'Cuando he llegado al vertice mas atrevido y frio
mi corazon se cierra como una flor nocturna.'
- Pablo Neruda
Somebody handed the young man sitting on one of the barstools a glass of provincial beer and after taking a few sips, without a hint of contemplation or puzzlement on his face, he matter-of-factly answered the question just put to him by Sebastian, who like the others perched on barstools which they had dragged to one side of the room.
"We moved together for two hundred metres in the centre of the route. It actually felt really secure," the young man added, as if anticipating the concern of anyone who happened to be paying attention. "because the neve was excellent. Though the mixed climbing was sometimes a little bit racy." He casually rolled the 'r' for emphasis.
There was just a trace of the Don Valley in the young man's accent, as though somewhere in his past he had spent enough time in South Yorkshire to absorb just a trace of its speech patterns. Of course, this may or may not have been true for there was no way of knowing, it seemed to Sebastian, if the man was acquainted with the pubs and cast steel foundries of Sheffield; whether he had jogged around the empty athletics stadium the morning after a Tina Turner concert or whether he had worried about meeting a girl on a November evening and then missed a train back home.
Yet on second thoughts, Sebastian saw nothing exceptional about this. No-one in the group seemed in possession of a provenance that was easy to recognise; nor were they all English, just him and the girl sitting quietly over there. Besides the speaker, Sebastian could make out five other people who had staked a claim to this section of the bar: talking excitedly, as if meeting for the first time, they were paying only modest mind to the tale unfolding from the round of Mont Blanc ale which had just been served. They included (as was often so in the Geneva weekday soirees whose roulette wheel he had spun for several years' worth of Tuesdays) a pair of young idealists from the 'Global Fund', who may have been French and Thai respectively; a very young and smartly-dressed French-Vietnamese man with a gift for quantitative analysis, who may have been attached to a Cern sub-atomic discovery taskforce (or operating a small hedge fund in the basement of his Eaux-Vives appartment); a young Portugese man who had just sublet his flat after being churned from some bank and was about to fly to Abu-Dhabi; and finally, the pretty English girl Sebastian had noticed earlier, her tinted hair slightly flattened down by having worn a hat against the evening rain, whose hands now held a glass of panache, as though for warmth, and who still wore the fingerless gloves she had arrived in some time ago.
Sebastian tried to focus his attention on the mountaineer who was talking softly and clearly.
"The crux of the route though was actually the easy ground down the bottom," he was continuing. "Because of the serac which threatened it."
"Can't you avoid it by going up to the right?" Sebastian countered. He was himself quite familiar with taking risks, being an accomplished paraglidist who had flown over the Alps quite a few times, gazing at their magnificent glaciated features.
The young man caressed his beer glass with the knuckle of a thick finger, wiping off condensation, and then he looked Sebastian squarely in the eye.
"It's not a moon, it's a space station unfortunately. Way too big to escape. And what's more is, there are others stacked up on top of it, which you're not even aware of from down below."
Sebastian considered the implications of this. The young man seemed to be referring to the Plan Glacier, which was shorthand for the icing cake which tumbled down in gigantic slices from the summit of the Aiguille du Plan above Chamonix, each one millions of cubic metres of suspended menace, hanging over the northerly aspect of the Aiguille des Pelerins, along which (it seemed) the young man and his partner had been obliged to make their approach. There, Sebastian imagined, with these ice buildings invisible in the early morning darkness, when the thermometer would have reached its lowest point, the alpinists would have 'run for it' up the narrow snow gully that broke through the lower rock slabs and which led to the ice runnels higher up - and which would serve as a disposal funnel for ice debris being launched from the heights, from the ugly green oppressiveness of the seracs...Up there, they would have been 'objectively' safe but not safe from the subjective dangers of technical face climbing, which included keeping a cool head...
All this seemed rather out of place in this smart lakefront bar in the banking district of Geneva, the venue for tonight's drinks. Sebastian had found his niche in Switzerland several years ago, and now he ran his own affairs, which revolved around valuing jewelry and living quietly in the Old Town, occasionally venturing out for long periods to paraglide, savouring the wild combat between pilot and atmosphere. But, as he knew from being an adopted Genevois, and a free outdoor spirit, urban space was but a tenant in this world of mountainous limestone and deep, green valleys into which waterfalls dropped precipitously and people climbed up and out using their wits in the same way he rode the thermals at weekends. Years ago, before the paragliding bug bit, he had climbed quite a lot especially on the Saleve. He had even 'ticked' a couple of routes graded 6c. But he was never going to get to 7b+ and then, at the end of a languid summer camping out on the Plateau de Glieres with Alison, his then climber-girlfriend who was a philosophy student from Toulouse, he had joined the Ecole de Parapente by Lac Annecy - and never looked back, at least not in anger.
