A Soldier of the Great War (24 page)

In the debate that followed, in a restaurant in Trastevere, Rafi was, like most lawyers who consider politics, uninteresting. Alessandro had contrary and volatile opinions and did a good job of justifying them even when they were totally absurd. He continued to read diplomacy and to devour the several newspapers that arrived with the dawn. He combined his burgeoning knowledge with logic, enthusiasm, and rhetoric, and he made a little go a long way.

They had returned at midnight, and Rafi had noticed that Lucianas cup was gone, and the latch in a different position. The next morning he had an appointment with an official who, as the cocks were crowing in the gardens on the hill in back of his ministry, would speak expansively about the demands he made of his staff. Before setting out to meet him, Rafi had pulled on his pants and shoes, and, with his suspenders hanging down, shirtless, gone to shave. When one half of his face had emerged from the drifts and
the other was still covered, the door to Lucianas room opened. With his hand still on the razor, and the razor about to glide from the top of his cheek downward, he turned.

Having forgotten that someone was staying in the house, Luciana had come into her bathroom after awakening, and she stood before him, in a short nightgown, absolutely immobile and hardly breathing. He was almost as startled as she, not by her entrance but, rather, by her beguiling appearance. She was taller than her brother, with a shock of golden hair that had yet to be combed that day. Her legs and arms were so long and slender that it was hard to draw conclusions about her age, just as it had been hard to deduce anything from her handwriting save contradictions that, if he had been of a mind to read them, would have told him her age exactly.

She was too tall to be a child. Twice as high as Lia Bellati, it seemed, she already had authority, and she would grow no more. On the other hand, she was too slight to be a woman. The delicacy of her limbs testified that they had not existed long enough for much to gravitate to them.

Rafi knew little about women, but he was a good observer. Because she focused her eyes at him in a way that exaggerated her look of surprise and made her seem like someone who has never seen another human being, he knew immediately that she wore glasses. He guessed that she kept them off whenever she could, for reasons of vanity, and although he didn't know exactly why, he liked that.

She and her classmates had done a lot of swimming off Capri, and because of this she was sunburned and her hair wildly blond. The brevity of the nightgown gave Rafi a pleasant shock, but he couldn't take his eyes off her face.

For her part, she seemed as fragile as a reed, frozen in place in the presence of the huge man who was stripped to the waist and bent over her washbasin. The table in which the sink was set came up to the middle of his thighs, and the top of the mirror showed
his shoulders and throat. To shave, he had to lean down. Had he been fully dressed, his black hair and sparkling Kirghiz eyes would have stopped her heart, but to see in addition to this the lean frame that years of heavy work had coaxed and changed into something that looked as solid and powerful as a marble statue, was for her an embarrassing pleasure. Only after several minutes had passed, as the steam billowed from the tap, had she said, "Oh, I guess I'd better back up." The memory of this would keep Rafi awake for many hours in the nights thereafter.

At dinner she had been unable to look at him except in quick glances. She was in her schoolgirl's uniform, and she stumbled over her words and left the table as soon as she could. He was a model of composure.

He could have gone back to Venice, but he stayed.

 

A
LESSANDRO HEARD
a ringing in his ears as he and Rafi alighted from their train onto a flinty rail bed near the station at Barrenmatt. The air at two thousand meters was so thin and tranquil that it seemed to be only a gloss of the light. Sound carried differently, and was not so urgent. The body's forced economy of movement translated into a gift of grace, and the August sunshine was less warm than clear. They took their packs from the doorway of the single baggage car, piled them beside the track, and sat down on their rolled-up tent.

At noon, hardly a cloud was in the sky. To the left, on an outcropping, was the village. Of its five buildings, including the station, the largest was the hotel, which had four storeys and an attic. Every window in the town was framed by shutters and by flower boxes in which were unrelieved ranks of geraniums. The only street led up the hill and doubled back toward the station, and the rest of Barrenmatt was rock, track, building, road, or field. The fields were empty now because the cows had migrated to a higher altitude,
where they nervously and continually rang their tin or copper bells. Such bells are heard mainly from afar, and the habit is strong, so they sound far away even when they are close.

