The Wild Boy

by Paolo Cognetti

  Then our relationship had moved into a golden period. At sixteen I had got over my sickness and had begun to enjoy our adventures: every summer Renzo would lead a group of boys to a high-altitude refuge for a week of mountaineering training. We would clamber up using an ice ax and crampons on the seracs of Monte Rosa, lower ourselves down into the depths of the crevasses to simulate rescue operations, and run down the glacier dragging an imaginary casualty on a sled, being passed meanwhile by the serious collectors of peaks. We weren’t interested in summits. Rock faces and crests were much more diverting—to climb them as if it were a game. I was strong now, I felt at home on the glacier, and fantasized about becoming an alpine guide too. On our return to the refuge I would imitate my teacher: I tried to talk like him (very little), walk like him (lightly, almost as if weightless), and to adopt the same attitude as his when faced with dangers such as being on the rock face in a rainstorm (whistling). I had learned from him so well that once, when he was in training for the Himalayas, he had come to ask me to race with him—just the two of us, up to a height of thirteen thousand feet and back again in only a few hours. With just a rope, the coordination of our steps, and no further need to ask or give instructions. Thirteen thousand feet was easily done, after all. We had almost immediately disappeared into the clouds, and had seen nothing further until the evening, just the amorphous white of the ice and mist—and yet it was the most beautiful memory that I cherished of him, of our private Himalaya.

  That must have been the last time that we went mountaineering together: afterward I was drawn to other places, and was guided by other teachers. Yet none of them would inspire in me the unconditional trust I gave to Renzo. Now fifteen years had passed, and I wondered whether he ever asked himself what had become of me: who knows what he would have thought if he’d known that I was there on the other side, just beyond the hill, playing at being a hermit in a hut. If truth be told, he was one of the reasons why I had ended up there.

  * * *

  I shared these thoughts with Remigio, who I found easy to talk to. From the outset we had established between us a sense of familiarity—from the day of the books and the snow—and it had grown in the dust of haymaking. We went back and forth from the fields, with him driving the tractor and me sitting in the rickety trailer. In the hayloft we would fling the bales at each other and pile them in stacks about a dozen feet high. One evening after work he invited me around to his place for a drink of the kind that his mother prohibited, and in the living room I was surprised to find a typewriter. It was a well-kept bygone. There was a sheet of paper loaded, and on the sheet of paper there was a single line: I wonder if I’ll be able to write as before. I was disconcerted by the phrase: whatever did that mountain man have to do with writing? Afterward it disturbed me more deeply, since I was familiar with such doubts myself: I had not written for months, and feared that I would never do so again. When I asked him to explain its meaning, Remigio said that the sheet of paper had been there for twenty years: it dated back to the period when his father died, and he had not touched the typewriter since.

  I began to listen with the respect that you feel when entering into other people’s lives, the same sense of awe. Remigio’s father had been a hunter, a builder of houses, and a storyteller. He would take him to the woods when he was a child, to set traps for animals, and had taught him to identify in the snow the tracks of foxes, marmots, and ermine. Years later he had taken him on as a laborer on the building sites, inducting him into the art of raising walls. They had been very close—Remigio was an only son, and there were no other young men in the village—until their relationship had been ruined by alcohol. At a certain point that affectionate and outgoing man had started to drink hard—so hard that he had fallen seriously ill. His character changed, or perhaps it was his son who had become reserved and bad-tempered with age, and that there was nothing to be done with such a drunken father but to argue. Accompanying him in and out of the hospital, he had watched him being slowly destroyed—and it had fallen to him, in the end, to find his father in the field where he had gone to die. He could never forgive himself that their last words had been words of anger.

  Now what remained of his father was his hunting trophies, sinister custodians of the room in which we were talking: the hooves of a chamois turned into coat hooks, a pair of ibex horns mounted on a wooden plaque, stuffed specimens of martens and ermine. The feathers of an eagle that his father had shot for a challenge, and that in its death agony had clutched his arm until Remigio had rushed over to get the bird off him, using all his strength to break her talons. From that moment on, hunting was repulsive to him. The passion, as hunters call it, had not been bequeathed to him along with the shotguns.

