K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [129]
Even more damningly, Marshall stumbled upon a pair of summit photos published in 1955 in the Swiss anthology The Mountain World, although not in Ascent of K2. One shows Compagnoni with his oxygen mask still on his face. The other is of Lacedelli, maskless, but with exactly the sort of ring of congealed ice on his mustache and beard that would have formed around a mask he had just removed. This discovery demonstrated almost beyond a doubt that the story of running out of oxygen was a lie.
In 2003, an American writer questioned Lacedelli about these discrepancies. “We were using German-made Dräger bottles,” the Cortina guide answered. “We didn’t know how to regulate them properly. We had too much oxygen—it burned our throats, and we bled from the mouth. That’s why we ran out.” This did not speak to Marshall’s point about the faster pace the two men would have had to manage after running out of oxygen.
Lacedelli also offered a new explanation for why they didn’t chuck the apparatus to lighten their loads: “I couldn’t take the bottles off because my fingers were frozen.” I don’t buy that reasoning, either. It’s the simplest thing in the world to take off the oxygen crate.
Asked about the seemingly incriminating summit photos published in The Mountain World, Lacedelli answered, “Compagnoni put his mask on for just five minutes, to warm his breathing. I just put up my hand. I didn’t want cold air in my throat.” That, too, doesn’t make sense. If you put a mask on your face when you’re not getting oxygen through it, it’s like breathing into a plastic bag. If you did it for five minutes, you’d probably pass out.
The American writer further probed Lacedelli about the strange cry at dusk, “Leave the masks!” In the original Italian edition of Desio’s book, the key phrase is “Lascia i respiratori!” Strictly speaking, “respirator” refers to the whole apparatus, gas mask and regulator included. Had Lacedelli meant the bottles alone, he would have cried, “Lascia le bombole!”
“What did you say when you called out to Bonatti at dusk?” the writer asked.
“Lascia le bombole!” Lacedelli answered guilessly. “Leave the bottles! Go down to Camp VIII!”
“Lascia i respiratori!,” then, must have been Compagnoni’s deliberate lie in 1954, as he was already planting the charge he would make through Nino Giglio ten years later, accusing Bonatti of siphoning off the precious gas in his bivouac.
At his worst, Ardito Desio emerges from the story of K2 in 1954 as a pompous dictator, a self-important and somewhat mad scientist, even a semicomic figure. If there’s a villain in the story, I’m afraid it would have to be Achille Compagnoni.
At the end of his interview with the American writer in 2003, Lacedelli sounded a wistful note. “For a long time after the expedition,” he said, “I was friendly with Bonatti. Then we stopped writing and telephoning. I haven’t seen him in 25 years.”
Lacedelli sighed. “This was not war. Millions of people fight wars, and then shake hands afterwards. I hope one day to shake hands with Bonatti.”
When all is said and done, what lingers about the first ascent of K2 is the feeling of just how sad a story it is. What should have been a great collective triumph ended up in backstabbing and endless controversy. The British team on Everest the year before had made its first ascent as a harmonious team. Decades later, the members of that expedition were still getting together in North Wales for reunions where they did a little climbing and a lot of nostalgic reminiscing.
Needless to say, the Italian K2 team never had a reunion. Instead, some of its members ended up suing each other. (Desio even went so far as to sue his own cinematographer, Marió Fantin, claiming that he’d withheld several reels of 16-millimeter film.) And