by Tim Weed
A blast of music reaches their ears as the doors to the great hall swing open. It’s Celia, exquisitely flushed from the exertion of dancing. “I told them I was going to have a cigarette. Why are you being so cold, Henry? Why won’t you dance with me?”
“I thought you—that is, I didn’t know that you—”
Lloyd shakes his head, smiling, and takes out a box of Choward’s Violets. Out of politeness he offers it to the couple, but they don’t notice, and he judges it best to leave them alone.
The new snow has restored the upper meadows to their virgin state, an unbroken expanse of sloping fields guarded by the snow-blanketed figures of sleeping conifers. Henry breaks trail up to the base of Diamondback Mountain’s horseshoe cirque, where the party unloads the gear and prepare for the morning’s motion picture shoot. He takes off his skis and postholes through deep snow to help Celia remove her climbing skins. She smiles fleetingly, but there is a sadness in her dark eyes that brings an aching constriction to his throat. He drops his gaze and kneels in the snow to peel the climbing skin from the bottom of her ski. “Everything all right?”
“It’s just that I hardly know you. And we have to leave soon.”
He doubles the skin on itself and stows it in his rucksack. “Don’t think about that, Celia. Not yet. Let’s make the most of the time we have.”
“I can’t help thinking about it.”
He peels off the second skin and folds it slowly—once, twice—crouching over her boots in the snow. Perhaps later in the day they will find a way to be alone together. Her departure still seems abstract to him, as if it doesn’t matter; as if the entire universe is made up of the lodge and the wild Colorado landscape that surrounds it; as if nothing exists outside of it; no politics, no economics, no war, no ocean, no differences in their lives and social positions, not even time. Just these few days: nothing before, nothing after. It’s a crazy thought and he knows it, but it nevertheless strikes him as, in some way, undeniably true.
The party spends a few hours skiing and shooting in the meadows. At midday, Lloyd, Henry, and Mr. Peggett boot-pack a flat area and spread out the lodge’s oversized oiled-canvas tarp. They unload the rucksacks and assemble a picnic of cheese, summer sausage, canned peaches, Hershey’s Bars, and four bottles of fine Italian wine from the Lodge’s cellar.
During lunch, Celia’s father becomes intrigued by what he says is a natural ski run bisecting the central bowl of the horseshoe cirque. He offers to film Lloyd and Henry skiing down it. The brothers gaze apprehensively up at the bowl, but after a moment’s hesitation, they agree to give it a try. Celia looks alarmed, and Mr. Peggett shakes his head. “We don’t generally go up into that sort of terrain this time of year,” he tells the Italian director. “It could be unstable, especially with all this new snow.”
“As you say,” Celia’s father replies. “But these young men seem eager to try it.”
Henry catches Lloyd’s eye. “Eager” is not the word he would use, but the truth is that Celia’s father has issued a challenge, and for his own part, he doesn’t feel like he has much of a choice. “You could send the footage to the newsreels,” he says to Mr. Peggett. “If it’s good enough, this could put the lodge on the map. After all, when it comes to the scenery, Sun Valley has nothing on Diamondback Mountain.”
In the end, Mr. Peggett agrees to let them go. Henry and Lloyd attach their skins and start breaking a trail toward the cirque. Glancing back at the tarp, he waves to Celia and smiles in a way that he intends to be reassuring. She puts a hand up to her mouth, her face pale with worry.
The slope steepens at the foot of the bowl, and the brothers shoulder their skis and use their boot-toes to kick a trail. It’s a slow and difficult climb in the deep snow. The plan is that when they reach the top of the bowl they’ll put on their equipment, and when they’re ready to go, they’ll signal Celia’s father to roll the Cine-Kodak.
The sun pierces the high clouds in such a way that the light is both bright and flat, making it difficult to distinguish contours in the snow. But on the laborious journey up the bowl, there’s no mistaking the steepness of the pitch, and Henry becomes increasingly nervous. As they mount the final cornice, he experiences a knee-weakening attack of vertigo. The slope beneath them falls away so abruptly that their boot trail is hidden from view. Dread hovers around the edges of his consciousness, shadowy batwings flickering in sync with his pulse.
