Solo Faces Read online

  “As the woman on the bus said when she saw the Pacific for the first time …”

  “Yes?”

  “I imagined it would be bigger.”

  They descended to the north on a slope covered with snow. It was steep, they had to stamp out steps. Suddenly Love, who had lost all thought of danger, slipped. His feet went out from under him. He began to accelerate.

  “Self-arrest! Self-arrest!”

  He did not make the slightest attempt to help himself but slid like a rag doll, faster, bumping, bouncing as if he would come apart. Far down, luckily, the snow was soft. He came to a stop and lay still. There were clots of ice in his beard. His knuckles were raw.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Rand cried, hurrying to him.

  “Oh, yes, I heard you,” he said gazing up. “I heard you. I said, he is my friend.”

  “What?”

  “My very good friend,” Love said.

  The public baths were in the basement of a building called La Residence, approached by a weedy path and entered through some flimsy doors. Inside was a booth where soap and towels were dispensed. It was usually crowded. The doors to the showers opened and closed. There was the sound of cascading water and strange languages, the odor of steam. A woman in carpet slippers collected a franc apiece.

  The woman knew Love. Where had he been climbing, she asked?

  “Pointe Lachenal,” he said casually.

  “Très bien,” she said. She had black hair and gold teeth. She glanced at the figure sitting next to him.

  “Avec ce monsieur?”

  Yes, Love confirmed.

  “What do you suppose takes them so long?” Rand said. He was watching the shower doors.

  “They’re in there washing their clothes. It’s forbidden, of course.”

  More people were coming to the entrance. Some, seeing the line, turned away. Suddenly Rand sat up.

  “Hey!” he cried.

  It was the red sweater. He jumped to his feet.

  “Hey, you!” He bumped into people in the doorway. “You!”

  Down the corridor he ran. Near the door he grabbed the sweater. He held it tightly.

  “Hey, listen. The next time,” he said it slowly to have it comprehended, “I’m going to throw you right off the goddamned mountain …”

  There was a look of utter bewilderment.

  “You understand?”

  A flat English voice responded, “What mountain?”

  “Weren’t you climbing on Pointe Lachenal?”

  “Sorry.”

  As Rand released him, the Englishman straightened his clothes. He looked even smaller and more wary, like a turtle about to pull in its head.

  “There was someone on the mountain with a sweater like yours.”

  “I gathered that,” he said.

  7

  JOHN BRAY HAD, BESIDES his red sweater, a dirty suede jacket and the face of a thief. He smoked French cigarettes. There was a fever blister on his lip. He was twenty-two.

  “The guides are looking for the bastard who’s pulling all their pins,” he said. It was raining. They were sitting inside the National, the floor filthy from wet boots. “They don’t think it’s so funny.”

  “Too bad.”

  “You’re screwing up their act.”

  “Come on. I was a guide,” Rand said.

  “Is that right? Where?”

  “In the Tetons.”

  “Never heard of them. They must be new.”

  “Have you heard of the Himalayas?”

  “I don’t think so,” Bray said. Then, in a low voice, “Look out, here they come.”

  A group of Japanese was entering, looking around to find an empty table.

  “Hello,” Bray said with a wave of his hand as they squeezed past. “Nice weather, isn’t it?”

  They were nodding and acknowledging in some confusion. Humor does not readily translate.

  “Having some good climbing?” he asked.

  Finally they understood.

  “Oh, yes. Crime,” they said.

  “Where have you gone? The Triolet? Grépon?”

  “Yes, yes,” they agreed.

  “Good luck.” He waved after them, smiling. “Nice little fellows,” he said in an aside to Rand. “They come here by the thousands.”

  “I’ve already heard the story.”

  “Which one?”

  “About a bit of a nip in the air.”

  Bray had a wry, grudging laugh.

  “What’s that? I don’t know that,” he said.

  Outside the rain came in gusts. The campgrounds were drenched, the paths slick with mud. The National, which was known as the English bar, was cheap, unadorned. There is a strain of English whose faces are pale and crude as if they were not worth finishing or touching with color. It was these sullen faces that filled the room.

  “Never stops raining here,” Bray said. “You have to wait for what they call a beau fixe, stretch of good weather. Then it’s all right.”

  “Where are you going then?”

  “You mean climb? I hadn’t decided.”

  “Would you like to do one?”

  “What are you thinking of?”

  “You know the Frêney?”

  Bray laughed a bit nervously. “You mean that?”

  “Are you interested?”

  “I might be, yes.”

  “Why not, then?”

  “Um …be a couple of days on it, wouldn’t we?”

  “I would think so,” Rand said.

  The Frêney is a buttress, inaccessible and huge, on the side of Mont Blanc. There had been famous tragedies on it.

  “That’s where Bonatti got in all the trouble, isn’t it? Yeah, sure, I’d be interested.”

  Bray, a thick cigarette in his small hand, head bent forward as if pondering a chessboard, was a plasterer. British climbing had changed since the war. Once the province of university men, it had been invaded by the working class who cut their teeth on the rock of Scotland and Wales and then traveled everywhere, suspicious and unfriendly. They came from the blackened cities of England—Manchester, Leeds. To the mountains they brought the same qualities—toughness and courage—that let them survive in the slums. They had no credo, no code. They had bad teeth, bad manners and one ambition: to conquer.

