In spring of 1936, Emilio’s officers dispatched him to the Pedrotti hut in the Brenta Dolomites to guide a group of officers who wanted to climb the Campanile Basso. As was usual in the army, they were late, and Emilio was ordered to wait at the hut at their pleasure. Emilio hated forced indolence as much as he hated doing anything before he felt like it, and watching the summer sun shine on the legendary climbs of the Vajolet Towers, the Catinaccio group and the steep-sided plinth of the Campanile Basso without being able to climb excruciated him.
Four years earlier, he had made a brief visit to the area. When the climbing legend Tita Piaz called for climbers from the full-to-capacity Vajolet hut to assist in a rescue, only Emilio and two other climbers had volunteered. Roping up with Piaz must have been thrilling for Emilio. Piaz was a hero of Dolomites climbing, but he was also a living connection to Paul Preuss. Piaz, a soloist of some note himself, admired Preuss’s boldness but had also warned Preuss, without much effect, about the dangers of his uncompromising ethics and penchant for climbing solo.
When Preuss died in 1913, the Alps lost its most rigid practitioner of pure climbing, but the dream of perfect style survived him. Alone in the hut where he had met Piaz and with so many of Preuss’s great climbs within view, Emilio brooded on the great Austrian’s achievements. Superficially, it seemed that they were opposites, one opposing pitons and the other embracing all of the possibilities they presented, but both were pioneers and superb free climbers, and Emilio praised Preuss as the purest alpinist in the history of climbing and the ultimate soloist, and Dülfer for showing the way with roped ascents.180 For Emilio, soloing and roped climbing were two expressions of the same tradition, branches on the same tree of alpinism, and Emilio was more obsessed by that tradition than almost any climber who had ever lived.
Emilio’s engagement with the traditions went beyond ethics and philosophies. It engaged him viscerally, spiritually and at a cost that only a few climbers would ever deliberately incur. Emilio knew that Preuss’s achievements had survived his fall from the Mandlkogel. People of a more ordinary, unharried habit of mind than Emilio (or, for that matter, Preuss) felt no need to wager their lives against the common promises of human existence – the love of a spouse, a family of one’s own, financial security, a home – in hope of eternity. Emilio’s oeuvre of new routes, recorded for posterity, was, wittingly or not, a gamble on transcending the limitations of earthly life. His name, certainly, but more importantly his achievements, would be recorded in climbing guidebooks and on the tongues of generations of climbers as yet unborn. His climbs would test those who stretched their sinews and minds. To solo was to embody this autonomy from death in the present, and to make an ultimate expression of the ambitious goal he first took upon himself when he slipped Lucia’s bracelet around his wrist beside her death bed on Via Bazzoni. Soloing at Emilio’s limit could not be justified by the simple pleasures of climbing unencumbered by equipment. To suffer the terrifying fall and to die, barely halfway through life, but to know one had forever changed the path of what one loved the most, was to partake at the fountainhead of the obsessions of art, religion, philosophy and magic.
“I recognize, a priori, that solo climbing, on difficult walls is the most dangerous thing possible,” Emilio wrote in 1937. “Only a few climbers have dared to try it and as history shows it usually ended badly, therefore I would not recommend it. What I feel [when I solo] is so sublime that it is worth the risk. I realize I have spoken a blasphemy and infringed upon beliefs and the commandments of Christ… But to live, you must risk something. You must dare.” Sadly, he ends this confession that even the ancient proscription against suicide does not apply to the free soloist with the hollow and unlikely claim that “the Duce has showed us the way.”181
After a few days, obsessing about the past and the physical urge to climb overcame Emilio’s sense of martial duty. He changed out of his alpini uniform into his climbing trousers and jacket, packed a few pitons and a rope and told the hut custodian, the superb climber Bruno Detassis, that he planned to solo the Fehrmann Dihedral, a IV+ route on the 300-metre-high pillar of the Campanile Basso. It was easily justified as a reconnaissance for his excursion with his officer-clients. Detassis knew that Emilio had rarely soloed, even in Val Rosandra, let alone the Dolomites, although he was famous for his roped climbing.182 Detassis begged him to bring the hut porter as a belayer, an offer Emilio declined.
With no belays or partner to slow him down, the Fehrmann Dihedral flowed into a single, continuous effort. On the summit of the Campanile, Emilio checked his watch. Three hundred metres of climbing had taken him only an hour and 15 minutes.
In the summit register, he read the signatures of the best climbers of the last 50 years. Hans Dülfer, Piaz, Otto Herzog, and new names too, like the young German Anderl Heckmair. He flipped backwards to the first few pages. There, dated July 28, 1911, on the third page, was the elegant Viennese German handwriting of Preuss himself. It gave Emilio goosebumps. “Extremely difficult,” Preuss had written after the solo first ascent of the east face; “Allein.” Alone.
Emilio had always felt alone, whether he was with friends or leading in a vertical maze of rock. In the solitude of his own mind he had conceived his big wall routes. On most climbs, his skill and drive isolated him from his partners. Now, he felt a wild urge to climb as Preuss had climbed, alone in the most existential sense, not on a trivial climb like the Fehrmann, but on one of Preuss’s own routes.
Emilio climbed down the Via Normale towards the ledge that traversed over to the east face, scrambling past startled roped parties, excusing himself as if he was on a crowded sidewalk. He heard his name murmured, but was too excited to slow down and exchange greetings.
He took a deep breath before he traversed out onto the east face. More climbers had scaled his two-year-old route on the north face of the Cima Grande than had climbed the east face of Campanile Basso in the 22 years since Preuss soloed the first ascent. None besides Preuss had soloed the climb.
Preuss had woven back and forth on the face to find the best rock. Emilio added his own, straighter variation.
Halfway up, he found a small ledge and looked down between his feet. No rope. No partner. Hundreds of metres of air between his feet and the ground. Somewhere near here, Preuss had left a note to prove his claim to the face in 1911, and in 1927, Pino Prati, Rudatis’s mystic apprentice, had fallen, torn out his protection pitons and the belay and pulled his partner, Giuseppe Bianchi, to their deaths. Shortly before Prati’s death, Dario Wolf painted Prati with a skull and the Campanile Basso in the background. He called the picture Gli amici, or Good Friends. Acknowledging the presence of Pino’s ghost, as well as Preuss’s, Emilio placed some solid pitons, as if in offering to Pino.
Emilio might have wanted to apologize to Preuss as he hammered. Preuss had placed two pitons in his career, and then only to help a couple of novices avoid an unplanned bivouac. The world had changed, however, and Emilio knew there was no going back.
Soloing the Campanile Basso changed Emilio. For a moment, climbing wasn’t about him, the CAI in Rome, the sesto grado, the gatekeepers in Cortina or the newspapers. It was about the breath of the ancient, dangerous, illimitable Alps, sombre, sweeping – a wildness that affirmed both life and death. That day, he knew he would, in his own way, continue the work of Preuss.
