A Hundred Million Years and a Day

by Jean-Baptiste Andrea

  There is no question now of sweeping the path every day. The trick worked: it seems to have brought my mind back to itself – no amnesias since I started. But now it is impossible to remain outside my tent longer than ten minutes at a time. And even those ten minutes cost me an hour of uncontrollable shivering afterwards, huddled under my blankets. I am not ashamed to say that I take care of my business inside the tent, in an old bowl whose contents I then throw as far away as I can. I don’t mind dying, but I refuse to let them find me in some ditch with my backside in the air.

  The wind blows almost every day now. It no longer comes from the south. It is a white, hollow wind, full of angles and sharp edges, and I cling to my soul when it passes. It stops only at night. And what night! It chimes like a crystal glass. Those stars, my God, those stars … If I could fall asleep one more time while staring at them, I would be a happy man. I have only five minutes to admire them, between the fire going out and my return to my tent. The blackness comes back then, powdering my cheeks with a shimmering talc. I will miss them, when I get home. It doesn’t take much to kill a star. One street lamp is enough.

  It’s ridiculous, Mathilde. I still love you. All the reason in the world is nothing against a flash of blonde hair. Perhaps we will bump into each other in the middle of a busy boulevard. A little thrill of recognition: aren’t you …? A surge of memory: yes, remember when we …? And we will start over. You will console me and delight me. I’ll be less harsh; I’ll have laughter on my lips and the sparkling blue eyes of all invincible lovers. Your hair will be shading into white, your face lined by the years. I won’t care. Trees lose their leaves but still the sap is green inside them. A cloud does not alter the sun that it hides. I will follow the paths of your wrinkles. You could never not be beautiful to me.

  But of course we won’t bump into each other. And I will keep stumbling down paths of ice.

  Everything has frozen. I can walk on the snow now without sinking into it. A few days ago, I was reckless enough to leave my boots too close to the wall of my tent when I went to bed. The next morning, their laces were like steel rods and I had to light a fire in the middle of the day to unfreeze them. If I’d put them on while they were filled with that deadly cold, I’d have lost my toes.

  My reserves of oil have diminished much faster than I expected. My stock of wood was used up long ago. Now I burn fuel, adding the odd piece of the triangular tent that used to shelter our equipment. Every day of cold reduces my chances of survival. If I reach the bottom of the jerrycan, I will never make it off this mountain. My body heat will bleed out, little by little, and my stiff fingers will not be able to hold it in. I have not seen the sun in a week. All my hope now is in ten or fifteen litres of oil, and the sound of the liquid lapping inside the metal container haunts my dreams.

  Last night I shivered inside three layers of clothing. The night was black. I am talking about that mystical blackness which is the absence of everything, not just light, the kind of night when you daren’t close your eyes for fear of adding darkness to darkness. And in those hours of dread, I suddenly heard a noise.

  The thing circled around my tent like a sigh for several minutes, the only sound that of the snow being disturbed. I was too scared to move. What could be living here? A rabbit? But the visitor took up too much air; I could perceive its mass, the place that it occupied in space, with the instinct of early man, man before fire, under constant threat, always on his guard.

  I thought of a ghost. Gio’s son, come to beg me for help? Peter, seeking vengeance from the depths of the glacier? All the tales and legends of my native Pyrenees haunted me, bouncing around my mind in a macabre dance. A drac, perhaps, that friendly donkey that our teacher warned us about, which would snatch children as they left the school, its body lengthening to let more and more of them ride on its back before taking them away to drown them in the river. In the end I cried out, like a child waking from a nightmare, and the noises stopped. I forgot about the cold and stayed up all night, watching as the walls of my canvas cocoon changed from black to khaki to emerald to lime.

  Even after that, I waited. For another hour, perhaps. Finally I went out, wielding my ridiculous penknife. I was alone with my mountains, as always. But when I looked down at the snow, I saw the tracks, the furrows left behind by the beast that had circled the tent. I had not dreamed it. I shuddered with dread when I identified the author of those sinister trenches. A ghost? The idea seemed almost laughable now. I would have gladly swapped my nocturnal visitor for all the phantoms in the world. It was a wolf.

