Black Mountain

by Venero Armanno

Mark called inside, knowing there would be no answer. ‘Hello?’

  Then in a hallway: ‘Mr Montenero?’

  The dogs had rushed in ahead of him. Their claws scuttled over a polished floor scarred by plenty of dog activity, and they huddled into a comfortable downstairs lounge room. It was full of deep chairs, dark couches, a four-seat sofa, a sideboard and an enormous fireplace. There was no sign of life.

  Not wanting to, feeling the trepidation growing inside him, Mark slowly walked through every downstairs room. He discovered a large country kitchen in need of paint and new utensils and appliances. There was a walk-in pantry as big as his bedroom at home, a formal dining room, the living room, a sunroom like a ballroom, and small, quaint sitting areas. A black Bakelite telephone was on a squat mahogany table by an upright chair, almost exactly as he’d pictured it.

  Mark could see the old man named Cesare Montenero sitting there, speaking to him, his breath coming hard with inexplicable physical distress.

  Shaking, he went up the carpeted internal staircase and found a vast study lined with bookshelves. They were heavy with books. Many different languages. There were two desks for working at. For writing at, Mark corrected himself. No computer. Another sofa, more soft lounge chairs, walls that were a deep red colour, and a black carpet. The room ought to have looked funereal but didn’t. Not in the slightest.

  The top floor, the third.

  Two glistening bathrooms and many bedrooms, all of them large, built for an extended family, for visiting relatives, for guests. None of these rooms looked as if they had ever been occupied. The beds and the furniture were dusty. There was little light. Mark didn’t count how many bedrooms, for he soon found what was clearly the owner of the manor’s own room.

  It was a well-appointed master bedroom with an ensuite. This place had been lived in, very well lived in, perhaps in preference to the rest of the house. Mark checked Cesare Montenero’s closets, thought he could even smell the old man on all the clothes hanging there. Rows of shoes. Nothing gaudy or expensive. Mostly apparel for the property, for farming land. The dressers held undershirts and underwear, socks and belts. There were bottles of prescription medications, but only a few.

  A lint brush; a mirror; a clean hairbrush.

  Mark slipped out of the bedroom, not wanting to intrude further. He couldn’t help wondering, How many people live in this house? The answer came to him.

  One old man. Three dogs.

  Or, perhaps now, simply three dogs.

  He shivered again.

  Mark returned to the living room and tried to make himself comfortable as night started to creep through the house. The fireplace was cold. There were gas heaters but he didn’t touch them. They weren’t his. He oughtn’t even to have been inside this place. Where was the old writer?

  You think you want to live forever?

  I never used to.

  The cold turned deep and strong but the longer Mark was in the house, the better he felt. He was hungry, but tired too. Soon he curled up in the deep sofa. The dogs snored softly. There was nothing to see outside now, only an inky black. And it was quiet. An absolute and utter quiet. No wind either.

  What was going on?

  Once you’re here you’ll know where you are.

  Mark didn’t know.

  He wondered how an image of a blank-faced thing with no eyes and pasty, gelatinous skin had got him here.

  He slept.

  The night passed and the cold didn’t get inside him.

  In the morning little had changed, except that the new day filled the house with light and the dogs needed to go outside.

  They also wanted to be fed. So did Mark.

  He opened the back door and the animals immediately scooted down the atrium and into the garden at the back. They urinated and defecated, poked around, sniffing at whatever life had gone on during the night. Mark let down his zip and urinated against the side of a tree. The blue sky caught his eye. He listened to birdsong nearby. He took in Mr Montenero’s patch of forest.

  The dogs came to his side and rubbed against him, licked at his hands. They were begging. Mark returned to the kitchen and opened Montenero’s refrigerator. There wasn’t much, and nothing for dogs. Then he remembered the pantry: he’d seen an older fridge in there. He took a look and had guessed correctly. There were plastic-wrapped packs of meat and bones from some produce store. Their labels read ‘Pooch Cuts’ and ‘Doggie Treats’. Mark took several packs outside, unwrapped them, and let the dogs have the lot. They ate heartily, and after they’d finished and had drunk plenty of fresh water from the bowls near an outside tap, they wouldn’t leave his side.

