The Eight Mountains

by Paolo Cognetti

  “So shouldn’t I stay here too?”

  “Maybe later. There are still a lot of materials to bring up. I’ve borrowed a mule.”

  Bruno had thought long and hard about the work that was before us. I was improvising; he certainly wasn’t. He had planned every phase, both my tasks and his, all the various stages and a timetable for them. He explained where the material had been prepared, and what I would have to bring up to him the next day. His mother would show me how to load the mule.

  He said: “I’ll expect you at nine in the morning. At six you’ll be free to go. If it’s all right by you, that is.”

  “Of course it’s all right by me.”

  “Do you think you can do it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good on you. So I’ll be seeing you then.”

  I looked at the time: it was six-thirty. Bruno took a towel and a bar of soap and headed uphill, to wash at some place that he knew. I looked over the ruin, which seemed just the same as we’d found it that morning, except that now it was empty inside, and outside of it there was a fine stack of wood. I thought that it wasn’t bad for a first day’s work. Then I took my rucksack, said goodbye to my tree, and began walking towards Grana.

  • • •

  There was an hour that I loved more than any other in this month of June, and it was precisely the one during which I descended alone at the end of the day. In the morning it was different: I was in a rush, the mule would not take my orders, my only thought was to get up there. In the evening, instead, there was no reason to hurry. I left at six or seven with the sun still high in the bottom of the valley and with no one expecting me at home. I walked calmly, with my thoughts slowed by tiredness and the mule following behind without needing any prompting from me. From the lake down to the landslide, the rhododendrons were in bloom on the flanks of the mountain. At the Guglielmina farmstead, around the deserted buildings I startled roe deer foraging in the abandoned pastures; bolt upright with their ears at attention, they would look at me in alarm for an instant, then flee to the woods like thieves. Sometimes I stopped there for a smoke. While the mule grazed, I would sit on the larch tree stump where the photo of Bruno and me had been taken. I would contemplate the farmstead and the strange contrast between the entropy of human things and the resurgence of spring: the three buildings were falling into decline—their walls curving like elderly backs, their roofs succumbing to the weight of winters—while everywhere around them was awash with burgeoning herbs and flowers.

  I would like to have known what Bruno was doing at that time. Had he lit the fire, or was he walking alone towards the mountain, or did he keep working until dark? In many ways the man that he had become surprised me. I had expected to find if not the double of his father then that of one of his cousins, or of the bricklayers I used to see him with at the bar. Instead he had nothing at all in common with these people. He seemed to me like someone who at a certain point in life had given up on the company of others, that he had found a corner of the world and retreated into it. He reminded me of his mother: I often came across her, in those days, when I was loading up of a morning. She showed me how to fasten the packsaddle, how to secure the planks or the tools on the flanks of the mule, how to goad him on when he refused to budge. But she had not uttered a word about my return, or about the work that I was doing with her son. Ever since I was a child it seemed that nothing in our lives was of interest to her, that she was happy in her own place, and that other people passed by her like the seasons. I wondered, though, whether she did not conceal feelings of an altogether different kind.

  I would take the path along the river, and reaching Grana, would tie the mule up next to the house, light a fire, and put a saucepan of water on to boil. If I’d remembered to buy one I would open a bottle of wine. In the larder I had only pasta, conserves, and a few tins for emergencies. After the first two glasses I felt completely exhausted. Sometimes I would throw in the pasta and fall asleep while it was cooking, and find it later that night—the stove gone out, the bottle half-drunk, my supper reduced to an inedible mess. So I would open a tin of beans and devour them with a spoon, without even bothering to tip them from the tin. Then I would stretch out on my mattress beneath the table, zip myself into the sleeping bag, and instantly fall back into a deep sleep.

  • • •

  Towards the end of June my mother arrived with a friend. Her friends were taking turns keeping her company throughout the summer, though she did not seem to me to have the air of an inconsolable widow. Yet she told me herself that she was happy to have someone close to her, and I noticed the silent intimacy that she shared with this other woman: they spoke together infrequently in my presence, understanding each other with a glance. I saw them sharing the old house with a mutual ease that was more precious than words. After the meager funeral of my father I thought a lot about his loneliness, that kind of perpetual conflict between himself and the rest of the world: he had died in his car without leaving a single friend to mourn his absence. But with my mother I could see the fruits of a long life spent cultivating relationships, caring for them like the flowers on her balcony. I wondered if you learn and develop such a talent, or whether you just have it, or not, at birth. Whether there was still time for me to learn.

  So now when I came down the mountain I found not just one but two women to care for me, the table laid, clean sheets on the bed: no more sleeping bag and beans. After supper my mother and I would linger in the kitchen to talk.

  Such talk came easily to me with her, and on one occasion I told her that it was like going back to old times there together—only to discover that her own memories of those evenings we shared were quite different from mine.

  In her mind, I had hardly ever spoken. She remembered me as absorbed in a world of my own that it was impossible to penetrate, and from which she rarely received any communication. She was only too happy, now, to have the opportunity to make up some ground between us.

