The Mountain

by Massimo Donati

  About The Book

  It’s only baby-children who always do what they’re told. Non-children decide when to obey, and they know how to disobey. This is the last day of our life as children.

  1981. Twelve-year-old Roberto, returning to the mountain village where he spends his summer holidays, renews his friendship with the intense, brooding Mattia. Bound together by contempt for ‘baby-children’ and a thirst for grown-up adventure, they drive each other to test their courage and daring. But then they decide to take on the mountain, and the expedition ends in tragedy and guilt.

  Thirty years later Roberto is an art dealer in Zurich. When his father dies he is forced to confront the unresolved issues of that distant summer, to unearth a guilt kept secret for too long. But to do this he needs Mattia. And to go back to the mountain, one last time.

  Contents

  COVER

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  PART ONE: THE LAST SUMMER, 1981

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  PART TWO: BIRD TRAP, 2015

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  PART THREE: THE HIKE UP THE MOUNTAIN, 2015

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  To Eva, with love

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual places or events is purely coincidental.

  The first thing he remembers of that last summer is the dark glasses. The ones his nonna shoved on to hide her tears before getting into the baby blue Citroën Ami 8 that Carlo drove as though it were a toy.

  In the grassy little valley where the Hotel Miravalle had been nestled since forever, they were the only people to be seen. Him, his grandmother and his father, departing. The unusually desolate scene might have been explained by the previous night’s storm, but he knew the real reason. He looked around; he had the feeling he’d landed in that television show where an epidemic has killed nearly everyone and the few people left alive are wandering around deserted cities looking for their friends and relatives.

  That was how he felt: a survivor.

  It was hardly surprising that nobody was here to see them off, after all that had happened. People preferred just to let them go, like a black cloud blowing over. In the brief period between night and morning, every single one of them had worked out their own explanation for the facts and, although the different versions did not add up, there was common consent about the appropriate attitude towards their departure. Don’t look, don’t say goodbye, don’t get involved. Stay out of it.

  And thus, without realising it, leave it all unresolved.

  It created a fissure that widened and swelled; that nothing would be able to close, not even time, not even the defects of memory. Not even the compulsory oblivion of forgetting.

  His father put the two leather suitcases in the boot, went around to the door of the driver’s side and, as though only then remembering him, made a curt gesture, instinctive and yet utterly unlike him. An overwrought jerk of his arm that said, Well, come on, but simultaneously, unexpectedly, betrayed his desperation and revulsion. He disappeared into the car and started the motor.

  Roberto stood for a few moments staring after him, as though the sight of that unheard-of detail had left an echo on the air that had to be let ring until the very end.

  He threw into the little fountain the twig he had used to clean his sandals and jogged, with the light, spontaneous movements typical of his age, towards the car. But there was no trace of lightness in him; perhaps there never would be again. He became aware of this when he noticed—as the car turned around to take the sealed road—that up above, on the dark wooden balcony that ran around the hotel, a figure had appeared. The squat, ungainly form of a mountain woman leaning timidly out to watch them leave. Old Emma had been unable to resist the urge to rest her gaze upon them like a curse, the colour of darkness.

  They looked at each other, just for an instant.

  It was then that he realised with a sense of finality that they, the Beltrami family, were not the survivors.

  They were the perpetrators.

  As the car began to travel along the strip of asphalt Roberto closed his eyes, wondering if children could be granted forgiveness. If there was the possibility of being saved, if only on the grounds of age. And he wondered if it would be possible to draw a line around his recollection of the previous day, as though it were a cliff or a crater, in order to keep it quarantined, out of his own and others’ lives, so that it would stop hurting. Tamed, if not embraced.

  He did not know the answer.

  The blue car, no longer a trivial, comical thing, now definitively a mass of rubber and iron, began to descend the road’s hairpin bends.

  PART ONE

  THE LAST SUMMER, 1981

  Walking in Father’s footprints, then over his inert body, one of us goes into the other country. The other one goes back to Grandmother’s house.

  ÁGOTA KRISTÓF, The Notebook (trans. Alan Sheridan)

  1

  As they climbed the hairpins, the baby blue Citroën Ami 8 scraped around the curve in first gear, sounding like an old man hawking up phlegm, then glided along the straight stretches, suddenly freed, with a sharp hiss of indrawn breath. The same thing at the next curve, and so on for the hundred bends that separated the valley from the peak. Roberto echoed it under his breath, the rapidly alternating scrape and hiss, revelling in the pretence of driving the little toy car his father was steering with one absent-minded hand on the wheel, looking at Nonna, then at him, then back at Nonna, then him and occasionally the road, as though the road were not very interesting and certainly not very important; and in any case one hand was clearly sufficient because the other was required for tracing in the air the outlines of words and concepts that might otherwise stumble clumsily halfway, whereas this way they rolled out smoothly. Lia, meanwhile, held between her cool, composed lips a long, pure white cigarette that never burned out, her arms crossed and her silent eyes fixed on the road. Only the occasional sharp comment would suddenly disrupt the stampede of her son’s words, creating a moment of bewilderment that would immediately settle back into the unstoppable flow.

