Sevastopol

by Emilio Fraia

  Sevastopol

  Copyright © 2018 by Emilio Fraia

  Translation copyright © 2021 by Zoë Perry

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Originally published in Portuguese as Sebastopol.

  First published as New Directions Paperbook 1502 in 2021

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Design by Erik Rieselbach

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fraia, Emilio, 1982– author. | Perry, Zoë, translator.

  Title: Sevastopol : three stories / Emilio Fraia ;

  translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry.

  Other titles: Sebastopol. English

  Description: New York : New Directions Publishing, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020055071 | ISBN 9780811230919 (paperback) | ISBN 9780811230926 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fraia, Emilio, 1982– Translations into English. | LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PQ9698.416.R345 S4313 2021 | DDC 869.3/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055071

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  Contents

  December

  May

  August

  Landmarks

  Cover

  December

  Given a choice, I’d never revisit all this. But it happened again today. Watching your video, I was hurled right back into the middle of it. That’s why I’m writing you now. Things haven’t been easy lately. What happened, when I think about it, feels something like a bandage, something I’m tired of wrapping and unwrapping, as carefully as possible. But it’s never enough. I know it’s 2018, but I feel like I’ve lived all these years without actually having lived at all. Like I just woke up one day, bedraggled and over the hill, and someone came up to me and said: Good morning, Lena, welcome to 2038. Or, doubting my sanity, asked: Do you dream often, Lena? And I’d reply: very little. Five years ago, before the accident, I dreamed even less. But Gino liked hearing about my dreams.

  Some nights he would sit me down in front of the camera and ask me to tell him about a dream, any dream you can remember. I’d usually tell him the same thing, that I don’t typically dream, or rather, that I never remember my dreams. Gino would push and, while I tried to think of something to say so I wouldn’t disappoint him, he’d ask me questions about my life, my past, my parents, friends, guys I’d slept with.

  One time, Gino came over to my house and showed me one of those videos. It was my voice playing over images he’d shot. Mountains, glaciers, winds across a deserted landscape. I was talking about mundane things, stories from my life, but the way he’d edited it gave the impression that what was being narrated was, in fact, a dream. The truth is, people get bored hearing about other people’s dreams, nobody has the patience for that. That’s why I don’t like to talk about my dreams.

  Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. But your video, the video I watched today, was a little like that. It made me think of Gino, of his experiments with the camera, of me sitting there for ages, rambling on and on. There was something similar about the rhythm, or maybe the tone. But I know it’s just another impression, because everything about it was different, too. When I entered that room today, the film was already playing. I couldn’t tell if it was at the start or half-way through. The image on the screen, a body on a stretcher — my body, in this case — instantly drew me in. It was a body in the middle of a green room that smelled of urine and medicine. I watched myself lying there, thousands of miles from home, and as much as I wanted to and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t move.

  I don’t remember anything about what happened earlier, the rescue itself, though I was awake a lot of the time. I only know what they told me afterwards, and that I was lucky because I’d been in a section that the helicopters could still reach, which is unusual, search and rescue is always difficult, and every year dozens of people die on the mountain.

  The doctor slunk around the gurney like a reptile. He was thin, with something that looked like a wound, a cut on his upper lip. There was a coldness about him, he seemed important. He told my companions that my condition was still touch-and-go and that I would need another operation. They talked over one another, trying to make sense of the situation, sometimes arguing like I wasn’t there anymore.

  I returned to São Paulo on a red-eye, an evacuation involving both the Brazilian and Nepalese governments, all arranged thanks to the influence of my sponsors at the time. Once I landed, I underwent another surgery and then another, and at the end of it all, I felt like months had passed. My body heavy, in a deep sleep: months, but maybe it had been hours, minutes, years?

  This is one of those cases where we have no choice, someone told me, at some point, with his hand on mine — we have no choice but to do what has to be done, do you understand? Then I thought I saw Gino, his face, hovering over mine.

  But I want to go back even further.

  In December 2012, six months before the accident, I was at home with a terrible sore throat, drinking tomato juice and watching TV. Sometimes my stamina would take a nosedive from all the training. I felt weak and I remember spending a lot of time like that, drinking tomato juice, with one of those ’90s action movies on TV, which for me always had Wesley Snipes on an airplane, a bounty hunter, about to smash through the mirrored windows on some skyscraper.

  Suddenly my phone rang. It was Mari. She asked how I was doing, how the training was going, if I was feeling prepared. Feeling prepared. On the other end of the line, I repeated those words — feeling prepared — and then I told her it was all a little weird. I needed a boost, to get back to being 100 percent. Because there wasn’t much time left. Before long I’d be facing the biggest challenge of all, I said it like that, I used to talk like that. I was feeling anxious. And I needed to be calm. I was feeling weak. And I needed to be strong. Then she told me she was thinking about getting some friends together at the beach house. She asked if maybe I wanted to go with them. It would be good for me. It’s December. Summer’s nearly here, there’s a warm breeze in the evening.

