Beneath the Mountain

by Luca D'Andrea

  “Stop.”

  Manny unhooked his harness, then mine.

  I was immersed in the icy water up to my knees.

  “Are you alone, signora?”

  The woman seemed not to understand the question.

  “Leg,” she stammered.

  “She’s in shock,” Manny said. “Move as far away as you can. Let’s see if we can do this.”

  I flattened my back against the wall of ice. My breath condensed in little clouds. I hoped they weren’t going to end up in the frame.

  The woman looked first at Manny then at her own leg. “It hurts.”

  “You see the helicopter? There’s a doctor on it who’ll give you a good dose of painkillers.”

  The woman groaned and shook her head.

  Manny secured himself to the rope of the pulley, then, pulling on the cable, tied it to the woman’s harness.

  “Pulley, Moses.”

  The pulley lifted the two of them.

  The woman screamed with all the breath she had in her. I held back the urge to raise my hands to my ears. If I had, I would have dropped the camera, and then Mike really would have killed me.

  Slowly and painfully.

  The ascent was textbook. The cable was like a straight line drawn in India ink.

  I saw Manny and the woman go up and up and finally leave the crevasse.

  I was alone.

  * * *

  What does the footage on the Sony show at this point?

  The walls of the crevasse. Vague glimmers in the total darkness. The beam of light from the camera moving from one side to the other, sometimes in slow motion, sometimes hysterically. Iridescent little cubes floating in the pool of water around my legs. The reflection of my face against the ice. First smiling, then attentive, with the expression of someone trying to eavesdrop on a private conversation. Finally contorted, eyes like a trapped animal, cold-darkened lips pulled over my teeth in a sneer that didn’t belong to me. A medieval death mask.

  And over everything: the voice of the Ortles. The cracking of the ice. The hissing of the mass of the Ortles as it continued to move as if from two hundred thousand years ago to the present.

  The voice of the Beast.

  Manny descending, worried. My name repeated several times.

  God’s scream swallowing Manny.

  The passing of seconds that stops making sense. The terrifying awareness that the time of the glacier isn’t human time. It’s an alien, hostile time.

  And the darkness.

  I sank into the gloom that devours worlds. I found myself drifting in deep space. A single, vast, endless, eternal night of spectral whiteness.

  Eight letters: “Darkness.” Three letters: “Ice.”

  At last, salvation.

  Too hot, Moses had said. Too hot meant avalanche. God’s scream. And the avalanche had taken Manny. And along with Manny, through the pulley cable, the Beast had snatched the EC135 and dragged it to the ground, crushing it as you would a troublesome insect. Why hadn’t Moses cut the cable? If he had, Manny would have been crushed but the avalanche wouldn’t have touched the helicopter. The Carabinieri wondered that, and the reporters wondered that. Not the rescuers who pulled me to safety. They knew. It’s all in the Rules.

  The pulley cable can’t be cut because in the mountains you never leave anyone behind. For any reason. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it has to be.

  Nothing remained of Moses, Ismaele, Manny, Christoph or the German woman. The fury of the avalanche, which had been unleashed by the heat and the wind, had swept them away, leaving their bodies unrecognizable. The EC135 was a carcass farther down the mountain.

  But the accident on the Ortles didn’t signal the end of Dolomite Mountain Rescue, just as it wasn’t the end of my story.

  As I said, nine letters.

  “Beginning.”

  280 Million Years Ago

  My body responded well to treatment. I spent less than a week in the hospital. A few stitches, an IV to prevent the onset of hypothermia, and nothing more. The worst wounds were those I carried inside me. “PTSD” was written on my medical record. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Before bidding me farewell with a handshake and a “Take care of yourself,” the doctor from San Maurizio in Bolzano prescribed some psychoactive drugs and sleeping pills, advising me to take them regularly. It was likely, he had added, looking me in the eyes, that for a while I would suffer nightmares and mild panic attacks, accompanied by flashbacks, just like war veterans in movies.

  Mild panic attacks?

