Bear Meat [New Yorker Fiction]

Fiction

Bear Meat

by Primo Levi January 8, 2007

Keywords

Mountain Climbers (Mountaineers); Italy, Italians; Danger; Death; Alps; Youth; Stories

Evenings spent in a mountain hut are among the most sublime and intense that life holds. I mean a real hut, the kind where you seek shelter after a four-, five-, or six-hour climb and where you find few so-called comforts.

Not that chairlifts and cable cars and such comforts are to be looked down on: they are, on the contrary, logical achievements of our society, which is what it is, and must be either accepted or rejected in its totality—and those who are able to reject it are few. But the advent of the chairlift puts an end to a valuable process of natural selection, by which those who reach the hut are sure to find, in its pure state, a small sample of a little-known human subspecies.

Its members are people who don’t speak much and of whom others don’t speak at all, so there is no mention of them in the literature of most countries, and they should not be confused with other, vaguely similar types, who do speak, and of whom others speak: hot shots, extreme climbers, members of famous international expeditions, professionals, etc. All worthy people, but this story is not about them.

I arrived at the hut at sunset, and I was very tired. I stayed outside, on the wooden porch, to consider the frozen mystery of the seracs at my feet until everything had vanished behind silent ghosts of fog, and then I went in.

Inside it was almost dark. By the glow of a small carbide lamp one could distinguish a dozen human figures gathered around three or four tables. I sat down at a table and opened my backpack. Across from me was a tall, large man, middle-aged, with whom I exchanged a few words about the weather and our plans for the following day. This is a standard conversation, like the classic opening moves of a chess game, where what matters, much more than what one says (which is brief and obvious), is the tone in which one says it.

We found ourselves in agreement on the fact that the weather was uncertain (it always is in the mountains; when it isn’t, it is nonetheless declared to be so, for obvious magical reasons), and on the forecast for the following day. A little later, two lanky men in their twenties entered, with long beards and ravenous eyes. They had arrived from another valley and were attempting an intricate series of crossings. They sat down at our table.

After we had eaten, we started to drink. Wine is a more complex substance than one might think, and, above two thousand metres, and at close to zero degrees centigrade, it displays interesting behavioral anomalies. It changes flavor, loses the bite of alcohol, and regains the mildness of the grape from which it comes. One can take it in heavy doses without any undesired effects. In fact, it eliminates fatigue, loosens and warms the limbs, and leads to a fanciful mood. It is no longer a luxury or a vice but a metabolic necessity, like water on the plains. It is a well-known fact that vines grow better on a slope: could there be a connection?

Once we started drinking, the conversation at our table became much less impersonal. Each of us spoke of our initiation, and we established with some surprise that we had all begun our mountaineering careers with an extremely foolish act.

As it turned out, the best of these foolish acts, and the best told, was the one recounted by the tall, large man.

“I was fifteen. A friend of mine, Saverio, was also fifteen. Another, Luigi, was seventeen. We had gone out a number of times together, to fifteen hundred, two thousand metres, without a plan or a destination; I should say, without a conscious destination, but, in essence, impelled by a subtle desire to get ourselves in trouble and then get ourselves out of it. Nothing easier: it’s enough to go straight up the mountain following your instincts, in any direction, by the steepest slope, struggle for a quarter of an hour across the mountainside, and then try to get back down. Of course, one also learns a few things in this process: that pine trees, when they’re available, make safe and friendly supports, especially during the descent, and that scree is hard to climb but easy to descend by. One learns different types of grasses, those peculiar terraced slopes, and the art of losing the trail and finding it again. Above all, one learns the limits, both quantitative and qualitative, of one’s own strength: when the breath, the legs, and the heart give out, and when, so to speak, it’s psychosomatic. It’s a great school—I wish I had attended it longer.

“September came and we felt like lions. Luigi said, ‘The G. Pass is twenty-four hundred metres high—eleven hundred vertical metres from here. According to the guidebooks, it should be a three-hour climb, but it’ll take us barely two. There’s nothing difficult, just scree and small rocks—no snow this time of year. On the other side, there’s a six-hundred-metre descent, one hour, and we arrive at the border-patrol hut; you can see it clearly here on the map. Then an easy return along the road. We’ll leave at two today; at four we’re at the top, at five at the hut, and home in time for dinner.’

“That was Luigi. We met at his house at two, with our good boots on our feet, but no backpacks, no rope (about whose use none of us had any real notion anyway; but we knew—having studied the Alpine Club guidebook—the theory of the double rope, the respective merits of hemp and manila, the technique for rescuing someone from a crevasse, and other fine points), a hundred grams of chocolate in our pockets, and (may God forgive us!) wearing shorts.

“We progressed well uphill. First, through a pine forest, spurning the mule trail and the shortcuts, and sampling the blueberries; then through an alluvial cone, wasting precious energy. It was the first time we had set off without grownups getting on our nerves with all their advice, without uncles, without experts. We were drunk on our freedom, and because of this, we delighted in the dirtiest high-school slang, accompanying it with lofty quotations from the classics, for example:

“It is another path that you must take …
if you would leave this savage wilderness”;

Or:

That was no path for those with cloaks of lead,
for he and I—he, light; I, with support—
could hardly make it up from spur to spur.

