But that evening we did not get around to telling my mother anything. I was about to have my bath when I heard the voice of a man ranting down in the courtyard. I went to the window and pulled back the curtain: I saw a character who was gesticulating and yelling words that I could not understand. My father was the only other one out there. He had hung his thick socks on the balcony and was bathing his aching feet in the trough, getting up from where he sat on its rim to confront the stranger.
For a moment I thought it might be a farmer furious at this misuse of his water. In Grana they would leap at any pretext to take offense from an incomer. It was easy to identify the locals: they all moved in the same way, had the same marked facial features from out of which, between cheekbones and forehead, a pair of sky-blue eyes peered. This man was smaller than my father, except for the muscular arms and huge hands that were completely out of proportion to the rest of his body. With those hands he grabbed the two sides of my father’s shirt just below the collar. It looked as if he wanted to pick him up.
My father spread his arms. I was seeing him from behind and imagined that he would be saying: calm down, calm down. The man mumbled something, showing his ruined teeth. His face was also wrecked: I didn’t know by what, being still too young to recognize the face of a drinker. He made a grimace that was exactly like one of Luigi Guglielmina’s, and at that moment I realized how much he resembled him. My father began to gesture slowly. I understood that he was explaining something, and knowing him, knew also that his arguments would be unanswerable. The man lowered his gaze, just as I always did. It looked as if he was having second thoughts, but he kept hold of my father’s shirt. My father turned up the palms of his hands as if to say: OK, do we understand each other? So now what? There was something ridiculous in seeing him in this situation barefoot. On his calves the line made by his socks sharply divided his pale ankles from a narrow band of scarlet skin just below the knee—the area that his plus fours left bare. Here was the educated city-dweller, sure of himself and used to telling others what to do, who had just burned his legs on the glacier and was now trying to reason with a highlander the worse for drink.
The man decided that he’d had enough. Suddenly and without warning, he lowered his right hand to make a fist and hit my father on the temple. It was the first time in my life that I had seen a real punch thrown. The sound of knuckle on cheekbone was clear even from the bathroom, dry as a whack with a stick. My father took two steps back, staggered, but managed not to fall. But immediately afterwards his arms fell to his sides and his shoulders sagged a little. It was the posture of a wretched man. The other man said something else before leaving, a threat or a promise, and it did not surprise me to see him heading, in the end, towards the Guglielminas’ house. During that brief confrontation I had realized who he was.
He had come back to reclaim what was his. He did not know that he had got the wrong person. But in the end it made no difference: that blow was thrown into my father’s face in order to plant something clearly in the mind of my mother. It was the eruption of reality into her idealism, and perhaps also into her arrogance. The next day Bruno and his father were nowhere to be seen. My father’s left eye became swollen and blue. But I don’t think that was what was hurting most, when he got into his car that evening and left for Milan.
The following week was our last in Grana. Bruno’s aunt came to speak to my mother: mortified, wary, worried, perhaps above all by the prospect of losing such faithful tenants. My mother reassured her. She was already thinking about damage limitation, about how to salvage the relationships that had been so painstakingly nurtured.
For me it proved to be an interminable week. It rained constantly: a blanket of low-lying cloud cover hid the mountains from view, occasionally clearing to expose the first snow at three thousand meters. I would like to have taken one of the paths I knew and gone up to tread all over it, without asking permission from anyone. But I stayed in the village instead, replaying what I had seen and feeling guilty about what had happened. Then on Sunday we locked the house and left as well.
FOUR
I COULD NOT GET that blow out of my mind until a few years later I found the courage to deliver one myself. In truth it was the first of a series, and the hardest of these I would go on to land in the valley in later years, but now it seems right that my rebellion should have begun in the mountains, like everything else that has mattered to me. The event itself was unremarkable. I was sixteen and one day my father decided to take me camping. He had bought an old heavy tent from a stall selling army surplus gear. He had this idea of putting it up on the side of a small lake, fishing for a few trout without being discovered by the forest rangers, lighting a fire at nightfall and roasting the fish on it—and afterwards, who knows, staying up late drinking and singing, warmed by its embers.
He had never shown the slightest interest in camping, so I suspected that there was something else that had been planned for me. In recent times I had withdrawn into a corner from which I observed our family life with a pitiless eye. The ineradicably fixed habits of my parents, my father’s harmless outbursts of anger and the tricks that my mother used to contain them, the little bullyings and the subterfuges that they no longer realized they were resorting to. He would be emotional, authoritarian, irascible; she would be strong and calm and conciliatory. They had a mutually reassuring way of always playing the same part, knowing that the other would play theirs: these were not real arguments; they were performances with always predictable endings, and in that cage I also ended up being caught. I had begun to feel an urgent need to escape. But I had never managed to say so: not once had I uttered a single protest about anything, and I think that it was precisely for this, to make me speak, that the damn tent had materialized.
