The Wild Boy

by Paolo Cognetti

  I went inside, lit the candle stubs, and continued reading in the sleeping bag. In “Iron,” the fourth story in the book, Levi remembers his friendship with Sandro Delmastro, whom he had met in 1938 in the chemistry department at the University of Turin. It was a meeting between two marginalized individuals: Levi had just become one on account of Mussolini’s racial laws (the son of middle-class Turinese parents, he was shocked and scared by the caution with which his peers suddenly regarded him); Sandro had always been one, due to his shoes and clothes, his hands and his way of walking, the language and the general way of doing things that he had brought down with him from the mountains near Ivrea in order to study in the city. A Jewish youth and a man of the mountains: between them there was a mutual recognition, and they began to help each other. Primo helped Sandro with the chemistry that was in the textbooks, convinced that therein was to be found the key to the mystery of matter; Sandro would take Primo to touch that very matter with his own hands, and to come to understand the mystery through rocks, streams, wind, and snow. In the mountains, in those increasingly tenebrous days that preceded “Europe’s darkest hour,” they had forged their friendship and enjoyed their last moments of freedom.

  He would drag me on exhausting canters through the fresh snow, far from any trace of humanity, following itineraries that he seemed to intuit like a primitive. In the summer, from refuge to refuge, getting drunk on sunshine, exertion and wind, and sanding smooth the skin of our fingertips on the rock that no human hand had touched before. But not on the famous peaks, nor in pursuit of a memorable exploit; these things did not matter to him at all. What he cared about was to know his own limits, to challenge and to improve himself. And more obscurely, he felt the need to prepare himself (and to prepare me as well) for an iron future that was getting closer with each passing month.

  To see Sandro in the mountains helped me to be reconciled with the world, to forget the nightmare that was looming over Europe. It was a place that belonged to him, that he had been made for, like the marmots whose whistles and calls he imitated: in the mountains he became happy, with a quiet and infectious happiness, like the turning on of a light. He aroused in me a new sense of communion with the earth and sky, in which my need for freedom, the fullness of my strength, and that hunger to understand the nature of things that had compelled me towards chemistry all flowed together.

  Numerous times during the night the rain stopped and started again. I too found myself constantly falling asleep and then waking again. For certain brief moments, in that confused overlapping of states of consciousness, I dreamed that presences were moving around me in the hut. The ghost of a solitary shepherd perhaps, or of two youths who had preceded me by about seventy years. Primo and Sandro might have passed by this very place on one of their forays: I was wandering in the same mountains they had tramped through. One day they had taken a wrong turn and had become lost, with Primo suggesting they turn back and Sandro adamant in his desire to proceed. “The worst that can happen,” he remarked enigmatically, “is that we’ll taste bear meat.” Night had fallen, and the two friends had resigned themselves to spending it in the open air, huddled together, teeth chattering, staring at the moon and a sky “of tattered clouds.” At first light they had descended toward the refuge, stumbling with cold and tiredness.

  * * *

  I too got up when the sky began to pale. It must have been five in the morning. I could not bear to spend a moment longer turning from side to side on the floor, avoiding the broken glass and the water that was coming down from the roof, thinking how time managed to contract and expand; how a whole year could fly past in the blink of an eye and one night could seem never-ending. I rolled up my sleeping bag and packed my rucksack again, laced my boots, and left the newspaper with which I had lit the fire, thinking that sooner or later it would be needed by someone else. Then I said farewell to the hut that had given me shelter, pulled the door shut behind me, and took a deep breath.

  Outside, the air was damp and cold. I felt racked with pains and still tired from the night before, but I knew that this feeling would vanish in the course of my walk. I tried not to fixate on the word coffee. I stopped by a small stream, brushed my teeth, and washed my face and neck until I was fully awake. The morning was becoming clear, with the lake still in shadow about six hundred and fifty feet below me and the mountain summit three thousand feet above already lit by the sun. Patches of grayish snow lingered on the black rock, but beyond it there was a new whiteness, sparkling and almost silver-tinted, striating the rock walls, inscribing edges and folds as if marked out with chalk. I thought that up there it might have snowed, but I had never seen the snow delineated with such clear-cut lines. I would discover later that it was not snow but ice—the hail that in the night had accumulated in cracks and on ledges, and that in the sunlight formed glittering veins. Ahead were at least two hours on the scree before I could get up there to gawp, amazed, at the ice between my fingers. So I lowered my head, mule-like, hitched my thumbs into the straps of my rucksack, and asked my trusty legs to get back to work.

