The Eight Mountains

by Paolo Cognetti

  That evening the refuge was full. No one would be turned away, but some would have to sleep on benches, or even on tables. Bruno and I were the youngest members of this gathering by far; we were amongst the first to eat, and to make room for others to do so we went immediately upstairs afterwards to the large dorm where we would be sharing a bed. Up there, fully dressed under a rough blanket, we spent a long while waiting for sleep to come. Through the window we could not see the stars or the gleam of the lights in the valley below, only the burning ends of the cigarettes of those who went outside for a smoke. We listened to the men on the ground floor: after supper they were comparing itineraries for the next day, discussing the uncertain weather conditions and recounting other nights spent in refuges, and old exploits made from them. My father had ordered a liter of wine and joined the others, and every so often I could make out his voice. Despite not having any conquest of summits in prospect, he had nevertheless made a name for himself as the guy who was taking two young boys up a glacier, and the role filled him with pride. He had encountered several people from his own neck of the woods and was exchanging jokes with them in Veneto dialect. Being shy, I felt embarrassed for him.

  Bruno said: “Your father knows a thing or two, doesn’t he?”

  “He sure does,” I said.

  “It’s good that he teaches you about it.”

  “Why, doesn’t yours?”

  “I don’t know. It always seems like I irritate him.”

  I thought to myself that my father was good at talking but that listening was not his strong point. Nor was paying much attention to me, otherwise he would have noticed how I was feeling: I had struggled to eat, and it would have been better to have had nothing, tormented as I now was by nausea. The smell of soup rising from the kitchen was making things worse. I was taking deep breaths to calm my stomach, and Bruno noticed: “Are you not feeling well?”

  “Not really.”

  “Would you like me to call your father?”

  “No, no. It’ll go away in a minute.”

  I was keeping my stomach warm with my hands. I would have liked more than anything to be in my own bed, and to hear my mother nearby in front of the stove. We remained in silence until at ten the supervisor announced lights-out and turned off the generator, plunging the refuge into darkness. A little while later we saw the light from the head torches of men coming upstairs in search of somewhere to sleep. My father also passed by, the grappa heavy on his breath, to see how we were: I kept my eyes shut and pretended to be asleep.

  • • •

  In the morning we left before daybreak. Now the fog filled the valleys below us and the sky was clear, the color of mother-of-pearl, with the last stars slowly fading out as the light spread. We had not anticipated dawn by much: the mountaineers heading for the most distant peaks had already left some time ago; we had heard them fumbling in the middle of the night and could now see some of them roped together high up, nothing more than miniature shipwrecks in a sea of white.

  My father attached for us the crampons that he had hired, and roped us together at a length of five meters from each other: himself first, then Bruno, then me. He strapped our chests with a complicated arrangement of the rope around our anoraks, but he hadn’t tied such knots for years and our preparation turned out to be long-winded and laborious. We ended up being the last to leave the refuge: we had still to cover a stretch of scree which our crampons knocked against and tended to get stuck in, and the rope hampered my movement and made me feel clumsy, burdened with too much gear. But everything changed the moment I set foot on snow. From my baptism on the glacier I remember this: an unexpected strength in my legs, the steel points biting through the hard snow, the crampons that gripped to perfection.

  I had woken feeling reasonably well, but after a while the warmth from the refuge dissipated, and the nausea began to grow. Up ahead my father was pulling the group on. I could see that he was in a hurry. Although he had claimed that he only wanted to have a short excursion, I suspected that he harbored a secret hope of reaching some peak or other, surprising the other climbers by turning up at the summit with the two of us in tow. But I was struggling. Between one step and the next it was as if a hand was wringing my stomach. Whenever I stopped to get my breath the rope between myself and Bruno tautened, forcing him to stop as well, the tension then reaching my father who would turn around to look at me, annoyed.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. He thought that I was playing up. “Let’s get a move on.”

  As the sun rose three black shadows appeared on the glacier next to us. Then the snow lost its bluish tinge and became blindingly white, and almost immediately afterwards began to give way beneath our crampons. The clouds below us were swelling with the heat of the morning, and even I understood that soon they would rise up as they had the day before. The idea of reaching anywhere was becoming more and more unrealistic, but my father was not the kind of person to admit the fact and withdraw: on the contrary, he was stubbornly determined to plow on. At a certain point we encountered a crevasse; he gauged its width carefully by eye and with one determined step got across it, planted the ice pick in the snow and wound the rope around it to reel Bruno in.

  I no longer had any interest in what we were doing. The sunrise, the glacier, the chain of summits that surrounded us, the clouds that separated us from the world: I was indifferent to all of this otherworldly beauty. All I wanted was for someone to tell me how much further we had to walk. I got to the edge of the crevasse where Bruno, in front of me, was leaning out to look into it. My father told him to take a deep breath and to jump. While waiting for my turn I looked around: beneath us on one side the mountain’s incline became sheerer, and the glacier split in a steep serac; beyond the wreck of broken, collapsed, and piled up blocks, the refuge from where we had started out was being engulfed by fog. It seemed to me now that we would never get back, and when I looked at Bruno for support he was already on the other side of the crevasse. My father was slapping him on the back, congratulating him on the jump that he had executed. Not I, I would never be able to get across; my stomach gave in, and I threw up my breakfast onto the snow. And so it was that my altitude sickness was no longer a secret.

