The maté gourd was passed my way again. I sucked it dry, the bitter taste convulsing the opening to my gullet. I was told it was good for me and, as I knew, the taste of anything good had to be acquired. The candle had a double in the black glass of the hut window. I shivered. It was a freezing night. Los Chicos played chequers and planned new routes for tomorrow. After three months in Chile I could hardly recognise their tongue as Castilian. The sound of Metallica came from the kitchen. They played their heavy metal all the time and they grew their hair long and wore leathers and beads. Here, somewhere in Argentina, a small pocket of teenagers mirrored other pockets of climbing subculture in the UK or America. They were living for the day and for the rock. And on the rock they were already experts, tutored by their, at twenty-one, elder statesman Sebastian de la Cruz. Sebas, spindly, nervous yet driven to the point of obsession, of Swiss descent, had climbed the giants of Patagonia at sixteen and los Chicos had followed, climbing Cerro Torre, FitzRoy and Torre Centrale sometimes by new routes. I was impressed by their ability and drive. It’s more difficult to give it all up for climbing in this country. There is no welfare state and, with the Catholic church, religious values are stronger than in Britain. Las Chicas are stretching on the wooden floor in the candle light. They’re into metal and rock too but seem a little less inclined to give up their career options totally. Gaby and Marcella study in nearby Bariloche and Fera works in the ski area in winter, teaching and guiding. Las Chicas and los Chicos seem to do everything together; climb together, eat together, party together and sleep together. They chatter incessantly and make plans for their next day.
I was dizzy. I needed air. “Buenas Noches, Chicos y Chicas”. I stumbled out of the refugio door into a night which was a long way from home. Frost pinpricked the exposed and unexpecting flesh of my face. It pinpricked the skin of the sky too and stark light shone in through the holes. This night was strangely two-dimensional. Scores of spires were silhouetted against starlight and crowded around like Klu Klux hoods. I liked maté. To look down on the lake was as to look up at the sky, creating the illusion of being suspended in the centre of a giant ball, dark, matt, but with millions of tiny holes. I buried my head in my pit and began to dream on the shore of the lake.
An almighty explosion.
I jumped bolt upright in shock. So did Phil.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know. A meteorite perhaps.”
“Yeah, right. G’night.”
“G’night.”
We awoke with the sun. The Klu Klux hoods were now bright shadowless spires. Five condors wheeled above the highest one, el Torre Principale. Over breakfast we pondered the mysteries of the night and decided that the next evening we would take more maté.
We shouldered our packs and went exploring. The mountains were further away than they appeared. We gazed at the panorama from above the forest canopy for these dwarf beech grew only to our nipples. Bluey chinchillas ran up and down the vertical walls. We arrived at the base of the Pyramidal and touched the rock. It was warm and rough to the touch. Unclimbed cracks were lined up side by side.
“Wow! This must be what it was like in Yosemite in the fifties.”
The vias normales had perfect lines but new rock was the essence of climbing for us; throwing loose holds over the shoulder, feeling the exposed grains crush like sugar on footholds, no chalk ahead to show the way and no idea, apart from a contract which the eye has with the body, of whether you are capable of getting up a thing or not. I uncoiled the rope at the bottom of a hand crack which snaked up the wall and flared through a roof. The rock was deep red liver. The crack went, just, but intolerant. It meted out its punishment like Wackford Squeers, so that’s what we named it. I had the bloody hands to prove it. From the summit we looked across to the Chilean Lake District and its volcanos; Osorno and Villarica, floating on a plate of cloud. On the Argentine side was Tronador, the Thunderer, that later claimed Teo’s life in an unfair avalanche. Out east shimmered the brown Pampa and, nearer, the resort of San Carlos de Bariloche fitted snugly between the Andes and Lago Nahuel Huapi like some South American Interlaken. The tourists down there would be buying their ski passes and eating famous chocolate. Nazi war criminals who had escaped Europe after the war used to live there. Perhaps some still do. Nearer again los Chicos and las Chicas could be seen and heard laughing and ascending other spires. I felt then that Frey was another special place. A place where climbers lived who cared for it, and knew it well enough to say that the yellow rock was more brittle than the red, or that there are hidden holds inside that crack, or that the number of condors is on the up, that the boulder in the next valley gives good shelter, or at what time exactly does the sun shine on that face of the mountain. Simple shared knowledge. That which we have of our home rocks. And, for all their magnificence, this particular specialness is lacking in the more remote mountains of the Himalaya or amongst the Patagonian giants. Very few climbers live through all four seasons in those places.
“Las Malvinas son Argentinas. Las Malvinas son Argentinas.”
That night the army arrived, a hundred of them with horses. They made a lot of noise and crapped a lot. I became the butt of all their Malvinas jokes and agreed, we shouldn’t have sunk the Belgrano. But I came out on top after selling most of my gear to them. With that cash I could head on to Brazil and Bolivia. They had come to lay their yearly siege on Torre Principale and for days a khaki ant line was lashed to the tower which buckled under their enthusiasm and jollity. With the maté the nights became more feverish and the dreams more intense.
It was getting late in the season and a cold wind blew in from the icecap. Climbers were migrating. Phil, my transient South African friend, to the Atacama Desert and los Chicos, after evading national service, to Peru. Ramiro was the only one who had to have his dreads cut off and join up. They sat around the radio and listened to the lottery of numbers, each with their own army number, which they had been recently posted, clenched in their fists. “Siete, dos, cinco, tres” the officer’s voice had said over the air waves and Ram’s head dropped with his friends’ hands on his shoulder. He wouldn’t get to Alpamayo and Huascaran now. I took to soloing for a while.
In the shade it was cold but, if I turned to the sun, I felt its warm hand on my cheek. The 180-metre Torre Principale stood stark white above me. I was the only climber in the whole of Frey that day. I took my clothes off, it felt like the right thing to do, and put my boots on. Goose flesh prickled up on my body and I started to climb fast to keep warm. The first couple of pitches were easy but on the exposed off width of the third pitch the wind picked up. Though my genitals had shrunk dramatically, I couldn’t help scraping them on the edge of the crack. Higher, a more sheltered steep corner began with a boulder problem which was luckily above a ledge. This led more easily up to the notch between the twin summits. I huddled up and shivered in the shade of that notch until I could linger no more. I tiptoed onto the summit block which leaned over a dark void and I crimped and edged, pecking at holds like a chaffinch toward where there was no more rock. The condors were near. This was their country. Now they were below me as they spiralled the tower. Their giant wings against the wind made the sound of an aircraft or sometimes, and not without surprise, the whoosh of a falling rock. As I climbed higher the rock fell away before me and I broke into a sort of vertical sprint. I manteled onto the top feeling like a chimpanzee, stooped, with my arms swinging low. I surveyed the now familiar world below and sensed something had come to an end. I opened the heavy summit tin and, after signing my name in the book and reading the soldiers’ comments, I began to wonder how I was going to get down.
