They set off with the usual list of names of people who claimed to have encountered the barmanu. Some of them Jordi had interviewed seven years earlier. For others, this would be the first time.
The camera was always rolling, swarming tirelessly around the group in search of good angles. Its presence put extra pressure on Jordi, in which being followed had something exam-like about it that he found deeply disagreeable, while at the same time — he had to acknowledge it — it did feed his vanity.
In On the Trail of the Wild Man, the documentary that would be screened years later on the Arte channel, you can see Shamsur approaching the house of a Gujjar. In those mountains, strangers ran the risk of being met with a gunshot, except if they were children. Shamsur greets a woman in the doorway, he asks her for water, and introduces Jordi, who is waiting at a prudent distance. Some of the Gujjars’ houses are on extremely steep, rocky slopes where the mist is often constant. One would think these places were only fit for goats, but there are people living there, too, who are faithful to the primitive manner. They know how to listen to the chasms that surround them, to use their hands, to look for food and prepare it. They have seen creatures and experienced situations that to those in the cities might seem incredible. They also live at a different temperature, which Jordi, so ill-suited to the heat, found especially pleasing in the summer. At night, they lit fires by whose light the adventurer launched his sixty-three questions before showing the series of drawings of assumed barmanus for each of the shepherds to identify, more or less, as his man.
Purdum Khan was one Gujjar whom Jordi had interviewed nearly seven years earlier, and Jordi now wanted to test the solidity of his story. There was a camera rolling.
‘I spotted it suddenly because the wind was in my face and I was alerted by the smell. It was downhill from me, on the mountain, sitting, about to eat. It was poking around among little things on the floor that it brought to its mouth. It was strong. It had long hair that fell over its shoulders. It was crouched down there, just there, in front of me. When it realised it wasn’t alone, it picked up a stone, it got up, and left. It was my dog that made it run away, coming down from the mountain with the flock.’
According to Purdum Khan, this had happened ten years earlier. The versions coincided. But now came the hard part: Jordi went through the questions again.
‘Did it look like a man?’
‘Yes. Feet and hands like a man. Nose like a man, too.’
‘How did it compare to you?’
‘It must have been my height [1m 80], but most of all it was wider. Big feet.’
‘How far away were you?’
‘Right next to it. I was there, and it was just further down.’ [The shepherd opens his arms wide.]
‘Was its body naked, or did it have something covering it?’
‘Hair.’
‘Clothing?’
‘No.’
He threw out a trick question to see if the Gujjar would repeat his earlier answer.
‘And how long was its hair?’
‘It came down over its shoulders.’
And he asked him similarly about the side of its nose, its eyes, its teeth … Purdum Khan replied just as he’d done years earlier, albeit with fewer details.
Mohamed Khan was interviewed on a different night, after they’d sung together beside the crackling fire.
‘It was just there, twelve metres away, close to my cabin, next to a walnut tree.’
[…]
‘Was it on all fours or up on its feet?’
‘On its feet, I’ve already told you. Like a man.’
‘When you’d seen it, what did you do then?’
‘I left, of course.’
‘You didn’t try to follow it?’
‘What for? I knew what it was. And I had to comply with Ramadan. The barmanu saw a man, and it left. What could I do?’
[…]
‘What colour was its skin?’
‘It was night-time. It was the colour of night. I didn’t have a lamp or any light. Black, it looked black.’
‘You said it carried itself like a man.’
‘It leaned forward a bit. All I saw was a man. What do you want? If I’d brought a rifle with me …’
[…]
‘After having told you all that, you might give me your binoculars,’ said Mohamed Khan at the end of the interview.
‘If you want, I’ll buy one of your goats and we can eat the meat, but those binoculars are staying with me.’
The shepherd accepted. They slit the throat of one of the goats and skinned it, draining the blood into earthenware bowls to be drunk by the dogs. Jordi ate hungrily, satisfied at the result of the survey. He was a little worried about Shamsur’s evident hostility towards Pascal Sutra. On the one hand, the boy wasn’t used to that pace of travel and ended every day feeling wrecked; on the other, he wasn’t good at putting up with the reporter’s behaving as though he knew the mountains better than he did, and what was more, he insisted on monopolising Jordi’s attention. Could it be jealousy? In any case, he’ll get over it.
Fog cast a veil over the mountains for several days. The extremely rare shepherds they met were not in a good mood, motionlessly alert to the sounds, praying that none of their goats would wander off in search of fresh grass or topple headlong into the abysses. One of the shepherds, Ilal Khan, agreed to forget about the fog for a few hours and to answer the sixty-three questions. Jordi had gathered fifty pieces of testimony in seven years, but Ilal Khan’s was to be one of the most promising.
‘What was its nose like?’
‘Wide. And long. Very wide. With big open nostrils. It looked like a Tajik’s nose.’
‘And its teeth?’
‘Not big. It had white fangs. Not like a dog’s — they were small.’
The small fangs created a kinship between the creature and man. When Jordi spread his pieces of paper on the ground, the man reached one of his striated hands towards the drawing of an Australopithecus — the same one identified by the shepherd Mohamed Khan.
