“Mein liebes Fräulein,” I began, bathing in the sound of eyes popping like champagne corks among that mass of horny students (including the fat guy). “Sie sollten nicht fragen, wie wir ‘Neid’ sagen, sondern wie wir ‘Idiot’ sagen.”
My dear young lady, you shouldn’t ask how we say “envy,” but how we say “idiot.”
Her name was Annelise.
She was nineteen years old and she’d been in the United States for little more than a month, for a short course. Annelise was neither German nor Austrian nor even Swiss. She came from a tiny province in the north of Italy where most of the population spoke German. It was a strange place was Alto Adige, or Südtirol.
The night before I left for the tour, we made love to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, which reconciled me at least a little with the Boss. The next morning was tough. I didn’t think I would ever see her again. I was wrong. My sweet Annelise, born amid the Alps eight thousand kilometers from the Big Apple, transformed her short course into a student visa. I know it seems crazy, but you have to believe me. She loved me, and I loved her. In 2007, in a little restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, as Mike and I were preparing to shoot the third (and, we had vowed, last) season of Road Crew, I asked Annelise to marry me. She accepted with such joy that I did a not very manly thing and burst into tears.
What more could I have wanted?
2008.
Because in 2008, while Mike and I, exhausted, were taking a break after the broadcast of the third season of our fuck-tual series, on a mild May day, in a hospital in New Jersey immersed in greenery, my daughter Clara was born. And then: fragrant mountains of diapers, baby food decorating clothes and walls, but above all hours and hours spent watching Clara learning to get to know the world. And then there were Mike’s visits with his current girlfriend (they lasted from two to four weeks, the longest a month and a half, but then she had been Miss July), during which he tried every which way to teach my daughter his name before Clara could even utter the word “Mamma.”
In the summer of 2009, I met Annelise’s parents, Werner and Herta Mair. We didn’t know then that the “tiredness” that Herta gave as an excuse for her dizziness and pallor was an advanced stage of cancer. She died a few months later, at the end of the year. Annelise didn’t want me to go with her to the funeral.
The years 2010 and 2011 were beautiful and frustrating. Beautiful: Clara climbing everywhere, Clara asking “what’s this?” in three different languages (the third, Italian, Annelise was teaching me, too, and I liked it a lot, a student motivated by a teacher I found very sexy), Clara simply growing. Frustrating? Of course. Because at the end of 2011, after presenting Mr. Smith with something like a hundred thousand different projects (all rejected), we began shooting the fourth season of Road Crew. The one we had sworn we would never make.
Nothing went right. The magic was gone and we knew it. The fourth season of Road Crew is a long, unhappy lament to the end of an era. But the public, as generations of copywriters know, loves feeling sad. Our ratings were better than for the three previous seasons. Even the New Yorker praised us, calling it “the story of a waking dream that crumbles.”
So Mike and I once again found ourselves exhausted and apathetic. Depressed. The work we considered the worst in our career was being praised to the skies even by those who only a little while earlier had treated us like lepers. That was why, in December 2012, I accepted Annelise’s suggestion to spend a few months in her native village, a little place called Siebenhoch in Alto Adige/Südtirol, Italy. Far from everything and everybody.
A good idea.
The Heroes of the Mountain
The photographs that Annelise had shown me of Siebenhoch didn’t do justice to that little village clinging up there at an altitude of 1,400 meters. Yes, the windows with the geraniums were there, the streets narrow enough to keep warm in, the snow-capped mountains and the forests all around. Just like a picture postcard. But in the flesh it was . . . different.
Magnificent.
I loved the little church surrounded by a cemetery that didn’t make you think about death but about the eternal rest spoken of in prayers. I loved the pointed roofs of the houses, the well-tended flower beds, the streets free from cracks. I loved the frequently incomprehensible dialect that twisted the language of my mother (and, for all intents and purposes, of my childhood) into a dissonant, off-color dialokt.
