The Eight Mountains

by Paolo Cognetti

  “If we can make it.”

  “Good luck,” one of them would say, and with that the exchange was concluded.

  We would move off in silence, just as we had arrived. Gloating was not allowed, but a little while later, when we were a good distance away, I would feel a hand on my shoulder; just a hand touching and pressing, and that was all.

  Perhaps it’s true, as my mother maintained, that each of us has a favorite altitude in the mountains, a landscape that resembles us, where we feel best. Hers was no doubt that of the woods at fifteen hundred meters, that of the spruce and larch, in the shadow of which the blueberries, junipers, and rhododendrons grow, and the roe deer hide. I was more attracted to the kind of mountainscape that comes afterwards: Alpine meadows, torrents, wetlands, high-altitude herbs, grazing animals. Higher up again the vegetation disappears; snow covers everything until the beginning of summer; and the prevailing color is that of the gray rock, veined with quartz and the yellow of lichen. That was where my father’s world began. After three hours’ walking the meadows and woods would give way to scree, to lakes hidden in glacial basins, to gorges gouged by avalanches, to streams of icy water. The mountain was transformed into a harsher place, inhospitable and pure: up there he would become happy. He was rejuvenated, perhaps, going back to other mountains and other times. His very step seemed lighter, to have regained a lost agility.

  I, on the other hand, was exhausted. Exertion and the lack of oxygen tightened my stomach and made me feel sick. This nausea made every meter a struggle. My father was incapable of noticing: approaching three thousand meters the path became less distinct; on the scree there remained only stone cairns and signs daubed in paint; and he would finally take his place at the head of the expedition. He wouldn’t look round to check on how I was. If he did turn, it was only so as to shout out: “Look!” pointing out, on the ridge of the crest above, the horns of the ibexes who were keeping an eye on us, like guardians of that mineral world. Looking up, the summit still seemed very far off to me. My nostrils were filled with the smell of frozen snow and flint.

  The end of this torture would arrive unexpectedly. I would make one last leap, go round a rocky outcrop, and suddenly find myself before a pile of stones, or a lightning-stricken iron cross—my father’s rucksack flung on the ground, beyond it nothing but sky. It was more of a relief than a cause for elation. There was no reward awaiting us up there: apart from the fact that we could climb no further, there was nothing really special about the summit. I would have been happier reaching a river, or a village.

  On the summit my father became reflective. He would take off his shirt and vest and hang them on the cross to dry. It was only on rare occasions that I saw him like this, and bare-chested his body had something vulnerable about it—with his reddened forearms, his strong white shoulders, the small gold chain that he never took off, his neck also red and covered in dust. We would sit down to eat bread and cheese, and to contemplate the panoramic view. In front of us stood the entire massif of Monte Rosa, so close that we could make out the refuges, the cable cars, the artificial lakes, the long procession of roped figures on their way back from the Margherita Hut. My father would then unstop his canteen of wine and smoke his single morning cigarette.

  “It isn’t called Rosa because it’s pink,” he would say. “It comes from an old word for ice. The ice mountain.”

  Then he would list the “four-thousanders”—the peaks above four thousand meters—from east to west, saying them over again because before going there it was important to know them, to have cultivated a long-standing desire for them: the modest Punta Giordani, the Piramide Vincent towering over it, the Balmenhorn on which the great Christ of the Summits rises, the Parrot, with an outline so gentle that it’s almost invisible; then the noble peaks of the three sharp-pointed sisters—Gnifetti, Zumstein, and Dufour; the two Lyskamm with the ridge that joins them, the “Devourer of Men”; and at the end the elegantly curved profile of Castor, the rugged Pollux, the deeply carved Black Rock, the Breithorn with its seemingly innocuous air. Finally, to the west, sculpted and solitary, the Matterhorn, which my father called the Big Nose, as if it were an elderly aunt of his. He did not willingly turn south, towards the plains: down there the August haze hung heavily, and somewhere beneath that gray blanket Milan was sweltering.

