True Summit (21 page)

No tiny fingers, No tiny toes

The memory lingers but the digit goes

In an Eastern Railway carriage, where the River Ganges flows

There are Twenty Tiny Fingers and Twenty Tiny Toes.

Chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop.

Thus I “outgrew” Rébuffat. Had I known, in the late 1960s, that side by side in the breast of the lyric singer of the brotherhood of the rope there lurked an iconoclast as fierce as Patey, a debunker of all things false and sentimental, I would have been astonished. But Rébuffat guarded that side of himself in hermetic privacy. Only a decade after his death would that well-hidden critic emerge, in his hitherto unpublished notes and jottings on the 1950 expedition. The man whom the crowds at Orly and in the Salle Pleyel wished to salute as one of the heroes of Annapurna would become instead its ultimate skeptic.

A
FTER THE FIVE-YEAR INTERDICTION
against writing about the expedition had expired in 1955, Rébuffat toyed with the idea of publishing his own account of Annapurna. “I talked him out of writing this,” Françoise told me, “because it would be too bitter.” She was
guided, as well, by simple pragmatism. The reputation of the man who, by virtue of his poetic celebrations of the mountain world, had become the most famous guide in France would not be well served by a polemic from his hand undercutting the most sacred myth in French mountaineering.

So Rébuffat kept the bitterness to himself. In 1981, Herzog published a book called
Les Grandes Aventures de I'Himalaya,
a collection of accounts of other people's expeditions. One chapter, called “Un Autre Regard” (“Another Look”), serves as Herzog's own meditation on Annapurna, three decades later. More personal than
Annapurna,
the chapter stands as a kind of first draft of the “subjective” account of the famous ascent that Herzog would publish in
L'Autre Annapurna.

In the seclusion of his study, Rébuffat opened his copy of
Les Grandes Aventures
and scribbled marginal comments throughout the text of “Un Autre Regard.” I first saw this remarkable document in Yves Ballu's house near Grenoble in 1999.

Rébuffat is plainly disgusted with Herzog's self-preoccupation. Sometimes he circles key words, then draws lines between them, creating a branching tree of emphasis. In the paragraph beginning, “Yes, there we were on June 3, 1950,” Rébuffat has highlighted “we,” “my [feet],” “I was [the first],” “Around me,” “I spoke to the 8,000-ers” that “surrounded me.” He has also circled the words “victory” and “conquered.” In the margin he notes simply, “And Lachenal?”

Above another paragraph, Rébuffat scrawls “Blah-blah-blah!” Beside yet another, “This is stupid.” Beside another, “A fairy tale.”

The annotations add up to an extended rant against the leader to whom, three decades earlier, Rébuffat had been forced to pledge total obedience. Another branching tree, covering more than two pages, links Herzog's professions of fear of death and frozen flesh: “My carcass was transformed into ice,” “would cost me my life,” “lost consciousness,” “die in battle,” “capitulate,” “out of breath.” Beside one section of this text, Rébuffat writes, “
Quel cinéma!
[What a comedian!]”

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 underestimated 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 epigrammatic 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?

It seemed to me at that moment [of Lachenal's and Herzog's return from the summit] that Terray and I were charged with a mission that, in my innermost heart, pleased me more than going to the top, because it converged with what I love about my métier as guide: to taste renunciation in the name of friendship and to negotiate with the storm to save my companions.

I have never liked those martial terms so often applied to the mountain: “The Himalayan assault,” “the conquest of . . .” Least of all, so often employed, “Victory over Annapurna.” I have never considered myself a victor over Annapurna.

Oh, if only Herzog had lost his flags instead of his gloves, how happy I would have been!

R
ÉBUFFAT CONTINUED
to climb into his fifties. In 1975, at the age of fifty-four, he made a remarkable ascent of the Freney Pillar, one of Mont Blanc's hardest and most extended routes.

That same year, he was diagnosed with cancer of the breast. There followed a decade of hope and despair, of radio- and chemotherapy, of brief remissions followed by more serious onsets, as the cancer slowly worked its ravages. By now, Gaston and Françoise had three children. As the children grew Rébuffat had taken them up classic routes in his enchanted garden.

Refusing to give in to his ailment, the tall guide made two more major climbs: the first ascent of the southeast face of the Aiguille du Plan, in 1979, and—by now seriously debilitated—the south face of the Aiguille du Midi in 1983, of which he had made the first ascent twenty-seven years earlier. After the latter climb, Rébuffat jotted a laconic entry in the guide's notebook he had kept all his life: “August 18. South face of Aiguille du Midi. Start at 9:00. Summit 15:00. Great fatigue.”

