In the Land of Giants

  IN THE LAND OF GIANTS

  Gabi Martínez has published eleven fiction and non-fiction books. He is particularly well-known for his outstanding travel writing and literary journalism, and his novels have been selected as books of the year by Spanish literary magazine Qué Leer. Martínez was included in Palgrave/Macmillan’s list of the top five writers of Spanish Vanguardism in the last 20 years.

  Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with forty-something books to his name. His translations from Portuguese, Spanish, and French include fiction from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award, among others. Recent books include The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature and translations of novels from Angola and Brazil. He is current chair of the Society of Authors.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3065, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published in Spanish as Sólo para gigantes by Alfaguara 2011

  First published in English by Scribe 2017

  Published by agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency

  The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

  Text copyright © Gabi Martínez 2011

  Translation copyright © Daniel Hahn 2017

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  9781925321630 (Australian edition)

  9781925228717 (UK edition)

  9781925307627 (e-book)

  A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia the British Library.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  I see in you something that offends the common herd.

  Stendhal, The Red and the Black

  [H]as not the whole of history been a search for false monsters?

  A nostalgia for the Beast we have lost?

  Bruce Chatwin, Songlines

  Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top.

  When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

  When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall,

  And down will come baby, cradle and all.

  Lullaby

  I

  THE Fokker’s shadow stretches out over the slopes of mountains that are vast and mostly nameless. The small propeller plane moves between the huge anonymous peaks that rise up all around. They say that the Hindu Kush mountain range has more than forty peaks over six thousand metres high, majestic summits that harbour edenic lakes, glaciers, gullies, and virgin forests where a different kind of life is possible. More than forty peaks brimming with treasures … but eclipsed in a world that is only interested in the popularity of ‘the rooftops’: Noshaq, Istor-o-nal, Saraghrar, and the champion, the only one that is really ever mentioned, the transcendent one, the Tirich Mir.

  The rooftops.

  Their height has earned them a nickname and, through it, a place in the memory.

  It’s summer; there’s not a single cloud. The sun is already burning, but the snows are constant at the tops of the great bulks that form a chain enclosing life way down there, with a suggestion that, in the valleys, everything is at their mercy.

  Way down there.

  People are talking about Taliban fighters lying in ambush after the last offensive by the Pakistani army. There are wide-open plains that are unexpected and beautiful. Legends about which nothing is known are glimpsed on the other side of this geological palisade that preserves settlements which are barely more than medieval — legends that tell of Alexander the Great’s descendants, of animals facing extinction, and furtive creatures that hide to escape from man. Down there, they say, it’s sometimes hard to make out what exactly ‘wild’ means.

  Yes, the sun is shining.

  Seven years earlier, Shamsur had left his house just before eight in the morning. It was August 3rd. The sun was alone, high in the sky, but the last cool breath from the night had not yet evaporated, and Shamsur could still move about without sweating. As he walked down the valley path, he often put a hand to his well-cut blonde hair. Since Jordi liked him to look presentable, he had got into this habit, though lately he hadn’t accepted many of the zoologist’s commands — ‘I’m not a child any more, you know …?’ — and they often argued now.

  When Shamsur entered the garden, he was surprised to see everything just as they had left it two nights earlier. The dogs didn’t bark or come out to greet him, though he only noticed this later. He went up to the terrace, where the structure stood that housed the bedroom and the office. The two doors were still closed. He noticed that the bedroom window was half-open, and looked in. Neither Jordi nor Wazir, the boy in Jordi’s care, were in their beds. Shamsur took four steps over to the office door and called out.

  ‘Jordi!’

  Three times.

  ‘Jordi!’

  Shouting.

  ‘Jordi!’

  He saw two photographs that had been thrown down onto the threshold — portraits of two men with beards and pakhol caps. It was only a few minutes past eight, and the heat had not climbed all that high, but Shamsur’s body temperature shot up. His breathing laboured, he bounded down the stairs in three steps, ran about twenty yards across the land to the room where Asif, one of Jordi’s assistants, slept. He found the door open, but Asif was not there.

  Next door, in their stalls, the horses began to stamp the ground and snort with nerves that were abnormal for them. Shamsur’s armpits were already almost drenching his shalwar-kameez. It’s not right, it’s not right …, he kept thinking, so he jumped over the little wall that ran alongside the path and continued down, now as quickly as he could manage, passing the first Kalash houses.

  ‘Where are you rushing off to?’ asked Abdul, who was clutching a bag.

  ‘I’ve been calling Jordi, and there’s no answer. There’s no one in the house. He’s been kidnapped!’

  ‘What do you mean he’s been kidnapped?’

  ‘I’m going for the police. Come, come!’

  ‘I’ve got to take these medicines to my wife. She gave birth last night, and she’s in a bad way. As soon as I’ve given them to her I’ll go.’