  There were times when the voice of the Beast (mine were auditory flashbacks, I never suffered from hallucinations, thank God) filled my head with such intensity as to force me to the floor, sobbing like a child. Nevertheless, I’d sworn that I would do without the drugs and would use sleeping pills only as a last resort. Any two-bit psychologist could have sensed what I was really doing. I wanted to suffer. And I wanted to suffer because I had to. Had to? Of course, I had soiled my hands with the worst of sins.

  I had survived.

  I deserved punishment.

  It wasn’t until later that I realized I wasn’t just punishing myself. I was also hurting Annelise, who had aged years in a few days and wept as I wandered dazed around the house. Worse still, I was hurting Clara. She had become taciturn, spent hours in her room, immersed in picture books and thoughts of God knows what. She ate little and had bags under her eyes that no child should have.

  Annelise and Werner tried to help me in any way they could. Werner would take me to the back of the house for a smoke, or out in his jeep to give me a bit of fresh air. Annelise tried to rouse me with her best dishes, with the local gossip, with my favorite DVDs and even with the most provocative lingerie available. Her attempts at using sex to revive me proved humiliating for us both.

  I would sit apathetically in my favorite armchair, watching the leaves turn red and the sky take on the typical autumn color of those parts, a glittering palette of blue and purple. When the sun went down, I would stand up and go to bed. I didn’t eat, I didn’t drink, and I made an effort not to think. I jumped at the slightest movement. I could still hear that noise. That damned hissing. The voice of the Beast.

  If the days were horrible, the nights were even worse. I would wake up screaming at the top of my voice. It was as if the world had split in two. One part, the wrong part, the one I called World A, had gone on as if nothing had happened, while the right part, World B, had come to an end on September 15 at two twenty-two p.m. with the obituary of Jeremiah Salinger.

  I remember the day when Mike came to see me. Pale, eyes circled in red, he told me what he was planning to do and we talked about it. The network had cancelled Mountain Angels, but we could use the footage we had shot for a documentary on Dolomite Mountain Rescue and what had happened in the crevasse on the Ortles. My partner had even thought of a title: In the Belly of the Beast. In dubious taste but appropriate. I gave him my blessing, then walked him to the door and told him this was goodbye.

  Mike took it as a joke, but I meant it. This was the last time Batman and Robin would meet. I was trapped in an infernal loop, and as far as I could see, there were only two ways to get out of it. Explode or throw myself off some cliff or other. Exploding meant harming Annelise or Clara. I wouldn’t even dream of that. As a brave idiot, withdrawn into my wounded egotism, the second possibility seemed to me less painful. I even began to imagine where, how, and when.

  So, goodbye, partner. Goodbye, everybody.

  Then, midway through October, Clara came to me.

  * * *

  I was sunk in the armchair, gazing at the infinite, a glass of water now warm in my right hand, the left clutching an empty cigarette packet, when Clara came and sat down in my lap, a book clutched to her chest, as she did whenever she wanted me to read her a story.

  With some difficulty, I brought her little face into focus. “Hey, kid.”

  “Hey, five letters.”

  That
was Clara’s favorite game, Numbers and Letters.

  I forced myself to smile. “Stress on the first syllable?”

  “Stress on the first syllable.”

  “D-a-d-d-y,” I said, surprised how strange it still felt to hear myself called that. “What’s this?”

  “Five letters.”

  “Five? But it’s a book. That’s four.”

  Clara shook her head and her hair turned into a blonde cloud. The smell of her shampoo reached my nostrils and I felt something move in my chest.

  A hint of warmth.

  Like a fire in the distance during a snowstorm.

  “Wrong,” she replied resolutely.

  “Are you sure it isn’t a book?”

  “It’s a ‘guide.’”

  I counted on my fingers. Five letters. She hadn’t cheated.

  Smiling came almost naturally.

  Clara lifted her finger to her lips, a gesture she had inherited from her mother. “The thermometer says seventeen degrees. Seventeen degrees at this hour of the day isn’t cold, is it?”

  “No, it’s not cold.”

