Fourteen

The old Sherpa keeps his worries quiet. These people… They call us ‘Sherpas’, he thinks and lifts his chin. Up here, they’re polite. They smile at us and call us ‘Sherpas’. That gives us a certain distinction, recognises some degree of expertise in us…

Now the old Sherpa spits, with force, and the saliva is carried away by the wind, falling fast on far-off snow. Although distances are difficult to estimate on the mountain. The lack of reference points, the abstract plane of a cloudless sky, the absence of movement.

…Up here they call us Sherpas, thinks the old Sherpa: but when they’re in their homes, with their shoes off, sliding around on their parquet floors in their woollen slippers… when they’ve turned on their central heating, set their thermostat to exactly where they want it, when they’ve got food in the oven and their bodies are being traversed by high-frequency microwaves… The old Sherpa pauses here to mentally compose a picture of an apartment with generous ceilings and curtained picture windows, polished pitch pine, a hi-fi system that doesn’t disturb the neighbours but that does blanket the room in sound. What’s playing? Satie? Gurdjieff? That’s what comes to his mind at first. But he thinks he shouldn’t go that far, get that carried away. It could be jazz, although that would be a bit broad. He needs something else… World music, that’s what’s on! Senegalese percussion or, at the height of ironic gesture, a litany by Tibetan monks. Religious mantras of the mountain, digitalised, having lost their dynamic range and, along the way, all mysticism, too. A sophisticated straying. No need to resort to the iconography of the nouveau riche. He imagines neither terraces open to the warm Malibu air nor importuning in the mansions of Saint Petersburg.

No: the old Sherpa evades the temptation of caricature. He visualises a spacious apartment, white walls hung with Turner reproductions, high-backed armchairs. Europe, of course. Never the plebeian Americas, nor plundered Africa. Nor Asian capitals, which have as many branchings as there are roots sunk into the earth. The picture windows, the pitch pine, the Turner, the guttural sound of Tibet! We’re in Europe, where else.