On the small summit, he met some of the climbers he had passed less than two hours before. They were astounded. Emilio would have preferred a request to be guided, but he was polite nonetheless. He opened the logbook for the second time that day and wrote in his achievement. It wasn’t the first grade V+ solo, but it was the first solo of the east face.
As Emilio descended the Via Normale, he passed climbers from Trento making their way painstakingly towards the summit. He had taken piton climbing as far as he could, and he began to wonder how far he could take his new-found passion.
Other long solos followed, the hardest of which were the 450-metre Dülfer Crack on the Cima Grande, the Dülfer Dihedral on the Catinaccio d’Antermoia and the Preuss Crack on the Cima Piccola di Lavaredo, all of which were V+. Most of his solos were unrecorded, and Emilio found freedom in the lack of publicity and competitors.
The most articulate observer of Emilio’s solos was one of his guiding clients, poet Antonia Pozzi. Pozzi had joined the Milan Section of the CAI in 1923, at age 11. Her life had material and social privileges, but she chafed against bourgeois norms of behaviour and took refuge in the hours she spent every day writing and revising poetry. Snow, wildflowers, laconic climbing companions and jangling iron climbing hardware were part of her internal poetic universe. Although her intellectual contacts included some of the leading figures of the inter-war generation, including the poet Vittorio Sereni, the alpinist author Guido Rey and the anti-fascist intellectuals Paolo and Piero Treves, she rarely showed her verse to anyone.
Too shy to climb on her own, or even with friends, she relied on guides like Angelo Dibona and Oliviero Gasperi, with whom she formed deep bonds. When Emilio introduced himself, she was charmed by his smile, his taut, sunburned skin, the movie star’s jawline, the sad eyes that made her believe that she shared something profound with him. Since her father had broken off her love affair with her tutor, Antonio Cervi, frequent periods of depression overwhelmed her. She could see that alpinism had made demands of Emilio, which he had accepted completely, similar to those poetry had made of her.
She hired Emilio both as a ski instructor and a summer guide, but he had no idea how deeply she observed him, nor the way his climbing gave her hope. After she watched him solo the Innerkofler Route on the Cima Ovest, Pozzi wrote that “the highest note was up there, a tiny point crucified on a black slab in the infinite silence.” She lay “on the sharp pointed grass and pressed my heart against a boulder… If I could always remember that hour, life would be a continual victory.”183
***
In early summer of 1936, when Emilio’s tour in the army ended, Escher, as usual, was eager to quit the confines of Alexandria for the freedom of the European mountains and the company of her favourite guide. In June, Emilio and Escher set out from Trieste on their second Mediterranean rock climbing adventure. In Marseilles, they joined up with Yugoslavian guide Jova Lipovec and a Miss Mally, whom Emilio had guided on the Matterhorn in 1932. They sailed to Perpignan and disembarked on June 11 in Barcelona.
Their first stop was the granite towers of the Sierra de Gredos, where Spanish climbers had been active on 200-to-300-metre-high granite pillars since 1916. They made a first ascent of the west face of Galayos Primiero, added a second route to the Torre de los Galayos and climbed the Torreón de los Galayos. Their last climb in the area was an attempt on the 2591-metre Almanzor, the first long route on their itinerary. Emilio’s leg pain, however, continued to be unpredictable, and they had to retreat before they reached the summit.
The last destination on the trip was the French Pyrenees. After a few easier climbs, on July 4, Emilio climbed a grade VI on the steep, alpine rock wall of the northwest face of Petit Encantat, likely with Escher and Lipovec. Unfortunately, whether or not Emilio knew it, the face had been climbed the year before by Spanish climbers Josep Boix, Josep Costa and Carles Balaguer.
As the party steamed homewards across the Mediterranean, elements of the Spanish military launched a coup against the elected government. On July 17, 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out with clashes between government supporters and conservative rebels who chose General Franco as their leader. The rebels soon had the support of Hitler and, as a result, Mussolini. Many Italians admired Mussolini’s conquests of Libya and Ethiopia as the fulfilment of the 19th-century dream of an Italian east Africa. Emilio’s hostility towards the Germans made him suspicious of any kowtowing to Hitler. Emilio shared Mussolini’s immature and cavalier attitude towards war, however, and likely did not join the majority of Italians, who disapproved of their dictator’s decision to embroil Italy in the first full-blown European conflict since the Great War.
***
When Emilio returned from Spain, he continued to solo, but also returned to the kind of big wall projects that had built his reputation, although this time with less enthusiasm than before. Emilio always procrastinated before he attempted his projects, although he was invariably disappointed when others took advantage of his dithering to claim the first ascents.
Emilio’s August 1936 climbs suffered from a Bohemian lack of logistical focus. In his letters to Casara, he complained that he had mislaid most of his climbing kit on his travels to lectures and his commutes between Misurina and Trieste, and asked Casara for 20 pitons, ten carabiners and a hammer. “Let me know if you can get these things,” he wrote, “or I will try somewhere else… Call at the blacksmith of Vincenza, so he can send me the pitons I ordered.”184
Emilio’s loss of the north face of the Cima Ovest in 1935 had left him with a surfeit of emotions. The sense of accomplishment he felt after climbing a wall never came close to his intense disappointment when he was denied a climb by circumstances. To add his own route now would only be to admit his exclusion from the honour of the first ascent; besides, the north face of the Cima Ovest offered few other climbable routes.
The company of his mother – or, if it was during one of his frequent breakups with Alice, a new girlfriend – would often help Emilio overcome the initial pangs of heartbreak when he was beaten to a climb. The Cima Ovest was so visceral, however, that Emilio needed another physical route to replace it, preferably a route of note in the same group that made a logical trifecta with his other two great ascents there.
He settled on the northwest ridge of the Cima Piccola di Lavaredo. The northwest ridge, although not on the Cima Ovest, offered some geometrical satisfaction as a sort of bookend to his Spigolo Giallo on the other side of the north face of the Cima Piccola. “They appear as two enormous pillars,” he said, “one 300 metres high, the other over 250, supporting the ruins of an ancient manor.”185
The “base [of the northwest ridge of the Cima Piccola] is corroded and concave,” Emilio wrote, “gloomy, always forgotten by the sun, corroded by old age. That northwest corner, the only one that directly connects the base of the mountain with the summit, particularly attracts the eye and calls out to you from a distance and is unforgettable. But how many, in the past, tried it, given the huge overhang at the base, and even more, the continuity of the overhanging line, rather than turn away their eyes and decline that invitation?” The northwest ridge of the Cima Piccola lacked the technical qualities Emilio admired most: firm rock and natural features that made a more or less vertical line he could follow to the top. His attraction to the climb had a kind of nostalgia for his days in the caves below the Carso; weirdly shaped roofs and almost subterranean shadows, a line going out as much as up, often on poor rock, by means of “the most difficult technique, that is, with double and triple rope on pitons and staffe and with pendulums.”186
Once again, partners were a problem. Piero Mazzorana, a 24-year-old guide from Selva di Cadore, a hamlet 20 kilometres south of the main guiding enclave of Cortina, needed to build his reputation, and a new route with the great Comici was good, free publicity. A third climber was helpful on a big aid wall, at least to remove pitons and haul rucksacks, and Emilio asked Umberto Pacifico to come along.
