When I saw the chamois, I sang. They were at the height of the road, but when they perceived us, or heard us, they climbed a few meters. Agile and light. They were a baby and an adult. The calf had small horns. In five seconds they climbed what would have taken us ten minutes to climb. Or more. But they didn’t hide. They were watching us from a pointed rock. Maybe it was safer not to lose sight of us, to have ourselves situated. The adult stuck his head out in a funny gesture that could be mistaken for curiosity. The little boy lay down with a movement that could have been read as disinterest. But curiosity or disinterest would have belonged to the person interpreting them, not necessarily to the two beasts.
I stopped for a moment at the foot of the rock, but I didn’t stop singing. Partly because she was already singing before seeing them. Partly to not look suspicious, stealthy or anything that would remind you of a focused hunter. And partly because of that almost childish and very human thing of wanting a living beast to perceive you, of imposing your presence on it for a moment, like when a child scares a bird, throws a stone at a cat or kills an insect, just so that they know that the child exists, and for a few hundredths of a second they have to care a little. I also thought that in that house of his, ravine and wild, the sound of vocal cords trying to inton must not have been heard many times.
The song was by Mishima. “The misery of love arrives, the moment when it no longer serves the songs. “Dona’m one more mica.” They were too far away for me to notice her reaction. I kept walking and humming, I had gotten hooked on the melody. The chamois did not move from their rock, oblivious to the concept of misery or love, oblivious to the possibility of the sum of the two concepts in a misery of love, and oblivious to the potential of transforming loves, miseries and lovemaking miseries into songs. .
On the Cremal bridge we ate two dried apricots and at the Ruira fountain we took the last drink of cold water before reaching Queralbs. It had taken us about seven hours to go up and down; what those two chamois, who had already forgotten forever about our existence and my strange sounds, would have done in an hour. Maybe less.