  Even if it’s no use now, even if it seems like I’m getting sidetracked, which I’m not, because deep down everything’s connected, I think it’s important to talk about this trip to the beach with my friends. Remember my frame of mind back then. Think about how things were before.

  The trip wasn’t all that different from the many I made with Téo, Mari, and the others. But it was the last. That way, with those people.

  It was nice spending hours on the deck with Mari, for example, chatting away, looking out at the water, where nothing ever happened, at most a passing boat, an ice cream vendor, clam diggers. The waves were all alike, neither weak nor strong. Around three, I remember, Cao would come in and start making something for us to eat. He’d disappear into the kitchen, then reemerge with glasses, disappear and reemerge, now with a stack of plates. If I guessed forks, he’d appear with a pot of sugar. I’d shut my eyes and try to concentrate: napkin, tomato salad. And then the table would be covered with bread, spoons, a pitcher of juice — I’d never guess right. Later on, the others would start to arrive. Téo, who spread his swim trunks across a rock, Lóli, holding her pink flip-flo
ps, saying she was starving. They took turns in the outdoor shower, laughing, saying that the water was too hot, that the water was too cold, that the ocean was great, that the seagulls were out on the deserted bit, on the other side, that Mari was nuts, laying out in the sun like that, getting burnt to a crisp.

  But now I think, all that’s in the past. And that’s something that still shocks me. The fact that things don’t come back. People, places. None of that will ever come back. See what I’m saying?

  In one image from your video, I saw myself lying in the bedroom at the beach house, listening to the watery voices and laughter outside, the noise mixing with the waves, the others who’d woken up around ten, and Téo, as soon as the sun stole in, he couldn’t stay in bed, he’d get up without saying a word, grab his surfboard, and go out into the water. Wrapped in the sheet, I gave up on sleep. I kept looking up at the ceiling, almost holding my breath, as if I were hanging from a rope, not knowing how many thousand meters high, tottering between nothingness and what felt like the days of acclimatization, that time spent adjusting to each stage of the climb, and each stage is different, that’s what Gino told me, what I remembered him telling me, any mountaineer can tell you that the hardest part is the descent, he said, but sometimes just knowing that isn’t enough. I remembered him telling me the story of the day Peter Hillary, son of the famous Edmund Hillary, following in his father’s footsteps on Everest, reached the summit and made a phone call to the elder climber: Dad, we’re on the summit, to which Edmund supposedly replied: great, you’re on the summit but now you need to get down.

  Gino grinned while he told this story, and I could almost see him. It was as if he were there too, in the bedroom at the beach house, as if I could hear his voice — it was as if he dwelled inside those days at the beach, as if, in spite of Téo, he was with me the whole time.

  The breeze batted against the walls, billowing the curtains. I felt hot, cold, my skin shivered, and those scenes kept unwinding, like bandages coming off wounds, or like the compartments of a chairlift at a ski resort, sailing past, one after the other: the common room at a lodge on the way to Everest base camp, Gino drying his boots on top of a yak manure-powered heater; Gino meditating; Gino drinking hot Tang from an aluminum mug in front of a mural with pictures of Sherpas and tourists on peaks like Ama Dablam, the most beautiful mountain in the world.

  You probably know all this, of course. Gino was into film, he was a photographer and partner at a production company. He was born in a small town in Italy whose name I could never remember and came to Brazil as a teenager, for his father’s job, an engineer. He was almost twenty years older than me. We’d met in February 2011, at a friend’s birthday party and, about two months later, we ran into each other again, in a situation some might call unexpected or unreal, because that’s exactly what it was. It was my first Everest expedition and there he was, with a team, on the mountain. Gino appeared in a relatively quiet spot, at almost four thousand meters, close to base camp. My team and I had paused our ascent, one of the many acclimatization stops we made that season, and we sat and watched this group with cameras and reflectors in the middle of the snow. There were three of them, plus a couple who I assumed were models or actors. Gino was close by, almost beside me.

  We stayed there for a while, staring straight ahead at the bluish glow that fell on the actor couple, surrounded by rock and ice, a scene that, because of the light, looked like it was set against a diorama of mountains and fake styrofoam snow.

  Gino gave directions, the actors moved unnaturally, like two little balls of mercury rolling along a block of white marble. When they took a break, I decided to ask him where we’d met. Gino looked me up and down. I took off my sunglasses. He made a gesture of surprise, an Aha! gesture. I wasn’t actually sure if he recognized me or not. He called over another guy, who was wearing huge fur earmuffs. I greeted him a little stiffly, and we went back to watching the scene. The couple I thought were actors were struggling not to freeze to death. They wore clothes that weren’t at all suitable for the conditions, and all I could think of was one of them having a stroke or getting a finger, ear, or nose amputated, victims of frostbite. But my group soon lost interest. We continued on our way up, to the top, towards Camp One. Several days later, on the long drive back to Kathmandu, I crossed paths with Gino again. This time at the lodge in Gorakshep and, even though everybody stayed there at one time or another, we found the new coincidence funny. We started a conversation that stretched long into the night, with stiff drinks and the cold outside.

