The Farm

The young Sherpa wonders: how has it never occurred to him, despite having spent so much time on Mount Everest with this older man, to find out why he decided to come all the way to Nepal?

The young Sherpa knows exactly where he himself comes from. He thinks that he could, if he wanted to, reconstruct each and every trace of his passage through the world so far. His birth in a public hospital, the yak wool blankets from the first two winters, the formula and his big sister’s efficient custody, the bleeding wounds of childhood, his education…

The morning of the field trip to the farm, to take just one example. He recalls it perfectly. The premise – the promise – was that they’d see animals whose nature had been altered by domestication. Going the opposite way from the tourists: down the mountain, the stony path, the thistles of the foothills. Reaching a valley and then the countryside, a farm, or something like it: indeterminate, pastoral; a little green, a lot of children, mud from all the thaws.

The young Sherpa – eight at the time – had been nursing exaggerated expectations. Then again that was childhood, or at least it was his: a constant assemblage of outrageous predictions, a permanent fleeing from the referential framework. He didn’t even know what he might find on a farm. But he assumed it was something wild, indomitable. The very thing that would bring about the greatest unpredictability. Fantasies of piracy punctuated his anticipation. Not Caribbean piracy, but South Pacific: a Malay tint to them, or one of Indochina, scimitars, pets with feral fangs, airs of illegality. He didn’t want to leave these images behind; eight years, stubbornness, and the young Sherpa made strenuous efforts not to allow those ideas out of his head, because the way they were, immaculate, with a hint of typhoon or electricity, they kept him bristling.

He could also describe in detail the journey to the farm, which began when the teacher stood at the door, straightened out an irregular line of children and gave the command for them to start walking. A hallway, a courtyard, the school gate, the exterior. Then they stopped a moment. The teacher’s voice reminded them: ‘You already know Raju, our bedel. Raju is going to accompany us on our excursion today. Listen to him. Is everybody ready? Does anybody need to go to the bathroom?’

The young Sherpa remembers everything. For instance, that the first thing he tried to do was figure out if he already knew Raju. Raju’s features struck him as familiar but far away, from another time. That is if childhood recognises other times. The young Sherpa scratched his knee and looked at the back of the bedel’s neck, his dark hair divided by the line of a baseball cap. It wasn’t like the hair on the back of his father’s neck, so carefully, evenly trimmed. It was quite different, in fact. Papa’s neck was more like mine, thought the young Sherpa, although he had a very vague image of the back of his own neck. No one has an exact idea of their own occipital measure. You’d need to be afflicted with a very specific type of narcissism, a literally retrospective vanity. But as three-dimensionality insists on incomplete images, it’s inevitable that certain things get left in the dark. Listening is something else, you might think. But the truth is that the treble of the violin or the military whistle also conceal from us unknowable frequencies. Dogs are different: they transgress the interdiction and parade around the full width of their hearing threshold as though in celebration of some merit of their own. Whales, in their oceanic, infrasonic becoming, reproach them from the opposite end of the tonal field.

It was already getting warm, recalls the young Sherpa; all the warmth a person can sense during springtime at the base of the Himalayas. The young Sherpa went up to Raju. He wanted to learn the sound of his voice.

‘Looks like it’s going to be a hot one today,’ he said to Raju, and he was surprised by the futile maturity of his comment. Perhaps being an adult was that: the uttering of appropriate and dead-end phrases, belonging and adaptation.

The bedel looked at him, his head pointing down, and responded perfectly naturally:

‘They’re predicting snow for tonight.’

Adulthood, then, was more complex: there was, as well, the sphere of confrontation. Before the young Sherpa could answer, the bedel was called into the school’s interior, fleeing the scene.

Later, yes, he remembers it now, an exhausting hike all the way down the mountain. Namche has no streets or highways: just a helipad and footpaths, the meanders of ruggedness and isolation. Thus they had to leave the village, cross a bridge, climb a hill, keep walking, simulate suicides, celebrate bad jokes. And even then they were still in the immediate vicinity. But we ought not imagine a declining industrial periphery, nor that indefinable geography that alternates between the primitivism of rural flora and the poverty of certain outlying areas. Namche is not Kathmandu – it’s not even Darjeeling. It’s just a collection of buildings given over to tourism and simple houses on steps drilled into the mountain range. Crossing the city limit consists in passing the last neighbour who lives next to a white painted stone. Beyond that is outer space.

After forty minutes of walking, after the young Sherpa had already revised his expectations – which suddenly struck him as without foundation, unjustifiable – they landed on a modest plain: the farm. Or rather, a scant lot with a few donkeys, mules, turkeys, four yaks, and a huge pig. But the visit to the farm was over in an instant, and it was time to number off, occupy positions, look straight ahead, return.

And on that ascent up the hill, the young Sherpa was for the first time – he remembers it now, facing the Englishman – suspended in the moment a forklift falls over, and a father dies. Mourning out of sync. The way back to Namche, then, a Golgotha. Valley, hill, bridge, stony path… But not the ascent of the Messiah, who knows he is predestined and reluctantly accepts his sacrificial delirium. More like the Calvary, the ordeal of the bad thief: he, too, has been whipped. Same nails, same splinters, and not even a crown.

The road back and Namche on the horizon, if a mountain range can allow for a horizon. The languor of the tail end of a party, the already vaporous memory of their excursion, and the young Sherpa hadn’t asked to lose his dad. His lunch still in his backpack. He hadn’t found a reason to eat it. First out of euphoria, now melancholy. What had he lost on the way to the farm, before the turkeys, the mules, that apathetic yet endearing pig? What is it he wants back now? The return weighed on him, that ascent of the mountain path, that walk home, the questions, the dinner with his family.