The Mountain

by Massimo Donati

  CUT

  6. Full-length shot. Autogrill service station: asphalt. Stationary car. Passers-by. Between two parked cars, Roberto and Carlo are leaning their backs against the car and biting into their panini. Sound of cars and jumbled voices of travellers.

  Carlo speaks to Roberto, who nods as he chews. Carlo (eating): I’ll send you to the States once you’ve finished high school and when you get back you’ll work with me. You’ll take care of young adult fiction. A young adult choosing books for young adults. You like the idea of that?

  They look towards the camera.

  Carlo: Mamma! It’s not just any old camera for taking photos!

  Carlo speaks to Lia. Roberto waves. Lia (off screen): Oh, so it takes a genius like you to operate! Come on, pose for me.

  CUT

  7. Half-length shot. Carlo puts his arm around Roberto’s shoulders. He squeezes him tight. Then he takes the microphone like a television presenter. Carlo: This is my son, Roberto. We’re going to the mountains for the summer holidays. He’ll behave himself and act responsibly just like at home, even though I won’t be around.

  Carlo passes the microphone to Roberto, who speaks to camera with a certain confidence. Meanwhile, Carlo follows the speech, amused. Roberto: This is my father, Carlo. The most intelligent man I know. He’ll go back home and be irresponsible and stubborn as always but there’s also a good side to him: he usually keeps his promises!

  Carlo takes him gently by the head to interrupt him.

  Roberto yells and laughs.

  CUT

  8. Long shot: the car climbs the hairpin bends that wind between meadows and pine forests. Soft sound of the wind.

  9. Half-shot: Roberto and Lia pull their luggage out of the boot. They disappear onto the steps of the Hotel Miravalle. Meanwhile, Emma and Rosa arrive. Both are embarrassed. Rosa runs her hand through her hair. Lia: Instead of playing movie director you could help your mother with her luggage!

  Emma: No, Signor Carlo, you mustn’t put yourself out, let me do it!

  10. Close-up: Rosa looks serious and stares into the camera for a long moment. Then she lowers her eyes. Rosa: I haven’t even done my hair.

  11. Long shot: Roberto steps out of the hotel into the small square, and looks around him, earnestly, as though searching for somebody. He seems disappointed. He spots his father. Rosa: Welcome back.

  CUT

  Roberto: Are you still filming?

  ‘And don’t forget, always listen to the crazy old lady. You know what Nonno says, don’t you?’

  Roberto, his eyes lowered, had the zip of his sweater in his mouth, and was pulling it up and down while the engine emitted a low hum like that of a departing ferry.

  ‘That the mountains are beautiful but treacherous…’

  He chanted the maxim without interest and then looked up into the eyes of his father and said all in one breath: ‘Next Sunday you’ll come with Mamma?’

  Carlo, in the driver’s seat, looked away from his son’s face and stared straight ahead, through the windscreen, in a deep, unspoken thought that took him who knows where. Finally, he smiled.

  ‘Of course. If she’s better, she’ll come up with me. You know how much she loves you, don’t you? It’s just that she’s not in great shape at the moment, she prefers to take it easy.’

  ‘And we’ll go up to Black Peak?’

  Carlo laughed to buy himself time, and reached through the car window to place his left hand on Roberto’s head, his fingers squeezing a handful of that dark brown mop of his as he always did, as though he wanted to lift him off the ground.

  ‘Of course we’ll go up to Black Peak. If the weather’s good. And we’ll take Mattia too. This is the year; you’re big boys now.’

  Roberto rarely allowed himself to express excitement about anything, but on hearing this he couldn’t keep the smile off his face. Then, his wariness returning, he fixed merciless blue eyes on his father. ‘Promise.’

  Carlo withdrew his hand, embarrassed, as though the words had broken a spell. He gripped the steering wheel and rested the other hand on the gearstick.

  ‘I don’t like it when you’re demanding, Roberto.’

