• • •
In the other battle she was fighting at Grana she held firm. From the beginning she had taken Bruno’s education to heart, like a personal crusade, but she knew full well that she could achieve nothing on her own: she needed to forge alliances with the women of his family. She had understood that his mother would be of no help at all, so she concentrated her efforts on his aunt. This is how my mother operated: knocking on doors and gaining entrance to homes, returning in a friendly but determined manner, not relenting until the aunt eventually committed to sending him to school during the winter—and over to our place to do homework in the summer. This was already quite an achievement. I don’t know what the uncle thought about the matter; perhaps up there in the alpeggio he was cursing the lot of us. Or perhaps, in truth, nobody in that family really cared anything about the boy.
And so it is that I remember long hours spent with Bruno in our kitchen doing history and geography revision, while outside the woods and the river and the sky beckoned. He would be sent to us three times a week, scrubbed and well dressed for the occasion. My mother would get him to read aloud from my books—Stevenson, Verne, Twain, Jack London—and would leave them with him after the lesson so that he could continue practicing while he was up in the pastures. Bruno liked reading novels, but studying grammar always sent him into a crisis: for him it was like studying a foreign language. And seeing how he got entangled with the rules of Italian, failing to spell a word correctly or stuttering over a conjunction, I felt humiliated on his behalf and annoyed with my mother. I could not see the justice of what we were forcing him to do. And yet Bruno did not utter a single word of protest or complaint. He understood how much it mattered to her, and perhaps having never experienced before what is was like to matter to someone, he struggled hard to learn.
Only on rare occasions during the summer was he allowed to come walking with us, and these were his holidays, the reward for the efforts that went into his studies: whether it was a summit we were taken to by my father, or just a field where my mother would spread out a blanket for lunch. On these occasions I would see Bruno transformed. Though undisciplined by nature, he would adapt to the rules and the rituals of our family. And whilst with me he already behaved like a grown-up, with my parents he would happily regress to his proper age. He allowed my mother to feed him, to dress him, to caress him—while my father inspired in him a respect that bordered on adulation. I could see it in the way he would follow behind him on the path, and how he would listen in rapt silence when my father started explaining something. These were perfectly ordinary moments in the life of a family, but Bruno had never experienced anything like them—and part of me felt proud of them, as if they were gifts that I myself had bestowed on him. On the other hand I would sometimes watch him with my father to try to gauge the nature of the understanding that there was between them, and I would feel that Bruno would have made a good son for him—perhaps not a better one than I was, but in a certain sense a more suitable one. Bruno was full of questions for him that he would ask naturally, without hesitation. He had the confidence that allowed him to get close to my father, and the physical strength to follow him anywhere. I would think these things but then try to suppress them, as if they were something about which I should be ashamed.
Eventually Bruno passed not only the first grade of senior school but the second and even the third, achieving an “average” mark in the exam. It was such an event in his family that his aunt phoned us immediately in Milan to give us the news. What a peculiar word, I thought, and wondered who had come up with it, since there was nothing “average” about Bruno. My mother on the other hand was simply delighted, and when we went back up to Grana she took him a prize: a box of chisels and gouges for working with wood. Then she began to ask herself what else she could do for him.
• • •
The summer of 1987 arrived: we were fourteen. We spent an entire month dedicated to a systematic exploration of the river. Not from its banks this time, or from the paths that intersected it from the woods, but in the water itself, in the current, jumping from rock to rock or wading within it. We had never heard of canyoning, if such a thing even existed at that time, but did it anyway, albeit in reverse: proceeding upstream from the bridge at Grana, climbing back up the valley. Just above the village we entered a long gorge of calm water, in the shadow of banks densely covered in vegetation. There were large pools infested with insects, tangles of submerged wood, old wary trout that would scatter at our approach. Further up, the gradient became problematic, making the river flow headlong, its progress all leaps and falls. Where we could not manage to scramble over we would rig up a rope to cross the rapids, or use a fallen tree trunk by floating it onto the water and wedging it between rocks to make a pontoon. Sometimes even a single modest waterfall would cost us hours of work. But this is what made the feat special. We planned to negotiate such passages one by one then connect them all, going up the entire length of the river on one glorious day at the end of summer.
First, though, we needed to discover its source. Towards the August bank holiday we had already gone beyond the territory of Bruno’s uncle. There was a large tributary which provided the Alpine farmsteads with water, and a little way after this fork a rudimentary bridge consisting of a few planks of wood provided a crossing. After that the river narrowed and presented us with no further difficulty. I understood from the thinning out of the tree cover that we were getting to a level of two thousand meters. The alders and birches disappeared from the banks, all other trees giving way to the larch; above our heads was that world of rock and stone that Luigi Guglielmina had called Grenon. At this point the bed of the river lost its usual appearance—that of something excavated and shaped by the water—becoming instead nothing but scree. The water literally vanished beneath our feet. It escaped beneath the stones here, amidst the contorted roots of a juniper.
