The Mountain

by Massimo Donati

  A moment later she regained her footing. She continued her descent, clutching on to the ladder with all her strength.

  As soon as he could reach her, Roberto grabbed her and pulled her down. He held her in his arms for a moment, as they both breathed softly.

  Then the little girl sat down next to him, holding his hand, both of them still shaken by a slight tremor. They reattached the safety line and continued sailing.

  The water had become calm once more. As they sailed on, Roberto and Alina looked back at the blue expanse, a hydrofoil at its centre travelling fast. Alina began waving to the passengers, though they could not see her.

  They returned home shortly afterwards, and said nothing about what had happened.

  Later on, when darkness had fallen heavily on the villa and the lights around the lake’s edge had been dimmed, Roberto was already in bed, in accordance with his old boarding school habit. Ada, too, had retired early, with Alina.

  Alone, Elena wandered a second time through the house, its rooms now more deserted than ever.

  The villa’s darkness no longer seemed hostile. On the contrary, she found it somewhat welcoming, perhaps because she embraced the solitude of the moment. Still, unanswered questions continued to fill her head with doubts.

  Elena thought about Roberto.

  She could sense his anguish. She had sensed it even from afar, at the time of the funeral, and perhaps this was why she had come—because she didn’t wish to accept and endure it.

  This anguish was not unfamiliar to her. It had always been there, she knew, nestled deep within Roberto. And over the many years of their life together—certainly not without its issues, but which she would have defined as happy—Elena expected her partner’s anguish, that latent low-frequency pain, either to come out into the open or to disappear. But it had continued to lie in wait there, frozen.

  With time she had tried to convince herself that this was the base note of the man she loved. This was in part why she loved him: for the melancholy that veiled the smiles and the moments of joy, and which had always gone along with a natural honesty, an unusual simplicity and kindness of spirit—towards everybody, really, but especially her. Roberto had made her feel loved.

  Even though that love came from across an immense distance.

  As she went upstairs, her sleepiness now pressing on her, she could not help but think about all this, and about the possibility that this terrible anguish, definitively re-emerged, might wipe out everything they felt for each other. She told herself she wouldn’t allow it. Together they would seek out the source of that anguish. They would find its root and so expunge it altogether—or at the very least bury it once more.

  She spent three hours between waking and deep sleep and when she stretched out her arm towards the reassuring presence of her partner’s body, she did not find him. It took a few moments of confusion, of scrabbling about among the covers, before she became aware of this. She rolled all the way over to his side of the bed and his absence seemed, in her drowsy state, like diving into the void, a kind of suffocation. She took a deep breath, awake now, and calmed down.

  She waited for him. And waited. Then, with some effort, she got up, put on a jumper and left the room.

  She went to look for him. She couldn’t find him at first and thought about waking Ada but was too embarrassed to do so. Finally, in the dark she noticed a pale blue light coming from behind a half-closed door. Carlo’s study.

  She approached without making a sound. She peeked around the door, invisible beyond the cold glow from his laptop.

  She took a couple of steps in the dark. Just enough to get a glimpse.

  The recordings from the 1980s. Faded, greenish colours. The children’s clothes seemed so dated as to belong to a forgotten era. They were kicking a ball around on a bumpy field. Mountains were visible in the background; a lake.

  Roberto was not watching the film from beginning to end. Instead he would stop, watch a sequence and rewind it. Then the images would run at normal speed. And then back again. He seemed very focused, like he was looking for something.

  Elena stood behind him. Then she went back out the door and waited there a moment to reorder her thoughts. She made her way back upstairs, slid under the covers and forced herself not to think.

  10

  He was walking with no particular destination in mind along the edge of the lake in the dark light that precedes dawn. His face bore the signs of another night spent in front of the screen.

  He had found nothing and now, feeling defeated, he was desperately looking anywhere he could for details that might provide an opening on the events of that period, and their sudden return.

  Him, Mattia, Rosa. His father, his mother. He was seeking out answers.

  But the city would be no use to him: Como had always been regarded as a foreign city by his family. They had moved there from Milan when he was two years old and had never done anything to reduce their sense of estrangement. There was the villa, there was the lakeside, there was the lake. The rest had always been a blur of buildings and roads that, with a kind of ruthlessness, they had completely ignored.

  From Villa Beltrami he turned left towards Villa Olmo, a neoclassical building that had been endowed with a museum. The pier where the cruise ship usually stopped was deserted at that hour. But the villa’s gardens, which had become a public park, were open.

  As he headed towards the building their outings from those days came to mind almost at once. Anna never missed an opportunity to take him to see exhibitions, and to comment on them. It was their only activity together, out in the world, and he awaited it with anticipation: looked forward to standing in front of some artwork and enjoying that moment, that flash, when he might say something original, something that might spark his mother’s enthusiasm. And the joy of that moment was all the greater for always being hard won. Anna was never one for flattery, not even towards her son; she had that kind of brusque frankness that can spot something out of the ordinary.

  He peered through the windows. No posters, no announcements. Just the main hall, well maintained but unremarkable. He felt disappointed.