  He stood with them, eating cheese and slices of wholemeal bread.

  Mark wondered if he ought to look for a neighbour and find out if they knew anything about the old man and where he’d gone. He traversed the property, liking the day, the view, the terrain, the ambience. Across smooth paddocks of grass and in the towering branches of Chinese elms and hoop pines, white cockatoos feasted on nuts and seedlings, and tore off shreds and strips of tree bark.

  Nothing else. No one. No neighbours at all.

  He walked back to the house, looked down the driveway for an approaching vehicle.

  Empty.

  Once you’re here you’ll know where you are.

  Oh yeah?

  The dogs went playing in the patch of forest. They’d heard something in the undergrowth and wanted to investigate. Maybe a hare, Mark thought, or some kind of lizard. He followed in through the first thick line of trees. The dogs emerged from the brush onto a path, eyes bright, tails wagging. They hadn’t found anything but were happy enough. Mark looked around.

  So many trees, a heavy canopy, mottled sunlight.

  Mark had the place entirely to himself, yet he wasn’t at all lonely or sorrowful. It only felt right, to be so alone.

  He walked further into the jungle, going around eucalyptus and jacarandas, the wide trunks of the hoop pines. There was an ocean of foliage and he found that the leaf- and mulch-covered pathway lead to an old wooden picnic table and benches. Here the air wasn’t simply fresh and clear, it vibrated.

  Mark wished the owner of this place, the owner of that hoarse, gruffly accented voice that had spoken to him on the telephone, was there with him.

  Then he stopped breathing.

  Someone was here.

  No. He saw something. In the corner of his eye.

  Mark spun around. The dogs looked at him. Studied him. They sensed his apprehension. Mark tried to make sense of whatever it was that he’d glimpsed from the corner of his eye.

  The creature.

  There.

  Then he looked again.

  No – he’d been startled by something perfectly commonplace: the thick, abbreviated trunk of a dead eucalyptus deep in the undergrowth. It had one short branch. In the shadows of the forest canopy, in this indistinct light, it had looked for all the world like a monstrous one-armed thing.

  Still curious, Mark made his way through the brush, leaving the path. Lorikeets moved in the branches overhead.

  He found that the dead trunk had been cut by human hands and stood a little taller than chest-height. Mark saw that any other trees that had been chopped down over the years were simply stumps close to the ground – it would have taken ten times the effort for someone, especially an old man, if indeed it had been Montenero, to swing an axe to that sort of elevation. No downward motion to give the axe head greater swing and heft.

  And there, by the rotted trunk were abandoned tools. An axe, a mattock, a shovel.

  Slightly overgrown with weeds and thorny creepers.

  Mark contemplated this. Been laying there a while, then.

  The dogs waited patiently for whatever this young stranger might do next.

 
Mark remembered the old writer asking him what he’d done with his screenplay, with him replying that he’d got rid of everything, was going to trash his computer too, and had buried the paper copies in a box under a dead tree.

  You buried them under a dead tree?

  The hint of amusement in the old man’s voice, and a sort of longing.

  Mark’s heart thumped again. No way.

  He started in with the mattock first.

  The sun had climbed high into the sky, then had moved on, starting to sink. Just as the tip of the shovel Mark was using struck deep down into something that was clearly not a tree root or a rock, the dogs stiffened and tore away. It took Mark a moment to realise that someone had arrived.

  He heard an engine, a door slamming.

  A voice cried out, ‘Hello! Anyone home? It’s Peter!’

  Mark climbed out of the hole he’d dug, legs and arms aching, his soft palms long-since covered in the ragged remnants of blisters that had burst and bled.