  It took Abdul half an hour to get back to Sharakat House, his own house that he had been renting to Jordi for five years. At the door to the study, he found Shamsur with a doctor from the Civil Hospital and an officer from the Bumburet police station. They had come very quickly, Abdul thought. It looked like they’d taken advantage of the half-open bedroom window to get into the outbuilding.

  The sun from the splendid day was projecting beams of light through the gloom, making the dust visible. Jordi was sitting in the cowhide-upholstered chair facing his desk. His head was tilted to the right, so peacefully that Shamsur wanted to believe he was sleeping. As he came close, he saw Jordi’s open eyes. Shamsur was streaming with sweat, the drops running down his temples, tickling his neck, sliding under his clothes, although for that moment he had lost any sense of his body, aware only of the doctor who tipped Jordi’s head sideways to reveal his neck, in which he could see a hole and a cut from which there was no longer anything flowing.

  ‘He’s been dead fo
r hours,’ said the doctor, trying not to step in the enormous puddle of dried blood that surrounded the chair.

  Shamsur took his head in his hands, gasping, and tumbled out into the brilliant morning, blind, not only because of the sun. Seven years on, he still would not be able to remember what had happened until a good while later.

  The men who remained inside noticed that the execution had spattered one single sheet of paper on the desk and a framed photograph showing Jordi and Shamsur and two friends standing in front of a Ferris wheel in Paris. On the other table in the room, a small corner desk, a set of little notecards were scattered, each of them representing one letter of the alphabet, many of them also blood-stained. Not long before his death, Jordi had been giving a writing lesson to his young protégé, Wazir Ali Sha.

  ‘And the boy?’ asked Abdul.

  As he formulated the question, he felt a pang of anxiety.

  The disappearance of Wazir was of particular concern to him: he was the first Kalash who had lived with Jordi in fifteen years. Until then, the zoologist had reserved that level of intimacy for the Muslims.

  ‘We’ll have to look for him,’ said the policeman.

  But everybody there knew that Wazir was not the priority. His name would not go far. A Kalash boy — what repercussions could he have beyond the mountains?

  For now, though, there was the certainty of only one corpse. Jordi Magraner’s had been a death foretold, agreed. Months earlier, the Chitral authorities had warned him to quit the valleys because his life was in peril, the pressure of the fundamentalists being more than a little stifling, and it was hard to understand why he hadn’t left after the attacks on the Twin Towers. And not only that, but he hadn’t even made any effort to hide: he spent the day in discussions, brawls, disturbed by his wretched ideas of honour, of nobility.

  Proud. Enigmatic. Multifarious. Pagan. Passionate. A beast. These are words still used to identify him.

  ‘I told him to make himself scarce for a few months,’ mumbled Abdul to the doctor as he looked over the spines of the books on the shelves, whose titles he could almost recite from memory, so often had he been there — books on the Roman empire, on regional tribes, studies of the Kalash, and several volumes that discussed wild men. As though it were a joke. Wild men. All the headlines in the next day’s newspapers would repeat the same old story: ‘Yeti-Hunter Found Murdered’

  II

  JORDI Magraner had grown up in the more modest neighbourhoods of Valence. When he decided to fly to Pakistan, he had been living in Fontbarlettes, a banlieue of that city in the south-east of France. Fontbarlettes is the last neighbourhood of the suburbs before the countryside starts. It is a place where immigrants were already congregating in the nineteen-eighties, and which less than two decades later would help exacerbate the legend of cars getting burned out by armed youths disgusted at the lack of a future, their anonymous lives, the feeling, almost the certainty, of not existing.

  In any case, Jordi was planning a different way to confront the oppressiveness.

  Ever since his childhood, he had preferred to escape into the mountains, his anxieties taking him further and further from the tarmac. He would enter the woods in search of animals to observe; he learned to trap them, and became a proper little boy scout. Later, he began to investigate the fauna more methodically, and his discoveries earned him some attention from experts on invertebrates …

  ‘… and then he abandoned it all: his studies in zoology, the Natural History Museum, and he went to Pakistan … to look for the yeti.’

  The story suited the strange atmosphere that had been created. It was a winter night that was as warm as usual in Barcelona. I had gone just to hang out for a bit until it was time for my monthly poker game, and I went into that café where I recognised a friend from whom I hadn’t heard any news in months. She was with another woman, a publisher with whom I’d occasionally exchanged fleeting words at cocktail parties. When I greeted them, I was surprised to see real shock on both their faces.

  ‘We were just talking about you.’

  Some stories are hard to believe, and this is one of them. The aura surrounding it has since the beginning had a kind of fable-like quality to it, something marvellous about it. It doesn’t matter that the narrative would later darken: it is touched by the unusual.

  ‘Right — that’s why I’ve come.’

  ‘No, seriously,’ said my friend. ‘Marina has a story, and she’s looking for a writer to tell it. The story is … uncommon.’

