The Eight Mountains

by Paolo Cognetti

  It was a momentous event for him, and for us. After securing the load he gave a kiss to Lara, a pat on the flank to the mule, and nodded in my direction, saying: “Berio, you know the way.” He said goodbye to us and went to clean the stable. Just as on the building site he had decided that transportation was no kind of work for him: the mountain man stayed in the mountains, the mountain man’s woman went up and down with things. He would not go down until the time came to leave the farmstead for the winter.

  We started out on the path in single file, myself in front and Lara behind with the mule—and behind them one of the dogs who followed her everywhere. At first the mule advanced unsteadily, adjusting herself to the load. With her you had to proceed more carefully going down than when climbing back up, because the packsaddle unbalanced her with its weight bearing forwards on her front legs, and you needed to help her on the steepest slopes by holding firm to the rope tied around her neck. Further down, at the bottom of the pasture, the path crossed the river and flattened out. It was the spot where I had watched Bruno disappear on his motorbike, before losing sight of him altogether for all those years. From here on Lara and I were able to walk side by side, with the dog going in and out of the wood hunting for game, and the mule following just behind us, her breathing and the sound made by her shod hooves becoming a calm presence at our backs.

  “What does he mean when he calls you that?” asked Lara.

  “Calls me what?”

  “Berio.”

  “Ah, he wants to remind me of something, I think. It was the name he gave me when I was a boy.”

  “And what are you meant to remember?”

  “The road. Jesus, how many times I’ve gone up and down it. In August I would come up from Grana every day, and he would leave the pasture to bunk off with me. Then he’d take quite a beating from his uncle, but he couldn’t care less. Twenty years ago. And now here we are carrying down his cheese. Everything has changed, and yet everything is the same.”

  “What has changed most?”

  “The farmstead for sure. And the river. It was very different then. Did you know that we used to play down there?”

  “Yes,” Lara said. “The river game.”

  I kept quiet for a while. Thinking about the path had brought to mind that first time with my father, when we’d gone to meet Bruno’s uncle. And as Lara and I descended I thought I saw coming out of the past a young boy walking in front of his father. The father was wearing a red jumper and plus fours, puffing like a bellows and spurring his son on. Good day to you! I imagined myself saying to him. The boy sure can run, eh! Who knows whether my father would have stopped to greet this man who was coming down from the future with a girl, a mule, a dog, and a load of cheese.

  “Bruno’s a bit worried about you,” Lara said.

  “About me?”

  “He says that you’re always alone. He thinks that you’re not well.”

  I began to laugh. “Is that what you two talk about?”

  “Every so often.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She thought about it and then gave a different answer: “That it’s your choice. That sooner or later you’ll get tired of being on your own, and that you’ll find somebody. But you’ve chosen to live like this, so that’s fine.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  And then, to make light of it, I added: “And do you know what he’s told me? That he’s asked you to marry him but that you won’t hear of it.”

  “That lunatic?” she replied, laughing. “Never in a million years!”

  “Why not?”

  “Who would want to get married to someone who never wants to come down from the mountain? Someone who has spent all that he has in order to stay up there and make cheese?”

  “Is it as bad as all that?”

  “See for yourself. We’ve been working for a month and a half, and this is all we have to show for it,” she said, pointing to what was behind us.

  She became serious. For a good while she remained silent, thinking about what troubled her. We were almost there when she said “I like what we’re doing, a lot. Even when it rains all day and I’m out in it pasturing the cows. It makes me very calm, makes me feel that I can think clearly about things, and that many of them no longer have any importance. For someone thinking about the money, it’s lunacy. But I don’t want any other life now. I want this one.”

  There was a small white van in the piazza in Grana, next to a tractor, a cement mixer, and my own car that had been parked there for a month. Two workers were digging a ditch next to the road. A man who I had never seen before was waiting for us: he was around fifty, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about the scene, except for the strangeness to us of seeing cars, asphalt, and clean clothes after all those days spent with livestock.

  I helped Lara unload the toma from the packsaddle, and the man inspected them one by one: feeling the crust, sniffing it, giving it a few taps with his knuckles to see if there were air bubbles inside. He seemed satisfied. In the van he had a set of scales, and as he loaded the cheeses he weighed them, noting down the weight in a ledger and a figure on a receipt which he handed to Lara. At the bottom of it their first earnings were recorded. I watched her face as she looked at that number, but got no hint of her reaction to it. She said goodbye to me through the window of my car, then took the path again with the mule and the dog. They disappeared into the wood, or the wood reclaimed them as its own.

  • • •

  In Turin I vacated the apartment that I’d lived in for the last ten years. It was no longer worth keeping, given how little I used it, but on leaving I experienced a certain melancholy. I remembered vividly what it had meant to go there to live, when the city seemed so full of promises for the future. I didn’t know now whether they had been just an illusion of mine, or whether the city itself had failed to keep them, but to empty in one day a home made over so many years, taking out jumbled-together things that had been brought there one by one, was like taking back an engagement ring, resigning oneself to defeat.

