by Emilio Fraia
I underwent seventeen surgeries. Who would ever think that one day you wake up feeling fine, going after your dream of climbing a mountain, and at journey’s end a piece of your body simply no longer exists? When asked how he coped, one of the thousands of soldiers maimed in the Crimean War said: the chief thing is not to think. If you don’t think, it’s nothing much. It mostly all comes from thinking.
In the years following the accident, I went out and told my story. I gave interviews. I did more than one TED talk. I made money. I became a successful speaker, someone who had beat the odds, overcome adversity, and moved forward with her head held high.
I was very active on social media, giving my opinion on subjects that elicited the sympathy of my audience. Many times, I recounted each stage of my recovery, my return to climbing. I began to tell my story in a sincere, transparent, emotionally committed way. The climb. All the tension during the climb. The fallen man. The adventure. The accident. The trauma. The story of my recovery, a year in bed, seventeen surgeries, including plastics, grafts, and others for rehabilitation. The time I went without looking in the mirror. The entire medical debate about whether or not they could save my left knee. Motor and mental confusion.
At first, I would aim my legs, or the lack thereof, toward my father, and ask him for some kind of reaction. I told how the accident had brought us closer together. I told how many times I had the impression that my legs were still there, and instinctively went to stretch them, remembering only at the last moment that they no longer existed. I told about the time I started to cry, saying that the laces on my boots were untied, that I would never again tie the laces on my boots, that I couldn’t remember the last time I did. I encouraged people to tell their own stories. You have to break free from all that. You can’t keep quiet. Your experience must be shared. People are interested in real stories. You just need to put it out there in a way that inspires.
I’d talk about a former American porn star who’d decided to tell her story. It’s touching and genuine when she says how she’d like for society to see her not as a former porn star, but as a mother, wife, daughter. At corporate lectures, I tried to build bridges for topics like personal quests, overcoming, teamwork. I tried to raise the audience’s awareness, get them to think about things in a new way and how to apply that knowledge to their routines. This is about me, yes, but also about all of us. People identified with me, and I soon understood that this identification was a key, a key that could open all doors.
Images from the expedition, taken by photographer and documentary filmmaker Gino Steffe, traveled the world. I was honored on two occasions by the Brazilian Excursionist Center. Reader’s Digest told my story in its February 2014 issue, and National Geographic, too: I didn’t know my biggest challenge was still to come. At twenty-three years old, I’d suffered genuine defeat. A tough break had radically changed my body, my life.
But I fought back. I moved forward. Happiness is contagious, it boosts self-esteem and strengthens the heart. Make your wish be the inspiration of those who admire you. Crisis is the right time for leadership. In short, don’t give up. It was this long and hard path that finally revealed a person I never would have become if I hadn’t gone through all that.
In the video, a woman appears from time to time, a woman with wavy hair, a big nose, and thin lips. Is that you, Miss Pikman? She never really looked at the camera but she narrated the story, which, as it unfolded, increasingly resembled my own, and at the same time, was also completely different.
What I think now is that maybe you’re an acquaintance of Gino. It’s possible you’re even close, and maybe he told you all this, down to the last detail.
Or maybe . . . and I can feel the blood pumping, I think my head’s going to detach from my body, maybe you were behind it the whole time, Gino, and this name, this name, Nora Pikman, is just another invention of your sick soul.
Or is it that, despite all this, everything that happened today was simply a misunderstanding, a unique coincidence? If that’s the case, I must apologize, and congratulate you on your work, Miss Pikman.
One night in April 2017, I was at my dad’s house, where I’d moved after the accident, and my phone rang. It was him, Gino.
He said he was in his car, on a dark street in Pacaembu — our secret spot where we used to go to have sex, he made a point of telling me that.
It was eleven when he called, I remember glancing at my watch a little later and it was nearly midnight. On the phone, he gushed with a kind of manic excitement and, at the same time, I think he’d started to cry. He said he’d seen me on a TV show. He said he was happy I was climbing again, even without my — he paused. Legs, I said. Yeah, he said. Then he praised my willpower. He said he always knew my potential. He was proud of me. And he said he’d like to see me. Are you able to get out? he asked. Of course, I said, I’m not dead, am I? I was shaking. He asked me to wait. He’d come by my house. We agreed to meet in front of the garage door. I hung up the phone, placed it on top of the dresser. The house was dark, my dad was asleep.
I went down the ramp, opened the garage door and waited. In the dark, I remember clutching the socket of my metal legs, the cold surface of the straps and buckles that attached them to my body. Back then I still wore prostheses, which I later decided to retire. In the street, the beam of light from a lamppost streaked across the ground. I got a whiff of night-blooming jasmine that reminded me of my mother. I saw the headlights of a car in the roundabout at the end of the block. I saw the window of a house light up.
Leaning against the wall, inside the garage, I looked at the two stumps of my legs. On one of them, they’d kept the knee, which gave the end of it a bigger bulge, a rounded and soft appearance. The other one still had the bandages on, which I constantly rolled and unrolled. How long had it been since I last talked to Gino? I hadn’t seen him since the accident. He felt like a stranger, someone from another life, a person who knocks on the door during a storm with his face battered by rain.
