The Eight Mountains

by Paolo Cognetti

  “Now help me,” he said.

  “What should I do?”

  I moved next to him. We were supposed to both push downwards, using the combined weight of our bodies to raise the millstone. So we clung together on the handle, and when my feet left the ground I felt, for a moment, that the great stone moved. Bruno had devised the right method, and with a better lever it might have worked, but that piece of old wood bent under our weight, creaking before eventually snapping in two and flinging us to the ground. One of his hands was injured. He let out a resounding curse.

  “Have you hurt yourself?” I asked.

  “Shitty stone,” he said, sucking his wound. “Sooner or later, I’ll move you from there.” He climbed up the stepladder and disappeared above, moving furiously, and moments later I heard him jump down from the window and run away.

  That evening I struggled to get to sleep. It was excitement that kept me awake: mine was a solitary childhood, and I wasn’t used to doing things with others. In this respect too, I believed, I was just like my father. But that day I had felt something, an unexpected sense of intimacy that both attracted and frightened me, like an opening into unknown territory. To calm myself I sought for a mental image. I thought of the river: of the pool, of the small waterfall, of the trout that moved their tails to remain stationary, of the leaves and twigs that flowed elsewhere. And then of the trout darting to meet their prey. I began to understand a fact, namely that all things, for a river fish, come from upstream: insects, branches, leaves, everything. That’s why it looks upstream, waiting for things to come. If the point at which you immerse yourself in the river is the present, I thought, then the past is the water that has flowed past you, that which has gone downstream and where there is nothing left for you; whereas the future is the water that comes down from above, bringing dangers and surprises. The past is in the valley, the future in the mountains. This is how I should have replied to my father. Whatever destiny may be, it resides in the mountains that tower over us.

  Then gradually these thoughts also dispersed, and I lay awake listening. I was used by now to the sounds of the night, and could recognize them one after another. This, I thought, is the water flowing into the drinking trough. This is the bell on the collar of a dog on its nocturnal wanderings. This is the buzzing of Grana’s solitary electric street lamp. I wondered whether Bruno in his own bed would be listening to the same sounds. My mother turned a page in the kitchen, while the crackle of the stove lulled me to sleep.

  • • •

  For the rest of that July not a day passed without us meeting up. Either I joined him in the pasture or Bruno strung a wire around his cows, connected it to a car battery, and turned up in our kitchen. More than the biscuits I think that it was my mother that he liked. He liked the attention she paid to him. She would question him openly, without preliminaries, as she was used to doing in her work, and he would answer, proud of the fact that his own story could be of interest to such a nice lady from the city. He told us that he was the youngest inhabitant of Grana, as well as the last boy left in the village, given that there was no prospect of any others. His father was away for the best part of the year, would turn up rarely and only in winter; and as soon as he sensed the arrival of spring in the air he would set off again for France or Switzerland, or wherever he could find a building site in need of workers. By contrast his mother had never moved from the village: in the fields above the houses she had a vegetable garden, a henhouse, two goats, beehives; her sole interest was in watching over this little kingdom. When he described her I recognized immediately who she was. A woman I had frequently seen passing me by, pushing a wheelbarrow or carrying a hoe and a rake; she would overtake me with her head down, seemingly oblivious to my existence. She lived with Bruno at an uncle’s house; he was the husband of our landlady and the owner of some pastures and dairy cows. This uncle was in the mountains with his older cousins: Bruno gestured towards the window, through which at that moment I could only see woods and scree, and added that he would join them up there in August with the younger cows that had been left down below.

  “In the mountains?” I asked.

  “I mean in the mountain pastures. Do you know what an alpeggio is?”

  I shook my head.

  “And are your uncle and aunt nice to you?” my mother interrupted.

  “Of course,” said Bruno. “They have a lot to do.”

  “You do go to school though?”

  “Oh sure.”

  “Do you like it?”

  Bruno shrugged. He couldn’t bring himself to say yes, even just to please her.

  “And do your mother and father love each other?”

  At this he looked away. He curled his lip into a grimace which might have meant no, or perhaps just a little, or that this was not a subject to stay there chatting about. The reply was enough to stop my mother from insisting further, since she had understood that there was something about the conversation that he did not like. She would never have let it drop otherwise.

  When Bruno and I were alone together we never discussed our families. We wandered around the village but never strayed too far from his grazing cows. To have adventures we explored abandoned buildings. In Grana there were more of these than even we could have wished for: old stables, old haylofts and granaries, an old shop with its dust-covered, empty shelves, an ancient bread oven blackened by smoke. Everywhere there was the same kind of detritus that I had seen at the mill, as if for a good while after these buildings had fallen into disuse someone had been occupying them, badly, until they were abandoned for good. In some kitchens we would find a table and a bench still in place, a plate or one or two glasses in the larder, a frying pan still hanging above the fireplace. Fourteen people were living in Grana in 1984, but in the past there had been as many as one hundred.