Pacifico was the last of the GARS climbers to enjoy Emilio’s patronage, if not his direct mentorship. His judgement and skill had, however, been impeded by the absence of his master. The other climbers from the GARS questioned Pacifico’s judgement on the rock. The word in Trieste was that Pacifico was unready for a big new route. In response to other climbers’ doubts rather than to his own, Emilio took Pacifico up a practice route on the Cadini di Misurina. Pacifico passed the test.
The next day, the trio started up the northwest ridge and climbed for 15 continuous hours. All of the pitches were difficult, and the rock was poor in places. The crux pitch overhung so much that they left the pitons in place so they could pull themselves in to the wall if they had to rappel. After a few more pitches, a rainstorm pinned them beneath an overhang for the night. In the morning, rockfall struck Mazzorana in the foot and injured him so seriously that they had to rappel.
Instead of making another attempt with Pacifico alone, Emilio gave Mazzorana a few days to heal. When they returned, the formerly ignored northern aspect of the Cima Piccola had drawn a party from Friuli, led by Gino Di Lorenzi. Their plan was to climb the north face, which was to the right of Emilio’s line, but Emilio was furious. He considered the Friulan line, which did come within a few metres of his own in some places, an attempt to claim the first ascent of the northwest ridge.
Emilio decided that only a party of two could climb fast enough to ensure the first ascent. As the climbing above the roof was likely poorly protected and mostly free, Emilio had to choose his partner with care. He also had to consider the social and professional implications of his choice. Mazzorana needed the climb to build his professional reputation as a guide. Pacifico wanted the climb to improve his status on the cliffs of Val Rosandra. On the Cima Piccola, Emilio decided that Mazzorana needed the climb more than Pacifico.
Emilio and Mazzorana left a disappointed Pacifico in the hut and climbed quickly beyond their high-point. To Emilio’s frustration, di Lorenzi’s team simultaneously made good progress beside them. Even as Emilio led a hard, dangerous face later found to comprise some of the most demanding climbing yet done in the Tre Cime, he shouted angrily at di Lorenzi’s team, accusing them of stealing his route.
Emilio and Mazzorana were still on the summit when di Lorenzi and his team arrived, half an hour later. When di Lorenzi tried to congratulate them, Emilio exploded. How could di Lorenzi expect him to be civil to a party who had practically tried to rob him of a wall he had climbed only after leading an incredibly challenging overhang and surviving an accident that injured one of his friends?
The outburst surprised di Lorenzi. Emilio, after all, had a reputation for graciousness. Di Lorenzi explained that they had intended to climb the north face, never the northwest ridge, and that their route was separate from Emilio’s. Emilio stared at the ground for a moment and then apologized. He offered di Lorenzi all of the equipment in his rucksack to make up for his behaviour. Whether or not di Lorenzi accepted the gift is unrecorded.
Emilio’s frustration had little to do with di Lorenzi. The unclimbed big walls of the Dolomites had become too crowded for Emilio, who, a few years before, had been able to make uncontested first ascents of some of the finest walls in the Alps. The Cima Piccola remained an obscure, little-travelled creation in Emilio’s oeuvre and the development of Dolomites climbing. Subsequent parties found an easier way around the roof that Emilio considered the crux. The climb’s history mirrored Emilio’s own dissatisfaction and emotional turbulence on the climb.
When Emilio returned to the hut, he learned that Pacifico, angry with himself for not demanding a place on the Cima Piccola climb, had teamed up with fellow Triestino Giuliano Perugino to try another new route right away. Emilio rushed to the base of their climb to shout encouragement, but it was no use. They retreated at a section of rock that would not be climbed until 1947, and then only with the use of bolts.187
Although Emilio had forgiven di Lorenzi, whatever satisfaction he had gained from the northwest ridge lasted only a few days. Although it was a hard climb, it was also his last new route in the Tre Cime. For his next project, he chose a mountain on which he had not yet climbed a new route. The south face of the Marmolada di Penia was high on Emilio’s list of unclimbed objectives. The face was not as overhanging as the Cima Grande’s or Cima Ovest’s north face, but it was 1000 metres high, with long, smooth and featureless sections that promised high-standard free climbing.
By late August, Emilio had guided only ten days since he had returned from Spain in July. He needed money, but his drive to climb new routes was more urgent. There was no time to entreat Casara to come to Misurina.
Since he was a boy, Emilio had believed that his outdoor adventures expressed his nationalism. The ultimate nationalistic institution, the army, had helped out with caving, his film and his climbing wall. In Emilio’s mind, there was nothing untoward about asking Colonel Masini, the commanding officer of his alpini regiment, to provide climbing instructors to accompany him on the wall.
Masini promptly ordered two hapless mountain infantry instructors to accompany Emilio on this dangerous detail. Emilio’s immediate impression of his conscripts was dubious. He used up three days of good weather that he could ill afford to waste so late in the season to train them on the crags of the Cadini di Misurina. On August 22, he ferried the officers, one by one, on the pillion seat of his motorcycle to Contrin, below the Marmolada.
Gino Soldà and his climbing partner Umberto Conforto had booked a room in the same hotel in Contrin. Soldà was a guide and an Olympic cross-country skier with legendary physical fitness. That summer, with Franco Bertoldi, Soldà had made a new route on the 1100-metre-high north face of the Sassolungo. At VI+, it was one of the hardest climbs in the Dolomites.
Neither party shared their plans, but both knew that the race for the southwest face of the Marmolada was on. What Emilio did not know was that Umberto and Soldà had already climbed as high on the face as the Cengia Alta ledge system and had fixed ropes on the hardest sections.
Emilio asked his hotelier to wake him at four a.m. He planned to sneak out quietly and get ahead of the others, but Soldà and Conforto had risen at three a.m., and with their superior knowledge of the wall, they were already 200 metres up it when Emilio’s team arrived at the face. There was no way to overtake them, so Emilio and his officers returned to the hotel. On August 26, Emilio wrote in his diary: “strong sorrow for the loss of the ascent.”188
Humiliation was added to Emilio’s sorrow when Soldà received the coveted Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano (CONI) medal awarded by the CAI for the most daring ascent of the year. Emilio had not won the medal in 1933, when he had climbed the north face of the Cima Grande and the Spigolo Giallo. In 1934, Renato Chabod and Giusto Gervasutti won it for a trio of new routes in the Mont-Blanc group.
