“About a week ago. Do you know what’s hardest? Not looking at a tree if you think you’re about to collide with it. If you look, you’re sure to hit it—bull’s-eye.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. Bruno laughed and clapped me on the back. He had a long gray beard, and his eyes were lit with euphoria. He must have lost some weight, as his features were sharper than ever.
“Oh, Merry Christmas,” he said, and then: “Come, come on,” as if we had met there by chance and needed to go and toast this fortunate coincidence. He picked up the skis and, carrying them on his back, cleared a path for me on the slope along a route that he must have known from his experiments as a skier.
I almost felt compassion for our little house on the rock face, when I saw it surrounded by walls of snow almost as high as itself. Bruno had cleared the roof, and dug a trench around the house which he’d widened into a small square in front of the door. When I went inside it felt like entering into a burrow. It seemed welcoming, and more cluttered and messier than before. The window was blind now; there was nothing to look out at but layers of white on the other side of the glass—and I had barely had time to take off my wet clothes and sit myself down at the table before something fell onto the tiles of the roof with a tremendous thud. I instinctively looked up, afraid that it was about to collapse on me.
Bruno burst out laughing. He said: “Did you fix the rotten ones properly that time? Now we’ll see whether the roof holds, eh?”
The thuds continued, but he took no notice of them. When I too had got more used to them I began to notice the changes that had been made to the room. Bruno had put up some more shelves by placing them on nails hammered into the walls, and had filled them with his books, clothes, and tools, giving to the place the air of something that it had never had before—that of a lived-in house.
He poured two glasses of wine. He said to me: “I’ve got to apologize. I’m sorry things went as they did last time. I’m glad that you’ve come back, I’d given up hope. We’re still friends, right?”
“Of course,” I said.
While I started to relax he rekindled the fire in the stove. He went outside with the bucket and brought it back filled with snow, then put it to melt to make the polenta with. He asked me if I felt like having a bit of meat for supper, and I told him that after that slog I would be happy to eat anything—so he took out pieces of chamois that he had cured in salt and put them in a pan with butter and wine. When the water in the pail reached boiling point he threw in a few handfuls of cornmeal. He took out another liter of red to keep us company while we waited, and after the first couple of glasses, as the room filled with the pungent smell of game, I began to feel good again too.
Bruno said: “I was angry. And what made me even angrier was that I had no one else to blame. The fact is that I made all the mistakes myself. Nobody led me into them. What was I thinking, trying to become a businessman? Someone like me who knows nothing about money. I should have fixed up a little place like this one, brought four cows up here, and lived like this from the start.”
I kept quiet, listening to him. I understood that he had thought long and hard, and had found the answers he had been looking for. He said, “You have to do what life has taught you to do. Perhaps when you’re still very young you can choose, maybe, to change the course of your life. But at a certain point you have to stop and say to yourself: fine, this is what I’m capable of doing and this is what I can’t do. This is what I asked myself. And the answer? I know how to live in the mountains. Put me up here by myself and I can cope. That’s something, don’t you think? But it took me until I was forty years old to realize the value of it.”
I was exhausted and was settling down into the warmth of the wine, and even though I would not have admitted it I liked hearing him speak like this. There was something absolute about Bruno that had always fascinated me. A certain integrity and purity that I had admired in him ever since we were boys. I was almost persuaded to believe him, up there in the little house that we had built together: that the best way of living his life was that one, alone in the middle of winter with nothing but a little food, left to his own devices and his own thoughts—even though it would have seemed inhuman for anyone else.
It was the mountain itself that woke me from this fantasy. I heard a sound that was different from the usual thudding on the roof. It began like the roar of an airplane, or like distant thunder—but then got immediately closer, deafening, a rumbling that shook the glasses on the table. We looked at each other, and I could see at that moment that he was no more prepared for this than I was, and no less terrified. To the rumbling another sound was added, that of a crash, something colliding and exploding, and immediately after it the sounds diminished in intensity. Then we began to realize that the avalanche could not have passed over us. It had passed nearby, but elsewhere. More material fell; we felt another, weaker fall, then the silence returned just as suddenly as it had been broken. When everything had stopped moving we went out to try to see what had happened, but by now it was night; there was no moon, and there was nothing to see but the dark. When we went back indoors Bruno did not feel like talking anymore, and neither did I. We went to bed, but an hour later I heard him get up, throw wood into the stove, and pour himself a drink.