Lloyd presses onward, up along the ramp-like ridge. He’s heading for the most photogenic spot, a high point in the cornice above a broad, funnel-like chute. Because of the light, he’s begun to look slightly unreal to Henry, like a ghost image in a double-exposed photograph. A strong westerly wind funnels down from the mountain, peeling off a sheet of snow and sending it sifting down into the bowl. Beyond Lloyd is the summit crag, rising up out of the snow-covered saddle. It looks especially sinister from this angle, a colossal shelf of barren, charcoal-gray bedrock.
They boot-pack a platform for themselves a few steps back from the lip of the cornice. Far below they can see the dark brown picnic tarp, like a postage stamp in the middle of a white plain fringed by the ant-like bodies of the filming party. Squinting, he can make out Celia—just a hint of that bright white headband—and two dark figures standing a little away from the tarp, which must be her father and Mr. Peggett with the tripod. “Want me to go first?” he asks, shouting to be heard over the howling wind.
“As you prefer,” Lloyd calls back.
Henry raises his hand. After a moment’s delay, one of the stick figures repeats the signal. Henry adjusts his glacier goggles and lowers his hand. The figure below lowers his hand. Lloyd gives him a thumbs-up, and Henry pushes off. The hickories slide across the wind-blasted snow, gaining speed as they approach the cornice lip. The ski tips find empty air, and he plummets.
After a moment of imbalance, he finds his center. The hickories become precise instruments on a slope this steep—gently flexing extensions of his feet—and the snow yields to them, hissing and billowing over his chest and face as he floats downhill in rhythmic sine curves across the fall line. The footage will be excellent, he thinks. The bowl is protected from the wind, and other than the hissing, everything is dead silent. The snow is as light and airy as smoke.
Faint shouts from below reach him. A quick downward glance catches the figures around the tarp, jumping and waving their arms, their enthusiasm oddly excessive, almost hysterical. In the next moment the snow all around him shudders and ripples like a bowl of milk on a shaken table, and that’s when he begins to understand.
Adrenaline shoots through his limbs as he stops turning and points the hickories down the fall line, reasoning that if he can gain enough speed, he may be able to outrun it. But he’s too late. With a thunderous crack, the entire slope dissolves in a field of careening white blocks.
It’s strange how slowly it all unfolds. The initial sensations are almost pleasant. The snow is soft at the beginning, and he’s buoyed along in the middle of it as in a cataract of dry whitewater. But as the avalanche gains momentum, it compresses, becoming a force of surprising brutality. It plunges him into darkness. It pummels his ears and rips off his woolen cap. It punches the breath out of his lungs and bends his body into impossible positions, like a child experimenting with a doll. He tries to swim up to the surface, but the hickories act like sea anchors. Twice he reaches daylight—quick glimpses of a wildly whirling sky—but each time he’s snatched down again into the punishing depths. His left ski comes off, but the other remains attached, twisting his right leg until the knee gives out with a sickening pop.
The avalanche grinds to a halt. He finds himself suspended in an airless darkness that is like a womb of frozen concrete, with an immense weight pressing in on him from all sides. At first he is frantic, but he can’t move more than a twitch, and gradually a feeling of serenity washes over him. When he thinks about it, he’s known for a while that this or something like it was coming. In a way, the pressure of the snow i
s soothing.
A dream or a memory comes into his mind: he and Lloyd at sunset, standing on a hill above the lodge, gazing up at the alpenglow on the summit crag of Diamondback Mountain. The peak glows like a massive, red-gold ember against the black conifers on the mountainside that cradles it. The dying sunlight illuminates every detail, every crack and fissure in the stone.
A blue-black Steller’s jay stares down at them from a ponderosa bough. Its sidelong glare feels strangely familiar, and it opens its heavy beak to utter what sounds for all the world like a phrase in English. Henry feels that he should know the words, but their meaning escapes him. The jay repeats the phrase again and again, and Henry feels that he’s right on the verge of understanding. But he never does.
The next image is of Celia stepping down off the train, hands plunged into the pockets of her wool jacket. Her face is vaguely troubled, as if she’s lost track of something, but can’t quite remember what it is. Her eyes search the platform until they come to rest on his, and then she smiles.