  But there was another legacy that he did preserve. Shortly before his death his father had left him the ruins of a hut in the middle of a meadow. A small stable below, above it a single room, a roof with warped and skewed shingles made of larch, and walls blackened by smoke and encrusted with dung. He had included no words of explanation along with this mysterious gift. Then he had died. Years later, Remigio had discovered its meaning for himself—and to assuage his feelings of guilt he had spent two long summers renovating the building. He had decided to work alone, without assistance from builders or machinery, excavating the earth with only the power of a pickax, raising the beams on a ramp of planks, with a rope and a tractor. They were from trees that he had cut down himself in the woods, choosing them with the care that he used on every other detail: every piece of wood, every nail, every stone of the house, so that the work was done perfectly, as his father, the bricklayer, had taught him. Then he had finished it, spending just one night under its roof before understanding that he would never live there. There were too many presences between its four walls to sleep well at night. So he had rented it out. Better to leave the bewitched place to someone who knew nothing about it. Ten years later I had turned up, looking for a place to be alone in—and this was the story I had strayed into, hoping to find how to write again.

  Goats

  In the summer the wild animals had all disappeared. It was the fault of the people who had begun to hit the mountain tracks, pushing them into ever more remote areas. I encountered these people every day around my house, and they seemed blind and deaf to the landscape through which they were moving, making so much noise that I could hear them long before they came into view. Even their chemically produced scents seemed to strike me from a distance. Is it just me, I asked myself, who has problems with the rest of humanity? Or is it they who don’t know how to walk the earth without invading it? They would burst into the woods with a riot of smells, colors, noise. And the woodland animals naturally reacted by making themselves scarce.

  I was missing my neighbors: the hares, foxes, and deer. So one morning I got up at six, gulped down a single cup of coffee, and set out for a long walk. No rucksack, flask, or boots—just a stick and shoes, light as the wind. After three months up there I felt in great shape. I left behind the wood and the first pastures, Gabriele’s lodge and the marmots’ clearings, the abandoned and crumbling villages. I stopped at the stream to drink, then sped to get beyond the high pastures too, so that by seven I had in front of me nothing but scree, the small lakes of the thaw, and residual snow. I breathed the pure morning air just before the sun rose from behind the crests and the day broke in earnest. Nobody seemed to have come before me.

  On the scree I slowed down, careful not to noisily dislodge any stones. Arriving at the ridge I had a stroke of luck: I must have been downwind, or perhaps I already reeked of goat myself, but either way I saw two chamois standing on a small snowfield. I had surprised them in the midst of one of their secret games. All around the scree was warming up, the snow reduced to small, frozen, and glittering patches—and the chamois were rolling about on their bellies, backs, and flanks, delighting in this vestige of winter. They would slide down for a bit, then get up and clamber back to the top of the snowfield. They carried on in this way unti
l, ears suddenly pricked, one of them sensed danger. I hid between the rocks and tried not to move, but something had already spooked them. The more cautious of the two was the first to leave, the other one hesitating before following, as if with regret at the interruption of their game—before disappearing into the scree with a few elegant bounds.

  I continued to climb: who was going to stop me now? Now I was on the ridge between the two valleys of my life, and I was walking on slabs of broken rock fractured by ice, and on that unbelievably soft moss that grows at ten thousand feet. On one side of the watershed, that of adulthood, the sky was clear and of such an intense blue that it seemed to have mass and volume. On the side of childhood, puffs of clouds were rising and curled up to and dissolved at my feet. Over there I had spent twenty years, over here the last few months: two valleys gouged by two rivers, and two rivers born from the same mountain. It was the mountain which I now had before my eyes, Monte Rosa, that united my present and my past.

