Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I asked about Lachenal's bond with Terray. “There aren't any
cordées
like that any
more,” said Jean-Claude. “Nowadays everybody climbs with one partner, then with
another.”
Jean-Claude made much of the Paris-Chamonix axis among the Annapurna team.
“It was necessary for France to have a great achievement,” he said. “Paris needed it,
but it couldn't be done without the three Chamonix guides. At all costs, Herzog wanted
to prevent Lachenal and Terray from going to the top together. Paris had to be at the
summit—not two Chamoniards.”
I asked Jean-Claude what Herzog had done for him as a youth, in his service as the
boy's
tuteur.
His answer was measured: “He consoled my mother. We skied together.
Later, he opened some doors for me.”
Two years later, on a return to Chamonix, I would meet Jean-Claude in a bar. In
the Interim,
L'Autre Annapurna
had been published, with its vignettes of Jean-Claude
as a delinquent rascal whom Herzog had barely kept out of legal trouble. I happened
to have a copy of the topic lying on the table as Jean-Claude walked in. “Why you
buy this piece of shit!” he railed in English, pounding the paperback with his fist. “He
writes about me,” Jean-Claude brooded, “only to say that I inherited the craziness of
my father.” A few minutes later, he pounded the topic again. “This man trashed my
father!” he raged.
In Jean-Claude and Arlette's chalet that evening in 1997, the mood had been nos-
talgic rather than angry. As we grew tipsy, Jean-Claude brought out some keepsakes.
A faded box of Lucky Strike matches held a pressed edelweiss, accompanied by a note
indicating that Lachenal, then fifteen years old, had found the flower, together with a
piece of the French flag, atop a peak near Annecy in 1936.
Jean-Claude handed me a long, rusty soft-iron spike. “This was a piton Andreas
Heckmair drove into the Eiger on the first ascent in 1938. My father brought it back
from the second ascent, with Terray, in 1947.” I turned the piton, with its bent tip, over
and over in my hands. Heckmair, I knew, was still alive at ninety-one. “In 1987,” ad-
ded Jean-Claude, “someone showed this piton to Heckmair at a film festival. He said
he remembered making it in his forge in Munich.”
Next Jean-Claude handed me the head of an antique ice axe. To my surprise, I real-
ized that it was the axe that the Duke of the Abruzzi had left on the highest point of
the Ruwenzori Mountains in Africa in 1906, which Lachenal had retrieved in 1952.
Awed by these talismans, I was unprepared to hold the next relic thrust into my
hands. It was a sort of homemade book, bound between heavy pieces of cardboard. I
opened the cover, and stared in shock at what I realized was Lachenal's Annapurna di-