This is not how I had imagined my river ending up, and I was disappointed. I turned towards Bruno, who was climbing a few steps behind me. All afternoon he had been keeping himself to himself, lost in his own thoughts. When this mood came over him the only thing I could do was follow after him in silence, hoping that it would pass.
But as soon as he caught sight of the spring he snapped out of it. He had sensed my disappointment at a glance. “Wait,” he said. He signaled to me to keep quiet and listen, and looked at the scree at our feet.
That day the air was not still, like it was at the height of summer. A cold wind blew over the tepid stones and, passing through the fading plants, carried away soft clusters of seeds and set up a rustling in the trees. By listening hard, together with this rustling I could hear water gurgling. A sound different from the ones it makes above ground, deeper and more muffled. It seemed to be coming from beneath the scree. I understood what it was and began to climb again to follow it, searching like a dowser for the water that I could hear but not see. Bruno let me go on ahead, already knowing what we would find.
What we found was a lake hidden in a basin at the foot of the Grenon. It was circular and at two or three hundred meters across was the largest that I’d ever seen in the mountains. The marvelous thing about Alpine lakes is that you never expect them, while climbing, unless you know already that they are there—that you don’t catch sight of them until the very last step over a ridge, at which point the view suddenly opens up before your eyes. The basin was all scree on its sunlit side, and as you moved your gaze gradually towards the shadows you saw that it became covered at first by willows and rhododendrons, and then by more woods. In its middle was this lake. Observing it, I was able to understand how it had been made: the ancient avalanche that could be seen from below, from Bruno’s uncle’s pastures, had sealed the valley like a dam. The lake had been formed above the dam, collecting the water that ran off from the surrounding snow, before resurfacing downhill, filtered by the scree, becoming in the process the river that we knew. I liked the fact that it was born in this way. It seemed to me an origin worthy of a
great river.
“What’s this lake called?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Bruno said. “Grenon. Almost everything’s called that around here.”
His previous mood had returned. He sat down on the grass and I remained standing next to him. It was easier to look at the lake than to look at each other: a few meters in front of us a large rock emerged from the water, like a small island, and it was useful to have something to fix my gaze on.
“Your parents have spoken to my uncle,” said Bruno, after a while. “Did you know about that?”
“No,” I lied.
“Strange. I don’t understand what’s going on at all.”
“About what?”
“About the secrets you have between you.”
“So what did they talk to your uncle about?”
“About me,” he replied.
Now I sat down next to him. What he was about to tell me came as no surprise. My parents had been discussing it for some time now, and I had not needed to listen behind doors in order to discover their intentions: the previous day they had suggested to Luigi Guglielmina that in September we should take Bruno with us. Take him to Milan. They had offered to take him into our home, and to enroll him in a college. In a technical or professional institute, whichever he preferred. They were thinking about a trial year: if Bruno wasn’t happy with the arrangement he would be able to give up and return to Grana next summer. If on the other hand it all worked out, then they would be happy to keep him with us until his graduation. At that point he would be free to decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
Even in the account of this given by Bruno I could recognize the voice of my mother. Happy to keep him with us. Free to decide. The rest of his life.
I said: “Your uncle will never agree to it.”
“Oh but he will,” said Bruno. “And do you know why?”
“Why?”
“For the money.”
He dug around in the ground with a finger, picked up a pebble and added: “Who’s going to pay for it? That’s all that interests my uncle. Your parents have said that they’ll take care of everything. Board and lodging, school, the lot. For him it’s a real bargain.”
“And what does your aunt say about it?”
“It’s fine by her.”
“And your mother?”
Bruno snorted. He threw the pebble into the water. It was so small that it made no sound. “What my mother always says. The usual. A big nothing.”
There was a layer of dried mud on the rocks on the bank. A black crust showing the level the lake had reached in spring. Now the snowfields that fed it had been reduced to gray stains in the gullies, and if the summer were to continue it would end up by making them disappear altogether. Without the snow, who knows what would happen to the lake.
“And what about you?” I asked.
“What about me?”
“Would you like to?”
“To come to Milan?” said Bruno. “I haven’t a clue. Do you know that ever since yesterday I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like? And I can’t do it. I have no idea what it would be like.”
We remained in silence. I, who knew only too well what it was like, did not have to imagine anything in order to be opposed to the idea. Bruno would have hated Milan, and Milan would have ruined Bruno, just like when his aunt washed and dressed him up and sent him around to us to conjugate verbs. I really could not understand why my parents were going out of their way to turn him into something that he wasn’t. What was wrong with letting him graze cows for the rest of his life? I was unaware of the selfishness of this thought, that it wasn’t really concerned with Bruno, with his own wishes and his future—but only with the use I could continue to make of him. I was thinking of my summers, my companion, my own experience of the mountain. I hoped that, up there, nothing would ever change—not even the charred shacks or mounds of manure lining the road—that he should stay the same, always, along with the piles of manure and the ruins, frozen in time and awaiting my arrival.
“Well, maybe you should tell them,” I suggested.
“Tell them what?”
“That you don’t want to go to Milan. That you want to stay here.”