  *

  So come on then, you bearded deity, you bitter and mean old god, be honest. What did I do to you? I went to church every Sunday for years without protest, because I adored the way my mother worshipped you, praying in a whisper, my hand in hers. Because I loved feeling her tremble when you descended during the elevation – abracadabra – and when you somehow hid yourself inside the wafer-thin Host. I am no more a sinner than any other man. I have never stolen, and I have certainly never killed, and while I may have coveted my neighbour’s wife occasionally, it was okay because he didn’t want her any more. And as we’re settling scores here, shall I tell you about all the times I found my mother in tears at the back of the barn, with a split lip or a black eye, and she begged me not to tell anyone? I could spend the whole winter telling you stories like that. So, no, don’t tell me that I deserved all this – this cold, this loneliness, this pain. And now a wolf? You are a worse man than me, heavenly Father. And your deadly sin? I’ve saved that till last: you don’t even exist.

  My fire burns all night now. When will the animal take the hint? It is still there: I can see its tracks every morning. I doze, feeding my fire with scraps of canvas dipped in oil.

  The wolf is a perfect work of nature. It watches patiently as I exhaust myself with fear. With the science of its species, it knows that a fire always goes out in the end. And I keep fighting, like so many other men before me. Instinct versus instinct.

  I have never seen the animal. It prowls at the edges of the darkness, not exactly where the firelight ends, but a little further on, to hide its eyes. It is black, too: now and then I find a tuft of its fur in the snow. I have even thought, idiotically, of taming it. One night I left it some ham as an offering. The wolf didn’t touch it. It prefers to wait.

  My submissiveness gives way to madness. Tonight, I take my knife and I go outside and blindly slash at the dark night air with it, screaming at the wolf to come and show itself – ‘if you’re a man’. It does not come, obviously.

  I pour out the last of the oil and stare into the empty jerrycan. Without fuel, the tent canvas won’t burn. After a week of struggle, I surrender. I stir up the dying embers and retreat into the tent with my terror. Where are you, Pépin, when I need you most? The enemy will come tonight. There are too many cracks and I can’t watch them all, not alone. If only my dog could curl its body around me, to protect me from harm …

  In the early morning I wake with a start, amazed that I have slept, amazed that I am still alive. The wolf has spared me. I emerge from my tent into a morning of bright sunlight, blinded by the promise of spring. I close my eyes to filter the burning dazzle. I am as hungry as an ogre. I could eat a whole valley, trees, men, animals and all, stones cracking beneath my teeth, leaves sticking to my tongue, and wash it down with a river. I take a few steps into the snow, which sighs and creaks, squeezed under my boots like an accordion.

  Alive. And then I see. There, in front of me … the disaster. I will not be eating any valley or men or animals. I will never eat anything again.

  The trunk containing my provisions is empty. The wolf has wolfed it all down. After seven months in this combe, reduced to a shadow of myself, a poor pile of bones, hair and wiry muscles, I didn’t think for a moment of hiding my Italian ham and my dried apricot somewhere safe. I thought that it was me the beast wanted.

  Gio was right. In the mountains, it is arrogance that kills you.

  The
hunger began almost instantly. It’s funny: I used to have to force myself to eat every day, cursing each mouthful of dried meat and its saltiness that burned my lips, cursing each piece of fruit and its sticky sweetness. Now they are all I dream of. Just let me taste them one more time, just once.

  The first day, I hunted around for leftovers. I made a frozen cone with the scraps I found, and devoured it. The wolf had done a good job. It had not wasted anything or left anything behind. I imagined it in its lair, sated and sleepy, drunkenly thanking its dark and nameless gods.

  The next day I ate snow. Eyes closed, I gave my sorbet exotic flavours: mango, orange blossom, perhaps a little passion fruit. I chewed on a bit of wood: mmm, what delicious liquorice! The illusion worked for a few minutes, then my stomach rebelled. I vomited up a torrent of iced water.