Emerging from the burrow in the morning we found ourselves in the light that follows prolonged snowfall. Behind us the sun was shining and the mountain in front of us dazzled the basin. We immediately saw what had happened: the main gorge of the Grenon, the one that Bruno had skied down just hours before, had discharged an avalanche that had started three or four hundred meters further up, at the steepest point of the slope. On plunging down, the snow had dug deep into the ground, so much so as to strip the rock beneath and drag the earth and gravel down with it. The gorge looked like a dark wound now. Crashing into the basin after falling for five hundred meters, the avalanche had gathered enough force to smash through the frozen surface of the lake. That must have been the second sound that we heard. Now at the base of the gorge there was nothing left of the lake’s soft expanse, just a mass of dirty snow and blocks of ice, like a serac. The mountain crows were circling above and alighting within it. I could not work out what was attracting them there. It was a terrible and fascinating sight, and we did not need to say anything before going to take a closer look.
The carrion that the crows were sharing was the corpses of dead fish. Small silver trout caught in the midst of their winter hibernation, flung out of the dense dark water in which they slept, up onto a bed of snow. Who knows whether they had time to be aware of what was happening. It must have been like a bomb exploding: from the upturned and shattered slabs I could see that the ice must have been half a meter thick on the surface of the lake. Underneath, the water had already begun to freeze over again. This was only a thin layer as yet, dark but transparent, like the one I had seen in autumn. Some crows were squabbling over a trout nearby, and finding it at that moment an insufferable spectacle of greed I scattered them with a couple of steps and a kick. All that was left behind on the snow was a pink mush.
“Sky burial,” said Bruno.
“Have you seen anything like this before?” I asked.
“No, I certainly haven’t,” he replied. He seemed impressed.
I heard the sound of a helicopter approaching. There was not a cloud in the sky that morning. With the first warmth from the sun, clumps of snow began to fall from every overhang of Grenon, and from the guttering small avalanches fell. It was as if the mountain were starting to free itself from that prolonged snowfall. The helicopter flew above without noticing us and passed on, and then it occurred to me that we were barely a few kilometers from the ski slopes on Monte Rosa, on December 27, on a morning of sunshine and fresh snow. It was a perfect day for skiing. Perhaps they were watching the traffic from up there. I imagined from above the lines of cars, the overflowing car parks, the establishments working to full capacity without a break—and just there, over a nearby ridge
, on the side that was in shadow, two men standing at the foot of a landslide surrounded by dead fish.
“I’m going,” I said, for the second time in just a few weeks. Twice I had tried, and twice I had failed to rescue him.
“Yes, it seems like the right thing to do,” said Bruno.
“You should come down with me.”
“Again?”
I looked at him. Something had occurred to him that caused him to smile. He said: “How long have we been friends?”
“I think that next year it will be thirty years.”
“And haven’t you been trying to get me down from here for the last thirty years?” Then he added: “You mustn’t worry about me. This mountain has never done me any harm.”
I remember little else about that morning. I was shaken, and too sad to think clearly. I remember that I could not wait to leave the lake and the avalanche behind me—but that later on, once I was down in the valley, I began to enjoy the descent. I found the route by which I’d come up, and discovered that with the snowshoes I could go down in great leaps even at the steepest points, as the fresh snow did not give way beneath my feet. The steeper the incline, in fact, the more I could launch myself and let myself go. I stopped only once, when crossing the river, because I had thought of something and wanted to see if it was true. I climbed down between its snow-covered banks and dug in the snow with my gloves. Just below it I found the ice, a thin transparent layer that broke easily. I discovered that this thin crust protected a vein of water. You could not see it or hear it from the path, but my river was still there, coursing beneath the snow.
• • •
It turned out that in the winter of 2014 the Western Alps had the heaviest snow for half a century. In the highest ski resorts they recorded three meters of snow at the end of December, six at the end of January, eight by the end of February. Reading these figures in Nepal I could hardly begin to imagine what eight meters of snow would look like in the high mountains. It was enough to bury the woods. So much more than was needed to bury a house.
One day in March Lara wrote to me asking me to phone her as soon as possible. She then told me that Bruno could not be found. His cousins had gone up to check on him, but at Barma nobody had been clearing the snow for some time: the little house had disappeared beneath it, and even the rock face was barely visible. The cousins had called for help, and a rescue team taken up by helicopter had dug down to the roof. They had made a hole in the tiles, and at that point had expected to find him—as sometimes happened with the old mountain folk—having taken to his bed with a sudden illness and died there of hypothermia. But there was no one in the house. Nor could any tracks be found in the surrounding area after the recent snowfalls. Lara asked me if I had any ideas, since I had been the last one to see him, and I said that they should check if there was still a pair of skis in the storeroom. No, they were not there either.
The mountain rescue team began to search the area with dogs, so for a week I called every day, hoping for news, but there was too much snow on the Grenon, and with spring the worst period for avalanches arrived. In March the Alps suffered many: and after the events of that winter, in which the death toll on the Italian mountainsides had reached twenty-two, nobody took much interest in a local man lost from view in a deep valley above his own home. It hardly seemed necessary to Lara or to me to keep insisting that they should prolong the search. They would find Bruno with the first thaw. He would turn up in some gorge in the middle of the summer, and the crows would be the first to find him.