Climbers were often emotionally crushed by the disappointment of losing the medal in a year when they anticipated a victory. In 1935, Mary Varale, who had accompanied Alvise Andrich on the first ascent of the sustained south face of the Cimon della Pala, resigned from the CAI and quit climbing when the prize went instead to Raffaele Carlesso. She had brutal words for the judges: “In this company of hypocrites and buffoons I can no longer stay, I am sorry to lose the company of the dear comrades of Belluno, but I will not do anything in the mountains that can honour the Alpine Club from which I walk away disgusted.”189
In 1937, the year Emilio soloed the north face of the Cima Grande, Ettore Castiglioni and Vitale Bramani won the medal for the first ascent of the northwest face of Switzerland’s Piz Badile. In 1938, Cassin and Ratti had taken the prize for the first ascent of the northeast face of the Piz Badile. Naturally, this had been difficult for Emilio, whose climbs were always amongst the hardest efforts and who had craved honours ever since the Raspo cave rescue in the 1920s. He might have been passed over for reasons that were political or personal rather than athletic, but his chances of winning nonetheless diminished with the growing evidence that he was no longer the best climber in the Dolomites.
A week after Soldà and Conforto’s victory on the Marmolada, 24-year-old guide Hans Vinatzer and Ettore Castiglioni climbed the hardest route in the Dolomites on the 1000-metre-high Punta Rocca, also on the Marmolada. After a day of hard climbing, Castiglioni shivered in his bivouac sack while Vinatzer slept as well as he could with nothing but old newspapers stuffed into his coat. The second half of the climb included some of the hardest free climbing ever done in the Alps. The Vinatzer-Castiglioni Route was not repeated until 1957. Emilio, like most active Dolomite climbers, would have known all about it through gossip from his friend Castiglioni, who was so taxed by the climb that he never hired Vinatzer again.
On September 8, Emilio returned to the Dito di Dio with expert client Sandro Del Torso and Piero Mazzorana, with whom Emilio had climbed his new route on the Cima Piccola. They made the first ascent of the Dito di Dio’s 600-metre-high north face, a hard route that followed an almost perfect, vertical line. For del Torso, it was the climb of his lifetime. Emilio had already climbed the nearby northwest face with Fabjan seven years before and remained unenthusiastic. New routes on walls that had already been climbed bored him. Instead of enjoying the climbing on the Dito di Dio, he had two days on the route to brood on how much more he would have preferred to have made the first ascent of the pristine southwest face of the Marmolada.
Emilio had helped out Mazzorana when he chose him over Umberto Pacifico for the first ascent of the northwest ridge of the Cima Piccola, and he generously shared his guiding fees with him after the north face of the Dito di Dio. He unintentionally helped Mazzorana in another way. While Emilio stewed on the Dito di Dio, Mazzorana was polite and engaging companion. Afterwards, Mazzorana became the well-heeled Del Torso’s favourite guide.190
Emilio thought so little of the Dito di Dio that he never mentioned it in his correspondence. Soon after his ascent, he wrote Casara to complain that he was running out of new walls to climb: “Meanwhile, the walls are taken by others. To me, every time a season of rock climbing passes, I am very melancholy and I feel I have done too little and I remain like a man whose hunger for the body of a beautiful woman can never be fully satisfied.”191
Despite Emilio’s ever-shortening list of projects, he procrastinated so much that the walls were often climbed by others first. He seemed almost to court the disappointment he felt at the loss of a first ascent.
His metaphor linking unfulfillable sexual desire to his remorse about unaccomplished climbs echoed the stresses in his relationship with Alice. She enjoyed rock climbing and the occasional ski trip, but her life was in the city, where she had a modest job and hoped to start her own adult life. Emilio wanted Alice but knew that he could not provide her with the normalcy that would be required to keep her.192 Emilio, who had fulfilled climbing dreams few mountaineers would ever have been brave enough to voice, dwelled on his unquenchable desires.
Emilio’s absences in the mountains had always upset Alice, and in April 1937, he planned his longest absence ever, a two-month-long trip to climb in Egypt with Anna Escher, her friend Dr. Gizman and the guide Jova Lipovec, who had been on the Spanish climbing trip. Alice could not compete against Escher’s privilege. Escher’s wealth allowed her to take Emilio away from home for months to entertain her in the mountains, and legitimized his absences as an essential part of his work. On April, 17, 1937, the day before Emilio was due to ship for Egypt on the SS Galileo, Alice broke off their relationship.
The ship called in Piraeus and Rhodes, and in the five days it took to reach Egypt, Emilio had time to himself to consider what to do about Alice, but as soon as he arrived in Alexandria, he was swept up into the exciting preparations for the desert adventure, which was to combine modern rock climbing with cross-country automobile exploration.
Their first objective was Itbāy, known to Europeans as the Red Sea Hills, a range of eroded volcanic rock peaks 350 kilometres south of Cairo. After the cars bogged down in the sand and had to be towed or pushed clear, they finally made it to a camp in a wadi beneath the red granite rock walls of Itbāy. The accounts of Western visitors were hard to reconcile with the canyons, rock faces and hills around their wadi campsite, but they settled on a new route on Gabel Sha’ib al Banat, at 2175 metres the highest mountain in mainland Egypt. Abu Harba had harder climbing, with long, unbroken rock walls, but the rock quality was too poor to inspire enough confidence to try a second climb.
Itbāy turned out to be something of a disappointment for climbing, and after a week, they made the long drive back to Alexandria, where Lipovec returned to Italy. Emilio, Gizman and Escher repacked for the train journey on the Sinai Military Railway to Wadi Feiran in the Sinai Peninsula, an area that had been extensively explored, if not by climbers, by prophets, monks, Arab hunters and the British Camel Corps.
On the granite mountains and walls of Sinai, they summited Um Shomer (2537 m), the second-highest mountain on the Sinai Peninsula and a beautiful peak with some steep face climbing on good rock. The northwest face of the Jebel Quattar provided a new 800-metre grade V. On Jebel Musa, they made the first ascent of the northwest face. On Jebel el Saru, they made the first ascent of the west face direttissima, which had sections of grade V.
In a couple of years, American rock climbers would climb Shiprock in Navajo territory in New Mexico, beginning an era of American desert rock climbing, but in 1937, Emilio and his friends were the first modern desert rock climbers. In an age obsessed with icy north faces, they explored the possibilities of pure rock climbing in wild settings, without the threat of rockfall or bad weather. An ethereal photo of Comici in an open shirt, a broad-brimmed sun hat and shorts, frozen in a balletic movement on a giant wind-carved feature, likely on Jebel el Saru, is a timeless image of rock climbing at its most balletic.
Emilio, who complained about approach hikes in the Alps, embraced the exotic challenge of desert approaches. On one occasion, however, he became separated from the rest of the group and was quickly lost in the unfamiliar desert terrain. An Arab he had helped down from a cliffside a few days before found him and brought him to safety.
Emilio had rescued refugees, stranded climbers and cavers trapped by floods. He had shielded his companions from rockfall with his body. The first person to rescue him was an Arab. After the rescue, Emilio grew a beard and wore little except shorts, boots and a turban; by the end of the trip, his skin was tanned deep brown. Unlike the Bedouins, though, Emilio maintained the privileges of being white – one of which was to dress like an Arab while ardently supporting a fascist regime that enforced brutal racist laws and committed acts of genocide against the Arabs in Libya and Black east Africans.