  Gino told me he was there to shoot a campaign, a series of commercials for a brand of cars — commercials in which cars never appear, he told me, with a pride I didn’t understand at the time, but that now makes perfect sense to me.

  I told him I’d majored in international relations, but that I’d never really been interested in anything to do with that field. But I finished the degree, more for my parents than anything else. I went through the motions at college while I devoted myself to what really mattered to me. And that’s how I put it: what really mattered to me. Which was true, because at that time what really mattered to me were the expeditions, days on the mountain, getting in touch with nature, the thinly veiled vanity of posting a photo at six a.m. surrounded by the ice, some vague idea of isolation and overcoming obstacles.

  I looked around and saw my friends trapped inside office buildings, locked in the struggle for a promotion, proud of the fact that they were prepared, efficient, praised by their superiors, proud to speak three, four languages and feeling sure that they’d made it, or were at least on the right track and that ultimately their world was what happened there, between those walls. And as for me, well, I’d found myself, as they say, at an age when hardly anyone knows what they really want. My friend Mari told me that, which is lucky, climbing gives your life meaning, and that’s what people really need, Lena, I always say that, people need to believe in something.

  At one point, looking out at a suffocating, corny sunset, I told Gino about my project, and that’s what I called it, my project: to reach the summit of the highest mountains on each of the seven continents, the so-called Seven Summits. I’d be the youngest Brazilian woman to do it, which, deep down, now that I think about it, was another way of winning, of being admired, of making it. But at the time, this hadn’t even crossed my mind. I also didn’t think my being there was because my family had money — climbing at a high level is an expensive sport. What motivated me, I thought, was a desire to prove to myself, and to as many people as possible, that I was different, that I could do things that nobody, or almost nobody else, could do.

  The year before, I told Gino, I’d climbed Carstensz Pyramid in Oceania. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. From that point on, things got serious, sponsors joined, and then I was at Denali and decided to do that first mission to Everest. Because if I was going to conquer Everest’s nearly nine thousand meters, I’d need to know the details, see it up close, get a feel for it. The roof of the world, Gino said. Yeah, the roof of the world, I said.

  In his armchair, Gino flicked a lighter open and closed. He told me he’d stopped smoking, but he couldn’t get rid of that lighter. He kept opening and closing the metal lid with an eagle on it as he told me that he’d also been to Carstensz, that he’d climbed Mount Roraima, and that this was his third time on Everest. The last time he’d taken part in an expedition on the other side of the mountain, which is pretty different from this side, he said. It requires a lot of technique, there’s a lot of rock climbing. The rocks are super sharp. If they slice through your down suit, at temps of minus thirty degrees, you only have a few minutes before you freeze.

  He said he specialized in films about sports and nature — commercials, TV series, documentaries. Gino waxed poetic about the joys of filming on the mountain. He talked about the difficulties as well. What interested him, he said, was finding new ways to show the same old stuff. He said this with a solemnity,
a tone that gave everything a feeling of urgency and truth. He spoke in detail about the work of an artist who’d made a video on the canals of Venice at night, a hypnotic video, he said, a different way of seeing the city, from the canals, at night.

  I was paying attention, I liked it when Gino shared ideas with me about how the mind works during a climb. The beauty of climbing is that it’s pointless. It has no meaning, it doesn’t hide a meaning, it’s a person and a wall — that’s it. At the time, I liked hearing that kind of thing, I’d even repeat it over and over, like those were my own ideas, and deep down they were, because he seemed to be reading my thoughts. But eventually all that started to sound fake, too.

  I remember telling Gino that I had a gray short-haired cat, not a dog, as your video made me believe today. Besides, I’ve never had a dog, he was the one who liked dogs. I told him I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was seventeen. Just yesterday, he joked, a stupid thing to say now that I think about it. I said I liked southeast Asian food. One topic flowed naturally into another, but thinking of it now, there was nothing natural about it, and before I realized it I was talking about my mother.

  My mother had died of a rare type of cancer that left her blind and wore on cruelly. We were close. In her last months of life, a nurse helped take care of her.

  One day I got home, my dad was out, and I found the nurse with his fly down and a hard-on, masturbating just inches from her face and her blind eyes, looking at nothing. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I pulled him aside, told him to get lost, to leave right that minute or I’d call the police — if he didn’t leave right that minute, I didn’t know what I might be capable of. I never told my mother what actually happened. She asked me a few times about the nurse, she liked him, but I’d say he’d moved to another city and change the subject.