The Mountain

by Massimo Donati

  Confirmation and retractions.

  The present was a difficult client for his memory. He had decided that on this free Sunday he would pay a visit to his past.

  Avoiding getting hurt if possible.

  Retractions.

  He had got up early, as usual, and reached the point where the path led into the woods. He had begun to descend among pines and firs, and then to walk along the river’s edge. It was a long and complicated route, dangerous in places even for a well-equipped adult. And along the way he wondered several times what kind of strength and courage had prompted two young kids to walk several kilometres through the forest, skirting rivers, to do their exploring. He had no answer, or perhaps he had forgotten the answer—lost along with those children, now long gone.

  In the open area, the spot where Mattia had taken him to lay claim to the bus, there was nothing left. He had prepared himself for the idea that the old bus, all crumpled up on itself, had been removed. In fact, he assumed it had. When he arrived at that part of the river, as he looked at the place where he remembered it being and where it now no longer was, he had the sense that an invisible imprint remained, the aura of that wreckage, a little like those images that remain impressed on the retina when you look too long into the sun. He lingered a few minutes and then gave in and began to wonder whether the entire course of the river had changed its appearance. Not just from the force of the water: there had also been large-scale human intervention. A new high-speed road passed by there now, on the opposite bank from the one he had arrived from. The forest, which thirty years earlier had seemed uncontaminated and inaccessible, was dominated by a raised viaduct. The sound of cars drowned out the sound of the water.

  Confirmation.

  Shortly after leaving the river, he had reached the cableway, the one above Madonna del Bosco. The long cable, which crossed many hundreds of metres of emptiness, could still be seen from a distance.

  When he got to the sawmill’s loading bay, Roberto felt he could finally tick something off his list of remaining tasks. The cableway, though not in use that day, was more or less the same as he remembered. From up high you could see that it went a long way down, making a very different leap from back in his day. And he thought that if he had to throw himself into that void now he would never be able to do it—it would be madness. The cableway was still operational, as shown by the neat stack of wood and some scraps on the ground, awaiting their journey. Evidently the need to transport larger loads had obliged the owners to change machinery, but there were no other differences apart from the fencing around it all.

  The mill was now much better protected; it looked like a military base. There was electrified barbed wire preventing access and the gates were quite smooth, making them impossible to climb over. There were closed circuit cameras all around.

  As he was admiring the mill’s new look he had the feeling that he in turn was being watched. He moved away almost at once, thinking that perhaps many other people, on many occasions, had attempted the same feat as he and Mattia had, sneaking in when the machinery was not in use and throwing themselves into the void. Perhaps once or twice it had not ended well.

  As he walked away he thought back on the time they had jumped off together. How amazing it was, and how hard, and how insignificant they considered the risk of falling and being injured.

  For a moment he felt nostalgic. Not only for that clear, sunny morning and those forbidden flights. But also for the vertiginous sense that it would never be repeated for the rest of his life. He felt nostalgia, too, for that absence of responsibility towards others and himself that is such a part of being a child and which allowed the limitless possibility of letting everything happen the way it must, without determining, chasing, wanting something. That day they had been right there living every instant. There was nothing else, they needed nothing else: neither outcome nor aim nor future.

  When the bus stopped at a slight curve that coincided with the first few houses in Monte Chino, the lady with the helmet hurriedly alighted. Roberto watched her through the large side windows as she came down the steps and into the open air, where a twenty-year-old smiled at her, gave her a vaguely embarrassed kiss on the cheek and took the helmet from her. He had to be her grandson, but there was no time to pursue this thought as the bus departed with all the might of a transatlantic liner, and the old lady and the young man headed in the opposite direction.

  He was now the only passenger.

  Suddenly the driver looked at him in the rear-vision mirror and said, ‘Where are you going, sir?’

  It took Roberto a moment to realise who the man was talking to.

  ‘Sorry?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I wanted to know where you’re getting off.’

  Roberto stood up and went down the front and sat just behind the driver. ‘The dam,’ he answered.

  ‘Good, then we’ll continue straight on.’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  They said nothing more. Every so often the man peered at Roberto, who was leaning his face against the window, looking out at the road.

  ‘A lot of people jump from there.’

  This observation came out of nowhere.

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘From the dam. Two or three jump every year.’

  The man looked Roberto in the eyes, to get a sense of what he thought of this. Perhaps, thought Roberto, he needed to report any suspicious passengers. And so he smiled ironically and said, ‘Well, that’s not what I’m going up there for, don’t worry.’

  ‘Do you like dams?’

  ‘I used to go on outings there with my grandmother in the eighties. I’d like to see it again.’

  The man jerked his chin to indicate: I get it. Then he was silent until they arrived.

  ‘I’ll leave you here. You’ll have to walk a few hundred metres. There was a landslide and until they fix up the road the bus can’t get through. See you.’

