On the other side of the flames, Peter is bent over his marionette. He is sewing it up, his lips curved in a half-smile. I can hear him singing a lullaby, the melody carried to my ears by gusts of wind. It is a peaceful, familiar scene. After a month together in this hostile world, we have become a family. A real family, full of disagreements and misunderstandings.
‘Berti?’
Behind me, Umberto is returning with that light tread that throws everyone off balance, even the stones under his feet.
‘Yes?’
I nod towards Peter, who is combing his doll’s hair.
‘He’s kind of strange, isn’t he?’
‘Stan-eh, Stan-eh … What happened to your sense of humour?’
‘I never had a sense of humour. You know that as well as I do.’
‘Some people smoke, others ride bikes or do crosswords … Peter has his puppet.’
‘I’d prefer it if he smoked.’
‘Tranquillo. He’s a very good researcher. And he’s only twenty-nine.’
‘So he’s not a kid any more. Why does he act like one?’
Umberto smiles strangely. ‘Why? Because he’s in love.’
‘She’ll wait for him.’
‘With you.’
I hear the Commander laughing, hear him bellow mockingly as he talked about those men who didn’t like girls, and what he would do to them if he ever caught one, and if Stan is a pillow-biter with his fossil obsession, if Stan is a pansy, a faggot, an uphill gardener, then it is time to quickly cure him of that affliction …
‘You mean he’s …’
‘I don’t know what he is, non m’importa. I’m talking about intellectual love. Peter admires you. I told him so much about you that he was dying to meet you. He just wants to impress you.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘The truth. That you’re an angel half the time, a bastard the rest of the time, and the best palaeontologist I know.’
‘If he wants to impress me, he’s going the wrong way about it.’
‘And I suppose you always go the right way about it when you want to impress someone?’
That was when I thought about Mathilde.
Mathilde came every year, like many of those children who swelled the population of our village in summer, because their parents had a house there or because they wanted to breathe our beautiful air. We all wandered around the dusty streets in a loose band, a nebula whose centre was formed around the most popular kids. I was on the periphery, an insignificant comet, following them around sometimes without being noticed, pretending to join in their games.
At that age, all girls are pretty. But she was the prettiest. And finally, after four summers, at the age of thirteen, I worked up the nerve to speak to her. I deviated from my usual orbit and approached the sun, inviting her to come and see my fossil collection, on the hilltop near the little church of Notre-Dame des Lavandes. I couldn’t invite her to the farm, because of the Commander.
I didn’t expect her to say yes. Girls who were much less pretty than she had already rejected me. When she agreed, my head exploded with incredulity at her stunning beauty and I shrugged and muttered: ‘Ciao, see you tomorrow then.’ I ran home. I was burning to tell someone. But who? My mother was no longer there.
The next day, I arrived an hour early. I sat amid the scent of lavender, laid out my fossils on a beach towel, folded the edges, and waited. She arrived late. Without apologising, she sat down next to me. We didn’t say anything for a long time, so long that the shadow of a cypress tree moved, creaking, until it covered us.
So I unfolded my towel and showed her my ammonites, my belemnites, and my crowning glory – an insect preserved in a drop of amber. Ignoring them, she turned to me and unbuttoned the top half of her dress. Gaping, I stared at her breasts. They were small and very white, with blue veins and pink nipples. I thought my heart was going to burst.
‘What are you waiting for?’ she asked with a smile.
I lowered my eyes and stared into the earth. I no longer understood what we were doing there, or the strange emotions that were bubbling up inside me. I started to name each fossil in a trembling voice. She shrugged, said, ‘Suit yourself,’ buttoned up her dress, and turned away from me.
