The Eight Mountains

by Paolo Cognetti

  He was only partly the man that I knew, and partly another—the one that I was discovering through my mother’s letters. I was intrigued by this other side to him. It brought to mind a certain fragility that I had only glimpsed before, certain moments of confusion which he would immediately attempt to conceal. When I would lean out over a rock and he would instinctively make a grab for my trouser belt. When I was sick on the glacier and he would be more worried about it than I was myself. It occurred to me that perhaps this other father had always been there at my side, and that I had failed to notice him, however difficult the first one was; and I began to think that in the future I should—or could—make an attempt to build bridges with him.

  Then that future vanished in an instant, together with the possibilities it contained. One March evening in 2004 my mother called to tell me that my father had suffered a heart attack on the motorway. They had found him in a lay-by. He had not caused an accident; in fact he had managed to do everything correctly: he had stopped at the side of the road and put on the hazard lights, as if he had a flat tire or had run out of petrol. Instead it was his heart that had completely failed on him. Too many miles on the clock, too little maintenance: my father must have felt an acute pain in his chest and had enough time to realize what was happening. In the lay-by he had turned off the engine. But he hadn’t even unbuckled his seat belt. He had stayed sitting there, and that’s how they found him—like a racing driver who had retired from the race, the most ironic way for someone like him to go, with his hands still on the wheel, being overtaken by everyone else.

  • • •

  That spring I went back to Milan for a few weeks to be with my mother. Apart from the practicalities that needed to be dealt with, I felt the need to be with her for a while. After the turbulent days of the funeral, in the calm that followed, we discovered to my surprise that my father had thought thoroughly about his own death. In his desk drawer there was a list of instructions, attached to which were details of his bank accounts, and everything else that was required for us to inherit his assets. Since we were the only inheritors, he had not been obliged by Italian law to make a formal will. But on the same piece of paper on which he had specified that he left to my mother his half of the apartment in Milan, for me there was the phrase I would like Pietro to have—followed mysteriously by the property in Grana. No last words, not a line of farewell or explanation: it was all cold and practical and legalistic.

  About this inheritance my mother knew next to nothing. There is a tendency to assume that one’s parents share everything that crosses their minds, especially as they get older, but I was discovering in those days that after my departure they had led more or less separate lives. He worked and was always traveling. Having retired from her own job, she was doing voluntary work as a nurse in a clinic for immigrants, helping with prenatal classes—and spent most of her other time with friends rather than with my father. She knew only that he had acquired the previous year, and for not much money, a small piece of land in the mountains. He had not sought her permission to spend the money, or even invited her to see the place—it was a long time since they had gone out walking together—and she had not objected, considering it to be some altogether private concern.

  Amongst my father’s papers I found the contract of the purchase and the land registry document, neither of which enlightened me much further. I had inherited an agricultural building four meters by seven at the center of an irregular plot of land. The map was too small to work out where this place was, and too different from the ones I was used to: it did not show the altitude or the paths, only the property, and looking at it told you nothing about whether it was surrounded by woods, fields, or by anything else for that matter.

  My mother said: “Bruno will know where it is.”

  “Bruno?”

  “They were always going off together.”

  “I didn’t know that they’d even seen each other again.”

  “Of course, we both saw him again. It’s quite difficult not to meet up in a place like Grana, wouldn’t you say?”

  “What’s he doing now?” I asked, though what I really wanted to ask was: “How is he? Does he remember me? During all these years had he thought about me as much as I thought about him?” But I had learned by now to ask questions in the adult way, asking one thing in order to find out about another.

  “He’s a bricklayer.”

  “So he never moved away?”

  “Bruno? And where do you think he would go? Things have not changed much in Grana, you’ll see.”

  • • •

  I did not know whether to believe her, since I had certainly changed a lot in the meantime. As an adult, a place that you loved as a young boy might appear entirely different to you, and turn out to be a disappointment; or it might remind you of what you once were but no longer are, becoming a cause for great sadness. I wasn’t that keen to find out how it would be. But there was this property that I had been left, and curiosity got the better of me: I went there at the end of April, alone, in my father’s car. It was evening, and climbing up the valley I could only see the areas illuminated by the lights. Even so I noticed several changes: the points at which the road had been improved and widened, the protective netting over the escarpments, the piles of felled tree trunks. Someone had started to build little villas in a Tyrolese style, while someone else had started to extract sand and gravel from the river, which was shored up now between cement banks, where it had once flowed between stones and trees. The second homes in darkness, the hotels closed out of season or shut for good, the immobile bulldozers and the excavators with their arms stuck in the ground gave the landscape an air of industrial decline, like those building sites left semi-abandoned due to bankruptcy.

  Then just as I was letting myself feel depressed by these discoveries, something called out for my attention, and I leaned over towards the windscreen to look up. In the night sky some white shapes emitted a kind of aura. It took me a moment to realize that they were not clouds: they were mountains still covered in snow. I should have expected it, in April. But in the city the spring was already advanced, and I was no longer accustomed to the fact that to go up high is to go back a season. The snow up there consoled me for the squalor in the valley.

