Why the Mountain?

Why the mountain? Why not the steppe or the wetlands? What attracted the old Sherpa to the mountain range, given that he, born far from everything, could have chosen the tropics or the tundra? Something must have summoned him from the high mountains. Possibly the obscene concentration of rocks, more than the snow. The hardness more than the altitude. The mass more than the atmospheric intimacy. That and the fact he wanted to get away from the sea.

The old Sherpa lived in a city. Avenues and pedestrian streets, out-of-control morbidity and scant urban planning. The old Sherpa lived a peaceful life in that metropolis with its immodest accident rates and unequal distribution of the surplus. He had a degree from a university, a routine: work, consumption, rest, diversions. He had flat-rate internet. His parents were understanding; his friends were friendly. He lived alone. Comfortable. He wasn’t poor, nor was he very sick. He didn’t belong to a cult, didn’t believe in all conspiracy theories, nor was he permanently numbed. Of course: the old Sherpa was young.

He decided to go on vacation one day. To the coast, a seaside peninsula, he sought the sun, the sea. Even he doesn’t know why. He bought his ticket, packed his suitcase, got on the bus with its soft seats. He arrived, some – a few – days passed, he met Rabbit, met Rabbit’s husband, heard about the war. He decided to go far away. He became a world-weary flâneur. A few years later he settled down. And for this purpose, the old Sherpa chose the Himalayas.

The first days on the coast were perfect and disappointing. Sun, beach, sea, another routine: the idyllic tableau and its ellipsis above the salty residue in the groin, sand on the scalp, and sunstroke. It was waking up and having a dream breakfast: caffeine and starchy foods imposing the inertia of habit on the supply of fruits and cereals, dairy products, eggs and cold cuts. The hotel, its buffet, its pomp.

Not until he had got his money’s worth for that fourth of what the bed and breakfast cost did he retire to his bedroom once more. A premature siesta: he’d sleep from noon to three in the afternoon. Half past three. Four o’clock at the latest. Then he would change and go to the beaches of the peninsula. He tried not to go back to the same one. Every day a new landscape. Similar, risibly similar. But new. What never changed was his equipment: just a towel, sunglasses in their case (to keep his money in), flip-flops, a t-shirt, a bathing suit, a book.

Fifteen metres from the shore, he would stretch out on the sand. He’d read lying on his back. Holding the book in such a way that its shadow prevented him from being blinded by the sun. Alternating arms, of course. Two pages with the left; three with the right. He’d read for half an hour, forty minutes. Then he’d turn over. He’d take off his t-shirt, improvise a pillow. He was still capable of dozing some fifteen minutes more. He’d wake up and go into the water. Not for long. A little while: what it took him to realise his surroundings left him indifferent, when they weren’t outright disagreeable. The children and their shrieks, their egotism; those adult men and their feigned nonchalance, that laid-back alienation of the summer season; the elderly and imminence. Not much longer. The same waves pushed the old Sherpa out of the sea, and he walked back to his towel, his flip-flops, feeling layers of protection, all of them justified and all of them false: isolation, exceptionality, self-pity… The fatty tissue of consciousness.

And so on, for how long? Three, four days? A different beach each time. Sleep, have breakfast, sleep, beach, read, sleep, sea, sleep… Dinner? Barely: it didn’t take much for the old Sherpa to get by. So he would grab something light at the corner store, and that would be his meal. A yogurt. Low-fat. Or less. Sleep, beach, sleep, sea, sleep, yogurt, read, sleep, breakfast, sleep… And so on, for how long? Three, four days when the old Sherpa felt safe? How long until the women showed up?

Denial, solitude. On the fifth or fourth day, it occurred to the old Sherpa to look at the women on the beach: pre-teens, teens, college girls, new mums, seasoned mums, leathery old ladies who held his gaze a few seconds before sinking into the surf. Women walking right up to sunset along the beaches of the peninsula. The old Sherpa was young: onanism, angst. The moment when the surface of the frozen lake fissures, that burst.

Because once the women passed by, just before sunset, on the sand, the children were no longer shouting their rambunctious shouts, prisoners of the most ill-tempered caprices, but were instead quite fragile, and you had to bite your knuckles to resist the urge to race to their sides, to sit down in the dunes, hug them and keep them away from the currents, from the currents’ scaly monsters, their depths, the abysmal dark, the giant squids and their tentacular forces that would snatch away all they had of any importance, all of their potential. Once the women passed and held his gaze a few seconds before plunging into the foam of the summer swell, the adults no longer looked falsely disinterested, but rather fraternal in their despair, victims, too, of that grinding clash of gears, companions in perdition, people to hand off the oars of Charon’s boat to. This is what the women who passed by and allowed themselves to be looked at brought, these women who held his gaze for several seconds: a new sense of belonging, a solitary impulse that was impossible to say no to, one that transformed the undeferrable finitude of the old into jackets and blankets and hot infusions, into the adoration of their calloused hands and their eyes sunk in under their eyebrows, awareness of legacy, construction of a lineage that would fuse into universality. All of that the women brought: hyperbole and a hollowing out. That’s what they brought if they let themselves look or be looked at, if they maintained his gaze – those pubescent women, those robust old women, those college kids a few seconds before plunging into the salt water, in those days, those first days of a vacation that had been, until then, perfect, and disappointing.