At some point, I realized he wasn’t coming. I called his number, but no one answered. Over the next few days, I called again, but suddenly there was a message that the phone number didn’t exist. Months later, I wrote him an e-mail.
In the e-mail, I said I understood that we might never see each other again. But just the idea that he existed gave me a good feeling, the simple idea of knowing he existed. It was as if a part of me, a part of someone I used to be, was free, walking around somewhere else. But at the same time it was a sad feeling too, because that part of me was no longer mine.
If we ever do meet again, I don’t think we’ll recognize each other, I said in the message. What if things had been different? What if none of this had happened? I dreamed about you this week. We’d arrived at a lodge, much like the one in Gorakshep. The room was filthy, bug-ridden. You went in first and cleaned it up before I came in.
We’re growing farther apart every day, I told him in the dream. I don’t know if we’ll be able to say these things in the future, because I don’t know if I’ll be able to communicate with you for much longer. It all happened so quickly. You are the repository of a place in time. I feel like, after so long, the plot of an old movie finally makes sense: the one where two people who like each other very much but can’t be together. I remember the feeling of not understanding movies like that when I was a girl. It made me angry. I thought that’s the way things were: you either love somebody or you don’t. And I remember getting upset at those kinds of movies, the ones that ended with love affairs that only existed in a kind of faraway, elusive place.
The truth is I never sent that e-mail to Gino, or told anyone about my dreams — after all, people get bored hearing about someone else’s dreams. But something changed. I started to dislike the person I’d become. Books, lectures, long posts on Facebook. What had I done with my story? To be honest, I did what people do all the time. Tell stories, retell them, freeze them in time, try to make sen
se of them. This is me, I exist, this is my story, this happened to me, I suffered, I fought, I kept going, I made it, the world needs love and justice, inspiration is the path forward, it’s the first step towards making a wish come true. And history is repeated until everything gets erased, and we no longer know what is what.
Whenever I read about people who’ve died, I think: is this how someone’s going to write about me one day? One event explaining another, reasons, motivations?
And if today everything came flooding back, and I now find myself writing this to you, it’s because some things never leave us. I don’t expect a reply, Gino. But I do wonder: what’s the difference between the story in this video of yours and the one I’ve told myself for so long? Is there even a difference, in the end?
Sorry for going on for so long. Or rather, sorry for being brief, because I know you prefer things that are long and drawn out, sorry for not giving you all the details, gestures, descriptions of anguished characters wandering around and moaning about in the city, smoking a cigarette, or on isolated beaches searching for something that got lost.
In the video, the woman opened her eyes and saw the beach.
From that weekend, months before the accident, I remember banal little things: a sunshade rolling across the sand, Mari walking past in a bikini, a towel thrown over her shoulder, Lóli in sunglasses, standing on the porch, eating yogurt with granola in a blue ceramic bowl. Waves rolling in, neither weak nor strong.
In the end, I think these are things we remember most. We remember a day when we stood by the fire and then put our boots out to dry, or the day we went out early for a walk in the snow and nothing special happened. Would you like to film me telling this? Is that a good enough story for you?
I remember Mari asking me on the porch: Lena, how do you take a shower on the mountain? She’d just come out of the water and was untangling her hair with one of those minty-smelling conditioners that made me feel like I was back home again.
I repeated what I normally said when asked that question. I explained how first we had to go to the lake with a container. But the lake will be frozen over, so when you get there, you have to break the ice, grab a funnel, and fill the container. Then you have to carry that container to the stove. It takes forty minutes just to heat up the water. Then we take something called a shower bag, a sort of backpack with a little hose, a backpack that turns into a shower. The hot water goes inside it. But it’s so cold out that water already starts to cool just by pouring the water in there. You have to run as fast as you can to and from the bathroom tent, which is a hell of a long way away, because if you take too long the water gets cold, and if you don’t dry off right after the shower, the water will freeze on your body.
Mari, trying to untangle her hair with the comb, said: I’d never make it, no fucking way. I replied: yeah you would, people can get used to anything in situations like that. Then Lóli, who’d been quiet the whole time, said: I don’t think we get used to anything at all, not ever.
We stood there awhile, in silence, feeling the sun on our faces. There was a cool breeze. The almond trees between the house and the sea fluttered against the late afternoon sun. At one point, Téo appeared, coming up from the beach, with his board. He came in, closed the little gate. He turned on the outdoor shower. As he wiped the sand from his feet and legs he looked up, he looked at me.
It’s getting late, he said, smiling. I repeated: yeah, it’s getting late, and I smiled, too.
May
He drags his leg with the bum knee — the worker sprints ahead to shut off the water and turn on the pump. They’re the only ones left there, along with a chubby helper who opens up the rooms from time to time to air them out, as they say, warding off the musty smell.
It’s a place with rusty cutlery at the bottom of heavy drawers. Chipped cups, chairs stacked atop the stained carpet in the corner of an empty hall.
The fireplace, dark and cold, looks like the mouth of a demon that lost its way, and finding no way back, stayed there, inhabiting the walls, crouched behind each door.
