The Mountain

by Massimo Donati

  That the valley was and always had been the true protagonist of their summer holidays was demonstrated clearly by the annual selection of walks. It was as though it was compulsory every year to complete a well-defined series of hikes chosen, on the basis of the day, the year and the weather, from a larger set of options. This choice was the prerogative of the older generation, in other words Lia, during these annual holidays with Roberto. It demanded the kind of experience, and familiarity with the valley, acquired during countless walks over many, many years. By the end of their stay the complete roster was almost like a series of courtesy visits—as though the mountains were to be treated like relatives.

  Unlike other city kids his age, it was no imposition for Roberto to follow Lia on a walk of several hours’ duration. It felt as though the very landscape had a grip on him and was pulling him towards it, wanting him for itself. So much so that he was unable to stay in his own room, an unlikely situation for a boy who never even seemed to consider, in the city, the possibility that the outdoors might extend beyond the grounds of the family home and the notional border checkpoint that was his mother’s rose garden.

  During those days, there was hardly ever any tension between the periods spent with Lia and those with Mattia Slat, because Mattia was not on holidays. It was a very concrete difference: Mattia had to help out his parents. Rosa was at the hotel from morning till night, running every aspect of the operation since Emma was old and temperamentally unsuited to management: she was a simple hardworking woman who needed direction and left decision-making to others. Mattia also had to work for Leo, who was something of a slave driver and often used him to fill in at the workshop, especially if the need was due to his own oversight, or his vices.

  That morning, Roberto and Lia had headed out very early to hike up to Trivia. Lia had decided they would walk for a few hours, eat a high-altitude packed lunch and return by mid-afternoon. She didn’t like to stay out late on that side of the mountain, because she said the winds could change fast and you could easily find yourself caught in a downpour, even after a sunny day. The plan had been followed to the letter, leaving a large part of the afternoon free: time Roberto had determined to spend with Mattia.

  For this reason, he went to his friend’s house and waited outside the door, taking in the sunshine on a stone bench where old people would sit at sunset on a hot day.

  He heard a phone ring in one of the rooms in Mattia’s house. It stopped almost immediately.

  Mattia came out, went briefly back in and then pulled the door behind him and quickly drew up next to his friend, as though they were running away.

  ‘You guys have a phone.’

  ‘Sure. We live here. This isn’t a holiday home.’

  Roberto realised that he’d inadvertently touched upon a source of family pride, but he pretended nothing had happened.

  ‘Who was it on the phone?’

  ‘My father. He’s checking everything’s okay.’

  ‘What if he calls and you’re not here?’

  ‘I told my brother not to hang up. And not to phone my father.

  Otherwise I’ll beat him up.’

  ‘Why? Does your brother call your father up on the phone?’

  ‘All the time. He calls him at work. Whenever he’s feeling lonely, or we’ve had a fight.’

  Mattia’s face darkened for a moment. ‘They have these long phone calls that I can’t listen to. It’s like they’re ganging up on me.’

  They reached the pond above Madonna del Bosco, beyond the strip of woods that rose up behind the village.

  To an adult’s eyes the little pool of water between the trees would have seemed neither interesting nor attractive, but at the transitional age Roberto and Mattia were both going through, that teeming puddle was their exclusive domain and a treasure-house of marvels.

  Roberto loved the suspended atmosphere, the sense of infinite numbers of organisms engaged in invisible industry in the seeming calm of the stagnant water. Creatures building, eroding, moulding, giving life and taking it away, under the cover of absolute stillness.

  The boys stretched out on a large flat rock that poked into the water like a pier. Just beyond the rock, at the centre of the lake, a swarm of aquamarine tadpoles was bursting with microscopic details in a shaft of sunlight. The tadpoles were agitated, an animated cluster of life, clumping then suddenly dispersing, separating into factions and then once again tangling upon one another in swirls of harmonious pattern. From the edge of the rock Roberto closely followed the bewildering unfolding variety, first wondering which subtle variables determined their transformations, and then experimenting: drops of water meted out from above, a floating leaf, a reed touching the bottom.

  ‘They’re like sperm. I’ve seen them in the encyclopaedia.’

  Mattia said this almost in passing, eyes half-closed, but Roberto looked at him, surprised. And since he seemed to be waiting for something, Mattia added: ‘We’ve got up to the letter S. My father insisted on getting it, and actually it’s not bad. Lots of photos. But then he got tired of it and the volumes stopped coming, maybe they even stopped publishing it. So we got as far as S. Sperm is what’s on the cover. They’re basically tadpoles.’

  ‘Have you ever seen any? Live, I mean…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah…they’re just like tadpoles.’

  ‘How did you do it? I’ve tried but…’

  ‘Me too. Nothing happens. I’ve got a friend who’s bigger; he says it’s true. It’s like turning on the tap.’

  ‘But…so do tadpoles come out? Out of your thing? Doesn’t it hurt? The hole is tiny.’