'How long did it take you to get up it?' Sebastian asked.
'Five hours and five minutes.'
'That's fast!' Sebastian exclaimed. 'He just did an ED2 in five hours!' Selene, the girl from the Global Fund looked startled, as though the pharma industry had just announced a further price increase on anti-retroviral medicines.
'Not really. We should have done it in about four, or less,' his interlocutor specified. 'But we went left instead of right in the middle and ended up doing two more pitches up some ice, then rapping off some V-threads and finally getting back on route via a link pitch. All good fun though,' the young man added dubiously. He seemed to disagree with the assessment, or the rapture apparent in Sebastian's remarks.
By now, the drinkers in the bar were thinning out. After all, it was well past eleven o'clock and for a Tuesday night, Sebastian was surprised there were still this many people out in Geneva, the city that always sleeps. He tried to read the young man's thoughts, but he remained inscrutable, matter-of-fact as though it was indeed all just fun, just part of the everyday. What propelled him to climb mountains? The thought teased Sebastian, momentarily eclipsing his desire to order more beer; desire returned and he stepped over to the bar.
Someone had left the door ajar, and the room began to suck in cold November air; the girls shivered and frowned. As Sebastian turned back with fresh drinks in hand for himself and his new friend, he saw that the young man had sprung up to close the door, strolling unhurriedly back to his seat. The English girl thanked him as he passed, her quiet face backlit by the lamps above the bar, and Sebastian felt himself flush with jealousy (what was it about the English girl?).
The break from the conversation allowed the young man, whose real name was Edmond, to take stock of what was going on in the room. He was actually thinking how nice it had been to run into some people through this drinks evening, to which he had been invited by the English girl, Sara, and her friend Evelyn on account of having attended the same university as most of the people who had gathered together on this Tuesday evening. Some time ago, he had decided that he was going to climb things, be tough in life and have done with it, but deep down he still retained the intellectual curiosity not to say romanticism which had given him, amongst other things a love of literature and a desire to one day write books of his own. Heartbreak, world events and the indifference of others had no doubt taken their toll on his sensibilities, and this was reflected in the fact that on average he spent more time training for climbing than writing verse or taking notes for his first novel, though now and then the Muse came hammering at his window in the dead of night, demanding to be satisfied with the warm milk of words.
It was the first time that Edmond had been out in weeks. During the whole of October and the first part of November, he had been spending his evenings after work running in the chill through the fields, forests and around the lake, and at night ploughing through a pile of mostly Russian novels and history books which addressed some of the largest still unexplored areas of his curiosity about the last century, all of it fairly dark. Nonetheless, it was an improvement compared to the evenings of the previous November, when he had been wrapped in a blanket reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an unremitting whip of rain dealt out black lashes against the window-panes. While he sat there talking with Sebastian, Edmond tried to avoid getting philosophical. This was always a temptation when he talked about many subjects, including the Carrington-Rouse route. He didn't want to set the cat amongst the pidgeons tonight, if possible, as he seemed to be getting along well so far; though he did have a strong desire to express some thoughts to his new friends about Life and Fate, the latest book he had been reading, if the opportunity ever arose.
Sara, who had just switched from panache to sparkling water, had only been pretending to listen to most of the conversations going on around her - about property prices, the lack of major concerts in Geneva, the public image crisis of the hedge funds and whether Cern's cricket team could win the Swiss league next season; she heard many similar things being discussed on a daily basis and she filtered it out dismissively. She had moved here three years ago, from London, and at first glance it would have been hard to infer from her modest bearing, the worldly intelligence and deep resilience which inhabited and surrounded her core like fuel-rods and armour. Two weeks ago, she had blown away her eleventh marathon, in less than three-and-a-half hours; for running was Sara's absolute passion, her 'bug' (as she called it). During the week, she would set off at lunchtime on twelve-mile laps, out beyond the airport; on Saturdays she would line up in a track race, often quite a long way away from home; and on Sundays she would put in the rest of her marathon training or just go out and indulge the rhythm of long distances for the absolute pleasure of it. Nor did this routine seem to vary between late summer and springtime. Last Sunday she had run 21 miles, marvelling at the snow, relaxing out of another hard week, sliding into an oblivious zone as she sped along the rural border where Geneva merged with France among winterised vineyards and small black apple trees. Although there were many things that had made her sad, there seemed to be few things in life that awed or frightened Sara, except of course Kenyans, who dazzled unbeatably in every race she had ever run. She nonetheless pricked up her ears to listen to the conversation going on opposite her about mountaineering: it seemed unusual and rather interesting.