I even loved the Despar supermarket slumbering in a clearing torn by force from the vegetation, the interweaving of local and national roads, just as I loved the mule tracks half-buried by the tracery of beeches, bracken and red firs.
I loved my wife’s expression every time she showed me something new. A smile that made her seem like the little girl who had, I imagined, walked along these streets, run through these woods, played with snowballs, and then, once grown, had crossed the ocean to end up in my arms.
What else?
I loved speck, especially the matured kind that my father-in-law brought home without ever revealing where he’d procured such a delicacy—certainly not in what he called the tourist shops—and canederli cooked at least forty different ways. I devoured pies, strudels, and lots of other things. I put on eight pounds and didn’t feel even slightly guilty.
The house we occupied belonged to Annelise’s father, Werner. It was on the western border of Siebenhoch (assuming that a village with a population of seven hundred could be said to have a border) at the point where the mountain rose to touch the sky. On the upper floor were two bedrooms, a study, and a bathroom. On the ground floor, a kitchen, a cubbyhole, and what Annelise called the living room, although “living room” was a bit of an understatement. It was huge, with a table in the middle and furniture of beech and Swiss pine that Werner had built with his own hands. The light came from two large windows that looked out onto a meadow, and from the first light of day I would put an armchair there for the pleasure of taking in the majesty of the space—the mountains and the greenery (which when we arrived were laden with a compact blanket of snow).
It was while I was sitting in that armchair on February 25 that I saw a helicopter cut across the sky over Siebenhoch. It was painted a beautiful bright red. I thought about it all night. By February 26, the helicopter had turned into an idea.
An obsession.
By the 27th, I had realized that I needed to talk to somebody about it.
Somebody who knew. Somebody who would understand.
On the 28th, I did so.
* * *
Werner Mair lived a few kilometers from us as the crow flies, in a place with very few comforts that local people called Welshboden.
He was a severe man who rarely smiled (a magical occurrence that only Clara could easily provoke), with white hair sparse over his temples, penetrating sky-blue eyes tending to gray, a thin nose, and lines like scars.
He was pushing eighty, but in magnificent physical shape. I found him busy chopping wood in his shirtsleeves, even though the temperature was a degree or two below zero.
As soon as he saw me coming, he propped his axe against a rack and greeted me. I switched off the engine and got out of the car. The air was sparkling and pure. I breathed in deeply.
“More firewood, Werner?”
He held out his hand. “There’s never enough. And the cold keeps you young. Would you like a coffee?”
We went inside and sat down by the fire. Through the smell of the smoke, there filtered a pleasant fragrance of resin.
Werner made the espresso (he made a mountain variant of Italian-style coffee: a tiny amount as black as tar that kept you awake for weeks), sat down, took an ashtray from a little cabinet, and winked at me.
Werner told me he had quit smoking the day Herta gave birth to Annelise. But after the death of his wife, perhaps out of boredom or perhaps (I suspected) out of nostalgia, he had taken up the habit again. Surreptitiously, because if Annelise had seen him with a cigarette in his hand she would have flayed him alive. Even though I felt guilty about enco
uraging him with my company (and my discretion), at that moment, as Werner lit a match with his thumbnail, my father-in-law’s tobacco dependence was convenient for me. There’s nothing better for having a man-to-man chat than sharing a bit of tobacco.
I relaxed. We exchanged small talk. The weather, Clara. Annelise, New York. We smoked. We drank the coffee and a glass of Welshboden water to take away the bitterness.
At last I came out with it.
“I saw a helicopter,” I began. “A red one.”
Werner looked straight through me. “And you’re wondering what it’d look like on TV, right?”
Right.
That helicopter wouldn’t make a hole on the screen. It would shatter it.
Werner shook the ash from his cigarette onto the floor. “Did you ever have one of those ideas that change your life?”
I thought of Mike.
I thought of Annelise. And Clara.
“I wouldn’t be here otherwise,” I said.
