He looked up and began to whistle his tune again. Gianni and the gray-haired professor were emerging from the other room. Durutti sewed his knee up and down, not nervously, just spastically. Maybe he was eighteen. Maybe he was sixteen. Suddenly I couldn’t tell. I’d lost the ability to know who was a child and who was an adult.
Gianni, though. Gianni was an adult.
The man went to a drawer and began to retrieve things.
“Even if you’re a novice,” he said to Gianni, “you just push along. And watch out for cliffs.” He smiled. “I joke, but you must be very careful about crevasses. And there are seracs, which will be starting to shift and melt since it’s now late March. Don’t stand under one, in other words.”
He had maps that he spread on a table. He showed Gianni and Durutti how Gianni should go. The man was calm but serious, tracing a line over the map with a pencil.
“Here,” he said, “the top, where the tram lets you out. You descend there over the face, but the main way down isn’t steep. Just take big, slow turns. You will come upon a large kidney-shaped rock, and there the trail goes left, down to the Mer de Glace, a glacier like a grooved tongue. The glacier will be soft this time of year. Nothing to worry about. You’ll see a little kiosk at the bottom. Take the trail through the trees, which brings you right into Chamonix.”
He had telephoned a friend who was bringing over gear. It was in the hall as we left, a pair of skis, poles, men’s boots, gloves, a hat, and goggles. The gray-haired professor gave us two warm parkas. We loaded everything into the little white Fiat. The man reminded Gianni to be careful and take it slow because of the crevasses.
Durutti did not come with us. He walked off like he didn’t know us, the sky now dark.
* * *
Once again I was on the autostrada with Gianni. I was wearing clothes that Bene had either loaned or given me, a pair of faded green corduroys, a black cotton turtleneck. Clothes that made me look almost Italian, and symbolized to me my acceptance among the group, to be dressed like the women in that apartment on the Via dei Volsci.
Because he had worked for the Valeras probably and because he had taken me to Rome and insinuated me with his group, Gianni was a kind of guardian to me, or at least that was my feeling. So if Bene opened a divide between them — angry at him for something that, I guessed, had to do with his situation and what to do about it — and if she put me on the side of Gianni, what was I to do?
I’d walked past, gone to Gianni. My secret guardian, whose silence had pulled me in. I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men liked to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.
* * *
We were on our way to the Val d’Aosta and Mont Blanc. I understood that this was about borders, getting Gianni to France before the police picked him up.
“You’re helping me,” he said. “I couldn’t do this without you. You’re a good girl.”
Brava ragazza.
His cover. A way to get the police off his back. A mistake — not for him but for me, and I knew it, all at once. But it was too late to back out.
The car up- and downshifted through mountain passes. At the coldest point of the night, just before dawn, there were signs for Courmayeur.
Beyond it was Entrèves and then La Palud, where we arrived at first light. A red-and-white tram went steeply up a mountain cable. The first ride would be at eight a.m.
We drank coffee together in the lodge as old men in wool ski knickers did their stretches, waxed skis, looked out the large windows at the mountain, wind whipping the snow that had settled in its rocky creases, the snow like smoke, drifting and resettling. The sky was an opaque white with a certain brightness to it. A storm was coming in.
Passamontagna, the balaclava was called in Italian, and in this case, Gianni needed it not to obscure his face like the people at the demonstration in Rome but to protect it from frostbite.
The tram would take him in three stages up to Punta Helbronner. From there he would ski the Vallée Blanche down into Chamonix. No passport checks, no police, no one. A no-man’s-land of snow, wind, steeps. The crevasses the gentle man with the nice apartment had warned of. The precarious chunks of ice. Gianni would pass from Italy into France, to some kind of exile.
I had the keys to the Fiat in the pocket of the down parka the man had loaned me, a curious sort of lending, never meant to be returned. The clothes under it also borrowed, their faint lavender smell from her soap a reminder of Bene.
The wind was picking up, blowing snow sideways. Before Gianni got on the tram, I asked if he really knew how to ski.
The question was a joke, but I had wondered it for part of the drive, up and up in elevation. A guy who had worked on the assembly line at a tire plant might possibly not ski.
“Good enough, I hope,” he said, and smiled.
* * *
I followed the signs toward the tunnel that went under Mont Blanc and through the border.
The signs were in French, the border guards, in their black leather gloves, puffing little gasps of steam from their mouths as they spoke to me. One of them flipped through my passport, stamped it, waved me on.
As I entered the Mont Blanc tunnel, under its perforated stream of white lights, I already sensed what would happen. I felt cut free, under the glare of those runny lights, in a tunnel through the bottom of a high peak. The lanes, one in each direction, were so narrow that each time an oncoming car passed I thought we would collide.
Fifteen minutes later I exited. I was in France. It was snowing.
* * *
At Chamonix, I parked where the man in Rome who’d helped us, or helped Gianni, had told me to, near the little Montenvers train station, a sign that said MER DE GLACE, the train’s scenic destination.
I got out of the car and tipped my face up into the blank white sky. There had always seemed something miraculous to me in the way snowflakes formed. As if they simply materialized about twenty feet above the earth, into these falling lacy clusters. The snow came toward my upturned face in a continuous symphony. Big dry flakes. There was no wind. Snow fell and collected in drifts. I was supposed to meet Gianni at the bottom of Les Planards. I asked a man scraping a walkway with the blunt end of a flat shovel. I spoke no French, just “Les Planards?” He pointed. It was a bunny slope, trees on both sides. Mont Blanc, high above it, was shrouded in clouds.
It would be hours, given the tram rides, the skiing. I walked to a little bar next to the train station. Heard only French. Chamonix, with its hotels, mountaineering shops, bakeries, was so different from the tiny station past Entrèves, on the Italian side, where I had waited with Gianni for the tram to open. I felt again what I’d experienced as I entered that tunnel through the mountain, a sense of being cut free, plunged into the unknown.
I ordered a coffee with milk. Sat at a table and waited. All the time spent in ski lodges growing up, the dreamy feeling of a crowded open room when you’re little and tired, people clomping up and down metal stairs in ski boots. Our coach buying us hot chocolate that I let burn my tongue, too impatient to wait until it properly cooled. Trapped inside lodges during a whiteout. When our race was rained out. Or when I’d crashed, did not finish and wasn’t getting a second run. Disqualified and wasn’t getting a second run.
Gianni and I had been awake all night. I let myself sleep, my face in my arms, there at an empty table in the bar next to the little train station.
I woke up to an enveloping din. The lunch crowd. A man and woman came and sat at my table, speaking something Scandinavian. I zipped the parka and went out to wait where I was meant to, at the bottom of Les Planards, where Gianni would ski down. I stared up at the mountain, blearily visible through the wet mist of snow-loaded clouds. I walked back and forth to keep warm. Gianni did not appear.