The Eight Mountains

by Paolo Cognetti

  When I reached the small snowfield I was breathing heavily from the run. I stopped to touch that August snow. It was icy and granular, so hard that you needed to scrape it with your nails, and I gathered together a handful to wipe over my forehead and neck to cool myself down. I sucked on it until I felt my lips sting, then climbed across the last section of scree up to the crest. Now the view opened up for me on the other side of the Grenon, the side that was in the sun, where beneath my feet after a section of rock a long meadow sloped gently down to a group of huts, and to grazing dotted by cattle. It seemed as if I had suddenly descended a thousand meters, or had found myself in another season. In front of me the full light of summer and the sound of the lively cattle; behind me, when I looked back, a shadowy, sombre autumn of damp rock and patches of snow. From up here the two lakes were twinned by the perspective. I looked for the house that Bruno and I were building, but perhaps I was too high up—or perhaps it was too well blended-in to be distinguished from the mountain that supplied the material from which it was made.

  The piles of stone markers continued beneath the ridge, along a good ledge. But I felt like climbing, and seeing no great difficulties ahead of me decided to reach the summit this way. For the first time in years I placed my hand on the rock, selected footholds, and heaved myself up. Although it was an easy climb, the old maneuvers demanded my complete concentration. I had to think again about exactly where to place each hand and foot, using balance rather than force, trying to stay light. I soon lost all sense of time. I was oblivious to the surrounding mountains, and to the two contrasting worlds that plummeted beneath me: only the rock face directly in front of me existed, only my feet and my hands. Until I reached a point at which it was impossible to climb further, and only then did I realize that I was at the summit.

  Now what? I thought. There was a mound of stones on the crest. Beyond this rudimentary monument Monte Rosa had appeared, its glaciers outlined against the sky. Perhaps I should have had a beer with me with which to celebrate, but feeling neither exultation nor relief I decided to stay only as long as it would take to smoke a cigarette, bid farewell to my father’s mountain, and then head back down.

  I still knew how to recognize each one of the peaks. I observed them while smoking, from east to west, and remembered all of their names. I wondered how high I’d reached, and thinking that I must have passed the three thousand meter mark without any adverse effects on my stomach, I began to look around for any marker giving the altitude. I saw that jammed into a mound of stones there was a metal box. I knew immediately what would be inside. I opened the lid and found a notebook inside a plastic bag, which had not wholly succeeded in protecting it. Its ruled pages had the texture of paper that had dried after getting wet. There were also a couple of pens inside, with which those rare climbers to this point had left a thought, or sometimes just a name and date. The last entry had been made over a week ago. I leafed through its pages and saw that no more than ten people a year had climbed this barren mountain, which cast its shadow over my house and which I already thought of as mine, and that its record of these climbers therefore went back over many years. I read many names, and hardly impressive comments. It seemed to be the case that after so much exertion nobody could find the words with which to express what they felt: those who tried left only some poetic or “spiritual” banality. I leafed backwards through the notebook somewhat irritated by humankind, and did not know what I was looking for until I found it: two lines, from 1997. I recognized the handwriting. And the spirit behind the words. He had written: Climbed up from Grana in 3 hours and 58 minutes. Still in great shape! Giovanni Guasti.

  I spent a long time staring at my father’s words. The ink blurred by water, the signature less legible than the two phrases that preceded it. It was the signature of a man who had been used to signing his name frequently—no longer really a name, just an automatic gesture. Concentrated into the exclamation mark was all the good humor that he had felt that day. He had been alone, or so it seemed from the notebook, and so I imagined him climbing over the scree and coming out on the summit just as I had done. I was sure that he must have been keeping an eye on the time, and that at some point he must have started to hurry. He would have wanted at all costs to get there in under four hours. He felt good up there at the top, proud of the strength of his legs and elated to see his luminous mountain again. I thought of tearing out the page to keep, but then it seemed as sacrilegious as taking away a stone from the summit.

  I carefully wrapped the notebook in the plastic, placed it back inside the box, and left it there.

  • • •

  In the weeks that followed I found other messages from my father. I would study the map of his routes and go in search of him on less noble peaks, those neglected ones lower down the valley. On Monte Rosa towards the August bank holiday processions of roped parties could be made out on the glaciers, and climbers from all over the world crowded into the refuges—but where I went I saw no one, except for the odd solitary climber of my father’s age or older. When I overtook them it seemed like I was meeting him. And for them I think that it was like encountering a son, since they would watch me approach and stand aside saying: “Make way for the young!” I could see that these men were pleased if I stopped for a chat, and began to do so. Sometimes I would take the opportunity of sharing a bite to eat. They had all been going back to these same mountains for thirty, forty, fifty years, and preferred just as I did the abandoned high valleys in which nothing ever seemed to change.

