The Eight Mountains

by Paolo Cognetti

  ANITA WAS BORN in the autumn, like all mountain folk.

  I was not there that year: in Nepal I had come into contact with the world of NGOs and was working with a group of them. I was filming documentaries in the villages where schools and hospitals were being built, agricultural projects or employment initiatives for women were being developed, and where sometimes camps for Tibetan refugees were being set up. I didn’t like everything that I was seeing. The managers in Kathmandu were no more than careerist politicians. But in the mountains themselves I came across people of every sort: from old hippies to students doing VSO; from volunteer medics to mountaineers who between one expedition and another would stay on to work as builders. Not even these examples of humanity were entirely free from ambition and power struggles, but what they did not lack was idealism. And I liked being amongst idealists.

  I was in Mustang, in June—an arid plateau on the border with Tibet, made up of small white houses clinging to the red rock—when my mother wrote to let me know that she had just gone up to Grana and discovered that Lara was five months pregnant. She felt immediately called to do her duty. Throughout the summer she sent me updates that resembled medical reports: in June Lara had twisted her ankle while she was out in the pasture, and had continued to hobble around for days; in July, with her very pale skin, she suffered sunstroke while making hay; in August, with backache and swollen legs, she still carried down the cheese twice a week with the mule. My mother would order her to rest. Lara would not hear of it. When Bruno suggested that they should hire someone to do her work she refused, saying that the cows were all pregnant too and that no one made a fuss about it, that seeing them so calm actually helped her to relax.

  I had come to Kathmandu at the height of the monsoon season. Every afternoon the city was whipped by a storm. Then the crazy traffic of motorbikes and bicycles would cease, the packs of street dogs would seek refuge under overhanging roofs, the streets themselves become rivers of mud and rubbish—and I would shut myself in some place or other with a phone line, in front of an ancient computer, and catch up on the latest news. I did not know whether to admire Lara most, expecting her first child in an alpeggio, or that other woman, now seventy years old, who would climb up to visit her on foot and accompany her to the hospital each month. The August scan established beyond doubt that Lara was expecting a girl. Even now she continued to pasture the cows, with a belly so big that it prevented any movement except simply walking in front of the herd, then sitting under a tree to watch over it.

  Then on the last Sunday of September, with their hides brushed and shining, their embroidered leather collars and their ceremonial bells, the cows went down to the valley in a solemn end of season procession. Bruno installed them in the stable he had rented for the winter, and at that point there was nothing left to do but wait. He must have done a certain amount of calculation, in true mountain man style, because Lara gave birth soon after, as if that too was seasonal work.

  I remember where I was when my mother gave me the news: in lower Dolpo, on the shore of a lake that uncannily resembled an Alpine one, surrounded by woods of red fir and Buddhist temples, together with a girl that I had met in Kathmandu. She worked at an orphanage in the city, but at that time we had taken a few days off and headed for the mountains together. In a refuge without a stove at three and a half thousand meters, the walls of which were nothing more than small shingles painted blue, we had put together our two sleeping bags and huddled inside: through the window I looked out at the star-studded sky and the pointed tops of the fir trees as she slept. At a certain point I saw the moon rise. I stayed awake a long time, thinking about my friend Bruno who had just become a father.

  • • •

  When I returned to Italy in 2010 I found it deep in a grotesque economic crisis. Milan announced it to me on arrival, with its airport looking virtually decommissioned: four planes on kilometers of runway, and the window displays of the high fashion brands glistening in the empty shops. From the train that took me to the city, freezing from the air conditioning on a July evening, I noticed building sites everywhere, tall cranes suspended, high-rise buildings with bizarre profiles that were taking shape on the horizon. I could not understand why all the newspapers were talking about all the money having run out when I was noticing in Milan, and also in Turin, a building boom that resembled that of a golden age. Going in search of old friends was like doing a tour of hospital wards: the production companies, the advertising agencies, and the television channels that I had worked for were shutting down due to bankruptcy, and many of those friends were at home on their sofas, doing nothing. Nearing forty, they were reduced to taking the odd day’s work and to accepting money from their retired parents. But look outside, one of them said to me, do you see the buildings sprouting up everywhere? Who is it that’s stealing what was due to us? Wherever I went I breathed in this air of disillusionment and anger, this intergenerational sense of grievance. It was a relief to have in my pocket already the ticket with which I would be able to leave.

  A few days later I took a coach to the mountains, then another at the beginning of the valley, and got off at the bar where I used to go with my mother to make calls, though there was no longer any trace there of the red phone box.

  I followed the path on foot, just as before. The old mule track cut through the bends of the asphalted road and soon became choked with brambles and leaves, so rather than follow it I went up through the woods, relying on my memory of the way. When I came out on the other side I discovered that next to the ruins of the tower a mobile phone mast had gone up, and that down in the gully a cement dam interrupted the flow of the river. The little artificial reservoir was full of mud from the thaw: an excavator was fishing it out of the water and dumping it on the bank, destroying with its caterpillar tracks and the muddy sand the meadows where Bruno used to graze cattle as a boy.

