Sevastopol

by Emilio Fraia

  I’ll never forget that, I said, and I’d never told anyone about any of this, and I think that’s when I discovered that I could tell Gino whatever I wanted. He had an empathetic way about him, and made me feel at ease for some reason. I didn’t know it, but I was alone. I had friends, my father, boyfriends, but I was a lonely person.

  Little by little, Gino and I discovered shared tastes, common interests. You probably know how good he is at that. During that first trip, on the last night, we wound up banging like two crazed animals. I came four times, the last time he was fingering me, my body clutching his legs, as if I needed his legs, his body, to feel free, and when we were done I started to weep desperate sobs. At the time I was still with Téo. I was sure he was the love of my life, I wanted to have his children, to live with him forever. But I felt like what I was doing was right, like it wasn’t wrong.

  In the weeks that followed, Gino and I made plans. I said that I’d been recording a lot on my own. I could show him the videos, all of the files, I really wanted to do something with all that footage, I just didn’t know how or what. Gino thought it would be extraordinary to collaborate. He had a lot of hours of tape, too. And he could accompany me with the camera on expeditions. We’d do the remaining peaks and then go back to attack Everest. Where it all began, he said. Where it all began.

  A series, seven episodes, one for each expedition. A different kind of approach. Action shots, preparations for the climbs, of course. But something more personal, too. Your own thoughts, Lena, stories from your life. That’s the kind of thing that really works. Try to show what you’re feeling, your stories. He said I seemed to be intimate with the camera. I wasn’t shy, that’s true. But I wasn’t exactly super confident, either. He smiled and, looking at me in that way that seemed to strike right through me, said he thought it could work. As soon as he got back to São Paulo, he’d get in touch with some friends. He knew people who’d be interested in the idea, for sure.

  On that first night, the very first, in the middle of our journey back to Kathmandu with our teams, the whole way on foot, a ten-day trek, departing from base camp and hiking past bridges, waterfalls, trees, Gino commented on the color of the ice on the mountain, how it changed throughout the day, in varying shades of lilac.

  But now I’m not sure if that really happened. Because in that damn video I watched today, your video, a man was talking about the color of the ice, how it changed throughout the day, and now I’m not sure where this came from, if I’d heard that comment about the lilac color of the ice in the video or if it was something I saw with my own eyes, on the mountain. There was another line about the grayish eyes of the man in the video — you made him look just like Gino, someone ostensibly interesting and mysterious — using turns of phrase and descriptions I’d never say, at least not like that. A smattering of silver in his beard and hair gave his face a metallic appearance and, up close, the strands looked like glittering dots.

  I remembered that night. And the others that followed, after we decided to go ahead with the project: train stations and the ferrous early morning air in Kathmandu; Mount Elbrus and the lights of an airport control tower shining through the fog; the month in Aconcagua; our conversations, the ex-wife he’d never see again, the daughter he’d like to spend more time with; my increasingly obsessive desire to climb; hot water bottles in sleeping bags so that, above four thousand meters, our lungs wouldn’t freeze. I could hear the ice outside the tent. The ice made noises when it moved or when water hollowed it out from the inside. Gloves, insulators, and socks over socks. Taking care to keep warm, to keep the blood flowing. If we died up there, would the ice preserve our flesh? Or would everything end up gnawed by the wind, until we became dust inside rock?

  The truth is, given a choice, I’d never revisit all this, believe me. But it happened again today. At a small gallery, in this city where I came after I decided to take a break, go off-grid, bow out.

  Admittedly, I hadn’t been feeling well all day. I’d felt dizzy the whole morning, a spasm that started in my right shoulder blade and radiated up to my temple, my blood coursing faster than normal in my veins, making me hold my wrists under cold water from the bathroom tap more than once, wet my forehead, look at myself in the mirror, and listen to my breath.

  I had a late lunch, something light and, at around four, I decided to go out. The neighborhood where I live is pleasant, with nice, wide sidewalks. I can get around without anyone’s help. There are rows of plane trees, antique shops.