“I was younger when I had mine. It didn’t happen by chance, it was born out of grief. It’s never a good thing for ideas to come out of grief, Jeremiah. But it happens and you can’t do anything about it. Ideas come to you, and that’s it. Some go away and others take root. Like plants. And like plants they grow and grow. They have lives of their own.” Werner broke off, examined the embers of his cigarette, and threw it in the fire. “How much time do you have?”
“Whatever we need,” I replied.
“Nix. Wrong. You have the time your wife and daughter have granted you. A man must always think first of his family. Always.”
“Right,” I said, and I think I blushed a little.
“Anyway, if you want to hear this story, it won’t take long. You see that photograph?”
He indicated a framed snapshot, hanging below the crucifix. Werner went over to it and brushed it with his fingertips. Like many mountain people, he was missing a few phalanges, in his case the first of the little finger and ring finger of his right hand.
The black-and-white photograph showed five young men. The one on the left, an unruly lock of hair falling over his forehead and a rucksack on his back, was Werner.
“We took that in 1950. I don’t remember the month. But I remember them. And I also remember the laughter. That’s one thing that doesn’t fade as you get older. You forget birthdays and anniversaries. You forget faces. Luckily, you also forget the pain, the suffering. But the laughter of that time, when you’re not yet a man but you’re not a child anymore either . . . that stays inside you.”
Even though I’d seen a good few springs less than he had, I understood what Werner was trying to tell me. I doubted, though, that his memory was failing. Werner belonged to a race of mountain people forged in steel. In spite of his white hair and the lines on his face, it was impossible for me to think of him as an old man.
“Life’s hard down there in Siebenhoch. School in the morning, down in the valley, then afternoon till night breaking your back in the fields, in the pastures, in the woods or in the stables. I was lucky because my father, Annelise’s grandfather, had survived the collapse of the mine, whereas many of my friends didn’t have their fathers, and growing up without a father in Südtirol in those years was no picnic.”
“I can imagine.”
“Imagine, maybe,” Werner replied without taking his eyes off the photograph. “But I doubt you can really understand it. Have you ever gone hungry?”
I’d once been robbed by a junkie who’d pointed a syringe at my throat, and a close friend of mine had been stabbed on his way back from a concert in Madison Square Garden, but no, I’d never gone hungry.
So I didn’t reply.
“We were young and carefree, in other words, we were happy. The thing we liked most was climbing mountains.” An expression that was a mixture of sadness and irony crossed his face, then immediately disappeared. “In those days, mountaineering was something for foreigners and dreamers. Not a respectable sport like today. In some ways, we were pioneers, you know? With time, mountaineering has turned into tourism, and today tourism is the main source of income throughout Alto Adige.”
It was true. Everywhere there were hotels and restaurants, and cable cars to ease the ascent to the mountain peaks. In winter, the tourists concentrated in the skiing areas, and in summer, they devoted themselves to excursions in the woods. I couldn’t blame them: as soon as the weather changed and the snow melted, I was planning to buy sturdy shoes and, with the excuse of taking Clara to get a little fresh air, to see if this boy from Brooklyn could compete with the local mountain men.
“Without tourism,” Werner went on, “the Alto Adige would be a poor province, inhabited only by aging peasants, and Siebenhoch would no longer exist, that’s for sure.”
“That would be sad.”
“Very sad. But it didn’t happen like that.” He blinked. “Anyway, for people at that time, especially people around here, going into the mountains meant going to work in the mountains. Taking the cows to pasture, cutting firewood. Cultivating. That was the mountains. For us, on the other hand, it was fun. But we were careless. Too careless. We had competitions to see who could climb the steepest rock face, we timed each other, we defied the bad weather. And our equipment?” Werner gave himself a slap on the thigh. “Ropes made of hemp. You know what it’s like to fall when you’re tied to a rope made of hemp?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“Hemp isn’t elastic. If you fall with modern ropes, the ones made of nylon and God knows what else, it’s almost amusing. They stretch and absorb your weight. Hemp is another story. You risk being crippled for life. Or worse. And on top of that, the climbing spikes, the hammers, and all the rest were handmade by the village blacksmith. Iron is fragile, extremely fragile, and expensive. But we didn’t have cinemas, we didn’t have cars. We’d been brought up to save every last cent. And we were really happy to use the money for our climbing expeditions.” Werner cleared his throat. “We felt immortal.”