  A man with white whiskers told me that for him it was a way of revisiting and thinking about his past life. It was as if, starting out on the same old track once a year, he was immersing himself in his recollections and climbing back up again the course of his own memory. He came from the countryside like my father, but his was the rice-growing region between Novara and Vercelli. From the house in which he was born he could see Monte Rosa above the fields, and when he was little had been told that up there was where all the water came from: water for drinking, the water in the rivers, the water with which to flood the rice fields—all the water that was used came from up there, and as long as the ice continued to glisten on the horizon there would be none of the problems caused by lack of water. I liked this old gentleman. He was a widower and missed his wife deeply. He had sunspots on his bald head and a pipe that he filled as we talked. At a certain point he took a canteen from his rucksack, poured two drops of grappa onto a sugar cube, and offered it to me.

  “With this you’ll go up like a train,” he said. And then after a short pause: “Well anyway, there’s nothing like the mountains for making you remember.”

  I too was beginning to realize this.

  At the summit I would find a crooked cross, sometimes not even that. I would disturb ibexes that would be startled without ever really fleeing from me. The males would snort their irritation at my presence, the females and little ones sheltering behind them for safety. If I was lucky I would find the metal box hidden at the foot of the cross, or somewhere amongst the stones.

  My father’s signature was in all the notebooks that I found. He was sometimes laconic, always boastful. I would find myself traveling back ten years just in order to find four words: Done this one too. Giovanni Guasti. He must have felt in particularly good shape on one occasion, and been moved by something to write: Ibexes, eagles, fresh snow. Like being young again. On another he’d written: Thick fog all the way to the summit. Old songs. Magnificent view of the interior. I knew all of those songs, and would like to have been with him, to sing them in the fog. It was part of a melancholy vein that I found in another message from the previous year: Came back up here after a very long time. It would be wonderful to just stay up here all together, without having to see anyone anymore, without ever having to go back down to the valley.

  “All who?” I wondered. And where was I on that day? Who knows whether he had already begun to feel his heart weakening, or what else had happened to prompt him to writ
e such words. Without ever having to go back down to the valley. It was the same sentiment that had made him dream of a house at the highest point possible, isolated and impervious, where you could live away from the world. Before putting the notebook back where I had found it, I copied his words and the date into my own notebook. In the books that had been left there I never added anything of my own.

  • • •

  Perhaps Bruno and I were actually living inside my father’s dream. We had found each other again in a pause in our lives: one of those pauses that bring one period to an end and precede another, though we hardly realized this at the time. From Barma we would see the eagles circling below us, the marmots on the lookout before the entrances to their burrows. We would occasionally spot the odd angler or two down at the lake, and the odd walker—but no one looked up in our direction to find us, and we did not descend to greet them. We would wait until everyone had gone before going down of an August afternoon for a swim. The water in the lake was freezing cold, and we would compete to see who could stay under the longest before getting out and racing around the meadows to get the blood circulating in our veins again. We also had a fishing rod, just a pole with a hook, with which I would occasionally manage to catch something using grasshoppers for bait. Then for supper there would be a trout grilled over the fire, and red wine. We would stay in front of the fire, drinking, until it got dark.

  By now I was also sleeping up there. I camped out in the unfinished house, directly beneath one of the windows. The first night, I spent long hours gazing from my sleeping bag at the stars and listening to the wind. I would turn over to face inwards, and even in the dark could feel the presence of the rock face, as if it were exerting a magnetic force, or a gravitational one—or like when, with your eyes closed, someone puts a hand close to your forehead and you feel the hand’s presence. I felt as if I were sleeping in a cave excavated from the mountain itself.

  Like Bruno, I soon became unaccustomed to hurry and to civilization: I reluctantly went down to the village once a week, just in order to buy supplies, and was surprised to find myself back amongst cars after a walk of only a few hours. The shop owners treated me like any other tourist—a slightly more eccentric one, perhaps—and I was content to leave it at that. I felt better when I was back on the path. I loaded the bread, vegetables, salami, cheese, and wine onto the mule, gave him a slap on the rump, and left him to find his own way along the path that he knew now by heart. Perhaps we really could have stayed up there forever without anyone even noticing.

  The late August rains came. I remembered them well. These are the days that bring autumn to the mountains: when they are over and the sun comes back, its light is less warm and more oblique, casting long shadows. Those banks of slow-moving, shapeless clouds that now swallowed the peaks had once told me that it was time to leave, and I had protested to the heavens that the summer had only lasted an instant—had it not only just started?—and could not have already flown away like this.

  At Barma the rain was flattening the grass in the meadows, breaking the surface of the lake. The drumming and run-off of the rain on our roof blended with the crackling of the fire. At this time we were lining one of the rooms with fir, keeping warm with the stove that I’d salvaged. We had installed it against the wall made from the rock face. The rock behind the stove would gradually warm up and radiate back heat to the rest of the room, and the wood paneling was meant to help in conserving it. But this was to be at some future date: without windows or doors in place the wind blew down our necks, and the rain came in, in diagonal gusts. With work finished for the day, it was pleasant to be inside, watching the stove and feeding the fire with wood that had once been part of the old house.

