The Old Sherpa

Why not the desert or the estuaries? Why not the fertile charm of the prairie? Why the mountain? It might be because on the mountain there are no phones. The old Sherpa feels the cold saliva beyond his mouth. The stupor. The phone rings in his room at the peninsular hotel. He opens an eye. The other is against the pillow. Only one eye open, then. But not for too long: he soon loses his vigour, the eyelid cedes, and the pupil clouds into the dome of the eye socket. Hibernation. The telephone rings. It’s cold. Air-conditioning, thinks the old Sherpa. And the alert eye is activated anew. It seeks its objective on the horizon of the sheet and finds the glacial mouth of Boreas, open in a frigid nineteen-degree grimace. It felt colder. The phone rings, and the old Sherpa picks up the receiver. The result is agreeable. It isn’t silence: it is rather the cessation of that sound. A hushed stridency in the middle of a hysterical crisis. A poultry bird that dies without feeling any pain, when a passenger plane falls on top of it. On the mountain there occasionally are, in fact, poultry birds. Chickens, some geese. Wild, of course. The bar-headed geese, for example, that migrate from India to Mongolia, ascending out of control above the mountain range, against all instinct for self-preservation. But the old Sherpa isn’t on the mountain, but rather at sea level. Or one storey above sea level. In room one thirty-three, where the phone stops ringing in the same instant that he remembers Rabbit, with her inconsolable tears, the languid way she passed the chocolate dessert through the barcode reader, the red lasers tracing the tracks of her left hand, the plastic spoon she gave him at the wrong time and in the wrong size, his return to the hotel, his guilt, the everlasting night that never led to breakfast, and the hieratic concierge who announced that no, that not yet, still, not any more was there breakfast for the estimable guest because in some way that was mysterious, or perhaps completely incomprehensible, Rabbit’s weeping had slipped the old Sherpa out of the usual flow of linear chronology, had taken him to another site where nothing was possible but to sleep, to indulge without pleasure in the suspension of consciousness, and to drag himself – univalve, gastropod – through the lowest level of existence. Until the phone rang, the old Sherpa answered, basked in the cessation of the ringing and, simultaneously, as if waking, answering, enjoying, and self-flagellating were all a single action, he recalled Rabbit’s weeping, his own indifference, his indolent way of paying her, saying a single syllable to her as he went out… He remembered how, in the epitome of cynicism, he went back a few metres to demand (reproach her for the lack of) a plastic spoon.

‘Good morning, señor, from the front desk.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m so sorry to disturb you, but we have the breakfast ready now.’

‘Who?’

‘The breakfast buffet is open now, señor. You had asked us to let you know.’

The old Sherpa hangs up the phone, still lying face down. He recognises the day, assumes his geolocation: the peninsula, his vacation, the morning. And he believes for a little while – the time it takes him to put on his flip-flops, go down the stairs, stain the tablecloth, tire of the baked goods – that things have started over. That he’ll go back to the beach, that the wheel has reacquired its circularity: sleep, breakfast, sleep, beach, read, sleep, sea, sleep… Eat. A little. What’s necessary. Some tropical fruit. Or less. Less than that: a dried fig. Some cranberry juice. He believes that yes, he will go back to his seaside routine of disdaining the idleness of others until the women prevail. Until it’s impossible to ignore them. Until they (light, plump, half-naked, carefree) pass by, look at him, enjoy looking and being looked at, and until they remind the old Sherpa of his pathological isolation, his libidinal incapacity, his affective idleness. He believes in this, in the reestablishment of a soothing routine, in the repetition of the scheduled shipwreck. This is the illusion: the spurious rearing of hope and fraud. A short-haul squab. The premature phoenix of the folk tale: a bird that just barely survives its birth only to immediately die. At every moment.

But the illusion evaporates with breakfast. It dissipates as soon as his blood glucose levels rise. Because all the shadow puppets of the morning theatre, those hunchbacked creatures, end up drowned in Rabbit’s crying.

Rabbit still cries among the crumbs on the stained tablecloth, among the ruins of a ravenous breakfast. She laments his gluttony, nutritional obverse of greed. She collapses in sobs and convulsions next to the tropical fruit that’s on offer to the tourist. Next to the orange juice. And the coffee. The buns, the croissants. The strawberry jam, the scrambled eggs. The bacon. Every time the old Sherpa remembers the moment when, absenting himself, he said, ‘Bye.’

Rabbit’s tear ducts flood, inundations, deluges, arks without crews that run aground on grey shorelines, arks without an ounce of biodiversity in their holds. Ghost arks that don’t even transport cadavers, but are rather artefacts of technical abstraction, that float and drift in Rabbit’s weeping until they crash empty against their Ararat, every time the old Sherpa recalls the final instant when he asked: ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a spoon, would you?’