  My father became frightened. He rushed to my aid in alarm, jumping back across the crevasse and in doing so tangling the ropes that held the three of us together. His fear surprised me—I had expected his anger instead—but at the time I had not realized the risks he had taken by leading us up there: eleven years old, poorly equipped and pursued by bad weather, we were being dragged up the glacier by his obstinacy. He knew that the only cure for altitude sickness was to go down to a lower level, and he did not hesitate before starting the descent. He reversed the order on the rope so that I could walk ahead and stop when I felt unwell: there was nothing left in my stomach, but every so often I was convulsed by dry retching, spitting out drool.

  Soon we were entering the fog. From his end of the rope my father asked: “How are you feeling? Do you have a headache?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And how’s your stomach?”

  “A bit better,” I answered, though what I felt above all was weak.

  “Take this,” said Bruno. He gave me a handful of snow that he had compressed in his fist until it had turned to ice. I tried sucking it. Thanks partly to this, and partly to the relief afforded by the descent, my stomach began to calm down.

  It was a morning in August in 1984, the last memory I have of that summer: the next day Bruno would return to the high pastures, and my father to Milan. But at that moment the three of us were on the glacier, together, in a way that would never happen again, with a rope that joined each of us to another, whether we wanted it to or not.

  I kept stumbling over the crampons and could not walk straight. Bruno was immediately behind me, and soon I heard above the sound of our footsteps in the snow his Oh, oh, oh. It was the call with which he brought the cows back to the stable. Eh, eh, eh. Oh, oh, oh.
He was using it to bring me back to the refuge, given that I could hardly stay on my feet by now: I abandoned myself to his song and let my legs adopt its rhythm and in that way no longer had to think about anything.

  “But did you look into the crevasse?” he asked. “Holy shit it was deep.”

  I did not answer. I still had in my eyes the image I had seen of them there, so close and triumphant, like father and son. In front of me now the fog and the snow formed a uniform whiteness, and I was concentrating only on not falling. Bruno said nothing else, and resumed his chanting.

  THREE

  WINTER, DURING THOSE YEARS, became for me the season of nostalgia. My father detested skiers and would not countenance mingling with them: there was something offensive to him in the game of going down the mountain without the effort required to climb it first, along a slope smoothed by snowcats and equipped with a ski lift. He despised them because they arrived in herds and left behind them nothing but ruins. Sometimes in the summer we would come across the pylon of a chairlift, or the remains of a caterpillar track stuck on a threadbare piste, or what was left of a disused cable station at altitude, a rusted wheel on a block of cement in the middle of scree.

  “What this really needs is a bomb under it,” my father would say. And he was not joking.

  It was the same frame of mind with which he would watch at Christmas the news items devoted to skiing holidays. Thousands of people from the cities invaded the Alpine valleys, got into queues at those stations, and hurtled down our paths—and he would disassociate himself from it all, locking himself away in the apartment in Milan. My mother once suggested that we should take a day trip to Grana, so that I could see it in the snow, and my father replied tersely: “No.” He wouldn’t like it. In the winter the mountain was not fit for humankind, and should be given a wide berth. According to his philosophy of ascending and coming down, or of going up above to escape the things that tormented you below, the climbing season needed to be followed by one of seriousness—by the period of work, of life on the flat, and of black moods.

  In this way I too began to feel nostalgia for being in the mountains, the affliction to which I had seen him subjected for years without understanding its cause. Now I too found myself capable of becoming spellbound when La Grigna appeared at the end of an avenue. I would reread the pages of the Alpine Club Guide as if it were a personal diary, drinking in its antiquated prose, and it would give to me the illusion of retracing the paths it described step by step: climbing up steep grassy ridges to reach a neglected Alp . . . and from here, proceeding through scattered boulders and the residual ice field . . . to then attain the crest of the summit in the proximity of a pronounced depression. But in the meantime my legs became gradually paler, their scratches and scabs healed, and they forgot the stings of nettles, the icy sensation of fording streams without socks or shoes, and the relief afforded by cool bed sheets after an afternoon in the blazing sun. Nothing, in the winter city, could strike me with the same force. I observed it from behind a filter that rendered it faded and indistinct, just a fog of people and cars that needed to be got through twice a day; and when I looked from the window at the avenue below, the days spent in Grana seemed so far off as to make me question whether they had actually existed. Could I have invented them, just dreamed them up? But I only felt this until I noticed, in a new kind of light on the balcony, in a bud emerging in the grass between two lanes of traffic, that the spring was coming even to Milan, and my nostalgia turned to anticipation of the moment when I would go back up there again.