THE FOREIGNER
AT A QUARTER TO SEVEN, James locked up the darkroom, grabbed his camera and tripod, and went out to shoot the procession. There had been a light rain, and the air was perfumed with flowers and melting candlewax. A crowd was forming in the Plaza de la Primavera—no good vantage point for the camera—so he kept walking, tracing the route the celebrants would take along the cobbled street through the Sacromonte. Eventually the crowd began to thin, and the street dwindled to a footpath winding out through the valley toward the Vírgen de la Esperanza chapel. He found a spot that would have a good view of the procession—atop a stone wall at the base of a steep hillside planted with rows of olive trees—and set up the tripod.
To his left and right, and indeed all along the path, onlookers had built small pyres using scraps of cypress and olivewood, and at a precise moment just before dusk—by what pre-arranged signal, James could not guess—the pyres were lit, filling the valley with flickering orange light and a haze of fragrant smoke. The onlookers were subdued, only the occasional outcry of a child rising above the murmur of conversation and the hiss and crackle of the fires. A Spaniard standing on the wall next to James tapped him on the shoulder and held out a bota, but James shook his head. The man raised his eyebrows and offered the wineskin again; when James declined again, he shrugged and pointedly turned his back. The mood was not festive, as a stranger might expect, but solemn, almost grim.
Soon dissonant music came echoing down the valley, the out-of-tune horn march and steady drumbeat familiar from the bullfighting season. The murmur of the onlookers rose in volume, and James stepped behind the tripod to peer through the lens. He felt the tension within his chest dissipate somewhat as the role of photographer filled him with a sense of competence and directedness.
The music was louder now, and the first of the secret societies rounded into view, men dressed in white robes and high conical hoods, disturbingly reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan. “Cofradía de los chapineros,” the Spaniard who’d offered him the bota intoned. He’d turned to face James again, and was staring with a curious intensity.
James adjusted the shutter and aperture to compensate for the celebrants’ white robes, which were surprisingly bright in the smoky half-light. He already knew about the cofradías, which had their roots in the ancient trade guilds. That the city was home to a network of secret fraternities was a strange and faintly unsettling concept.
Several more cofradías filed by—red robes, black robes, one especially striking combination of royal blue and gold—and then came the procession’s centerpiece, a float or palanquin bearing the ancient wooden statue of the Vírgen de la Esperanza. The float appeared top-heavy and unbalanced, loaded with an array of tall candles, Easter lilies, silver chalices, and reliquaries, as if at any moment it might tumble off the suffering shoulders of the bearers and into the tangled ravine below the footpath.
Next came a few more floats, one bearing an enormous gilded reliquary in the shape of an ark, which James guessed housed the bones of a martyred saint. It was on this float, perched atop the swaying ark, that a small boy dressed in rags sat and seemed to wave at him. He zoomed the camera in on the urchin, who was thin and extremely pale. And yes, it was James the boy was waving at, or someone close behind him on the wall. He turned to look for the Spaniard who’d offered the bota, but the man was gone. James peered through the lens again, but the boy had left his perch and was nowhere to be seen. How strange, he thought, that the urchin had picked him out of the multitude lining the path; normally he felt all but invisible in a crowd of Spaniards. And the man with the bota—who had been staring at him so avidly just a moment before—where had he gone?
At the tail of the procession came the marching band, brass section silent now, as if vanquished by the mournful beat of the drums: doom, doom, doom. The whole valley shook with the sound, so regular and predictable that it seemed to have been hovering in the air for weeks. As the musicians passed, the crowd swelled and filled in behind them, choking the footpath and pressing up against the wall where James stood. Fearing that the human river would soon overflow the wall, he collapsed the tripod and dropped into the procession heading back to the city. Night was closing in. Everything blurred together in the flickering firelight: the crowd, the drumbeat, the treasure-laden floats bobbing ahead as if carried downstream on an undulating, slow-motion torrent. Nearing the Sacromonte the crowd pressed in closer, and James’s uneasiness slipped into a strange feeling of disembodiment—as if he were watching the procession through someone else’s eyes, or through the lens of the camera now slung over his shoulder. This, too, was a familiar sensation, and an unpleasant one, reminding him forcefully of his longstanding distaste for crowds.