Sheer deluge among the remains of a breakfast in a peninsular hotel. Sleep, breakfast, sleep, beach, read, sleep, sea, sleep… Never again. Stripped of the dazzle of its shell, the illusion exaggerates his eyes; his lungs well up with water. Now what? Now the illusion floats there, dead, and the old Sherpa bids farewell to his Ophelia, downriver. That river, now the mouth, now frank maritime expansion, filters its humidity from the buffet into the lobby, the carpeted staircase, up to the door of room one thirty-three, up to the bed and the sheets still rumpled lying in wait for the daily service. The old Sherpa collapses in bed. His head to one side, eyes open, staring at the beige curtains of the hotel. Minutes pass; the old Sherpa doesn’t want to sleep. He doesn’t want to eat, doesn’t want to go to the beach. He’s lying down and breathing. His hands pressed together between his bent knees. His shoulders a little raised: later his neck will hurt, his calves, his head. He doesn’t know whether to be cold or what. Whether to get under the covers, turn over. Whether to shut his eyes. For Rabbit to stop crying, is what the old Sherpa wants.

Now he’s lying down. Without moving. Still. It could be said that stretching out the fingers of one hand or releasing for a second his jaw from the lock of bruxism is, in a certain way, changing position. But the proxemic approach is static: his right ear resting against the pillow, his knees pressing against the phalanges, legs doubled up, feet together on the dishevelled sheets of room one thirty-three.

He tries without much luck to stay awake. He dreams short dreams of low rhetorical density: practically lacking metonymy, metaphor exhausted. More like reviews of flat images, half coloured. Like someone who shakes the feather duster over the shelf, raising the dust so that it stays suspended in the air a few seconds and falls back onto ornaments: little tourist saucers from Swiss vacation houses, post-Columbian ocarinas, a family photo… Clinging to the bed, oblivious to the wide world and its sensuality, it is, for the old Sherpa, a way of flagellating himself. Falling asleep during his penitence is, in turn, a way of spoiling it.

His eyes burn. For the first time in hours, he moves one of his hands from between his knees, and the torture takes multiple forms: his hand hurts, his knee, his shoulder, the back of his neck. He rubs his closed eyelids with the same right hand. For a moment he stops looking at the beige curtains in the hotel room. In perplexion, his eyes rove over other points in space. He is aware that it is no longer morning. He is broken down and desperate.

Sitting on the bed, he sees a flip-flop on the floor peeking out from under the bedspread. He doesn’t see the other one. He imagines it hidden by the mass of the mattress. But it’s mere speculation. A hypothesis that will be disproved: the left flip-flop was next to the door. He feels like going to the bathroom. Yes, the bacon. Tropical fruit and coffee. The buns, the strawberry jam, the scrambled eggs. He gets up. He is standing. The mechanism works, he can make plans. He can go out.

Now on the street, the old Sherpa drags his flip-flops over the sandy gravel of the resort town. Tourists wander around anaesthetised by leisure, returning early from the beach, maybe planning on siestas. Looking for shade in the early afternoon, craving a late lunch, emanating fumes of sun protection. The old Sherpa lingers for a moment on that expression: sun protection. He thinks it could be a noble title in the proper empire. ‘Sapa Inca, Viracocha’s Chosen Brother and Great Sun Protector of the Tahuantisuyo.’ The old Sherpa walks. Where are his footsteps taking him, those steps that are in fact the reptilian spasms of his flip-flops upon the barely perceptible tracks of the summer season? To the only site possible: the corner store, the little grocery, the summary supermarket. It isn’t far. Even if it’s still hot. It’s the worst time of day. The most critical period for those summering: not morning, not dusk, not unbridled noctambulism. Afternoon: that moment when you have to make a determination. Leaving the beach enables the possibility of returning as sunset starts to scatter all its melancholy – at least as a plan. Staying forces you to carry on by the sea until the emergence of the first star. Take a siesta on the beach? That’s what the old Sherpa could do if he weren’t walking the few blocks that separate the hotel from the corner store; the Calvary on account of Rabbit’s crying, which allows him to do nothing but sleep. He turns a corner and it’s twenty metres, fifteen, seven. He hesitates. He understands the vulnerability of his idea: seeing Rabbit… Why? He does not deceive himself. He knows that this excursion is born of some new selfishness. Rabbit does not need to see him, Rabbit doesn’t know him. As far as Rabbit’s concerned, he’s a chocolate dessert crossing the bar code reader on a bad night at the corner store. Seeing Rabbit is, to put it crudely, an exculpatory operation. This atonement can only have one beneficiary: the future Sherpa who now walks the streets of the peninsula and enters the store.