I’m sorry, Mathilde, it wasn’t easy for me to know what to do. Nobody had ever taught me to touch the living. The only flesh I knew was stone. I wished I could explain this to her but I couldn’t find the words. It took me years to find them. Besides, I wouldn’t have had time. Just then, the boys from the group came pouring out of the woods. I don’t know if they’d followed her or if they had come that way by chance. They looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. I heard one of them say: ‘Who’s that?’ Yelling, they swooped on my fossils. They left Mathilde alone because they respected her, admired her. They must all have been wondering how a guy like me had ended up alone with a girl like her near the church. There was an English kid among them, a big boy who came every summer. He pointed at me and shouted, ‘Fossil Boy!’ The nickname stuck. They called me Fossil Boy until I was eighteen, when a scholarship allowed me to leave the village for good. That afternoon, though, they went berserk. They picked up my fossils and threw them down the hill. I spent months looking for them after that; I never abandoned them, but I only found one. I gradually created a new collection of fossils, and pretended to believe that it was the same.
I am ashamed that I didn’t fight them, that I just curled up in a ball and waited for the storm to pass. But the worst thing is … While they were throwing away my childhood, laughing and shouting, I turned to look at Mathilde, and I saw pity in her eyes.
Let me tell you something, Mathilde, something I should have said a long time ago. Go to hell, and take your pity with you.
For two days I attack the ice, my face whipped by cold sparks at each crack of the ice axe or the pickaxe. For two days my body vibrates, my tendons strain, my bones crumble. My muscles burn, sing, tense … then suddenly stretch out, holding each other back so that they don’t give way as I lift the axe again, bring it down in an arc onto the hard ice. With each impact, I leave a little of myself behind.
If I ignore the pain, if I push myself beyond what I thought possible, it is because I have spent the last five years dreaming of what I will see when I enter that cave. I have imagined the moment a thousand times, I have sculpted it, perfected it; I have woven a skein of clouds at dusk, and I think that everything is ready. I will enter, then, at sunset. First I will glimpse the head. It will be held to the side in a patient gesture, a dog waiting for its master. The head alone will be enough to tell me what kind of dinosaur it is – the precise species, ultimately, doesn’t really matter. The rest of the beast will be hidden by the darkness. I will move towards it, lamp raised, afraid to discover that the skeleton ends there, after a few solid brown vertebrae. But Leucio wasn’t a liar, and the skeleton will bloom in the beam of light thrown by my lamp. Careful not to trip over its feet, I will keep walking until I reach the very end of its tail. There, I will turn around. The head will have disappeared into the blackness, thirty or thirty-five metres away.
As I have already said, I am a humble storyteller who suffers from a curse: I am voiceless, because I have never had an audience to whom I could tell my stories. I have been voiceless since childhood.
But listen up, all of you.
This animal will give me back my voice.
Third day of digging. Yesterday Gio forced us to stay in the camp for forty-eight hours on the pretext that I had fallen twice. Fatigue, in the mountains, is more dangerous than incompetence or misfortune. We used the time to order our belongings, take stock of our provisions, sharpen our tools.
Getting dressed this morning, I looked down and was surprised to discover that my stomach was almost flat. I couldn’t believe it: I have not been in this kind of shape for nearly twenty years. My skin is brown, tight against my muscles. I have dried out like the meat that we eat every day.
Aside
from our rest period and the time that we were confined to our tents during the big storm, we have followed the same unchanging schedule since our arrival more than a month ago. Get up at dawn. One hour later, we are on the glacier. We work until nine, when we take a short break to eat some dried fruit, then we work again until eleven. Lunch, and a quick nap, leaning against the rock wall. The glacier is cast into shadow early in the afternoon and we work hard until four, when we make our way back to camp. We eat dinner around six, and go to bed when the stars appear.
Our aim: to excavate at least one metre of ice each day. At that rate, we will penetrate the cave in early September. Every hour gained could be decisive, because I still nurture the hope that we will be able to detach the head and organise its transportation – assuming Leucio’s dragon really is there.
At the end of the third day, we put down our ice axes. Autumn is chewing the backs of our necks, prowling under a cold wind, still too young to be really dangerous. Breathless, we contemplate the well we have dug in the ice. It should be three metres deep by now.
