“Oh,” he would say, “you’re here.”
He would raise his hand and give me his truncated salute, then join me for breakfast. With his knife he would cut a chunk of bread and a slice of toma. The tomato he ate as it was—without cutting it and without salt or anything else—staring at the building site and thinking about the work that lay ahead.
SEVEN
IT WAS THE SEASON of return and of reconciliation, two words I thought about frequently as the summer ran its course. One evening my mother told me a story about herself, my father, and the mountain, about the way in which they had met and ended up marrying. It was odd to be hearing about it so late, given that it was the story of how our family originated, and therefore of how I came to be born. But when a boy I was too young for this kind of story, and after that had stopped wanting to hear: at twenty I would have put my hands over my ears rather than listen to family reminiscences, and even on this evening my first reaction was one of reluctance. Yet one side of me looked with affection on these things that were unknown to me. As I listened I gazed out at the opposite flank of the valley, in the penumbra of nine in the evening. It was thick with fir trees on that side, a wood without clearings that descended emphatically all the way to the river. Only a long gorge cut through it with a lighter line, and it was this that held my eye.
As my mother’s story unfolded I began to feel something quite different. I know this story already, I thought. And it was true that in my own way I did know it. For years I had collected fragments of it, like someone who possesses pages torn from a book and has read them thousands of times in random order. I had seen photographs, listened to conversations. I had observed my parents and their way of dealing with things. I knew which arguments ended abruptly in silence, which others were drawn out, and which names from the past had the power to sadden or to move them. I had all the elements of the story at my disposal but had never managed to reconstruct the narrative in its entirety.
After I had been looking outside for a while I saw the does that were waiting there on the other side. In the gorge there must have been a vein of water, and every evening just before dark they would leave the wood to drink from it. From this distance I could not see the water, but the deer showed that it was there. They came and went along their own track, and I watched them until it was too dark to see anything anymore.
• • •
This was the story: in the fifties my father was the best friend of my mother’s brother, my uncle Piero. They had both been born in 1942, and were five years younger than she was. They had met as children, on the campsite to which the village priest would take them. In the summer they would spend a whole month in the Dolomites. They slept in a tent, played in the woods, learned how to be in the mountains and to fend for themselves, and this was the life that had made them such close friends. I could understand that, no? my mother said. Yes, it was not at all difficult to imagine them.
Piero did extremely well at school; my father had stronger legs and a stronger character. Actually, though, the contrast was not so simple: in some respects my father was the more fragile of the two, and he was also the one who could touch others with his enthusiasm—he was the most imaginative as well as the most restless. His high spirits when in company were infectious, and partly because of this, partly because he was living at boarding school, he soon became a regular at my mother’s home. To her he had seemed like a boy with too much energy to burn, like someone who needed to run faster than others in order to use it up. The fact that he was an orphan counted for nothing in those days. It was so common after the war, just as it was common to take in somebody else’s son—the son of a relative, perhaps, or of someone who had emigrated, who knows where. In the farmhouse there was no shortage of room, or of work either.
It was not that my father was in need of a practical arrangement. He didn’t lack a roof over his head: what he lacked was a family. And so it was that at sixteen or seventeen years old he was always there, Saturdays and Sundays—and every day in the summer for the harvest, the winemaking, the hay cutting, the woodcutting in the forest. He liked to study. But he also liked the outdoor life. My mother told me about when they had challenged each other to press I don’t know how many hundreds of kilos of grapes with their feet, of their youthful discovery of wine and of the day they had been found hiding in the cellar, completely drunk. There were so many anecdotes of this kind, she said, but she wanted to make one thing clear: this relationship did not begin and develop by chance. There was a specific mover behind it. The priest, the one from the mountain who was a friend of my grandfather, had for years taken girls and boys camping, and had kept a keen eye on my father to see if he would bond with the others. My grandfather had in turn agreed to welcome this orphan into his own home. It would also be a way of providing for his future.
• • •
Piero was similar to me, my mother said. He was taciturn, reflective. He had a sensitivity that made him able to understand others, and which at the same time made him a bit vulnerable around anyone with a character stronger than his own. When the time came to go to university, he was in no doubt as to his choice of subject: he had always wanted more than anything else to become a doctor. And he would have made a good doctor, my mother said. He had what it took to be one, a talent for compassion and for listening. My father on the other hand was less interested in people than he was in the material world: in earth, fire, air, water; he liked the idea of being able to plunge his hands into its material components and to find out what they were made of. Yes, I thought, that was him all right. That was how I remembered him, fascinated by every grain of sand and crystal of ice, altogether indifferent to people. I could easily imagine the passion with which, at nineteen, he had embarked on his study of chemistry.
In the meantime he and Piero had begun to go into the mountains by themselves. Almost every Saturday, from June to September, they would take the bus for Trento or Belluno, then hitchhike back up the mountain. They spent the nights in meadows, or sometimes in a hayloft. They had no money with which to buy anything. But then neither did anyone else who went into the mountains in those days, my mother said: the Alps were a poor man’s North Pole or Pacific Ocean, the destination of young people like them who were in search of adventure. Of the two it was my father who studied the maps and planned new routes. Piero was more cautious, but also more obstinate. He was difficult to convince in the first place, but even more difficult to dissuade halfway, and was the ideal companion for my father, who had a tendency to give up as soon as things did not go according to plan.