  He walked back the other way. The light was still below the horizon, and the only sound came from distant cars travelling along the state highway, beyond the line of villas and historic palazzi.

  He passed Villa Beltrami and continued in the direction of the city. He stopped for a moment outside the hangar of the Como Aeroclub.

  A flying boat was parked on the asphalt on the other side of the barriers, a few metres from the small harbour, which was a short stretch of cement that sloped down into the water. It looked as though somebody had inadvertently left it out. He climbed over the barriers to look through the windows. And then, suddenly, a confused image of a Sunday morning returned to him.

  A placid crowd stood watching a row of amphibious planes sliding into the water, one after the other. With their white wings and coloured fuselages, they were very simple creatures of the air, from simpler, truer times. The planes settled gently onto the water and, after a moment, moved out. Then they rose into the air, with a fine, deep sound of turbines.

  Someone was holding him up above the barrier, off the ground.

  It was Carlo lifting him up.

  Roberto went through his memories in search of his face during those years, but could not find it. But inside he retained the feeling of that tight grip, those hands around him, making him feel safe around those frightening machines.

  Roberto breathed deeply and coughed. He patted his face: it was wet.

  For a moment he thought it was sweat. He looked at his fingers. They were red.

  More red drops, many of them, on his shirt, and then a trickle. His nose was bleeding. A lot.

  He began to feel woozy. This had not happened to him since that morning in the mountains, when he had panicked because he didn’t know how to stop it.

  Now, too, he did not know how to stop it.

  The viscous liquid was sti
cky. He felt filthy and his breathing had become laboured. He looked through his pockets for a handkerchief, without success. Then he pressed his nostrils with his fingers to stop the flow, but it made no difference. The taste of blood reached his throat and filled him with disgust. It was just an instant: he only had time to cast his gaze upward, towards the rectangle of buildings enclosing the white marble clouds.

  Then, darkness.

  She began searching at around nine. She looked in the garden, then in the rooms on the top floor. Maybe Roberto had left a note somewhere. Finally, she went into Carlo’s study.

  Elena was not comfortable in there. It was as though the room still held the imprint of that man she had never known. The echo of his life was still present.

  And of his death.

  On the desk the standby light of Roberto’s laptop was flashing. Her impulse was to turn it off, but then she sat down, feeling like she was violating some unwritten rule. She turned it on. The click of the DVD drive. The low sound of the disk whirring.

  On the screen, the media player opened up right where Roberto had left off.

  SUMMER 1981—OUTING TO LAGHETTO AZZURRO ROLL 4—8 MM KODAK

  The images were accompanied by a soundtrack that had been added after filming, at times silent and at other times consisting of hits from the eighties.

  Elena stopped the video almost at once.

  The setting was always the same, the mountains. Apart from the novelty of seeing Roberto as a boy, there really was nothing else of interest.

  Only one thing struck her, and seemed incomprehensible: Roberto—for at least as long as she’d known him, but he claimed for his entire life—hated going to the mountains.

  Hated it. He said it was dangerous. And on the rare occasion that they had gone on an outing or a walk, perhaps dragged along by others, he had always been irritable and on edge.

  Yet the child Roberto spent every summer in the mountains, judging by the videos, and he had a good time. A great time.

  While she was reflecting on that contradiction, which now seemed huge to her, close to a lie, and far more than a simple change in taste from childhood to adulthood, she began looking through the files on the computer. She had seen Roberto in front of his computer a lot those last few days and was only now wondering if it was just for work or if there was something else. A quick check: there was nothing among his files that wasn’t work-related.

  She was about to get up and leave when she had an idea. She opened the web browser.

  She typed in Slat.

  The dropdown list unfurled the long series of searches Roberto had done.

  Elena’s eyes glanced over the chronology.

  He, too, had looked up Slat.

  Rosa Slat, in various combinations, as you would expect.

  Then, just as she was about to close it down, she stopped. She stared at a detail in the list. It said Mattia Slat.

  Mattia Slat, Trentino. Repeated through numerous variations. Mattia. Mattia. Mattia.

  Who was Mattia Slat?

  She closed the laptop, more confused than ever. She got up and went to Ada’s room. Perhaps she knew where Roberto had got to.

  When he reopened his eyes, an urbane gentleman, no longer young but with a firm grip, was supporting him.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  Roberto instinctively went to stand up but his arms were weak and his breath short.

  ‘Take it easy. You fainted a moment ago,’ the stranger said, passing him a tissue.

  ‘I can’t stand the sight of blood.’

  ‘It takes some getting used to.’

  ‘You know…this hadn’t happened in more than thirty years.’

  Roberto remained there, on the ground, for a minute, maybe two, holding the tissue tightly against his nose, but only to be on the safe side, as it had stopped bleeding.

  ‘Do I need to call you an ambulance?’ the man proposed, leaning over him.

  Roberto shook his head.

  ‘There’s no need. It’s stopped.’

  ‘As you like.’

  He picked up his bag, which he had placed nearby.