It is barely thirty centimetres.
It’s over. We won’t succeed. We have known it since the first blows of the pickaxe against the ice, but we have continued anyway, driven on by the senseless hope that the nature of the ice might change, that we might reach a softer layer or that, one morning, we might suddenly find ourselves blessed with superhuman strength. But the ice has not changed. And neither have we.
It is hard to imagine that four men armed with sharp metal tools and the force of their rage should be able to penetrate only thirty centimetres into a block of ice in three days of solid work. This ice is incredibly dense, shot upwards from the bowels of the glacier by a telluric convulsion. It gives way atom by atom to the bite of the ice axes; it is ground to dust without ever cracking. It would be wrong to see this struggle as a conflict between two materials, metal and water. The forces at work are far more powerful. The might of the entire glacier, two hundred metres deep at this spot, against the will of four madmen. A wave of cold pushes us back, freezes our breath, our limbs, our minds. If we don’t immediately sweep away the powder that we make of the ice, it solidifies again almost instantly. This glacier radiates cold like a negative sun.
It’s a quick calculation. At this rate, it would take us nearly a hundred days to reach the cave. Even if we had that much time, this tempo is unsustainable. We have fought like heroes. We all deserve state funerals.
And this is a kind of death. Without photographs, without evidence, I will not be able to finance a second expedition. Even if I persuaded the Commander to lend me an advance, I doubt I would be able to get the money in time. Poor Stan, he’s losing it, the gods laugh up above. That old bastard would never give him a centime; he’d rather die than help his son. Well then, Stan will just have to find the money somewhere else!
But what hope is there that a secret thirty metres long will remain a secret for much longer? A beast like this is bound to arouse covetous thoughts. Someone will talk. Not Gio, obviously. Umberto, perhaps, by accident. Or Peter, boasting. Someone will talk. By the time I return, it will be too late.
Stan staggers like a drunken man on the path back to the camp.
‘Why don’t you smell of strawberry?’
I stared at the Commander, my throat too tight to swallow. His right eye quivered. I was only eight, but I already knew what that sign meant: it was a precursor of the blows to come, the lashes of the leather belt.
‘Did you go to the village?’
I nodded.
‘You went to the village because the fair is on?’
I nodded.
‘Why don’t you speak? Cat got your tongue?’
‘No.’
‘So answer me. Did you go to the fair?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you wanted to eat some candy floss. That’s what you told me, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘I gave you the coin so you could buy candy floss. Ten centimes. Right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it nice?’
‘Very nice.’
‘Bloody gypsies, say what you like about them, but they know how to make candy floss, don’t they? You smell of strawberry for about ten kilometres after you’ve eaten some!’
The Commander leaned gently towards me and asked in a soft voice: ‘So why don’t you smell of strawberry?’
‘I washed my face before I came ho—’
The slap knocked me against the sideboard. The taste of blood on my lips. A taste I knew well, much better than the taste of strawberry.
‘Sit down. Let’s try again.’
I told him everything. I had used my coin to buy the herbal gels that the pharmacist made for Mama, the ones that made her better. The Commander had forbidden her to spend his money on such quack remedies. He had even threatened to beat up the pharmacist and Mama, so obviously the whole operation was top secret. Or had been.
He looked at me with an expression on his face that I never saw again: compassion.
‘If you hadn’t changed your story, I would have believed you. Next time, when you lie, keep lying until the end.’
It had never happened before. And I would probably have sworn, under torture, that it could never happen. Impossible. Unthinkable. I had argued with Umberto.
I was idly wandering around while Gio made dinner. My footsteps took me towards the triangular tent that served as our storeroom. Wood, tools, ropes, eight large red jerrycans. Eight large red jerrycans. How had I not thought of it before? Eight times fifty. Four hundred litres of oil, as thick as syrup, almost reluctant to be set on fire. When it did finally burn – I had seen it, in our lamps – it let itself be consumed slowly, grudgingly, drop by drop. This oil was the elementary twin of our ice, its alchemical opposite.