The train pulled a few meters down the track and stopped so some women with parasols could delicately descend the outboard steps. The space between these women and the two young men and their climbing equipment was the distance between the freight and passenger terminals, but it might as well have been an ocean. The train itself was a mountain train, its engine a muscular little plug of cylinders and rods. It had pulled only two cars, each smaller than a normal railway carriage, each made of aromatic wood that creaked at every bend in the tracks. The windows in the passenger car were actually made of crystal, which was heavy, clear, and thick, with a barely perceptible tinge of purple, and the rock faces that could be seen through it came out sharp and in bright detail. Steam shot lazily to the ground and then disappeared near the feet of a railroad worker tightening bolts as the ladies descended from his beautifully made toy.

Had these things been in Rome they would have been surrounded by other such things, their attributes bled into chaotic illusion. In Rome they would have seemed larger, but at two thousand meters in the open air they were as inconsequential as the cows in the upper pastures, rendered invisible by the distance. Both the train and the little houses were compressed by standing alone in the midst of vast openness. Their colors seemed intense and friendly, their masses solid and dense. Like many man-made objects that originate in the mountains, they seemed to have been perfectly realized within well defined limits. The beauty of the Swiss watch lay in its precision, and its precision had sprung from modesty. It did not have to be an orrery or a tower clock any more than a yodeler has to sing in symphonies, and this friendliness to restriction had left the designers within easy reach of perfection.

According to Alessandro this was simply because people who lived in the mountains knew that all the truly great things had al
ready been accomplished. They did not need to imagine ladders that would lead to heaven, or things of massive size that would astound the heart, because they had them in such profusion that it was difficult to get from town to town, and because of them the sun itself often was denied a chance to shine, or forced to break in gold through opaque ridges of ice and snow whiter than physics would allow.

At noon the scale of the landscape was shockingly apparent, and everything but the mountains seemed freakishly small. The very sky had relinquished a third of its volume to the thrones of rock and ice, and though the massif was half a day in the distance, it rose so high that Alessandro and Rafi felt as if they were standing within arm's reach of a tall garden wall.

No end was apparent to the silvery creases glinting amid folds of ox-blood-colored rock, to the shattered glaciers that poured from between spires and sheer walls, and to the meadows large enough to hold a city. Engraved upon the electrifying height and mass of the rock were inverse wells, steeples, and gleaming towers that echoed thunder and spun lightning like wool.

Alessandro and Rafi leaned back against their equipment, hands shading their eyes, heads tilted. After the train left, the sun went behind a mountain, and though they themselves were soon covered in cold shadow, the cathedrals ahead still shone.

 

T
HE FOLLOWING
day they made two trips to their campsite at the top of a wide meadow, next to a wall of pines. On the first trip they carried their equipment, and on the second, ten days of provisions. They ate in the hotel restaurant before setting out in the afternoon. Ascending with their heavy frame packs was agony, and by the time they reached their camp it was dark. They left the packs leaning against a tree, and slept as if they had died.

The tent was big enough to stand up in, and they hung their climbing equipment from the ridge poles—ropes, slings, iron pins
and chocks to drive into cracks in the rock, carabiners, ice axes, crampons, smoked glasses. Alessandro held aloft a sack of pitons and jangled them. "Many more people in the world hunt whales or train elephants than know how to use these," he said.

"So?" Rafi asked.

"More people are freaks in sideshows than know how to use these."

Rafi stared at him blankly.

"More people," Alessandro continued, undeterred, "have eaten dinner with the King of England."

"But the King of England has dinners for hundreds of people."

"That's true. However, he's been king for only a short time."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that we are more or less alone, and that the places we're going to are often places where no human being has ever been—ever, since the beginning of time. You'll feel it when you're there. It's different from anything you've ever felt."

