Fifty-One

Where did he come from, though? What combination of mishaps and luck swept the old Sherpa up the southern slope of Mount Everest? The young Sherpa encounters no answer, though this doesn’t upset him. Not at all. Rather, it remains dissolved in his consciousness, where other anxieties float in a reverie of frosted panes.

He looks at the sky, the snow-capped peaks, and without saying anything lets his gaze get lost over imprecisions in the landscape. An ache, a faint helplessness afflicts him; this happens every time he goes away from Namche, his home, its habitual slopes and its tourists and that flow of foreign exchange… Or perhaps it’s something else. The truth is that there is something in the inactivity of waiting that ushers the young Sherpa into a phantasmagoric zone. A place that is not the resinous chaos of the present, but also not the fossil past. A site that has no form. It’s hard to give it a name. The magmatic, perhaps. Something that at first manifests itself as a devastated region of snippets of unfinished information: the damp on the low walls of his house, the door of a piece of furniture that came off its hinges and must be fastened with a piece of cardboard, the pictures of his father… the starrily ragged reverberation of the physical presence of that father, which has already started to harden, to set as a memory of memories. Which is already getting distanced in the evanescence of anecdotes recounted in third person.

‘The forklift fell over with your dad and three other people inside.’

His mother’s explanation never went beyond that. That was all that could be said. But for the young Sherpa, by some quirk of the economy of grief, it was impossible to picture the scene: the going wrong, a forklift falling just because, that sudden imprisoning, the influence of budget on the wear and tear of the equipment.

It seemed to work better for him, as the years went by, to convert the fall of the forklift into a car wreck. Something similar, but less involuntary; with a slight dose of the epic came a minimal responsibility for one’s own demise. He constructed his personal accident rate with a specific point of view: partly obscured by the nape of his father, who was driving the car, and the other three dead people who would squeeze in beside him in the back seat so as to all be in the frame at the very moment of the fall. At sunset, with a sun that was already setting but still gleaming against the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas. And then the landscape and its Expressionist acceleration out the window. The impact.