The Eight Mountains

by Paolo Cognetti

  He climbed lightly and flexibly, giving the impression of being weightless, and that his every movement was effortless. He did not need to feel around to find the right point of purchase, but just hit the mark every time. Every so often he unhooked a quickdraw from the harness, clipped it onto one of the bolts that marked the way, and would pass the rope through the carabiner; then he would plunge his hands into the bag of chalk, blow on his fingers, and start to climb again with ease. He looked very elegant. Elegance, grace, lightness, they were all qualities that I was so keen to learn from him.

  His friend had no such qualities. I could see him close up, climbing, because when the Genoese arrived at the resting place he shouted down to us to climb up together, leaving just a few meters’ distance between us. And so, one pull after another, I found myself with his companion directly above my head. I had frequently to stop because my head was right beneath his shoes, at which point I would turn round to look at the world behind my shoulders: the fields yellowed at the end of August, the river sparkling in the sunlight, cars already miniaturized on the trunk road. The drop did not frighten me. Away from the ground, in the air, I felt good and the movements of the climb came naturally to my body, requiring concentration but not exceptional muscles or lungs.

  My companion instead used his arms too much and his feet not enough. He clung close to the rock so was obliged to seek handholds blind, and he did not refrain from grabbing hold of a bolt when he found no alternative.

  “You shouldn’t do it like that,” I told him, making a big mistake. I should have let him do it in whichever way he thought best.

  He looked at me, annoyed, and said: “What do you want? Are you trying to overtake? You’re always pressing from down there.”

  From that moment I had made an enemy. At the resting place he said to the other one, “Pietro’s in a hurry, he thinks it’s a race.”

  I didn’t say: your friend is a cheat who hangs on the bolts. I understood that it would have ended up two against one. I kept my distance from then on, but the guy would not let it go: every so often he would make a crack at my expense, and my competitiveness became a running joke for the rest of the day. According to that joke I was running behind them, I would get to just below them and they would have to give me a few kicks to get me out from under their feet. The collector’s son laughed. When I reached the last resting place he said: “You’re going strong. Do you want to try going first?”

  “Fine,” I answered. In reality I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible, so that they would leave me in peace. I already had my safety harness and all the clips; we didn’t have to make any of the usual maneuvers required to exchange places—so I looked up, saw a bolt planted in a fissure, and set off.

  Finding your way is easy if you have a rope above your head: it’s something else entirely when the rope is at your feet. The bolt on which I hooked the first clip was an old ring nail, not one of the steel bolts that glinted along the rock face. I decided to ignore the fact and to advance along the fissure, as I was already making good progress. The thing was, though, that further up the crack began to narrow and soon disappeared altogether. I now had jutting out above me a black, damp roof of rock—and no idea as to how to get over it.

  “Where do I go?” I shouted.

  “I can’t see from here,” the Genoese shouted back. “Are there any bolts there?”

  No, there were no bolts. I held fast to the last bit of the fissure, and leaned out first to one side of it and then the other, to see if I could spot any. I discovered that I had followed a false trail: the line of steel plaquettes ran up at a diagonal a few meters to my right, skirting the overhang and reaching to the top.

  “I’ve taken the wrong route!” I shouted.

  “Oh, really?” he shouted back in response. “And what’s it like there? Can you get over it?”

  “No. It’s completely smooth.”

  “Then you’ll have to come back down.” I couldn’t see them, but could hear that they were amused.

  I had never climbed backwards. The fissure that I had come up looked impossible when seen from above. I felt an impulse to hold on even more tightly, and at the same time realized that the rusty iron peg was now some four or five meters away. One of my legs began to tremble: an uncontrollable trembling that began at the knee and went down to my heel. My foot no longer responded. My hands were sweating, and the rock seemed to be slipping from my grasp.

  “I’m falling,” I shouted. “Hold tight!”

  Then I went down. A fall of ten meters is not really anything very serious, but you need to know how to fall: push yourself away from the rock face and cushion the impact with your feet. No one had taught me how to do this and I went straight down, flaying myself on the rock in my attempt to get a grip on it. I felt a tightness in my groin when I reached the bottom. Yet this other pain was fortunate—it meant that someone had blocked the rope. Now they were not laughing anymore.

  Shortly afterwards we came out on the top of the rock, and it felt strange at that point to find ourselves in the fields again, with a taut line a step from the precipice, the cows grazing, a half-derelict farmstead, a dog barking. I was shaken and in pain, I had blood everywhere, and I suspect that the two friends felt guilty, since one of them asked me: “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you want a cigarette?”

  “Thanks.”

  I decided that it would be the last thing we would ever share. I smoked it lying on the grass, looking up at the sky. They said something else to me, but by that stage I wasn’t listening anymore.

