Sixty-Eight

From the age of ten to the age of fourteen, the young Sherpa listened to National League broadcasts on the radio every Sunday. Of the nine teams that make up the Nepalese football association, he has a soft spot for the Three Star Club, The Patanites of Lalitpur, and for their cobalt jerseys. After, on spring and summer evenings, he would go out to play ball under the influence of that day’s results. Sometimes with a couple of friends, but also alone, or with the walls of the houses. Even, from time to time, with some of the Europeans who for some incomprehensible reason believe that playing football with a Nepalese boy in the middle of the Himalayas is a sublime experience. That’s when the tourists understand that, due to the domination of the incline, negotiations with the spherical aren’t so easy when you live in the high mountains. But the young Sherpa was always a persevering boy. He still is.

What about studying something with more of a connection to our habitat? he wonders now. Urban planning, protecting the environment? He has always been very sensitive to his surroundings, his teachers never seem to tire of praising his curiosity, his ties to the external world. In fact, at this very moment his focus shifts from vocational uncertainty to the immediate: the Englishman and his sojourn on that ledge, fatal or providential, on the southern slope of the giantess.