  “It all looks so small, doesn’t it?” he would say, and I did not understand. I could not understand in what possible sense that magisterial panorama could seem small to him. Perhaps it was other things that seemed small, things that came back to him when he was up there. But his melancholy did not last for long. His cigarette finished, he would extract himself from the mire of his thoughts, collect his things and say: “Shall we go?”

  We took the descent at a run, going down every slope at breakneck speed, letting out war cries and American Indian howls, and in less than two hours would be soaking our feet in some village fountain.

  • • •

  In Grana my mother had made progress with her investigations. I would often spot her in the field where Bruno’s mother spent her days. If you glanced up in that direction you would always see her there, a bony woman wearing a yellow beret, bent over, tending her onions and potatoes. She never exchanged a word with anyone, and no one would seek her out there until my mother decided to do so: one of them in the allotment, the other sitting on a tree stump nearby. From a distance it seemed as if they had been chatting there for hours.

  “So she does speak then,” said my father, who had heard from us about this strange woman.

  “Of course she speaks. I’ve never known anyone who was mute,” my mother replied.

  “More’s the pity,” he remarked, but she wasn’t in the mood for jokes. She had discovered that Bruno had not advanced beyond primary school that year, and she was furious about it. He had not been to school since April. It was clear that if no one intervened then his education was already at an end, and this was the kind of thing that made my mother indignant, every bit as much in a small mountain village as in Milan.

  “You can’t always be rescuing everyone,” my father said.

  “But someone rescued you, or am I wrong?”

  “True enough. But then I had to rescue myself from them.”

  “But you did get to study. They didn’t force you to herd cows when you were eleven years old. At eleven you should be going to school.”

  “I’m just saying that it’s different in this case. He does have parents, luckily.”

  “Some luck,” my mother concluded, and my father did not respond. They almost never touched upon the subject of his own childhood, and on those rare occasions he would shake his head and let the subject drop.

  And so it was that we were sent, my father and I, as an advance party to forge links with the men of the Guglielmina family. The alpeggio or farmstead where they spent the summer consisted of a group of three mountain shacks about an hour’s distance from Grana along the track that climbed up the deep valley. We caught sight of them from a distance, perched on its right flank, where the mountain became less steep just before plunging down again until it reached the same stream that flowed through the village. I was already very fond of that little river. I was pleased to meet up with it again there. At this point the valley seemed to close, as if an immense landslide had blocked it upstream, and it ended in a basin watered by small streams and overrun with ferns, bushes of rhubarb, and nettles. Passing through it the way became boggy. Then, leaving behind the wetland, the path went beyond the river and climbed into the sunshine and onto dry ground, towards the huts. From the river onwards all the pastures were well maintained.

  “Hey,” said Bruno. “It’s about time.”

  “I’m sorry. I had to spend some time with my father.”

  “Is that your father? What’s he like?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He’s fine.”

  I had started talking like him. We hadn’t seen each other in fifteen days, and we felt like old friends. My
father greeted him as if he were one, and even Bruno’s uncle made an effort to seem hospitable: he disappeared into one of the huts and came out with a piece of toma cheese, some mocetta salami, and a flask of wine, but his face hardly accorded with these gestures of welcome. He was a man who seemed marked by his own worst inner thoughts, as if they were carved there in his features. He had an unkempt, bristling, and almost white beard, its moustache thicker and gray; eyebrows that were arched permanently, giving him a distrusting air; and eyes that were sky blue. The hand my father stretched out had taken him by surprise, and the movement he made to shake it seemed hesitant, unnatural; only when unstopping the wine and filling the glasses did he seem back on his own familiar territory.