Then their paths in life diverged. The chemistry degree was shorter than the one in medicine: my father graduated first, and in ’67 went to do his military service. He ended up in the Alpine artillery, dragging cannon and mortar up the mule tracks of the Great War. His degree earned him the rank of NCO, or Sergeant of Mules, as he called it: he didn’t spend much time in barracks that year, but spent almost the entire time moving from valley to valley with his company. He discovered that he did not dislike this kind of life at all. Whenever he came back he seemed older, both in comparison to the young man who had left and to Piero, who was still spending whole days buried in his books. It was as if he had been the first to taste something harder and more real, and that he liked the taste. He had experienced, albeit in a grappa-induced fog, the long marches and encampments in the snow. And it was about the snow that he would talk to Piero when on leave. About its different forms, its mutable character, its language. In one of those bursts of enthusiasm to which he was prone as a young chemist, he had fallen in love with a new element. He would say that the mountain in winter was another world entirely, and that they should go there together.
• • •
And so it was that during the Christmas of ’68, soon after his discharge from the military, he and Piero inaugurated their first winter season. They managed to borrow from someone the skis and sealskins. They began by going again to the places they knew best, except
that now, rather than staying out under the stars, they had to pay to sleep at the refuges. My father was super fit, my uncle much less so since he had spent the last year preparing for his final exams. But he was as enthusiastic as my father about making new discoveries. They barely had enough money for food and board, let alone to employ an Alpine guide, so their technique was what it was. And in any case, according to my father, going up was just a question of having good legs—and you could always find a way of getting down. Little by little they were even developing a style of their own. Until, that is, they decided to head in March for a fork of the Sassolungo, and found themselves crossing a slope in the afternoon sun.
I could see vividly the scene that my mother was describing, however many times she must have told it before. My father was up ahead a short distance, and had removed a ski to prepare for the assault, when he felt the ground giving way beneath his feet. He heard a rustling, like the sound that a wave makes retreating over sand. And it really did seem as if the whole slope that they had just traversed was in the process of retreating downwards. Very slowly, at first: my father went down a meter, shifted to the side, and managed to grab hold of a rock, and watched his ski continue sliding on down. Piero, who had been on the steepest and smoothest part of the slope, was going down too. My father saw him lose his balance and slide on his belly, looking up, with his hands scrabbling for purchase that was not there. Then the bank of snow gathered speed and momentum. This was not the dry snow of winter which plummets in powdery clouds—it was the damp spring snow that goes down rolling. Rolling and gathering until it encounters an obstacle, and it buried Piero with hardly an impact: it just went over him and continued its descent. Two hundred meters below the slope flattened out, and it was only there that the avalanche stopped.
Even before it had done so my father ran down in search of his friend, but could not find him. Now the snow was hard: heavy snow compacted by the fall. He wandered on the avalanche calling out, searching everywhere for any sign of movement. But the snow was completely still again, even though it was less than a minute since it had moved. In the months that followed my father would tell it like this: it was as if some great beast had been disturbed in its sleep, merely growled, and then shaken off its irritation before settling down to sleep again in a more comfortable place. As far as the mountain was concerned, nothing had happened.
The only hope, something that happens in a few rare cases, was that Piero had created an air pocket beneath the snow in which he was still able to breathe. In any case my father did not have a shovel, so he took the only sensible course of action open to him: he started towards the refuge where they had slept, only to find himself sinking in softer snow. So he turned round again, retrieved the one remaining ski, and managed somehow to get down with it—despite sliding in short bursts and frequently falling, it was still much better than sinking at every step. He reached the refuge midafternoon and called the emergency services. By the time they got there it was already dark, and they found my uncle the next morning, dead beneath a meter of avalanche, suffocated by the snow.
• • •
It was immediately clear to everyone that it was all my father’s fault. Who else could they have blamed? Two facts proved the extent to which they were badly underprepared for winter: they were ill-equipped and had been up there at completely the wrong time. It had recently snowed. It was far too warm to attempt the crossing of a slope. As the more experienced of the two, my father should have known this—should have avoided the crossing and been the first to retreat. My grandfather found something unforgivable in his mistakes, and rather than diminishing with time his rage became more deeply rooted. He did not go so far as to shut my father from the house, but he was no longer pleased to see him, and his whole demeanor altered whenever he turned up. Then he started to avoid him. Even a year afterwards, at the memorial Mass for his son, he made sure to sit on the other side of the church from him. At a certain point my father gave up and ceased to disturb him.
