Climbing Story in the New Yorker

After we had eaten, we started to drink. Wine is a more complex substance than one might think, and, above two thousand metres, and at close to zero degrees centigrade, it displays interesting behavioral anomalies. It changes flavor, loses the bite of alcohol, and regains the mildness of the grape from which it comes. One can take it in heavy doses without any undesired effects. In fact, it eliminates fatigue, loosens and warms the limbs, and leads to a fanciful mood. It is no longer a luxury or a vice but a metabolic necessity, like water on the plains. It is a well-known fact that vines grow better on a slope: could there be a connection?

It is a well-known fact that vines grow better on a slope: could there be a connection?

So when Levi's narrator says of Carlo dying in the mountains, that he died "doing what he had to do: not the kind of duty imposed by someone else, or by the state, but the kind one chooses for oneself," he's making a political point, namely, that it is possible to commit in a serious way to this sort of calling without falling into Nazism or Fascism. In a way, he's trying to reclaim serious alpinism for those who had opposed the Aryanisation of the Alps. That's why the punchline is so grim: In the end, of course, Carlo turns out to be a fictional character, plagiarized from a popular romance about sailors.