I’m arming myself with patience. Apparently, when they are asked about the animals of the region and the inhabitants of the mountains, those questioned speak unprompted about the relict hominids. I never question them about this […] When they see our interest, they invite us to go in search of visual evidence. The most surprising thing is that the existence of these creatures is seen by the inhabitants as no different from that of any other living being. They take them down in the record of things that are natural and real, not things of mythical tradition. [Diary.]
The coincidences in the accounts of the witnesses had been awakening his curiosity more and more, although it was those cries on the second night that prompted him to collect some new statements without sparing his efforts. He had begun to believe in earnest.
Yannik had nearly killed himself by falling down a fifty-metre gully while trying to take a photo, and the bruising had forced him to take several days’ rest. When they ran out of food, they ate the fruit from the trees, and the plants they found along the path. Jordi hunted lizards with the same crossbow with which he had intimidated a group of men who had wanted to attack him. Then they roasted the lizards in strips and ate them. He managed to do more interviews and, thanks to his skill at drawing, he sketched out the first outlines of wild men according to the indications that the locals had given him.
Returning from one of the excursions, he fell ill with a fever, and his periodic toothache came back.
‘Nothing serious — a flu,’ the Chitral doctor diagnosed.
They didn’t sell aspirin in Chitral, and since he also needed to deal with a number of administrative requirements in Peshawar, Jordi bought a plane ticket for the following day. It was May, and the sky was a constant blue. His body was feverish. Flying over Dir, the gigantic spectacle of the mountains crushed him. He took a biro, opened his diary, and wrote: ‘I do understand that our enterprise consists of looking for a needle in a haystack.’ The peaks went on and on. Faced with that concentration of mountains, grottos, cliffs, forests, and gorges, he asked himself: ‘Which of them to explore first? Which will allow us to reach our goal?’
VIII
ONE day in 1949, a doctor of zoology called Bernard Heuvelmans opens the Saturday Evening Post and reads an article entitled ‘There May Be Dinosaurs’. He’s wary when he sees that it’s signed by a writer he trusts. Then, amid the claims made in the text, he reads the names of researchers he also considers serious, and by the end he has found that he needs to look into the information.
Seven years later, he publishes On the Track of Unknown Animals, introducing a series of animals discovered to date in the twentieth century. Most of them are pretty big. There you’ll find the okapi, the coelacanth, the Paraguayan peccary, the pygmy hippopotamus, the Cambodian wild ox, and the Komodo dragon.
Heuvelmans is a scientist, he considers himself a scientist, the animals he writes about exist ‘in reality’, but he has demonstrated that many of them were only located after conversations with indigenous people who gave assurances of their existence by recounting stories, describing them. Before they were discovered, these animals were no more than legends to westerners, or the victims of extinction. In which case, why should we not believe other stories told about fugitive beings?
Heuvelmans decides that those creatures that have powerfully anchored themselves in the imagination deserve to be sought out — he considers them a real possibility because in one sense they do already exist — and so into his new club he welcomes animals ranging from the Tasmanian wolf to the giant squid, the Mokele-Mbembe (a sort of brontosaurus from Cameroon), and the Loch Ness Monster. Thus he founds cryptozoology, a science that uses scientific methods to seek and study creatures that are by definition invisible.
The yeti is the star of all the crypto-zoological creatures.
Apart from Edmund Hillary — the hero of Everest — or the similarly illustrious alpinist Reinhold Messner, one man stands out among the names of yeti hunters: the Russian Boris Porshnev, the philosopher and historian who, from the nineteen-fifties, immersed himself in the study of prehistoric man.
It was he who indicated Chitral as ‘one of the permanent habitat zones most favourable to the wild men’, and who got on well with Heuvelmans to the point of co-authoring a book that would stimulate the dreams of thousands: Neanderthal Man Is Still Alive.
Long before he left for Pakistan, Jordi Magraner had initiated a correspondence with Heuvelmans, a misanthrope who claimed to prefer apes to humans. Remarkably, Heuvelmans did maintain contact with his young admirer. And that wasn’t all.
