The Eight Mountains

by Paolo Cognetti

  “This is it,” my mother said. “Go slowly.”

  My father slowed to a walking pace. Since starting out he had followed her directions obediently. He lowered his head, looking right and left through the dust raised by the car, his gaze dwelling on the stables, the chicken coops, the log-built haylofts, the charred or collapsed dwellings, the tractors at the edge of the road, the hay balers. Two black dogs wearing bells around their necks sprang out from a courtyard. Apart from a couple of newer houses, the whole village seemed to be made of the same gray rock as the mountain and clung to it like an outcrop, or an ancient landslide. A little further up, goats were grazing.

  My father said nothing. My mother, who had discovered this place on her own, pointed out where to park and got out of the car to look for the owner while we unloaded the luggage. One of the dogs came towards us, barking, and my father did something I’d never seen him do before: he stretched out a hand for it to sniff, spoke to it gently, and stroked it between its ears. Perhaps he got on better with dogs than with his own kind.

  “And so?” he asked me, as we unhooked the elastics from the roof rack. “What do you think of it?”

  It’s beautiful, I would like to have answered. A smell of hay, stable, wood, smoke, and who knows what else had enveloped me as soon as I’d stepped out of the car, full of promise. But unsure as to whether this was the right answer or not, I had replied instead: “It’s not bad. What do you think?”

  My father shrugged his shoulders. He looked up over the suitcases and glanced at the shack that stood before us. It was leaning to one side, and would surely have collapsed if it weren’t for the two poles that were propping it up. Inside, it was crammed with bales of hay, and above the hay there was a denim shirt that someone had taken off there and forgotten.

  “I grew up in a place like this,” he said, without letting me know whether this was a good or a bad thing.

  He grabbed the handle of a suitcase and was about to take it down when something else occurred to him. He looked at me, thinking of something that evidently caused him great amusement.

  “In your opinion, can the past happen again?”

  “It’s difficult,” I said, so as not to be wrong-footed. He was always asking me riddles of this kind. He saw in me an intelligence similar to his own, inclined towards logic and mathematics, and thought that it was his duty to exercise it.

  “Look at that river,” he said. “Can you see it? Let’s suppose that the water is time passing. If where we are now is the present, where do you think the future is located?”

  I thought about it for a moment. It seemed like an easy one. I gave the most obvious answer: “The future is where the water goes, down over there.”

  “Wrong!” my father declared. “Fortunately.”

  Then, as if he had freed himself from a great burden, he said “Oopala,” the word he used to use when picking something up, including me, and the first of the two suitcases fell to the ground with a thud.

  The house my mother had rented was in the upper part of the village, in a courtyard set around a drinking trough. It bore the signs of two distinct periods. The first was that of its walls, balconies of blackened larch, a roof of moss-covered slates, the large soot-stained chimney, all pointing to its venerable origins. The second was merely dated: a period in which, inside the house, layers of linoleum had been used to cover the floor, floral wallpaper had been hung, fitted cabinets and the basin had been installed in the kitchen, all now damp-stained and faded. The only object that could be salvaged from this mediocrity was a black stove, made of cast iron, massive and severe, with a brass handle and four hotplates on which to cook. It must have been reclaimed from another place and time altogether. I think that what my mother liked more than anything else was what was not actually there, because she had found in effect a house that was more or less empty. She asked the proprietress if we could improve it a bit, and she had simply replied: “Do what you like.” She had not rented it out for years, and in all likelihood had not expected to do so that summer. She was brusque in her manner but not impolite. I think she was embarrassed, since she had come from working in the fields and had not had time to change. She handed to my mother a large iron key, finished saying something about the hot water, and gave a brief show of resistance before accepting the envelope that my mother had prepared.

  By this time my father had made himself scarce. For him one house was much like another, and the next day he was expected back in the office. He had gone out onto the balcony for a smoke, his hands on the coarse wood of the balustrade, his eyes scrutinizing the summits. It looked as if he were surveying them in order to calculate from which angle to launch an assault. He came back in after the owner of the house had left, so as to be spared any pleasantries, in a somber mood that had come upon him in the meantime. He said that he was going out to get something for lunch, and that he wanted to be back in the car before the evening.

  • • •

  In that house, once my father had gone, my mother reverted to a version of herself that I had never known before. In the morning, as soon as she had got out of bed she would put some kindling in the stove, scrunch up a page of newspaper, and strike a match on the rough surface of the cast iron. She wasn’t bothered by the smoke that would then unfurl into the kitchen, or by the need to wrap ourselves in a blanket until the room warmed up, or by the milk that she would overheat and burn on the scalding hotplate. For breakfast she would give me toast and jam. She would wash me under the tap, scrubbing my face, neck, and ears before drying me with a kitchen rag and sending me on my way outdoors: out into the wind and the rain, so that I would finally lose a little of my delicate urban constitution.

