In the Land of Giants Read online

  Naturally, the barmanu is similarly hairy, and apparently it gives off an unbearable stench.

  There are fuzzy recordings and distant photographs of yetis, but none reliable enough to guarantee its existence, and so the majority of the world remains convinced that this beast belongs to the limbo of fantasy.

  ‘If you don’t go to sleep, the yeti will come and eat you all up,’ parents in the mountains tell their children. Because to them, the creature is real. And they grant it the status of monster.

  IV

  THERE is a flight of stairs leading down from the entrance hall to the Magraners’ apartment. The front room is covered with photographs, paintings, and drawings that conjure up family members, places, and festivities, but your eyes are drawn to the picture-frame that occupies the centre of the large sideboard. This frame is decorated with roses from the garden, and it holds a photograph of Jordi atop a white horse and wearing a pakhol, the typical Chitral cap so popular among the Pashtuns. It is a kind of discreet altar to which someone has affixed a little card that reads: ‘Eternity receives you and keeps you in her universe of Peace.’

  Sitting in front of this picture, Esperanza and Dolores talked for two-and-a-half days, drinking kir, eating cheeses, Saint-Félicien and Saint-Marcellin, cooking chicken in the oven. That first afternoon, Esperanza emphasised the mistrust with which she, along with the rest of the family, still regarded me.

  ‘When we got your letter, my brother Andrés said, “Throw it away.” There have been a lot of people who’ve come, asking for pieces of information, bits of paper. We go to the trouble of getting all the information together, we hand it over, and then they disappear. It’s always the same. We’re tired of it.’

  It had taken me nearly three months to persuade the Magraners to let me at least visit them, and now that I found myself at last on the other side of the door, I was resolved to go through with my plan.

  ‘I’m sorting out Jordi’s diaries, between 1987 and 2002,’ Esperanza said then. ‘Up till last year [2008], I just couldn’t find the strength to touch his papers … I’m arranging them year by year. The good thing is he used to write quite a lot. Some documents have been lost, but still there’s a lot of material. That is good, right?’

  A football banged against the garden window.

  ‘Damn Muzzies!’ exclaimed Esperanza. ‘They’re everywhere, these people, always bothering us …’

  ‘No,’ said her mother. A silhouette crouched down on the other side of the curtain, then straightened up with the ball. ‘They’re good people, these people — our neighbours have never given me any cause to complain. They say hello politely, and they’re always very nice to me. We mustn’t go confusing one thing with another.’

  Later, Dolores took out all of Jordi’s letters that were piled up in a chocolate box, and read out odd lines. Sometimes she’d laugh. Sometimes she would fall into a long silence. At night, she let me sleep in the bed that had been her son’s. The bedroom has space for a small wardrobe, three cheap bookcases, a little table, two chairs, and a bed, pushed into the corner by the barred window that looks out onto the street. This made the mattress an exceptional platform from which to get closer to Jordi’s world. Only the cleanness slightly belied the impression of being in a place that had not been touched in years. All manner of things poked out between the books and files, with no particular sense of order: a quiver filled with arrows, a bow, trophies, pots, a wooden Kalash container for melting butter and cheese, an otter-skin, a homemade slingshot, horsehair, daggers, swords …

  On the second night, before I went to bed, Esperanza said: ‘If you go on with this … we’ve got the diaries and a whole heap of photos we keep in two iron cases. We bought them in case there was a fire or anything like that.’

  On the last afternoon, his brother Andrés showed up. He is not very tall, his head is shaved nearly smooth, and he has sinewy arms that must be strong, yet nothing about this is intimidating. His overall appearance is softened by a face that gives an air of something approaching fragility. One of the photos in the living room shows him with Jordi, as boys. In another, Andrés is posing on the wing of a Russian Yak-11. We talked about planes for a bit; Esperanza had told me they were what excited him.

  ‘What’s serious has got to be taken seriously. That’s something I learned from aviation,’ said Andrés at one point. I took this as an invitation to broach the subject.