  Then, as always, I got beyond Grana and it seemed like I was leaving every poisoned thing behind me. It was like entering the sacred valley when going to Annapurna: except that here it was not any religious precept but simply neglect that had left everything unchanged. I discovered again the clearing that as children Bruno and I called the sawmill, because two tracks remained there together with a trolley used who knows how long ago for cutting planks of wood for buildings. Nearby there was a cable lift for dispatching those planks up to the alpeggi, the steel cable wound around a larch tree that with the passage of time had engulfed it in bark. They had forgotten my childhood mountain because it wasn’t worth anything—and it was fortunate in this respect. I slowed down like the Nepalese porters who would whisper at high altitude: bistare, bistare. I did not want these moments to be over too soon. Every time I went back up there I felt like I was returning to my own self, to the place where I was most like myself again and felt best.

  At the farmstead they were expecting me for lunch. Bruno, Lara, the little Anita who at less than a year old was playing on a blanket in the middle of a meadow, and my mother who did not take her eyes off her for a moment. She said: “It’s your Uncle Pietro, Anita, look!” and immediately brought her to me to get acquainted. The little girl looked at me with suspicion, intrigued by my beard; she tugged it, and making a sound that I didn’t catch started laughing at her new discovery. My mother seemed quite different from the aging woman I had said goodbye to when I left. Other things had altered too; the whole farmstead was livelier than I remembered it: the new chickens and rabbits, the mule, the cows, the dogs, a fire on which the polenta and a stew were cooking, the table laid in the open air.

  Bruno was so pleased to see me again that he embraced me. It was a gesture so unusual between us that as he squeezed me I wondered how much he might have changed. When we separated I looked hard at his face, searching for wrinkles, gray hairs, the heaviness of age in his features. I had the impression that he was looking for the same in mine. Were we still the same? Then he sat me down at the head of the table and poured the drinks: four glasses brimming with re
d wine with which to toast my return.

  I was no longer used to wine or meat, and soon felt intoxicated by both. I was speaking nonstop. Lara and my mother took turns to get up and look after Anita, until the little girl began to feel sleepy and there was a sign, I think, or a silent understanding between them, and my mother gathered her up in her arms and moved away cradling her. I had brought back as a gift a teapot, cups, and a packet of black tea, so after lunch I made some, Tibetan style, with butter and salt, even if the Alpine butter was not as strong or rancid as butter made from yak’s milk. While I was mixing it I told them that in Tibet they used butter in every way imaginable: they burned it in lamps, spread it as a moisturizer on women’s hair, mixed it with human bones in sky burials.

  “What?” said Bruno.

  I explained that on the high plateaus there wasn’t enough wood to cremate corpses: the dead were flayed and left on top of a hill so that the vultures would devour them. After a few days they would return and find the bones picked clean. The skull and the skeleton were then pounded up and mixed with butter and flour, so that this too would become food for the birds.

  “How horrible,” Lara said.

  “But why?” said Bruno.

  “Can you imagine it? The dead person there on the ground and the vultures eating them piece by piece?”

  “Well, being put in a hole in the ground is not so very different,” I said. “Something will end up eating you there as well.”

  “Yes, but at least you don’t have to see it,” Lara said.

  “I think it’s a great idea,” said Bruno. “Food for the birds.”

  On the other hand he was disgusted by the tea, and emptied our cups as well as his own before filling them with grappa instead. The three of us were all a little drunk by now. He put his arm around Lara’s shoulders and said: “And what about the Himalayan girls? Are they as beautiful as those in the Alps?”

  I became serious without meaning to and mumbled something in reply.

  “You’re not turning into some kind of Buddhist monk, are you?”

  But Lara had picked up on the meaning of my reticence, and answered for me: “No, no. There is someone who is keeping him company.”

  Then Bruno looked at my face and smiled, seeing there that it was true, and I instinctively looked over to where my mother was, too far off to hear what we were saying.

  Later on I went to lie down beneath an old larch, a solitary tree that dominated the meadows above the house. I remained stretched out there with my eyes half-closed and my hands behind my head, looking at the summits and the ridges of the Grenon through the branches and surrendering to sleep. That view always reminded me of my father. I thought that in some way, without knowing it, this strange family amongst which I had found myself had been founded by him. Who knows what he would have made of it, seeing us all together at that lunch. His wife, his son, his other son from the mountains, a young woman, and a little girl. If we had really been brothers, I thought, Bruno could be nothing other than the eldest. He was the one who made things. The builder of houses, a family, a business: the firstborn with his land, his livestock, his offspring. I was the younger brother, the squanderer. The one who does not get married, does not have children, and who travels the world without sending news for months at a time, turning up out of the blue on the day of a party, just as lunch is about to be served. Who would have thought that, eh Dad? Immersed in these alcohol-induced musings, I fell asleep in the sun.

  • • •

  I spent a few weeks with them that summer. Not long enough to stop feeling that I was only visiting, but too long to just sit around doing nothing. Up at Barma my two-year absence had left its mark, so much so in fact that when I saw the house again I felt like apologizing: the invasive vegetation had already begun to lay siege to her, certain roof tiles were warped or out of place, and when I left I had forgotten to remove the piece of chimney flue that stuck out of the wall, so that the snow had broken it and caused some damage inside the house as well. It would have taken only a few more years for the mountain to reclaim her, and to reduce her again to the pile of rubble that she was before. I decided to devote my remaining time there to the house, preparing her for my next departure.