'So what will you climb next?' Sebastian asked.
'Everyone seems to think I'm going to do the Eiger,' Edmond replied, and smiled as if acknowledging a private joke. 'But that's just Chinese whispers. What I really want to do is the north face of Les Droites...or however it is you pronounce it.'
'You say it like 'Les Doigts',' chimed in Selene unexpectedly (Sebastian was rather shocked by this). 'It means 'the fingers' in French.' She waved her free hand playfully. But you have to pronounce the 't' at the end as well or it doesn't work.'
'It's a tough one,' Edmond acknowledged. 'I seem to have a fascination with mountains whose names I can't pronounce.' Glancing at Sara, he added: 'That's one area where an Oxford education doesn't help.'
'Perhaps you didn't study hard enough,' Sara replied.
'That surely is the case,' Laughing, Edmond tilted his glass and drained the last of his beer. 'Well, I should probably go home and make up for lost time then.'
'Ah yes, we have to catch the train,' Selene said, looking intently at her watch.
'Who's paying?' Somebody said.
'We're all paying,' someone else said, 'This is Switzerland.'
Outside in the streets of Bel-Air, the dealers had dispersed, a sure sign that there were no more fund managers tramping in and out of the lakefront bars, the younger ones sometimes looking a little laughable, as though they were wearing clothes belonging to a rich old uncle. A light rain danced on the paving stones, and across the narrows where the lake funneled sleepily into the Rhone, rooftop lettering advertised Breitling watches and private client banking in reds and yellows. Sara unlocked her bicycle from the lamp-post, and peered into the darkness. Down the quay she could make out Edmond vanishing into the gloom. She wheeled the bicycle around, and eased into what was for her at least, a short ride home.
Sebastian walked slowly up the hill past the closed gates of the Parc des Bastions. Sometimes he played chess on the public chessboards beside the tea pavillion, especially in the springtime. Surprisingly, for someone of a quiet disposition who was accustomed to living alone, he found he had much to think about tonight, and he reckoned that if he could just stay awake for a couple of hours, he should put his thoughts into words.
Edmond was the last to arrive home, entering his appartment as usual without turning on the light. He poured himself a glass of water, and studied the moonlit garden from the kitchen window. His heart felt somewhat lighter but his face was still a mask.
"We moved together for two hundred metres in the centre of the route. It actually felt really secure," the young man added, as if anticipating the concern of anyone who happened to be paying attention. "because the neve was excellent. Though the mixed climbing was sometimes a little bit racy." He casually rolled the 'r' for emphasis.
There was just a trace of the Don Valley in the young man's accent, as though somewhere in his past he had spent enough time in South Yorkshire to absorb just a trace of its speech patterns. Of course, this may or may not have been true for there was no way of knowing, it seemed to Sebastian, if the man was acquainted with the pubs and cast steel foundries of Sheffield; whether he had jogged around the empty athletics stadium the morning after a Tina Turner concert or whether he had worried about meeting a girl on a November evening and then missed a train back home.
Yet on second thoughts, Sebastian saw nothing exceptional about this. No-one in the group seemed in possession of a provenance that was easy to recognise; nor were they all English, just him and the girl sitting quietly over there. Besides the speaker, Sebastian could make out five other people who had staked a claim to this section of the bar: talking excitedly, as if meeting for the first time, they were paying only modest mind to the tale unfolding from the round of Mont Blanc ale which had just been served. They included (as was often so in the Geneva weekday soirees whose roulette wheel he had spun for several years' worth of Tuesdays) a pair of young idealists from the 'Global Fund', who may have been French and Thai respectively; a very young and smartly-dressed French-Vietnamese man with a gift for quantitative analysis, who may have been attached to a Cern sub-atomic discovery taskforce (or operating a small hedge fund in the basement of his Eaux-Vives appartment); a young Portugese man who had just sublet his flat after being churned from some bank and was about to fly to Abu-Dhabi; and finally, the pretty English girl Sebastian had noticed earlier, her tinted hair slightly flattened down by having worn a hat against the evening rain, whose hands now held a glass of panache, as though for warmth, and who still wore the fingerless gloves she had arrived in some time ago.
Sebastian tried to focus his attention on the mountaineer who was talking softly and clearly.
"The crux of the route though was actually the easy ground down the bottom," he was continuing. "Because of the serac which threatened it."
