BIG INTERVIEW


dignity, today set off with a fresh pair of Nike trainers. His gentle handshake is that of a famous climber whom a million jealous grips have previously tried to paralyse, and his movements have a tai chi quality to them, slow and strong, with remarkably expressive wrists which twirl as he speaks.


There is a Buddhist festival taking place in the museum this evening – a converted castle and onetime summer home of the local prince bishops – and a steady stream of people intercept us as we stroll to the café to talk, through frescoed arches and cool stone colonnades. As befits a man who was hiking with Angela Merkel last week (“We had a wonderful evening… I cannot tell you what she told me about Trump”), Messner is gracious and statesman-like with fans who approach him, though he does send one grovelling autograph hunter off with a line in German that I assume it’s best I don’t understand. And he has achieved this A-list status via climbing, part of a post-war mountaineering meritocracy which could propel a man from a poor village in the Dolomites to the very highest echelons of European society.


Messner’s early life, however, was far from fairy-tale. He was born in 1944 in an isolated alpine region squeezed between fascist powers. His father was a Nazi and Reinhold’s


HIS GENTLE HANDSHAKE IS THAT OF A FAMOUS CLIMBER WHOM A MILLION JEALOUS GRIPS HAVE PREVIOUSLY TRIED TO PARALYSE.


later radical individualism, the dashing solos and contempt for large scale expeditions, must stem in part from his rejection of his father’s party political excesses.


But in the beginning there were the simple joys of the mountains of the South Tyrol. We sit at a corner table in the now quiet museum café, and Messner tells me about growing up in the lean post-war years. “I came to climbing very young. In the valley I was coming out from we had no swimming pool – I still cannot swim – we had no soccer pitch, we had nothing. There was only the possibility to express our bodies as human beings on the rock. At twelve, thirteen years we went together climbing these Dolomite walls, 5-600m, not on high difficulty in the beginning but to find out the route, to cope with bad rock, to cope with bad weather. I was doing first ascents at 13, 14 years. This bred the instinct I had to survive on the high mountains.” In the grip of a prodigious talent, upwardly mobile in the bohemian climbing circles of the hippy period, Messner was transported from provincial obscurity to celebrity in a short space of time. By 1969, he was one of the best climbers in Europe on both rock and ice, making his name with solo ascents of the then hardest routes in the Alps, including the North Face of the Droites and the Phillip Flamm on the Civetta. Despite often climbing with his younger brother Guenther he became, in his own words, “an absolute solo traveller”. Messner would soon take his audacious solos to the highest peaks in the Himalayas. But his first visit, in 1970, was as part of a lavish, old school Karl Herligkoffer expedition where climbers might offer prayers to the mountain gods and hymns to the fatherland. The Teutonic politics and rigid hierarchies of the job were never going to sit well with an idealistic young Tyrolean like Messner. But then their objective was the then most significant unclimbed mountain wall in the world, the giant Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat, and an invitation was not one many young climbers would turn down. Peter Habeler however did pull out (Habeler later joined Messner on the first oxygenless ascent of Everest), leaving a space to be filled at the last minute by Guenther Messner.


46 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.


After weeks of action on the face, Reinhold – perhaps predictably – headed out from the team’s attack camp alone. He was chased at a distance by Guenther who by the time they joined forces near the summit was unwell and hallucinating. After an uncompromising bivouac, the siblings decided to risk a traverse off down the easier but as yet unclimbed Diamir flank of the mountain; Guenther was lost during an epic descent. Reinhold spent so long searching among the crevasses, stumbling around the mountain in a delirious state, gripped by an unimaginable sense of grief and responsibility, that he lost seven toes to frostbite. To make matters worse, his integrity was soon cast into doubt by his fellow expedition members who believed that his ego had gotten the better of him: that he’d tried the mind-boggling Nanga traverse in order to make his name, to put himself up there with legendary first ascensionist Herman Buhl, and that he had – disastrously – dragged his ailing brother down with him. Such fairy-tale adventures in


surreal alpine realms, with family tragedy, immense physical suffering, controversy, envy – these are the ingredients of myth, and Reinhold was cast forever as the mythic hero. Yet, if he fitted a classical type, Messner was also fortunate to be present at the dawn of a new era.


This was the age of The Beatles and early colour TV, and the then new media machinery catapulted the floppy fringed young Italian mountaineer to a celebrity unique in climbing.


It is easy to forget, among the complex dramas of his later years, that Messner had made his name as a rock climber. Any ambitions he had in this area were cruelly cut short on Nanga Parbat – literally, with the amputation of all the toes. “I could not wear a rock shoe,” he tells me, shifting his Mercedes keys across the table. “Also in my finger, they cut a little bit of the bone, so if you are crimping it is painful. You cannot be a good climber if you have pains. “I had many projects in the Dolomites before going to Nanga


Parbat. Also The Fish (Via Attraverso il Pesce, E5 or 7b+ on the on the Marmolada), I just took down the line. In the end it was too late,” he says somewhat wistfully. “For me a line on a Dolomite rock face is a piece of art. It tells


a story in a way, to the best of my abilities.” Messner is lucky to have found his artistic medium so close to home. But had he always conceived of climbing in such elevated terms, as something finally more than just messing around in the mountains? He shakes his head. But by 1971 he had already set down something like an artistic credo in his essay Murder of the Impossible, which is critical (‘…they have a horror of deviations’) of those who pursue the ‘diretissima’ or direct line to the summit above all else. At times this early essay sounds more like a philosophy of life. ‘We young people don’t want a mountaineering code,’ he writes. ‘On the contrary, ‘up there we want to find long, hard days, days when we don’t know in the morning what the evening will bring.’


In Britain, we are suspicious of athletes who offer an opinion on matters outside of their hyperventilated worlds, wanting to keep them firmly in their box. But then climbing is not your average sport and has always offered a home to thinkers, like the Sussex economist Alfred Mummery whom Messner very much admires. “One of, if not the most important climber ever,”


P Messner in Brunico in the Dolomites.


PHOTO: YUKI YAMAMOTO.


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