At the back of the patio, a bar sits beside a disconnected hot tub where various items, covered by a tarp, sit forgotten: rackets, shovels, bags of fertilizer, a pair of Le Coq Sportif sneakers with no shoelaces. Around the property, wooden owls dot a gravel path, which looks longer than it really is. After he makes it across the grass block pavers, Nilo stands on the edge of the pool beside his employee.
*
They watch the water level lower in silence. Nilo smooths his hair, he has white hair. He wipes his hand across his small, blue eyes, afloat on a face that implausibly defies wrinkles. Nilo is wearing a light-colored shirt and the steel-gray windbreaker that accompanies him everywhere, his hands drop to his waist, his fingers reach for the waistband of his pants, he stomps his leg and it locks into his gumboot like a piece of wood.
In the swimming pool, the water leaves behind a dirty ring on the tiles, two feet from the edge. Years ago, when he first got the idea to build all this, he’d imagined a clean, clear, blue basin. But the river water is dark. It gets muddy this time of year because of the rain. His employee’s name is Walter. He shakes his head and says this doesn’t make the slightest sense; if he were in there, the body would have floated to the top. He says something else. But the pump is hard at work and Nilo doesn’t hear him. Walter also doesn’t repeat himself. He may well have gotten carried away, Nilo says, had too much to drink, I mean, and fallen in.
If it were a river, the fire department would spend days searching. Because sometimes a body can get stuck on the bottom, tangled up, and won’t rise to the surface. That can happen, yes, indeed.
The water creeps down at a tepid pace, and Nilo barely moves, he just stands there, surrounded by the area that was once the campground, the vegetable garden, the orchard. A pine tree rises up next to the white statue of a woman holding a pitcher, and when the wind shifts, the eucalyptus trees on the mountain lean forward, and it is as if they were marching towards the property, gaining ground, and leaving no way out. Nilo blinks and asks when they’re going to plant the squash. Walter says they’ve already planted them, together, two weeks ago. The noise of the water draining leaves him bewildered.
It was two weeks ago. Nilo was on one of the sun loungers, trying to read — an old magazine, with a man catching butterflies on the cover — when he saw the car pull up. It was a couple, they weren’t young, the man looked to be his age. In retrospect he must have been younger, but not by much. His name was Adán. His wife, Veronica, was a wispy, nervous-looking woman who wore glasses. At first glance, Nilo thought she was hideous, not necessarily because she was unattractive, though she certainly was, but because she immediately seemed agitated, anxious, restless. She asked if they had a room available. She said she preferred one with large windows because she tended to suffocate in enclosed spaces.
The man, Adán, had eyes that pinched between his cheeks, making an expression that resembled a grin or, depending on the angle, a grimace. He was short, potbellied, with earthy-colored skin and a broad nose. His full head of hair had been dyed dark black. He looked like an old Indian. He said that the day before they’d gone to the wedding of a distant cousin on a farm in Redenção, the city with the dam, the one where the accident had flooded everything. They’d slept there, and bright and early in the morning they’d decided to explore the area, spending the day going from one place to another, visiting stops on the Cheese Trail, touring the local honey producers. Doing some sightseeing, the woman added, which was unusual, since for many years they’d rarely left home.
On the patio, the shadows of Nilo and the couple grew longer, the late afternoon sun carrying them all the way out onto the faded slate pavers at the entrance. This kind of thing still happened from time to time. Nilo apologized. He said that the inn was no longer open. There were eight rooms, separated from each other, cabin-style, and an area where you could camp, but unfortu
nately the whole thing never worked out. Nilo really was very sorry, because after all these were people who’d arrived, confused, looking for a place to stay, only to find an all-but-abandoned spot in the middle of nowhere, drowning in the landscape, about to get swallowed up by the surrounding wilderness. What he could do in situations like this was offer one of the rooms, even though they’d long sat shut and unused, as long as they weren’t bothered by the smell of rotting timber, the ants, spiders, possible cracks, damp corners, and leaks here and there. He could provide clean towels, bedding. Drum up something for breakfast. Something simple. Bread, butter, jam. Juice and milk. Because there really was nowhere else to go for miles around.
Veronica adjusted her glasses: they would clearly not stay be staying. But Adán didn’t think it was a bad idea. He reckoned the man was being kind, and that, speaking for himself, he couldn’t bear to drive any further. They’d been driving around since early that morning, and ended up drifting hypnotically along the dirt roads, losing all track of time, traveling further than they would like.
And maybe he thought of it as an adventure, because suddenly he recounted how he used to go camping in his youth, that it had been his dream to buy an RV and travel across southern Chile, that the roadside inns in northern Peru were just like this, bare bones, practically someone’s house, but that this was better than a hotel, a thousand times better, no comparison. The woman adjusted her glasses several times. Under the deep-red afternoon sky, their three shadows intersected on the lawn, Adán’s flowing from his pair of soiled white loafers, and the woman’s head suddenly joining the angle of a potted plant, which gave her shadow a sculpted, extravagant hairstyle.