And it is precisely at this point in the story that my mother enters the stage. Though in fact she had always been a part of it, albeit as a spectator. She had known my father for what seemed like a lifetime, even if at first she had merely thought of him as the friend of her brother. Then, gradually, he had become her friend as well. They had sung, drunk, walked, harvested grapes, side by side together so many times that, after the accident, they began to meet up to talk: my father was in a terrible state, and to my mother it did not seem fair. It did not seem fair that he had been given the blame for everything and then left alone to shoulder it. They ended up falling for each other, and about a year later they were married. The entire family refused their invitations to the wedding. So they were married without any relatives present, already prepared to leave for Milan where their lives would begin again. With a new house, new jobs, new friends, new mountains. I was also part of this new life: in fact, my mother said, this was what made sense of all the rest. I with my old-fashioned name: a family name.
• • •
That was all. When my mother had finished her account, I thought about the glaciers. The way in which my father would speak about them to me.
He was not one for retracing his own steps and did not like thinking again about unhappy times, but on certain occasions in the mountains—even on those virginal mountains where no friend had died—he would look at the glacier and something would resurface and come back to him. He put it like this: that the summer erases memories, just like it melts the snow; but the glacier is the snow of winters long past; it is a memory of winter that does not wish to be forgotten. Only now did I understand what he was talking about. And I knew once and for all that I had two fathers: the first had been the stranger with whom I had lived for twenty years in the city, and then burnt my bridges with for another ten; the second was my father as he was in the mountains, the one I had only glimpsed but still knew better than the first: the man who walked behind me on the paths, the lover of glaciers. This other father had left me a ruin to rebuild. So I decided to forget all about the first, and to complete that work to remember him by.
EIGHT
BY AUGUST WE HAD finished the roof of the house. It was made up of two layers of planks separated by a metal sheet and insulation. On the outside it was covered with shingles of larch, superimposed one over another and traversed by grooves down which the water could run off; inside there were matchboards made of spruce. The larch would protect the house from the rain; the spruce would retain the heat. We had decided not to make a hole in it for a skylight so that even at the height of summer the interior would be shaded. The north-facing windows received no direct light, but looking out of them you could see the mountains in front of you, rising on the other side of the lake, shining almost white. Their outcrops of rock and scree were blinding in this season. The light which entered the windows came from there, as if from a mirror. This is how a house built on the reverse side works.
I went outside to look at the far mountains in sunlight. Then turned towards our own, the Grenon, which covered the sky on the other side. I wanted to climb to its top and see what Barma looked like from up there. It had been looming above me every day for two months, but I had not thought of doing this until now: I think that my legs themselves were fostering the desire in me, together with the heat of summer. They were restless again, having regained their strength, and the summer was drawing me towards the heights.
Bruno came down from the roof where he was working on a painstaking job. A layer of lead needed to be fixed between the rock face and the roof, so that the water draining down on rainy days would not find its way into the house. The lining needed to be molded one piece at a time with a hammer, so that it would follow and adhere to every hollow and protrusion. The lead was soft, and with careful work it looked in the end almost as if it had been soldered to the rock, or as if it were one of its own dark veins. In this way the roof and the rock became a single surface.
I asked Bruno about
the path leading to the Grenon, and he pointed to a track that went up from the lake along the slope. It disappeared in a thicket of alder, crossed a swampy area, and reappeared further on between flounces of new grass. Behind there, he said, what looked like a ridge actually hid another basin, and another lake smaller than our own. From the lake onwards it was all scree. There wasn’t really a path to follow when climbing it, perhaps just a few piled stones indicating the way, or some track used by chamois. But in any case, he said, pointing to a notch in the crest of the summit where a residual snowfield stood out, by keeping my eye fixed on that snow I couldn’t go wrong.
“I’d like to take a trip up there,” I said. “On Saturday or Sunday maybe if it’s sunny.”
“Why not go now,” he said. “I can do this on my own.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course. Take a day off. Go on, go.”
• • •
The lake higher up was different from ours. The last few Swiss pines and larch trees, the last clumps of willow and alder gradually disappeared from the slope, and beyond the ridge the rarefied air of the mountain already blew. The lake was only a greenish pool surrounded by meager grazing and expanses of blueberries. Twenty or so unattended goats were huddled near a ruin and ignored my presence, or almost. The path ended there, amongst the false trails made by the passage of cattle, where the threadbare grass gave way to slabs of scree. I could see clearly the snowfield up above, and I remembered my father’s rules: I imagined a straight line between myself and the snow and took it. I could hear his voice in my ears, saying: straight, go up this way.
It had been a long time since I had walked above the treeline. I had never done so alone—but must have learned well, as I still felt at ease moving across the scree. I would see a pile of stones up ahead and make directly for it, moving from stone to stone, instinctively choosing the largest and most stable and avoiding the unstable ones. I felt a kind of give from the rocks, which did not absorb your step like earth or grass but returned some of the force to your legs, enhancing your momentum. So as soon as I had placed a foot on a stone and pushed my weight forwards and upwards the other foot began to move forwards too, and I soon found myself running and leaping across the scree, almost ceding control to my legs and letting them do the work for me. I felt that I could trust them, and that I could not go wrong. I remembered the joy that my father showed as soon as we had left behind the Alpine meadows and entered into the world of rock. The same joy that I felt now, coursing through my own body.
The Eight Mountains Page 12