  8

  DOWN A CURVING, DAWN street in the stillness, at the hour when shutters are still closed and all that distinguishes this century from the last are empty cars ranked along the gutters, Rand walked. He was carrying a large pack and a rope. He passed almost no one—a lone woman going in the other direction and a white cat without a tail hunting in a garden. As he came close the cat stepped into some bushes. It had a tail, almost invisible, perfectly black.

  At the cable car station there were people already waiting. They stood silently, some chewing bits of bread, and watched him approach. Bray had not arrived. Several guides wearing the blue enameled badge were with their clients. He slipped off his pack. Two or three stragglers came down the street. It was a few minutes before six. He felt a certain detachment. It seemed he was made of cardboard and was waiting among other cardboard figures, some of whom occasionally murmured a word or two.

  There was a stirring—the ticket seller had entered the booth inside. The crowd, like animals knowing they are about to be fed, began to press closer to the doors.

  At the last moment a figure came hurrying toward him. It was one of the English climbers in a thick sweater and corduroy pants.

  “John can’t come,” he said. “He caught some bug.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “This morning. He’ll be all right tomorrow.”

  The doors had been unlocked. The crowd was moving forward. It was a long walk back to camp. He had packed the night before, carefully putting everything in a certain order.

  “You’re not going, anyway?”

  “Tell him I hope it’s not serious.”

  He was among the last to get a ticket. The cable car lur
ched slightly as he stepped aboard. For a moment he felt nervous, as if he had made a fatal mistake, but then they were gliding up, over the pines, ascending at a steep angle. The town began to shrink, to draw together and move off. Noiselessly they swept upward.

  Bray was in a sleeping bag, his clothing scattered about. He raised himself on one elbow.

  “Did you find him?” he asked.

  “Yeah, he was there. I told him you were sick.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He went up anyway.”

  “Went up?” Bray said.

  The sun had risen. It was filling the trees with light. Bray had a moment of remorse. The day was clear, the mountains beckoned.

  “He wouldn’t go alone,” Bray said.

  “Perhaps he’ll meet someone up above.”

  “Yeah, they’re standing in line.”

  “Is he the one who said he’d throw you off the mountain?”

  “Not me. You’ve got it backwards.”

  “You were going to throw him off?”

  “No.” Bray cut him short. “Did you tell him I’d go tomorrow?”

  “I don’t think you’re going to see that much more of him.”

  The sky was absolutely clear and of a perfect color. Late in the day there was a calm. The wind began to shift. Suddenly, from nowhere, there were gray streamers in the air and, as if to announce them, thunder. Climbers hurried down. Rain, which might be snow at higher altitudes, started.

  The sound of it woke Bray who had been sleeping fitfully. He was startled. He was able to see a little in the dark. It had gotten cold. The grass of the meadow below was jerking in the rain. His thoughts, somewhat confused, went quickly to the Frêney. Like a great ship, at that moment, it was sailing through clouds and darkness. There was a sudden bolt of lightning, very close. An ear-splitting clap. The silence swam back quickly and in it, like a kind of infinite debris, the snow was pouring down.

  The next morning he went into town. The rescue service was in an old building next door to a garage. It was still raining. There were bicycles inside the entrance; upstairs a door slammed. Two men came down the stairs in hats and blue sweaters. They passed him and went out.

  On the second floor was a bulletin board and the office. A short-wave radio was going. No one spoke English. Finally someone came to the counter who did.

  “Yes?”

  “I want to report someone missing.”

  “Where?”

  “On the Frêney Pillar.”

  “How do you know? Were you with him?” the guide asked.

  “No, he’s alone,” Bray said.

  “Alone?” The guide was half-listening to something on the radio at which he and the others suddenly laughed. Bray waited. “Why is he alone? You know, we can’t do anything until the storm has passed.”

  “How long is it supposed to last?”

  The French were always the same. They never answered a question, pretended they didn’t understand. He waited until the guide, who had nothing else to do, finally noticed him again.

  “Come back tomorrow.”

  “Thank you so much,” he said.

  They hadn’t made a note, they hadn’t asked for a name. He went downstairs. There were two police vans parked across the street. It was raining like winters in England, days of going to work while cars, their windows up, dry and warm inside, splashed past. He was used to working in the cold, in unheated houses, and going off on weekends to climb in the cold as well, not a meteor figure like Haston or Brown—it took big climbs to do that, incredible climbs—but somewhere close behind. He was lingering near the edge of things awaiting his chance. He could climb as well as any of them. The confidence on absolutely impossible routes, even to dare them, that was perhaps what he lacked. It might come. In any case, he was waiting.

  He walked back in the rain. The longer the storm lasted, the less were the chances. Up there it was cold, ice forming in great, invincible sheets. All the features of the rock would be covered, whole routes obliterated. He was lucky—diarrhea had saved him.

  “I couldn’t go,” he would often later say. “I was too busy.”

