In the shadow of the Tepui

(excerpts from the story “The Whistling Woman”)

We unload our material and once the Cessna has taken off again, all around us a disquieting silence falls; one of those silences that is more than just the absence of noise, that echoes around your head and buzzes in your ears.

If it weren't for our guide Leonardo, the Pemòn village would seem completely uninhabited. Later, as evening falls, some children grant us the paradoxically pleasant feeling of being watched.

All around us, the typical environment of the Venezuelan savannah, dotted with lush forest, a few huts, and tepuis, those odd-looking mesas with their flat tops and vertical walls irresistible to climbers.

(…) We have come to climb Acopan tepui, and in the morning we find that our group of porters for the journey is made up of women and children; there's one girl of six or seven years of age, carrying on her back a baby just a few months old, and along the way the mother-porter feeds her from her swollen breasts that are sweaty from the effort and from the sultry heat. As a woman and a mother, this troubles me, I feel like we are violating her motherhood, but I also realise that if I tried to help her my intentions might not be understood, and I might just cause her embarrassment.

(…) In the evening, as they return to their huts, they stop at our base camp, curious to find out how it's going; by day they watch us on the wall. Who knows if they wonder why we want to climb up their tepuis.

(…) Last night they heard my desperate whistles, because I got lost in the forest; they ask me to whistle for them, to make those strange sounds with my mouth, which make them smile, because they are unfamiliar to them.

(…) Many days later, when I return to the village, as if by magic it is populated with the noise and chatter of people; I take a wash in the river, and spot the children peeking at me; I hear them whistling and laughing joyfully.

Antonella Giacomini, age 48, has travelled the Americas, exploring and climbing in Alaska, Canada, North America, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Chile and Argentina.

Always with her Dolomite on her feet. igm