“But you weren’t, were you?”
“Nobody is. A few months after we took that photograph, there was an accident. Four of us went up Croda dei Toni—have you ever been there? In Belluno dialect, it means ‘crown of thunder,’ because when it rains and lightning comes down it’s a sight to give you goose bumps. It’s a beautiful place. But that doesn’t make death less bitter. Death is death, and nothing else matters.”
I read it on his face. He was thinking about Herta, who had died with a monster in her brain, devouring her. I respected his silence until he felt ready to continue with his story.
“Three of them didn’t make it. I survived only because I was lucky. Josef died in my arms, while I screamed and screamed, begging for help. But even if someone had heard me, you know how many kilometers there were between the place where the rope broke and the nearest hospital? Twenty. Impossible to save him. Impossible. I waited for death to take him, recited a prayer, and turned back. And then. I had the idea. Or rather, the idea came to me. After the funeral, a few of us had a drink in memory of the dead. Around here, as you’ll have noticed, drinking is quite common. And that night we drank like sponges. We sang, we laughed, we cried, we cursed. Then, when dawn came, I presented my idea. Even though nobody said it—some things you don’t need to hear with your own ears—to the rest of the world we were lunatics who were asking for it. Nobody could have helped us, or even wanted to, if we’d got into trouble up there.”
“To survive you could only count on your own strength.”
“That’s right, Jeremiah. So we founded Dolomite Mountain Rescue. We had no money, we had no political support, and we had to pay for the equipment out of our own pockets, but it worked.” Werner granted me one of those smiles that only Clara managed to get from him. “One of us, Stefan, bought a first aid manual. He studied it and taught us the principles of resuscitation. Mouth-to-mouth respiration, heart massage. We learned how to splint a fracture, how to recognize a head trauma. Things like that. But i
t wasn’t yet enough. The first holidaymakers, as we called them at the time, were starting to arrive, and with them, inexpert and badly equipped people. Our interventions increased. We were still on foot. We didn’t buy our first van until ’65, a rickety old crock that could take us only up to a certain point. After that, we had to manage in the old way. Transporting the wounded on our backs. And often the dead.”
I tried to imagine the scene. It gave me the shudders. I hate to admit it, but they weren’t just shudders of horror, because I, too, like Werner, had my own idea in my head.
“We’d arrive, we’d find the body, we’d say a prayer, then the oldest of the group would hand around a little bottle of cognac or grappa, one sip each, and the youngest would get the job of carrying the body. We’d go back to base. Which in those days was none other than the bar in Siebenhoch, the only place where there was a telephone.”
“Shit,” I murmured.
“To cut a long story short, here in Siebenhoch, real tourism arrived in the early ’90s, when Hermann Kagol had the idea for the Visitors’ Center, but already by the ’80s other valleys had their work cut out keeping up with the demands of the tourists. Tourists bring money. When money starts to change hands, as you yourself know, the politicians arrive, and if you have any kind of a brain, you can twist them ’round your little finger.”
I wouldn’t have liked to be in the shoes of the politician who tried to get the better of Werner Mair.
“So funds arrived. We made agreements with the Civil Defense people and with the Red Cross. At the end of the seventies, we used army helicopters for a special project. The results were incredible. If, before, three injured people out of seven survived an accident, with the helicopter it was six out of ten. Not bad, eh?”
“I’d say not.”
“But we wanted more. First,” Werner counted, showing me his thumb, “we wanted a helicopter that was at our disposal all the time without having to deal every time with the whims of some colonel or other.” To the thumb was added the index finger. “We wanted to raise that statistic. We didn’t want any more deaths. So . . .”
Beneath the Mountain Page 2