  ‘Yes … you know why I’m here,’ I said. ‘I know it isn’t pleasant for you to go back over this subject, but soon I’m going to be settling in Valence for a few weeks—’

  He raised his hand in a gesture for me to stop.

  ‘Look, I’m going to tell you straight: I don’t know you, and I’m not going to talk to you because I don’t trust you. I’m fed up of all these people coming here wasting our time. And the only thing I feel is rage …’ He tensed his arms and the veins in his neck. ‘All I want to do is get hold of a shotgun and start shooting. Since August the fourth I’ve been at war with our authorities, who’ve been so … so modern.’

  Esperanza interceded. She spoke well to him of the work we had been doing these past days. She calmed him down and inoculated him with the trust I’d earned — not too much of it, we had only just met, but enough for Andrés to grant himself permission to try again with one more intruder. His desire to repay his brother’s memory and find an explanation for the crime were still too strong for him. The next morning, shortly before I left, Andrés appeared at his mother’s house with a small folder.

  ‘Here — something to help you pass the time on the train.’

  On my way back to Barcelona, I read twenty devastating pages, which included the six hypotheses floated to explain Jordi’s murder.

  Espionage was considered.

  Debts.

  An argument with a representative of the regional government, who had ended up taking justice into his own hands.

  There was also a suggestion that Jordi might have been involved in a political plot with Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, and that this was why he had been eliminated.

  Or that he’d been killed by Shamsur, who was jealous at seeing Wazir occupying his former position as protégé.

  There was a sixth option, the most controversial of them all, the most damaging, and which Andrés set out in nine lines written with a chilliness from which no neutral reader might have guessed that he was the dead man’s brother, and that he’d loved him the way he loved him.

  V

  WHAT is a monster?

  In his Systema Naturae, the botanist and physician Carl von Linnaeus identified six divisions of Homo sapiens: ferus, americanus, europaeus, asiaticus, afer, and monstrosus. The Homo monstrosus, according to Linnaeus, is characterised by being, essentially, extraordinary, the possessor of some radical abnormality — a being outside the normal. It is the only one capable of suggesting unlikely hybrid shapes, natures that are truly strange — remote beings, savage ones, which do exist, even if perhaps no one has seen them yet.

  Experts assure us that the earth holds thousands, possibly even millions, of creatures as yet unknown to man.

  Invisible species.

  Contrary to appearances, the planet does have vast stretches of territory about which very little is known, from Papua New Guinea to Amazonas, the Great Barrier Reef, the uppermost part of many mountain ranges, and such a number of ocean chasms inhabited by creatures that would surprise us, some might even terrorise us, although it may be that somebody has imagined them already.

  What do we believe in?

  What do we not?

  What is a monster?

  VI

  ‘WE are flying over Arabia. The plane is going low enough that we can see the flames of the oil wells, a series of small points of light against a black background,’ wrote Jordi. And he looked back to the screen in the Boeing 747 where the Sherlock Holmes movie was conti
nuing, which he’d given up on, owing to not having enough English. No doubt Pakistani English will work out better for me. He glanced at Yannik, who was cleaning the lens of one of his cameras. With such an amazing head of hair, there was no doubt he would come out well in the photos that the Dauphiné Libéré reporter had taken a few days earlier. They publish the article tomorrow, thought Jordi. And then: Tomorrow’s my birthday.

  On 6 December 1987, Jorge Federico Magraner was to turn twenty-nine, and he was going to do it in Islamabad. As he flew there, the presses of Valence’s main newspaper might already have been printing the article about the zoologist and the photographer who were travelling to the valleys of northern Pakistan in search of new animal species — birds especially — and reptiles and amphibians, as well as planning to study the region’s goats, tigers, bears, and wolves, and the snow leopard.

  ‘We’ll be armed with nothing more than knives, and with bows and arrows that we’ll make ourselves, using the materials of the forest,’ Jordi had told the journalist. ‘We want to live in total autonomy, without a guide or an interpreter, with just wild horses and dogs for company. We’ll feed on what we find on the land by hunting and collecting the forest’s plants and fruit.’