  ‘I’m just asking if you meant it…what you said.’ His tone was suddenly plaintive, caught out in a recurring and intolerable weakness that perhaps only he and his father could recognise and hate.

  ‘Well, all right. If the weather’s good.’ He looked at him one last time and started the car.

  As it turned around towards the road, Roberto stayed there in the middle of the grass and continued to stare at the car, expressionless, until it disappeared behind the trees at the last bend at the bottom of the plain.

  Back in the hotel he walked through the bar, looking around him. It was deserted. He continued through the other rooms in the common area, the small TV room, the games room. Only then did he return to the tiny lobby that led to the dining room. Rosa and one of the staff were setting the tables for dinner. As soon as he saw her Roberto stopped in his tracks and stared: not intrusively, but waiting for her to notice him and understand. She only glanced at him, and for a few moments kept on with what she was doing, a mechanical dance of gestures that was beautiful to watch: napkin, fork and spoon, knife, glasses, plate. When she had finished, she stopped for a moment and looked at him once more.

  ‘He’s not here today. He’s taking Dino to their grandmother’s down in the valley. You’ll see him tomorrow.’

  She didn’t wait for a reply, but went back to setting the tables with the same precise, habit-formed gestures. The boy turned, with a look of resignation, and ran up the stairs.

  That evening Roberto and his grandmother went to bed early, as they always did. Lia had excused herself and gone outside briefly to smoke her long white evening cigarette; then, once she was back in the room, they turned out the light.

  She slept heavily and quite loudly, but Roberto liked the sound of her breathing in the dark. Once his eyes got used to the gloom he continued to stare at her on the other side of the room. Meanwhile he fantasised about all the things they would do over the coming days, planning in his head an imaginary schedule that he would never be able to realise. He lay there, waiting for the day ahead, feeling a disquiet he was reluctant to acknowledge. It hung there, little more than a shadow.

  The doubt that was so hard to admit even to himself was clear: how could he be sure things hadn’t changed? That everything could be repeated with the same fluid intensity as in previous years? He’d turned eleven some time ago, and at home and at school everything had changed—why should it be different here? In his memory, the days spent in the mountains seemed brightly lit, moving in their purity. But tomorrow? Not seeing him on arrival, as he had every other year, was in its own way a painful change.

  He looked one last time at the room. It was the same one as always: the same furniture, the same colour walls, and Lia, despite her age, did not seem any different from the previous year.

  2

  The next day, quite early, Roberto was waiting on the front steps of the building, watching the road that led towards the hotel.

  While he was staring off in that direction, a small black patch jumped out of the woods and crossed the grass edging, sniffing and hopping from one spot to the next. The squirrel stopped to inspect some acorns lying on the pavement—some split open, others blackened—and it was no small task because there were quite a few of them. The squirrel rolled them around, sniffed them, tried to pick one up, then let it go. It didn’t seem very good at it, and anyone who knew about squirrels would have been able to tell from its size and its movements that it was very young.

  The sawmill’s shiny pick-up appeared where the road curved out of the woods and came tearing down the road loaded with logs. It was heading straight for the squirrel, which was calmly continuing its investigation. Roberto watched the scene closely, no particular expression on his face. He was trying to calculate whether the squirrel would get squashed. He estimated the pickup’s rout
e and was certain it would hit the animal. About forty metres to go now, a few seconds, and the pick-up didn’t brake or slow. Just as the fat front tyre was almost on top of it, the creature leapt gracefully out of the way, onto the grassy border on the side of the road, and the vehicle passed with less than thirty centimetres to spare. As soon as it was gone, the little rodent resumed its work on the acorns, unfazed.

  ‘It’d be so cool to shoot it. Bang and it drops dead.’

  Here he is, thought Roberto.

  He’d sat down next to him without making a sound. Roberto looked at him for a long time, as though to properly imprint the image in his head once more. For him that was the same as giving him a hug.

  Mattia Slat.