After lunch my father spread out the equipment in the kitchen and divided it up so as to distribute its weight equally between us. The poles and pegs alone must have weighed ten kilos. With the sleeping bags, anoraks, sweaters, and food supplies on top, the rucksacks soon became full. With one knee on the kitchen floor my father began to loosen every strap and then to push, compress, pull—at war with mass and volume, and I could already feel myself sweating beneath that load in the sweltering afternoon heat. But it wasn’t only the weight that was unbearable. It was the scene that he had conjured up, or that they had: the campfire, the lake, the trout, the starry sky; all that intimacy.
“Dad,” I said. “Come on, that’s enough.”
“Wait, wait,” he said, still trying to stuff something inside the rucksack, absorbed by the effort.
“No, I mean it: it’s no good.”
My father stopped what he was doing and looked up. He had a furious expression on his face from his exertions, and the way he looked at me made me feel like another hostile rucksack, another strap that wouldn’t comply.
I shrugged.
With my father, if I kept quiet it meant that he could speak. He unfurrowed his brow and said: “Well, perhaps we can take some stuff out. Lend a hand if you feel like it.”
“No,” I replied. “I really don’t feel like doing this.”
“What don’t you feel like doing, the camping?”
“The tent, the lake, the whole thing.”
“What do you mean the whole thing?”
“I don’t want it. I’m not coming.”
I could not have dealt him a harder blow. Refusing to follow him into the mountains: it was inevitable that it would happen sooner or later, he must have expected it. But sometimes I think that because he had no father of his own he had no experience of making certain kinds of attack, and was therefore ill-prepared to receive one. He was deeply hurt. Maybe he could have asked me a few more questions, and it would have been a good occasion to hear what I had to say—but in the event he wasn’t capable of doing so, or didn’t think it was necessary, or at that moment he just felt too offended to think. He left the rucksacks, the tent, and the sleeping bags where they were and went out for a walk by himself. Fo
r me it was a liberation.
• • •
Bruno had been dealt the opposite fate, and was now working with his father as a builder. I hardly ever saw him. They worked high up in the mountains building refuges and alpeggi, and slept up there on weekdays. I would encounter him on a Friday or Saturday, not in Grana but in some cafe bar down in the valley. I had all the time that I wanted now that I had freed myself from the obligation to climb mountains, and while my father scaled the summits I would head in the opposite direction, searching for someone my own age. It only took two or three attempts before I was admitted into the company of holidaymakers: I spent the afternoons between the benches of a tennis court and the tables of a cafe bar, hoping that no one would notice that I had no money with which to order anything. I listened to the chat, watched the girls, every so often looked up at the mountains. I recognized the pastures and the minuscule white stains that were plastered huts. The bright green of the larches that gave way to the more sombre green of the firs, the “right” side in sunlight and the “reverse” in shadow. I knew that I had little enough in common, and to share, with those young people on their holidays, but I wanted to fight against my inclination towards solitude—to try to be with others for a while and to see what might happen.
Later, towards seven, the workmen would arrive at the bar: the bricklayers, the cattle breeders. They would get out of white vans and 4x4s, filthy with mud or lime or sawdust, moving with a lolling gait that they had learned in adolescence, as if together with the weight of their own bodies they were always moving another, greater one. They would take up positions at the counter, complaining and cursing, bantering with the waitresses and ordering rounds of drinks. Bruno was with them. I could see that he had developed his muscles, and that he liked to show them off by rolling his shirtsleeves high. He owned a collection of caps and a wallet that stuck out from the back pocket of his jeans. This struck me more than anything else, given that for me, earning money was still a distant prospect. He would spend it without even counting, paying for his round with some crumpled banknote or other, imitating the others.
But then at a certain point, with the same distracted air, he would turn towards me from the counter. He knew already that he would meet my gaze. He would give a signal with his chin, and I would reply by raising the fingers of one hand. We looked at each other for a second. That was it. No one noticed; it wasn’t repeated during the course of the evening; and I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting properly the significance of this greeting. It could mean: I remember you, I miss you. Or it might be: it’s only been two years but it seems like a lifetime, doesn’t it? Or perhaps: hey Berio, what are you doing with that crowd? I didn’t know what Bruno thought about the clash between our fathers. Whether he had any regrets about how things had turned out, or if seen from his current point of view that whole story seemed as distant and as unreal as it did to me. He didn’t have the look of someone who was unhappy at all. On the other hand it could be that I did.
His father was with him in the row of drinkers, amongst those with the more irritating voices and the always-empty glasses. He treated Bruno as if he was just another of his drinking companions. I disliked this man, but envied him in one respect: there was nothing perceptible between them, not a more brusque or solicitous tone of voice, not a gesture of irritation, confidence, or embarrassment—and if you did not know it already there was nothing to indicate that they were father and son.
• • •
Not all of the young men of the valley wasted their summer in the bar. After a few days someone took me to a place on the other side of the river, a wood of wild pines which concealed some huge monoliths, as alien to that landscape as meteorites. The glacier must have pushed them to that point in some far distant past. Then the earth and the leaves and the moss had covered them, pines had grown around and on top of them—but some of these stones had been brought back to light, cleaned up with wire brushes, and even christened with individual names. The youths would challenge each other to find every possible way of climbing them. Without ropes or pegs they tried and retried approaches from about a meter above ground level, ending up by landing softly in the undergrowth. It was a pleasure to watch the two or three strongest: agile as gymnasts, with hands scoured and white with chalk, they had brought this pastime to the mountain from the city. They were happy enough to teach it to others and I asked them if I could have a go. After all, I had already climbed with Bruno every kind of rock without knowing anything, since my father had always warned me against adventuring any place where you were dependent on using your hands. And perhaps it was because of this that I decided to become good at it.