  The village was dominated by a building that was more modern and imposing than the houses that surrounded it: it had three white-plastered floors, an external staircase, and a courtyard enclosed by a wall that had collapsed at one point. We got in through there, stepping over the weeds that had invaded the courtyard. The door on the ground floor had only been pulled to, and when Bruno pushed it we found ourselves in a shadowy entrance hall, complete with benches and a wooden coat rack. I realized immediately where we were, perhaps because all schools resemble one another: but the school in Grana was being used now only to rear the fat, gray rabbits that peered at us fearfully from a row of cages. The schoolroom smelled of hay, animal feed, urine, and of wine that was turning to vinegar. On a wooden dais, where in the past a lectern must have stood, some empty tins had been thrown; but nobody had had the temerity to take down the crucifix from the far wall, or to make firewood from the desks that had been pushed up against it.

  These were more interesting to me than the rabbits. I went to have a closer look: they were long and narrow, each with four holes for inkwells, their wood polished by all the hands that had rested there. Inside, with a knife or a nail, those same hands had carved a few letters. Initials. The G for Guglielmina appeared frequently.

  “Do you know who they are?”

  “Some of them, yes,” Bruno said. “Some of them I don’t know, but I’ve heard of them.”

  “But when was this?”

  “I don’t know. This school’s always been closed.”

  I did not get a chance to ask any more questions before we heard Bruno’s aunt calling. It was thus that all of our adventures ended: the peremptory command arrived, shouted once, twice, a third time, reaching us wherever we happened to be. Bruno snorted. Then he said goodbye and rushed off. He would drop everything unfinished—a game, a conversation—and I knew that I would not see him again that day.

  I stayed a little longer in the old school: I examined every desk, read all the initials, and tried to imagine the names of the children. Then, snooping further I found a more cleanly cut and recently made carving. The grooves left by the knife stood out against the gray wood as if freshly cut. I ran
a finger over the G and over the B, and it was impossible to have any doubt as to the identity of their author. And so I made a connection between other things, things that I had seen but not understood in the ruins of the buildings that Bruno would take me to, and I began to understand something about the secret life of that ghost village.

  • • •

  July was flying past meanwhile. The grass mowed at our arrival had grown back a foot, and along the mule track the herds passed, heading for the high pastures. I would watch them disappearing up the deep valley, hearing the sound of their hooves and bells as they made their way through the woods, reappearing after a while in the distance above the treeline, like flocks of birds alighted on the mountainside. Two evenings a week my mother and I would take the path in the opposite direction, towards another village—one that was scarcely more than a handful of houses at the bottom of the valley. It would take us half an hour to arrive there on foot, and at the end of the path it seemed as if we had suddenly re- entered the modern world. The lights of a bar illuminated the bridge across the river, cars could be seen going to and fro on the trunk road, and the music blended with the voices of villagers sitting outside. Down there it was hotter, and the summer was both lively and leisurely, like summers at the seaside. A group of young men was gathered around tables: they were smoking, laughing, every so often one was picked up by passing friends, and they would drive off together towards the bar higher up the valley. My mother and I, on the other hand, would join the queue for the payphone. We would wait our turn before going together into that cabin exhausted by conversations. My parents would keep it short: even at home they were not inclined to small talk; listening to them was like overhearing old friends who needed few words to understand each other.

  “So, mountain man,” he would say. “How’s it going? Climbed any good peaks lately?”

  “Not yet. But I’m in training.”

  “Good for you. And how’s your friend?”

  “He’s fine. But he’s going up to the alpeggio soon, so I won’t be seeing him anymore. It takes an hour to get there.”

  “Well, an hour away isn’t so far. I guess we’ll have to go and see him together. What do you think?”

  “I’d like that. When are you coming?”

  “In August,” my father would say. And before signing off he would add: “Give a kiss to your mother from me. And look after her, do you hear? Don’t let her get lonely.”

  I would promise him that I would, but secretly thought that he was the one feeling alone. I could imagine him in Milan, in the empty apartment with the windows wide open to the noise of traffic. My mother was doing fine; she was happy. We would go back to Grana by the same path through the woods, over which darkness had now fallen. She would turn on a torch and direct it at her feet. She had no fear of the night. Her calmness was such that it reassured me too: we walked following her boots in that uncertain light, and after a while I would hear her singing in a low voice, as if to herself. If I knew the song I would join in, also in a low voice. The sounds of the traffic, the radios, the laughter of the young people gradually vanished behind us. The air became fresher as we climbed. I knew that I was almost there a little before seeing the lit windows, when the wind carried towards us the smell of chimney smoke.

  TWO

  I DO NOT KNOW what changes my father had detected in me that year, but he had already decided that the time had come to take me with him. He came up from Milan one Saturday, breaking into our routine with his battered Alfa, determined not to waste a minute of his short vacation. He had brought a map that he pinned to the wall, and a felt-tip pen with which he intended to mark routes taken, as generals do with conquests. The old military backpack, his velvet plus fours, the red jumper worn by climbers of the Dolomites: this would be his uniform. My mother preferred not to get involved, seeking refuge with her geraniums and her books. Bruno was already away in the alpine pastures, and all I could do was keep going back to our haunts alone, missing him, so I welcomed this new development: I began to learn my father’s way of being in the mountains, the nearest thing to an education that I was to get from him.

