Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

My father became frightened. He rushed to my aid in alarm, jumping back across the crevasse and in doing so tangling the ropes that held the three of us together. His fear surprised me—I had expected his anger instead—but at the time I had not realized the risks he had taken by leading us up there: eleven years old, poorly equipped and pursued by bad weather, we were being dragged up the glacier by his obstinacy. He knew that the only cure for altitude sickness was to go down to a lower level, and he did not hesitate before starting the descent. He reversed the order on the rope so that I could walk ahead and stop when I felt unwell: there was nothing left in my stomach, but every so often I was convulsed by dry retching, spitting out drool.

Soon we were entering the fog. From his end of the rope my father asked: “How are you feeling? Do you have a headache?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And how’s your stomach?”

“A bit better,” I answered, though what I felt above all was weak.

“Take this,” said Bruno. He gave me a handful of snow that he had compressed in his fist until it had turned to ice. I tried sucking it. Thanks partly to this, and partly to the relief afforded by the descent, my stomach began to calm down.

It was a morning in August in 1984, the last memory I have of that summer: the next day Bruno would return to the high pastures, and my father to Milan. But at that moment the three of us were on the glacier, together, in a way that would never happen again, with a rope that joined each of us to another, whether we wanted it to or not.

I kept stumbling over the crampons and could not walk straight. Bruno was immediately behind me, and soon I heard above the sound of our footsteps in the snow his Oh, oh, oh . It was the call with which he brought the cows back to the stable. Eh, eh, eh. Oh, oh, oh . He was using it to bring me back to the refuge, given that I could hardly stay on my feet by now: I abandoned myself to his song and let my legs adopt its rhythm and in that way no longer had to think about anything.

“But did you look into the crevasse?” he asked. “Holy shit it was deep.”

I did not answer. I still had in my eyes the image I had seen of them there, so close and triumphant, like father and son. In front of me now the fog and the snow formed a uniform whiteness, and I was concentrating only on not falling. Bruno said nothing else, and resumed his chanting.

WINTER, DURING THOSE YEARS, became for me the season of nostalgia. My father detested skiers and would not countenance mingling with them: there was something offensive to him in the game of going down the mountain without the effort required to climb it first, along a slope smoothed by snowcats and equipped with a ski lift. He despised them because they arrived in herds and left behind them nothing but ruins. Sometimes in the summer we would come across the pylon of a chairlift, or the remains of a caterpillar track stuck on a threadbare piste, or what was left of a disused cable station at altitude, a rusted wheel on a block of cement in the middle of scree.

“What this really needs is a bomb under it,” my father would say. And he was not joking.

It was the same frame of mind with which he would watch at Christmas the news items devoted to skiing holidays. Thousands of people from the cities invaded the Alpine valleys, got into queues at those stations, and hurtled down our paths—and he would disassociate himself from it all, locking himself away in the apartment in Milan. My mother once suggested that we should take a day trip to Grana, so that I could see it in the snow, and my father replied tersely: “No.” He wouldn’t like it. In the winter the mountain was not fit for humankind, and should be given a wide berth. According to his philosophy of ascending and coming down, or of going up above to escape the things that tormented you below, the climbing season needed to be followed by one of seriousness—by the period of work, of life on the flat, and of black moods.

In this way I too began to feel nostalgia for being in the mountains, the affliction to which I had seen him subjected for years without understanding its cause. Now I too found myself capable of becoming spellbound when La Grigna appeared at the end of an avenue. I would reread the pages of the Alpine Club Guide as if it were a personal diary, drinking in its antiquated prose, and it would give to me the illusion of retracing the paths it described step by step: climbing up steep grassy ridges to reach a neglected Alp . . . and from here, proceeding through scattered boulders and the residual ice field . . . to then attain the crest of the summit in the proximity of a pronounced depression . But in the meantime my legs became gradually paler, their scratches and scabs healed, and they forgot the stings of nettles, the icy sensation of fording streams without socks or shoes, and the relief afforded by cool bed sheets after an afternoon in the blazing sun. Nothing, in the winter city, could strike me with the same force. I observed it from behind a filter that rendered it faded and indistinct, just a fog of people and cars that needed to be got through twice a day; and when I looked from the window at the avenue below, the days spent in Grana seemed so far off as to make me question whether they had actually existed. Could I have invented them, just dreamed them up? But I only felt this until I noticed, in a new kind of light on the balcony, in a bud emerging in the grass between two lanes of traffic, that the spring was coming even to Milan, and my nostalgia turned to anticipation of the moment when I would go back up there again.

Bruno waited with the same excitement for that day to arrive. Except that I came and went, and he stayed. I think that from his vantage point in the fields he must have kept an eye out for our return, since he would come to find us within an hour of our arrival, shouting “Berio!” from the courtyard. This was the nickname with which he had baptized me. “Come on,” he would say, not bothering with any kind of greeting, or with saying anything else for that matter, as if we had last seen each other just the day before. And it was true: the intervening months were canceled in an instant, and our friendship seemed to be lived in a single uninterrupted summer.

Yet Bruno, in the meantime, had been growing up more quickly than me. He was almost always covered in dirt from the stables, and refused to come inside the house. He would wait on the balcony, leaning on the balustrade, which we almost never did ourselves, since it would move the moment you touched it, convincing us that one of these days it would collapse. He would look over his shoulder as if checking to see whether he’d been followed: he had absconded from his cows and was taking me away from my books, to have adventures which he did not want to ruin by talking about them.

“Where are we going?” I would ask while lacing my boots.

“Into the mountains,” he would limit himself to saying, with a mocking tone that he had developed, perhaps the same tone that he used when answering his uncle. He was smiling. All I needed to do was to trust him. My mother trusted me, and would often enough repeat that she didn’t worry because she knew that I would do nothing wrong. Nothing “wrong”—rather than reckless or stupid—as if she was alluding to quite other dangers that would come my way in life. She did not resort to prohibitions or to other advice before letting us leave.

Going into the mountains with Bruno had nothing to do with the peaks. Although we did follow a path into the woods, climbing quickly for half an hour, we would at some point known only to him leave the beaten track and continue along other routes. Up a gorge even, or through the thickest fir cover. It was a mystery to me how he got his bearings. He walked fast, following an internal map which indicated passageways where all I could see was a collapsed bank or a scar that looked too steep. But right at the last moment, between two twisted pines, the rock would reveal a fissure that we could get a purchase on to climb, and a ledge, which had been invisible at first, would allow us to cross it with ease. Some of these trails had been first opened up with the blows of pickaxes. When I asked him who had used them he would say, “the miners,” or, alternatively: “the woodcutters,” pointing out the telltale signs that I was incapable of noticing. The winding gear of a cable lift, rusted and overgrown with weeds. The earth that beneath a drier layer was still blackened by fire, where a charcoal works had been. The woods were littered with these excavations, mounds, and ruins, which Bruno interpreted for me as if they were phrases written in a dead language. Together with these cryptic signs he would teach me a dialect that I found less abstract than Italian: as soon as I was in the mountains it was as if I would need to substitute the concrete language of things for the abstract language of books, now that the things themselves were tangible and I could touch them with my own hands. The larch: la brenga . The spruce: la pezza ; the Swiss pine: l’arula . An overhanging rock under which to take cover from the rain was a barma . A stone was a berio —and so was I, Pietro. I was very fond of that nickname. Every river cut a valley and so was called a valey ; every valley had two sides with contrasting characteristics: an adret nicely exposed to the sun, where there were villages and fields, and an envers that was damp and in shadow, left to the forest and to wildlife. But of the two it was this reverse side that we preferred.