  For a nominal rent a friend was letting me a room for my stays in Turin. I loaded other boxes of my things into the car and took them to my mother’s place in Milan. From the motorway Monte Rosa emerged above the haze like a mirage: in the city the heat was melting the asphalt, and it seemed to me that I was pointlessly shifting stuff from one place to another, going up and down stairs of apartment buildings expiating who knows what sin that I’d committed in the past.

  My mother was in Grana during this period, so I spent more than a month alone in the old apartment, by day doing the rounds of the offices of the producers I was working with, and at night watching the traffic from the window, imagining the anemic river buried beneath the avenue. There was nothing that belonged to me, nothing that I felt I belonged to. I was trying to get into production a series of documentaries on the Himalayas that would keep me away for a long time. It took a lot of fruitless meetings before finding someone who had faith in me: in the end I secured funding that would cover the cost of travel and not much else. But for me it was enough.

  When I went back up to Grana in September there was a cold air blowing and a few chimneys in the village were smoking. Once out of the car I noticed a smell on my body that I did not like, so at the beginning of the path I washed my face and neck in the river; and in the woods rubbed my hands with a green larch twig. These were my usual rituals, but I knew that it would take a few days to be properly clean of the city.

  All along the deep valley the pastures were beginning to fade. On Bruno’s land, beyond the bridge of planks, the bank of the river was all trampled by the hooves of the herd: from there upwards the grass was finished, closely shaved and already fertilized, and there were patches of earth where the odd cow would scrape on days of bad weather, unsettled by the smell of a thunderstorm. I could smell a storm in the air right now, together with the pungent odor of dung and of wood smoke risi
ng from Bruno’s home. This was the time when he would be making the cheese, so I decided to head straight on and come down to find him on another occasion.

  Having passed the stable, I heard the cowbells and saw Lara pasturing the herd high up, far from the path, on slopes where the last grass remained; I waved to her, and having already caught sight of me, she waved back with her unopened umbrella. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall, and after all those nights made restless by the heat and by dreams, I felt overcome by exhaustion: I just wanted to get to Barma, light the stove, and sleep. There was nothing like a long sleep in my burrow inside the mountain to put me right again.

  There followed three days of fog during which I hardly left the house. I would stay at the window observing the way in which the clouds rose up from the valley and insinuated themselves into the woods, passing between the branches of the larch and fading the colors of my prayer flags before swallowing them completely. In the house the low pressure extinguished the fire in the stove, smoking me as I read or wrote. Then I would go out into the fog and stretch my legs by walking to the lake. There I would throw a stone that would vanish even before producing its phantom thud, and I imagined schools of small curious fish swimming around it. In the evening I would listen to some Swiss radio station or other, thinking about the year that was in store for me. It was a period of incubation, of the kind appropriate before great exploits.

  On the third day there was a knock at the door. It was Bruno. He said: “So it is true that you’re back. Want to come to the mountain?”

  “Now?” I asked, since everything was shrouded in fog outside.

  “Come on, I’ll show you something.”

  “And the cows?”

  “Let the cows be. It won’t kill them.”

  And so we set off climbing back up the slope, along the path that led to the higher lake. Bruno was wearing his rubber boots, filthy with dung up to his thighs, and as we walked he told me that he had been into the slurry pit to pull out a cow that had fallen into it in the fog. He laughed. He was going up in a rush, so quickly that I was struggling to keep up. A viper had bitten one of the dogs, he said: he realized because he saw him next to water all the time, constantly thirsty, and checking him over had found the puncture marks made by the viper in his swollen belly. He was dragging himself around pitifully, and Lara was ready to put him on the mule and take him to the vet when Bruno’s mother had said to give him as much milk as he would drink, just milk and no water or food—and now he had recovered and was gradually regaining his strength.

  “With animals there is always something new to learn,” he said. He shook his head and resumed climbing with that pace of his that nearly did for me. All the way up to the lake he continued talking about cows, milk, manure, grass, because during my absence so many things had happened that I needed to be informed about. He was thinking of bringing some rabbits and chickens up some time in the future, but he needed to build some good fences because there were foxes about. Eagles too. You might not believe it, but the eagle is even more ferocious than the fox when it comes to farmyard animals.

  He didn’t ask me how I had got on in Turin or in Milan. He wasn’t interested in anything I might have been up to during the course of a whole month. He talked about foxes and eagles and rabbits and chickens, and pretended, as usual, that the city didn’t exist and that I didn’t have another life elsewhere: our friendship existed there, on that mountain, and what happened down below should not even be mentioned.

  “And the business, how’s that going?” I asked, as we got our breath back at the small lake.

  Bruno shrugged his shoulders. “Well,” he said.

  “Are the sums adding up?”