The women passed like Huns along the seashore. They’d pass by and leave the countryside devastated behind them. The women would pass, look, or hold his gaze an instant before plunging in. They’d pass, and the old Sherpa, still young, would feel very little, would feel next to nothing; he would look at his ankles barely grazed by dark seaweed. The faint current that returns, the wet sand, and its roughness. The regurgitation of the ocean mass: the ebb. The women would pass, and the Sherpa would return.

Slowly. Dragging the soles of his feet to that indeterminate point of the peninsula where he had left his towel, books, sunglasses, case, money, flip-flops, t-shirt. He’d return, the sea behind him, head bowed, no longer seeing anyone, terrified of himself, but even more so of those women who were passing, letting themselves look and be looked at, who enjoyed looking and feeling looked at; frozen stiff and soaking wet, in dormant and absolute terror, a terror of no consequence to the world; he’d return in an abyss of that autonomous terror, in the solipsism of that black hole-facing terror. He’d walk back, covering a few metres, not many, those it took to walk from the waves’ edge to his towel, eyes on the sand, without raising his gaze; he no longer cared about looking at anyone, nor about the discomfort of his wet bathing suit and its frictions; he didn’t care any more if the pages of his book were destroyed by the droplets that fell from his hair. All there was was his return, from the sea to that illusory island demarcated by five or six possessions. A t-shirt turned insufficient pillow, sunglasses, a book, money, flip-flops. The abstraction of a territory delimited for itself between the dunes and the horizon. He’d return to legislate that scant homeland founded upon sand, where he could stretch out on his towel: banner or flag, or capital city perhaps, of that sterile country where the old Sherpa, who was so far neither Sherpa nor old, could always return, more and more fed up with self-pity, that vice.

Face in the sand on the beach. The heat that dissipates. First in the air. Then in his own body. Finally, in the sand: in its crystals, in the pulverised minerals. The extinction of the sunlight, gradual; another circadian cycle to the measure of senility. Old Japanese people sliding rice paper doors. Until it is night, or until – at least – night can be called night. And there is no longer any point in hiding his head in the sand. The cosmic order informs the old Sherpa that it’s time to go, to leave the beach, to seek another habitat. It tells him that the day has exhausted its splendour, and that it is time to take refuge: sheets, air conditioning, pale blue tablets to fight the mosquitoes. The book, if his diurnal frustration hasn’t overwhelmed him completely, can accompany him. Reading forty to sixty pages and going back to sleep. But first he will have to stop by the corner store. Stock up on the essentials to make it to the next morning’s breakfast at the hotel. Buy a soft cheese. Three slices of some cold cuts on promotion. Less, less than that. Only what’s strictly essential. Mineral water? Less, less: there is a glass in the hotel bathroom and a magnanimous tap from which turbid water flows, but how turbid can water be, and how damaging can turbidity be from such a magnanimous tap next to the glass in the bathroom at the hotel?

So the old Sherpa goes: he walks though the ebbing streets of the peninsula towards a corner store. In flip-flops. Before – long before – the mountain summoned him by virtue of its volume, its massiveness. Before that orographic flight, those Himalayan slopes, the old Sherpa walks to the corner store: a yogurt with granola. Less, less: a fleshy fruit, just a sliver of a seasonal fruit. What’s essentially strict. He shouldn’t even go, the old Sherpa feels. If in eleven hours he can wake up and have breakfast. He doesn’t need anything. But he is already on his way, and it is difficult for him to stop that inertial movement: make a decision, a different decision, an opposing one. It is preferable, then, to go by the corner store and purchase the minimum, the superfluous. Less: a spool of white thread for sewing. Less, less: a cotton swab, if they were to sell them individually.

The old Sherpa gets to the corner store: he goes straight to the fridge with the dairy products. He does not say hello, doesn’t let himself be distracted. He chooses a chocolate dessert. He looks up. No one’s there. Nor are there security cameras. In the solitude of the aisle, he resolves to be provocative. He takes the products off the shelves and examines them as though genuinely thinking of taking advantage of this lack of oversight to hide and steal them. But there is nobody watching him, nor anybody letting him watch them, or enjoy watching, and so he puts everything back on its shelf. Because there’s no one.

Except her. There, next to the cash register, sitting on a tall, rickety stool. The old Sherpa will later learn: her name is Rabbit. She is crying.