The Mountain

by Massimo Donati

  He said it without much conviction. The barman pulled out a little notebook, tore off the corner of one page and wrote with a blunt pencil: Mary, and a phone number underneath.

  ‘Tell her I gave you her number. She’ll treat you well. Giorgio from the spa, that way she’ll understand.’

  Roberto put away the scrap of paper with the number, looked at Giorgio the barman and let out a little smile that could have conveyed thanks or derision, an out-of-control sort of smile. Then he made a gesture that approximated a wave, but the other man was deep in thought once again; perhaps he had already forgotten him. Roberto took the stairs and disappeared, leaving him alone in the deserted bar.

  2

  She thought back to the look on the flight attendant’s face when she had turned on her heel and left without a word. A nervous smile flashed across her lips and then immediately disappeared. She had never done anything like that before: abandoning a flight just an instant before boarding the plane. Which was why, as she walked slowly and deliberately back through the shopping area, the food hall, and then the corridors and the escalators; as she crossed the enormous check-in hall to reach the outside and the urgent vacuum that surrounded the airport, Elena felt like she was escaping. As though she had planted a bomb at departures.

  On the return taxi trip she was immersed in nothingness. Later, she couldn’t remember the car ride or the driver’s face at all. During the journey she was unable to focus her thoughts. The one thing she knew for certain was that she had been unable to take that flight, and it was the only reassurance she could find.

  As soon as she was back between the four walls of the villa she put down her luggage and wondered, disoriented, what she was going to do there without Roberto.

  She greeted Ada warmly, said a few vague words in explanation, after which Ada took her luggage upstairs and returned to her tasks, whatever they were, leaving Elena alone to make herself comfortable in the living room.

  She collapsed on the sofa, unable to find any concrete activity she could latch onto to change the direction things were going. She felt like the vital energy that had given her the strength to react, to not get on the flight, had now been exhausted. She sat there almost motionless for more than an hour, dazed by the sudden acceleration that the day had undergone.

  As she continued to reflect on her partner’s behaviour, it became horribly clear to her what needed to be done.

  She got up from the sofa to seek confirmation: first in Carlo’s study. It was perfectly in order. Roberto’s laptop was gone. It wasn’t in the bedroom either. And the holiday DVDs were missing.

  As though all of that were just a preamble, she went up into the archive.

  That was the epicentre of memory. The traces of the past that were tainting life, if they existed, could only be found up there somewhere.

  She climbed the stairs and turned on the light. As soon as she glanced at the shelves and the things Roberto had decided to throw away, she realised she would be unable to stop until she had done everything she could to find what she was looking for. She had no way of knowing what it was, but it must be here.

  She emptied the two black plastic bags and started working her way through the mementos Roberto had discarded. In one bag she found the black box with the super 8 cartridges. She recognised them, but left them on the side table. She already knew what they contained.

  It was two in the morning by the time she got to working her way through the objects on the second shelf, the one that Roberto and Ada had not even begun to look over.

  These were things that had belonged to Anna. When she picked up the first box, she stopped for a long moment. She felt she needed to show respect for something sacred.

  Much of what she saw and touched had an ill-defined connection with Roberto’s life, and with Carlo’s. They were objects that had belonged to the mother, practical objects to which she had probably ascribed only incidental importance, which perhaps, after her death, had been imbued for Carlo with the substance of a shared life, so that preserving them had become his only means of refuting death.

  There was nothing extraordinary. Day-to-day objects treated like relics. A thick flannel, a sachet of hairpins. A little leather box, dirty white from use with a picture of a ballerina on the lid, containing a safety razor and blades long tarnished by the years. She turned it over in her hands, curious, and felt tenderness for the intimacy that had involuntarily been revealed: it was the razor Anna had used for shaving her legs.

  In another wooden box, she found all her paintbrushes. She touched the tips, crumbling the paint that covered them, and brought them to her nose, but they had no smell even though they were still splattered with colour, the bristles now stuck together in a compact block. No one had taken the care to wash them before putting them away. Perhaps that had been a choice. Whatever the reason, they were all that remained to bear witness to a lifelong passion, and this seemed unjustly little, far too little.

  Taken together, those objects seemed like coded messages for which the key was lost forever. Roberto, in a few angry mumblings, had once hinted to her that initially Carlo’s response to his pain had been a kind of rage and many things had immediately been thrown away, though this had later been replaced by remorse and perhaps obsession.

  She came to the books, perhaps the last ones Anna ever read. She leafed through them in a torpid state akin to a cautious immersion. She looked inside a few and paused over a book by an art critic, a woman. It was about Flemish art. There was a long analysis of the symbols and allegorical messages hidden within the artworks. There were various reproductions, and among them Elena noticed the winter landscape with skaters and birds that was hanging in Carlo’s study. Roberto’s mother had highlighted several passages, even entire pages of reflections and comments. Sentences here and there had been hurriedly underlined in impetuous, disordered pencil strokes.