  When he reached the grassy plain, he did not head for the dam. Or at least not straight away. He had made the trip up there in part to see that sad building on the edge of the woods. The children’s holiday camp had not been demolished. In fact, of all the relics of his past that he had visited so far, this was the one that had suffered the least damage over the years.

  There was nobody around, so he plucked up the courage to cross the yard where the girls used to play, where males had been forbidden. Now the gates were open.

  He got to the other end and stopped.

  They had all been felled.

  All that was left were stumps sawn down to half a metre from the ground. Perhaps they used them as tables. The trees that had burnt in the fire that summer were no longer there. Now the closest trees were a long way from the building. No shade. He recalled that evening with no particular emotion. The frightened children in their pyjamas. The rescue efforts. He recalled being there as the fire burned and crackled in the dark.

  It had been a spectacle without equal.

  A woman came out of the building and sat on a stone bench out the front. She began to read.

  He went up to her at once. ‘Good morning.’

  She looked up at him and Roberto noticed for the first time the veil and the cross on her chest. She was a nun. Around forty years old, or a little more, but she looked good for her age.

  ‘Good morning,’ she replied, rather uncertainly.

  ‘I’m sorry, I hadn’t realised…’

  ‘That I’m a nun?’

  He nodded.

  ‘If I’m annoying you I can leave at once.’

  ‘No, stay. You’re not annoying me. Did you want to ask me something?’

  Roberto sat down next to her.

  ‘I was wondering if you know anything about those trees?’

  He pointed to them. She was astonished by the question. But he seemed serious, so she gave it some thought.

  ‘I remember that some got burnt many years ago in a fire.’

  ‘All of them?’<
br />
  ‘No, just some of them. But it was arson. They never found out who did it. I was just a child, but I remember it was a big event. Things like that don’t usually happen around here. And haven’t happened again since. But they cut down the trees.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think for fear it might happen again and that the fire could burn down the whole camp. That’s all I know, sorry. Why are you interested?’

  ‘No reason. I was on holiday here the year of the fire.’

  ‘Me too.’

  They said nothing more. Roberto stayed seated next to the woman, who resumed reading the prayer book resting on her knees.

  Shortly afterwards, he found the courage to disturb her once more. ‘What about the holiday camp? Is it still running? Do children still come here in the summer?’

  She put the book down again, not in the least annoyed. ‘No, it’s no longer a holiday camp.’

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  The woman turned a little towards Roberto, and it seemed she had a lot to say on the matter.

  ‘Many reasons. The first is that it’s not up to standard. It doesn’t meet regulations. But it’s not just that—it could have been renovated, the bathrooms and so on…’

  ‘So what else?’

  ‘The truth is nobody sends them to us anymore.’

  Roberto looked at her, confused.

  ‘Children don’t want to come here to be with us. And their parents don’t send them. At some stage, camp went from being an open-air holiday out here in nature to being seen as a way of getting rid of your children. And a kind of torture, I think. So they stopped sending them. And we stopped organising the camps.’

  She said it with a certain regret.

  ‘In my day, you were lucky to be able to come here. We all used to come. My father was a lawyer, and I would come because I enjoyed it. And then I stayed.’

  She smiled, alluding to her current status.

  ‘So what you do you use the place for now? It doesn’t look abandoned.’

  ‘Elderly people come, and our own nuns. I’m here to meet a group.’

  As her words gave way to the silence of the plains and, in the distance, the sound of the water flowing down into the dam, Roberto remembered, for the first time in so many years, that girl from the holiday camp, and how he had practically killed himself climbing to the top of a tree to look at her. He thought about how the little things, the most insignificant events, once held for him the power of an earthquake. He missed that very direct contact, flesh- and-bone contact, with the minute stories of day-to-day life, with physical sensations and changes, with nature. He thought about how it was all just a trick of perspective, a misunderstanding. A mirage. But so real it took his breath away.

  He stood up, said goodbye to the nun and walked away, imagining that the girl she once was must have played, laughed and shared secrets with that other girl, the one from his past, who for him—for the very first time ever—had felt special. And he was astonished by the miraculous threads that run between things and people and across time, brushing past that girl he so admired back then, and here, now, a man on a return trip to his past.

  He left those thoughts behind and went on to the dam.

  The mass of concrete was still suspended over the artificial lake, just as it had been. But his déjà vu lasted only a moment, because maintenance works were underway at the dam. In front of the entrances there were barriers, and red and white tape fluttering in the wind. And the balustrade, which once upon a time made safety—or lack of it, as the case might be—a matter of individual responsibility, had been made higher: the extra cement had made the walkway seem even more like the walls of a castle.

  He passed the first line of barriers, ignoring the signs, and after slipping under the tape he began crossing the dam.

  In the void above the deep basin, as he walked, the concrete had something supernatural about it, something colossal, something primitive. Remnants of an ancient civilisation. The level of the water today was even lower than he remembered it, and this exposed the vertical walls of the dam, the outlets, the calcium build-up, amplifying the sense of its immensity. After a few minutes he was in the centre of the walkway. The balcony of the past, of Mattia and his stupid joke, had been enclosed in a box made of steel and plexiglass, open at the top. That was certainly the most dangerous spot, and it was no less dangerous now. Yet behind plexiglass, it was as though this spot—the only thing that really made it worth saving the dam—had lost its fascination for him. It felt like looking out at the world from inside a motionless cable car.