  Just as it did every summer the weather changed at the end of the month. It started raining and getting cold, and it was the mountain itself that prompted in you the desire to go down to the valley to enjoy the warmth of September. My father had left again. My mother began to light the stove: in brief breaks in the weather I would go into the woods to collect firewood, bending down the dry branches of larches until they broke with a sharp crack. I felt fine up there in Grana, but this time I too was anxious to return to the city. I felt that I had so many things to discover, people to go in search of, and that the near future held important changes in store for me. I lived those last days knowing that they were the last in more than one sense, as if they were memories of the mountain that were already in the past. I liked the fact that we were like this: my mother and I alone together again, the fire crackling in the kitchen, the cold of the early morning, the hours spent reading and wandering in the woods. There were no rocks to climb in Grana, but I discovered that I could train well enough by climbing the walls of derelict houses. I would go up and come down the corners methodically, avoiding the easiest handholds and trying to support myself using only the cracks and the tips of my fingers. Then I would cross from one corner to another and back. In this way I must have climbed every derelict building in the village.

  One Sunday the sky was clear again. We were having breakfast when there was a knock at the door. It was Bruno. He was standing there on the balcony, smiling.

  “Hey, Berio,” he said. “Coming into the mountains?”

  Without any preamble he explained to me that his uncle had had the idea of acquiring some goats that summer. He would leave them to graze freely on the mountain near the alpeggio, so that he needed to do nothing except check on them through binoculars in the evening, making sure that they were all there and had not strayed from where he could keep an eye on them. The problem was that during their first few nights up there it had snowed, and now his uncle couldn’t find them. Chances were that they had sought shelter in some hole or other, or run off behind a passing herd of ibexes. Bruno spoke of it as if it was just one more example of his uncle’s harebrained schemes.

  He owned a motorbike now, an old rusted one without number plates, and with this we took the road leading up to the farmstead, dodging the lowest branches of the larches and getting covered in mud going through puddles. I liked gripping his back rid
ing pillion, and sensed no embarrassment on his part. On the other side of his uncle’s meadows we took a straight track at a good speed: in this patchy and stony grass the goats’ droppings were everywhere. Following them, we climbed up a bank of rhododendrons and of fallen rock where a nearly dry river ran. Then the snow began.

  Up to that moment I had known only one of the mountains’ seasons: a short-lived summer that resembled spring at the beginning of July, and autumn at the end of August. About winter I knew next to nothing. Bruno and I used to speak about it often enough as children, when my return to the city was approaching and I became melancholy and imagined what it would be like to live up there with him all the year round.

  “But you don’t know what it’s like up here in the winter,” he would say. “There’s nothing but snow.”

  “I’d love to see it,” I would reply.

  And now here it was. This wasn’t the frozen snow of the gorges at three thousand meters: it was fresh soft snow that got into your shoes and soaked your feet, and it was strange to lift them and to see, compressed in your footprint, the wildflowers of August. The snow barely reached to my ankles, but it was deep enough to have covered all traces of the track. It covered the bushes, the holes and stones, so that every step was a potential trap, and with my lack of experience walking on such snow I could only follow Bruno by stepping into his footprints. As when we were younger, I could not understand by what memory or instinct he was guided. I just followed.

  We reached the ridge that overlooked the other side, and as soon as the wind turned it carried to us the sound of bells. The goats had taken shelter lower down, beneath the first rocks. Reaching them was simple enough: they were huddling in groups of three or four, the mothers with their kids around them, in clearings in the snow. Counting them Bruno saw that there was not a single one missing. They were less obedient than cattle, some feral after a summer spent on the mountain, and climbing back over our own tracks he had to shout to keep them together, throwing snowballs at any that strayed and cursing his uncle and his brilliant ideas. Eventually we reached the crest again, and went down onto the snow in unruly and noisy procession.

  It must have been midday by the time we had the grass beneath our feet. Suddenly it was summer again. The goats, famished, scattered over the meadow. For our part we began to rush down, not because we were in any particular hurry but because this was the only way we knew of being in the mountains, and the descent had always exhilarated us.

  When we reached the motorbike Bruno said: “I saw you while you were rock climbing. You’re good.”

  “I started this summer.”

  “And do you like it?”

  “A lot.”

  “As much as the river game?”

  I laughed. “No,” I said. “Not that much.”

  “This summer I’ve built a wall.”

  “Where?”

  “Up in the mountains, in a stable. It was falling down and we had to rebuild it completely. The problem was, there was no road, and I went back and forth on the bike. We had to work like in the old times: spade, bucket, and pickaxe.”

  “And do you enjoy it?”

  “Yes,” he said, after mulling it over a bit. “The work, yes. It’s difficult to build a wall in that way.”

  There was something else that he didn’t like, but he didn’t tell me what and I didn’t ask him. I didn’t ask him how he was getting on with his father, or how much money he was earning, or if he had a girlfriend or any plans for the future, or about what he thought of what had happened between us. Nor did he ask me anything. He didn’t ask how I was, or how my parents were, and I didn’t reply: my mother’s well, my father’s still fucked off with me. That things had changed a bit that summer. I thought that I had found some friends, but I was mistaken. I had kissed two girls in one evening.