  And to the innkeeper, who asked us while sniggering how we had got on and glanced at our dazed faces, we replied defiantly that we’d had an excellent outing. We paid the bill and left with dignity. This was it, the bear meat: and now that so many years have passed, I regret that I did not eat more of it, because of all the good things which life has afforded me, nothing comes close to the flavor of that flesh, which is the flavor of being strong and free—free to make mistakes, the master of one’s own destiny.

  Refuge

  No matter how early I got up, in the refuge there was always someone who had risen before me. My window faced east, toward a chain of black mountains from which dawn arrived at six in the morning, illuminating the wall in front of my bed and tingeing the room orange and gold. I would open my eyes in that sudden light, the sleeping bag reduced to a tangle of disturbed dreams. It was the smell of the fire that reminded me where I was. Beechwood, with a scent quite unlike the larch I used at home. The stove kept burning it all day but would barely warm the kitchen. During that rainy August we always gathered together there: on the stove we prepared coffee, cooked, hung out our laundry to dry, toasted the pistachios we had found one day, damp and who knows how old, in the bottom of a cupboard in the pantry.

  It was an antique refuge, built in the nineteenth century to provide shelter for the emigrants who returned home in winter. It was located at an elevation of eight thousand feet, on the border pass between two valleys—one plunged westward, from where I had come, the other stretched more gently east, toward the summits and the valleys I could see from my bedroom, along an ancient track for men and goods that had now fallen into disuse. The age of mules having become obsolete, the mountain was off all the routes, surrounded as it was by others regarded by mountaineers as lacking nobility, and by ordinary walkers as too inaccessible. Instead the refuge was perfect for me, because that world had all the wildness I could desire: made of broken rock, crests, snowfields, and with no one else around.

  I had stopped over to sleep the night and then in the morning had one of my ideas. With all the nerve that I could muster I had asked its two keepers if I could lodge there in exchange for work, given that I was tired of wandering around: I liked the place but did not have the money to cover many days’ board and lodging. They had given me a peculiar look. I was the only guest that night, and the refuge hardly seemed to be a flourishing business. But they had consulted each other, and perhaps they had understood something of what I was not saying. We were all of an age, around thirty. In the end they had replied that there was no work available, but that I could stay with them anyway for as long as I liked, free of charge, if I was prepared to share that life. I could hardly have asked for more.

  In the space in front of the refuge an Italian flag flew. Although it was replaced every year in June, the wind would little by little tatter and fade it during the summer, so the condition of that flag became a clock with
which to measure the time I spent up there. By the time I arrived the band of red had almost gone, and you could barely make out a frayed trace of it against the sky. When I left, there was half of the white band left—a stump of the nation that well expressed the spirit of the mountain pass, our life on a brink.

  * * *

  Of the two keepers, Andrea was the earlier riser, and the one I would get on with best. By the time I came down he’d already lit the stove, set up breakfast, washed the dishes from the previous night, and was smoking and watching films on his mobile, or scanning through profiles of girls on the Web. He always sat in the same place at the table, near the window wet with condensation. Toward eleven he shifted from coffee to wine diluted with water, or Pernod and water instead, or white wine and Campari, rolling cigarettes with golden Virginia, inviting me to have a drink and showing me the tourists—English, female—that he’d taught to ski during the winter. Now they were on a beach somewhere, posting photos of themselves in swimwear. They looked like mermaids from infinitely far-off seas. Above us it rained daily, and sometimes the rain became a mush that was almost snow—and when it didn’t rain or snow, a freezing wind gusted that beat me back as soon as I poked my nose outside. The only flesh and blood female was an athlete who was in training for mountain racing: through the binoculars we would watch her as she climbed up the track, commenting on the way she looked and hoping that at least once she would stop for a coffee. But she would reach the pass, touch the wall of the refuge, turn on her heels, and head back down again, as fleeting as every other glimpse of beauty. To watch her going was even more alluring, though in a much more melancholy way, than to see her coming up.

  Davide slept until late, and was the last one to come down to the kitchen—but from that point he was constantly on the go. Every other day he kneaded the dough that he baked in the oven of the stove. He kept the accounts, answered the phone, and was the one who greeted the guests, given that Andrea preferred to stay in the kitchen and speak as little as possible. Davide had many more ideas than he ever got to put into action. Investments, parties, schemes to improve the efficiency of the refuge. If he found himself at a loose end, he would grab a chisel from the windowsill and begin whittling a handle for a knife. He would say that he could never draw anything symmetrical. He was convinced that there was something inside him that was at war with symmetry, perhaps on account of the cheekbone that he had fractured years ago, and that had so marked his features. Sitting there on rainy days he talked nonstop. It was like having the radio on.

  I had taken over the kitchen. Sifting through the pantry, I had salvaged rice, pulses, flour, tomato sauce, tins of tuna fish, anchovies, and olives. There were sacks of enough onions and potatoes to last until September. The butter, eggs, and cheese were sourced from an alpeggio just down from us, and this was all I had to invent our daily meals from.