  Bruno had something to show me, so we left them to their drinks and went for a wander around. I took in the farmstead that he had told me so much about. It exuded an ancient dignity—whose presence you could still feel in the drystone walls, in certain enormous angular stones, in the hand-hewn roof beams—as well as a more recent air of poverty, like a layer of grease and dust over everything. The longest of the cabins was being used as a cowshed, humming with flies and encrusted with dung right up to its threshold. In the second, its broken windows stopped with bits of rag and its roof patched with metal sheets, Luigi Guglielmina and his heirs lived. The third was the cellar: Bruno took me to see it rather than the room in which he slept. Even in Grana he had never invited me into his home.

  He said: “I’m learning how to make the toma.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The cheese. Come.”

  The cellar surprised me. It was cool and shadowy, the only really clean place in the whole alpeggio. The thick shelves made of larch had been recently washed: the cheeses were being aged there, their crusts moistened with brine. They were so polished, round, and symmetrical as to seem laid out in display for some kind of competition.

  “Did you make them?” I asked.

  “No, no. For now I only turn them and that’s it. They’re nice ones, no?”

  “What do you mean turn them?”

  “Once every week I turn them over and sprinkle them with salt. Then I wash everything down and tidy up in here.”

  “They’re really nice ones,” I said.

  Outside, on the other hand, lay plastic buckets, a pile of half-rotted wood, a stove made out of a diesel oil drum, a bathtub converted into a drinking trough, scattered potato peelings, and the odd bone picked clean by the dogs. It wasn’t just an absence of decorum: there was a perceptible contempt for things, a certain kind of pleasure in mistreating them and letting them go to pot that I had also begun to recognize in Grana. It was as if these places had already had their fate sealed, that it was a waste of time and effort to try to maintain them.

  My father and Bruno’s uncle were already on their second glass, and we found them in the midst of a discussion about the economics of small Alpine farmsteads. My father must have initiated the conversation. When it came to other people’s lives he was more interested in their work than anything else: how many head of cattle, how many liters of milk a day, what the yield was like regarding the production of cheese. Luigi Guglielmina was more than happy to discuss it with someone who knew what they were talking about, and he made his calculations out loud to show that, what with current prices and the absurd regulations imposed by cattle breeders, his work no longer made economic sense, and was continued by him only because of his passion for it.

  He said: “When I die, within ten years it will all revert to forest up here. Then they’ll be happy.”

  “Don’t your children like this kind of work?” my father asked.

  “Oh sure. What they don’t like is working their asses off.”

  What struck me most was not hearing him talk in such terms, but his prophecy. It had never occurred to me that the pastures had once been wooded, and that they could revert to being so again. I looked at the cows scattered over the grazing, and made an effort to imagine these fields colonized by the first thick covering of weeds and shrubs, erasing every sign of what had once been there. The drainage ditches, the drystone walls, the paths, eventually even the houses themselves.

  Bruno had in the meantime lit the fire in the open-air stove. Without waiting to be told, he went to the bath to fill a saucepan with water and began to peel potatoes with his penknife. There were so many things that he knew how to do: he made a pasta dish and put it on the table with the boiled potatoes, the toma, the mocetta, and the wine. At that point his cousins appeared: two tall and thickset youths, about twenty-five years old, who sat down to eat with their heads lowered, looked up at us briefly, and then went off for a siesta. Bruno’s uncle watched them going, and in the grimace contorting his lips it was clear to see that he despised them.

  My father paid no heed to such things. At the end of the meal he stretched, put his hands behind his head, and looked at the sky, as if he was about to enjoy a show. And he said as much: “What a show.” His vacation was nearly over, and he had already started to look at the mountains with nostalgia. He would no longer be able to make it to certain summits that year. We had some above us: all scree, spurs, pinnacles, rivers of fallen rock, gullies of debris, and broken ridges. They looked like the ruins of an immense fortress destroyed by cannon fire, poised precariously before collapsing completely: what could indeed be considered a real show, in fact, for someone like my father.

  “What are these mountains called?” he asked. A strange question, I thought, given the amount of time he spent poring over his wall map.

  Bruno’s uncle glanced up as if he were looking for signs of rain, and with a vague gesture said: “Grenon.”