  He made no reference to the mission’s main objective: finding traces of feet that were humanoid but not human … Jordi had not wanted to emphasise this part, because in reality he wasn’t at all convinced about the existence of wild men. He just wanted to ascertain whether there was the least bit of truth and biological coherence to these beings, or whether the stories about them were no better than well-told fantasies.

  As he passed through the airplane door, he was hit by a wave of dense air that, while not hot, made him think of summer, shivering with pleasure and concern because the heat disturbed him, consumed him. It had so often dehydrated him and made him ill, but what did that matter now? He was far away, someplace else.

  His taxi joined the caravan of vehicles, and progressed slowly down the broad avenue that crossed Rawalpindi. He lowered his window halfway. On the streets, there was a constant coming and going of people who, at times, were barely able to move. Others squatted in the doorways of shops or on the edge of the ridge full of cracks and potholes that passed for a pavement. Of course, his banlieue of Fontbarlettes looked better than this lumpy concentration of horrendous low buildings. He wasn’t about to draw comparisons between France and Pakistan; but the thing was, in the number of smiles on the street, there was no comparison either. The looks in the Asians’ eyes, their gestures, the way they moved … not even the number of soldiers deployed here diminished that chilled-out feeling. It was obvious they lived differently here.

  Inside the taxi, he was even more aware of how badly he needed to abandon the oppressiveness of the neighbourhood where he had spent his whole life. Enough of feeling like a pauper from out on the margins — a little boy scout content to explore the Vercors. In his French neighbourhood, it was as though everything happened on a small scale, and, what was more, you were supposed to be grateful for occupying whatever little space you had been allotted.

  ‘A boy scout,’ he muttered, lowering his window all the way. He stuck his head halfway out, and like this he enjoyed taking in the dromedaries, the V-shaped flight of the pelicans, and the ballet of taxi-drivers around him, as well as the roughness of the people and even the filthy streets.

  They spent their first days between Rawalpindi and the pleasanter, more civilised Peshawar, until the eleventh of December, when they boarded the Fokker 27 that does a daily flight on the route to Chitral.

  They flew between majestic, snow-covered mountains. He had studied the mountain range at his feet so many times he could practically recite the names of the main peaks. From the air, the airport looked small and basic. The plane cut out its engines in the middle of the valley, beside the Chitral river, which roared with the force of winter. The houses were scattered over the big snowy plain at the feet of hillsides criss-crossed with impressive striae, predicting the paths that the waters would follow when the thaws came.

  A jeep took them to the Great Bazaar, the avenue that runs through Chitral, and Jordi felt disappointed. The wooden shacks were interspersed with badly set stone walls, everything was disgustingly dirty, and the damn humidity meant that the snow was filled with impurities, which all combined to give an impression of filthy, grimy mud.

  One of the numerous Chitrali carrying rifles and carbines pointed towards where they might find a driver to take them to the Kalash valley of Bumburet.

  ‘I’ll be going as far as Ayun,’ the driver warned them. ‘You’ll have to change jeeps there.’

  They were sharing the car with another passenger.

  ‘Hello,’ the man introduced himself. ‘I’m Prince Hilal Ahmad Khan.’

  Jordi shook his hand firmly. Well now, a prince, no less! He was dressed no differently from the others, a simple long tunic and a good jacket, but he was a prince. And he travelled in a shared jeep. Jordi was going to have to be ready for the unexpected, to learn new codes. When he saw the way Hilal looked at Yannik, he wondered what kind of impression they would themselves make on these people.

  Despite his discretion and his fine manners, Hilal had not been able to prevent himself spending rather longer than was proper examining Yannik’s face, thinking at first that he was a girl. He had never seen men with such long hair. When he spotted traces of a beard on Yannik’s face and heard his manly voice, he chuckled to himself about the oddities of the west. In any case, he was won over by such boldness and by the appearance of these adventurers, who had shown themselves willing to talk.