  The sun lit up the mountain air: a cosmic blue that seemed at times as though it might burst over the car windows—they were half-open, which is to say as open as they could go—and flood the whole vehicle, viscous as paint. Until that happened, Roberto kept his head pressed to the glass, gulping in hiccups of a breeze that was starting to carry the scent of pine needles and hay laid out to dry.

  This kind of day—the ascent, the company—he liked everything about it. Everything. Three hundred and forty-four days earlier he had left these mou
ntains behind with a deep sense of nostalgia, and with the solemn promise to return that he had made every summer since he’d learnt to remember. Back then, the sense of routine had been a reassurance, but also a source of latent expectation. As though in his head, behind the mundane daily concerns, a silent, untiring stopwatch had begun a countdown. Now the clock was close to zero. As in other years, these last moments were suffused with a subtle, painful pleasure, a wild itch that inflamed his insides and his thoughts. It was so intense that if he’d really been driving, the feeling would have forced him to turn around and go home. But it was his father at the wheel of the almost-toy car that was drawing them, one curve after another, towards their destination.

  He surrendered to the rigid back seat in the certainty of the joy that awaited him, and went back to eavesdropping on what Carlo and Nonna were discussing so heatedly.

  ‘I’m telling you, there’s a risk we’ll end up too small.’

  ‘Your father says if you grow too much you lose control of what you’re doing, you do it badly, and then the good name and the good faith you’ve built up over time are lost in a flash. He says one bad book is all it takes.’

  ‘He’s got an artisan’s mindset, but the publishing market has changed. And it’ll continue to change. We have to be ready.’

  Carlo turned his head for a moment and smiled at his mother. ‘That’s why you sent me to university.’

  But Lia didn’t pick up on the attempt to defuse things.

  ‘Soon you’ll be running the business entirely and you’ll be able to make your own decisions. But you can’t ask your father to change his way of thinking, not at his age.’

  ‘It might be too late by then.’

  As he said this, they looked at each other and fell silent, as though something inauspicious had been said. Beltrami Publishing was not just the family business they had built up over three generations, the entire family’s main occupation and daily preoccupation. It was almost like an extended-family member, an uncle by marriage or an adopted nephew who comes to be regarded as a younger brother or son: who inspires the same sense of responsibility and in whom the same hopes for the survival of the dynasty are placed.

  ‘What does Anna say?’

  ‘She says we should set fire to the existing books one by one, and then burn down the business so we can never print any more, and then the villa. Not forgetting to summon all the Beltramis together first so we can lock ourselves inside before lighting the match.’

  ‘As fair-minded as ever.’

  ‘She’s always said that books are lies trying to defy the passage of time. At least she’s consistent.’

  ‘But she reads a lot…’

  ‘She says you have to know what lies people believe. Plus, some aren’t too serious.’

  ‘Consistent without overdoing it. But that’s Anna.’

  At that point they smiled at each other, but Lia at once became serious again and turned back to her son two, three times, as though she had an urgent question and didn’t want to miss her chance, but hesitated nonetheless. Eventually she asked, in a soft voice: ‘And between you two…Have you decided?’

  Carlo gestured to the rear-view mirror with his chin to indicate his son, who was staring out the window but still listening.

  ‘Let’s not talk about it.’

  They were silent again. Carlo looked in the mirror once more and said, ‘Well then, champ. Are you ready for the banquet of mountain life?’

  Roberto nodded lazily without making eye contact. When his father spoke to him like that, the jokey attempt to connect, he immediately became embarrassed.

  ‘Robbie, listen to me.’ Now his tone was different. ‘You’re almost twelve years old. You’re a big lad now, you don’t need to be told how to behave, so I won’t tell you.’

  He looked across to Lia for back-up but she was impassive, smoking, the cigarette almost down to the filter at last.

  ‘I have to ask you to do some things for me.’

  Roberto looked up towards his father, the words catching him by surprise. As usual, he had found a way to grab his attention.

  ‘The first is to look after Nonna. She’s old, there’s things she can’t do anymore and…well, let’s just come out and say it: she’s losing her marbles, poor old dear.’

  Roberto laughed with his father as Lia shook her head vehemently, the way she always did. ‘It’s official: my son is an idiot.’

  ‘So don’t tire her out too much and when she says no, just go along with it even though she’s nuts.’

  He leaned back and ran his finger along Roberto’s nose, to let him know it was a joke.