  We would leave early in the morning, driving up to the villages at the foot of Monte Rosa. They were more fashionable tourist spots than our own, and with sleep-filled eyes I saw rush past the strings of little villas, the hotels built in an “Alpine” style in the early twentieth century, the ugly condominiums of the sixties, the caravan sites along the river. The whole valley was still in shadow and wet with dew. My father drank a coffee in the first open bar, then flung his rucksack over his shoulder with the seriousness of an Alpine infantryman. The path would start behind a church, or after a wooden footbridge, then enter the woods and immediately steepen. Before taking it I would look up at the sky. Above our heads the glaciers sparkled, illuminated by the sun; the early morning cold raised the hairs on my arms.

  On the path my father would let me walk in front. He would keep a step behind me, so that when necessary I could hear what he was saying, and hear his breathing. I had rules to follow, few but clear: one, establish a pace and keep to it without stopping; two, no talking; three, when faced with a fork in the way, always choose the uphill route. He puffed and panted more than I did, on account of his smoking and his sedentary office life, but for at least an hour he would not countenance a break; not to get our breath back, or to drink, or to look at anything. The woods were of no interest, in his eyes. It was my mother, in our wanderings around Grana, who would point out plants and trees and teach me their names, as if each one was a person with its own character; but for my father the woods merely provided access to the mountains: we climbed through them with our heads down, concentrating on the rhythm of our walking—of our legs, lungs, and hearts—in mute, private communion with our own exertions. Underfoot there were stones worn down over centuries by the passage of animals and men. Sometimes we would pass a wooden cross, or a bronze plaque engraved with a name, or a shrine with a small Madonna and some flowers, giving to those corners of the wood the somber atmosphere of a cemetery. And then the silence between us assumed a different character, as if this was the only respectful way to pass by them.

  I would only look up when the trees ended. On the flank of the glacier the path became less steep, and emerging into the sun, we would come across the last of the high villages. These were abandoned or semi-abandoned places, in even worse condition than Grana, except for the odd isolated stable, a fountain that still worked, a chapel that was still maintained. Above and below the houses the ground had been flattened and the stones collected in piles, and then ditches had been dug to irrigate and fertilize and the banks of the river terraced so as to make fields and vegetable gardens: my father would show me these works and speak with admiration of the old mountain people. Those that had arrived from the north of the Alpine region during the Middle Ages were capable of cultivating land where no one else had ventured before. They had special techniques, as well as a special resistance to the cold and to deprivation. Nowadays, he said, no one could survive the winter up there, completely self-sufficient for food and for everything else, as these people had managed to do for centuries.

  I looked at the crumbling houses and tried hard to imagine their inhabitants. I couldn’t even begin to understand how anyone could have chosen such a hard life. When I asked my father he answered in his usual enigmatic way: it always seemed as if he could not give me a solution, but only a few clues instead, so that I would only arrive at the truth through my own efforts.

  He said: “They didn’t really choose it. If someone comes up this high, it’s because down below they won’t leave them in peace.”

  “And who is bothering them there, down below?”

  “Landlords. Armies. Priests. Bosses. It depends.”

  I could tell from the tone of his reply that he wasn’t being entirely serious. Now he was bathing his neck with water from the fountain, and was already more cheerful than he had been first thing that morning. He shook
the water from his head, wrung it from his beard, and looked up above. In the deep valleys that awaited us there was nothing impeding our view, and sooner or later we would notice someone further up ahead of us on the path. He had an eye as sharp as a hunter’s with which to pick out those small red or yellow dots—the color of a rucksack or of an anorak. The more distant they were, the more mocking the tone with which he would ask, pointing to them: “What do you think, Pietro, shall we catch them?”

  “Sure,” I would answer, wherever they were.

  Then our climb would be transformed into a pursuit. Our muscles were well warmed up, and we still had energy to burn. We were ascending through the August pastures, past isolated alpeggi, herds of indifferent cows, dogs that came growling around our ankles, and swathes of nettles that stung my bare legs.

  “Cut across,” my father would say, where the path took a slope too gentle for his liking. “Go straight. Go up this way.”

  Eventually the incline would steepen, and it was there on those merciless concluding slopes that we would catch our prey. Two or three men, about his age and dressed just like him. They confirmed my sense that there was something from another era about this way of going into the mountains, and that it obeyed outmoded codes. Even the manner they adopted when giving way to us had something ceremonious about it: they would step aside, to the edge of the path, and come to a standstill in order to let us pass. They had no doubt seen us coming, had tried to keep ahead of us, and were not pleased at being caught.

  “Good day to you,” one would say. “The boy sure can run, no?”

  “He sets the pace,” my father would reply. “I just follow.”

  “What I’d give to have legs like his.”

  “That’s right. But we did have once.”

  “Oh sure. Decades ago maybe. Are you going right to the top?”