  At Barma Bruno and I had begun to build the walls. I described to my mother the way in which we were working, since she seemed keen to hear about what I was learning as a laborer. Each wall was actually made of two parallel rows of stones, separated by a space which we filled with smaller ones. Every so often a large stone was put in place across the gap, joining the two rows together. We used cement as little as possible, not for ecological reasons but because I had to carry it up there in sacks, each weighing twenty-five kilos. We would mix the cement with sand from the lake and would pour the mixture between the stones, so that from the outside it could hardly be noticed. For many days I had been going back and forth between Barma and the lake with the sand: there was a small beach on its far shore, where I would fill the mule’s saddlebags. I really liked the idea that it was this sand that was holding the house together.

  My mother listened carefully, but she was not really interested in the carpentry.

  “So how are you getting on with Bruno?” she asked.

  “It’s strange. Sometimes I feel like I’ve known him forever, but then I think that I know next to nothing about him.”

  “What’s so strange about it?”

  “The way that he speaks to me. He’s very kind to me. More than kind, actually, he’s affectionate. I didn’t remember that side of him. It always strikes me as something I don’t really understand.”

  I threw a piece of wood into the stove. I felt like having a cigarette. But I was embarrassed to smoke in front of my mother, and even though I would have liked to rid myself of that stupid secret, I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I went to pour myself a little grappa instead. Grappa was different; there was no embarrassment involved.

  When I sat back down my mother said, “Well, you know, Bruno was very close to us during these years. At certain times he was here every evening. Dad helped him a lot.”

  “Helped him in what way?”

  “Not in a practical sense. How can I put it? Yes, on occasion he did lend him money, but that wasn’t it. At a ce
rtain point Bruno fell out with his own father. He never wanted to work with him again; I think he didn’t even see him for years. So if he needed any advice he would come here. He had real faith in what your father had to say.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “And he always asked after you; how you were, what you were up to. I told him what you had written in your letters. I never stopped giving him news about you.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I repeated.

  I was finding out what happens to the person who leaves: life goes on for the others without him. I imagined their evenings together when Bruno was twenty years old, twenty-five years old, and was there in my place, talking with my father. Maybe it would not have happened if I had stayed, or perhaps we would have shared those moments; more than jealousy I felt regret for not having been there. I felt as if I had missed out on important things, busying myself with others so inconsequential that I could hardly remember what they were.

  • • •

  We finished the walls and went on to construct the roof. It was already July when I went to the blacksmith in the village to collect the eight steel brackets that Bruno had ordered, made to his own design, together with a few dozen foot-long expansion screws. I loaded these materials onto the mule, together with a small generator, some more petrol, and my old climbing gear. Once everything had been delivered I went to the top of the rock wall, where I had never been before then. There were four larch trees up there. I secured myself to one of the biggest and lowered myself halfway down using a double rope, armed with an electric drill—then spent the rest of the day between the instructions shouted by Bruno from below, the humming of the generator, and the deafening shriek of the drill as it penetrated the rock. Four screws were necessary for each bracket, which meant thirty-two holes in all. According to Bruno these numbers were crucial: the whole viability of the roof depended on them. In the winter the rock would constantly shed snow, and he had thought long and hard about the specifications, in order to construct a roof that could withstand these blows. Several times I pulled myself up the rope, shifted the anchor point a bit further on, and slid back down to where he was indicating to drill the rock. Towards evening the eight brackets had all been fixed in place, aligned at regular intervals of four meters in height.

  Our days would end with the beer that I now squeezed into the rucksack in the morning along with our provisions. We sat down in front of the fireplace that was blackened by ash and embers. I, in contrast to it, was white: covered in dust, hands aching from using the rock drill. I was proud that Bruno had decided to entrust me with that work.

  “The problem with snow is that you never know how heavy it might get,” he said. “There are calculations with which you can work out the load borne, but it’s best to double everything.”

  “What calculations?”

  “Well, a cubic meter of water weighs ten quintals, right? Snow can weigh between three and seven, depending on how much air it contains. So if a roof was to withstand snow to a depth of two meters, you would have to allow for a weight of fourteen quintals. I double it.”

  “So how did they used to work that out in the past?”

  “In the past they used to shore everything up. In the autumn, before leaving. They would fill the house with poles reinforcing the roof. Remember those short, thick trunks that we found? But it looks as if one winter even the poles failed to do the job, or who knows, perhaps they forgot to put them in place properly.”

  I looked at the tops of the walls. I tried to imagine the snow that had accumulated up there suddenly becoming detached and falling. It was some fall.

  “Your father really enjoyed discussing this kind of problem.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “How wide a plank needs to be, at what distance from each other they need to be spaced, what is the best wood to use. Pine isn’t right because it’s too soft. Larch is stronger. It wasn’t enough for him to be told what was to be used; he always wanted to know the reasons behind everything. The fact is that one grows in the shade, the other in the sun: it’s the sun that hardens the wood; shade and water make it soft and unsuitable for beams.”