Next to the cash register there is a man. Grey moustache. He counts coins. He separates them, classifies them, orders them.

The old Sherpa peeks in and sees the man with the grey moustache who is absent-mindedly stacking up coins on the tin of the counter next to the cash register. He remains in that contemplative state for a moment. What is he seeing? A usurper, a litigant who is occupying the site of the desolation. There is an element of duel in the old Sherpa’s fantasy. A duel on the dusty street, abandoned after the gold rush. There’s no one else. Or is there? Is that shadow that’s moving past the spice shelf an old woman in a black and gold bathing suit, or the inverted reflection of the glow of the dunes? It doesn’t matter: it is something ethereal in any case, of a transience well above average.

The old Sherpa pushes away his distractions and focuses on the cashier. What does he see? He sees an enemy, an opponent. Someone to defeat. He starts to walk, in a straight line, from the door up to the register. This manoeuvre, he believes, must necessarily disconcert his adversary. Because cashiers, he reasons, have the atavistic instinct to await frontal attack: the horde of consumers who line up in front of their own trenches. They don’t even know the cashiers have a rear guard. They are like pawns unaware of the reversible acrobatics of a knight, the oblique vileness of the bishop, or the omnivorous voracity of a queen.

Stealthily, the old Sherpa approaches. A metamorphosis: now he is in the Central African steppe. The cheetah stalking the gazelle. Imperceptible footsteps on rubber flip-flops that avoid that drag, the irritating friction of the grains of sand that the carelessness of the tourists, unapprehensive, negligent, scatter around the peninsula. Two, three steps, and it all falls apart. An out-of-tempo exhalation, the excessive swinging of an arm, the impact of the shadow cast indoors, the grazing of the Bermuda shorts against the inner thighs… Or, to put it more plainly, the peripheral vision of the cashier with the grey moustache who notices an element that’s out of place and pauses his count of those coins made out of nickel and raises his eyes.

There are two omissions that surprise the old Sherpa in that moment. That the cashier does not shoot him. That the cashier doesn’t run out of the store. What follows, instead, is suspended sequentiality. A holding of the breath, a parenthesis. But it doesn’t last. Immediately the world keeps going, and their eyes meet as they unite in the ambiguity of a mutual lack of recognition. The cashier looks at the Sherpa, who has yet to even dream of the Himalayas. His eyes are dull, yes, but they hide in their gelatinous beds a hint of intrigue. The Sherpa looks at the cashier and his pupils, in turn, reveal immediate terror.

The optic lasso forces the old Sherpa to take the next step. They can’t keep looking at each other indefinitely. He feels like he’s going to have to say something. Soon, now. To himself, with his mouth shut, he tries to start with a casual justification. An ‘excuse me’, a ‘sorry’, or, to take a more articulate route, a ‘Just a quick question, if I may…’ But he does not get to shape the conversation for two reasons. Firstly, he is paralysed by the impossibility of wrapping up his preamble. ‘Excuse me,’ what? Secondly, an older woman – dark bathing suit, detail of gold clasps on the front and back, high flip-flops, bluish makeup – materialises in front of the cash register.

‘Rabbit didn’t come in today either?’ she says to the cashier. ‘What’s going on with that girl? Is the baby all right?’

On the one hand, the old Sherpa gets the name: Rabbit. On the other, a bifurcation: who should he talk to now? With the cashier with the grey moustache or with the woman with the gold clasps on black Lycra? The official channel, the protocol, continues to lie with the man who occupies the sloping stool, almost without solder, where Rabbit spilled her tears with the incontinence of an overflowing reservoir. But the woman seems more accessible, more open, less reserved. Her name is Rabbit, then?

The old Sherpa resolves that he will talk with that older woman, a disagreeable idea to him, as well, of course, but in a different way. The cashier inspires an apprehension verging on violence. In a completely capricious way, the Sherpa believes that the cashier will wind up battering him in the face with one of the sets of inflatable arm bands on display at the entrance to the corner store. In his fantasy, in some homoerotic way, he – the Sherpa – must defend himself from the irascible employee of this store, and he ends up whacking him between the eyes with the base of one of the beach umbrellas stacked to the side of the fruit crates. Baby? Did someone mention a baby? The old Sherpa, in a gesture difficult for any passing witness to interpret, stops staring at the woman and the cashier, turns on his heels and walks out of the corner store.

