Beyond it was Entreves and then La Palud, where we arrived at first light. A red-and-white tram went steeply up a mountain cable. The first ride would be at eight a.m.

We drank coffee together in the lodge as old men in wool ski knickers did their stretches, waxed skis, looked out the large windows at the mountain, wind whipping the snow that had settled in its rocky creases, the snow like smoke, drifting and resettling. The sky was an opaque white with a certain brightness to it. A storm was coming in.

Pa.s.samontagna, the balaclava was called in Italian, and in this case, Gianni needed it not to obscure his face like the people at the demonstration in Rome but to protect it from frostbite.

The tram would take him in three stages up to Punta Helbronner. From there he would ski the Vallee Blanche down into Chamonix. No pa.s.sport checks, no police, no one. A no-man's-land of snow, wind, steeps. The creva.s.ses the gentle man with the nice apartment had warned of. The precarious chunks of ice. Gianni would pa.s.s from Italy into France, to some kind of exile.

I had the keys to the Fiat in the pocket of the down parka the man had loaned me, a curious sort of lending, never meant to be returned. The clothes under it also borrowed, their faint lavender smell from her soap a reminder of Bene.

The wind was picking up, blowing snow sideways. Before Gianni got on the tram, I asked if he really knew how to ski.

The question was a joke, but I had wondered it for part of the drive, up and up in elevation. A guy who had worked on the a.s.sembly line at a tire plant might possibly not ski.

"Good enough, I hope," he said, and smiled.

I followed the signs toward the tunnel that went under Mont Blanc and through the border.

The signs were in French, the border guards, in their black leather gloves, puffing little gasps of steam from their mouths as they spoke to me. One of them flipped through my pa.s.sport, stamped it, waved me on.

As I entered the Mont Blanc tunnel, under its perforated stream of white lights, I already sensed what would happen. I felt cut free, under the glare of those runny lights, in a tunnel through the bottom of a high peak. The lanes, one in each direction, were so narrow that each time an oncoming car pa.s.sed I thought we would collide.

Fifteen minutes later I exited. I was in France. It was snowing.

At Chamonix, I parked where the man in Rome who'd helped us, or helped Gianni, had told me to, near the little Montenvers train station, a sign that said MER DE GLACE, the train's scenic destination.

I got out of the car and tipped my face up into the blank white sky. There had always seemed something miraculous to me in the way snowflakes formed. As if they simply materialized about twenty feet above the earth, into these falling lacy cl.u.s.ters. The snow came toward my upturned face in a continuous symphony. Big dry flakes. There was no wind. Snow fell and collected in drifts. I was supposed to meet Gianni at the bottom of Les Planards. I asked a man sc.r.a.ping a walkway with the blunt end of a flat shovel. I spoke no French, just "Les Planards?" He pointed. It was a bunny slope, trees on both sides. Mont Blanc, high above it, was shrouded in clouds.

It would be hours, given the tram rides, the skiing. I walked to a little bar next to the train station. Heard only French. Chamonix, with its hotels, mountaineering shops, bakeries, was so different from the tiny station past Entreves, on the Italian side, where I had waited with Gianni for the tram to open. I felt again what I'd experienced as I entered that tunnel through the mountain, a sense of being cut free, plunged into the unknown.

I ordered a coffee with milk. Sat at a table and waited. All the time spent in ski lodges growing up, the dreamy feeling of a crowded open room when you're little and tired, people clomping up and down metal stairs in ski boots. Our coach buying us hot chocolate that I let burn my tongue, too impatient to wait until it properly cooled. Trapped inside lodges during a whiteout. When our race was rained out. Or when I'd crashed, did not finish and wasn't getting a second run. Disqualified and wasn't getting a second run.

Gianni and I had been awake all night. I let myself sleep, my face in my arms, there at an empty table in the bar next to the little train station.