  Filthy face running with sweat, Mark made his way from the jungle. A brightly painted van was in the driveway and a white-haired strutting cock of a man played with the dogs.

  At least now I’ll get some answers.

  As he came closer he saw the van was some kind of pet pickup and delivery service. ‘Godbless Pet Motel’, read its gaudily painted side panels.

  ‘Hey, hello, Peter here for the dogs. You working for Monty now?’

  ‘I’m doing some digging,’ Mark said, wanting to remain noncommittal.

  Peter slammed open a side door and the three dogs immediately jumped into the metal cages waiting for their transport. They clearly had done this many times before, and liked it.

  ‘The old fellow’s gone travelling, huh?’

  ‘I don’t know. What did he say?’

  ‘Not sure. He’s paid six months. Don’t you worry about the dogs, they’ll be fine with us. But funny someone Monty’s age makes plans so far ahead. I said to him, “What do I do if you don’t come back?” You know what he said?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘ “It’ll be clear by then.” ’ Peter laughed. ‘Yeah? Will it?’

  Mark thought about this. ‘Did he tell you anything else?’

  ‘Nuh.’ Peter rolled the side door shut. Mark was almost sorry to see the dogs leave him. ‘You gonna be a caretaker or something?’

  ‘No, just finishing a job.’

  ‘Well, have a good one. Guess I’ll be back in half a year. Me and these dogs are going to become very friendly.’

  Mark wanted to ask more questions, get some clearer idea of what was happening, but, he thought, really, now he had everything he needed to know. Old Montenero had decided to leave, had gone somewhere, and had arranged for his dogs to be looked after. Maybe things like utilities to the house had also been arranged, would be switched off soon enough.

  Then why had he agreed to let Mark visit?

  The van circled and then headed back down the driveway. Mark wiped his face of perspiration, gently rubbed his painful hands against his ruined shirt.

  Nothing made sense.

  Then he remembered the stroke of the shovel’s blade against something hard.

  It was a locked metal box and he extracted it from the dirt and broken shale. Kneeling on the leaf-covered forest floor, Mark used the tip of the mattock to carefully snap the latch. He thought his discovery’s contents might be precious and fragile, or they might be underwear and accounting pages.

  Old newspapers protected neatly bundled loose-leaf manuscripts. These were held together with twine. Written in Italian, the manuscripts seemed to be novels. Each had a title page and a date, and were all of course by Cesare Montenero. The titles were also in Italian, and perfectly similar: Monte Nero. Black Mountain.

  Same book, over and over.

  The dates showed the diligence with which Mr Montenero had kept at his craft all the way through the decades. There was no let-up, but the writing seemed to start around 1950. Nothing before that. Some of the random pages Mark tried to make sense of were mottled and water stained, but most were unspoiled, perfectly preserved.

  Beneath these bundles were a collection of quarto-sized notebooks with covers of different colours. Unlike the typed manuscripts, the bound notebooks were filled with steady handwriting in a blue fountain pen. From the very first page the script was neat and assured. The notebooks were numbered one to eight and the pages were hand-paginated so that by the end of the last book there were three hundred and seventy-three pages.

  A title was written small and neat on the facing page of number One, which was a black notebook. It wasn’t called Monte Nero. The title was Sulphur.

  It took Mark a moment to realise that all the handwriting was in English. Astonished, he turned the page. Its first words were addressed to someone.

  So you’ve found me.

  The air in the jungle seemed to shiver.

  Mark Alter slammed the black book shut.

  Then he waited for his thoughts to make a straight line.

  They did make a straight line, and the line went from Mr Cesare Montenero, once only a hoarse voice on a telephone line, directly to himself.

  Because those words were addressed to him. They had to be.

  Mark took the metal box and all its contents into the house. He couldn’t do anything about the Italian manuscripts, but the notebooks . . .