In Emilio’s eyes, the Arabs were just part of the scenery. Their ongoing struggle with colonial powers was irrelevant to the sense of freedom he felt there. In Emilio’s white, colonial gaze, what made the desert an Eden of rock climbing was the absence not of locals but of European climbers. Through the landscape of rock, sand, privilege and fantasy, he carried and nurtured his dream of climbing alone, on the wildest wall imaginable.
***
On the boat trip home to Trieste, Emilio convinced himself that the latest breakup with Alice was temporary and that she would at least meet him at the docks when he disembarked on May 17. She did not. On May 18 and 19, Emilio wrote in his diary, “A. does not come.” On May 26, he noted that he “wrote her a letter.”193
He took a guiding job in the Grignetta and lectured in Bergamo, but when he returned, he noted that “A. writes me but does not come.”194 In her letter, she revealed that she had fallen in love with another man. Emilio was desolate. “Saw A. in the Via Caducci with the other,” he wrote. And then, “I wait for her outside her office at six and left as her good friend.”195 The underlined words might have been a warning to himself to accept Alice’s decision, but they had little effect. The next weekend, he saw her in Val Rosandra. “How much bitterness,” he wrote in a diary usually restricted to the most basic facts; “my greatest disillusionment.”196
“I was ill and could not find peace or health,” he wrote Casara; “that evil had brought me down badly, morally and physically.”197 Emilio was prone to bouts of depression, but this time, the illness crippled him. He might have picked up a virus in Egypt that worsened his typical symptoms, or his leg injury might have flared up, but whatever the cause, for a month and a half, he could not climb, guide, write or give presentations.
On June 28, an unexpected proposal from Casara arrived from Vicenza. Casara suggested that they attempt the north face of the Eiger. The north faces of the Grandes Jorasses, the Matterhorn and the Cima Grande di Lavaredo had all been climbed. Of the great north faces, only the northeast face of the Piz Badile and the most famous and sinister of all, the Eigerwand, remained unclimbed. The mere mention of that icy, dark 1800-metre-high wall overcame Emilio’s symptoms.
In 1935, Germans Karl Mehringer and Max Sedlmeyer had died of exposure high on the face. In 1936, Germans Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz and Austrians Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer had been trapped in bad weather above a traverse later named after Hinterstoisser. All but Kurz were swept off the face to their deaths by an avalanche. Kurz hung from his rope, out of reach of rescuers, until he died. Hitler, out of a predictable fascination with anything deadly and heroic, offered a prize to any German climbers who made the first ascent.
Most of the climbers who had attempted the Eiger were less talented and experienced than Emilio. Hinterstoisser and Kurz’s biggest climb had been the fifth ascent of Comici’s own route on the north face of the Cima Grande di Lavaredo. Not many Eiger climbers were any more expert at ice and snow climbing than Emilio, and the current preference for trying the climb in the summer made it mostly a rock climbing problem. Emilio was highly qualified for an attempt, and his enthusiastic response to Casara contrasted with his decreasing enthusiasm for objectives in the Dolomites:
I am writing you urgently to let you know that if you intend to go to the Eiger there is not a moment to lose, because the highly trained rope of [Giorgio] Pirovano, wrote to tell me that he has been training for more than a month with [Bruno] Detassis and that he was leaving that day for the Eiger, as are many other German, Italian, French Swiss, Yugoslavian, etc.… teams. Now I am overwhelmed by two obsessions, one that I cannot explain, and the Eiger. I would do anything to be there and I think if I was under the wall, I would even try it alone. Therefore, I beg you to make a decision and we will leave together, immediately. Maybe we do the Cima d’Auronzo for training, or we could go for a workout on the spot (in Grindelwald). If Carlesso came, it could also be a good thing, but two crazy people like us might succeed. I would carry only sleeping bags and bivy sacks for the bivouacs. The big question is how you can get Swiss money. Please call me by telephone asking for an urgent communication. I could leave by Saturday and be in Vicenza by noon with the equipment, if you want.198
Emilio’s increasing dependence on climbing partners and friends who were also client-benefactors might have contributed to his idea that an attempt on the Eiger with Casara was a good idea. Like Preuss, he was the type of expert who thrived when he was the strongest and most experienced leader. Emilio would not have invited Carlesso, since they had fallen out, but Carlesso would have been a more suitable partner than Casara, who had no chance of scaling the hardest north wall in the Alps.
Emilio, however, soon had second thoughts about trying the wall with Casara. It was one thing to humour a client-friend on familiar mountains, and another to launch onto one of the hardest climbs in the world with a man who some considered a fantasist. Before Casara had a chance to respond, Emilio sent him a telegraph to cancel his proposal.
“Bad timing,” Emilio wrote, “needless to come.”199
After the Eiger’s brief moment on Emilio’s itinerary of projects, only the obsession he alluded to in correspondence, but neither revealed nor explained – but for which he seemed as yet, unready – remained on his list. Liberated from the climbing desires that had tortured him, Emilio haphazardly, and yet with a certain peace with himself, fell in with partners on routes they had selected, often against his advice. These climbs were typified by encounters with rockfall, avalanches, bad rock, storms, hapless partners and ghosts, and in Emilio’s reports, comprise the most complete, personally integrated and even strangely tranquil periods of climbing of his life.
Emilio’s first climb since Egypt, and the climb he would attempt with Casara in lieu of the Eiger, was the 1000-metre-high south face of the Cima d’Auronzo on the Croda dei Toni in the Sexten Dolomities. Casara had tried to get Emilio to attempt the wall for years, but Emilio thought it was ugly and doubted the quality of the rock.
From the start, it was a stressful excursion. The road to the Principe Umberto hut was closed for repairs, and they had to walk uphill for hours in the dark to reach the hut. Emilio, who often had trouble falling asleep, got little rest that night. The next day, they trudged uphill for a reconnaissance and to stow their gear for an attempt, but then the weather broke. The wet snow was tinged blood red, which seemed ominous to Emilio, although the source of the redness might have been the corroding equipment from the Great War strewn across the talus. They stowed their gear in a trench lined with old armour plates and waited for the clouds to thin and allow a glimpse of the wall. Emilio tried to sing himself to sleep with his favourite song of the moment, “Triste Domenica” (Gloomy Sunday), Rezső Seressa’s so-called “Hungarian Suicide Song,”
Sunday is gloomy,
My hours are slumberless
Dearest the shadows
I live with are numberless
Little white flowers
Will never awaken you
Not where the black coach of
Sorrow has taken you
Angels have no thought
Of ever returning you,
Would they be angry
If I thought of joining you?