  On those days I would set about exploring the river. There were two boundaries that I was not allowed to cross: upstream a small wooden bridge beyond which the banks steepened increasingly and narrowed into a gully, downstream the thickets at the foot of the cliff where the water followed its course to the valley floor. This was the territory that my mother could control from the balcony of the house, but for me it was as good as having the whole river itself. That river coursed down crags at first, falling in a series of foaming rapids between huge rocks which I peered over to observe the silver reflections at the bottom. Further on it slowed and meandered, as if transformed from youth to adulthood, and cut around islets, colonized by birch trees, that I could leap across to reach the opposite bank. Further on still, a tangle of timber formed a barrier. At this point a gorge descended, and it had been an avalanche during winter that had torn down the trunks and branches that were now rotting in the water, though at the time I knew nothing of such things. In my eyes it was the moment in the life of the river when it simply encountered an obstacle, then stopped and stagnated. I would always end up sitting there, watching the weed that was undulating just below the surface of the water.

  There was a young boy who grazed cows in the meadows along the banks of the river. According to my mother he was the nephew of the woman who owned the house. He always carried with him a yellow stick, made of plastic and with a curved handle, with which he would prod the cows towards the tall grass. There were seven of them, all chestnut-colored and restless. The boy would scold them when they wandered off by themselves, and would occasionally chase after one or another of them, cursing; while on the way back he would climb the slope and turn to call out to them with an Oh, oh, oh, or an Eh, eh, eh until, reluctantly, they would follow him to the stable. In the pasture he would sit down and watch them from above, carving a small piece of wood with his penknife.

  “You can’t stay there,” he said, the one time that he spoke to me.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “You’re trampling the grass.”

  “So where can I stay?”

  “Over there.”

  He pointed to the other side of the river. I could not see how to reach it from where I was standing, but I did not want to ask him or to negotiate a passage through his grass. So I steppe
d into the water without taking off my shoes. I tried to keep upright in the current and to show no hesitation, as if fording rivers was an everyday occurrence for me. I managed to cross, sat down with my trousers soaked and my shoes streaming, but when I turned to look at the boy he was no longer paying any attention to me.

  We spent a good few days in this way, on opposite banks of the river, not deigning to notice each other.

  “Why don’t you try to make friends with him?” my mother asked, one evening in front of the stove. The house was impregnated with the damp of too many winters, so we would light the fire during supper and stay up warming ourselves until it was time for bed. We would both be reading our books, and every so often, between one page and another, the fire and our conversation were rekindled. The great black stove was listening to us.

  “But how can I?” I answered. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You just say hello. Ask him what he’s called. Ask him what his cows are called.”

  “OK, good night,” I said, pretending to be absorbed in my reading.

  When it came to social interaction my mother was well ahead of me. Since there were no shops in the village, while I was exploring my river she discovered the stable where you could buy milk and cheese, the allotment that sold certain types of vegetables, and the sawmill for a supply of offcuts of wood. She had also come to an arrangement with the young man from the dairy, who every morning and evening passed by in his van to collect the milk churns, so that he would deliver to us bread and a few groceries. And I’m not sure how she did it, but by our second week she had hung flower baskets on the balcony and filled them with geraniums. Now our house could be recognized from a distance, and she was already hearing the sparse inhabitants of Grana greeting her by her name.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” I said, a minute later.

  “What doesn’t matter?”

  “Making friends. I also like to be on my own.”

  “Oh, really?” my mother said. She raised her eyes from the page, and without smiling, as if it was a very serious matter, she added: “Are you sure about that?”

  And with that she decided to help me herself. Not everyone is of the same opinion, but my mother was firmly convinced of the necessity to intervene in the lives of others. A couple of days later, in that same kitchen, I found the cow boy sitting on my own chair having breakfast. I smelt him, in fact, before seeing him, because he exuded the same smell of the stable, of hay, curdled milk, damp earth, and wood smoke which has always been for me, from that moment onwards, the smell of the mountains—the smell that I have found in all mountains, anywhere in the world. His name was Bruno Guglielmina. Everyone in Grana had the same surname, he insisted on explaining, but the name Bruno was unique to him. He was just a few months older than me, born in November of ’72. He devoured the biscuits that my mother offered him, as if he’d never eaten biscuits in his life before. The final discovery I made was that it wasn’t just me studying him down in the pasture, while both of us pretended to be oblivious to each other. He had been studying me too.

  “You like the river, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you swim?”

  “A bit.”

  “Fish?”

  “Not really.”

  “Come on, I’ll show you something.”

  Saying this he jumped from the chair. I exchanged looks with my mother, then ran after him without a second thought.