  Elena was turning the book over in her hands when a yellowing envelope fell out from under the dust jacket and slid to the floor. She picked it up. It read simply: for Anna.

  She opened the envelope with a certain amount of agitation.

  Como, 14 October 1981

  May this old painting, this delightful whim,

  which you say is a prophecy of our lives,

  be the first of many whims, a thousand whims,

  those you never followed,

  those I’d have liked to satisfy

  and that I will always satisfy.

  Carlo

  She read the note several times.

  From the handwriting, it seemed to have been dashed off quickly, with the urgency of an emotion that needed to be expressed at once. Maybe it had accompanied the painting itself. She was convinced it was the one in the study, which Roberto’s father had decided to take from him.

  She thought about the date. The woman was dying. They must both have known it. But Carlo was hopeful; or perhaps he wanted to give her, and himself, courage.

  She re-read it one more time. She noted the desperate cheerfulness. She felt briefly moved, but then she focused on the most obscure phrase:

  a prophecy of our lives.

  She reflected on this for a long time. A reference to something they had talked about, or something that had happened previously. It was too vague. She gave up, but the phrase stayed in her head.

  This was not enough. It wasn’t the clue she had been looking for. She recommenced her search. She went through one box after another, every single object, every insignificant accessory of those lives.

  It was five in the morning and dawn was beginning to break when she decided to stop. She was holding a box of photographs that had been taken in the mountains and which she hadn’t yet looked at, but she was tired and needed sleep. She picked them up to put them away, then she put them back on the floor. She began glancing through them. They were large-format photographs in black and white: the mountain peaks of Trentino, deep rocky gorges, the outlines of little lakes, rare flowers. From the writing on the back
they could be dated to the summer of ’79 or of 1980. Much to her disappointment there were none from 1981. Perhaps there had not been the opportunity that year. Perhaps Anna was already too ill.

  She was putting the box high up on the shelf when the bottom of it fell out and everything crashed to the ground. As she was gathering together the photographs she picked up a notebook she had not previously noticed. Perhaps it had been in the bottom of the box, as a base, under the photographs. It was a large exercise book with a robot on the cover.

  The date at the top of the first page marked the beginning: 7 July 1981.

  Seven July nineteen eighty-one.

  The date resounded through her head over and over. She flicked quickly through the pages and knew at once what she had found. Here it was, the last clue. In a child’s handwriting.

  There were no photos, no home movies, no mementos after ’81. But there was this notebook.

  She started reading at once.

  3

  In his room, he found he had nothing to do. He thought about going down into the valley to look for a restaurant that served the local dishes he used to love as a child, but he didn’t go, perhaps because the urgent need to make sense of his search was weighing on him.

  He cast around for a manageable task: a place to start.

  He opened his laptop and connected to the hotel’s wi-fi network so he could check the online telephone directory. He half-heartedly typed in a few names of valley towns and villages alongside the surname Slat, and immediately began to feel like a third-rate private investigator. He was certain Ciprini would already have thought of this—perhaps putting one of his younger and more computer-savvy employees to work on it—and got nowhere.

  When, a fraction of a second later, the short list of the valley’s Slats appeared, he had his verdict.

  No Rosa, and just one Mariolino. No Mattia. Because of mobile phones, there were fewer and fewer home phone numbers available online these days, though. He could try a paid service, but a kind of lethargy held him back. Perhaps the next morning he would start phoning the Slats that appeared in the list. They might be relatives. Or he could speak to Ciprini and settle his doubts, but he didn’t feel like phoning him. He’d manage on his own, at least for a while.

  He let an hour go by in a state of inactivity, then he picked up the phone number the barman had given him. He was doubtful. He looked at the time. It wasn’t late. He called from his hotel phone. It rang, but there was no answer. When the voicemail began, he hesitated a moment, and then decided to hang up.

  A few minutes later, the phone in his room rang.

  ‘This is Mary. You tried to call me?’

  ‘Roberto. Thanks for calling back. I’m staying at the hotel, but I guess you already know that. I got your phone number from Giorgio at the spa.’

  She made no comment.

  ‘I need to ask you something.’

  The girl paused, undecided. ‘Not over the phone. You’re in room 304, right?’

  She must’ve deduced this from the phone number. That was the only plausible explanation.

  ‘Yes, I’m in 304. But we can talk about it now.’

  ‘Better in person. Wait for me in your room. I’m near the hotel.’

  And she hung up.

  Roberto sat with the receiver in his hand for a few seconds, uncertain. He had an intuition, but he repressed it. Anything was better than being eaten up by all the waiting. He sat on the bed, neatly dressed, waiting for her.

  She took a good twenty minutes. Then, just as he was getting up to change out of his clothes, thinking she wasn’t going to turn up, someone knocked lightly on the door.

  ‘Mary.’

  The girl was almost as tall as him. They looked each other in the eyes. Then she walked straight past him and into the room. She remained standing a few metres from him and he turned to follow her.

  ‘Close the door.’

  He did so, mechanically, without knowing what was happening.

