest point of steel, above all difficulties somehow, above all fears. This is how one must feel at the end, he thought uneasily, a surge of joy before the final moment. He looked past his feet. The steepness was dazzling. Far above him was a great bulge of ice. There were two ways past it, two ways only.
Each step, each kick into the rime, methodical, sure, took him farther and farther up. He thought of Bray. For a moment it was as if he were there. These lonely faces, these days, were still his, he existed in them. Dead and dismembered, he was not gone. He had not disappeared, only stepped offstage. The day brought thoughts of him, the feeling of triumph as he passed the overhang, the view that awaited at the top.
He was often seen, rope over one shoulder, a pack on his back, headed out. He was off for a stroll, he would say. In the morning he woke among peaks incredibly white against the muted sky. There is something greater than the life of the cities, greater than money and possessions; there is a manhood that can never be taken away. For this, one gives everything.
A strange thing’s happened to me, he wrote to Cabot, I’ve lost all fear of death. I’m only climbing solo these days. I did the N. Face of the Triolet and the Coutrier on the Verte. Fantastic. I can’t explain it. What’s happening in the States? Where have you been?
It was not only solitude that had changed him but a different understanding. What mattered was to be a part of existence, not to possess it. He still knew the anguish of perilous climbs, but he knew it in another way. It was a tribute; he was willing to pay it. A secret pleasure filled him. He was envious of no one. He was neither arrogant nor shy.
Early in August he arrived at the small refuge hut on the Fourche. It was evening. On the long trek across the glacier he had passed Pointe Lachenal, the Grand Capucin. The sun had passed behind Mont Blanc. He made his way in twilight.
The hut was nearly full. The vast face of Mont Blanc, directly opposite, had sunk into darkness. Voices, when they spoke, were low. Most of the climbers had gone to sleep.
“Bonsoir,” someone whispered. It was a guide, one of the younger ones. Rand knew him by sight.
“Bonsoir.”
“Beau temps, eh?”
“Incomparable.”
The guide moved his hand one way and the other—who knew how long it would last—and glanced at the entry Rand had made in the book, “Brenva, eh?”
Rand did not reply.
He made some soup and found a place on the wooden sleeping shelf. As he drew the blanket around him there was a cough in the darkness, the cough of a woman. He turned his head slightly. He could not see her. A sudden loneliness swept over him. He was frightened by its strength. Lying there he fell into dreams. Catherin came to him, just as she was when they first had met. The newness of her dazed him, exactly as then. The little Renault parked behind the shop, the smell of her breath, her sudden smile. How impossible ever to tire of her, her scent, the white of her underclothes, her hair. Her face amon
g the pillows, her naked back, the watery light of mornings in which she gleamed. Her slender hand touching him—he could feel these things, words collapsed in his head. She became a harem, a herd, his mind was wandering, multiplying her as she cried, as she yelped like a cur. The memory overwhelmed him. In the darkness he lay like a stone.
At dawn the sky was overcast. It had begun to snow. No one would climb that day. A few parties had already started down. He noticed the woman who had coughed, he heard her complaining, in fact. She was English, wearing a thick sweater and climbing pants unfastened at the knee. He watched her comb her hair.
“What do you think?” she came over to ask. “Will it clear?”
“Hard to say.”
“I can’t decide whether or not to go down.” Her voice seemed amiable. “How do you manage to stay so calm?”
Rand was boiling water.
“Could I have some tea?” she asked. She watched as he poured it. “Are you really doing the Brenva?”
“Perhaps.”
“And you’re going alone.” She put in three spoonfuls of sugar. “Isn’t that asking for trouble?”
“Not really,” he said.
Her eyes were direct and gray. She was not like Audrey. She was a different breed.
“But one mistake and it’s all over, isn’t it?” A pause. “My guide seems to think you’re some sort of outlaw,” she said.
“Well, guides sleep in warm beds.”
“And you?”
“Occasionally,” he said.
“I would imagine.”
“Are you here for the season?”
“Just a fortnight. I’m with my husband, he’s a very good climber, he’s been doing it for years. I’m afraid he’s a bit irritated at the moment.”
“Is he?”
“He’s hurt his leg. He fell on the Blaitière, so I came with a guide but I think I’m a bit over my head. You’re the American who does everything by himself, aren’t you? I don’t think I know your name.”
“Rand.”
“Yes, that’s it. Rand …?”
“Vernon Rand.”
“I saw you come in last night. To be truthful, it frightened me. I wasn’t sure I should even be up here. When I saw you, I knew I shouldn’t be.”
“Well, you have a guide.”