Lhe night fell much harder than expected, curtain, no time to reach camp IV. Standing at the bottom of the crevasse, without a tent or sleeping bag, she feels herself leaving. There are big, agitated flies in his eyes that are bent on blurring everything. She hardly sees anything. She knows the narrowness of the rift, but the space around her seems so vast; a palace engulfed in the last drawer of a giant freezer.
That’s it, she has halluses. Like the survivor of the Himalayas, in agony in her high mountain fold, in the middle of the dark night, she too will be visited by a ghostly lady who has come to serve her hot tea. To thank her, she too will give her her shoes before letting her go in the wind, to wake up in socks at dawn, her toes blackened by murderous chilblains, and perhaps losing one of her two feet, the cells exploded by the frost.
Do not sleep so as not to die
Afraid of a ghost coming to steal it, she clings to her leopard-print fleece, as proof that she is not just a climbing shadow among others, not just a faceless person obsessed with the conquest. That spotted jacket to stand upright against you men back there judging her; a woman who travels alone, necessarily without children and without libido, to escape her loneliness and emptiness. In all this blue pierced by a sourceless light, she makes the zip of her jacket go up and down, opens her mouth, lets out a sound, just to hear her voice vocoded because of altitude sickness bouncing against the walls of the ice corridor. She knows it, on the threshold of the door of the club of legendary mountaineers, in the heart of its miraculous crevasse, blood will flow and freeze on her chin, she will die.
Hold the night, do not sleep so as not to die. She has taken a hundred and fifty years, she feels it. They also say that a night in the ice makes you a snow zombie. Going from a young woman to an almost dead mummy, she tries to remember why she does this. Set off alone at an altitude of 6,000 meters in the Himalayan massif, tackling the killer mountain. In Paris, it was clear. Get out of the rat race, learn the lessons of the disease that fell on your chest, no longer be afraid, leave.
Suddenly, she hears a growling voice. An avalanche voice that speaks to her of the summit ridge that she will therefore never reach, that sways her with shame encapsulated in large contemptuous sputters. The voice speaks to him of transference. She clearly hears him say, you have the same heart, he dies, you die, since he died, anyway, you died, then. She sees light. Surely the helicopters, finally, we heard his SOS. Suddenly, how is it possible, she’s hot, she sees. Light. Around her, by day, a snow-white plateau. But fluffy and soft and warm. A duvet, his duvet.
The voice that speaks to him of fusion and transference is still there. But it comes very clearly from the mouth of the love coach of “The Villa of Broken Hearts”, on the TV in front of her, which is addressed to Romane and Antho, in tears. In her Parisian bed, slumped in the sheets, with the bottle mixing air and nitrogen that she gets used to inhaling every day, between swimming and running kilometers, to train at altitude, before the big start. It seems that she has charged the mule a little with nitrogen this time. A current of cold air slips under her duvet, she pulls up the zip of her leopard fleece and lodges her chin in the large collar.