Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

“A hundred? Really?” asked Bruno.

“Perhaps even more. It’s difficult to determine exactly. You’d need to know the exact degree of incline and friction. You can try an experiment first.”

“How?”

“Ah, that’s easy. Do you see those crevasses up there above? Tomorrow we’ll go there, throw in a coin, then go and sit in the river and wait for it to arrive.”

My father laughed. Bruno continued looking at the crevasses and at the glacier where it jutted below, and you could tell that he was fascinated by the idea. For my part I was not so interested in bygone winters. I could feel in the pit of my stomach that we were about to go beyond the level at which, on previous occasions, our ascent had come to an end. The timing was also unusual: in the afternoon we had felt a few drops of rain, and now with evening falling we were heading into fog. It felt very strange to discover, at the end of the moraine, a wooden building on two stories. The smell of fumes from a generator announced its proximity, followed by voices shouting in a language I did not recognize. The wooden platform at the entrance, pockmarked by crampons, was cluttered with rucksacks, ropes, sweaters, vests, and thick socks hung out everywhere to dry; and by climbers crossing it in unlaced boots, carrying their washing.

That evening the refuge was full. No one would be turned away, but some would have to sleep on benches, or even on tables. Bruno and I were the youngest members of this gathering by far; we were amongst the first to eat, and to make room for others to do so we went immediately upstairs afterwards to the large dorm where we would be sharing a bed. Up there, fully dressed under a rough blanket, we spent a long while waiting for sleep to come. Through the window we could not see the stars or the gleam of the lights in the valley below, only the burning ends of the cigarettes of those who went outside for a smoke. We listened to the men on the ground floor: after supper they were comparing itineraries for the next day, discussing the uncertain weather conditions and recounting other nights spent in refuges, and old exploits made from them. My father had ordered a liter of wine and joined the others, and every so often I could make out his voice. Despite not having any conquest of summits in prospect, he had nevertheless made a name for himself as the guy who was taking two young boys up a glacier, and the role filled him with pride. He had encountered several people from his own neck of the woods and was exchanging jokes with them in Veneto dialect. Being shy, I felt embarrassed for him.

Bruno said: “Your father knows a thing or two, doesn’t he?”

“He sure does,” I said.

“It’s good that he teaches you about it.”

“Why, doesn’t yours?”

“I don’t know. It always seems like I irritate him.”

I thought to myself that my father was good at talking but that listening was not his strong point. Nor was paying much attention to me, otherwise he would have noticed how I was feeling: I had struggled to eat, and it would have been better to have had nothing, tormented as I now was by nausea. The smell of soup rising from the kitchen was making things worse. I was taking deep breaths to calm my stomach, and Bruno noticed: “Are you not feeling well?”

“Not really.”

“Would you like me to call your father?”

“No, no. It’ll go away in a minute.”

I was keeping my stomach warm with my hands. I would have liked more than anything to be in my own bed, and to hear my mother nearby in front of the stove. We remained in silence until at ten the supervisor announced lights-out and turned off the generator, plunging the refuge into darkness. A little while later we saw the light from the head torches of men coming upstairs in search of somewhere to sleep. My father also passed by, the grappa heavy on his breath, to see how we were: I kept my eyes shut and pretended to be asleep.

In the morning we left before daybreak. Now the fog filled the valleys below us and the sky was clear, the color of mother-of-pearl, with the last stars slowly fading out as the light spread. We had not anticipated dawn by much: the mountaineers heading for the most distant peaks had already left some time ago; we had heard them fumbling in the middle of the night and could now see some of them roped together high up, nothing more than miniature shipwrecks in a sea of white.

My father attached for us the crampons that he had hired, and roped us together at a length of five meters from each other: himself first, then Bruno, then me. He strapped our chests with a complicated arrangement of the rope around our anoraks, but he hadn’t tied such knots for years and our preparation turned out to be long-winded and laborious. We ended up being the last to leave the refuge: we had still to cover a stretch of scree which our crampons knocked against and tended to get stuck in, and the rope hampered my movement and made me feel clumsy, burdened with too much gear. But everything changed the moment I set foot on snow. From my baptism on the glacier I remember this: an unexpected strength in my legs, the steel points biting through the hard snow, the crampons that gripped to perfection.

I had woken feeling reasonably well, but after a while the warmth from the refuge dissipated, and the nausea began to grow. Up ahead my father was pulling the group on. I could see that he was in a hurry. Although he had claimed that he only wanted to have a short excursion, I suspected that he harbored a secret hope of reaching some peak or other, surprising the other climbers by turning up at the summit with the two of us in tow. But I was struggling. Between one step and the next it was as if a hand was wringing my stomach. Whenever I stopped to get my breath the rope between myself and Bruno tautened, forcing him to stop as well, the tension then reaching my father who would turn around to look at me, annoyed.

“What’s going on?” he asked. He thought that I was playing up. “Let’s get a move on.”

As the sun rose three black shadows appeared on the glacier next to us. Then the snow lost its bluish tinge and became blindingly white, and almost immediately afterwards began to give way beneath our crampons. The clouds below us were swelling with the heat of the morning, and even I understood that soon they would rise up as they had the day before. The idea of reaching anywhere was becoming more and more unrealistic, but my father was not the kind of person to admit the fact and withdraw: on the contrary, he was stubbornly determined to plow on. At a certain point we encountered a crevasse; he gauged its width carefully by eye and with one determined step got across it, planted the ice pick in the snow and wound the rope around it to reel Bruno in.

I no longer had any interest in what we were doing. The sunrise, the glacier, the chain of summits that surrounded us, the clouds that separated us from the world: I was indifferent to all of this otherworldly beauty. All I wanted was for someone to tell me how much further we had to walk. I got to the edge of the crevasse where Bruno, in front of me, was leaning out to look into it. My father told him to take a deep breath and to jump. While waiting for my turn I looked around: beneath us on one side the mountain’s incline became sheerer, and the glacier split in a steep serac; beyond the wreck of broken, collapsed, and piled up blocks, the refuge from where we had started out was being engulfed by fog. It seemed to me now that we would never get back, and when I looked at Bruno for support he was already on the other side of the crevasse. My father was slapping him on the back, congratulating him on the jump that he had executed. Not I, I would never be able to get across; my stomach gave in, and I threw up my breakfast onto the snow. And so it was that my altitude sickness was no longer a secret.