By the time the procession reached the Plaza de la Primavera it was impossible to move in any direction not dictated by the press of murmuring bodies. He saw flashbulbs ahead and caught a glimpse of a group of tourists standing on benches at the south end of the plaza, by the riverbank—a quick vision of glistening white teeth hinting at the skulls behind the faces. Spurred by panic, he shouldered his way through the crowd in the opposite direction and ducked into a narrow alley opposite the northern end of the plaza.
The alley was dark and climbed at a steep angle, becoming a cobbled staircase that led up into the heart of the Albaicín, the old Arab quarter. He sat on one of the steps, panting dejectedly. Down in the plaza, the crowd continued to stream by. Beyond him, on a hillside visible through an opening between the buildings, the Alhambra loomed in all its glory, high walls and turrets lit by golden floodlights. It was what the tourists came for, and what James himself had originally come to see and to photograph: the largest Moorish palace in the world, a masterpiece of architecture commemorating seven centuries of Arab rule in Spain. He leaned back, with his elbows on the stairs, and closed his eyes. What was troubling him? Nagging at the edges of his consciousness was a simple fact, one that he thought would explain everything, if only he could remember what it was.
When he opened his eyes, there was a woman. She was supporting herself against one of the stone buildings at the alley entrance, breathing heavily as if she’d been running or dancing—or perhaps, like James, escaping her claustrophobia by fighting her way out of the crowd. She wore a black dress gathered tightly at the waist, with billowy, multi-flounced skirts like those of a flamenco dancer.
“Buenas noches,” he said, shyly curious.
“Buenas noches,” she repeated, in a teasing voice that was clearly intended to mock his American accent. He couldn’t see her eyes—her face was hidden, backlit by the Alhambra and the flickering torchlight from the plaza—but he thought he detected a note of warmth in her voice, perhaps even a hint of flirtatiousness.
“Do we know each other?” he asked in his rudimentary Spanish.
She laughed, took out a cigarette, and lit it. The alley filled with the pleasantly astringent scent of burning cloves.
“May I have one?” he asked in E
nglish.
“May I have one?” she repeated, mocking him again. Then she flicked the burning cigarette his way and was gone. Acting on a sudden instinct, he got to his feet and ran after her, but it was no good. She’d disappeared into the crowded plaza.
Shaking his head, he strode back up to his cobbled step. He found the smoldering cigarette and picked it up. He examined it for lipstick stains, then put it to his mouth and inhaled deeply. The clove tasted good, cool and numbing, and it kept the woman’s image fresh in his mind: the old-fashioned dress; the cascade of black hair; the impression, more felt than seen, of her scornful eyes watching him from the shadows. And yes, her body: the narrow waist, the suggestive swell of her bosom as she breathed. There had been something so bittersweet in the way she’d mocked him—a presumption of familiarity, as if she’d known very well who he was, and what it was that he wanted.
But perhaps that was only wishful thinking. What young Spanish woman would care to know anything about him, a solitary foreigner who spoke her language at a very basic level and lived in her city without a single friend or acquaintance—who existed, in other words, in a state of near invisibility?
James lived in a small apartment not far from the Plaza de la Primavera, in the heart of the warren-like Albaicín. He’d made a darkroom out of a converted storage closet on the rooftop terrace, and it was there that he spent most of his time. Early on in his stay, he’d made an effort to reach out to the Spaniards in his neighborhood. He still said “buenos días” or “buenas tardes” whenever he passed one of them on the street, but by and large they ignored him. He had no interest in Granada’s expatriate community, and the feeling was apparently mutual; the Americans had organized a dinner party for Thanksgiving to which he’d not been invited, and there had been various other functions, over the months, that he’d gone out of his way to ignore. He had no idea whether the other foreigners even knew his name, although he supposed they probably did. Still, there was no way of knowing for sure, because he’d never spoken to any of them. His solitude was nearly absolute. This allowed him to focus intensively on his work, but that too was problematic. He couldn’t seem to get beyond the hackneyed tourist shots. He had no interest in producing postcards, yet that was basically what he was doing.