Silvio in America del Sud

Naples, 23rd July 2007
South America is a special place. No doubt every stay in that continent - for short that was - leaves deep notalgic feelings. So deep that some people decide at some point to return back and live there for good.
Well, it is not my case - not yet, however! - but the sense of deepness I fell right now has stronger reasons than the simple nostalgy of a place, which is by itself already very strong. It is perhaps the lack of a more comprehensive condition, made by times and actions.
Many people asked me: "Silvio, weren't you missing your family, the friends, a fixed place where to stay? " Sure, but only during the pauses between two mountains! Everytime I was climbing a mountain nothing was missing because it was like the entire planet belonged to me. Perhaps sedentarity and nomadism are for me two alike conditions, one dependent from the other.

The Alps are the most beautiful montains in the world. It is a compact, dense, beautiful and aestethical range. The Andes, are the longest mountain range on Earth but do not have Alps' grace and beauty. But in South America I made the encounter with a dimension of alpinism totally different from what I had known so far. And not only because I made a major jump in the quality of my climbing level. It was trekking across the rugged Patagonia, climbing desperate routes in Peru, enjoying the desolate Atacama desert or travelling across the Bolivian plateau and climbing in the Cordillera Real that I truly encountered the mountain. My previous idea of physical confrontation against the mountain became suddenly obsolete.

My feet are still sore. The toes have been burned by the cold and even just walking is painful. But I cannot think to anything else than climbing. As soon again in good health I will start climbing using all of my spare time. I need to improve, and a lot, in rock-climbing; I need to improve technique, style and endurance. The objective is to have within the next sixteen months enough skill and try to climb the Cerro Fitz-Roy, probably one of the most beautiful mountains in the world. A vertical rock face, the most vivid expression of the pure essence of Patagonia. A land I left just a few months ago.

My return to the so-called active life will be in France. I leave tonight for Paris and from tomorrow I will have to hurry up to reinsert myself in the productive western society.
Returning to the "productive life" is right now an unavoidable choice, but I feel the real life is not there. Not for me, however. I don't know the psycology that explains my research of the limit. I just know that closer to that limit I feel alive. I do not have any joy in privations, in the pain, in the solitudine or when there's just an hair between me and the death. But it is only at proximity of the limit, when I move that frontier a little further away, that I can get the sense of the the human existence.

The toughts that express a value should not be understood but lived (H. Kessler, May 1986)