Out of Sight

The young Sherpa’s mind was elsewhere. His angle of sight kept him shut out of the moment. The curve precluded action. The old Sherpa would speak of the advantages of the oscillatory. He’d say you have to make turns slowly, not letting yourself be overtaken by vertigo. He’d say you have to enjoy the detour, even at the risk of procrastination. The young Sherpa wouldn’t be so sure. He wouldn’t care so much whether the path is straight or crooked, more its orography. Is the path flat? Is it downhill? Is there a lot of scree? The young Sherpa was bringing up the rear, watching the Englishman’s back. But the event occurred on a bend. First the older man rounded it, and then the tourist. The young Sherpa lost sight of them. It was a moment, if moment means anything. First he observed, from the side, the old Sherpa disappearing behind a rock. Then he saw the Englishman exiting the frame. Once he was – you might say – alone, the younger man lowered his eyes to analyse the precise point on the mountain where he was about to rest his right foot. It could have been – what? – three seconds the young Sherpa took to take that step, and then four more with a half twist of the shoulder girdle, and in the end, to make his way around the curve: no longer looking south, but northeast. And it was in those three seconds that the young Sherpa would come to understand the dramatic potential of the out-of-sight.

There is a well-founded idea born in Mitteleuropa and perfected in France: everything we’ve grown accustomed to calling life is, in reality, a symptom. Actions, thoughts, interpretations, dialogues and soliloquies, sufferings… are nothing more than intermittently surging projections, stamps on the surface of the knowable. Symptoms. The real is in the out-of-sight, permeating from an aberrant beyond. It’s inaccessible. And yet we keep conforming to the merely perceptible. Somewhat like the way astronomers infer the presence of an invisible black hole by means of its gravitational effects. The real is missing: we can only begin to glimpse its consequences.

His eyes aimed northeast now, the young Sherpa became aware of the Englishman’s absence. Then, in a flash that was similar to simultaneity, he saw the older man, who had already crawled towards the edge. And right away he made himself believe: He didn’t kill him.