Cat was impressed. When Ilal Khan identified the exact place where he had seen the barmanu — one of those places which those groups of people come down to when they know how to hunt and they know which vegetables are edible, with waters from the recent snowfall, mushrooms, pikas, those small rabbits, and big lizards — the scientist put the pieces together, and everything fitted. Any urban geneticist or anthropologist would discard these pieces of evidence, branding them as fantastical, but what was prehistory except a landscape of the mind? How could a scientist judge what dozens, perhaps hundreds, of indigenous shepherds said they had seen? Who had the most imagination, in reality? Valicourt did indeed ask the scientists to make an effort to understand other people’s fantasies, certain that a science with no room for imagination was a science with no room for genius.
In the morning, they loaded up their rucksacks once more, tied Gorki and Fjord’s leashes, and set off again along the craggy terrain back to Chitral. In the report on Arte you can see Fjord climbing, marking the path across abominable land. At one point, they undo his leash to allow him to get over an extremely sheer wall. Remarkable. Wonderful. I’ve never seen another animal like it. Fjord was universally admired. All who met him attributed extraordinary abilities to him, and understood why Jordi took him everywhere.
‘Why does Fjord sleep inside the house instead of staying outside with the other dogs?’ they once asked him.
‘He doesn’t sleep outside on guard duty because he’s worth more than everything inside put together,’ replied Jordi, in whose affective universe Yannik and Erik had begun to give place to a dog and a child.
‘How’d you get him?’ asked Pascal Sutra, with a nod towards Fjord, who was coming down a slope with a step that was careful but assured.
‘By looking for him.’
Fjord was a synthesis of Jordi’s appreciation of powerfully eccentric characters. Before choosing the dogs that he was going to take to Chitral, he had consulted several canine magazines. The Siberian husky came out as the indisputable star of the mountain dogs, for which reason he downgraded it. There were huskies everywhere, as though that natty coat rounded off with spectacular blue eyes, its strength, and its sociability had eclipsed all the other breeds. Who hadn’t heard of these amazing huskies? But how many people could name other dogs that might compete with them? One candidate presented itself in a big double-page magazine photograph: the Alaskan Malamute.
Fjord was a classic Alaskan Malamute: calm, dignified, independent, with the temperament that was required of a unique way of life. His ancestors had come from the Great North, and he owed the name of his breed to the Mahlemut Eskimo tribe, whose lives depended on the power of these dogs to pull the sleds, and to which they even came to entrust their babies. Gold diggers, hunters, trappers, traffickers in pelts and explorers, like Amundsen himself, had also taken advantage of their benefits.
‘The king of their kind,’ read Jordi. It was a breed that had had no contact with progress and had never been crossbred, thus preserving its primitive nature. Hence the dogs’ sense of smell and orientation, which still allowed them to detect tracks in the snow even during storms, and able to survive fifty degrees below zero, thanks to a thick padding of wool-like fur, small ears lined with insulating hair, and a metabolism designed to economise as much energy as possible. ‘They are aggressive with others of their kind,’ he read … ‘They have a poor reputation because they bark and howl.’ … ‘They’re very inclined to run away, owing to their nature.’
When he saw Fjord in late summer 1992 in the kennels of S.O.S. Husky, he didn’t hesitate. He paid the Sesame Association the five hundred francs that were the cost of his adoption, and in December received the licence document in which he was named as owner of the animal that would one day save his life.
XVII
BACK in Chitral, Jordi needed money. In July, he had asked Andrés to send him at least fifteen thousand francs, and his brother had complied, as he always did. All the same, it wouldn’t do to cling to a system of finances that was entirely based on temporary stop-gaps. The winter was long, and his savings were not going to be enough to deal with it, so he talked to several colleagues who lived in Peshawar, the closest big city. He ended up making contact with the representative of the Alliance Française in Pakistan, who offered him work as a teacher of French.
‘Even though I’m not French?’
‘You’ve lived in France your whole life, you speak French …’ replied the representative, Maurice Lévêque.
‘Yes, but I’m Spanish.’
‘You could get French citizenship.’
In the Natural History Museum they had made the same suggestion to him months earlier, saying that with dual citizenship it would be easier to include him in projects financed by the French, and he would receive a salary. Jordi gave the same reply he’d given then.
‘I won’t do that. I’m fine the way I am.’
‘It was just an idea — it doesn’t matter really. You can work at the Alliance all the same.’
And not just that. As the current director at the Peshawar headquarters was planning to quit his job shortly, Lévêque saw in Jordi a suitable successor: he spoke local languages, he was an expert in the geography, he knew many tribal customs, and he was a cultivated man. Lévêque also trusted his intelligence and his capacity to work alongside the Pashtuns. Besides, it wasn’t easy to find a director for this post that only paid a local salary.
‘If you start in November and it all goes well, you have my word that in March you’ll be named the Alliance’s director in Peshawar.’
‘Right … and I’m supposed to be pleased? The pay isn’t brilliant.’
‘How do you know what the director gets paid?’