“Do you think that this is what he wanted?” Lara asked me over the phone.
“No, I don’t think so,” I lied.
“You managed to understand him, didn’t you? You understood each other.”
“I hope we did.”
“Because it sometimes seems to me that I never knew him.”
And then I asked myself who was it that had known him on this earth except me? And if what was between us was kept secret, that which we had shared, what was left now that one of us was no longer there?
When those days came to an end, and the city became unbearable, I decided to take a tour in the mountains on my own. Spring is a wonderful season in the Himalayas: the green of the rice paddies dominates the sides of the valleys; a little above them the rhododendrons are in flower. But I didn’t want to go back to a familiar place, or to retrace the path of any memory—so I chose a region where I had never been before, bought a map, and set off. I had not felt the joys of freedom and discovery for a long time now. I found myself leaving the trail, climbing up a hillside to reach a ridge, just out of curiosity, to see what was on the other side, lingering in a village without having planned to, spending a whole afternoon amidst the pools of a river. That was our way of being in the mountains, Bruno’s and mine. I thought that would be a way of preserving our secret in the years to come. It also came to mind that there was a house up there at Barma with a hole in its roof, and that it would not survive like that for very long. And I thought this as if from very far off.
From my father I had learnt, long after I had stopped following him along the paths, that in certain lives there are mountains to which we may never return. That in lives like his and mine you cannot go back to the mountain that is in the center of all the rest, and at the beginning of your own story. And that wandering around the eight mountains is all that remains for those who, like us, on the first and highest have lost a friend.
An Atria Reading Club Guide
The Eight Mountains
Paolo Cognetti
This reading group guide for The Eight Mountains includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
For fans of Elena Ferrante and Paulo Coelho comes the international sensation about a friendship between two Italian boys from different backgrounds and how their connection evolves and challenges them throughout their lives.
Pietro is a lonely boy living in Milan. With his parents becoming more distant each day, the only thing the family shares is their love for the mountains that surround Italy. While on vacation at the foot of the Aosta Valley in northwestern Italy, Pietro meets Bruno, an adventurous, spirited local boy. Together they spend many summers exploring the mountains’ meadows and peaks and discover the similarities and differences in their lives, their backgrounds, and their futures. The two boys come to find the true meaning of friendship and camaraderie, even as their divergent paths in life—Bruno’s in the mountains, Pietro’s across the world—test the strength and meaning of their connection.
A modern Italian masterpiece, The Eight Mountains is “an exquisite unfolding of the deep way humans may love one another” (Annie Proulx) and a lyrical coming-of-age story about the power of male friendships and the enduring bond between fathers and sons.
Topics and Questions for Discussion
1. Pietro’s parents both loved the Dolomites, but how did their love differ? What does this say about their personalities and attitude toward life?
2. How would you describe Bruno and Pietro’s first conversation, and how does this set the tone for their friendship?
3. How does Pietro’s relationship differ with each of his parents? Talk about what Pietro might have in common with his father and his mother, as well as which differences might lead him to value his friendship with Bruno all the more.
4. “I ran a finger over the G and over the B, and it was impossible to have any doubt as to the identity of their author. And so I made a connection between other things, things that I had seen but not understood in the ruins of the buildings that Bruno would take me to . . .” (p. 27). What is the epiphany that Pietro reaches here?
5. What was the ultimate purpose of Pietro and his father�
��s visit to the alpeggio?
6. Pietro observes his mother and father’s efforts to integrate Bruno into their family. How does he feel about this development? How does Bruno seem to feel about it?
7. Describe Pietro at age sixteen. What does he seem to gain? What does he seem to lose? Are these things typical occurrences for people during adolescence?
8. Did the cause of Pietro’s father’s death surprise you? Of this revelation, Pietro writes, “He was only partly the man that I knew, and partly another—the one that I was discovering through my mother’s letters” (p. 89). What does he truly come to learn about his father?
9. Pietro’s mother tells him the story about his father and his uncle Piero. What effect does this story have on Pietro? How does it affect his perception of his father?
10. When Bruno and Lara start a relationship, how does Pietro react? Being around them, what does Pietro realize about himself?
11. How do you interpret the legend of the eight mountains? How does it relate to Pietro and Bruno?
12. Is it fitting that the novel closes with Bruno’s death? Did you expect this? What was the lie that Pietro told Lara? How does he view the mountains now?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. “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” (p. 92). Try remembering a place you knew as a child and later returned to as an adult. Do you agree with Pietro’s statement?
2. Pietro views the act of building the house on the land left by his father as a second chance to renew his “interrupted friendship” with Bruno (p. 109). What are some “second chances” you’ve come across in your life?
3. Pietro observes his mother’s knack for maintaining relationships and writes, “I wondered if you learn and develop such a talent, or whether you have it, or not, at birth” (p. 113). What do you think?
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