Bruno turned to look at me. He raised his eyebrows. He had not expected such advice from me. Although he may have been thinking the very same thing himself, coming from me it did not seem right. “Are you crazy?” he said. “I’m not staying here. I’ve spent my whole life going up and down this mountain.”
Then he got to his feet, and there on the grass where we stood he cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted, “Oh! Can you hear me? It’s me, Bruno! I’m leaving!”
From the other side of the lake the slope of the Grenon sent back to us an echo of his cry. We heard some stones falling. His shout had startled a group of chamois that was now clambering up the scree.
It was Bruno who pointed them out to me. They were passing through rocks which made them almost invisible, but when they crossed a snowfield I was able to count them. It was a small herd of five. They climbed up that stain of snow in single file, reached the crest, and lingered there for a moment, as if to look at us for one last time before going. Then, one by one, they disappeared down the other side.
• • •
Our four-thousander that summer was meant to be the Castor. We would scale one of these each year, my father and I, on the Monte Rosa, so as to conclude the season on a high, when we were best trained up to do so. I hadn’t stopped going onto the glacier, but neither had I stopped suffering its effects: I had just become accustomed to feeling unwell and to the fact that this sickness formed a normal part of that world, like getting up before dawn, or the freeze-dried food in the refuges, or the cawing of crows on the heights. It was a way of going into the mountains that for me had lost all sense of adventure. It was a brutal putting of one foot after the other before vomiting my heart out at the top. I hated doing it, and found myself hating that white desert every time: and yet I was proud of going above four thousand meters again, as further proof of my courage. In 1985 my father’s black felt-tip ink had reached the Vincent, by 1986 the Gnifetti. He considered the ascent of these summits to be a kind of training for me. He had consulted a doctor and was convinced that I would grow out of my altitude sickness, so that over the course of three or four years we would reach the point when we could do more serious things, such as crossing the Lyskamm or the rock faces of Dufour.
But what I remember most about Castor, even more than its elongated crests, was the vigil that we shared in the refuge. A plate of pasta, a half-liter of wine on the table, the mountaineers nearby arguing amongst themselves, ruddy-faced from the sun and from fatigue. The prospect of the next day created in the room a kind of concentration. In front of me my father was leafing through the guest book, his favorite reading in a refuge. He spoke German well and understood French, and every so often he would translate a passage from these languages of the Alps. Someone had returned to a summit after thirty years and thanked God. Someone else regretted the absence of a friend. He was moved by these things, to the point where he took up the pen to make his own contribution to that collective diary.
When he got up to refill his carafe I looked at what he had written. His handwriting was dense and nervous, difficult to decipher if you were not already familiar with it. I read: I’m here with my fourteen-year-old son, Pietro. These will be my last occasions at the head of the rope, because soon he will be the one pulling me up. Don’t much feel like going back to the city, but I’ll take with me the memory of these days as the most beautiful refuge. It was signed: Giovanni Guasti.
Rather than making me feel moved, or proud, these words just annoyed me. I detected in them something that sounded false and sentimental, a rhetoric of the mountains that did not correspond to reality. If it was such a paradise then why did we not stay and live up there? Why were we taking away a friend who had been born and raised there? And if the city was so revoltin
g, why were we forcing him to live in it with us? This is what I would like to have asked my father—and my mother as well, come to think of it. How is it that you are so sure of knowing what’s best for the course of another person’s life? How is it that you don’t have the slightest doubt—that he might know better than you?
But when my father returned he was in high spirits. It was the third from last day of his holiday, a Friday in August of his forty-sixth year, and he was in an Alpine refuge with his only son. He had brought another glass and half-filled it for me. Perhaps, in his imagination, now that I was growing up and getting over my altitude sickness, our relationship as father and son would be transformed into something different. Climbing companions, just like he had written in the book. Drinking companions. Perhaps he really did imagine us like this in a few years’ time, sitting at a table at three and a half thousand meters drinking red wine and studying maps of the routes, with no more secrets between us.
“How’s your stomach doing?” he asked.
“It’s not bad.”
“And your legs?”
“They’re really good.”
“Excellent. Tomorrow we’ll have fun.”
My father raised his glass. I did the same, tasted the wine and felt that I liked it. While I was getting it down a guy sitting nearby burst out laughing, said something in German, and clapped me hard on the back, as if I had just been initiated into the great brotherhood of men and he was welcoming me into it.
• • •
The next evening we went back to Grana as veterans of the glacier. My father with his shirt unbuttoned and his rucksack slung over one shoulder, and with a hobbling gait due to the blisters on his feet; I as ravenous as a wolf, since as soon as we descended from altitude my stomach realized that it had been empty for two days. My mother was waiting for us with a hot bath and supper already on the table. Later on the time for telling our story would come: my father tried to describe the color of ice in the crevasses, the vertiginous nature of the north faces, the elegance of the cornices of snow on the crests; while I for my part had only blurred recollections of such visions, fogged as they were by nausea. I usually kept quiet. I had already learned a fact which my father never resigned himself to, namely, that it was impossible to convey what it feels like up there to those who have stayed below.
The Eight Mountains Page 6