I woke up to an enveloping din. The lunch crowd. A man and woman came and sat at my table, speaking something Scandinavian. I zipped the parka and went out to wait where I was meant to, at the bottom of Les Planards, where Gianni would ski down. I stared up at the mountain, blearily visible through the wet mist of snow-loaded clouds. I walked back and forth to keep warm. Gianni did not appear.

Wind gusted, stirring the snow-laden branches of the pine trees that cl.u.s.tered along the sides of the slope. The wind moving those trees sent an exhilarating loneliness through me. I looked up, waiting to see the red jacket. Snow stung my face. Visibility was poor. Vapory drifts blew across the open slope. The beginners had now abandoned it. Almost no one was skiing.

For a brief period snow stopped falling and the clouds parted, revealing Mont Blanc, my first real view of it. The sun burst in between low, lumbering clouds, which cast dark shadows over its glaciered face. I tracked them and hoped, as if the shadows were themselves faint images or messages of Gianni. Arriving soon.

Mont Blanc, above, was still and serene. A steep white desert peopled only by clouds and snow. Jagged and stark. It refused my question, Where is he?

Late afternoon. The opening in the clouds closed, obscuring the top of Mont Blanc. Snow was coming down. Windows glowed yellow. Two children ran, shrieked, looked up, mouths open to melt falling flakes on their tongues.

How long was I meant to wait?

Dusk, and my feet numb as I paced at the bottom of Les Planards, the run going dimly gray, harder and harder to see.

The yellow lights of Chamonix were blazing now. There was a smell of woodsmoke.

The woman in the movie who had thrown her life away had waited, but for nothing specific. In hair curlers, sitting in a bar. For a man to pick her up, buy her a beer, take her somewhere. The curlers that meant some occasion to come, not yet named.

I wasn't in that kind of time, curler time.

I didn't know if Gianni had ditched me, or had an accident, fallen into a creva.s.se. I knew only to wait.

Soft clumps of snow dropped from tree branches. I heard a door open and shut. A bus motored by, with external slots filled with skis, black clouds of diesel behind it, illuminated by an orange streetlamp.

It was almost dark now, and much colder. I could see the jagged lines of Mont Blanc's peak, its steeples and snow-filled cracks. A huge mountain, dark and present, but nothing like human presence. It was a monolith of doubt.

You can think and think a question, the purpose of waiting, the question of whether there is any purpose, any person meant to appear, but if the person doesn't come, there is no one and nothing to answer you.

It's dark. I hear a small group of men call to one another in German, see them pa.s.s by, their pom-pom ski hats bobbing, a squeak of fresh snow under their boots.

They're gone now. The wind whistles through the trees, branches floating up and down with slow, wild elegance.

I'm alone at the base of the run, almost too cold to move.

The answer is not coming.

I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away.

Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I would like to thank Susan Golomb, Nan Graham, Marisa Silver, Nam Le, and most especially Jason Smith, each for invaluable insights. Thank you also to Daniel Burgess, Claudio Guenzani, Hedi El Kholti, Remy Kushner, Knight Landesman, James Lickwar, Vittorio Morfino, Susan Moldow, Katie Monaghan, Gianluca Pulsoni, and the Santa Maddalena Foundation.

The monologues of the character Marvin are inspired by the voice-over in Morgan Fisher's elegiac and beautiful 1984 film Standard Gauge.

The cover image is from issue 10 of I Volsci (March 1980), a newspaper of the Autonomia Operaia group I Volsci, named after its headquarters on Via dei Volsci in San Lorenzo, Rome.

LUCY RAVEN.

RACHEL KUSHNER's debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of a California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. It was named a best book of 2008 by The Washington Post Book World, San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and The Christian Science Monitor. She lives in Los Angeles.

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JACKET PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS RED.

NOTES ARCHIVE, FROM THE NEWSPAPER I VOLSCI (MARCH 1980), ISSUE 10.

COPYRIGHT 2013 SIMON & SCHUSTER.

ALSO BY RACHEL KUSHNER.

Telex from Cuba.

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