Casara, however, kept Emilio awake by speaking of what Emilio called “strange things” about Paul Preuss. As Emilio listened and watched the face, the clouds dissipated and he “saw the mythical silhouette of Preuss climbing up [Casara’s chosen line] in front of us,” he said, “all alone, with his unmistakable style,” of which he had heard from Emmy. “Then the words [of Preuss] touched the core of my being, my eyes clouded and as if through a veil, the rocks became confused. When I saw clearly again, Preuss was gone.”200
A cascade of rockfall triggered by snowmelt poured down the face. If they had been closer, or the rock had fallen while they were on the wall, they would have been killed. It was one of the many times in his climbing career that Emilio’s intuition of the presence of danger was accompanied by the experience of ghosts.
The ghosts of Spinotti on the north face of the Riofreddo and Orsini on the Torre degli Orsi had urged Emilio upwards to justify their sacrifices. No blood had been shed to conquer the south face of the Cima d’Auronzo. There was no vendetta. Emilio could walk away with honour. Was the ghost a manifestation of Emilio’s sense that given his partner, the rockfall and the bad weather, they might face serious consequences on this wall?
The sky was full of low clouds the next morning. They climbed anyway, because Casara did not know better and Emilio had been less cautious since his last breakup with Alice. Clouds darkened by the hour, but they went on. An exposed and unprotected traverse was as dangerous for Casara as for Emilio, but both climbed it quickly, conscious of the impending bad weather. Snow, accompanied by thunder, overtook them on the last half of the wall. Emilio climbed without protection. Time after time, he thought he was on the last pitch, only to find that the falling snow had hidden the mountain above.
On the summit, their hardware hummed from the electrical charge in the air. Emilio said his “face felt like it was being caressed by a horrible maiden, from underneath my clothes and up towards my hair. It was the electricity of the peak escaping through our bodies. The summit cairn made noises like sizzling, a big pot of boiling oil, or as if the stones were a hundred singing cicadas.”201
To Emilio’s horror, Casara did not seem to understand the risk of being killed by lightning. When Casara knelt to write a note for the tin can that served as the summit register, Emilio shouted at him to leave the summit at once.
On the descent, the air was thick with snow, and they shivered and fought to remain mentally focussed. A rappel sling on a rock spike began to become untied as Casara rappelled. Emilio shook off his torpor fast enough to replace the sling before Casara fell to his death.
After the Cima d’Auronzo, Emilio returned to Trieste to teach at the climbing school and try to mend things with Alice, who was single once again. Fabjan, who knew Emilio better than most, said that Emilio hung on to the relationship with Alice mostly because she was the first woman who walked away from him before he was done with her.202 Emilio’s inability to either abandon the relationship or provide the stability needed to maintain it doomed him to a cycle of breakups and rapprochements that were emotionally intense but settled nothing.
In 1937, Emilio’s financial situation continued to embarrass him. He ran out of money and accepted a loan from his mother, a deeply shameful situation, since it had always been his intention to continue to support his family on Via Bazzoni, even when he lived in Misurina. In the entire month of August, he only found enough clients for five days of work, even when he reduced his fees by half. Tourists continued to ask for his autograph, but they hired less famous guides.203
Emilio’s poverty as a guide coincided with his discovery that soloing appealed to his sense of lontananza, more than the piton-heavy approach to big walls that had made him famous. He did not give up on big wall climbing as he had come to know it, but he had already thought up a plan in which soloing and his big wall experience would complement each other. He told a climbing friend, Gianfranco Pompei, about his secret obsession: to bring Preuss’s solo approach to a climb from his own oeuvre. And not just any climb, but the creation that had brought him both glory and pain: the north face of the Cima Grande.
It was an astounding vision. A solo would be greater, even, than the first ascent. No one had ever free soloed a grade VI, because few climbers could climb at that level without absolute confidence that they would not fall. Emilio planned to free solo most of the route, but he would have to use aid on the bottom half of the climb. It would take incredible strength to struggle with pitons and staffe without rope tension from a partner. Even with some aid on the lower half, the route would be dangerous without a proper belay. The upper half of the climb was easier, but still grade VI, and many parties still used some pitons for aid. Rescue anywhere on the route would take days to arrange. Even if he could rig a rope on some of the aid sections, for the majority of the route, a fall would kill him.
The plaudits for such a climb would be inevitable. There were few solo climbers in the Alps, and mostly they stayed on less steep routes with secure cracks or, in a few cases, ice routes. The only solo climb in recent years that had caught the public’s attention was Gervasutti’s 1936 Christmas Eve solo of the Matterhorn, partly because of its pious overtones. No one had soloed one of the great north faces, let alone a climber who had also made the first ascent of the same wall.
The intensification of climbing experiences by grades, and the implication that to pursue that difficulty was not just an option but both natural and the source of merit in climbing, had always been in harmony with Emilio’s personality. Since the Campanile Basso, Emilio had adapted himself to an existence that offered rewards and risks few had savoured. The logic of his new life on the mountains led him, alone, directly to the north face of the Cima Grande.
The decision to solo the north face was also fuelled by Emilio’s unresolved vendetta with the Dimais. Free soloing the pitch Giuseppe Dimai had led because he said that Emilio had been too weak to continue would prove not only Emilio’s ability but his superiority. Even after Emilio had moved into a higher and more rarified field of climbing endeavours, he could not forget a slight to himself or his comrades, whether it came from rivals, a mountain, or even death itself, the power at the root of all of his quarrels with the world.
This quarrel with death, his oldest adversary, justified on its own the total risks of the climb. The mystics could speak of making friends with death, but Emilio was its sworn enemy, ready to take umbrage at its every incursion into his world. His solo would question death’s rule over one of its least disputed realms, the north walls of the Alps.
***
By 1937, the north face of the Cima Grande had been climbed at least 30 times. Austrians Peter and Paul Aschenbrenner had made the second ascent a month after Emilio and the Dimais and discovered the abandoned drill on the bivouac ledge. Although the Aschenbrenners took the gear as a souvenir, no one seemed to have been scandalized by their discovery.204
The Aschenbrenners were so impressed with the first ascensionists that Peter said, “We will never be able to overcome greater technical difficulties.”205 Germans Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz and Austrian Mathias Rebitsch had climbed it, and so had Italy’s best: Hans Vinatzer, Mario Dell’Oro, Raffaele Carlesso and Riccardo Cassin. The oldest climber of the north face was Peter Aschenbrenner, who was born a year before Emilio; Heckmair and Dell’Oro were 30. The rest were in their 20s. Emilio was 36 and planned to solo what the others had done with partners.
The wall had become a barometer of climbers’ skills. The first eight ascents had been made with at least one and sometimes two bivouacs. On the ninth ascent, German climbers Arthur Heilin and Joseph Reischman stormed the wall in 12 hours. By 1937, the record was five and a half hours. But to do the climb alone, at speed, was such a break with the wall’s history to that point that Emilio brought his friend Gianfranco Pompei as a witness.
On September 2, 1937, Emilio arrived at the base at 11 a.m. He knew from the hut logbook that Germans Killian Weissensteiner and Hubert Höller had started out early that morning, and he wanted to give them time to complete the lower half of the climb, where they would be hard to pass. His calculation had been correct, and they were already 200 metres up the face when he arrived. Emilio would reach them when they were on the easier upper half of the route, where he could pass them if he needed to.