Years later, he would write to him: ‘If you were able to find it, it would be the greatest joy of my life.’
IX
To Julien, making a fortune meant in the first place leaving Verrières; he loathed his native place. Everything that he saw there froze his imagination.
(extract underlined in Jordi Magraner’s copy of Le Rouge et le Noir)
LANDING in Paris, he felt a desire to urinate. The first bathroom he found was out of order. In the second, he had to wait his turn in a queue. The filthy stench of the toilets and this difficulty in immediately satisfying such a basic need reminded him of the ease of the forests. He had spent the whole flight missing the valleys he had just left, weighing up how he might return to add further testimonials to the twenty-seven he was already hoarding, and devising ways to get hold of money.
‘I’ve got to go back there,’ he told his friend Jean-Paul Thomas, who had looked after his eleven lizards while he was travelling.
‘But you’ve only just got back — take it easy,’ replied Thomas, picking up one of the two babies born in Jordi’s absence. ‘You’ve got two more mouths to feed now.’
Thirteen lizards. A number and a species without many admirers. Jean-Paul asked again why his friend liked reptiles, why amphibians, those animals almost nobody bothered with professionally in the Ardèche. There, almost all the researchers opted for ornithology or mammals. Jean-Paul himself was an amateur naturalist, while earning his wage as a primary-school teacher.
He stared hard at Jordi. Perhaps you needed to be a certain kind of person to be attracted to these fauna … Who knows? The fact was, the pro-reptilian virus had got to them both very early, in their childhoods. At ten, Jean-Paul had built his own terrarium. In it, he put tarantulas, snakes, a gecko … things developed over many years in anarchic fashion, until he found Jordi, who schooled him in scientific rigour. With him, he learned to catch reptiles by tying a little bow to the end of an extendable antenna. He saw himself as his student.
That night, Jordi was expressing himself with particular vehemence. They chatted about Pakistan, about the barmanu, about fauna, about politics. Jean-Paul defended his views as a trade unionist affiliated to the French Communist Party and, as usual, they argued.
‘Come on, Jordi, how can you still be spouting that right-wing line, coming from where you come from? In the context of the class struggle, it’s the left that best represents our class — can’t you see that?’
‘The left? Man, come on …’ replied Jordi, grabbing hold of the table edge with both hands. ‘The left fantasises, it doesn’t confront real problems. You can’t just live in a fantasy world. You really think it’s the left that will create jobs in the banlieues? You think the left is going to get the flow of immigrants under control? You ought to go to one of those meetings Michel organises, at least there they say things clearly.’
‘Noooo! Are you letting yourself get brainwashed by that trash? Fuck’s sake, Jordi. I don’t want anything to do with the far right. They can all go to hell. Those people talk about purifying France, about going back to the values of I don’t know how many centuries ago. You really think that’s some kind of alternative? Come off it.’
Jean-Paul’s replies fired him up agreeably. His friend stood up to him without any complexes, forcing him to come up with solid arguments. Michel’s
friends, who would later found Terre et Peuple, made a good case, though Jean-Paul’s arguments were not bad either. When Jordi glanced as his watch, it was three in the morning. They sat for a few moments in silence, slumped on the sofas.
‘So now what?’ asked Jean-Paul.
‘I’ve got to look for work.’
He shaved with care, put on his best suit, and showed up at the meeting with the employees of the Ministry of Housing, convinced that they would accept him. All those dozens of job applications he’d sent in recent weeks had been of some use.
The ministry recruiter had Jordi’s c.v. on his desk.
‘Senior Technician in Agriculture from the Lycée Agricole Le Valentin de Bourg-lès-Valence,’ the official read. Letting go of the sheet, he added — ‘Well, then … but that’s not what matters most. We know you’re considered one of the leading experts in the invertebrates of the Rhône-Alpes region. And this most recent expedition to … Pakistan?’