  Then I realized that I had just repeated one of my father’s typical gestures. How many times had I seen him while driving lean forwards and look up at the sky? To check the state of the weather, or to study the side of a mountain, or to just admire its outline as we passed it. He placed his hands together high up on the steering wheel and rested his temple on them. I repeated the gesture, aware this time of the similarity, imagining myself as my father at forty, having just turned into the valley, with my wife sitting beside me and my son on the backseat, looking for a good place for the three of us. I imagined my son sleeping. My wife was pointing out villages and particular houses, and I was pretending to be listening. But then as soon as she was looking the other way I would lean forward and look up, heeding the powerful call of the peaks. The more towering and menacing they looked, the more I liked them. The snow up there was most promising. Yes, perhaps on that particular mountain there would be a good place for us.

  The little road that climbed up to Grana had been asphalted, but as for the rest my mother was right, it seemed as if nothing had changed at all. The ruined buildings were still there, and so too were the stables, the haylofts, the piles of manure. I left the car in the usual place and went into the village on foot in the dark, letting myself be guided by the sound of the drinking fountain, finding my way to the stairs and the door of the house, its big iron key still in the lock. Once inside I was greeted by the old smell of smoke and damp. In the kitchen I opened the stove door and found a small pile of still faintly glowing embers: I put in some of the wood that had been stacked nearby and blew until the fire was kindled again.

  Even my father’s concoctions were still in their usual place. He would usually bring a large bottle of white gr
appa and then flavor it in smaller bottles with the berries, pinecones, and herbs that he collected in the mountains. I chose a jar at random and poured some into a glass to warm myself up. It was very bitter, flavored with gentian maybe, and I sat with it next to the stove and rolled a cigarette. Smoking and looking around me in the old kitchen, I waited for the memories to come.

  My mother had done a good job there over the course of twenty years: everywhere I looked I could detect her touch, that of a woman with clear ideas about how to make a house homely. She had always liked copper pans and wooden spoons, and never liked curtains that stopped you from seeing outside. On the ledge of her favorite window she had placed a bunch of dried flowers in a pitcher, together with the small radio that she listened to all day and a photo in which Bruno and I were sitting back to back on a larch stump, probably at his uncle’s farmstead, with our arms folded, looking like real tough guys. I could not remember who had taken it, or when, but we were wearing the same clothes and adopting the same ridiculous pose: anyone who saw it would have taken it for a portrait of two brothers. I also thought that it was a good photo. I finished the cigarette and threw the butt into the stove. I picked up the empty glass and got up to refill it, and it was then that I saw my father’s map still thumbtacked to the wall, though it looked quite different now from how I remembered it.

  I went closer to look at it in detail. I saw at once that it had changed from being what it was before—a map of the valley’s trails—and that it had become something else altogether, something resembling a novel. Or better still perhaps, a biography: after twenty years there was not a summit, an alpeggio, a refuge that my father’s felt-tip pen had not reached, and this network of itineraries was so dense as to render the map illegible to anyone else. And now there was not just black ink there. Sometimes it had been marked with red lines, at other times with green. Occasionally the black, red, and green were used together, though most frequently it was the black ink alone that had been used to record the longest excursions. There must have been a key to this code, and I lingered there trying to figure out what it was.

  After I had thought about it for a while it began to resemble one of those riddles that my father used to ask me when I was a child. I went to fill my glass and returned to scrutinize the map. If it had been a cryptographic problem like those I had studied at university I would have begun by looking for the most recurrent elements, and for the least frequent. Most frequent were the single black lines, the least frequent those lines where the three colors had been used together. It was the three colors that gave me the key, because I remembered well the time that the three of us—myself, my father, and Bruno—had got stuck on the glacier together. The red line and the green line ended at precisely this point, but the black one continued: from this I understood that my father had completed the rest of the climb alone, on another occasion. The black, of course, was him. The red accompanied him up to our four-thousanders, so could only be me. The green, by a simple process of elimination, was Bruno. My mother had told me that they’d gone walking together. I saw that there were many routes of black and green combined, perhaps even more than of black and red, and I felt a pang of jealousy. But I also felt pleased that during all those years my father had not just gone into the mountains alone. The thought occurred to me that, in some complicated way, this map that was pinned to the wall might contain a message for me.

  Later I went into my old room, but it was too cold to sleep there. I took the mattress from the bed, carried it to the kitchen, and put the sleeping bag on top of it. I kept the grappa and tobacco within reach. Before turning off the light I stoked up the fire in the stove, and lay there in the dark listening to the sound of it burning for a long while, without falling asleep.

  • • •

  Bruno came to get me early the next morning. He was a man I no longer knew, but somewhere inside of him was the boy I knew so well.

  “Thanks for the fire,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it,” he said.