  ‘They’re really slippery and they only come out one at a time, not all at once, but there are loads of them. Loads and loads. If you did it here in the pond it would fill all the way up, and then if a woman came and got into the water she’d get pregnant and she wouldn’t even know why.’

  ‘So you have to be careful.’

  Mattia nodded and added gravely, ‘That’s why there are teen mums.’

  Roberto’s face expressed unfettered surprise, as though Mattia had suddenly clarified a perpetual mystery.

  ‘Poor things.’

  ‘This thirteen-year-old guy I know in Rovereto, he’s already developed, he told me they’re even in your saliva. Less, but they’re there. The ones in your saliva aren’t dangerous.’

  He said it with the tone of a scientist. Roberto rolled onto his stomach to look down into the water. The tadpole-sperm had thinned out. It was as though, suddenly aware of the responsibility they carried, they’d decided to go into hiding.

  Then he picked up a stone and tried to hit a rock off in the distance, just visible above the surface of the water, where the pond became deeper and darker. It was a few metres away, and he missed. He tried again, and failed.

  ‘I’m out of practice.’

  ‘Whoever hits it first, the other one has to be his slave until this evening.’

  As he said it, Mattia took a throw. The stone landed a few millimetres from the rock.

  ‘If you’d hit it, it wouldn’t have counted. It counts from now.’

  And then Roberto had a go. It was a bad throw. His stone made a clumsy parabola through the air, but it landed right on the flat side of the rock, making a satisfying sharp sound as it bounced.

  ‘Yesss! You’re my slave! You’re. My. Slave!’

  ‘It doesn’t count. You’d already had three tries…Let’s aim for that one right down there. Whoever hits it first is boss of the pond, and the valley, and the other one is his slave for three days.’

  6

  We decide to build an artesian well.

  We go to the bar and ask the old people, people over fifty, to explain what they are.

  They don’t even know. We say to each other that old people never know the important stuff.

  Then we go to Mattia’s house and wait for Rosa to leave with his little brother.

  Then we look it up in the Enciclopedia Universo and we find it. The picture
is clear but the explanation isn’t, plus it’s really long. We read it anyway and decide that we know enough and we should start work. We choose a spot on a slope near the pond. We’re almost certain it will fill up with water. That’s essential because the boy on TV died because of the water in the end. Otherwise it’s not artesian.

  We dig. We brought two little children’s shovels. We realise at once that they suck: you can’t get anything out with them and they bend in the earth.

  We’re ashamed of using children’s stuff.

  One of us says: using children’s tools and looking like a child is like being a monster or handicapped. It makes me sick.

  The other one says: I’m tired of being a child.

  We can’t both dig the hole. So we take it in turns to take out the earth and move it to near the trees, where you can’t see it. We don’t want to leave behind any sign of our work. We decide that our work has to be completely invisible.

  Digging the artesian well is slower and more boring than we expected. After a while we feel like a couple of children digging a hole. If someone saw us they could think that we’re children and that makes us sick.

  We decide to continue just digging up the earth, and to do it in silence. We do this for two hours. The rule is you’re not allowed to talk.

  One of us says: how long a person can last is the difference between a child and a man. A child gets tired straight away and gives up, because he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do, he doesn’t even understand the concept of time. A man keeps going even if he’s tired, even if he’s wrecked, until it’s all done. Children don’t finish things. And that makes us sick.

  While we’re digging (without complaining), we revise out loud the exercise we’ve given ourselves for the artesian well.

  One of us says: they should have lowered down one of those dwarf gymnasts from the Russian circus, who are only 40 cm tall and really strong.

  The other says: you’ve got to have imagination to save someone. Otherwise they die like the boy in the artesian well.

  One of us says: he didn’t last long, though.

  The other one says: it’s true, he didn’t last long.

  If he hadn’t died so soon they would’ve pulled him up, he just had to hold out another 43 cm and then he wouldn’t have died. It’s a shame: if he’d held out he’d have become a hero.

  We convince ourselves that we could’ve done it.

  We agree: yes, we’d have survived.

  One of us says: maybe destiny has something to do with it. He was destined to die.

  The other says: he had to die but not because he was destined to. He had to die because he wasn’t strong.

  The remaining one says: you have to be strong to survive when you’re up against nature.

  Nature is vicious and fierce and it’s got your measure.

  The other says: nature is like in Sparta. The Spartans threw the weak children down a hole. If you survived, fine. If not, you died and they had another baby. It was really simple in Sparta.

  Nature treats everyone like in Sparta.

  When we finish work on the well it’s almost evening.

  There’s water at the bottom of the well. Too little. Our artesian well is 80 cm deep and you can only get two arms down there at most.

  We stop digging.

  We decide we can still do the exercise. We use a toy. We put the toy figure into the well. It’s the right size. We slide it all the way down to the bottom and go on with the exercise.

  The star of the rescue mission was tied to a nylon drawstring from a backpack. The best bit was coming up with unforeseen problems for Big Jim to solve. They took turns carrying out the operation and doing the running commentary.

  ‘As we can see from this footage taken at the scene, the rescue mission appears to have begun. The expert from the Emergency Services, Big Jim, is lowering himself down headfirst at this very moment.’