  There I was, wandering around, trying to stay calm, when a neon sign caught my eye. It was a bright blue triangle above a set of glass double doors. One of those trendy galleries. For some reason, probably because it made me think of Gino, I went up the ramp and inside. It was a photo exhibition. Even though I’d always traveled lots of places with my parents and visited museums all around the world, I’ve never really understood art very well. I like to look at it and all, but there comes a point when everything starts to look the same, and I just feel tired. I’d rather wander aimlessly and then get an ice cream.

  But today it kept my attention. It was what I needed, I think. Something to give me a boost, something to put me in a different vibe. As I moved through the gallery, there was a series of photographs in a row along the walls. I thought they were beautiful. On the back wall, there were only two, larger photographs, occupying the entire space. In one of them, a light bulb hanging from a ceiling painted bright red. In the other, in black and white, a silver-colored sea under a single cloud. The bulb and the cloud were the same size and seemed to somehow talk to each other.

  I was happy I had this thought, how those images might relate to one another, without really being related, but connected by a kind of invisible thread. I thought maybe the events of someone’s life worked like that. I lingered there awhile, trying to decipher what those images might be trying to tell me. At least, I thought, my little outing was doing the trick. I’d managed to find a distraction.

  I went to the back of the room, where a sort of narrow corridor led to a door, a passageway, protected by a heavy velvet curtain.

  Behind it was a small room, in total darkness, with only a wooden bench in the center. A video was playing. Your video. The label said: The Ama Dablam Route, and the running time, 42 minutes, just above the name of the artist, a Belgian woman, born in Antwerp in 1984, Nora Pikman — your name, Miss Pikman, your name.

  What I can say, my dear, is that I positioned my wheelchair in the middle of the room, the film was playing, I couldn’t tell if it was near the beginning or if it was halfway through. A woman’s voice was narrating and, against images I thought seemed familiar, she told the story of a woman, a high-performance climber.

  As I watched, all I could do was blink, perplexed. This was my story.

  My friends, my first encounter with Gino, my relationship with Téo, a ridiculous re-enactment of that last trip to the beach with my friends, the accident — it was all in there, albeit somewhat distorted, and each episode was steeped in this forced, overly dramatic tone, full of over-the-top images. The names, of course, had been changed. And there were unrecognizable moments. There were quite a few. A young female climber, the highest mountains in the world. Watching this, I had one of those sensations that words can’t explain, as if the countless times I told my story, in interviews and to packed audiences, I’d been telling the truth, telling things exactly as they happened, but lying. That video seemed to do the opposite.

  How could someone have done something like this? How could someone have twisted my story so horribly? Everything in the video upset me. Everything was inaccurate. I don’t remember Gino having a lighter, for example. And the whole story about our encounter in the snow didn’t happen like that, and neither did my mother’s illness, or the night of sex — I didn’t come four times, I can guarantee that.

  For a moment, I was afraid that everything would be forever crystallized in those scenes. Like a tr
avel diary: when we write in a diary, what we remember from the trip — years later, when we read those words — has less to do with the trip itself than with what we’ve jotted down in the diary.

  I watched the film until the end. It stopped abruptly, in the middle of a stream of thoughts, with the image of a man and a woman crossing an empty avenue at night.

  After a brief moment of total darkness, the video started again. It was a shot of a clear day, looking out on a still lake with a few tiny boats leaving behind trails of white foam in the dark blue water, moving incredibly slowly. In the background, a snow-covered mountain. It looked like a postcard.

  Ever since I was little, it had been my dream to climb Everest. In 2011, at the age of twenty-one, when I was at base camp for the first time, I dreamed I’d reached the summit.

  I felt every sensation: the shortness of breath, tiredness, the happiness of being on top. But I had no idea what any of that really meant. It took a lot of training and willpower to understand and really feel the mountain firsthand. Because above eight thousand meters everything gets really hard, and you feel like you’re dying. That’s no figure of speech. It’s an altitude that causes the body to deteriorate, not just the muscles, but the brain as well.