  “Yes, I can believe that he liked to know such things.”

  “He had even bought himself a book. I would tell him: don’t bother, Gianni, we can go and ask some old builder. I took him to see my old boss once. We took our plans to him, and your father brought along a notebook in which he wrote everything down. Though I suspect that afterwards he went to double-check everything with his book, since he didn’t trust people much, did he?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think he did.”

  I hadn’t heard my father’s name since the day of the funeral. I was glad to hear it uttered by Bruno, even though it seemed to me at times that we had known two altogether different people.

  “Are we raising the beams tomorrow?” I asked.

  “First we’ve got to cut them to size. And shape them to fit the brackets. To lift them we’ll need the mule; let’s see how it goes.”

  “Do you think it will take a long time?”

  “I don’t know. One thing at a time, no? First the beer.”

  “OK. First the beer.”

  • • •

  In the meantime I had been getting back in shape. After a month of taking the road down every morning I was beginning to rediscover my former speed. It seemed to me that the grass in the fields along the way was getting thicker each day, the river water calmer, the green of the larches more vivid: and that for the woods the arrival of summer was like the end of a turbulent adolescence. It was also the period in which I used to arrive, as a boy. The mountain took on again the aspect with which I was most familiar, from the time when I thought that the seasons hardly changed up there and that there was a permanent summer awaiting my return. In Grana I would find the workers preparing the stables, moving things around with tractors. In a few days’ time they would take the herds up, and the lower reaches of the valley would be repopulated again.

  Now nobody would be going higher anymore. There were another two ruins near the lake, not far from the road that I used going to and fro. The first, besieged by nettles, was in the same state as I had found my own property in the spring. But the roof had only partially collapsed, and taking a look inside, I found the same sad spectacle: its one small room had been vandalized, as if the owner had wanted on leaving it to take revenge for the miserable life lived there, or as if successive visitors had searched fruitlessly for anything of value. There remained a table, a wonky stool, crockery thrown amongst the rubbish, and a stove that still looked good to me, and that I intended to go back and salvage before everything was buried under another collapse. The second ruin, on the other hand, was barely the memory of a much older and more sophisticated building: the first could not have been more than a hundred years old; this one must have been built at least three centuries ago. It wasn’t a simple, small stable building but a large Alpine farmstead made up of separate structures, almost like an entire small village, with external stone staircases and roof beams of mysteriously imposing dimensions—mysterious because the trees big enough to make them grew hundreds of meters lower down, and I couldn’t imagine how they had been carried there. There was nothing left inside the houses except the walls that remained standing, scoured by the rain. Compared to the shacks I was familiar with, these ruins seemed to speak of a more aristocratic civilization that had exhausted itself in a period of decadence before becoming extinguished altogether.

  Going up, I liked to stop for a moment on the shore of the lake. I would bend down to touch the water and test the temperature with my hand. The sun which illuminated the summits of the Grenon had not yet reached the basin, and the lake still had a nocturnal aspect, like a sky no longer dark but not yet light. I could no longer remember clearly why I had distanced myself from the mountain, or what else I had found to love when I had ceased to love it there—but it seemed to me, going back up alone every morning, that
I had gradually begun to make my peace with it.

  In those July days Barma resembled a sawmill. I had delivered various loads of planks, and now the terrace was crowded with stacked wood: two-meter-long planks of pine still white and perfumed with resin. The eight beams were suspended between the rock face and the long wall, fixed to the iron brackets, inclined at thirty degrees and supported in the middle by a long beam of larch. Now that the skeleton of the roof was in place I could imagine the finished house: its door faced west and it had two fine north-facing windows that looked towards the lake. Bruno had wanted them to be arched, losing entire days shaping with mallet and chisel the stones that surrounded them. Inside there would be two rooms, one per window. From the two floors of the old building, with the stable below and living room above, we wanted to make only one that would be taller and more spacious. Though it proved to be beyond me as yet, I would sometimes try to visualize the light that would come into it.

  On arriving, I would rekindle the embers in the fireplace by throwing in a few dry twigs, fill a small pan with water, and put it on the fire. From the rucksack I would take out fresh bread and a single tomato—one of those that Bruno’s mother had managed to grow miraculously at an altitude of thirteen hundred meters. In search of the coffee I would poke my head inside the bivouac and find the sleeping bag disheveled, a candle stump melted onto a plank, a half-open book. Glancing at the cover I smiled at seeing the name of its author: Conrad. From all the schooling that my mother had given him, Bruno had retained a passion for novels about the sea.

  He would come out of the house as soon as the smell of the fire reached him. He was in there measuring and cutting the rafters for the roof. He looked wilder as the week progressed, and if I had lost my sense of time I could tell what day of the week it was by the length of his stubble. At nine he was already deep into his work, absorbed by thoughts from which he would only emerge with difficulty.