‘Yes, to Chitral, in Pakistan.’
‘It would appear this expedition has sent your professional reputation sky-rocketing.’
Jordi did not react.
‘We have an offer to make you. We want you to study the design of the route of the A44 motorway that will connect Balbigny to Lyon. We need to determine where the bridges should be placed to allow the local fauna to cross from one side to the other without harming the ecosystem. If it works out, you’ll be doing the route of the A72, too. What do you say?’
The first night of work, he took a deep breath, clapped his hands, put on his helmet lamp, and went out to map the surroundings of the motorway. Alone, lighting up fields and animals with the ultra-powerful light of his beam, he was feeling exceptionally good. Checking out the inside of holes and grottos, inhaling the damp smell of the earth and the vegetation, walking expectantly, that was what he liked. He would return at dawn as tired as he was happy, and that was why, in the time that followed, he would each night repeat the same steps he’d taken on that inaugural night before beginning his walk: taking a deep breath, clapping his hands, and putting on his helmet lamp. He could walk between ten and fifteen kilometres, ferreting around in caves, testing the firmness of embankments, making a note of the animal species he saw.
‘Sometimes I turn out the light and wait for something to come along,’ he told his friend Erik L’Homme one afternoon at Valence’s Le Continental café.
‘Something?’ asked Erik.
‘Whatever. The other day I caught a snake.’
‘One day you’re going to get bitten.’
‘They’ve bitten me before now. That’s why I use hypodermic needles — they’re good for sucking out the venom. Then you put on some anti-coagulant, a decent anti-inflammatory, and you’re all set.’
The smile was distorting half his face.
‘I want to go back to Chitral,’ he added. ‘But your brother has already told me he can’t go — he’s got to do his national service.’
Chairs squeaked as they were pushed back. A waiter clinked glasses as he took them out of the sink.
‘Come with me,’ suggested Jordi. ‘You’d like it.’
It wasn’t often that Erik wrinkled his smooth, pale brow. He glanced at the station clock, which was visible from their table. In a few minutes he had to board the train to southern Drôme. He continued to study history at Lyon, and since he was still living in the southern Drôme, he took advantage of a two-hour stop in Valence to have a chat with his old friend about anything — about their days in the boy scouts, about the world, about religions.
‘So there was Jordi, waiting for an answer … Then my mind went back to that afternoon in 1987, before the very first expedition with my brother, when he’d told me his theory about the wild men. As a historian, I was really struck by that, fascinated. Jordi was exceptionally convincing, he was charismatic. He was extraordinary,’ said Erik nearly twenty years after that conversation. His skin is as smooth as ever, giving him an adolescent look, though he’s already in his forties. He lives in an old family mansion that has stood for more than four centuries to the south of Drôme. He avoids noise whenever he can; he values isolation.
‘What could I tell him? I’m a wild man!’ he exclaimed with a laugh.
Erik L’Homme is a bestselling author of children’s books. In his Tales from a Lost Kingdom, he revived very ancient Chitrali stories, and he has just finished another book, Footsteps in the Snow, based on the expeditions he took with Jordi. Those days have also left him with a back injury that stops him carrying heavy weights and forces him to write in ergonomic chairs.
‘I wasn’t able to sit down and write it until a few months ago — it was all too emotional, too many things had happened. But last year I got past the block. In this book I talk about my favourite memories. It’s a way for me to say the world is still full of dreams and surprises. It’ll have about seventy of Yannik’s photos in it.’
‘How long did it take you to write?’ I asked him, sitting in an elegant wooden chair in Le Continental.
‘I’ll give the answer Picasso gave: fifteen years … and three months.’
Erik, like Esperanza, had needed to remain in mourning for more than five years to try to restore his memory of Jordi. They’re odd, these synchronicities, the way periods of pain are shared.
‘He was extraordinary,’ Erik said again.