  The worst moments were the ones leading up to our assault on the summit. Five of us made it as far as the final camp: my friend with the camera, Gino Steffe, doctor and climber Max Camargo, the two Sherpas who accompanied us, and me. Then came the problem with the weather forecast . . . On Everest, climbers use three weather reports: a British, a Swiss, and a service maintained by the Indian Army. They all said that conditions on June 13th would be perfect. Low winds, mild temperatures, clear skies. But on the 12th, when we arrived at Camp Four, the last one before our summit push, the winds were over a hundred kilometers an hour, the temperature hovered around minus forty degrees.

  Nawang, one of the Sherpas accompanying us, was blunt: if you want to go on, that’s fine, but we’re going to go ahead and dig our graves so we save the others the trouble. We’d planned everything down to the last detail, the idea was to arrive, rest, let the ice melt off our clothes, fill up our water jugs, and leave by eight a.m. at the latest. Because no intelligent mountaineer spends the night in the death zone.

  Camp Four is in the death zone, above eight thousand meters. It’s called that because anyone who spends too much time there will obviously die. Because of the bad weather, we couldn’t move ahead or go back, we couldn’t do anything. Sleeping there, without oxygen, was a real risk. So we decided to use the oxygen. Except when the weather improved, we wouldn’t have enough oxygen to reach the summit. Not only is oxygen on Everest expensive, it’s something we have to carry ourselves. And carrying each cylinder, at that altitude, along with the rest of the equipment, wasn’t easy. We went up with five bottles per person, which isn’t much, but our strategy was to only use the oxygen above seven thousand meters.

  In larger teams you can have virtually unlimited oxygen, with the Sherpas carrying the packs. It’s a different kind of climbing. I wanted to carry my own gear — that was my idea of overcoming. So one option would be to try to find more oxygen, but at Camp Four you’d have better luck getting someone to give you a pound of diamonds than a milliliter of oxygen. Then my friend Max suggested we take his oxygen cylinders. He and his sherpa would go back so that Nawang, Gino, and I could summit. We’d been together the whole time. Thirteen days of hiking to the base camp, then the thirty days of acclimatization. And when it came time to attack the summit, the most glorious moment, they wouldn’t go. We hugged Max. I cried a lot.

  The night of June 12 was the coldest of my life. Nawang and I had hypothermia, it was awful. We spent the next day waiting for the winds to let up. We’d already been waiting more than thirty hours. By around eight, the weather seemed to show signs of change. I said: let’s go. Nawang said it was nuts, the wind was still too strong. But it seemed to be dying down. So we decided to start the climb. The temperature was minus forty-two degrees, but the wind chill was less than sixty. The climbing equipment was covered in ice. Blocks of ice formed on top of my watch, ice was coming out of my oxygen mask.

  In the darkness, with just a flashlight, around two in the morning, we saw a light. In my expeditions, I’d seen people lose hands, get their fingers, nose, or ear amputated, suffer cerebral edema, pulmonary edema because of the lack of pressure — the lungs fill with fluid, the person drowns in their own liquids — but I’d never seen a corpse.

  I thought: now’s the time I’ll see a corpse, and I tried to prepare myself. From a distance, the light didn’t move. We kept walking towards it, at a robust pace, trying to keep warm. Suddenly, I heard a voice, getting closer and closer.

  It was a large man, lying with his head stuck in the snow. I tried to communicate with him. In a last-ditch effort, the man lifted his neck: where his eyes should have been, there was a sheet of ice. He screamed in pain. I tried talking to him, but we couldn’t understand each other, he didn’t seem to speak English, and I didn’t speak his language, so we both just stayed there.

  I checked his oxygen cylinder: it had enough oxygen for a few more minutes. He was already blind and, when his oxygen ran out, he’d die. A lot of people make mistakes at high altitudes, and there’s an unspoken agreement that it’s every man for himself. How could I, someone who weighs 60 kg, carry a 90-kg man, eight thousand meters up, and barely able to breathe? I tried putting him on my back so that I could drag him down. Gino told me: Lena, our oxygen is running out, our expedition ends here.

