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This book is for Gabriele and Remigio, my mountain guides.
And to the memory of Chris McCandless, guiding spirit.
I dwelt in the high day that lives
beyond the firs,
I walked in fields and on mountains
of light—
Crossed dead lakes—and a secret
song was whispered through
landlocked waves—
I crossed white shores, calling
by name
somnolent gentians—
I dreamt in the snow
an immense sunken city
of flowers—
I dwelt on the mountains
like an upstanding flower—
and looked at the rocks,
the other promontories
through the sea of winds—
and sang to myself of a remote
summer, that with its bitter
rhododendrons
burnt in my blood
Antonia Pozzi, “Snowfields”
WINTER
Season of Sleep
In the City
A few years back I had a difficult winter. It hardly seems important now to recall the reason for my malaise. I was thirty years old and felt drained, disoriented, and disillusioned, as you do when a project in which you believed ends miserably. Imagining the future at that moment seemed as unlikely as setting out on a voyage when you’re sick and it’s raining outside. I had tried hard, but what did I have to show for it? I was dividing my time between bookshops, hardware stores, the café bar in front of my house, and my bed, contemplating through a window the white sky of Milan. Above all, I was not writing, which for me is like not sleeping or not eating. I was in a kind of void that I’d never experienced before.
In those months, novels turned away from me, but I was attracted to stories of individuals who, rejecting the world, had sought solitude in the woods. I read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and The History of a Mountain by Élisée Reclus. I was particularly taken by the journey of Chris McCandless as told by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild. Perhaps because McCandless was not a nineteenth-century philosopher but a young man of my own time, who at the age of twenty-two had left the city, his family, his studies, a brilliant future as defined by the norms of Western society—and had set off on a solitary journey that would end with death by starvation in Alaska. When the story came to public attention he was judged by many to have made an idealistic choice amounting to a flight from reality, if not altogether to a suicidal impulse. I felt as if I understood it—and inwardly I admired it. Chris did not get the chance to write a book, perhaps he never even intended to do so, but he loved Thoreau and had adopted his manifesto:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
I had not been back to the mountains for ten years. Until I was twenty I had spent all my summers there. As a child of the city, raised in an apartment, having grown up in a neighborhood where it was not possible to go down into a courtyard or out onto the street, the mountains for me had represented an idea of absolute liberty. Brutally at first, and then very naturally, I had learned how to navigate up there just as other children learn to swim because an adult flung them into water: at eight or nine I had started to tread the glaciers and get my hands on rock, and I had soon found myself more at ease on mountain tracks than on the streets of Milan. For ten months of the year I felt constrained in stiff, good clothes, trapped within a system of authority and rules that had to be obeyed; in the mountains I divested myself of everything, and freed my true nature. It was a different kind of freedom than that of someone who is free to travel and meet people; or to spend a night drinking, singing, and courting women; or to seek out companions with whom to embark on some great adventure. These are all freedoms that I appreciate so much so that at twenty it seemed important to me to explore them for all they were worth. But at thirty I had almost forgotten what it was like to be alone in a forest, or to immerse myself in a river, or to run along the edge of a crest beyond which there is only sky. I had done these things, and they were my happiest memories. To me the young urban adult I had become seemed like the exact opposite of that wild boy, and hence the desire grew to go in search of him. It wasn’t so much the need to leave as the desire to return; not to discover an unknown part of myself, but to recover an old and deep-seated one I felt that I had lost.
* * *
I had saved some money, enough to live on for a few months without working. I looked for a house that was far from any center of population, and as high up as possible. There are no vast wilderness spaces in the Alps—but I didn’t need an Alaska for the experience I was longing for. I found the place I was seeking in the spring, in the valley adjacent to the one where I’d grown up: a cabin of wood and stone about six thousand feet above sea level, where the last conifer trees gave way to summer pastures. A place I’d never been to before, but one that I knew well, since it was just on the other side of the mountains I used to explore as a boy. It was about six miles from the nearest town, and a few minutes away from a village that would fill with people in summer and winter, but that was deserted when I reached it on the 25th of April. The fields were still dormant, tinged with the browns and ochres of the thaw; the slopes in the shadow of the mountains were still covered in snow. I left the car at the end of the asphalt road. I loaded my rucksack onto my shoulders and headed along the mule track, climbing through a wood and then a snow-covered pasture up to a cluster of huts, which were little more than ruins, except for the one that had been restored and that I’d rented. At the front door I turned around: there was nothing in the vicinity except the woods, the meadows, and those abandoned ruins; on the horizon the mountains that enclose the Valle d’Aosta in the south, toward Gran Paradiso; and then a fountain carved out of a tree trunk, the remains of a drystone wall, and a gurgling stream. This would be my world for an as yet unspecified amount of time, since I had no idea what it had in store for me. That day the sky was a funereal gray: a freezing cold morning, devoid of light. I had no intention of submitting myself to any kind of torture. If I found it to be good up there, then I’d stay—but it was also possible that I might plunge into even deeper despair, in which case I was ready to make my escape. I had brought books and notebooks with me. I hoped to start writing again, eventually. Right then I was cold, I had to put on a sweater and light the fire. So I pushed the door open and entered my new home.