  It was one of those coincidences that mark famous lives.

  9

  IN THE SILENCE OF the peaks and valleys, fading and then drifting forth came the dull, unmistakable beat of rotors. From a distance the helicopter resembled an insect slanting across the snowfields, lingering, then moving on.

  The rain had stopped. There was blue sky visible behind the clouds. Snow covered everything in the upper regions, every horizontal, every ledge. The summits were still shrouded, the cold clinging.

  A climber was caught on the Central Pillar of Frêney, that was what they were saying. The sound of the rescue helicopter going back and forth became more and more ominous, like one of those disasters where nothing is announced but the silence tells all. Accidents were common. Occasionally there was one that stood out because of its inevitability or horror. Really cruel instances never vanished; they became part of climbing, as famous crimes become part of an era.

  The search stopped in the late afternoon. A lone figure had been seen on the glacier. At noon the next day, dirty and exhausted, the pack hanging from one shoulder, Rand came up the path to the campground. He walked looking neither to the right or left, as if there were not another soul on earth.

  Love was sitting outside his tent and called to him. Rand walked on. From inside his parka he took out a bottle of wine. The cork had been pulled. Still walking, he began to drink.

  On reaching the tent he simply dropped to his knees and disappeared by falling forward, his feet outside. After a moment they were drawn in behind him.

  Bray found him lying there, eyes open.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Rand’s gaze drifted over slowly.

  “I thought they were going to bring down a frozen body.” Bray waited—there was no reply. Then a low voice,

  “That was some beau fixe.”

  “How far up did you get? Where were you?”

  He had closed his eyes when he lay down, but only for a minute. They had opened again by themselves. He lay there teeming with words, like a dying man who could not confess, who would take them with him to the grave.

  “It caught me by surprise,” he said, “it came in so fast. I didn’t have time to do anything. I got to a small ledge. At first it was just rain …”

  “And then?”

  “I stayed there. That night and the next day.”

  “You weren’t frightened?”

  “I was paralyzed,” he said. “I thought how stupid I’d been. I went up for the wrong reason, I didn’t know anything. No wonder it happened.”

  There were several faces attempting to see in. Rand’s voice was too low to be heard.

  “Finally I decided I had to try and get down. I made some rappels. The rope was frozen. I chopped holds. I was afraid I’d drop the ax, it would come out of my hand and that would be the end.”

  “Did they find you? I alerted the mountain rescue.”

  “They flew by. I don’t know if they saw me.”

  Bray nodded. He was ashamed of what he had earlier felt, of having so easily given up someone for dead. The drained, low voice seemed to come from an inner man. The weary face touched him deeply. He recognized the defeat in it, the renunciation. At that moment something bound him to Rand, he would have liked to acknowledge it but he remained silent. Instead he picked up the bottle.

  “Want some?” he asked.

  Rand shook his head.

  “Not bad,” Bray said, drinking. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  He fell asleep. His boots were on. He was lying in the disorder of retreat, his fingernails black with dirt. He slept for eighteen hours, people walking up and down the path. In town they were already telling his story.

  10

  IN THE FALL HE found a room behind the papeterie, along the Impasse des Moulins, in a house by the riv
er. The campground was empty, the town still. September light fell on everything. A lazy, burning sun filled the days.

  Cowbells ringing mournfully in the high meadows, the indifference of local people, the cool green forests—these seemed to spell out the season. The peaks were turning darker, abandoning their life. The Blaitière, the Verte, the Grandes Jorasses far up the glacier, he began to look at them in another way, without eagerness or confusion. There was a different sky above them, a sky that was calm, mysterious, its color the blue of last voyages.

  His hair was long, he was growing a beard—it was already fanning out, filling with wildness like a prophet from the Old Testament. They knew him in the shops where he had begun to speak a halting French. He was clean, he was dry. He walked to his room in the evening with the end of a long, narrow loaf of bread sticking out of his pack.

  Later he lived in a room behind a small museum, the Musée Loppe, which was at the end of a passageway, and then in the attic of a house near the station, a large house with green shutters and faded walls. It was entered by a garden gate in the shade of an alley. Two café tables were rusting near the door. Inside was an odor of cooking and tobacco, warm, oppressive. His room had a small skylight and balcony with a set of double doors hung with curtains that once were white. Across the way was a garage and the rear of Hôtel des Étrangers. Rain fell on the metal roof. Occasionally there was the soft clatter of a train.

  He stood outside Sport Giro, looking at boots in the window. Someone motioned him to come in—it was the owner at the door.

  “You don’t need to stand in the rain,” he said.

  “Merci.”

  “You speak French?”

  “Not really.”

  “I think you do,” Giro said.

  The salesgirl barely glanced up. If you look like that, you don’t have to speak, she remarked in French. Eventually you have to say something besides “thank you,” Giro replied. Such as? she said.

  Giro’s homely face made an expression of resignation.

  “I didn’t quite understand that,” Rand said.

  “It’s nothing.”

  The girl had turned away. She had a certain disinterest, even insolence, that annoyed him. Ordinarily he would have known how to respond but here the language baffled him.