  Apart from the limited diet and the chronic absence of women, our main problem was the electricity supply. There wasn’t enough sun to feed the panels, the wind turbine was still only a dream in Davide’s head, and the gas had to be rationed. So when guests arrived we turned on the generator, otherwise the afternoon meant getting gradually accustomed to the dark. Sitting at the head of the table, I read aloud the poems of Antonia Pozzi, and a book that I had found in the refuge, the story of an ex-soldier of the Napoleonic era who had lived up there summer and winter for forty years, tasked with clearing the track after each snowfall, ringing the fog bell, keeping the stove alight for any new arrival. A century and a half later we were not leading such a different life there. Toward six, by moving to the window, I managed to catch on the pages a little of that milky glow, just enough to make out the words printed there. Later we lit a candle, and when that was finished it was time for bed.

  I was surprised that these men had welcomed me so naturally, but also felt that I understood why they’d done so. We had been pushed up there by the same needs, and it hadn’t taken us long to recognize each other. In bed I would place two blankets on top of my sleeping bag. I would get into it in total darkness. I slept in clothes that were redolent of onion soup, stew left to cook for hours, damp wool, and woodsmoke—the smell that I would keep for a long time, since it was the fragrance of home.

  * * *

  It was easy to lose track of the passing days. Outside the window, a uniform whiteness reigned—the same from morning till night. Only at dawn did I happen to catch sight of the sea of clouds from above, just as if our world was separated from the one below, the one bright and clear, the other rain-sodden and gloomy. But shortly the tide would rise, swallowing the woods, the meadows, the scree, eventually lapping against the final slope before engulfing us as well. Closed in the kitchen, we would listen to the flag’s metal cable banging against the flagpole, and that clinking was the music of the mountain, along with the whistles of marmots, the creaking of shutters in the wind, the crackling of the stove, the guitar occasionally taken up by Davide or Andrea, even though neither one of them really knew how to play.

  Occasionally someone would turn up. Only a couple at a time, and we could spot them from above with our binoculars. Andrea called them the ephemeral ones. Davide would greet them at the door, serve them a plate of polenta and sausage and a glass of wine before rejoining us in the kitchen. We kept our distance, not because we disliked visitors but because those people belonged to the world below and brought news of it with them, news that we did not want to receive. We were fine without it. When the ephemerals took off we would watch them receding, becoming ever smaller before finally vanishing round a bend in the path, giving us a comforting sense of once more being alone.

  A Good Bottle

  One morning a gap opened in the cloud cover. Among the stuff in the refuge I had found a fishing rod, so I asked Davide and Andrea where I might use it.

  At the lake that isn’t there, they said.

  Why is it called that?

  Because sometimes you find it, and sometimes not.

  And are there any trout in it?

  If you can find the lake, then maybe you’ll also find the trout.

  They pointed to a road that passed along the line of the watershed and then crossed it westward, in the middle of the scree, always keeping to the higher ground. Whether the lake was there or not, after days on end shut in the refuge I was desperate to stretch my legs, so I packed the fishing rod into my rucksack and set off. At a good pace I passed the flag and reached the rock where Davide and Andrea had carved their initials, together with those of a friend of theirs who was no longer alive, under a small cross. On the crest I disturbed some chamois and deviated from the path in order to chase them, until I saw them disappear down the frozen wake gouged by an avalanche. I had not set foot on snow for weeks and decided to throw myself down too. I slipped, fell, got back up again, laughed out loud to myself, and gave in to the sudden urge to shout. I remembered it being the case all the way back to my childhood, this transformation that the mountain provoked in me: this joy in having a body, the sense of harmony that you rediscover moving in its element, this freedom to run and jump and scramble as if your hands and feet were moving of their own accord and it was really impossible to come to any harm. At this point I possessed a body without age—no longer the one that, a few winters ago, I had begun to feel growing old.

  The mysterious lake really did exist. I could understand how it had got its name: sunk between massive boulders shaped by glaciers, at an altitude of nine thousand feet, you could easily pass by its black water without noticing the presence of the lake. I caught a few grasshoppers in the sparse grass up there and put them into a jar to use as bait. Fishing . . . I had only gone fishing a few times in my life, but then perhaps the trout in that lake had only seen a few fishermen: casting my line near the shore I caught three small ones, not much longer than the width of my palm. The fourth time I threw it farther out. I managed to catch a glimpse of a large moving shadow, felt a tug, and pulled in response—only to instantly lose both catch and
rod to the lake. Here was the fish that was not, I thought. Being a novice, I had not brought along any backup equipment, and in any case the sky was becoming overcast again and I decided to head back.