"Can't you avoid it by going up to the right?" Sebastian countered. He was himself quite familiar with taking risks, being an accomplished paraglidist who had flown over the Alps quite a few times, gazing at their magnificent glaciated features.
The young man caressed his beer glass with the knuckle of a thick finger, wiping off condensation, and then he looked Sebastian squarely in the eye.
"It's not a moon, it's a space station unfortunately. Way too big to escape. And what's more is, there are others stacked up on top of it, which you're not even aware of from down below."
Sebastian considered the implications of this. The young man seemed to be referring to the Plan Glacier, which was shorthand for the icing cake which tumbled down in gigantic slices from the summit of the Aiguille du Plan above Chamonix, each one millions of cubic metres of suspended menace, hanging over the northerly aspect of the Aiguille des Pelerins, along which (it seemed) the young man and his partner had been obliged to make their approach. There, Sebastian imagined, with these ice buildings invisible in the early morning darkness, when the thermometer would have reached its lowest point, the alpinists would have 'run for it' up the narrow snow gully that broke through the lower rock slabs and which led to the ice runnels higher up - and which would serve as a disposal funnel for ice debris being launched from the heights, from the ugly green oppressiveness of the seracs...Up there, they would have been 'objectively' safe but not safe from the subjective dangers of technical face climbing, which included keeping a cool head...
All this seemed rather out of place in this smart lakefront bar in the banking district of Geneva, the venue for tonight's drinks. Sebastian had found his niche in Switzerland several years ago, and now he ran his own affairs, which revolved around valuing jewelry and living quietly in the Old Town, occasionally venturing out for long periods to paraglide, savouring the wild combat between pilot and atmosphere. But, as he knew from being an adopted Genevois, and a free outdoor spirit, urban space was but a tenant in this world of mountainous limestone and deep, green valleys into which waterfalls dropped precipitously and people climbed up and out using their wits in the same way he rode the thermals at weekends. Years ago, before the paragliding bug bit, he had climbed quite a lot especially on the Saleve. He had even 'ticked' a couple of routes graded 6c. But he was never going to get to 7b+ and then, at the end of a languid summer camping out on the Plateau de Glieres with Alison, his then climber-girlfriend who was a philosophy student from Toulouse, he had joined the Ecole de Parapente by Lac Annecy - and never looked back, at least not in anger.
'How long did it take you to get up it?' Sebastian asked.
'Five hours and five minutes.'
'That's fast!' Sebastian exclaimed. 'He just did an ED2 in five hours!' Selene, the girl from the Global Fund looked startled, as though the pharma industry had just announced a further price increase on anti-retroviral medicines.
'Not really. We should have done it in about four, or less,' his interlocutor specified. 'But we went left instead of right in the middle and ended up doing two more pitches up some ice, then rapping off some V-threads and finally getting back on route via a link pitch. All good fun though,' the young man added dubiously. He seemed to disagree with the assessment, or the rapture apparent in Sebastian's remarks.
By now, the drinkers in the bar were thinning out. After all, it was well past eleven o'clock and for a Tuesday night, Sebastian was surprised there were still this many people out in Geneva, the city that always sleeps. He tried to read the young man's thoughts, but he remained inscrutable, matter-of-fact as though it was indeed all just fun, just part of the everyday. What propelled him to climb mountains? The thought teased Sebastian, momentarily eclipsing his desire to order more beer; desire returned and he stepped over to the bar.
Someone had left the door ajar, and the room began to suck in cold November air; the girls shivered and frowned. As Sebastian turned back with fresh drinks in hand for himself and his new friend, he saw that the young man had sprung up to close the door, strolling unhurriedly back to his seat. The English girl thanked him as he passed, her quiet face backlit by the lamps above the bar, and Sebastian felt himself flush with jealousy (what was it about the English girl?).
The break from the conversation allowed the young man, whose real name was Edmond, to take stock of what was going on in the room. He was actually thinking how nice it had been to run into some people through this drinks evening, to which he had been invited by the English girl, Sara, and her friend Evelyn on account of having attended the same university as most of the people who had gathered together on this Tuesday evening. Some time ago, he had decided that he was going to climb things, be tough in life and have done with it, but deep down he still retained the intellectual curiosity not to say romanticism which had given him, amongst other things a love of literature and a desire to one day write books of his own. Heartbreak, world events and the indifference of others had no doubt taken their toll on his sensibilities, and this was reflected in the fact that on average he spent more time training for climbing than writing verse or taking notes for his first novel, though now and then the Muse came hammering at his window in the dead of night, demanding to be satisfied with the warm milk of words.