  One evening Bruno talked to me about a project that he had in mind. He wanted to buy his uncle’s farmstead. He had been putting aside money for a good while now. His cousins, who were more than happy to rid themselves of the place and their bad memories of it, had come up with a price: Bruno had spent everything he had on a down payment, hoping to borrow the rest from the bank. These months spent in Barma had served as a kind of trial run: now he knew that he could cope. If everything went according to plan he would spend the next summer working in the same way there: he wanted to rebuild the huts, buy some cattle, and in a few years hoped to have the farm up and running.

  “It’s a nice idea,” I said.

  “Cows don’t cost much now,” he said.

  “And does it pay to keep them?”

  “Not a lot. But that doesn’t matter. If it was just about the money I’d stay as a builder.”

  “You don’t like working as one anymore?”

  “Sure, I like it. But I always knew that it was a temporary thing. It’s something that I can do, but it’s not something I was born to do.”

  “So what were you born to do?”

  “To be a man of the mountains.”

  Uttering this phrase he became serious. I’d only ever heard him use it a few times before, when speaking of his ancestors: the old inhabitants of the mountain that he knew through the woods, the wild meadows, the derelict houses that he had spent a lifetime exploring. Abandoning them had once seemed inevitable to him too, when the only life he could see for himself was the same as for the men of the valley. You had to look down, to where the money was and the work—and not up, to where there was nothing but weeds and ruins. He told me that in the end, on the farmstead, his uncle had stopped fixing anything. If a chair broke he just burned it in the stove. If he saw an invasive plant in the meadow he couldn’t be bothered to bend down and uproot it. His father would start cursing if you so much as mentioned the place to him: he would gladly have turned his rifle on the cattle, and the thought that everything there was going to rack and ruin gave him a twisted kind of pleasure.

  But Bruno felt himself to be different from this. So different from his father, his uncle, and his cousins that at a certain point he had understood who it was that he did in fact resemble, and from where he had got his desire to heed the call of the mountains.

  “From your mother,” I said. But not because it had ever occurred to me before: I only saw it now, at this moment.

  “Yes,” said Bruno. “We’re just like each other, me and her.”

  He paused so I could reflect properly on what he’d said, and then he added: “Except that she’s a woman. If I decide to go and stay in the woods no one says anything about it. If a woman does it, she’s taken for a witch. If I keep quiet, what problem is there with that? I’m only a man who chooses not to speak. A woman who doesn’t speak must be half-crazy.”

  It was true: we had all thought this about her. I myself had never exchanged with her more than a couple of words. Even now, when I passed by Grana and she gave me potatoes, tomatoes, and toma to take back up. A little more stooped and thinner than I remembered, she was nevertheless still for me the strange figure that I had seen up there in the vegetable garden as a boy.

  Bruno said: “If my mother had been a man she would have had the life she wanted. I guess that she wasn’t really cut out for marriage. Definitely not for marriage with my father. Her only bit of good luck was getting free from him.”

  “And how did she do that?”

  “By keeping her mouth shut. And by staying up there with the chickens. You can’t get so angry with someone like that; sooner or later you leave them in peace.”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “No. Or perhaps she did, in a way. It doesn’t matter whether she told me or not, I worked it out for myself.”

  I knew that Bruno was right. I had understood something similar about my own parents. I began to think over that phrase—her only bit of good luck was getting free from him—and wondered whether it could be applied to my mother too. It was always possible, given what I knew about her. Perhaps not really a stroke of luck, but maybe more like a relief. My father had always been a man who filled the room. He was bossy, and he was hard work. When he was around, no one else mattered but
him: his character demanded that all of our lives should revolve around his.

  “And you?” Bruno asked me after a while.

  “What about me?”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Oh, I’m going away, I think. If I can manage it.”

  “Where to?”

  “To Asia maybe. I don’t know yet.”

  I had hardly ever spoken to him about my longing to travel. I was tired of being penniless, especially so since I needed money in order to leave: in the past few years I had spent all my energy just struggling to make ends meet. I didn’t miss any of the things that I didn’t have, except for the freedom to travel the world. With my father’s small inheritance I had paid off my debts and wanted to devise a project that would take me far away from home. I felt like taking a flight somewhere and staying away for a few months, without any clear idea as to what I would do, just to see if I could find some story to tell. I had never done anything like this before.

  “It must be great to leave like that,” Bruno said.

  “Would you like to come?” I asked. I was joking, but not entirely. I was sorry that the work had come to an end. Never before had I felt so at ease with anyone.

  “No, it’s not for me,” he said. “You’re the one who comes and goes. I’m the one who stays put. Same as always, right?”