  He hadn’t changed much since the previous year. A bit taller than Roberto with long hair falling into his eyes and down to his shoulders, a ring in one ear, long-limbed but solid, like a miniature adult. He had his mother’s lean, nervy musculature—you might mistake him for a Slav—and the face of an angel. A permanently pissed-off angel.

  And that voice was his and his alone. A ten-year-old with a deep, hoarse smoker’s voice, though smoking had nothing to do with it. Someone once told Roberto that with a voice like that, something must have gone wrong when they pulled him out of his mother’s belly. They had never talked about it. Mattia’s voice had always been that way and, truth be told, nobody really took any notice. Besides, up in the mountains people don’t talk much.

  Beneath his mop of hair, Mattia also wore an involuntary smile; it had slipped out. He was looking straight ahead to hide his joy, and his embarrassment about his joy.

  ‘Do you know how to shoot?’

  ‘Yeah, a bit. Leo showed me. I’ll show you one of these days.’

  Mattia called his father by his name, as Roberto did with his.

  ‘I’ve only ever tried an air gun.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Roberto nodded. Then they sat in silence. They were together again.

  They stayed there for a few minutes, crouched on the steps enjoying the direct morning sun.

  ‘Is the magazine still there?’

  Mattia didn’t answer right away.

  ‘I haven’t checked.’

  Entering the woods always put him on edge, but this time he didn’t even think about it because Mattia was there and he felt sure his friend knew every footstep and tree trunk, even though that couldn’t really be so.

  Then, once they’d arrived, they realised they hadn’t brought anything to dig with and over the course of the year the earth had compacted under a layer of new leaves. They studied the burial spot and looked around them, not knowing what to do.

  ‘How do you want to do it? Let’s use our hands, we don’t have anything else.’

  After twenty minutes, they were still digging; their hands, covered in dirt, diving into the hole and bringing out ludicrously small handfuls of earth, because it became even harder further down, and then they looked at each other and laughed. When they pulled out the biscuit tin, it was covered in rust. Roberto turned it over in his hands for a moment as though that, more than anything, showed irrefutably that a year had gone by. They opened it and saw that through the cellophane covering the booklet was intact. They exchanged the complicit smiles they always shared in moments of glory, then they removed the plastic. The damp had fused the pages into a puffed-up block. The boys tried to turn them: they wouldn’t open, they tore. Now all that was left of those lovely illustrations—about which Roberto had fantasised for the past year, with naked women in almost every frame doing things he still didn’t quite understand—was the faded colour cover.

  ‘What a shitty idea to bury it in the woods. Shitty, shitty idea.’

  It had been his idea. While he persisted in trying to peel the pages apart, trying to save some, Mattia sat calmly on the ground chewing something in the side of his mouth.

  Suddenly Roberto, conceding defeat, stomped on it, tore it apart and threw away the largest, most intransigent chunk. Mattia waited for him to finish and then gave him a crooked smile. Roberto snorted and collected himself.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  They went back the way they had come.

  ‘We can get a thousand more around the place, don’t worry. That’s all anybody reads in the valley.’

  He wasn’t saying it as a joke, it was analysis, a point of fact.

  Roberto laughed. ‘Yeah, who cares. It’s just that that one was ours.’

  We spend the whole day making the treehouse. The one we built two years ago has come down. We choose a big, old tree and get started.

  We take the good wood from the old one to the new one. We gather dry branches and put them under the tree.

  Once it’s all on the ground we remove the leaves.

  Then we start building.

  We decide we need to commit to memory how it’s done. So then we shout out loud one word, which is the name of the operation. The second one of us repeats it, also shouting, then we shout the third bit together. The first few times we can’t stop laughing and the first one of us chokes and the second almost falls over.

  We put down a layer of crisscrossed branches to make the roof and lay down a blanket we stole from the hotel.

  We climb down from the tree together so we can see the result. We’re satisfied. We carve our initials into the wood along with the threat of a painful death.

  We go back up into the treehouse and pull out the Notebook.

  The first rule of the Notebook is that both of us can write in it.