Emilio carried barely enough equipment for a day in Val Rosandra: a hammer, ten carabiners and pitons and a 20-metre rope he would tie in a loop to his waist and clip into any pitons he found. He carried a single staffa but planned to pull up on the pitons with his hands as much as possible. In case of retreat he had a thin rappel line with him. When he reached the Italian Bivouac, he would coil the ropes, clip his carabiners and pitons to them and throw it all off the wall. He would then be committed to free soloing the last 350 metres.
As Emilio arranged his equipment, the Germans dislodged some rocks that tumbled through the air before they broke on the talus five metres out from the wall. Emilio shrugged to reassure Pompei and started to climb. At the first aid pitch, he was still a little clumsy with his unfamiliar self-belay system and dropped a carabiner. He still had nine, but on this, the ultimate climb, there could be no more mistakes.
On the next pitch, he attached himself to a piton with a carabiner and tied in to both ends of the rope so that when he no longer needed the security of the piton, he could untie one end and pull the rope through and save time at the expense of a couple of pieces of hardware. He aid climbed on pitons for 20 metres, until he no longer needed the rope. He untied one end of the rope, but as he pulled it through, it twisted and jammed in the below carabiner. It was the second mishap of the climb.
Piton by piton, with his fingers pinched by the rope creaking and twisting in the carabiners, Emilio climbed down to the rope jam, freed it and climbed back up. On the next pitch, he let the ropes hang from his waist and free soloed, as he had done on the Campanile Basso. He felt free and secure, with good holds, on steep but firm rock. He sang as he climbed. When a foot slipped, he laughed. As frightening as it must have been for Pompei to watch, Emilio was solid.
A hundred metres below the bivouac ledge, he shouted to the party ahead to be careful not to drop any rocks because he was alone.
“Alone?”
There was a pause.
“We’re Killian and Hubert. Who are you?”
“Comici!”
Another pause.
“We thought so!”206
Emilio had reached the most strenuous pitch of the climb, the overhanging 20-metre crack and the traverse where he had let Giuseppe Dimai take the lead. Emilio was disappointed to find fixed pitons in the crack, which had been pristine before the last time he climbed it. Without realizing it, Emilio and the Dimais had defeated not just the wall itself but the concept of the impossible in the Dolomites. Ironically, they had also made the former symbol of the impossible accessible to less extraordinary climbers by leaving pitons in place.
Emilio had observed the end of timelessness in alpinism. After Mont-Blanc and the Matterhorn had first been climbed, they remained more or less as they had been for a century. Reaching these summits required the same bravery and skills in 1930 as it had in 1850. After 30 ascents, the reign of the north face of the Cima Grande as a fearsome route was ending, largely because of the increasing number of fixed pitons that made the climb easier and safer for each subsequent party. Emilio and the Dimais had left 30 pitons on the wall; by 1937, there were more than 90. Emilio said he felt sorry for the mountain, but the ironmongery on the crux allowed him to make fast work of it.
He coiled the rope and slung it over his shoulders to free solo the traverse he had surrendered to Giuseppe Dimai on the first ascent. Now he would undo the humiliation of giving up the lead to Giuseppe in 1933. Emilio picked his way across the vertical wall alone, unroped, where the slightest error would send him hundreds of metres to his death on the talus. He later said that Giuseppe’s traverse was, at best, no harder than grade IV.
At the Italian Bivouac, Emilio made some small talk with the startled Germans as he snacked on some sugar and chocolate. Then he coiled his ropes, clipped his carabiners and pitons to the coils and threw them off the wall. The bundle of manila and steel tumbled silently through the air for many seconds before it crashed into the talus, 30 metres away from the wall.
The Germans were shocked, but Emilio was calm. He had already free soloed three climbs at least as long and difficult as the rest of the route without incident. He left a note to prove he had been on the ledge and free soloed out ahead of the others. It can be dangerous to follow other climbers on limestone walls, since no matter how careful they are, they could drop rocks on climbers below. A soloist could also become a dangerous projectile. The Germans, however, trusted Emilio’s reputation too much to bring up these objections. They set out after Emilio had climbed about 30 metres.
When Emilio soloed, he instinctively avoided holds that looked suspiciously friable and carefully tugged even solid-looking holds before he weighted them. But to climb on alpine limestone is to accept the limits of knowledge and to proceed on faith. Fifty metres above the bivouac, he reached a ledge where he could stand with both his feet and view the rock above. From his stance, he could see at least one overhang where most climbers still used aid.
Without any warning, the ledge slipped off of the mountain. He slapped his free hand on the closest hold, gripped hard, and scrabbled for purchase in his basketball shoes on the dusty scar where the ledge had been. With his heart beating fast, he saw the ledge plummet past the Germans and burst into fragments against the bivouac ledge. Then he saw Pompei, a tiny figure on the ground, walking into the path of the rockfall to retrieve his rope and carabiners. He screamed for Pompei to run, but his voice was muffled by the wind. As if by a miracle, the stones peppered the scree around Pompeii and left him unharmed.
Emilio climbed down through air that smelled of crushed rock, checking every hold more carefully than before. A white scar marked where the rock had struck the ledge beside the Germans, but to Emilio’s relief, they were both unharmed. Emilio apologized, and although he had no real way to control it, risked a promise that there would be no more broken holds. The fact that a few minutes ago his solo attempt had almost cost his life, the lives of the Germans and the life of his friend on the ground remained unsaid. Emilio would not allow himself to turn back, so his life depended on climbing the last 350 metres as calmly as if the rock had never fallen.
Emilio did not record his state of mind on the upper wall but elsewhere spoke of a trance-like state when he soloed. “I like [soloing] immensely,” Emilio wrote. “I have not tried anything more beautiful [than the north face of the Cima Grande]. If these moments brought me joy, it means that they also messed me up and dazed me. It is beautiful, very beautiful to climb everything free, on a wall that overhangs. To see between your legs that emptiness and feel that you can dominate it with your abilities alone. When I am alone, I always look down to inebriate myself with emptiness and I sing with joy. If I do not have the breath to sing because I am on a difficult passage, then the song remains, silently inside my head.”207
His client Antonia Pozzi was the greatest poet of the psychological and spiritual landscape of climbing between the world wars. Her reflections on Emilio’s climbing in a poem dedicated to him offer her insights into Emilio’s preoccupations while he was “messed up” and inebriated with emptiness on the final 350 metres of the north face of the Cima Grande.
Ascent
Your hand blooms on the rock
We are unafraid of the silence.
The immense womb,
The valley elides fear
Distant avalanches
Are light smoke
On black walls,
Your fingers on
The stone
Reach upwards
For the white edge of the sky
We are not afraid of the desert
Let us go up to Cima Sorapis
Where we will be alone
And exposed
On the crystal altar.208
An hour and a quarter after he had left the Italian Bivouac, Emilio slipped out of the shadows of the north face and stood in the sunshine on the summit. He was the first to reach it that day.