  It was only then that he had the chance to study her better under the downlights that traced little glowing halos around her. She was wearing tight trousers with black lace inserts down the sides, through which you could see the colour of her skin. Her shoes, also black, had silver trims and built-in heels that gave her several centimetres of height and had a slimming effect. On top she was wearing a small rust-coloured leather jacket, unzipped, over a top decorated with a print of lipstick kisses. While her face was only conventionally pretty—perhaps due to her heavy makeup—her figure, bursting out of her clothes, was attractive. She couldn’t be more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old.

  During this short time she had stood there smiling, her pose studied, while her eyes remained serious and focused on Roberto, who was wearing a blue suit and an air of bewilderment.

  ‘So? Better to meet in person, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, better,’ he repeated, trying to buy some time.

  ‘Giorgio said you’re here on your own and you’re looking for a friend.’

  Roberto nodded. With a conspiratorial air, the young woman took a couple more steps into the room as though to check it out, yet without much interest. She must already have visited that room, or others just like it.

  ‘Maybe I could be that friend.’

  And she stared at him once more, curious to see the effect of her proposal.

  ‘So?’

  Roberto was silent for a few seconds as he struggled to quickly think of something to say, keen to take charge of the situation.

  ‘Sit down on the bed.’

  She nodded, placed her handbag on the chair next to the dresser and sat down trying to be as natural as possible. Her eyes followed him, her expression now harder and more focused. Roberto stood in front of her, a metre away, leaning over her so she was forced to look up at him.

  ‘There’s been a misunderstanding.’

  The girl retained her composure.

  ‘What misunderstanding? Weren’t you looking for a friend?’

  Roberto noticed that the woman’s accent was local. Maybe she really could help him. He should at least try.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Why did you call me, then?’

  Roberto hesitated. She began to get to her feet.

  ‘Wait a moment.’

  ‘If you’ve changed your mind, that’s fine. There’s no obligation. I’ll leave.’

  ‘I just want to know what your surname is. I need to know.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ She was becoming nervous and stood up decisively, as though to gain some space, and headed for the door.

  ‘I can pay you for your time. That’s not a problem. But you need to answer me. The barman said you’re a Slat.’

  The girl began to smile, and half restrained a laugh. ‘We don’t do surnames.’

  Roberto stepped aside, and insisted. ‘I’m looking for a woman whose surname is Slat.’

  ‘Are you a policeman?’

  Roberto shook his head. ‘No one’s getting arrested. You tell me if your surname is Slat and I’ll pay for your wasted evening. And then I’ll tell you why I’m looking for her.’

  ‘So you weren’t looking for a woman for sex?’

  Roberto looked at her, uncomfortable about the question, but also about having to say no, as though he might offend her by refusing her service.

  ‘But you won’t be wasting your evening. You just have to answer me.’

  He put a few bank notes in her purse and passed it to her.

  Then the girl laughed, amused, but in a cutting way. She opened her handbag and began looking through it.

  ‘It’s real money, don’t worry.’

  ‘I believe you, I believe you. But Slat is not my surname. And Mary is not my first name either, for that matter. I’m sorry.’

  Roberto looked disappointed.

  ‘This is my name.’

  She handed him an ID card in a leather case.

  Roberto took it and his eyes opened wide. His eye
s rushed back to her face and she nodded. She looked amused.

  ‘This hotel chain is part of a foreign company and they care very much about the reputation of their brand. They like to carry out checks. A certain number of checks, and when you asked the barman…but unfortunately he’s not very smart, so here I am. I’ll talk to him later. It’s important to be certain, he can’t be making this kind of mistake.’

  Roberto smiled nervously. ‘I’m just looking for someone.’

  ‘I get that. In fact, I should apologise on behalf of the company. I hope you won’t be wanting to make a complaint, otherwise the barman…I can help you out.’

  Roberto seemed relieved. ‘So were you born here, in the valley?’

  ‘Unfortunately not. I’ve only been living here a few years.’

  Roberto was silent.

  ‘So, tell me about it.’

  ‘I’m looking for a certain Rosa Slat. She’d be about seventy. It’s about the transfer of an inheritance. Can you think of anyone around here who has that surname and is roughly that age?’

  ‘An inheritance.’

  She looked sceptical, as though it were an excuse, but she was undaunted.

  ‘I’m sorry. I know there are Slats around these parts, but I don’t know them. It is certainly a local surname. But I’m not from round here and I mostly mind my own business.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  She picked up her purse and then stopped. She took out the money and handed it back to him.

  ‘But perhaps there is someone…’

  ‘Who? Any connection could be useful to me.’

  ‘Emidio Pichler. The old mayor of Madonna del Bosco. He’s more ancient and cantankerous than the mountains themselves, but he knows everyone in the valley. If you can manage to talk to him. I don’t want to get your hopes up. He’s very bad-tempered.’

  I know him, he thought. From thirty years ago.

  ‘Do you know him well?’

  Mary placed a hand on the doorknob.

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to have his phone number?’

  ‘He doesn’t have a phone.’