  The second rule of the Notebook is that if there’s something to write, or not write, we decide together.

  The third rule of the Notebook is that we write only what’s true for us and that’s it.

  We go over other secret rules for writing, and we learn them off by heart, then we decide not to write them down and we swear we’ll never reveal them.

  We make a list of things to write for today. From now on we’ll write things down as soon as they happen so we don’t forget.

  We want to play war games, us against everybody, to try out the treehouse, but we don’t want to tell people where it is and besides no one round here is worth the effort.

  We decide we’re better off doing the floor of the treehouse so then it won’t prick us in the bum every time we sit down.

  Tomorrow we’ll make a rope ladder.

  We take branches and stones up into the treehouse and we train in defending ourselves in case of attack. But it’s no fun without an enemy. We make a list of essential weapons. And a list of possible enemies.

  We lie down on the blanket and decide to take turns telling an amazing piece of news that the other one doesn’t know. We stay quiet for half an hour. Then one of us says: I passed the first grade of middle school. I went on the underground in Milan. I steered the sailboat by myself. My nonno, Mamma’s father, has started to get really seriously sick and maybe he’ll die.

  The other one of us says: I went hunting and I shot the gun. My father took me on his motorbike at 255 an hour. I had to do the fifth-grade exam again because I was sick one year. We bought a colour TV so now we can see Switzerland. I had a glass of wine all to myself. I saw how you kill a pig. If you touch the blood it’s boiling hot.

  They would have gone on for hours more, if only to be together, but suddenly, when the shadow of the mountain had begun to fall on the woods, Roberto heard Lia’s voice in the distance, like so many other times. It was barely a whisper through the trees yet it was enough to make Roberto leap down from the tree, followed by Mattia, and run towards the hotel, which was actually less than three hundred metres away.

  ‘Roberto! Roberto! It’s time, come on.’

  If you listened closely, Lia sounded a little tired. But she never lost her spirit. When Roberto was in sight of the hotel he signalled to say he was coming and she stopped calling and went back inside. The boy said goodbye to his friend with a nod accompanied by a look that was halfway between bye see you tomorrow, and disap
pointment at the interruption—and the fact that jurisdiction over their lives was still unavoidably in the hands of adults.

  Mattia replied to this by blowing away a lock of hair, and then he ran towards home.

  3

  In the hotel restaurant a sudden silence had fallen, an unreal, overblown silence, as though even the little children, the dimwitted ankle-biters, as Roberto put it, knew what had happened and were as struck by it as the adults.

  About three weeks had passed since that little boy—in some place he couldn’t quite remember but it was definitely a godforsaken dump in the middle of nowhere—had fallen into an artesian well.

  Roberto didn’t even know what artesian meant and he’d never asked, perhaps not to ruin the allure of it. But every time he heard the word, which everybody kept repeating obsessively, it gave him the impression of something terrible, evil and in some way supernatural. Artesian wells, he’d understood, were things you find in nature, and here nature was showing its ruthless side, its cruel desire to work evil. He reasoned that they must be something like quicksand, which he knew for sure was living sand capable of swallowing you whole, same as pythons. But he couldn’t think of any other instances.

  Before that, as the big square television showed a succession of politicians’ faces—ugly and unsuited to the medium, like cave-dwellers who’d evolved to survive in the dark and then suddenly been brought into the sunlight—the hotel guests hadn’t been much bothered. The volume was kept respectfully low, a murmur of plates, glasses and low chatter rising from the two rows of tables in the dim, rather sad light of the floral lampshades that hung over the diners’ heads.

  But when, for the umpteenth time, the grainy photo of that six-year-old boy appeared, that photo of him in a navy blue and white striped singlet looking out defiantly at the world, that exact same photo that everyone knew intimately by now, the atmosphere suddenly changed. Straight away somebody went and turned up the volume, conversations were broken off mid-sentence, mothers hushed their snotty-nosed kids and everyone turned their chairs to face the screen.