It was a day in early March and still winter. Still, it must have been a strange sight when travel writer Sylvain Tesson and his friend Daniel du Lac de Fugères began their great adventure: They stood, each with a pair of skis in their hands, on the beach at Menton, a picture-perfect town on the French coast Mediterranean coast, located directly on the border with Italy.
Three years later, Tesson and du Lac wanted to be back on the Mediterranean, somewhere near Trieste. Your way there: always along the main Alpine ridge. “A ride, only on skis, between two seas.” Sylvain Tesson, whose book “The Snow Leopard” about a trip to Tibet was also a bestseller in this country in 2022, summarizes the project succinctly in his new work “White”.
He and his companion have planned four winters for this special Alpine crossing; they want to be on the road for about three weeks each season. Always continuing the tour where it left off the year before. Soon there are three of them: Philippe Rémoville, whom they met at the end of the first week in an Italian mountain hut, joins them.
Extreme ski mountaineering is a meditation for the author
There are easier ways to get from the Riviera to the Adriatic. What Tesson, du Lac and Rémoville were doing “sounded like slave labor. In reality it was a gift from heaven.” Because it’s lucky to be able to sink your teeth into something. “When climbing mountains,” says Tesson, “time suddenly dissolves, space expands and the mind is forced deep within… The effort erases everything – memory and regret, desires and guilt.”
The stairs of Menton, built on a hillside, become a path, which becomes a slope, which in turn becomes a track. The men reach the snow at an altitude of 1,300 meters and can put on their skis for the first time during the second day. The Mediterranean can still be seen there. But “from now on we belonged to the mountains. The snow was everything: betrothed, shroud, promise, sexual purity and cosmic power, matrix of forgiveness and ablutions.”
Initially, Tesson and du Lac’s paths cross with those of police officers and legionnaires as well as members of various aid organizations. In 2018, committed residents of the Mercantour in the hinterland of Menton took in refugees from the Sahel and the Middle East who were wandering through the high alpine terrain on their way to France. This border between Italy and France has been fortified again and again over the centuries. But every protective wall, Tesson states, has its weak points: “Hannibal’s elephants, traveling salesmen and Italian smugglers, the refugees of the 21st century and the wolf of the 20th century, they all knew this passage.”
Shortly after Rémoville joins the two ski mountaineers, they find themselves alone in the high mountains. There are no more patrols above 2000 meters. Most of the huts in which they spend the night are not managed, but rather shelters. When the weather is particularly nasty, Tesson says the doors of these huts are the border between hell and paradise. As spartan as they are and often as cool, they are comfortable and enable the necessary regeneration.
Sylvain Tesson describes this moment of arrival at one point with charming clarity: “As soon as the skis were stowed away, the violet tea was already bubbling on du Lac’s gas stove. Mountaineering: daily change between the life of an athlete and that of an old lady.”
Although “White” is told chronologically, with a separate small chapter for each individual day, this book is very different from most accounts of similar adventures. The physical exertion, curiosities, mishaps and injuries are only marginally discussed here. “White” is not a classic diary in which the relevant and the irrelevant are juxtaposed (un)important. The book and its author do not boast about mastering moments of danger. “White” is not a hero saga. Tesson is not interested in the pure reporting level. The focus is not on the experience, but on its consequences for him, for his personality, for his view of things.
“White” is a poetic, almost philosophical reflection on this undertaking. At times she is also self-deprecating. The author describes how du Lac picks up a ski pole that Tesson has lost and that has slipped down a slope as a little comedy, watched by an audience of chamois. Sometimes “White” also skirts the edge of tragedy. Above all, this outstanding work of travel literature is a very reduced, fairly sober and yet pointed text that focuses on the essence of what is to be told.
In the evening, at the hut, your head is free to listen to poems by Rimbaud
At the end of the second winter, the trio has passed Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn and the Splügen Pass and is marching towards Sils Maria, Sylvain Tesson decrees: “The landscape must not be too spectacular.” In any case, he had learned that early on: “Whenever the world revealed its beauty to me, I would have to pay for this happiness with a slap in the face.” With a change in the weather, a particular strain. On top of that, the enchantment of the landscape is distracting.
Using the example of the two painters Nicholas Roerich and Cuno Amiet and their depiction of high alpine sceneries, Tesson explains what fascinates him about the snowy, icy, glaciated mountain world: The white has the power of erasure. It robs the scene of its contours and dissolves the disorder: “Yes, the white was a source of the hypnotic.” It “did not represent a natural environment, certainly not a landscape, rather a substance.”
Tesson is keen to immerse himself in it, to be absorbed in it and to be able to shed everything else through a uniform effort. Even if it wasn’t always easy: “I wanted to turn back, du Lac wanted to move on, we moved on. Friendship is obedience.”
In the evenings, in the hostels, when his head is clear of everything, Tesson reads poems by Arthur Rimbaud, for example. When they are back on the Mediterranean, in Duino, the three men finally go swimming, even though the water is as cold as March. The blue replaces the white: “Another order, another baptism.”
Sylvain Tesson: White. Translated from French by Nicola Denis. Verlag Rowohlt Hundert Augen, Hamburg 2023. 256 pages, 23 euros.