  Today, the dish of the day is lichen. I sweep the snow from the few rocks that jut above the surface and go at them with my teeth, trying to catch anything that still survives. The rock takes more of my tooth enamel than I do its lichens, and in the end I give up. The hunger has become a physical pain, a knife stab in my guts. But none of that matters any more. Because it is now mid-February 1955 and I – Stanislas Henri Armengol, born in Tarbes in 1902 to Henri Manuel Armengol, aka the Commander, and María Dolores Jiménez, aka Mama – have just understood that I will not die from hunger.

  The snow has been falling for the last hour. I had believed in the spring, I had prayed for it, but my prayers must have bounced back from the gunmetal sky. A white quilt descends, blown haywire by pizzicato gusts. I know what this means and yes, here it is, the winds’ master: the great mistral with its brass howl. During the first blizzard, it attacked my curved tent; unable to find a way of lifting it from the ground, the mistral went away, furious, and plotted its revenge. This time, Gio’s ingenuity cannot save me. The wind shoots through the door, left carelessly open, and grabs the canvas from the inside. The tent swells like a bubble. I am not far away. I run and manage to catch hold of a rope as it snakes through the snow. It bites my fingers through my gloves as I enter a tug of war with the mistral. It drags me through the powder snow in a furious struggle – let go, you fool! – but I hold tight with every ounce of my strength, ignoring the pain, refusing to surrender the wild canvas sail on which my life depends. And then finally, exhausted and defeated, I obey the wind. I let go, my fingers swollen with cold and blood.

  For a long time, I lie face down in the snow. Everything burns: my skin, my breath, inside, outside. I move. Get to my knees. Crawl back to the camp. All that remains of my shelter is a circle of burned grass. I have not seen that grass in so long. The last time I saw it, it was bright and fresh, full of green dreams, but now it is white and dead.

  So, no, I will not die of hunger. The cold will take me first, and I am glad about that.

  The night ends. The wind blows even harder and sows the snow horizontally. I wait, my back to a rock. I am not afraid. The shivering lasted two hours. My heartbeat has slowed. Little white clouds puff from my lips like a cartoon of a toy steam train. I have no last wishes. Although I wouldn’t say no to a piece of chocolate. I would also like, one last time, to feel a woman’s body under my hands.

  I am not afraid.

  I spread my fingers in front of my eyes. The grime, the calluses, the deep lines and wounds. Which one of these lines is my lifeline? I once heard a story about an adventurer who, thinking his lifeline too short, lengthened it with a knife blade. To what end? With or without a knife, you will soon reach the end of your palm. Lengthening your lifeline – what an idea! Our hands are too small to hold anything of importance.

  I’m sleepy.

  Have to. Open. My eyes. Open your eyes, Nino, you’ll be late for school. I push away Pépin, who is licking my face, his sweet puppy breath. I am not at home, I know that. I am on my mountain. For the first time, I hear it. Really hear it. The mountain is a symphony, Bewegt, nicht zu schnell. Moving, but not too fast. I always liked Bruckner.

  Open your eyes. I have forgotten something. Something important.

  I hear the snow, the crystals cracking. Far below, the earth is already stirring. A seed unfolds and sends a tendril up towards the surface. I hear the black rivers oozing and I sink even deeper, into the soft boiling of a volcano. Voices, music, the radio waves of the universe. Sap rising through the trunk of a tree, the splitting of an insect’s egg in its cradle of moss. My prayer for spring is granted: it is not far away now. All you have to do is listen. See, Aimé? I’m listening.

  I have to wake up. Something about a wolf. At the bottom of the lake, I sink softly. The ice, shattered by my weight, shines on the surface. Far away, my books float out of my school bag, and then it’s the muddy bed, fear giving way to a feeling of well-being, the tall grass rising like Mama’s hair when she leans down to kiss me … But, no, it is not my time. Hands call me. With the kick of a heel I am pulled up to the surface and I swallow an immense gulp of air.

  The storm rages. I no longer feel cold. I remember. Something Gio said, long ago. There are no wolves where we’re headed … unless they’ve found a path that we don’t know about. Perhaps there is another exit, a way out of this combe other than the via ferrata.