  Instead I just told him that I would go back to Grana on foot.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m leaving tomorrow and I feel like walking.”

  “Right. Be seeing you then.”

  It was my end of summer ritual: a last wander around alone to say goodbye to the mountains. I watched as Bruno straddled the motorcycle and started it after a few attempts, with a puff of black smoke from the exhaust. He had a certain style as a motorcyclist. He raised a hand in farewell and revved the engine. I returned his wave, even though he was no longer looking at me.

  I had no way of knowing it then, but we would not meet up again for a very long time. The next year I turned seventeen and would only return to Grana for a few days, and would then stop going there altogether. The future would take me away from this mountain of my childhood; it was a sad, a beautiful, and an inevitable fact that I had already become fully aware of. When Bruno and his motorcycle disappeared into the wood I turned towards the slope we had come down, staying there a while before leaving, looking at the long line of our tracks in the snow.

  TWO

  The House of Reconciliation

  FIVE

  MY FATHER DIED when he was sixty-two and I was thirty-one. It was only at his funeral that I realized I was the same age now as he’d been when I was born. But my thirty-one years had little enough in common with his: I had not married; I had not gone to work in a factory; I had not fathered a son; and my life seemed to me to be only partly that of a grown man, and partly still like that of an adolescent. I lived alone in a studio flat, a luxury which I struggled to afford. I would like to have made a living as a documentary filmmaker, but to pay the rent I accepted work of every kind. I too had emigrated: having inherited from my parents the idea that at a key point in one’s youth it was necessary to leave the place where you’d been born and raised in order to go and develop elsewhere, I had at twenty-three, and fresh out of military service, left Milan to join a girlfriend in Turin. My relationship with the girl did not last, but my relationship with the city did. Between its ancient rivers and in its arcade cafes I’d felt immediately at home. I was reading Hemingway, and wandered around penniless, trying to keep myself open to new encounters, to offers of work and to every possibility, with the mountains as the background to my moveable feast: even if I had never gone back there, to glimpse sight of them on my horizon every time I left the apartment seemed like a blessing.

  And so it was that a hundred and twenty kilometers of rice fields now divided me from my father. It was no distance, but to cover it you had to want to do so. A couple of years previously I had given him one last great disappointment by abandoning my university studies: I had always excelled at maths, and he had always foreseen for me a future similar to his own. My father told me that I was throwing my life away; I replied that he had thrown away his before me. We didn’t speak for an entire year after that, during which time I was coming and going between home and my military barracks, returning from leave with scarcely a word in parting. It was better for both of us that I should follow my own path, invent a life different from his in some other place—and once that distance was established, neither of us was inclined to close it.

  With my mother it was different. Since I was not one to speak much on the phone she took it upon herself to write me letters. She discovered soon enough that I would reply. I liked to sit down at the table of an evening, take pen and paper, and tell her what was happening with me. It was by letter that I told her of my decision to enroll in a film school. It was there that I made my first friends in Turin. I was fascinated by documentary film and felt that I had a vocation for observing and listening, so it was good to get her reassurance: Yes, you’ve always been good at that. I knew that it would take a long time to turn it into a profession, but she encouraged me from the outset. For years she would send me money, and I would send her in return everything that I was making: portraits of people and places, explorations of the city—short films that nobody ever saw but of which I was proud. I liked the life that was taking shape around me. This is what I would tell her when she asked if I was happy. I avoided answering her other questions—about t
he relationships with girlfriends, which never lasted more than a few months, since as soon as they became serious I would extricate myself from them.

  And you? I would write.

  I’m fine, my mother would answer, but your dad is working too hard, and it’s damaging his health. She would tell me more about him than about herself. The factory was in financial crisis and my father, after a thirty-year career, was redoubling his efforts instead of slowing down and biding his time before retirement. He was spending a lot of time in the car alone, driving hundreds of kilometers between one plant and another, returning home exhausted and collapsing into bed immediately after supper. His sleep was short-lived: at night he would get up and go back to work, unable to rest because of his worries, which according to my mother were not only about the factory. He’s always been anxious, but now it’s becoming an illness. He was anxious about his work, anxious about approaching old age, anxious because my mother had flu—and he was anxious about me as well. He would be jolted awake with the thought that I was unwell. So he would ask her to phone me, even if it meant getting me out of bed; she was unable to convince him to wait a few hours but tried to calm him, to get him back to sleep, to slow him down. It was not as if his own body hadn’t been giving him signs that he should do so, but he only knew how to live this way, with everything breathing down his neck: imploring him to calm down was like constraining him to go up a mountain more slowly, to avoid getting into a race with anyone, to enjoy the health-giving properties of the air.