  Then I saw some dark shapes, figures moving on the jagged rock. It was a small herd of male ibex. Less cautious than chamois, they have not been hunted for a century and have ceased to fear man. They stay up there on the crests and pinnacles because they love to survey their kingdom from on high, in the wind and the blinding light. The herd consisted of a majestic alpha male that had eased itself down and assumed on a ledge the solemn pose of a leader, four restless young bucks that were goading each other, and a venerable animal so old and tired that he moved only with painful difficulty. His coat was mangy, the weight of his horns such that he could no longer support it, forcing him to keep his neck bent toward the ground. As soon as I was spotted, the leader of the group stood up and placed himself between the rest of the herd and me. He was staring at me, emitting a battle cry like a sustained F blown from full lungs. He had horns that were three feet long, and powerful muscles to carry them: it would have taken him very little effort to thrust me out of his territory, if not to say out of this world altogether. But I was trying to make him see that I had come in peace. The young males jumped onto a rock, finding safety behind him, while the older one had to take a circuitous route to join them. I sat down on the ground and remained still for a minute, until the alpha male concluded that I was a tedious adversary, and gave one last snort before commencing to graze on the moss that carpeted the rocks. In training for the mating season, two of the youngsters began to butt each other with their horns: they raised themselves up on their back legs before letting themselves fall upon their rival, using all their weight to lend power to their blows and producing with their horns a blunt tock, like the sound of two rocks being knocked together. By now the old buck was the only one paying me any attention: he had squatted down in front of me, nine or ten feet away, and scrutinized me while ruminating, scratching his back occasionally with his horns. I counted around fifteen knots in them: fifteen years spent wandering the mountains, without enemies and without ever descending to the valley. What a wonderful life, I thought. Who knows whether this would be his last summer, or whether he would be able to overcome his aches and pains and survive another winter. Who knows what kind of questions he was asking about me.

  Then I looked down through the clear air of eight in the morning. I could see clearly the roads at the bottom of the valley, where the sun would not reach for another few hours yet. That shadowy world had the appearance of an alien planet: with the cars coming and going between villages that had sprawled out of all proportion, the neighborhoods of condominiums and chalets spreading like city suburbs. And then the quarries of sand and gravel in the riverbeds, the pistes that cut swathes through the woods, the parking lots at the bottom of the skiing developments, building sites everywhere. An industrious and invasive species, wholly dedicated to eroding, leveling, colonizing: this is what humanity looked like from the vantage point of the mountain crests, where to live it was sufficient to graze a little grass and lie down in the sun. I observed the house in which I had been a child, or rather the apartment complex that was rising where it had once been. The house of my childhood had ceased to exist some time ago, and this seemed only right. A crane was positioned next to a silo of cement in the courtyard, making me wonder what had happened to the large wild cherry tree that used to be there. My gaze met that of the old buck’s again, and this time I felt I knew clearly what he was thinking. Sorry, I felt like replying.

  * * *

  I went down in no hurry that morning, feeling hostile toward the place I was going back to. The hut, my collection of finds, the unused notebooks, the books. A small garret room so full of me, while outside the mountain offered itself, unexplored, in every direction. What did I need a house for? I would like to have followed the example of the shepherds of times past, who would wander from one pasture to another, stopping to sleep in the shelters provided by the rocks. I would sometimes come across these in my explorations: protruding boulders at the base of which the ground had been cleared and sometimes enclosed with a drystone wall. They had a name for these in the local dialect, which I had heard uttered by Remigio while we were haymaking. What is a barma? I’d asked him. A rock giving shelter when it rains, he’d replied.

  Down at the hut it was midday, and a small family had spread a blanket on the grass in front of it. Two children were splashing each other in the fountain, the mother had taken out bags and containers, the father gave me the once-over with the kind of surly stare that men exchange when there is territory or family to defend. It’s possible that I was looking at him that way too.

  Excuse me, is this private property? his wife asked me, rather more courteously.

  No, no, I said, it’s for everyone, please stay.

  Once inside I unhooked the rucksack from the nail on which it was hanging, stuffed a few items of clothing inside together with a waterproof ground sheet, a sleeping bag, a flask of wine, all the tins I had in the kitchen, and a lighter, a knife, strips of newspaper, a torch, two hooks, a pen, and a notebook. I wanted to push myself beyond the area I was familiar with, to discover what lay two or three days’ walking distance from there. I was setting off with that load—yet shutting the door behind me it seemed as if I was freeing myself of a burden. The burden, as usual, could be the hut or the people who in my eyes had profaned it, but it was much more likely that it was myself. What do we run from when we run away from home? So long, said the wild boy to the domestic double of himself, then turned his back on him and took the rising path.

