A Tranquil Star Read Online Free PDF Page A

else, or by the state, but the kind that one chooses for oneself. He would have put it differently, called it ‘reaching the end of the line,’ for example, because he didn’t like big words, or, for that matter, words.
    â€œHe was the kind of boy who doesn’t study for seven months, who is known as a rebel and a dunce, and then in the eighth month he absorbs all the courses as if they were water and comes through with straight A’s. He spent the summer as a shepherd—not a shepherd of souls, no, a shepherd of sheep, and not to show off or to be eccentric but happily, for love of the earth and the grass. And in the winter, whenever he got restless, he would tie his skis to his bicycle and ‘go up’ alone, with no money, only an artichoke in one pocket and the other full of salad. He would come back in the evening or maybe the following day, having slept who knows where, and the more storms and hunger he had endured, the happier and healthier he was. When I met him, he already had a considerable mountaineering career behind him, while I was still a novice. But he was reluctant to talk about it: he wasn’t the type—which I respect, because I’m like that, too—who goes into the mountains to be able to tell a story. On the otherhand, it was as if no one had taught him how to speak, just as no one had taught him how to ski: because he spoke the way nobody speaks, he voiced only the essence of things.
    â€œHe seemed to be made of steel. If necessary, he could carry a backpack that weighed thirty kilos as if it were nothing, but usually he traveled without a pack: his pockets were enough. Besides the vegetables, they held a piece of bread, a pocketknife, sometimes the Alpine Club guidebook, and always a spool of wire for emergency repairs. He could walk for two days without eating, or eat three meals in one sitting and then be off. Once, I saw him at three thousand meters in February, in the sleet, bare-chested, eating calmly, a spectacle so upsetting to two men nearby that it turned their stomachs. I have a picture at home of the whole scene.”
    He paused, as if to catch his breath. People from the other tables had gone to bed: in the sudden silence we distinctly heard the deep roar of a serac, like the bones of a giant trying in vain to turn over in his bed of rock.
    â€œI beg your pardon. I’m no longer young, and I know that it’s a desperate endeavor to clothe a man in words. This one in particular. A man like this, when he’s dead, is dead forever. He’s not the kind you tell stories about or build monuments to; he’s all in his actions, and, once those are over, nothing remains—nothing but, precisely, words. So, every time I try to talk about him, to bring him back to life, as I’m doing now, I feel a great sadness, an emptiness, as if I were on a cliff, and I have to be silent, or else drink.”
    He was silent, drank, and continued.
    â€œSo one Saturday morning in February Carlo came to us. ‘Tomorrow, eh?’ he said. In his language, what he meant was that, since the weather was good, we could leave the next day for the winter ascent of the Tooth of M., which we had been planning for a while.
    â€œI won’t give you all the technical details. I’ll tell you, briefly, that we left the following morning, not too early (Carlo didn’t like watches—he felt their tacit, continuous warning as an arbitrary intrusion); that we plunged boldly into the fog; that we came out the other side at around one in the afternoon, the sun was shining, and we were on the ridge of the wrong mountain.
    â€œAntonio said that we could go down a hundred meters or so, cross along the mountainside, and climb back up the next mountain. I, who was the most cautious and the least able, said that, while we were at it, we could just as well continue along the ridge and arrive at a different peak—it was only forty meters lower than the