  ‘The second favour I’m asking is to always be open with us. If possible, with everybody. In the mountains, there are a thousand dumb and dangerous things to do—there’s a hundred thousand in the city—and it’s not always easy to make the right choices. Up here you’ll often have to take responsibility. Neither Mamma nor I will be around to decide for you, and that’s a good thing, it’s like a test. But what I’m asking is that you don’t hide anything from us. If you make a mistake, if you do the wrong thing, own up to it. Even if you don’t like the truth, don’t try to avoid it or cover it up or tone it down. Half-truths are sometimes more damaging than big lies. Face up to the truth—with us and with anybody you meet. And we’ll be right beside you to protect you, no matter what happens. Do you promise me you’ll always keep that in mind?’

  Roberto looked his father in the eyes for an interminable moment. Then he nodded, and lowered his head for the last time.

  And finally, there it was. Madonna del Bosco. A hamlet in the municipality of Rovereto. Little more than a grassy plain cut down the middle by the road; a handful of houses running alongside it, each no more than two storeys high with a garden whose beginning and end were hard to discern, if they even had such limits. And then off to the side, at the end of a little laneway, there was a small cluster of buildings somewhat closer together, as well as hay barns, a joinery and a pensione with a few rooms, after which point the mountain really got serious and rose straight up, making no allowances for anybody. Off to the other side, separate from everything, was the same hotel as always, identical to the previous year, still with its back to the precipice. The rest was mountains, alpine pastures, woods, paths and small hamlets below and on the opposite slope, away in the distance. Around those parts, at least for now, nature was still coming out on top.

  The car made a partial turn, off the only sealed road, and began bouncing along the dirt track in front of the hotel, an old building a few storeys high with a steeply sloping grey slate roof. It had few ornate details but there were flowers on all the balconies and each year it looked like it had been freshly painted—and maybe it had been—so that it had an airy, smiling quality to it.

  The Ami 8, with Roberto rattling around on the back seat, drew decisively to a standstill in front of the steps at the entrance, and the horn brought old Emma and her daughter Rosa running.

  Carlo leapt straight out, pulling with him his Kodak super 8, which lay ready on the back seat. ‘Okay, now come towards me.’

  ‘No, Signor Carlo, you mustn’t put yourself out, let me do that!’

  Emma and Rosa Slat scoffed—politely, as they did everything—and approached with a few shy, half-hearted protests then, as always, played along with the harmless little charade. Rosa hid behind her lowered eyes as the 8 mm drew in for an extreme close-up, while Carlo did the live voiceover: clumsily, holding the presenter’s mike in one hand so it kept finishing up in shot. But then this woman—you might have thought she was mute, sculpted by nerves as much as by the wind, with a proud head of coffee-coloured hair without a single strand of white even though she had two children and a life of hardship behind her, weighing on her, bending her spine—this extremely shy woman looked up and stared, for an interminable handful of seconds, straight into the camera. A long close-up, just as though she were a professional actress. First serious, then smiling, her expression opening
up to become dazzling, revealing an imperceptible hint of knowing—even of malice, one might have said of any other woman. But this one looked back down at the ground and commented as she ran her fingers by her ear: ‘I haven’t even done my hair.’

  Carlo stopped his narration when those eyes appeared in the lens, and simply filmed her. Then, when the moment had passed, he emerged from the spell and resigned himself to the usual greetings.

  As he did every year, Carlo filmed Lia and his son’s settling-in phase: their lunch together, the goodbyes before he returned to the city. The images were the result of an uncontrolled mix of spontaneity and artifice which—although artistically they reached no great heights—might allow them in future to look back with tenderness and indulgence on their holidays and, at the same time, on the work of the director and his assistants.

  SUMMER 1981—ARRIVAL AT MADONNA DEL BOSCO ROLL 1—8 MM KODAK

  1. Long shot, hand-held from the car, side-on. A stretch of wheat and sunflower fields as far as the horizon. In the distance, a few farms can be seen in the saturated early afternoon sun. Silence.

  2. Handheld panoramic. The car window comes into view, then the highway on one side, the inside of the Ami 8 car. From behind, sitting in the front seats, Carlo and Lia are arguing. Carlo gesticulates animatedly. They ignore the camera. Silence.

  3. Detail. Lia’s profile is gradually revealed from around the seat. She has a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. Silence.

  It is partly burnt out.

  4. Close-up. Carlo leans between the front seats, stretches out a hand to the camera, fiddles around and says something, partway between severe and light-hearted. Silence.

  Sudden buzzing and an irritating whistle.

  5. Detail. Roberto’s hand comes into sight holding a wide, flat microphone. The cable of the mike disappears out of shot. Carlo: If you’ve attached it properly we’ll even get sound this year. Otherwise why are we making all these silent films? What are we, Laurel and Hardy?

  The camera dances around with laughter.

  They laugh. Roberto laughs very close to the microphone.