In remembrance of human audacity
At five years old, I contracted tuberculosis and spent a lot of time in bed. Before getting sick, my eyesight was excellent, but
when I went back outside, I had one diopter of myopia in each eye, a prescription that remained stable throughout
my life and was related to the scant three meters that separated me from the wall of my bedroom. That is to say, I could only focus clearly up to that distance, which for so many months was my whole world. My vision shrank when I stopped looking at distant horizons. We are currently marking our first year of coronavirus, and I have remembered that
story because the pandemic undoubtedly shrinks us. I say this metaphorically; I don’t mean that the various
and, for me, necessary lockdowns have caused a wave of myopia in the world (I was confined to bed for longer), but rather the mental shrinking that these dark times are imposing on us. Prolonged fear shrinks our perspective and our spirits. A stunted attitude that is actually alien to human nature. We are unbridled creatures, audacious to the point of absurdity, curious, always driven by the blind and mad impulse to go a little further. We have explored the entire planet on the back of that desire, and now we are embarking on the conquest of space. A decade ago, the Dutch foundation Mars One (now bankrupt and a fiasco) set out to send colonists to Mars by 2033.
In 2013, it asked for volunteers for this one-way trip and received more than 200,000 applications. More than 200,000 people willing to leave Earth forever, presumably condemned to a gruesome death. What strange dreams inhabit the minds of humans: I am both terrified and amazed by this feverish drive toward the impossible. Our need to push the limits.
It’s the same audacity that the Vikings who colonized Greenland (and ultimately perished) or the polar explorers possessed. I’ve always been fascinated by Arctic explorations, and also by that other vertical version of the icy and extreme journey that is the conquest of summits. I’m incredibly lucky to be friends with one of these remarkable individuals, an adventurer of indomitable courage, Chus Lago from Vigo, who, among other feats, was one of the first women in the world to climb Everest without supplemental oxygen (she used a tank for a couple of hours on the descent). And she did it all from an everyday life as relatable as anyone else’s. Her father was an administrator in the naval sector; her mother, a seamstress and homemaker. Chus became a senior sports technician and worked as an aerobics instructor from the age of 18.
But inside her burned the fire of challenge, the call of the unknown. And so she set out. She has not only climbed a handful of the highest mountains on Earth; she has also undertaken expeditions to Greenland, Lake Baikal, and Baffin Island, and crossed Antarctica solo, pulling a sled twice her weight, in a brutal two-month journey. She has written several books about all these extreme feats, beautiful texts, because she also writes wonderfully.
Without a doubt, she is the most original person I have ever met, and one of the strongest.
She has just released her latest work, The Mirror of Ice, winner of the 2020 Desnivel Prize. In the gloom of this pandemic anniversary, I started reading it. It is a beautiful book with reflections and stories from all her adventures, a text capable of opening even the most closed mind. Chus says things like: “I miss the stench of carbide stones, my hands numb from the low temperatures, the thrill of walking along the blue thread of the sky, the smell of my companion in the tent, the brutal fear that brings you back to life, living in constant intensity. The beauty of the cold:
everything that made me free.” And like: “To understand the summit, you have to look down, at the path back,
reaching the beach again; that will make us cry. It’s that fleeting moment of glory just before you die.” How good it has been to read this book now, to broaden my chest and my gaze, to feel the intrepid wind of the peaks whistling in my ears. No shortsightedness can withstand this reminder of human audacity.