He took the summit register out of the steel box bolted to the rusty cross. Inscribed on its pages were the entry he had made after the first ascent of the wall he had climbed alone, the names of the rivals and friends who had climbed it since, the climbers from all over the world who had scaled this, the proudest rock pillar in the Dolomites; the communion of the climbing living and dead. He flipped ahead to a blank page and added a note unprecedented in the history of climbing. He had soloed the north face of the Cima Grand in three hours and 15 minutes.
He closed the book and laid his head on his rucksack to have a nap. An hour later, the first party of the day on the Via Normale arrived on the summit. Emilio was easily recognized by climbers throughout the Eastern Alps. They asked him whether he had climbed the north face.
“Yes.”
“Then where is your partner?”
“I climbed it alone. It’s a very beautiful route. Have you done it?”209
He still heard them babbling when he lay down again on his rucksack.
It was the hardest solo ever done. The master of aid climbing was now also Preuss’s obvious successor. Emilio had become the first climber to solo one of the classic north faces, and remained the only climber to make both the first ascent and first solo ascent of any of them. Free soloing had just been the way that Preuss usually climbed. With Emilio, it became a sport and a style unto itself, albeit one open only to the very best climbers.
His climb would have seemed to have transcended all doubts about his mastery of the north face of the Cima Grande. A few days afterwards, Emilio was back on the summit of the Cima Grande with guiding clients. When he flipped to the new page on the summit register, someone had scratched out his note about his solo climb and scribbled in the margin, “Exaggeration!” Someone else had written “Bumm,” Tyrolean slang for crazy.
Summit registers and hut logbooks had always tempted climbers to anonymous insults and compliments. Sometimes, the insults backfired. When the Germans wrote in the summit register of the Civetta that the northwest face was “no food for Italians,” they galvanized Italian climbers to improve. Emilio could have scratched out or ignored the slight. Predictably, he chose to treat the comments as a serious affront.
Emilio suspected the Dimais or some other rival who anticipated his reaction to be the culprit.210 Instead of ignoring the insult, Emilio announced that if the anonymous detractor identified himself and offered a wager, Emilio would solo the face again and shave 30 minutes off his time.
Although he could have made up the time merely by avoiding the mishaps with the stuck rope and the loose rock, the dare exposed a petty, self-defeating side of Emilio. His solo had been in the finest traditions of alpinism. He could have weighed the two words in the logbook against the numerous letters and telegrams he had received from all over the world praising his solo, and dismissed the scribblers as unworthy of his attention. The solo was so far ahead of anything yet done, it would remain unrepeated for 24 years.211 There was no need to boast that he could do even better.
Emilio was also embarrassing himself politically by taking umbrage. He had praised the partnership of the rope, but now, he seemed to prefer his own company in the mountains. His attitude fell outside of the fascist narrative in which mountaineering was a metaphor for literal battle precisely because, on the mountain, comrades strove together, not alone, for victory. “Only some forms of camaraderie,” wrote Evola, “forged during wartime on the battlefield, may bring about, like the experience of the mountain, this active sense of solidarity… this is virility without ostentation…”212
Emilio’s reaction reminded Manaresi and Berti of his unwelcome complaints about the Dimais, his inability to let any slight go unanswered and his combination of fame and self-absorption. To the fascist intellectuals of the CAI, Emilio’s dare was more proof of his proletarian lack of gentlemanly polish. The climbers who saw Emilio as a self-promoter, a modern soul with little feel for traditions or community, were too sophisticated to write silly comments in a logbook, and in many cases too old to climb the Cima Grande. When Emilio cited the whole climbing world as potential authors of the comment, he had created an impasse for himself. No score could be settled against his anonymous detractors.
Emilio’s last new routes of 1937 were partly to pay back Gianfranco Pompei for his help with the Cima Grande. Together, they climbed a new grade VI on the north face of the striking but short pillar near Misurina know as Guglia Giuliana and the easier, 300-metre south ridge of Il Mulo, a sub-peak of the Cima Ovest.
In early autumn, Emilio’s leg injury flared up once again. His mother had come down with chronic mastoiditis, an infection of the skull behind the ear, and before the fall weather came, he retreated to Trieste to rest his leg and attend to her. “Everyone on earth must suffer,” Emilio wrote Casara from Trieste, “and many people are more miserable than I am. What I really cannot stand and what causes me terrible pain is the pain of a mother, and my dear mother… These mothers suffer a lot but do not complain.”213 Emilio found in his mother something like the Mater Dolorosa, or Mother of Sorrows, of Catholic piety, ever present in her temple on Via Bazzoni, where her son might, at any time he needed, find succour.
Here was a source of Emilio’s lontananza: Regina’s love was beyond anything that could ever be known with climbing partners or lovers. Her love kept him apart from others and devoted to her. The ultimate test of the mother’s love, the event for which she prepared both herself and her son, was their inevitable separation. In the story of the passion of Christ, that separation was through death and resurrection. For many traditional Italian women, it was through the slightly less awesome but nonetheless distressing process of the son’s marriage to a woman who would replace her. Losing Emilio to a wife seemed less likely every year, now that he was in his mid-thirties, but he had chosen another love in life, and one with much more literal potential to take him from her.
Emilio knew that his love affair with climbing might add to his mother’s sorrows. His solos were more dangerous than the climbs that had won him his fame. Deaths in climbing depressed him, partly because he considered each one a vendetta that must be settled against, or at least, on, the mountain. He knew that the fallen were mostly as strong as he was. He knew he could die too. Emilio, however, with his tears, ghosts, depressions and worship of his suffering mother, accepted the potential cost of his dreams and felt powerless to resist them.
To the poet Vergil, ante ora parentum – a parent watching the death and burial of their own child – was the apotheosis of anguish; the climbing community, however, had become inured to the deaths of its young. Accidents happened in a few incomprehensible and almost unreportably violent moments. They had become so common that climbers developed language and symbology to slow down death in the mountains enough to beautify and comprehend it in elegiac language. Emilio had had cause to use these words many times.
In 1937, Italians were beginning to see the difference between Mussolini’s speeches about the glories of Italian expansion and the complicated realities of foreign adventures. The war in Ethiopia, although declared an unequivocal victory by the party, ground on, with guerilla attacks by the Ethiopians and massacres of prisoners by Italian troops. Mussolini’s unpopular support of General Franco brought Italian fascism more and more in line with Nazism, to the chagrin of fascists like Emilio who were decidedly anti-German. Both campaigns drained the government’s funds at a time of economic crisis and resulted in thousands of Italian casualties.
“Gloomy is Sunday, with shadows I spend it all,” ran the lyrics to Emilio favourite song. In 1937, two of the beacons of his life – climbing and Mussolini – faltered. Then he lost a third. After his Cima Grande solo, Alice visited him in Misurina, where they had their last fight. In the morning, she left abruptly for Florence, far from both the mountains and Trieste. Emilio never saw her again.