  ‘Have a good day.’

  ‘Thank you…very much…I just panic when I see blood,’ he began, but the man was already far away.

  When he got back to the house, he carefully avoided Elena, had a shower, got changed and then recounted only that he had wandered to Como, just for the sake of it, to break the monotony of waiting around.

  11

  A muffled tune could be heard through the villa’s thick walls, first softly, but then louder and louder. It suddenly stopped and then started over again. It took Elena a few seconds to react.

  ‘Roberto, your phone!’

  Her partner was not around. With a sigh, she began looking for him.

  She found his phone on a coffee table. It was buzzing.

  ‘Roberto! What do you want me to do?’

  She read the name on the display.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Ciprini.’

  ‘Elena?’

  ‘Roberto’s around somewhere…I’m just not sure where.’

  ‘That’s all right. I can tell you. It’s not confidential.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s not good news. I was able to check the transactions in the account indicated in the will, which is an account at a bank branch in Rovereto. Over the last few years there have been no deposits for Rosa Slat, nor any other transactions. It’s what they call a dormant account.’

  Elena nodded, thinking. She could hear an annoying buzz in the background as he spoke.

  ‘I dug deep. I requested all the documentation related to Carlo’s account. You’re not supposed to be allowed to do that, but I went straight to the manager. He was very attached to Carlo, and to me. I looked over all your father-in-law’s transactions.’

  ‘He wasn’t my father-in-law, we’re not married.’

  ‘There have only been two transfers to Rosa Slat, and they both date back more than ten years. After that, nothing.’

  ‘I don’t see why this is an issue. Can’t you use her account number to trace her place of residence?’

  ‘That’s the problem. Signora Slat’s account gives her residential address as a hotel up in the mountains, at Madonna del Bosco, near Rovereto.’

  ‘So? Can’t we phone?’

  ‘It closed down years ago.’

  Elena took in this news but was unable to evaluate its significance.

  ‘I phoned the local registry office: the woman is not deceased, and they confirmed her place of residence.’

  ‘It’s as though she’s disappeared.’

  ‘Except that if she’d disappeared they’d know that at the registry office. Technically, she hasn’t even disappeared. For now, we’re at a dead end. So I’ll tell you what I’m planning to do. If you and Roberto agree, as soon as I’ve finished a few jobs around here, I’ll head to Rovereto and start looking for Rosa Slat.’

  There was a long pause, as though the lawyer had finished. Then he added: ‘To be honest I don’t really know where to start, but there’s no other way. If Roberto wishes to proceed differently, he needs to let me know at once. Meanwhile, an interbank search will be undertaken, at our request. Given that there has been no judicial order that will enable us to get around the privacy legislation, it’s not going to be easy, but the banks do each other certain favours from time to time. Informally, shall we say.’

  Elena went up to the window that looked out over the garden. At first, she didn’t notice him. At the far end, Roberto was kneeling next to a rosebush with his back to her, doing something to the earth.

  ‘I’ll let him know. In the meantime, thank you: I don’t know how we’d have managed this business of the will without you.’

  ‘I’m doing it partly out of loyalty to the company. It’s a ship adrift at the moment. And this interregnum could run it completely aground. We need to move quickly. That way you can get back to your lives and we can get back to ours.’ />
  A moment later she was beside Roberto, who crouched there looking up at her. He smiled, pointing out a miniature rose bush in front of him, with just a single withered bud.

  He pressed down the dark earth around its roots, and then stood up.

  ‘I replanted it. It was dying.’

  He showed her where he’d taken it from, in the middle of other bushes that were larger and more robust.

  ‘It’ll get more light here.’

  Elena, sorry to have to taint his little gardening joy, passed on all the information word for word.

  Roberto thought for a moment while he took off his gloves.

  ‘Give me my phone, please.’

  He dialled the number. It was ringing.

  ‘It’s Roberto Beltrami, Mr Ciprini.’

  He listened to Ciprini for a few seconds, then coughed and interrupted him.

  ‘That’s all clear, don’t worry. I wanted to let you know that a few details have come back to me, and perhaps I might be able to trace Rosa Slat.’

  He paced a little, with the phone to his ear.

  ‘That won’t be necessary…It would be too complicated, those are just details. I will personally take care of the search. Yes. As soon as possible.’

  Elena listened to him in silence. Speechless.

  ‘No, I’ll go alone. Elena? If she can, she’ll stay here and keep track of the property transfer. I’d like to conclude everything by the end of next week.’

  Roberto listened to the lawyer for a few minutes, without interest. ‘Absolutely. I’ll find her in time. I know where to look.’

  And he ended the call.

  He went to walk away, but Elena, who had been sitting there immobile, working hard to contain her rage and bewilderment, said: ‘You’d already decided. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  Her partner turned back towards her. It was only now that Elena noticed how pale and damp Roberto’s face was.

  ‘There’s nothing else to be done.’

  ‘You’re not even asking me what I think, if I want to stay on.’

  ‘I said if you can stay. You’re not obliged to, but one of us needs to be here. This is a family affair.’