  The hole was now almost a metre deep with a small amount of water at the bottom that had seeped through the earth. But then on the third rescue attempt, when Mattia got the doll, dangling from the cord, to make a turn in order to hook on to the pine cone that needed rescuing, the string got caught on something, maybe a root. Mattia pulled hard and Big Jim ended up stuck down there as the drawstring came loose.

  ‘I can’t reach, dammit! Now what?’

  Mattia put his whole arm down the miniature artesian well, and had his face pressed to the earth.

  ‘Can’t you reach him at all? If I go back without Big Jim, Nonna will be furious…Let me try.’

  But Roberto’s arm was shorter still. So they dug around the hole a bit to make more space and then Mattia tried again.

  ‘He’s here. I can feel him with the tips of my fingers but I can’t reach. Hang on…’

  Now they really did need to mount a rescue operation, but the hole was narrow and Big Jim, their erstwhile hero, was just a dumb, stupid, rigid doll.

  It took nearly half an hour. Mattia was cursing under his breath. In the end, they tied the drawstring like a noose between the doll’s legs. Mattia had his entire arm down the hole, and Roberto one forearm as he pulled on the other end of the string.

  ‘Can you reach?’

  ‘Nearly.’

  ‘Hurry up, I’m all twisted.’

  ‘It’s not that easy.’

  ‘Come on, you’re breaking my arm!’

  In the midst of this earnest activity, every so often they would get the giggles. They were so squashed that it looked like they were glued together and some subterranean monster was sucking them down into the hole. When they finally emerged, they celebrated as though they actually had saved somebody, but after the euphoria passed they looked at themselves and realised they were completely filthy, black dirt all over their arms, legs, faces and covering their T-shirts and shorts.

  ‘My mother will be furious.’

  ‘So will Nonna.’

  ‘Know what we’ll do? We’ll go to the fountain and at least wash our T-shirts. Dirt washes off, and then we’ll hang them out to dry in the sun.’

  It was a completely nutty plan—there would never be time for them to dry.

  ‘Ow! Owwww!’

  ‘So that’s where you were. And you’re filthy as well.’

  Mattia’s arm was twisted around his head, his body following behind, shaken and dragged by a brutal force.

  Leo.

  He’d come up behind them unseen. Mattia tried to break free, but they were not evenly matched. As soon as he was on his feet his father slapped him so hard it sounded like applause, and then a second time, just to quieten him down.

  ‘I tell you to look after Dino and you spend the whole day here playing?’ he shouted into his ear.

  ‘I told him to be good and not touch anything. I even shut the kitchen…’ Mattia’s tone was imploring but also manly as he managed to hold back his tears.

  ‘Animal! You’re an animal! Next time I’ll smash you up. Understood?’ A third slap ended the speech, snuffing out any chance of reply.

  ‘Leave him alone!’

  Leo turned upon hearing this rage-filled cry, still twisting his son’s arm to keep him under control.

  Roberto looked straight at his friend’s father, his eyes burning. He stood his ground, trying to look threatening, in reality frightened by what was happening.

  ‘Please leave him be. We were just playing.’

  Leo turned to face Roberto, forgetting about Mattia, but his surprise lasted only a moment.

  ‘Beltrami, you stay in your place or I’ll put you there myself. You don’t intimidate me.’

  He gave him an angry shove in the chest that knocked him to the ground.

  Roberto stayed there a moment, eyes wide. The emotion of the violence, more than the pain, frightened him to the core. He dragged himself up to his knees, the rage making his teeth chatter and his heart thump, while Leo dragged his friend off towards home.

  7

  He got back to the hotel before Lia came out
to call him. It was not yet sunset. His rage had been followed by frustration at not having been able to do anything, and humiliation at his own disappointing powerlessness. It was all to do with the fact that he was still only a child, weak and insignificant, not just physically but also in character.

  This was what he felt as he made his way back, along with the contradictory desire to return to the watchful protection of his grandmother, into the maternal embrace of his temporary home at the hotel. That shove, which had after all been more a potential than an actual abuse of power, had shocked him.

  In his world adults never touched children, not even to punish them. Any punishment always took the form of a suspension of rights, of freedom, of childhood pleasures. Never violence. But he had no intention of saying anything about what had happened. In truth, nothing had happened, and he would not seek revenge by running and telling his grandmother, who would tell Emma and Rosa and generate a cascade of unpredictable outcomes more than anything else. But the real reason for his reticence was not the consequences—it was his realisation that he needed to acquire the maturity of a grown man.

  The chance would come, he felt sure, to make Leo pay personally for that affront, and he fantasised about what he would do. He forgot about it almost immediately.

  Lia was not in their room.

  He waited impatiently for a few minutes, sitting on the bed, feeling agitated; he wanted to see her, needed to see her at once, to re-establish the reassuring order of things.

  She still hadn’t come so he went back down to the hotel’s modest reception to enquire, but there was no one at the desk: at that hour they were all busy with preparations for dinner.