  At that moment, a lot of things went through my mind. One year of preparation. Daily training sessions. Building climbing muscles at the gym. Distance runs and sprints at the park. All of that was going down the drain.

  After a few minutes of descent, dragging the man behind us, we saw a cluster of lights. We let them get closer. It was a group of climbers. They were Germans. One of them introduced himself. The man we were carrying was from their team. He had shot ahead and left the others behind.

  Now they would take responsibility for the man: his care, his rescue.

  I looked at Gino. We were back in the game. I was filled with energy and enthusiasm. We continued at a brisk pace. With so much adrenaline, I had no idea where I was stepping. I hung from the rope about five times. Dangling, rope stretched, with I don’t know how many thousand meters below me. We went on and on, not stopping.

  On June 13, 2013, at seven in the morning, we reached the summit, Gino and me. Nawang hung back at a distance, showing support. We stayed fifteen minutes at the top. We recorded everything, and I tried to describe the feeling for the camera — at the time, I kept a video diary. Gino got some good shots, we watched the sun rise. Gino hugged me. We kissed. The story might have ended there, but nothing ever works like that.

  We started our descent. We were already at Camp One when one of the ropes fixed across a crevasse came loose. An ice pack shifted. I lost my balance and fell. My legs got stuck. It all happened so fast. I felt hot, like something warm had been placed on my knees, something that didn’t allow me to think of anything else. While I waited for the search and rescue team, I was sure I was going to die.

  Dozens of people die on Everest every season. Search and rescue is difficult. Helicopters don’t have access to many sections.

  In the ambulance, I had hallucinations.

  In one of them, I found myself in the middle of a lawn around an isolated house, flanked by a stream and a row of eucalyptus trees, and I felt a sudden pain. I called Téo and he said he thought we’d better go back. He seemed upset. He’d planned to go mountain biking that day and now this. We put our backpacks in the car and left. On the road, he told me to breathe, relax, he said that deep down it was all my fault: you need to eat better, Lena, eat less meat, do yoga, change your routine, make your body an instrument for expanding and knowing the soul, etc.

  He turned on the stereo and scrolled through hi
s phone searching for some song. He stayed like that, looking at the screen, looking at the road, the road getting swallowed up under the headlights, his head moving in a sleepy, blue, sort of phosphorescent way, detached from the darkness like the bust of a statue. At one point, he turned to me and I thought he wanted to tell me something. But he said nothing. He looked back down and kept fiddling with his phone, looking at the screen, then at the road.

  Outside, the brush that covered almost the entire shoulder bowed in the breeze, the sky was a puddle of oil, dozing peacefully behind a single cloud, and we were submerged in a feeling of darkness when suddenly something lit up. I didn’t have time to turn, Téo looked up, and I think we both saw it at the same time, a blur lumbering across the asphalt in front of us: I screamed and he braked, the wheels locked and the car came dragging to a stop, about two meters from it, now staring at us. The mane. A screech and hooves; the animal ambled off, sluggish — and vanished.

  Did that really happen? An animal crossing the road, Téo and I, together, in the car, gasping, watching. In the ambulance, I thought that if everything had turned out fine before, if nothing serious had happened, why wouldn’t this be the same? But in the middle of that dream, which I didn’t know whether I was dreaming or not, I heard a voice telling me that just because everything turned out fine once, twice, a hundred times, didn’t mean it would be that way forever, Lena, all it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then a rope comes loose, your crampons lose their traction, a stone shifts from the spot it’s been in for thousands of years and that’s it. Connected to all those tubes, the ECG machine plotting lines as if agonizing in fear and doubt, I couldn’t feel my body.

  Through the window, which looked far away, because the roof of the ambulance really did look far away, lampposts flickered past against the night sky, it felt like my face blended with them, the traffic lights on Kantipath Road and, surrounded by those beams of light, everything was confusing, uneven. The sky looked more like a mirror that reflected nothing.