SPRING
Season of Solitude and Observation
Houses
There is something moving about opening a mountain cabin in the spring
. I was throwing open doors to rooms that had been shut for months, with the ice their only master and the skylights blocked by snow. I passed a finger over the surface of a table, a chair, a shelf on which a layer of dust had settled, like forgotten ash from a chimney. Do houses have a way of sensing the passage of time? Or is a winter for them the same as an instant? I thought about the day, ten years previously, when I had left for the last time through that other door, looking lingeringly at everything. Now the sense of return was more olfactory than visual: it was the fragrance of the resin that reassured me that I was home again. I asked the house if the winter had been particularly hard. I imagined it moaning and creaking during January nights, when the temperature at that altitude drops below zero, then soaking up the pallid March sun, walls tepid now, the snow dripping through the guttering. If the purpose of a house is to be lived in, I thought, then perhaps it experienced its own kind of happiness, knowing that once again someone was going back and forth carrying wood, lighting the stove, washing their hands in the kitchen. In this way the water that came from snow and rock was starting to flow through the walls again like sap in a tree. The fire was the lifeblood in a body.
* * *
In a story that I love called “My Four Houses,” Mario Rigoni Stern revisits the stages of his life via the houses that he lived in. They were not all real houses: you can dwell in a house by imagining it, or by borrowing it from someone else’s memory. The first house was a lost one: the ancestral home of the Sterns, four hundred years old and destroyed during the Great War. Born in 1921, Mario learned about it through the stories of his elders. It was the place he regretted not having been born in, to have this link between his family and the land, the patriotic feeling that for mountain folk does not belong to the nation but to a language, to the names of things and places, to seasonal tasks and to the proper way of doing them. The second was a real house, that of his childhood, full of secret corners like all the houses in which we were children. The third was a house of the mind: confined to a prison camp in 1945, Mario had found a piece of paper and a pencil and spent long, famished days designing a mountain cabin. He imagined it in a clearing where he would live by hunting, in solitude, with books for company, in order to cure himself of the war—like Nick Adams in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” For a long time that drawing kept him from despair. The fourth house was the one he actually built and lived in for fifty years with “my wife, my books, my pictures, my wine, and my memories,” with its woods in front of his window, its beehives, its fields grazed by deer, its kitchen garden, and its woodpile.
I imagine that it must give you a great sense of peacefulness, living in a house built with your own hands. I did not have that privilege: the hut I was in had been built by mountain folk, who knows when, to house both animals and people during the pasture season, and done up ten years previously with modern conveniences. It was a house with only two rooms: below, where the stable used to be, there was a bathroom and a bedroom with a wardrobe, a chest, and a stove; above it was the kitchen, a sofa, a table with two benches and a chair. But the walls of uncut stone had not changed from when they were first built; touching them I wondered how many other hands had passed over them, how much woodsmoke, animal breath, steam rising from polenta and milk. Here and there, driven between one stone and the next, there were large nails, or half-charred wooden stakes. What was hung there, and who was it who’d hammered them in? It was a house infested with ghosts, but it was not frightening: it seemed a little as if I were living alongside those mountain folk, getting to know them through their spaces and the shapes of things there, the soot which still blackened that piece of wall.
