Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Sometimes the comments have the taunting yap of an adolescent jeering his rival.
When Herzog, narrating the dropped gloves on the descent from the summit, writes,
“The incident, however, failed to provoke me to get out of my pack a pair of wool socks
I had stuck there for such an emergency,” Rébuffat adds, “Wrong. The socks are for
the feet, the gloves for the hands.”
“Wrong.”
“Quel cinéma.”
“The cinema continues.”
“Le cinéma intime!”
Beside the
single word “curiously,” when Herzog writes of his strength as he rakes through the
snow at the bottom of the crevasse in search of the precious boots as “curiously under-
estimated during the previous hours,” Rébuffat editorializes, “Yes, very curiously, if
this isn't cinema.” When Herzog, describing Schatz's embrace near Camp IVA, writes,
“He gave me a kiss of peace,” Rébuffat annotates, “What is he trying to say?” Herzog
wonders aloud if he can survive the night in the crevasse, prompting Rébuffat to circle
the word “survive” and gibe, “The cheater of death. He's going to die ten times.”
Later, “Again the cheater of death.” Narrating his avalanche fall with the two Sherpas,
Herzog reflects on his survival, “Was this not another miracle?” Here Rébuffat jots,
“One more time! The everlasting miracle.”
Taken in sum, the savage annotations to Herzog's chapter do not begin to add up
to a coherent critique. Instead, they bespeak the furious frustration of a man who has
had to live all his life in silent acquiescence to a sacred text and a “number one national
hero,” both of which Rébuffat knows to be profoundly false. In their petulant wit, their
exasperated disdain, those jottings are utterly unlike anything Rébuffat published in
his lifetime.
In the last years of his life, as Ballu interviewed him for the biography, Rébuffat
began to write down his own version of Annapurna. These notes never amounted to
more than a series of
aperçus,
discrete sentences and paragraphs that ponder the pivotal
events of the 1950 expedition. The tone is almost that of a literary critic, as if Rébuffat
had come across some ancient, anonymous saga preserved on vellum and were using
all his intuition to probe to the core of the story's meaning. In their lucidity, their epi-
grammatic perfection, some of these
pensées
promise to stand alone as a kind of last
word on the myth of Annapurna, magisterial pronouncements by one who, after all,
was there.
A boy who loses his gloves on Mont Blanc is an imbecile. An alpinist who loses his gloves in
the Himalaya, we make of him a national hero.
Is the myth of the hero, then, founded on frozen feet and hands?