  Before he started reading he had to calm down. Occupy himself a little.

  It wasn’t easy.

  Mark ate some of the old writer’s food. He had a glass of wine from a corked bottle in the refrigerator. He took his time building a wood fire in the living room’s fireplace and getting it ablaze.

  Then and only then did young Mark Alter trust himself to sit down with the first volume. The black book. His hands were cold and his heartbeat was irregular, but from the very first words he felt an affinity with everything that was written.

  In fact, the old man said it himself:

  So you’ve found me.

  And that means you’ve found yourself.

  Please don’t look away.

  Black Book (i)

  I don’t know who you are, friend, your name, your age.

  I don’t know what you know, what you might suspect, what you imagine you are.

  It’s a mystery to me how you think of yourself and how you perceive the world and its souls. I can only tell you my story. Perhaps it will turn out to be our story combined, perhaps not.

  If these first pages sing somewhere inside you, then we’re on the right track. If they leave you cold, we’re wrong. You’re free to burn these pages and to never have to turn your thoughts towards one lost old man.

  This is how it starts.

  A long time ago, in another place, I had a different name. Now I know that it was the name I had when the bastards gave up on me: Sette, which means ‘Seven’.

  So, at the start, there were at least six others like me.

  There must have been many more who came later, children nicely labelled Otto, Nove, Dieci.

  They got rid of me young, sold me, I believe, at maybe four or five years of age. There’s no town or village that I was born into, and I don’t remember the faces of any people who surrounded and studied me. I do recall a mood, however, a permeating sense of failure and disappointment. I don’t know why this has stayed with me over so many scores of years, but I do know they started getting rid of us, the ones who hadn’t already died or gone mad.

  There’s an unclear picture in my mind of a man delivering me to another man, and a transfer to a place that in my innocence must have looked both beautiful and strange. I learned that this would be the start of my new life. I was sold and this was a perfect act of subterfuge. In that era the Sicilian poor usually lived with a plen
tiful supply of children, and the strongest males could be sold young in order to bring the family some small but much-needed income. Not to mention fewer mouths to feed. It wasn’t called slavery, though that’s what it was.

  The subterfuge was that I was supposed to be one of these pressed boys, dumped here from some tiny village, from some worthless family. So now who would be able to trace my true antecedents?

  For the first thirteen years of my life I was in Caltagirone, famous for the production of pottery, terracotta and ceramics. The principal feature of the town remains its decorated Staircase of Santa Maria del Monte, with its one hundred and forty-two steps, on which construction had started in 1602 in the old part of the town. Each of those steps is lovingly and painstakingly hand-decorated. Go see them, friend. Once a year they’re lit by candles in veneration of Saint James, the city’s patron saint, and when our master was happy with us – which was not a common occurrence – the luckier boys would be brought out to the ceremony in order to appreciate the sort of fine work that had been in the Gozzi family business for centuries.

  Caltagirone is in the province of Catania, and I was housed with many other children who were mostly older than me. Our master was Aldo Gozzi. He and his family business created and manufactured tiles for the great houses of Italy and Europe.

  Using boys for labour was an easy enterprise for a man like Gozzi. We were beaten into working hard, and we ate little and died frequently. His command was everything. Whenever a boy collapsed for a last time under the weight of the clay he was carrying, his corpse was bundled into a sack and transported away in a cart. If coughs and fevers commenced, the onset of influenza, asthma or tuberculosis, the individual in question was quickly moved to the so-called ‘medical quarters’ and was deemed very lucky indeed if he was ever seen again.

  One day Gozzi had acquired a group of new boys of particular ruddy health, so he decided to prune his existing workforce of bony children. He picked me out, plus six others, and without ceremony and in the rags we were wearing he made us stand in front of a gathering of prospective new masters. Gozzi’s overseer recorded transactions in a ledger as the other six boys were purchased almost immediately. My sin, apparently, was to be the most emaciated of all.