Extraordinary in what way? When he was eleven or twelve, Jordi broke his right arm. He didn’t complain once. Once they had put it in a cast, he insisted on going back to school, and he learned to use his left hand; he didn’t want anyone to dress him. In his early twenties he had a car accident while driving through the mountains. He broke the steering wheel with his face. His jaw was split in three, he broke his nose, and he nearly lost an eye. He also lost several teeth, the muscles of his face lost their elasticity, and his face was left slightly paralysed. From then on, his face tensed depending on his expression, making him look fake when he laughed.
At the end of his recovery, he removed his own stitches. From then on, he would resort to aspirin to alleviate his now perennial dental annoyances. The accidents didn’t change his personality in the least. Ever since he was little, he had dealt with every adversity, however big, concerned only with reaching his goals, dedicating a lot of time to devising plans that would allow him to fulfil them.
Jordi had soon realised that progressing even his childhood plans was going to need money, and he invented a kind of agreeable tax that his amused older siblings — only Andrés was younger than him — had paid. Now, if he wanted to return to Chitral, he would need another solution like it.
His first thought as ever went to Andrés. His brother was a sure thing. He’d given him ten thousand francs to allow him to finance the first trip. But no, he couldn’t do it, he shouldn’t abuse the trust and affection of the youngest in the family, and it wasn’t as though Andrés had money to spare.
Provisionally settled in his sister Esperanza’s house in Lyon, he sent letters to various bodies and people, asking them for material or economic support for his plan, while reading the writings of Pierre Grimal on the Roman civilisation he so admired. He copied down maxims on loose scraps of paper. As he wrote them, he felt how the words embedded themselves in him even more deeply:
Austerity, discipline, faithfulness to her engagements, and strict honesty […] A Roman’s word is his law.
Anyone who becomes addicted to luxury shows that he is lacking in self-discipline. Man ought to overcome this instinct for easiness that destroys societies.
The barmanu was waiting for him. It was undoubtedly his priority now, but he couldn’t even name it, because who would take him seriously if he did? In a few letters, he masked his real intention by referring exclusively to the research into chiroptera and amphibians he was planning to carry out in the Hindu Kush. Writing to prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, he did explain his aims more clearly.
The person in charge at the Aga Khan Foundation was an Ismaili, a branch of Islam governed by the spirit of the Koran, rather than its text. Their interpretation of the Koran is looser and, perhaps in order to counteract the totalitarian pressures from the Sunni majority, the Aga Khan Foundation had the financial backing of a number of western states. Since there was a sizeable Ismaili community in Chitral, getting their support was important, and not only for economic reasons.
While he waited for answers, Jordi established the Troglodytes Association with the aim of attracting subscriptions from people interested in the investigation he was going to carry out. In exchange, he would distribute an annual report on the progress of his studies. The official headquarters would be the family home in Valence.
And it worked.
Three months after launching the Troglodytes, when he pressed the equals sign on his calculator, the numbers worked out right. He hadn’t raised large sums of money, but the subscription instalments and other supportive contributions from members were going to allow him to escape not just Valence but the whole of stifling France. Why did he feel so distant from the country that had taken him in, the country where he’d grown up? The thing was, his instinct didn’t often fail him, and it obliged him to put some distance between them. As soon as possible.
As he waited at the window of the bank to be given the savings book where he had paid in the money from the last subscribers, he consulted the clock on the wall. There were still several hours to go before he was due to return to his prospecting tasks on the A44. Pah, the work wasn’t bad, it actually entertained him, but the simple gesture of watching the clock just to fulfil a schedule bothered him. It drew his memories back to him, triggering associations. How could the A44 possibly compete with the valleys of the Hindu Kush? And, of course, the city could bear no comparison with Chitral. The colours, the oppressiveness of the space, the artifice, and above all the monotony, this accumulation of programmed and predictable situations, overwhelmed him to ever more unbearable limits. What life must she have, the poor girl who handled his savings book behind the bulletproof glass? The clerk passed back the booklet, naming a sum that was small but much more than he needed. How little he needed to get by. How lucky he was.
In the Land of Giants Page 4