The left side of the tent was Rail's, the right Alessandro's. Provisions and clothing were piled in a ridge down the center. They made a kitchen in the space in front of the tent, building a stone firebox and a table, and arranging sectioned logs as chairs. They got their water from a waterfall that was ejected horizontally from the mountain wall before it fell fifty meters into a rock cauldron perpetually filled with spray. The jet of water, as thick as a train, was so fast and powerful that they could stand next to it and see their reflections in its smooth wall. Not a drop left the confines of the ice-cold beam. To get water, they merely touched it with their fingers and bled a stream into their buckets.

"It's wasteful not to turn off the faucet when you're done," Rafi said as a million tons of water passed by.

The first night, they boiled dried beef, potatoes, mushrooms, and various greens, in the purest water of the world. They had carried up four bottles of beer, and these they drank with their soup as they looked at the lights of Barrenmatt. Except as suggested by
a vague pink glow in the western sky, above a distant town, no other lights were visible. The stars were not yet out, the air was warm, and they were slightly drunk on the beer and the altitude. That day Alessandro had spent ten hours going over the equipment and its use.

"I can talk all I want," he said, swaying slightly in the dark. "We can sit for days, with you memorizing knots, technique, and rope handling, but in the first hour of climbing you'll learn more than anyone can tell you in a month—because your life will depend on the knots, the way you place a piton, and how you run the rope."

"Sometimes, Alessandro, you sound like a rabbi."

"I've never heard one. Do they sing?"

"Others sing."

"Aren't you afraid? Most people are terrified the night before they climb, although they call their fear anxiety. I breathe hard as I'm walking through the pastures to the base of the wall, but as soon as I cease to think of anything but the rock and the route up, I lose my fear."

"I'm not afraid," Rafi said.

"Why not?"

"If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today."

By ten o'clock they could hardly keep their eyes open. After boiling their pots and utensils clean, they stumbled into the tent and fell on their blankets.

Alessandro tried to lift his head to see the moonlight on the mountains that shone in the distance over the meadows and the great spaces of blank air, but he couldn't move. When his eyes closed, he forced them to open, but in two breaths they were closed again, and in another he was deep asleep.

 

T
HE NEXT
day they climbed a hundred-meter wall. The base wasn't far from the waterfall, and they heard the roar of water
below them and the sound of the wind whistling over the top of the rock far above. Rafi asked why they were going to carry oilskins. It would be hard enough to pull oneself up the face of the rock while bearing the weight of rope and iron.

"What if it rains?" Alessandro asked in turn. "What if the temperature drops, and a wind rises? You might be seventy-five meters up, with twenty-five to go. You can't afford to be too cold or too wet.

"But look at the sky!"

Alessandro studied the sky. A few matronly clouds were gliding across a field of blue, their origins beyond the cliff top unseen. "A huge thundercloud might be just beyond the rim," he said, still looking up. "Ten seconds from now we could be in a rain and lightning storm the likes of which you've never seen.

"What we're going to do is relatively simple," Alessandro said as he uncoiled one of the climbing-ropes. "I'll start to climb while you belay me from the ground. As I go up, I'll bang in a pin here and there, or set a chock in a crack. Then I put a runner on it, and clip a carabiner onto the runner. I pass the rope through the gate of the carabiner. Now the rope is anchored to the rock at that point, so, if I fall, I fall past it and the rope doubles over the carabiner: you would feel an upward pull. You'd let the rope slide around your body and through your hands, and you'd stop it gradually to break my fall.

"You see those ledges and trees? The first is about forty meters up, and the second about thirty more."

Two tiny splays of vegetation projected from what seemed to be sheer overhanging rock. Rafi looked dubious. "Trees?"

"Dwarf pines. The trunks are probably three times as thick as your arm, and can support the weight of fifty men. The roots are strong enough to split granite, and they penetrate far into the rock. The pine itself is sinewy and dense. These are the belay points we'll use today. They're easier than just using the rock. When I get to the first belay, I'll tie myself in and bring you up.