It was the first time that Edmond had been out in weeks. During the whole of October and the first part of November, he had been spending his evenings after work running in the chill through the fields, forests and around the lake, and at night ploughing through a pile of mostly Russian novels and history books which addressed some of the largest still unexplored areas of his curiosity about the last century, all of it fairly dark. Nonetheless, it was an improvement compared to the evenings of the previous November, when he had been wrapped in a blanket reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an unremitting whip of rain dealt out black lashes against the window-panes. While he sat there talking with Sebastian, Edmond tried to avoid getting philosophical. This was always a temptation when he talked about many subjects, including the Carrington-Rouse route. He didn't want to set the cat amongst the pidgeons tonight, if possible, as he seemed to be getting along well so far; though he did have a strong desire to express some thoughts to his new friends about Life and Fate, the latest book he had been reading, if the opportunity ever arose.
Sara, who had just switched from panache to sparkling water, had only been pretending to listen to most of the conversations going on around her - about property prices, the lack of major concerts in Geneva, the public image crisis of the hedge funds and whether Cern's cricket team could win the Swiss league next season; she heard many similar things being discussed on a daily basis and she filtered it out dismissively. She had moved here three years ago, from London, and at first glance it would have been hard to infer from her modest bearing, the worldly intelligence and deep resilience which inhabited and surrounded her core like fuel-rods and armour. Two weeks ago, she had blown away her eleventh marathon, in less than three-and-a-half hours; for running was Sara's absolute passion, her 'bug' (as she called it). During the week, she would set off at lunchtime on twelve-mile laps, out beyond the airport; on Saturdays she would line up in a track race, often quite a long way away from home; and on Sundays she would put in the rest of her marathon training or just go out and indulge the rhythm of long distances for the absolute pleasure of it. Nor did this routine seem to vary between late summer and springtime. Last Sunday she had run 21 miles, marvelling at the snow, relaxing out of another hard week, sliding into an oblivious zone as she sped along the rural border where Geneva merged with France among winterised vineyards and small black apple trees. Although there were many things that had made her sad, there seemed to be few things in life that awed or frightened Sara, except of course Kenyans, who dazzled unbeatably in every race she had ever run. She nonetheless pricked up her ears to listen to the conversation going on opposite her about mountaineering: it seemed unusual and rather interesting.
'So what will you climb next?' Sebastian asked.
'Everyone seems to think I'm going to do the Eiger,' Edmond replied, and smiled as if acknowledging a private joke. 'But that's just Chinese whispers. What I really want to do is the north face of Les Droites...or however it is you pronounce it.'
'You say it like 'Les Doigts',' chimed in Selene unexpectedly (Sebastian was rather shocked by this). 'It means 'the fingers' in French.' She waved her free hand playfully. But you have to pronounce the 't' at the end as well or it doesn't work.'
'It's a tough one,' Edmond acknowledged. 'I seem to have a fascination with mountains whose names I can't pronounce.' Glancing at Sara, he added: 'That's one area where an Oxford education doesn't help.'
'Perhaps you didn't study hard enough,' Sara replied.
'That surely is the case,' Laughing, Edmond tilted his glass and drained the last of his beer. 'Well, I should probably go home and make up for lost time then.'
'Ah yes, we have to catch the train,' Selene said, looking intently at her watch.
'Who's paying?' Somebody said.
'We're all paying,' someone else said, 'This is Switzerland.'
Outside in the streets of Bel-Air, the dealers had dispersed, a sure sign that there were no more fund managers tramping in and out of the lakefront bars, the younger ones sometimes looking a little laughable, as though they were wearing clothes belonging to a rich old uncle. A light rain danced on the paving stones, and across the narrows where the lake funneled sleepily into the Rhone, rooftop lettering advertised Breitling watches and private client banking in reds and yellows. Sara unlocked her bicycle from the lamp-post, and peered into the darkness. Down the quay she could make out Edmond vanishing into the gloom. She wheeled the bicycle around, and eased into what was for her at least, a short ride home.
Sebastian walked slowly up the hill past the closed gates of the Parc des Bastions. Sometimes he played chess on the public chessboards beside the tea pavillion, especially in the springtime. Surprisingly, for someone of a quiet disposition who was accustomed to living alone, he found he had much to think about tonight, and he reckoned that if he could just stay awake for a couple of hours, he should put his thoughts into words.
Edmond was the last to arrive home, entering his appartment as usual without turning on the light. He poured himself a glass of water, and studied the moonlit garden from the kitchen window. His heart felt somewhat lighter but his face was still a mask.
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