“No, it’s not. Back in September, when the rock was bare, it was worse, but see the ice on both sides? The ice has narrowed the chimney, made it more climbable.”
Pino looked to his brother. “This may take a little time, but I’m going to cut steps. Keep them moving and warm until you hear me whistle that I’m sending down the axes. Then rope up and send Mr. D’Angelo. I’m going to need his strength up there. You’ll come up last.”
For once, Mimo didn’t argue about being last. Pino freed himself from the group rope, dropped his pack, and put on crampons. With Mimo’s rope coil slung like a bandolier, he picked up his ice ax and Mimo’s and said a prayer before he began to climb. His back to the mountain, Pino reminded himself not to look down before he kicked in the blades of his crampons for support, reached overhead, and jabbed the pick points of the axes into the ice floe.
With every half meter gained, Pino stopped and carefully chopped out flat spots for the others. It was maddeningly slow work, and the higher he got, the more he was aware of lights coming on, one by one, down in Campodolcino. He knew that with binoculars someone might see the miner’s lamp lighting up the inside of the ice chimney, but he felt he had no choice.
Forty minutes later, drenched with sweat, Pino reached the balcony. He kept the lamp on long enough to attach a carabiner to a piton he’d driven into the rock the last time he’d climbed this way, and to pass one end of the rope through the carabiner before testing it with his weight. The anchor held.
Pino tied the ice axes and his crampons to the rope, whistled, and then lowered them down the chimney. Several minutes later, he heard his brother whistle, and he took the slack out of the rope. Mr. D’Angelo came up onto the balcony fifteen minutes later. Together they pulled his son, daughter, and wife up quickly.
Pino could hear Mrs. Napolitano moaning with fear even before she entered the icy slot. He lowered the mining lamp down for her to use. The additional light only seemed to deepen the pregnant violinist’s terror. Shaking head to toe, she took the ice axes and in crampons clomped into the chimney.
“Right hand first,” Mimo said. “Just give it a good whack in there where Pino’s leveled things off.”
Mrs. Napolitano did so, but halfheartedly, and the ax came free before she could get her full weight on it.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t.”
Mimo said, “Just climb the stairs Pino made, stabbing the axes and the crampons’ blades in tight, back and forth all the way up.”
“But I could slip.”
Pino called down the chute, “Not with us holding the rope, and definitely not if you kick those crampons and swing those axes like you mean it . . . like your violin bow when you play con smania.”
That last bit, referring to playing with passion, seemed to get through to her, because Mrs. Napolitano slashed up and out with her right ax. From above, Pino heard the pick end drive solidly into the ice. He backed up to join Mr. D’Angelo on the rope, and he had his wife lie on her belly, looking over the edge and down the chute to tell them each time the pregnant violinist was going to shift her weight and climb higher. Whereas the others had come up half meter by half meter, her ascent was measured in centimeters.
Almost four meters off the ground, Mrs. Napolitano somehow lost her footing, shrieked, and fell. They caught her, and she dangled there, moaning and blubbering until they could coax her into trying again. Thirty-five nail-biting minutes later, they hauled her up and over onto the balcony. In the wavering light of the miner’s lamp, frost coated her clothes and icy snot clung to her face, making her look like she’d been through a frozen hell and back.
“I hated that,” she said, collapsing. “Every second of it I hated.”
“But you’re here,” Pino said, grinning. “Not many people could have done that, and you did. For your baby.”
The violinist placed her mittens over her overcoat and belly, and closed her eyes. It took another twenty minutes until they could hoist up the packs, tasks made difficult by the poles and skis strapped to the sides, and another fifteen minutes for Mimo to come up the chimney.
“That wasn’t too bad,” Mimo said.
“You must have been tortured as a child,” Mrs. Napolitano said.
By Pino’s watch it was almost six o’clock. Dawn would come soon. He wanted them off the face of the Groppera before that. He tied them all back into the rope line, and they started higher.
At six thirty, when they should have been seeing the first paling in the eastern sky, it was suddenly darker than it had been during the entire ordeal. The moon had vanished. Pino felt the wind shift, too, out of the north now, and stronger.
“We have to move faster,” he said. “We have a storm coming.”
“What?” Mrs. Napolitano cried. “Up here?”
“This is where storms happen,” Mimo said. “But don’t worry. My brother knows the way.”
Pino did know the way, and for the next hour as daylight came amid flurrying snow, they made steady progress. The snowfall was good, Pino decided. It would help hide them from all prying eyes.
Around seven thirty the storm intensified, and Pino dug out a pair of glacier glasses his father had given him for Christmas, with leather side blinders to keep out the snow. Dark clouds enveloped the Groppera. Supercooled by the frozen crag above them, the clouds began to pour snow down on them. Pino fought the urge to panic as he used his ski poles to probe his way forward, intensely aware that the higher they got, the greater the likelihood of a false step. The wind began to swirl, causing whiteouts. The visibility was so low he was almost climbing blind, and it rattled him. Pino was trying to keep faith, but he felt doubt and growing alarm creep into his mind. What if he took the wrong angle on the route? Or made a misstep at a crucial time and fell? With his weight, they’d all be going for a neck-breaking ride. He felt the rope tug him to a halt.
“I can’t see,” Judith cried.
“Neither can I,” her mother said.
“We’ll wait, then,” Pino said, trying to keep his voice calm. “Turn your backs to the wind.”
The snow kept falling. Had the wind stayed a steady gale, they never would have made the catwalk. Instead, it gusted and died to almost nothing every few minutes. During those gaps where Pino could make out the route, they fought their way upward until he felt the ridgeline level out and narrow. Ahead fifteen meters, he could make out the catwalk and the snowy, concave mouths of the avalanche chutes on either side.
“We go one by one here,” he said. “See the white little bowls of snow next to the spine? Don’t step there. Just put your feet exactly where I do, and you’ll be fine.”
“What’s under that snow?” Mrs. Napolitano asked.
Pino didn’t want to tell her. Mimo said, “Air. Lots of it.”
“Oh,” she said. “Ohhh.”
Pino wanted to smack his brother.