And also:

… he’d see another spur,
saying: “That is the one you will grip
next,
but try it first to see if it is firm.”

“Forgive me if I get a little carried away. You see, I’m not a Dante expert, and yet, believe me, one of these days an honest man will come along and prove that Dante couldn’t have just invented these founding principles of rock climbing—he must have been here or in a similar place. And when he says:

Remember, reader, if you’ve ever been
caught in the mountains by a mist through
which
you only saw as moles see through their skin—

I congratulate him! I, for one, never doubted that he was a professional.

“At any rate, we were climbing at a brisk pace, saying and doing foolish things. And so it happened that we reached the pass at six, not at four, near collapse, and with a certain trembling in our knees that wasn’t just from exhaustion. Saverio was the worst off. Luigi and I were already at the top and saw him struggling among the loose rocks fifty metres below us. ‘ “Now you must cast aside your laziness!” ’ Luigi had the gall to shout to him. At which the poor boy paused to catch his breath, looked upward like Christ on the Cross, then clambered up to us and breathed out, in a faint voice, the implausible yet utterly correct reply: ‘ “Go on, for I am strong and confident.” ’

“When all three of us were at the pass, two unhappy truths became clear. One, that night was falling; and I swear on this bottle that I have never since then (and many years have passed) seen darkness fall in the mountains without feeling an emptiness here in the pit of my stomach. The other truth was that we were trapped.

“From the pass, there was no logical descent to the hut. There was a gentle, rocky valley, with no human trace, and beyond it a terrifying precipice, not vertical, no, but of broken rock and gullies of crumbling earth—one of those places no one ever wants to go because you’ll break your neck without glory or satisfaction.

“With the last light, we pushed on all the way to the edge: you could see the big dark leap of the valley and, if you stuck your nose out, even the light in the hut, almost beneath you. But as for getting down there on our own, we couldn’t even consider it; we sat there and started shouting. We took turns. Saverio shouted and prayed. Luigi shouted and cursed. I just shouted. We shouted until we were hoarse.

“Toward midnight, the light in the hut split into two lights, and one of the two blinked three times. It was a signal: we shouted three times in response. At that, a faraway voice called, ‘We’re coming,’ and we replied with a cacophony of shouts. The voice asked, ‘Where are you?,’ and we three, without a single match to strike, blurted out confused and irrelevant information, all at the same time.

“Our rescuers, poor devils, cursed as they climbed, and stopped now and then to sing, drink, and laugh loudly. They weren’t very enthusiastic. Many years later, I also happened to be part of a rescue party, so I know exactly how they felt. These expeditions are tedious and dangerous affairs, and in most cases they can only lead to trouble, because no one wants to pay for the emergency supplies—least of all the rescued, who are rarely solvent.

“They reached us at around two in the morning; and here I must tell you that, on top of everything else, they were members of the border patrol. Once they’d found us, a signal was sent to the valley with a flashlight. ‘Who are they?’ a voice asked from below. ‘It’s just three whiny gagno’ was the fierce reply, in dialect. Then, turning to us, ‘Is this what they teach you in school?’

“After that, they tied us up like salami and lowered us down to the valley without talking to us but stopping often to drink, and curse, and guffaw among themselves. Pass me the bottle, please.”

I passed the narrator the bottle and asked him what a gagno was.

“Gagno,” he said, “means child, but it’s a word loaded with mockery. Second-grade kids say it to first graders.

“That’s how I started. It’s not a story to be proud of, you might say. And I’m not. But I’m sure that even this foolish adventure was useful to me later. These are things that make your back broad, which isn’t something Nature gives everyone. I read somewhere—and the person who wrote this was not a mountaineer but a sailor—that the sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don’t know much about the sea, but I do know that that’s the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head… . But, excuse me, that’s another story. The one I told you ends like this. They called me ‘whiny gagno’ for years. Some people still do and, I assure you, I don’t mind at all.”

He drank, and silently busied himself with the complex rituals of a pipe smoker.

“I, too, started with an extremely foolish act,” a voice interjected at this point, and then we noticed that there were no longer four of us but five at the table. The voice had come from a man who, in the dim light, appeared to be thin, balding at the temples, with a sharp face furrowed by shifting wrinkles. He told his story at an uneven pace, swallowing his words and leaving sentences incomplete, as if his tongue had difficulty following the thread of his thoughts; at other times he struggled to find the words and would stop as if under a spell.

