Forty-Eight

The old Sherpa attempts to reconstruct the moment of the fall. As if surrounding the episode with a story might serve as a shortcut to establish how much time has passed since then. He recalls that everything was relatively silent. The Englishman was walking between them; the young Sherpa was bringing up the rear. They had come to a curve. To the left, the slope; to the right, the void. It wasn’t complicated. It was practically a passageway, an asphalted street. They could have pitched a tent there, even, spent the night. It wasn’t an upward stretch. The old Sherpa underscores this idea: it wasn’t upward. It was completely horizontal, posing not the slightest risk. That’s why we didn’t have the ropes attached to the harnesses, that’s why we were walking free, each according to his abilities and each according to his needs, he thinks. Once they were around the bend, but only then – then yes, they would arrive at a period of clambering, of having to best the verticality of the mountain. But not yet. But for now it was an avenue, a polystyrene highway, a yielding plaza.

It might not have been ten minutes, even. Six since it happened; eight, at the most. The old Sherpa leading the charge. He heard a tsk, a tongue pulling away from a set of teeth. Annoyance. That was what that tsk expressed. Not fear, not surprise, not the unstoppable anger of mortals in the face of their finitude. None of that. Annoyance: like a father on discovering that the laces of his child’s shoes have come undone. Like someone who observes, after washing and drying the dishes, that the pan is still dirty on the stove, greasy, unpostponable. The old Sherpa heard that tsk and turned his head. He saw that the Englishman was stumbling, moving his arms like rattan blades, wanting to regain his balance.

A mistake. The best option, always, is to fall.