  Standing in the snow. How did I get here? Oh yes, the wolf’s tracks. I have been following them for an hour. I just nodded off for a minute, leaning against a snowdrift while I gathered my strength. Beneath my feet, the tracks are still clear despite the storm. They go up the eastern side of the combe, the one I know least well. The walk has warmed me up. I’ve had to take off my jacket and my gloves. The sweat burns on my skin. I strip off the sweater, the woollen vest that is suffocating me. Bare-chested. Hope gives me wings; I feel no fatigue. The tracks go behind a rise in the land that creates a miniature valley on the side of the combe. A large area of snow there has been disturbed, red fur mixed with black fur. My wolf was two wolves, perhaps a couple seeking food for their young.

  After the valley, the tracks continue. They go up and up, following the length of the combe, three hundred or four hundred metres above the bottom. The moon has vanished and in that instant I enter what I have learned to fear: the death of the soul, that crazy uncertainty where you even start to doubt that the sun will rise again. Don’t stop, whatever you do. My shoulder brushes past a black rock that Gio pointed out to me: it’s the 3,000-metre marker. The air thins and my lungs pump desperately, sucking in the little oxygen that remains.

  I have been walking for two hours. And then suddenly the tracks vanish into a fresh dusting of snow halfway up the slope. A dramatic blaze engulfs the peak above me, scattering the demons that are messing with my mind, whispering the idea of wolves falling from the sky like an evil rain. Think logically, Stan. They didn’t come from the sky. And if they didn’t come from the sky …

  On all fours, I sweep away the snow around me. There: a crevice in the rock! It’s wide enough for me to slip inside, and I’m sleepy, so sleepy.

  Not now. I am too close to give up now. Open your eyes. They’re open; I’m being lifted out of the lake, my body laid out on the ice. Thank God the ranger happened to be passing by, somebody call for help, you okay, kid? Oh, forget all of that, it was a long time ago.

  One last time, I turn to the combe. Far below, a black dot leaning against a snowdrift. It’s a man, his arms around his knees: a little ball rolled under the thumb of the god of cold. Between two worlds, he resists, refuses to be crushed. That man is me. A hallucination, one of those vast dreams that Gio described.

  But which one is true? Am I standing here on the slope, tracking the wolf? Or is it me down there, that crumpled man, listening to the last few beats of his heart? Which one of us is dreaming the other?

  I dive into the bowels of the mountain. The path is long. I walk with my arms held out in the darkness. An endless corridor of stone, a veritable labyrinth where the wolves’ tracks are visible sometimes in the grey luminescence of strange mushrooms. I stumble a thousand times. For hours and hours, again
and again, until I can’t any more, until …

  A gigantic cavern. A cathedral of stalagmites. On one side, a blue stained-glass window in the middle of the wall: we are touching the glacier. On the other, the sun floods through an opening that reveals a peaceful valley. The wolves’ door. Freedom. But freedom can wait.

  Titanosaurus stanislasi. Leucio didn’t lie. His dragon is there, in the middle of the nave, watched over by a congregation of limestone penitents. It’s a diplodocus, a creature almost thirty metres long, the most perfect specimen I have ever seen. It is lying next to another one, smaller, presumably its baby. The baby is three times my size and its front feet are broken. It fell into this abyss, far back in the mists of time. Its mother fell too as she tried to rescue it. The world continued turning. Nobody mourned them because there was nobody for a long time. Because it would be another 140 million years before anyone had the idea of mourning anything. So I stay beside them, for a long time, watching over their sleep in this endless night, watching over their immense love, this love between giants.

  Sleep, my dinosaurs, sleep. Soon, I will leave without waking you, because waking has been impossible for a long time.

  ‘Is it for me?’

  ‘Of course it’s for you.’

  Mama holds on to her suitcase. She moves forward, touches the bed – bigger than she ever imagined – and paces around her bedroom, which is located at the far end of the apartment. I open each wardrobe, one for her dresses, one for her coats, another for all the ballgowns she does not yet have.

  ‘And look at those mouldings, Mama. Look!’

  She looks at everything with her American eyes, her lips curved in a smile. She lied: she hasn’t aged. She will never be old.

  ‘Thank you, Nino. We’ll be happy here together, the two of us. Just like the old days. When we had that dog that you loved so much, the grey one …’