  The space alongside it was open. He moved to the left side.

  He leaned out into the void.

  The parapet reached his shoulder, but with a little effort, standing on tiptoes, he could see down. That was why he had come: to be able to look down into the void with his own eyes: without barriers.

  Without any fucking barriers, he thought.

  Finally.

  At the widest point it was an amazing spectacle. He stood there enchanted for a few minutes. Until the tips of his toes began to hurt. He looked around him. There was nobody, not even away in the distance. So he used his arms to hoist himself onto the parapet and leaned his chest out, dangling.

  If he lost his balance he would go over the edge for sure.

  But the sense of freedom and the immensity before his eyes were intoxicating. He stared down to the bottom. He wanted to throw himself over the edge, to see how it felt. A thought crossed his mind, a thought to be chased away immediately. He shouted into the void: ‘Where have you ended up?’

  The deep basin replied, returning his words to him just slightly muddled, so that it seemed like a question that the giant of the dam was asking of him. Where are you, Roberto? Where are you?

  He held his breath and leaned over a tiny bit further, his head down. Just a centimetre, that was all it would take. He shouted, ‘Is this why you made me come all this way?’

  A dark smile formed on his face. ‘This is not for me! You’ve got the wrong guy!’

  He stared at the dark water at the edge of the concrete wall.

  And repeated more softly, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy.’

  As he dangled over, a hundred metres above the water, he let a drop of saliva fall and watched it go down, further and further down until, long before it reached the bottom, it disappeared into the void.

  8

  After putting the notebook away safely among her personal items, Elena went to Ada’s bedroom. She was not yet awake, the door was shut. Elena sat down in the hall. She closed her eyes.

  When Ada emerged, still sleepy, she almost tripped over her.

  ‘Elena? What’s happened?’

  Elena slowly opened her eyes.

  ‘I was waiting for you.’

  Ada helped her to her feet, a little worried.

  ‘What for?’

  It was an obvious question, and yet it seemed to baffle Elena.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe just so I don’t have to sit alone with what I’ve just discovered.’

  She seemed bewildered, and the sleepless night had left a grey pallor on her face. She looked suddenly older.

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘I know who Mattia Slat is. And who Rosa is. And I know something happened that summer.’

  As they made their way downstairs, Ada listened to what Elena had to tell her, about the notebook, about Roberto and Mattia.

  ‘But the final pages have been torn out. There’s no way of knowing what happened next.’

  ‘Maybe we can find something more in the archive.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Elena began thinking aloud.

  ‘Roberto wasn’t interested in the archive, yet I saw him spend whole nights in there going back over those summer home movies.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘And he took them away with him. Because he’s looking for something. But what?’

  Both were silent. Then Ada
turned to Elena.

  ‘The 8 mm films: they were among all the things to be thrown out, right?’

  Elena looked at her blankly.

  ‘The originals, on film.’

  ‘That’s right, but how would we watch them?’

  Ada did not reply. She bit her lip nervously. Then she began to walk away, forgetting about Elena, caught up in the thoughts that were running through her head.

  ‘Where are you going, Ada?’

  ‘Wait a moment.’

  She disappeared into the various rooms of the villa. These days nobody but her knew what could be found between those walls.

  Elena waited a few minutes. She saw Ada reappear with a tough plastic bag, similar to a typewriter cover, and the package of 8 mm films.

  ‘Carlo held on to the film projector.’

  ‘That’s a projector?’

  ‘Something like that. It plays film cassettes.’

  ‘But…Does it work?’

  ‘We’ll find out if we turn it on. Carlo was a meticulous man. In any case, the instruction booklet is inside.’

  They spent a good hour working out how to operate it. It was in excellent condition. Only the lamp was a little weak. They did a few checks and when everything was clear they began watching.

  What remained of the summer of ’81.

  A piercing hiss forced them to check the projector. They switched it off, fiddled with a knob and started it up again.

  After less than a minute they stared at each other, like people who had made a discovery.

  SUMMER 1981—OUTING TO LAGHETTO AZZURRO ROLL 4—8 MM KODAK

  1. Long shot. A forest of tall trees that ends with a narrow meadow. A pile of rocks forms a pier on the lake. The lake is a still, bright blue, between the trees on one side and the backdrop of very high mountains, their peaks white with snow. The sky is blue, a few clouds marking it. Carlo: Sunday 12th of July 1981. Laghetto Azzurro. One of the most beautiful and easily reached places in the world. Some members of the crew wanted to go elsewhere…But the weather looked threatening and heading up to a high altitude was not possible. To get back to the hotel from here, even in the rain, only takes a moment. But for now that doesn’t look necessary.