  • • •

  Bruno waited with the same excitement for that day to arrive. Except that I came and went, and he stayed. I think that from his vantage point in the fields he must have kept an eye out for our return, since he would come to find us within an hour of our arrival, shouting “Berio!” from the courtyard. This was the nickname with which he had baptized me. “Come on,” he would say, not bothering with any kind of greeting, or with saying anything else for that matter, as if we had last seen each other just the day before. And it was true: the intervening months were canceled in an instant, and our friendship seemed to be lived in a single uninterrupted summer.

  Yet Bruno, in the meantime, had been growing up more quickly than me. He was almost always covered in dirt from the stables, and refused to come inside the house. He would wait on the balcony, leaning on the balustrade, which we almost never did ourselves, since it would move the moment you touched it, convincing us that one of these days it would collapse. He would look over his shoulder as if checking to see whether he’d been followed: he had absconded from his cows and was taking me away from my books, to have adventures which he did not want to ruin by talking about them.

  “Where are we going?” I would ask while lacing my boots.

  “Into the mountains,” he would limit himself to saying, with a mocking tone that he had developed, perhaps the same tone that he used when answering his uncle. He was smiling. All I needed to do was to trust him. My mother trusted me, and would often enough repeat that she didn’t worry because she knew that I would do nothing wrong. Nothing “wrong”—rather than reckless or stupid—as if she was alluding to quite other dangers that would come my way in life. She did not resort to prohibitions or to other advice before letting us leave.

  Going into the mountains with Bruno had nothing to do with the peaks. Although we did follow a path into the woods, climbing quickly for half an hour, we would at some point known only to him leave the beaten track and continue along other routes. Up a gorge even, or through the thickest fir cover. It was a mystery to me how he got his bearings. He walked fast, following an internal map which indicated passageways where all I could see was a collapsed bank or a scar that looked too steep. But right at the last moment, between two twisted pines, the rock would reveal a fissure that we could get a purchase on to climb, and a ledge, which had been invisible at first, would allow us to cross it with ease. Some of these trails had been first opened up with the blows of pickaxes. When I asked him who had used them he would say, “the miners,” or, alternatively: “the woodcutters,” pointing out the telltale signs that I was incapable of noticing. The winding gear of a cable lift, rusted and overgrown with weeds. The earth that beneath a drier layer was still blackened by fire, where a charcoal works had been. The woods were littered with these excavations, mounds, and ruins, which Bruno interpreted for me as if they were phrases written in a dead language. Together with these cryptic signs he would teach me a dialect that I found less abstract than Italian: as soon as I was in the mountains it was as if I would need to substitute the concrete language of things for the abstract language of books, now that the things themselves were tangible and I could touch them with my own hands. The larch: la brenga. The spruce: la pezza; the Swiss pine: l’arula. An overhanging rock under which to take cover from the rain was a barma. A stone was a berio—and so was I, Pietro. I was very fond of that nickname. Every river cut a valley and so was called a valey; every valley had two sides with contrasting characteristics: an adret nicely exposed to the sun, where there were villages and fields, and an envers that was damp and in shadow, left to the forest and to wildlife. But of the two it was this reverse side that we preferred.

  There no one could disturb us and we could go hunting for treasure. There really were mines in the woods surrounding Grana: tunnels closed off, boarded up with a few planks that had already been trespassed through before us. In the old times, according to Bruno, they had found gold there, searching for seams all over the mountains. But they had not managed to extract everything. Surely there must be a little remaining. And so we would enter into blind tunnels which ended in nothing after a few meters. And into others that went deep and were winding and pitch black inside. The ceilings were so low as to make it difficult to walk upright. The water that dripped down the walls gave the impression that the whole thing might cave in at any moment: I knew how dangerous it was, and I also knew that I was betraying my mother’s trust, s
ince there was nothing very sensible about poking around in such deathtraps—the sense of guilt I felt ruined any pleasure there might have been in doing so. I longed to be like Bruno, to have the courage to rebel openly and to accept any punishment that might follow, with my head held high. Instead I disobeyed furtively, and was ashamed of what I had got away with. I would think about these things as my feet were soaked by the puddles of water in there. We never did find gold: sooner or later the tunnels turned out to have been blocked by a cave-in, or just became too dark to go along any further, and there was no choice but to retreat.

  We made up for the disappointment by ransacking some ruins on the way home. Shepherds’ huts that we came across in the woods, constructed from whatever came to hand there, resembling burrows. Bruno would pretend to be discovering them with me. I suspect that he knew every one of those overgrown cabins, but it was more fun to be shoulder-barging open their doors as if for the first time. Inside we would purloin a dented bowl or the terminally blunted blade of a scythe, and imagine them to be valuable finds—and in the village, before parting, we would divide the spoils.

  In the evening my mother would ask me where we had been.

  “Just around here,” I would answer, with a shrug. In front of the stove I did not give her much satisfaction now.

  “Did you find anything worth seeing?”

  “Of course, Mum. The woods.”

  She would give me a melancholy look, as if she were losing me. She really believed that the silence between two people was the origin of all their troubles.

  “All I want to know is that you are OK,” she would say, giving up and abandoning me to my thoughts.