  He shook my hand on the porch and uttered one of those conventional phrases that I had become accustomed to in the past two months, and to which I no longer paid attention. Such phrases would have been of no use between friends, but who could say what Bruno and I were to each other now. His clasp as we shook hands seemed more sincere, his right hand dry and coarse, calloused and with something else about it that was strange and that I didn’t understand at first. He sensed my unease and raised it to show me: it was a builder’s hand, with the ends of its index and middle fingers missing.

  “Have you seen?” he said. “I was messing around with my father’s rifle. I wanted to shoot a fox, and boom! I blew off parts of my own fingers.”

  “Did it burst in your hands?”

  “Not exactly. Faulty trigger.”

  “Ouch,” I said. “That must have hurt.”

  Bruno shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that there were worse things in life. He looked at my chin and asked: “Don’t you ever shave?”

  “I’ve had this beard for ten years,” I replied, stroking it.

  “I tried to let mine grow once. But I had a girlfriend, you know how it is.”

  “She didn’t like your beard?”

  “That’s right. On you it looks good. You look like your father.”

  He smiled as he said this. Since we were trying to break the ice I tried to pay no attention to the phrase, and returned his smile. Then closed the door and went with him.

  The sky in the deep valley was low and overcast with spring clouds. It looked as if it had just stopped raining, and that it could start again at any moment. Even the smoke from the chimneys was struggling to rise: it slipped down the wet roofs and curled up in the guttering. Leaving the village in that cold light I rediscovered every shack, every henhouse, every woodshed, as if no one had touched anything since I’d left. The things that had been damaged I saw soon after, beyond the last house: down below, the bed of the river was at least twice as wide as I remembered it. It looked as if a gigantic plough had recently turned it over. It flowed between wide stony areas that gave it an anemic look, even in this season of thaw.

  “Have you seen?” Bruno said.

  “What happened?”

  “The flood of 2000, don’t you remember? So much water came down that we had to be taken out by helicopter.”

  There was a digger working down there. Where was I in the year 2000? So far away in both body and spirit that I hadn’t even been aware of the flooding in Grana. The river was still littered with tree trunks, beams, pieces of cement, wreckage of every kind dragged down from the mountain. On the bends the eroded banks exposed the roots of trees growing in search of soil that was no longer there. I felt very sorry for our poor little river.

  A bit higher up, near the mill, I noticed something in the water that raised my spirits: a large white stone in the shape of a wheel.

  “So was that also brought down by the water?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” said Bruno, “I threw that one down before the flood.”

  “When?”

  “I did it to celebrate my eighteenth birthday.”

  “So how did you manage it?”

  “With a car jack.”

  It made me smile. I imagined Bruno entering the mill with the jack, and the millstone coming out through the door and starting to roll down. I would have loved to have been there.

  “Was it good?” I asked.

  “It was amazing.”

  Bruno smiled too. Then we headed off in search of my property.

  • • •

  We climbed a good deal slower than we used to, since I was not in shape at all and had ended up drinking too much the previous evening. Going up the valley devastated by the flood, where the meadows along the riverbank were reduced to sand and stones, Bruno had to turn around frequently, show his astonishment that I was so far behind, then stop and wait. Between one bout of coughing and another, I said, “Go ahead if you want. I’ll catch you up.”

&
nbsp; “No, no,” he said, as if he had set himself a specific task and had a duty to complete it.

  Not even his uncle’s farmstead looked right: when we passed by it I saw that the roof of one of the huts had caved in, pushing out the wall on which the beams rested. It looked as if a heavy fall of snow would have been enough to finish it off altogether. The bath had been left to rust outside of the stable, and the doors were off their hinges and thrown jumbled against a wall. Just as in the prophecy made by Luigi Guglielmina, the larch saplings were springing up everywhere in the pastures. Who knows how long it had taken them, and what had happened to his uncle. I would have liked to ask Bruno, but he did not stop, so we passed the farmstead and kept going without a word between us.

  Beyond the cabins the flood had done the worst damage. Up above, where once the cows used to climb at the height of the season, the rain had brought down an entire piece of the mountain. The landslide had dragged down with it trees and rocks, a mess of unstable material which even after four years gave way beneath our feet. Bruno continued in silence. He led the way with his boots sinking in the mud, jumping from one rock to another, concentrating on keeping his balance while walking across fallen tree trunks, and he did not turn round. I had to run to keep behind him until we were beyond the landslide, the forest welcomed us again, and he finally recovered his speech.

  “Few people used to come this way even before,” he said. “Now that the path is no longer here, I’m probably the only one who does.”

  “Do you come here much?”

  “Sure, in the evening.”

  “In the evening?”

  “When I fancy a walk after work. I take the head torch with me in case it gets dark.”

  “Some people go to the bar.”

  “I’ve been to the bar. Enough bars already; the woods are better.”

  Then I asked the forbidden question, the one that could never be uttered while walking with my father: “Is it much further?”