‘Everyone round here knows, Maurice.’
Lévêque shook a few specks of dust off the shoulders of his shirt. He glanced at the calendar.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll get a bit more. You’ll have a very respectable salary.’
‘How much?’
Jordi did the sums. He would have to stay away from the mountains for a good while, but if he could put up with that, and if he did receive the fifteen thousand francs monthly on offer (some two thousand euro today), he would save enough to relaunch his investigation in the valleys with something resembling comfort.
‘Can you recommend a house for me in Peshawar?’ he replied.
Jordi jotted down Lévêque’s suggestions on a folded sheet of paper, on which he added addresses and phone numbers he had got from colleagues. Sometimes he noted down a feature of the recommended house, like ‘big garden’; ‘four bedrooms’; ‘two bathrooms’ … When he had chosen the first to call on, in the residential neighbourhood called the Peshawar Cantonment, he got into the car. In twenty minutes he arrived at his destination; however, he circled around the area for an hour and a half. He wanted to gauge the atmosphere, to evaluate other options. The headquarters of the N.G.O.s served as reference-points to stop him getting lost; he had been in many of them. All the same, he was surprised by the sheer number of N.G.O.s and embassies — he hadn’t thought there would be so many. A lot had been said in recent years about the European landings in Central Asia, but driving around like this you could get a better sense of the scale of the boom.
The following days, he alternated between visits to houses in the Peshawar Cantonment and to those in another residential area in the outskirts, University Town. They were quite the little fortresses. Of course, foreigners could walk around calmly with all those armed guards. He stopped the car outside the address he had noted down on his bit of paper. A long wall hid the inside of a property of which he was only able to make out the roof of a house. He liked the seclusion of the place. By the time he left, he had agreed the terms of the contract. He would settle in University Town.
The rumour of the imminent arrival of The Yeti Seeker at the Alliance spread through the international community, to whom Jordi was already known as a real character. Those who suspected that the story of the barmanu was no more than a front saw this contract as definitive proof. Who was going to swallow the idea of a pipe-dream hunter scaling such diplomatic heights? Some were publicly critical of the scientific nature of his project, and attacked him in a way that he found strange, with hostility and aggression.
While he was in Chitral preparing for his move, he received a letter from Cat. Somebody had opened the envelope. How dare they! He went in search of the postman.
‘I’ve not touched a thing, Mister Jordi. That’s how they gave it to me.’
He couldn’t blame him, of course. Nor did it make any sense protesting to the postal service; no one was going to pay him any attention — those bureaucrats could never handle criticism, least of all from a foreigner. But who would have an interest in rifling through his correspondence? He turned it over a few times in his head, but not for long, because out of all the theories, what was most evident was the reality that a number of professors from the Natural History Museum had begun to communicate with members of the Alliance. Those damned academics knew he was getting close to something, and they weren’t going to let a poor ‘little immigrant’, a starveling, show up the whole French research system. Bastards. What were scientists capable of in the pursuit of success? This was a battle, no doubt about it. Was his life in danger?
Uneasy at the possibility that the famous Yves Coppens’s pals were conspiring to get him ahead in the race to find the barmanu, Jordi remained quite oblivious to the real forces that from that moment had begun to encircle him: those of Pakistani counterespionage. The agents from Inter-Services Intelligence (the I.S.I.) would never leave his tail.
In any case, it would take a lot more than an open envelope to frighten him. He t
ook a biro, and on the back of a scrap of paper he started to write his letter in response to Cat, expressing his satisfaction at the new job and the opportunities it offered him:
I’m also happy at the idea of taking Shamsur with me for good. He’s absolutely thrilled at the idea of our living together, and I’ve told him I feel very attached to him. He’s now at his house, and I miss him a great deal. This lad has adopted me, and as a result, I have him. Since Pascal left he has proved extraordinarily sensible and kind, he’s gone back to normal. The truth is, nowadays I never want to be apart from him. I’ve done what was needed to enrol him as a student in the correspondence courses with the C.N.E.D. It’s a dream solution: he won’t go to school, and I’ll be able to educate him my way. I’ve got the green light from his family. I’m touched at the regard in which his family holds me.
Andrés went to spend his holidays in Chitral, and gave his brother a pipe of white wood that he had bought from some Ukrainian globetrotters while they were doing a dance show in Valence. In those days, Jordi was smoking a pipe again.
After an October spent playing the perfect host, he said goodbye to Andrés. In the car back home he lit a Pree, and with the bitter taste of the tobacco still on his palate he began to choose the clothes and the belongings that he would take with him to his new house in the big city, where he would also look for a school for Shamsur. The correspondence courses weren’t working, obviously they weren’t — how foolish that had been. Who’d have thought it was a good idea to leave the boy on his own for so many hours, where he could be distracted by any little thing? Even his willpower still needed educating. But how would Shamsur react to the idea of enrolling in a school? Anyway, there was no alternative. Well, he’d adapt. It was beginning to be time for the boy to integrate into the reality of other people. It surely wouldn’t cost him too much — children are very elastic.
In the Land of Giants Page 11