  During the journey, Hilal enjoyed himself rather a lot. He liked Jordi’s jokes and his intensity, the way he jabbered away in broken languages to make himself understood, and so when in Ayun they failed to find a vehicle to take them up to the Bumburet valley, the prince invited them to spend the night at his house.

  Hilal seemed like a decent guy, and that was the way local people behaved there, wasn’t it? Hospitality was sacred in the region, or at least they had read as much.

  ‘Very well, it would be an honour. Thank you.’

  Hilal’s father was delighted to put them up. He spoke reasonable English, and the arrival of foreigners meant a way for him to practise and learn things.

  Prince Hilal was a Muslim from the Katour clan, a member of the ancient Chitrali royal family. It is true that when the kingdom of Chitral was converted to just one more district in the north-western frontier province, the government abolished all the old titles of the nobility; but history weighs heavily, and princes and kings still exist here, free men and countryfolk tied tyrannically to the land. Hilal belonged to the lineage of heirs … now fallen.

  Thin, with a hooked nose and a sparse beard, he moved gracefully. He frowned exaggeratedly when he was showing interest, although he did not usually look you in the eye. He said that one day he would like to build a house with his son Ahmed.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll put it up down there,’ and he pointed to the bottom of the slope, where a rocky bed stretched out, a kind of antechamber to the great Chitral river where prospectors still found little nuggets of gold. The river disappeared into the fissures of a single solitary peak that emerged clearly defined, sublimating the idea any child would have of the word ‘mountain’, and closed off the valley like a natural door.

  Hilal’s property included fields of wheat, corn and rice, vegetable gardens, and other gardens filled with trees. He worked as the head of the forest rangers, and he was crazy about zoology, so guests and hosts would talk about life in the forests.

  They dined by candlelight on bowls of rice with chicken in sauce, and slices of onion with lemon. As a dessert, dried fruit — pomegranates and apples — were served. But Jordi and Yannik were not sufficiently reassured by the warm welcome. The locals were known for their skill in pretence, and everywhere you went you heard stories of fight
ers who were fleeing the war against the USSR in Afghanistan taking refuge in the valleys, people who were armed and furious and hungry, who were certainly marauding about the area. What was more, the Pashtuns and the Punjabis had not shown themselves to be too friendly to the Kalash. The insulting arrogance of the Pashtuns got on Yannik’s nerves — were they trying to provoke them? … And, after all, they’d only met this so-called Prince Hilal hours earlier … Despite their attempts to hide it, their hesitation was patently obvious. But they would not reject the hospitality. That would be an ugly, ungrateful gesture; besides which, at that time of the night, where else were they to go?

  ‘He will sleep with the two of you,’ the father said, indicating a boy. ‘If you want anything, you ask him.’

  The boy led them to the outbuilding reserved for guests. From the window, it was possible to see the Tirich Mir.

  ‘They say the peak is where the queen of the mountain fairies lives,’ said Jordi.

  Then he lay down, holding onto his Muela knife from Ciudad Real, making it clearly visible to the boy.

  ‘Yannik,’ he murmured.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Keep your hand on your knife.’

  Yannik heard him without answering. They managed to sleep.

  As the thin light of dawn was starting to pick out the outlines of the objects inside the cabin, Jordi awoke. He was the first. He went quietly outside. The mountains were dawning, unveiling their thick, woody foliage. The last of the morning humidity formed sporadic blocks of mist that hung over some of the slopes. He heard the cry of birds of prey. The drama of the sight overwhelmed him. He inhaled deeply, and greeted the sun according to the pagan rite. How many times must he have greeted the sun … and yet this was undoubtedly different. As though it were more … more … true.

  He recalled other springtimes, when he would celebrate the arrival of the good weather in the mountains or at the house of a friend who had a large amount of land. He saw himself engaged in ancestral games, pulling a rope tightly against the opposing team, playing rugby in the original style. He himself had made offerings of food and flowers, he had sung and danced, and when night fell he had lit bonfires to jump over. For some reason, he had fabricated a pagan flag, which consisted of a large yellow circle on a red background.