  Bivouacking

  Down the slope that had been engulfed by a landslide my boots sank into the soft earth: a grayish, viscous paste, like fresh malt, making each step laborious. I mounted an uprooted trunk and balanced along its length to cross a chaos of dislodged rocks, rivulets of muddy water, and enormous clods flung around as in the aftermath of an explosion—resting precariously here on the brink of a boulder or stuck there in a crack in the earth, insisting on putting forth flowers even in these unnatural positions. Up above, a wide, dark strip showed where the mountain had split. It was damp and rotten rock face, with larch roots that stuck out halfway up and could not hold it together. Of wildlife there was no trace: not a whistle of alarm, no sudden going to ground as I passed by. It was as if they had migrated en masse from the site of that disaster. Even the birds were silent, leaving only the gurgle of a subterranean stream to be carried through the air. I felt relieved when at last I got beyond the final debris, found a trace of the path that turned to the left, and leaving behind the landslide, started to climb again.

  * * *

  I had the idea of spending the night on the shore of a lake, warming myself next to a fire and gazing at the August night sky, but it was not to be: that was a summer of rain, and when I arrived there I could feel the storm approaching. A front of dark, swollen clouds was thundering several miles away in the valley, above the village I had left just a few hours ago. Two fishermen were busying themselves putting up a small Canadian-style tent in the wind. The wind arrived in furious squalls, crenellating the surface
of the lake and pushing the clouds toward us, so I headed in the direction of a cluster of ruined buildings, hoping to find shelter there. There was a hut less dilapidated than the rest: the walls were managing to stay upright if skewed, and a sheet of corrugated iron had been placed on the roof. I thought to myself that if somebody was still using it there would be a padlock somewhere, or even a proper lock on the door. But I could see no keyhole. The door was completely warped and wedged in place by sheer force. I tried pushing against it with my hands, felt that it was giving way, and shoved it with my shoulder, flinging it wide open.

  My eyes were slow to adjust to the dark. Outside, the rain was beginning to drum on the corrugated metal. Inside, there were no windows, but a gap between the walls and the roof allowed a little light to permeate. The hearth was at the center of the room: four flat stones to contain the brazier, in the corner the revolving hook to hang the cauldron from. Then a wooden shelf with an oil lamp, a few empty bottles, some candle ends, a toy gun. What was a toy gun doing there? It was a replica revolver, badly broken and held together with Scotch tape. Seeing it, I was reminded of the shepherds’ children I had seen in the mountains when I was small: filthy, diffident, behaving like adults when they looked after their cows—and I tried to imagine what they got up to when there was nobody around to see them. I also found a sliver of mirror and a dirty bowl, two metal cups and a foul, ripped-open mattress. It must have been the mice who had shredded it, I thought, because the floor was littered with balls of dirty wool as well as fragments of broken bottles, hay, and who knows what else. Fortunately, there wasn’t enough light to reveal it. The storm was now making a deafening racket; I cleared a corner of the floor as best I could to spread out my sleeping bag, then sat down and opened my rucksack. A piece of black bread, a tin of meat, two tomatoes, and a little wine would make up that evening’s menu. Pinned down by all that rain, dinner was my only distraction—so I tried to make it last for as long as possible, chewing the bread slowly and taking small sips of the wine. But then the storm relented. I found some dry wood in another corner of the room and lit a fire outside, a few feet from the hut, because I feared that I would be smoked if I used the fireplace. When the rain started again it was already a lively bonfire. Sitting in the doorway I managed to keep dry and have a little light to read by, so I spent the evening in the company of a book by Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, an autobiography in the form of short stories. Above me towered the mountain that I would have to overcome the next day: every so often I would raise my eyes to study it, until it became too dark to see anything at all.