  “Mamma says you hurt your head. The inside of your head,” she corrected herself. “That’s why you’re always sad. But your legs are still working, aren’t they?”

  That was it. Papà had hurt the inside of his head and that was why he’d become sad.

  I bounced her up and down on my knees. Soon that type of game would bore her, within a few years even embarrass her. Time was passing, my daughter was growing, and I was throwing away the days watching the leaves fall from the trees.

  “I’d say so, eight letters.”

  Clara frowned and started counting on her fingers, concentrated. “‘Sweetheart’ has ten.”

  “‘Honeybun’ has eight. A point for me, honeybun.”

  Clara gave me a sidelong look (she hated losing) then opened the guide she had in her hands. I noticed she’d put some pretty bookmarks in it.

  “We’ll have Mamma make the sandwiches, we’ll take some water, but not too much, because I don’t like doing wee-wee in the woods.” She sighed. “I’m scared of the spiders.”

  “Spiders,” I said, almost choking with love for her. “Yuk.”

  “Yes, yuk. We’ll start from here,” she pointed at the map, “turn here, you see? Where the lake is. Maybe it’s already ice.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Will we see frozen fish?”

  “Maybe a few.”

  “And then we’ll come home. That way, you can carry on looking at the meadow. Is the meadow so interesting, Papà?”

  I hugged her. I hugged her hard.

  Four letters: “Fire.”

  * * *

  That was how our walks started. Every evening Clara would sit on my lap, her guide in her hand, and we’d plan an excursion.

  The autumn was a warm embrace, and those walks, but above all Clara’s company and the mountain of chatter under which she buried me, worked better than any drug I could have taken.

  There were also nightmares, and sometimes the hissing paralyzed me, but these episodes were increasingly sporadic. I even managed to reply to Mike’s questions by e-mail: he’d gone back to New York in the meantime to edit In the Belly of the Beast. Even though I refused to look at even a single clip, giving him a few suggestions did me good. I felt alive again. I wanted to get better. World B, the one in which I was a corpse, no longer attracted me. Because that world wasn’t the real world. Whether I liked it or not, I had survived.

  It had taken a five-year-old girl to make me realize that.

  * * *

  It was toward the end of October when Clara, instead of showing me the guide as usual, sat on my lap and stared at me with very serious eyes.

  “I want to go and see someone.”

  Theatrically, I turned to Annelise, who was huddled on the couch, absorbed in a book, her long, slender legs gathered under her, and asked her, “Is there something yours truly should know?”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “The kind that every self-respecting father should be aware of.”

  I heard Clara laughing at the ridiculous accent I was using: the one I called “Charlie the English butler.”

  “Let me make myself clear. Our first-born, Clara Salinger here present, five years old, and I underline five, has just expressed the desire to go and see someone of her acquaintance. Do you think she’s referring to Martin’s son Roberto?”

  “He’s in bed with scarlet fever.”

  “Then by ‘someone,’ which is a generic and therefore neutral term, could our child be referring to Elisabeth? That sweet, friendly little girl who once saw fit to throw up on yours truly’s trousers?”

  Annelise had closed the book and could no longer hide her amusement. “I’m afraid Clara and Elisabeth have had a little falling out.”

  “Stop it, you two!” Clara cried. “I don’t like it when you make fun of me.”

  Confronted with her worried little face, we burst into uncontrollable laughter.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s just that . . . Did I hear correctly? You want to go and see someone? And who might this someone be?”

  “A friend.”

  “A friend?”

  “His name is Yodi.”

  “What kind of name is Yodi?” I said, nonplussed.

  “Yodi is very kind. And very old,” she whispered, “but don’t say it to his face. Yodi is like Ops, he doesn’t like that word.”

  “Three very sensitive letters: ‘old.’”

  “What does ‘sensitive’ mean?”

  It was Annelise who replied. “Sensitive means that you get upset about little things. In German, it’s empfindlich.” We were determined for Clara to grow up learning her parents’ three languages. “In Italian . . .”

  “Suscettibile,” I finished for her.