* * *
The house in which I spent my summers as a child had been built as a hotel in 1855, but it was already a ruin during my childhood. It emerged outside the village, at the top of an avenue of beech trees, at the foot of a waterfall that became turbulent with end-of-summer rains. A plaque on the cracked plaster façade commemorated the sojourn of Queen Margaret of Savoy, when the mechanic’s office was still the ballroom, and the roof, now invaded by weeds, was the terrace on which afternoon tea was served. The hotel had been open until the nineteen thirties but had been occupied by the Germans during the war and then sold, and fifty years later it had acquired the look of a gloriously dilapidated manor house. It belonged to two elderly sisters who had subdivided it into lodgings, earning them something from the summer rentals and remaining shut for the rest of the year. Devoid of maintenance or heating, every winter it suffered further decline. The snowfalls of April 1986 delivered the coup de grâce: an avalanche hit a section of the front of the building, and a whole wing was subsequently declared in danger of collapse. By the following summer large cracks had appeared in the remaining walls, and for years the nettles proliferated in the rubble that no one had been paid to remove. But what I remember more than the ruin is my astonishment at finding snow at the beginning of July—piled so high, so frozen and hard as to become a slide for toboggans. From then on, that summer would always be known as the summer of the avalanche.
Arriving from the city it seemed as if we were entering another era. An era in which kitchens had draining boards made of stone, and baths and basins of white enameled iron. On the ceiling, in the attic where I slept, the names of two girls were carved: Angela and Maddalena. Knowing that the servants used to lodge in those rooms, I wondered if at the beginning of the last century Angela and Maddalena had been maids in the service of some aristocratic lady or other—and I imagined their discussions in bed at night before falling asleep. I don’t know if houses have souls, but I know that in that house I left a good part of mine: for twenty years from 1979 I lived there for two months of every year. With the end of the twentieth century came the end of the old hotel: sold, demolished, and replaced by a condominium. And so of that place, as Mario Rigoni Stern has it, “only my words now remain.”
* * *
I thought of the summer of the avalanche as I looked at the patches of snow in the pasture in front of the cabin. Though protected by the shadow cast by the woods, each day they melted a little more: rivulets of water rushed down the field, exposing a black, humid soil, and grass that looked burned. Small birds with white bellies and dark backs lingered there, pecking at the ground on the margins of the snow. I had taken a book to help identify them, and I was almost certain they were alpine finches, “looking for the larvae of insects,” as it was written there, “in the soil saturated by snow-melt, making their nests in the cavities of rocks or in the walls of huts.” In fact, two had made a nest precisely in the gable end of mine, in that dark, protected corner between beam and roof. They flew back and forth between meadow and nest, keeping me company when I had lunch sitting at a table in front of the window.
In the afternoon a thick mist would arise: I could see it advance from the valley below, climbing up the meadows and woods until it enveloped everything. I remained immersed in that white blanket until it became dark. There was no moon or any stars at night, just rain mixed with a little snow that began to fall as I retired to bed.
At night I would struggle to get to sleep. Unused to the altitude, my heart beat more rapidly than normal and seemed to drum in my chest. Sounds are not like smells, it takes time to let oneself be lulled by them and not be startled by every new noise. So with eyes wide open I stared at the ceiling and thought: that’s the noise made by embers being consumed, squeaking in the fireplace. That’s the sound of the old fridge starting up. This is the rain on the stone roof. And these steps outside, at almost three in the morning, what are they? They were circling around the house, they were near the door, and in the city, one would have instinctively suspected it was a thief. Up there I had to resort to the most rational part of my being in order to convince myself that this visitor was only a wild animal in search of food. It made little difference: I could not close my eyes for the rest of the night, not until the first light of dawn prompted me to give in and get up to put the coffee on the sto
ve.
Topography
Élisée Reclus, the nineteenth-century geographer and anarchist who suffered long years in exile on account of his ideas, writes that “from every peak, every ravine, every slope, the mountain landscape shows itself in a new relief, with a different aspect. The mountain is an entire range of mountains in itself; in the same way that in the sea every wave is made up of innumerable small irregular waves. To grasp the architecture of the mountain in its entirety you need to study it, walk it in every sense, clamber over every slope, penetrate into even the narrowest gorge. As with everything, it is infinite for anyone who wants to know it in its entirety.”
This was the spirit in which I began my explorations. I took the path that began at the cabin and started following it to see where it led. I crossed a wood of larch, their tall, bare trunks alternating every so often with the green of a younger fir. A little farther up, the trees began to thin out; in the pastures exposed to the sun the first crocuses were already emerging, but I only needed to change sides, from south to west, and the grass was replaced by snow. Water was gushing everywhere, as if the entire mountain was saturated with it. From a hole between the exposed roots of a larch came murky torrents of mud. Where the path curved toward the north I sank to my waist in snow, and decided to turn back just as soon as I’d extracted myself. I descended in leaps and bounds, shouting like a yeti. I had not yet started talking to myself, but I liked to sing loudly; songs about love, about mountains, about struggles. I hadn’t seen a living soul for a week, and this is how I kept myself company.
The Wild Boy Page 1