When I saw the chamois, I sang. They were at the height of the path, but when they perceived us, or heard us, they climbed a good bunch of meters. Agile and light. They were a cub 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 perched on a rock. Perhaps it was safer not to lose sight of us, to keep our positions. The adult tilted his head in a graceful gesture that could be mistaken for curiosity. The little boy sat down with a movement that could have been read as disinterest. But the curiosity or disinterest would have belonged to the person playing them, not necessarily to the two beasts.
I stopped for a moment, but I didn’t stop singing. Partly because I was already singing before I realized they were there. Partly to not seem suspicious, stealthy, or anything reminiscent of a focused hunter. And partly because of that almost childish and so human thing of wanting a living beast to perceive you, to impose 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 they know the child exists, and for a few hundredths of a second they should care a little. I also thought that they must not have heard the sound of vocal cords trying to tune up on that cliffy and wild house of theirs many times.
The song was by Mishima. “Now comes the miseries of love, the moment that never appears in songs. Give me a little more.” They were too high for me to perceive their reaction. I continued walking and humming, the melody had stuck with me. The chamois did not move from their rock, alien to the concept of misery or love, alien to the possibility of the sum of the two concepts in a miseries of love, and alien to the potential to transform love, miseries and miseries amateurs in songs
At the Cremal bridge we ate two orellanas and at the Ruira fountain we took the last sip of cold water before arriving in 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 and everything.