At sunset the group expanded to include those who had come to party. Someone would light a fire, someone else would bring something to smoke and something to drink. Then we would sit around, and while the bottle of wine circulated I would listen to discussions about things that were completely new to me and that fascinated me every bit as much as the girls sitting on the other side of the fire. I heard about the Californian hippies who had invented modern free-form climbing, bivouacking for entire summers beneath the rock faces of the Yosemite and climbing half-naked; or about the French climbers who trained on the sea cliffs of Provence, wore their hair long, and were accustomed to going up swiftly and light-footed—how when they moved from the sea to the gullies of Mont Blanc they would humiliate veteran climbers such as my father. Rock climbing was all about the pleasure of being together, about being free to experiment, and for this a two-meter-high stone on the bank of a river was as good as any at eight thousand meters: it had nothing whatsoever to do with the cult of difficulty, or with the conquest of summits. I listened while the woods became shrouded in darkness. The twisted trunks of the pines, the powerful fragrance of resin, the white monoliths in the light of the fire made it a more welcoming refuge than any of those on Monte Rosa. Later on somebody would begin to try a route with a cigarette between his lips, his sense of balance skewed by drink; someone else would wander off with a girl at his side.
The differences between us counted for less in the woods, perhaps because they were less evident there than elsewhere. They were wealthy young men from Milan, Genoa, and Turin. The less well-off lived in small villas high up in the valley, buildings erected in crazy haste at the foot of the ski slopes; the richest in the old-style mountain dwellings in exclusive areas, where each stone and every slate had been removed, numbered, and then placed back according to the design of an architect. I happened to go into one of these accompanying a friend who was fetching drink for the evening. From outside it looked like an old timber-built barn; inside it revealed itself to be the house of an antiques dealer, or a collector: virtually an exhibition of fine-art books, paintings, furniture, sculpture. And of bottles as well: my friend opened a cupboard and we each filled a rucksack.
“But won’t your father be angry that we’re pinching his wine?” I asked.
“My father!” he replied, as if he found the very word ridiculous. We emptied the cellar and ran for the woods.
• • •
In the meantime my own father was mortally offended. He had begun to go to the mountains again, alone, getting up at dawn and leaving before we were awake, and sometimes during his absence I would take a look at his map in order to check on his latest conquests. He had started to explore a part of the valley that we had always avoided, since you could tell from below that there was nothing up there: neither villages, nor water, nor refuges, nor stunning peaks—only bare slopes that climbed steeply for two thousand meters, and an endless expanse of scree. I think he went there to cool down his disappointment, or to find a landscape that resembled his state of mind. He never again invited me to join him. From his perspective I had become the one who needed to go to him: if I was the one who’d had the courage to say no, then the onus was on me now to say sorry and please.
The time of the glacier came round again, our two days of glory in the mid-August holiday, and I saw him prep
aring the crampons, the pickaxe as severe as a weapon, the water bottle dented by all the knocks it had taken. He seemed to me like the last survivor of one of those Alpine expeditions, one of those soldier-climbers who went in the thirties to die in droves on the north faces of the Alps, blindly attacking the mountain.
“You need to speak to him,” my mother said that morning. “Look how hurt he is.”
“But shouldn’t he be the one speaking to me?”
“You’re capable of doing it; he isn’t.”
“But capable of doing what?”
“Come on, you know full well. He’s only waiting for you to go and ask to come with him.”
I did know it—but I did not do it. I went to my room, and shortly afterwards watched from the window as my father walked off with a heavy tread, his rucksack stuffed with metal gear. You don’t go up the glacier on your own, and I knew that in the evening he would have to resort to a humiliating search. There was always at least one person in his predicament in the refuge: he would go from table to table, he would listen to the discussions for a while, joining the conversation, and would eventually propose joining the group the next morning, despite knowing that nobody was keen to tie a stranger to his rope. At that moment it seemed to me like the perfect punishment for him.
• • •
I tasted my own punishment too, that summer. After much training on the monoliths, I went with two youths on my first real free-form climb. One of them was the wine thief, the son of the collector, a Genoese who was amongst the strongest in the group; the other was a friend of his who had started a few months ago, probably just to be with him, since he had not much passion, dedication, or talent for climbing. The rock face was so close to the road that we only had to cross a meadow to reach the point of attack, an overhang jutting out so far that the cattle used it to shelter from the wind and rain. We put our shoes on amongst the cows, then the Genoese handed me a harness and a locking carabiner and tied the two of us to the ends of the rope with himself in the middle. Without further ceremony he told the other boy to go safely and we set off.
The Eight Mountains Page 7