  He grimaced. He looked at me as if I had asked an annoying question, just for the pleasure of ruining his day. Then he said: “I leave the accounts to Lara. I’ve tried doing them myself, but I guess I’m no good at it.”

  We climbed up the scree in thick fog, with no path, each of us finding his own way. We couldn’t see well enough to follow the cairns, losing sight of them almost immediately in fact, and letting ourselves be guided by the incline, our instincts, the lines suggested by the scree itself. We were climbing up blind, and every so often I heard the sound of stones that Bruno had dislodged above or below me, made out his outline and headed straight towards it. If we got too far from each other, one of us would call out: oh? and the other would respond with oh! We adjusted our direction like two boats in fog.

  Until, at a certain point, I realized that the light was changing. Now it was casting shadows on the rocks in front of me. I looked up and saw a blue tone in the flurries of increasingly sparse fog, and after a few more steps I was through it: all at once I found myself looking around in full sunlight, with a September sky above my head and the dense white of the clouds beneath my feet. We were well above two and a half thousand meters. Only a few peaks emerged at that height, like chains of islands, like surfacing dorsals.

  I also saw that we had deviated from the proper route to the Grenon’s summit, or at least from the usual one: but instead of crossing the scree at the fork I decided to reach the crest by climbing what was immediately above me. It didn’t look difficult. As I climbed I fantasized about achieving a first, something that would be recorded in the annals of the Italian Alpine Club, together with the author of such a feat: North-west crest of the Grenon: Pietro Guasti, 2008. But just a little further up, on a ledge, I found a few rusty meat or sardine tins of the kind that many years ago no one bothered to take back with them to the valley. So I discovered once again that someone had preceded me.

  There was a gorge between where I was and the usual route, getting steeper and steeper up to the crest. Bruno had taken it, and on its steep slope I saw that he had developed a peculiar style of his own: he used his hands as well and climbed on all fours, rapidly, instinctively choosing the right places for his hands and feet, and never putting his whole weight on them. Sometimes the ground would give way beneath his feet or hands, but his momentum had already carried him forward, and the small cascades of stones that he dislodged continued on down, like memories of his passing through there. Omo servadzo: the wild man, I thought. Having got to the top before him, I had time to admire this new style of his from the crest.

  “Who taught you to climb like that?” I asked.

  “The chamois. I watched them once and said to myself: now I’m going to try it like that too.”

  “And it works?”

  “Well . . . I’ve still got a few improvements to make.”

  “Did you know that we would get above the clouds?”

  “I was hoping that we would.”

  We sat down, leaning against the pile of stones where I had once found words written by my father. The sun was sculpting every edge and indentation in the rock, and doing the same to Bruno’s face: he had new crow’s feet around his eyes, shadows under his cheekbones, furrows that I did not recall him having before. His first season at the farmstead must have been hard going.

  It seemed like the right moment to talk to him about my journey. I told him that in Milan I had secured enough funding to stay away for at least a year. I wanted to go around the regions of Nepal and portray the people that lived in its mountains: there were so many different groups in the valleys of the Himalayas, all distinct from each other. I would be leaving in October, near the end of the monsoon season. I had little money but many contacts—people working there who would be able to help me and put me up. I confided that I had given up my home in Turin, that I didn’t have another one there now and neither did I want one: if things went well in Nepal, I would stay there even longer.

  Bruno listened in silence. When I had finished speaking he took a while to reflect on the implications of what I had told him. He was looking at Monte Rosa, and said: “Do you remember that time with your father?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “I think about it sometimes, you know? Do you think the ice of that day has
reached the bottom yet?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s probably about halfway.”

  Then he asked: “Are the Himalayas like our region at all?”

  “No,” I replied. “Not at all.”

  It was not easy to explain, but I wanted to try, and so I added: “You know those enormous ruined monuments, like the ones in Athens and Rome? Those ancient temples of which only a few columns are left standing, with the stones of their walls lying scattered about on the ground? Well, the Himalayas are like the original temple. It’s like being able to see it intact after having spent a lifetime only ever seeing ruins.”

  I immediately regretted having spoken in this way. Bruno was gazing at the glaciers, above the clouds, and I thought that in the coming months I would remember him like this, like the custodian of that pile of rubble.

  Then he got up. “Time to do the milking,” he said. “Are you coming down?”

  “I think I’ll stay here a bit longer.”

  “Good for you. Who would want to go back down below?”

  He entered the gorge up which he’d climbed and disappeared amongst the rocks. I caught sight of him again a few minutes later, about a hundred meters further down. There was a spit of snow down there, pushed northwards, and he had crossed the scree in order to reach it. From above that small snowfield he tested its consistency with his foot. He looked up in my direction and waved, and I responded with a big gesture that might be seen from a distance. The snow must have been well frozen, because Bruno jumped on it and immediately picked up speed: he went down with his legs spread out, skiing with his work boots, waving his arms to keep his balance—and in an instant was swallowed up by the fog.

  ELEVEN