“There were three of us, too, but not so young—in our twenties. One was Antonio, and I wouldn’t want to say much about him, nor would I know how to. He was a fine, handsome youth, smart, sensitive, tenacious, and bold, but with something in him that was elusive, dark, wild. We were at that age when you have the need and the instinct and the immodesty to inflict on others everything that is seething in your head and elsewhere; it’s an age that can last a long time, but ends at the first compromise. Yet with him, even at that age, nothing had slipped out of his wrapping of restraint; nothing escaped from his inner world—though we sensed it to be rich and dense—except some rare allusion dramatically cut short. He was like a cat, if I may put it this way, whom you live with for years but who never allows you to get under his sacred skin.

“The third was Carlo, our leader. He is dead; it’s best to say it right away, because one can’t help speaking in a different way of the dead than of the living. He died in a way that suited him—not in the mountains, but the way one dies in the mountains. Doing what he had to do: not the kind of duty imposed by someone 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.

“He 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 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 other hand, 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.

“He 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 travelled 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 metres 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.

“I 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, and drank, and then continued.

“So 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.

“I 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.

“Antonio said that we could go down a hundred metres 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 metres lower than the other one anyway—and be satisfied with that. Carlo, in perfect bad faith, said with a few harsh, cackling syllables that my proposal was fine but, then again, ‘by the easy northwest ridge’ we could reach the Tooth of M. in half an hour; and that it wasn’t worth being twenty-one if you didn’t allow yourself the luxury of taking the wrong path.

“ ‘The easy northwest ridge’ was described rock by rock in the battered guidebook that Carlo carried in his pocket, along with the wire I mentioned. He took this guidebook along not because he believed in it but for the exact opposite reason. He rejected it because he perceived it, too, as a constraint, and not just any constraint but a bastard creature, a detestable hybrid of snow and rock and paper. He took it with him into the mountains to scorn it, delighted if he could catch it in error, even if that error was to his own detriment and that of his climbing companions.

“The easy northwest ridge was truly easy, in fact elementary, in the summer, but the conditions we found that day were difficult. The rocks were wet on the side that faced the sun and glazed with ice in the shade; between one rock spike and the next were pockets of wet snow where we sank up to our shoulders. We arrived at the right peak at five, two of us dragging ourselves pitifully, while Carlo was seized by a sinister hilarity that I found slightly irritating.

“ ‘How will we get down?’

“ ‘We’ll figure it out,’ Carlo said, and added mysteriously, ‘The worst thing that happens is we taste bear meat.’

“Well, we tasted it, bear meat, in abundance, during the course of that night, the longest of my climbing career. It took us two hours to descend, feebly assisted by the rope. I’m sure you know what an infernal instrument a frozen rope is: ours had become a stiff, evil tangle that got caught on all the outcrops and clanged against the rock like a steel cable. At seven, we reached the shore of a small frozen lake. It was dark.

“We ate the little we had left, built a useless wall of stones to shelter us from the wind, and lay down on the ground to sleep, huddled side by side. We took turns—the man in the middle slept while the others acted as a buffer. For some reason I can’t explain, our watches had stopped—perhaps because we had forgotten to wind them—and without watches we felt as if time, too, had frozen. We stood up now and then to get our circulation going, and it was always the same: the wind was always blowing, there was always a semblance of moon, always in the same spot in the sky, and in front of the moon a fantastic cavalcade of ragged clouds, always the same. We had taken off our shoes, and put our feet in our backpacks. At the first ghostly light, which seemed to radiate not from the sky but from the snow, we got up, our limbs numb and our eyes glazed from sleeplessness, hunger, and darkness, and found our shoes so frozen that, when struck, they rang like bells. In order to put them on we had to sit on them for half an hour, as if we were hatching eggs.

“But we returned to the valley on our own: and when the innkeeper asked us, chuckling, how it had gone, all the while stealing glances at our two-day stubble, we answered without hesitation that it had been a great outing, paid the bill, and left without losing our composure.

“That was bear meat. Now, you must believe me, gentlemen, many years have passed, and I regret having eaten so little of it. I think and hope that each of you has gleaned from life what I have—a certain measure of ease, respect, love, and success. Well, I’ll tell you the truth, none of these things, not even remotely, has the taste of bear meat: the taste of being strong and free, which means free to make mistakes; the taste of feeling young in the mountains, of being your own master, which means master of the world.

“And, trust me, I am grateful to Carlo for having deliberately got us into trouble, for the night he made us spend, and for the various enterprises, senseless only on the surface, that he involved us in later on, and then for various others, not in the mountains, which I got into on my own, by following his doctrine. He was a young man full of earthly vigor who had a wisdom of his own, and may the earth in which he rests, not far from here, lie light on his bones, and bring the news, each year, of the return of the sun and of the frost.”

The second narrator fell silent, and he seemed to me to be looking with some embarrassment toward the two young men, as if afraid that he had disturbed or offended them; then he filled his glass but did not drink. His last words had roused in me a rare echo, as if I had heard them somewhere before. And, in fact, I later found almost those exact words in a book that is now dear to me, by the same sailor, cited by the first man, who had written of the gifts of the sea. ♦

(Translated, from the Italian, by Alessandra Bastagli.)

Photograph: CORBIS