Ninety-Seven

An idea settles provisionally in the young Sherpa’s mind. What if it wasn’t an accident? He’s not thinking about predestination, but rather about attempted murder. He reconstructs the sequence. He was bringing up the rear; the older man was ahead; the Englishman in the middle, protected. Then came the bend, the old Sherpa turned. Then the Englishman and, for a few seconds, the landscape looked inorganic and unspoiled. He remembers being side-tracked by some thoughts about his academic future. And then right away he thought about his mother, who at that hour would be having lunch at the help desk of the Ministry for Tourism. He heard a noise and a voice. That much he knows for sure. A noise of secretive violence and a voice that was saying something: a single unintelligible word. In that moment, at that instant, he did not think anything urgent was happening. He kept walking. Two, three, five steps, and the young Sherpa, too, turned the corner. The older man was already looking down over the edge. Crawling. His gaze would have been hard to define, the muscles in his hands were tense. But the scene was easy enough to interpret: the Englishman had fallen, and the old Sherpa was moving towards the cliffside in order to corroborate his condition.

The young Sherpa remembers that his first thought was: He didn’t kill him. Although now that he’s decided to go over everything again, he wonders: Why did I think that? Why introduce the possibility of murder, even if it came negated? Now, since he has decided to review the episode one more time, he reasons: What if the old man did kill him? Is there, in fact, any way to find out? And if so, what role would he want to play in that hypothesis? Complicity or denunciation?