I gathered the group and asked for silence. Breathless from the altitude and my excitement, I explained my plan. Fire. The element that changed the destiny of humankind could certainly alter our own destiny, which is so small in comparison. Beginning with the fuse – the hole that we had dug – we would melt the ice by setting fire to the oil. Drum roll, applause, my son is a genius, don’t you think, my mother told anyone who would listen. Madame Mitzler came close to believing it too, because she couldn’t pronounce ‘palaeontologist’.
My companions looked baffled.
‘Why not? Hmm … but wouldn’t it be better to wait until next year, Stan-eh?’
‘I’ve been waiting fifty-two years for this!’
‘We could come back with more men. Better tools.’
‘What better tool is there than fire?’
‘Fire? Maybe. Except that this oil is crude. It’s a dirty solution.’
‘Clean or dirty, who cares? The ends justify the means. And let me remind you that you are being paid for this, and paid well.’
I immediately regretted my words. Gio shook his head in response to some internal dialogue. Peter followed our exchange without a word. Deep down, I knew what was happening. Everyone was exhausted, maybe even Gio, whose movements had grown slower and heavier in recent days. I had, in my euphoria, forgotten about the health of my friends.
Umberto spoke again, looking up at me from below.
‘Even if we burned that oil, there’s no guarantee that there’d be enough of it. Or that we’d be finished before the snow came.’
Umberto wanted to go home, after more than a month away from the world; I could tell. This expedition was my dream, my project; he wasn’t interested in glory. And anyway, what glory? His name in parentheses, a footnote in an article devoted to me? The money didn’t matter to him either. He would probably have come for nothing, for the pleasure of seeing me.
‘You’re right, Berti. All I ask is that you give my idea a chance. Just one.’
Peter watched for Umberto’s reaction, his chin raised like a dog waiting for its master’s signal. With a pang, I realised that Peter was my old Umberto. I had thought that I wouldn’t miss anything from
that wretched time, but I was wrong.
‘So if the experiment hasn’t been conclusive by tomorrow evening, we’ll give it up?’
‘And go home, yes. I promise.’
Thank God Umberto agreed. The adventure could continue, for a few hours at least.
Returning to my tent after counting the jerrycans again, I found my friend waiting for me. I was struck by the long, sad look he gave me.
‘You’re financing all this out of your own pocket. That’s why you want to stay, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. I sold my apartment to cover the costs.’
‘The university didn’t approve this expedition. It probably doesn’t even know about it. You lied to us.’
It’s true, Umberto, I lied. I learned as a boy. It’s a long story, a story about the taste of strawberry; you wouldn’t be interested.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘So am I, Stan.’
Sighing, he walked away, taking with him the little syllable that he always added to the end of my name, and for the first time I understood that it was a syllable of friendship, a little game between the two of us.
The jerrycans, each one weighing fifty kilos, are too heavy to be quickly transported to the glacier, and we can’t risk sacrificing our flasks by using them to decant the oil. With no other containers available to us, we have to empty half a jerrycan onto the ground to lighten the load. In doing so, we lose twenty-five litres of fuel. I hope we won’t regret that loss later. The earth drinks up the black pool as Gio stands watching in dismay. It is a stain on his mountain, almost a personal insult.
It may not seem much, twenty-five litres. At this altitude, it is the weight of the world. We stagger to the glacier, each taking turns to carry the container for ten minutes. When we come to the final wall, our guide takes over.
An unpleasant surprise: our hole is fifteen centimetres smaller than it was yesterday afternoon. Incredible. The glacier breathes out the humidity of the air, and uses it to heal itself. It regenerates while we sleep, destroying our efforts to destroy it. But the glacier won’t win, I swear. We are too close to give up now.
A Hundred Million Years and a Day Page 7