Once he’s outside of the supermarket, the old Sherpa simulates innocence and anticipates the apparition of the black Lycra and the gold clasps. He notes – without intending to – that on the sidewalk, in some display racks, the same store also offers books and postcards. The books don’t attract him so much: a selection of bestsellers from the past twenty years in pocket, portable, inexpensive editions, with lots of commercial airliners on the covers, as well as some freedom fighters, here and there some silk fetish, too. Or nylon fetish. Or synthetic taffeta. The postcards, on the other hand, he finds disturbing. The postcards radiate disorder. A discovery would require a little process of intellection: is that not the Venetian Lido? And beside it, by contiguity, is that the St. Petersburg Hermitage? And the Pyramid of the Sun, in Teotihuacán? But even one step further: not only visual recognition, but also the finding of divergence.

That is, why on a beach in a subordinate country are postcards of tourist attractions so remote being sold? Does it count if you send your godmother a picture of Angkor Wat from the profanity of the postal service of this seaside resort? Is it not an injustice to the godmother who welcomed you in her arms while the priest poured cold and holy water on your bare head? The Sherpa takes four postcards at random and reviews their backs. The printing of all has the same origin: a printer dedicated to offset and headquartered in another coastal city that is larger, uglier, more industrious, richer. The legends and epigraphs are accurate: ‘Megalithic Temple of Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England,’ or ‘Kruger National Park, Mpumalanga, South Africa.’ The motifs multiply on the upper branches of the display. London, Rio de Janeiro, New York, the Iguazu Falls, and of course, the Himalayas.

The old Sherpa is fascinated by the postcards. He has a few in his hand, and, due to that fascination they inspire in him, he feels a little stupid. He tries to remember who’d said that humanity could be defined by – or that it found its key identifier in – its capacity to create secondary systems: tools that are used to make tools, codes with an aptitude for metalinguistic reflection, sexual regulations on progeny… But the old lady in the black and gold is already exiting the store:

‘Just a quick question, if I may, madam…’

‘You mean me?’

‘Yes, please forgive me… Might you be able to tell me where miss Rabbit lives? It’s just that I was supposed to bring her something, and today…’

‘Today she didn’t come to work.’

‘Yes, exactly: I tried to come, but…’

‘Is it something for the baby?’

‘Yes, no… For the baby and for her.’

The woman looks at him. She sees the postcards in his hand. She accepts the improbable.

‘Come with me,’ she tells the old Sherpa. ‘Take her the postcards; you can pay for them another time. No one ever buys them. And help me with my bag.’

How close to the sea does the bed or the kitchen of a house need be so that its inhabitants, without being misleading, can still say: ‘Yes, I live on the coast’? At the very very edge of that estimate, the woman in black and gold and high-soled flip-flops, with her skinny calves and her commendable balance, delivers the old Sherpa to his fate. ‘The house is there,’ she tells him and points at nothing.

The west, or southwest, calculates the old Sherpa. There are trees, yes. Quite a number of them. Mostly eucalyptus. But also araucarias, cypresses. He thanks the old woman and returns her bag to her: a squash, powdered milk, chamomile tea, two cans of an energy drink, a colossal number of leeks. ‘Leeks; onions are hard on my system, you get me? At my age,’ she explains and hits her belly. He nods. He turns back to the trees. Eucalyptus all around. The occasional pink lapacho tree, too, a few ash trees, a pale cedar twisting its crown towards the sea that can neither be seen nor heard here. He thanks her again. He says goodbye. He sees no houses. Not in that direction. The old woman turns right and walks off with her bag from the corner store, leek stalks sticking out in the sun. There are no constructions on her horizon, either. This fills the Sherpa with hope. And so he walks. It is not time for climbs, for steep cliffs, not yet. That’s some time away. Everything on the peninsula is plains. And the old Sherpa, who is still very young, walks. Seven, ten, thirteen minutes. The wind pushes him from behind; the design of the flip-flops begins to pierce his skin, to form a blister between his toes. It’s still early. It is, it could still be said, afternoon. Or its death rattle. Summer evenings never quite finish starting, and the old Sherpa walks. Fifteen, nineteen minutes. Finally he sees it: a shack. Almost like a raised granary. But at ground level. A hut. Picturesque, austere, in its own way enchanting. Delimited by a colourless wooden fence. Varnished years ago. Two coats of marine lacquer that have already been eaten away by the salt air. The Sherpa gets closer: this has to be Rabbit’s house.

As he advances, two perceptual epiphenomena. First, an old bicycle parked next to the door. Then, a dog that’s almost blind that appears from somewhere with its hypertrophied sense of smell and howls in the direction of the old Sherpa. Then, yes, the mother lode: the door opens, and Rabbit comes out of the house. She’s holding a baby in her arms. She isn’t crying. The baby isn’t, either.