  ‘Do you have ten minutes?’ asked Marina.

  And she explained the whole thing about the young naturalist from the banlieue, and how Jordi Magraner had also got involved in humanitarian convoys in Afghanistan, and how he ended up becoming someone important to the Kalash, an ancient people of the Hindu Kush who, in turn, had very distinctive characteristics of their own.

  ‘Just imagine: three thousand pagans who live in valleys surrounded by Islamic fundamentalists.’

  But I didn’t need any more incentives. From the moment she mentioned it, I was already caught on her hook.

  ‘The yeti,’ I repeated, managing a faint smile at the scale of that fantasy.

  I asked for a few weeks to dig up a little more about Jordi and his gun-less murder.

  There were references to his collaboration with the Alliance Française in Peshawar. It was said that he even had dealings with Shah Massoud, the area’s legendary anti-Taliban resistance leader. On the question of the nature of his death, the newspapers did not agree, wavering between a political crime and a crime of passion.

  My small investigation confirmed the story of a life uncommonly linked to nature and adventure. Every new page about Jordi opened up worlds that escaped the bounds of convention, and it seemed impossible that a single individual should take so many and so often outlandish initiatives. But that was how it was. The doors half-opening, one after another, with light seeping out from each, and names and smells so unrelenting that they provoked me to do something unprecedented in my case history.

  Up until that point, I had always written books that had been born from inspirations that were originally my own, and I had never been able to figure out what it was that drove people to devote years of their lives to following in the footsteps of others. What satisfaction could they find in leeching off other people’s lives? Those were the terms in which I judged their undertakings. Jordi provided an inkling of an answer when I discovered that the superficial tracking of the footsteps of the yeti-hunter, far from fulfilling me, set off questions that demanded that I keep moving forward, that I learn more, and seal certain commitments, some of them so serious that they would force me to put my own life in danger.

  Writing Jordi’s story would be an extreme bet. His adventure, his obsession, could not be conveyed at all satisfactorily without me travelling to Pakistan, specifically to the region that political and military analysts in 2009 were still indicating was the operational base of Al-Qaeda. And on discovering that I was contemplating a visit to that western version of hell, renouncing for the first time my principle of avoiding situations of obvious risk, on registering this decisive change and, above all, the need to take that journey, I felt myself intimately connected to the man I was investigating.

  In 1987, Jordi left his banlieue, all set to achieve something great, to be seen.

  Born in Casablanca, Morocco, he had inherited his parents’ Spanish nationality. At the age of four, he moved with his family to Valencia, though the Magraners soon opted for the economic benefits that French Valence would secure them. Jordi arrived there aged six. That was where he grew up. He spoke Spanish, French, and a fair bit of English, and he would later learn Khowar, Kalasha, Urdu. But where was he from? Despite what his passport concluded, in Pakistan his identity had always proved inexplicably imprecise, and perhaps that partly explained the complications that arose when the time came to repatriate h
is body.

  Those marginal origins, the scarcity of money, and the lack of institutional support really endeared Jordi to me, though what most excited me was his idea of throwing himself into the pursuit of a myth — the certainty with which he surrendered his life to a cause with no apparent meaning, which, contrary to all predictions, would open up unimaginable rifts in the French scientific establishment.

  On the other hand, Jordi was reviving the Romantic figure of man within nature, bestowing a new perspective on it. He went beyond the gaze of Walt Whitman, of Henry David Thoreau, or Chris McCandless — whose life Jon Krakauer wrote about in his superb Into the Wild — bringing to it the novelty of a bond that was more dynamic. He wasn’t going to merge with the myth — nature — but he was going to seek it out, to rummage around in it, with the aim of extracting a secret. Jordi’s ideal was a thing with legs, it was a ‘fugitive’ being, and following its trail had allowed him no less than to live the life others had merely dreamed of. The Nobel laureate Patrick White once wrote that it’s enough to have dreamed. I don’t agree. And I don’t think I’m taking too big a risk by saying that Jordi would not have agreed, either.

  III

  IN Tibetan, yeh means ‘wild beast’ and teh, ‘craggy place’. The yeti is the sum of these two meanings, plus a legend. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of pieces of testimony in which the speaker insists they have seen the creature; some have even had an encounter with it, and the descriptions more or less coincide. The yeti dwells in high-altitude, hidden-away mountain areas, and, according to witnesses, it is a heavily built biped completely covered in fur, though there are variations in its appearance depending on the area where it was sighted.

  The creature’s name varies from place to place, too. Russians and Mongols call it ‘alma’ (wild man). In North America he is known as ‘bigfoot’, while in the Hindu Kush they refer to a different physical trait, calling him ‘barmanu’, which can be translated as ‘the sturdy one’, ‘the fat one’, or ‘the muscly one’.