  “Which one is Grenon?”

  “This one. For us it’s the mountain of Grana.”

  “All of these peaks together?”

  “Of course. We don’t give names to peaks here. It’s the region.” Having eaten and drunk he was beginning to get fed up with having us around.

  “Have you ever been there?” my father persisted. “Right up to the heights I mean.”

  “When I was young. I used to go with my father, hunting.”

  “And have you been to the glacier?”

  “No. I never had the chance. But I would’ve liked to,” he admitted.

  “I’m thinking of going up there tomorrow,” my father said. “I’m taking the boy to trample some snow. If it’s all right with you, we could take yours with us too.”

  This is what my father had been aiming at all along. Luigi Guglielmina took a moment to understand what he was saying. Yours? Then he remembered Bruno who was there beside me—we were playing with one of the dogs, one of that year’s puppies. But we were also hanging on every word.

  “Do you feel like going?” he asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Bruno.

  The uncle frowned. He was more used to saying no than yes. But perhaps he felt cornered by this stranger, or who knows, perhaps for once he felt sorry for the boy.

  “Well, go then,” he said. Then he put the cork in the bottle and got up from the table, tired now of the effort to appear anything other than who he was.

  The glacier fascinated the scientist in my father before it did the climber. It reminded him of his studies in physics and chemistry, of the mythology by which he was formed. The next day, as we climbed towards the Mezzalama refuge, he told us a story which resembled one of those myths: the glacier, he said, is the memory of past winters which the mountain safeguards for us. Above a certain altitude it stores the memory, and if we wish to know about a winter in the distant past, it’s up there that we need to go.

  “It’s called the level of permanent snow cover,” he explained. “It’s where the summer cannot melt all of the snow that falls in winter. Some of it lasts until autumn, and is buried beneath the snow of the next winter. Therefore it’s saved. Under the new snow, little by little, it gradually turns to ice. It adds a layer to the growth of the glacier, just like growth rings in tree trunks, and by counting the
m we can know how old it is. Except that a glacier doesn’t just stand there on top of the mountain. It moves. All the time it does nothing but slide downwards.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why do you think?”

  “Because it’s heavy,” said Bruno.

  “Exactly,” my father said. “The glacier is heavy, and the rock beneath it is very smooth. That’s why it slides down. Slowly, but without ever stopping. It slides down the mountain until it reaches a level that’s too warm for it. We call that the melt level. Can you see it there, down below?”

  We were walking on a moraine that seemed made of sand. A spit of ice and rubble jutted out beneath us, way down below the path. It was crisscrossed by rivulets that collected into a small lake which was opaque, metallic, icy-looking.

  “That water down there,” my father said, “it hasn’t come from the snow that fell this year. It’s from snow that the mountain has stored for who knows how long. Perhaps it’s from snow that fell a hundred winters ago.”

  “A hundred? Really?” asked Bruno.

  “Perhaps even more. It’s difficult to determine exactly. You’d need to know the exact degree of incline and friction. You can try an experiment first.”

  “How?”

  “Ah, that’s easy. Do you see those crevasses up there above? Tomorrow we’ll go there, throw in a coin, then go and sit in the river and wait for it to arrive.”

  My father laughed. Bruno continued looking at the crevasses and at the glacier where it jutted below, and you could tell that he was fascinated by the idea. For my part I was not so interested in bygone winters. I could feel in the pit of my stomach that we were about to go beyond the level at which, on previous occasions, our ascent had come to an end. The timing was also unusual: in the afternoon we had felt a few drops of rain, and now with evening falling we were heading into fog. It felt very strange to discover, at the end of the moraine, a wooden building on two stories. The smell of fumes from a generator announced its proximity, followed by voices shouting in a language I did not recognize. The wooden platform at the entrance, pockmarked by crampons, was cluttered with rucksacks, ropes, sweaters, vests, and thick socks hung out everywhere to dry; and by climbers crossing it in unlaced boots, carrying their washing.