  After a long pause Clara said, “Twelve. Twelve letters, Mamma!”

  “Impressive. But you were telling me about Yodi.”

  “If you like, I can show him to you.”

  “You have a photograph?”

  Clara didn’t reply. She ran to her room and came back immediately, giving me and Annelise time to exchange puzzled glances.

  “This is Yodi. Nice, isn’t he?” Clara asked, handing me a book.

  Yodi was a fossil. An ammonite, to be exact.

  “Shall we go and see him, Papà?”

  “Sure, he’s seen lots of people in the course of his . . .”—I read the caption—“. . . 280 million years of existence. But where exactly do we go to see our new friend?”

  It was Annelise who replied, amused. “I know. In the Bletterbach.”

  “And what the hell, pray, is the Bletterbach?”

  Both Annelise and Clara looked at me as if I’d asked the stupidest question in the world. They weren’t far wrong. The fact is that things tend to escape me, especially when they’re right under my nose. That’s the way I am.

  The Bletterbach was all around us, the tourist magnet that pumped money into the veins of the local communities. Not only Siebenhoch, which was in fact the largest beneficiary of that flow of cash, being very close to the Visitors’ Center, but also the villages of Aldino (in German, Aldein), Salorno (in German, Salurn), Cembra and Cavalese (which, being in the Trentino part of the region, escaped the double name rule), Ora (which was still in the province of Bolzano and so was also called Auer), Nova Ponente (Deutschnofen) and Nova Levante (Welschnofen) and many other tiny conglomerations of houses and small churches (in the local dialokt, Hittlen und Kirchln).

  The area around Siebenhoch, something like 15,000 acres of woods, forests, and rocks, was part of the nature reserve of Monte Corno. In the center of the reserve, beneath Monte Corno, that is, the Corno Bianco (Weisshorn, in German), a peak more than 2,000 meters high, was a gorge eight kilometers long and more than 400 meters deep.

  Through it runs the stream that gives it its name: the Bletterbach.

  The rock that the area, and the rest o
f the Dolomites, is composed of is a strange mixture of calcium carbonate and magnesium, a crumbly mixture through which the waters of the stream have hollowed a canyon, bringing a great many fossils to light. The Bletterbach isn’t just a gorge. The Bletterbach is a movie, an open-air documentary that began 280 million years ago, in the period known as the Permian, and ended in the Triassic, a hundred million years later. From the time of the great extinctions to that of the great lizards.

  There’s a bit of everything in the Bletterbach. Shells, ammonites (like Yodi), the remains of fauna and beasts that would make your skin crawl and your jaw drop in amazement. A prehistoric zoo concentrated in a lost gorge toward which I headed with Clara, her hair gathered into two delightful braids and her little pastel-colored boots on her feet, that afternoon in October when things, I thought, had started to take off again.

  * * *

  We were greeted by a young woman whom I had met several times in Siebenhoch but whose name escaped me, however hard I tried to remember it. She asked me if I had recovered from the accident. She didn’t add anything else and I was grateful for that.

  To visit the Bletterbach, there were two possibilities. Ilse—her name was written on the badge on the lapel of her blouse—showed us a route marked on the map by a red dotted line. It was the route recommended for families. An excursion of three or three and a half hours that wouldn’t take us too far “into the deep” (I couldn’t help noticing that strange use of words) but that would show us quite a lot of shells, the footprints of dinosaurs (“nine letters, Papà!”) and ferns crystallized in time and in the rock. The second route was estimated at around five hours and would take us farther in, to where the gorge narrowed and the Bletterbach stream became a waterfall. In both cases, Ilse added with a severe frown, it was obligatory to stay on the route indicated, to wear helmets and to remember that the management of the reserve took no responsibility in the event of accidents.

  “Enter at your own risk” was written on a trilingual notice.

  Ilse explained, “It’s a difficult area, sometimes there are rock falls. You could easily hurt yourself. That’s why it’s obligatory to wear protective helmets. If you don’t have them, we can rent you a couple.” She smiled at Clara. “There should be a pink one just your size, signorina.”