  Spending time with Bruno and Lara I discovered that something else had begun to deteriorate while I was away. When my mother was not there and Anita had been put to bed, the place changed from being a happy farmstead to being a business that was in the red—and my friends became squabbling financial partners. Lara talked about nothing else. She told me that the sums they made from cheese making did not even cover the mortgage repayments. The money came and went, leaving them with nothing to spare, and making no inroad on their debt with the bank. Living up there in the summer they were able to be almost self-sufficient, but in the winter, what with the rent for the stables and other costs, they were really struggling. They had needed to take out another loan. New debts with which to pay for old.

  That summer Lara had decided to cut out the middleman, bypassing the distributor that I had met and selling directly to shopkeepers, even though it meant a load more work for her. Twice every week she would leave the little girl with my mother in Grana and go by car to make deliveries, leaving Bruno to manage on his own. They should have taken someone on, but this would have put them back where they started again.

  He would start fuming soon after she began telling me about these things. One evening he said: “Can’t we change the subject? We hardly ever see Pietro. Do we always have to be talking about money?”

  Lara took offense. “So what should we be talking about?” she said. “Let’s see, what about yaks? What do you think, Pietro, could we set up a nice business breeding yaks?”

  “It’s not such a bad idea,” Bruno said.

  “Listen to him,” Lara said to me. “Living up here on the mountain with his head in the clouds he doesn’t have any of the problems of us mere mortals. And then to him— But remember that it’s you who got us into this mess, right?”

  “That’s right,” said Bruno. “They’re my debts. You shouldn’t take them too much to heart.”

  Hearing that she glared at him furiously, got up abruptly, and left. He immediately regretted having uttered such words.

  “She’s right,” he said. “But what can I do? I can’t work any harder than I am already. And thinking about money all the time solves nothing, so it’s preferable to think about something else, isn’t it?”

  “But how much do you need?” I asked.

  “Forget it. If I told you you’d be shocked.”

  “Perhaps I can help. Perhaps I can stay here and work until the end of the season.”

  “Thanks, but no.”

  “You wouldn’t have to pay me of course. I’d be only too pleased to help.”

  “No,” said Bruno, curtly.

  • • •

  In the days that were left before my departure we did not mention the subject again. Lara kept to herself, offended, worried, busying herself around the little girl. Bruno pretended that nothing had happened. I would go up and down from Grana with the materials I needed to fix the house: I had reapplied cement where it was needed, stopped up the chimney flue, cleared the weeds from the surrounding land. I’d had larch tiles cut similar to the old ones, and was on the roof replacing them when Bruno arrived to see me: perhaps he had intended us to go up the mountain together, but finding me on the roof changed his mind, and he climbed up to join me there instead.

  It was a job that we had already done, six years ago now. We quickly found our old rhythm. Bruno removed the old nails and I threw them down onto the grass, then I put the new tile into place and held it firm while he hammered it down. There was no need to say anything. For an hour it seemed as if we had gone back to that summer, when our lives still had direction and we had nothing to worry about other than building a wall or raising a beam. It was over too quickly. In the end the roof was like new, and I went to the fountain to get two beers that I kept cold ther
e in its icy water.

  That morning I had taken down the prayer flags, faded by the sun and rain and torn by the wind, and had burned them in the stove. Then I hung up some new ones, stringing them this time between the rock face and a corner of the house rather than between trees, thinking about the stupas that I had seen in Nepal. Now they were dancing in the wind above my father’s epitaph, seeming to be blessing him. Bruno was watching them when I went back onto the roof.

  “What’s written on those things?” he asked.

  “They’re prayers asking for good fortune,” I said. “Prosperity. Peace. Harmony.”

  “And do you believe in that?”

  “In what, good fortune?”

  “No, in praying.”

  “I don’t know. But they put me in a good mood. And that’s enough, no?”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  I was reminded of our own good luck charm, and looked to see how it was getting on. The little Swiss pine was still there, as delicate and contorted as the day when it was transplanted—but still alive. By now it was heading towards its seventh winter. It too was swaying in the wind, but inspired neither peace nor harmony: tenacity, if anything. A clinging on to life. I thought that in Nepal these were not virtues—but that in the Alps, perhaps, they were.

  I opened the beers. Handing one to Bruno I asked: “So how’s it going, being a father?”

  “How’s it going? I’d like to know the answer to that myself.”

  He raised his eyes to the sky, and then added: “For now it’s easy. I carry her in my arms and stroke her as if she were a little rabbit or a kitten. That I know how to do. I’ve always done it. The difficulty will come when I have to tell her about things.”

  “But why?”

  “What do I know about anything? In my life I’ve only ever known this.”

  When he said this he made a gesture with his hand to encompass the lake, the woods, the meadows, and the scree that we had in front of us. I did not know if he had ever gone away from there, or if he had, how far. I had never even asked, partly in order not to offend him, partly because the answer would not have changed anything.