Two years before he died, Rébuffat fulfilled a lifelong dream by rafting the Colorado River with Françoise, signing up for a commercial trip. “He was very tired, just out of chemotherapy,” she told me. “There were clients of all ages on the river. They quickly saw that Gaston was very sick. Very discreetly the other clients started to do everything for him. To get in and out of the boat, he needed help. Two young Germans found the best campsites for him.”

Did these companions realize who Rébuffat was, I wondered. Did they know what this man had done in the mountains in his prime?

“No,” said Françoise. “All they knew was that he was French, and that he was very sick.”

A year after Gaston's death, Françoise began to write a memoir about her life with her husband. Still unfinished, never published, it nonetheless contains passages of heartbreaking pathos, as well as bearing witness to a rapport as complete as any married couple may have ever had. By addressing her lost husband as “you,” she achieves a kind of hallucinatory intensity.

“June? 1986,” Françoise writes atop the first page. “It is now one year since you left me.” The memoir opens with a “radiant memory” of the couple's first meeting at the
salon de thé
in Chamonix, where the young fashion student hoped to encounter a mountain guide. Yet by the second page, she has plunged into the ordeal of Gaston's degeneration.

Those last four years, we lived thinking only about your survival.

We existed, but in another identity. The characters left the stage, giving way to others who walked into a new novel that was too short, the ending already written, menacing like a cataclysm that was in the air. . . .

That last week of May, the issue was there, perceptible. It infested the air, making it hard for us to breathe.

I sensed the time that was inexorably abandoning you, without appeal. Our happiness slipped through our fingers . . . the cancer charged ahead. Silently, from the bottom of my soul, I pleaded with you to live. I could no longer do anything to make you live, the hemorrhaging of your vigor was operating in me also. Yet up until
the last moments, I tried to communicate to you those waves of love that could work miracles, perhaps even help the medicine.

The losses accumulated, one by one. One of the bitterest came the day Rébuffat, after long deliberation, asked the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix, of which he had been a member since 1942, to take him off the list of active guides. As Françoise understood, that step “already signified death, a first death.”

Other losses were more intimate, manifesting themselves in scenes that Françoise later vividly recaptured:

The last night that we had dinner at our daughter's apartment, at the moment of leaving you didn't have the strength to go home. There was no bed available for me.

No one offered to accompany me home. I left by taxi, alone, in despair. Thus I understood the full horror of what awaited me. The next morning, you told me of your distress at seeing me go away.

The night before you entered the hospital, you were exhausted, there was nothing you desired. You got up in the morning, wracked by the pain in your bones, reeling with weakness, but you wanted to go out all the same. For the first time I had to help you to get dressed. You cried, you held me in your arms and said, “I can't take it any more. I'm holding on only for you.”

In the hospital, Françoise discovered her husband on his deathbed:

I found you alone in a vast, cold, repellent room. I had been authorized only a one-hour visit. How could the medical corps . . . so lack common humanity as to tear one of us away from the other, two beings who were never meant to be separated?

You did not seem to be conscious. You lay there inert. Did you smell my scent? Your lips were slack and loose, as if in a smile. Your pupils were half open, but your sight was gone—it had already left us.

I was petrified.

You were so cold, your body no longer breathed, but in that extreme moment, by a reflex of will, you raised your arm to pass your hand through my hair. From the light touch of your fingers, I
understood that you wanted me to bring my face near to yours and embrace you. That stroke of your hand in contact with my skin, that kiss, that gesture—I keep that as your final gift.

Rébuffat died on June 1, 1985. In the months that followed, Françoise was haunted not so much by his absence as by a feeling that he was still there: “I write to you, as though you were simply away on a voyage. I continue to wait for you.” And yet, “The monotony of my days grows heavier and heavier.” Still, “In the darkness, our complicity goes on. There is no decision that I make without asking you about it. . . . Love has its excuses, it ought to be unconditional, and sometimes it persists only through an absence of logic.

“In return, I sense that wherever you are, you hear me and pardon me.”

Rébuffat lies buried on a hill near the side of the old Chamonix cemetery, surrounded by other guides. For his epitaph, Françoise chose an epigram from Rébuffat's most poetic book,
Les Horizons Gagnés,
that defines the essence of mountaineering: “Conduire son corps là où un jour ses yeux ont regardé”—“To transport one's body to the place where once the eyes first gazed.”