  Bruno took me to a place that I already knew, where the river passes through the shadow cast by the little wooden bridge. Speaking low when we had reached the riverbank he ordered me to remain as quiet and hidden as possible. Then he gradually raised himself above the rock he was crouching behind, until he was just able to peer over it. He signaled with his hand for me to wait. While I waited I looked at him: he had straw-blond hair and his neck was burnt by the sun. He wore trousers in a size not his own, rolled up at the ankles and low-slung, a caricature of a grown man. He also had the demeanor of an adult, a kind of seriousness in his voice and gestures: with a nod he commanded me to join him, and I obeyed. I peered over the rock to see what he was looking at. I did not know what I was supposed to see there: beyond the rock the river formed a small waterfall and a shadowy pool, probably knee-deep. The surface of the water was unsettled, agitated by the churning fall. At the edges floated a finger’s depth of foam, and a large trapped branch sticking out diagonally had collected grass and sodden leaves around itself. It wasn’t much of a spectacle, only water that had run there from the mountain. And yet it was spellbinding; I don’t know why.

  After staring hard at the pool for a while I saw the surface break slightly and realized that there was something moving beneath it. One, two, three, and then four tapering shadows with their snouts facing into the current, with only their tails moving slowly from side to side. Occasionally one of the shadows would shift suddenly before stopping in another place; at other times it would break the surface with its back before sinking below again—but always stayed pointing in the direction of the little waterfall. We were further down the valley than they were, which was why they had not noticed us yet.

  “Are they trout?” I whispered.

  “Fish,” said Bruno.

  “Do they always stay here?”

  “Not always. Sometimes they change hole.”

  “But what are they doing?”

  “Hunting,” he replied, as if to him it was the most obvious thing. I, on the other hand, was learning about it for the first time. I had always thought that fish swam with the current, which seemed easiest, and not that they would use up their energy by going against it. The trout moved their tails just enough to remain stationary. I would like to have known what they were hunting. Perhaps it was the gnats that I could see skimming the surface before stopping as if trapped by it. I observed the scene carefully for a while, trying to understand it better, before Bruno suddenly lost interest and leapt to his feet, waving his arms so that the trout sped away in an instant. I went to have a look. They had fled from the center of the pool in every direction. I looked into the pool and all that I could see was the white and blue gravel at the bottom—and then I had to abandon it to follow Bruno as he rushed up the opposite bank of the river.

  A little further on a solitary building loomed above the bank like the house of a watchman. It was falling to ruin amongst the nettles, the brambles, the wasps’ nests desiccating in the sun. In this countryside there were so many ruins just like this one. Bruno placed his hands on the walls, at a point where they met in a corner that was all cracks, pulled himself up, and with two quick movements reached the first-floor window.

  “Come on!” he said, peering out from above. But then neglected to wait for me. Perhaps to him there seemed no difficulty in my following, and it did not occur to him that I might need help. Or perhaps he was just accustomed to this: that whether easy or difficult, it was every man for himself. I copied him as best as I could. I scraped my arms on the sill of the small window, looked inside, and saw Bruno lowering himself through the trapdoor of the attic on a ladder that led to the lower room. I think I had already decided that I would follow him anywhere.

  Down below in the semi-darkness there was a space subdivided by low walls into four rooms of equal size, resembling tanks. In the air hung a stagnant smell of mold and rotten wood. As my eyes gradually adjusted to the dark I saw that the floor was littered with cans, bottles, old newspapers, shirts in rags, four wrecked shoes, bits of rusty equipment. Bruno had bent down next to a large white polished stone in the shape of a wheel that was placed in a corner of one room.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The grindstone,” he said. Then added: “The stone of the mill.”

  I bent down next to him to look. I knew what a grindstone was, but had never seen one with my own eyes before. I stretched out my hand. The stone was cold, slimy, and in the hole at its center moss that adhered to your fingertips like green mud had gathered. I felt
my arms smarting with the scratches from the window ledge.

  “We need to stand it up,” Bruno said.

  “Why?”

  “So that it can roll.”

  “But where to?”

  “What do you mean where to? Down, no?”

  I shook my head, because I did not understand. Bruno explained, patiently: “We stand it upright. We push it outside. And then we roll it down into the river. Then the fish will leap out of the river and we can eat them.”

  The idea seemed both awesome and impossible. That boulder-like weight was too much for us. But it was so lovely to imagine it rolling down, and to imagine that the two of us were capable of such a feat, that I decided to offer no objection. Someone must have already tried to move it, since between the stone and the floor two woodcutter’s wedges had been inserted. They had gone under it just enough to raise it from the ground. Bruno picked up a stout stick, the handle of a pickaxe or a spade, and with a stone began to hammer it into that gap like a nail. When the end of it had wedged in, he worked the handle beneath the stone and stopped it with his foot.