Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

There no one could disturb us and we could go hunting for treasure. There really were mines in the woods surrounding Grana: tunnels closed off, boarded up with a few planks that had already been trespassed through before us. In the old times, according to Bruno, they had found gold there, searching for seams all over the mountains. But they had not managed to extract everything. Surely there must be a little remaining. And so we would enter into blind tunnels which ended in nothing after a few meters. And into others that went deep and were winding and pitch black inside. The ceilings were so low as to make it difficult to walk upright. The water that dripped down the walls gave the impression that the whole thing might cave in at any moment: I knew how dangerous it was, and I also knew that I was betraying my mother’s trust, since there was nothing very sensible about poking around in such deathtraps—the sense of guilt I felt ruined any pleasure there might have been in doing so. I longed to be like Bruno, to have the courage to rebel openly and to accept any punishment that might follow, with my head held high. Instead I disobeyed furtively, and was ashamed of what I had got away with. I would think about these things as my feet were soaked by the puddles of water in there. We never did find gold: sooner or later the tunnels turned out to have been blocked by a cave-in, or just became too dark to go along any further, and there was no choice but to retreat.

We made up for the disappointment by ransacking some ruins on the way home. Shepherds’ huts that we came across in the woods, constructed from whatever came to hand there, resembling burrows. Bruno would pretend to be discovering them with me. I suspect that he knew every one of those overgrown cabins, but it was more fun to be shoulder-barging open their doors as if for the first time. Inside we would purloin a dented bowl or the terminally blunted blade of a scythe, and imagine them to be valuable finds—and in the village, before parting, we would divide the spoils.

In the evening my mother would ask me where we had been.

“Just around here,” I would answer, with a shrug. In front of the stove I did not give her much satisfaction now.

“Did you find anything worth seeing?”

“Of course, Mum. The woods.”

She would give me a melancholy look, as if she were losing me. She really believed that the silence between two people was the origin of all their troubles.

“All I want to know is that you are OK,” she would say, giving up and abandoning me to my thoughts.

In the other battle she was fighting at Grana she held firm. From the beginning she had taken Bruno’s education to heart, like a personal crusade, but she knew full well that she could achieve nothing on her own: she needed to forge alliances with the women of his family. She had understood that his mother would be of no help at all, so she concentrated her efforts on his aunt. This is how my mother operated: knocking on doors and gaining entrance to homes, returning in a friendly but determined manner, not relenting until the aunt eventually committed to sending him to school during the winter—and over to our place to do homework in the summer. This was already quite an achievement. I don’t know what the uncle thought about the matter; perhaps up there in the alpeggio he was cursing the lot of us. Or perhaps, in truth, nobody in that family really cared anything about the boy.

And so it is that I remember long hours spent with Bruno in our kitchen doing history and geography revision, while outside the woods and the river and the sky beckoned. He would be sent to us three times a week, scrubbed and well dressed for the occasion. My mother would get him to read aloud from my books—Stevenson, Verne, Twain, Jack London—and would leave them with him after the lesson so that he could continue practicing while he was up in the pastures. Bruno liked reading novels, but studying grammar always sent him into a crisis: for him it was like studying a foreign language. And seeing how he got entangled with the rules of Italian, failing to spell a word correctly or stuttering over a conjunction, I felt humiliated on his behalf and annoyed with my mother. I could not see the justice of what we were forcing him to do. And yet Bruno did not utter a single word of protest or complaint. He understood how much it mattered to her, and perhaps having never experienced before what is was like to matter to someone, he struggled hard to learn.

Only on rare occasions during the summer was he allowed to come walking with us, and these were his holidays, the reward for the efforts that went into his studies: whether it was a summit we were taken to by my father, or just a field where my mother would spread out a blanket for lunch. On these occasions I would see Bruno transformed. Though undisciplined by nature, he would adapt to the rules and the rituals of our family. And whilst with me he already behaved like a grown-up, with my parents he would happily regress to his proper age. He allowed my mother to feed him, to dress him, to caress him—while my father inspired in him a respect that bordered on adulation. I could see it in the way he would follow behind him on the path, and how he would listen in rapt silence when my father started explaining something. These were perfectly ordinary moments in the life of a family, but Bruno had never experienced anything like them—and part of me felt proud of them, as if they were gifts that I myself had bestowed on him. On the other hand I would sometimes watch him with my father to try to gauge the nature of the understanding that there was between them, and I would feel that Bruno would have made a good son for him—perhaps not a better one than I was, but in a certain sense a more suitable one. Bruno was full of questions for him that he would ask naturally, without hesitation. He had the confidence that allowed him to get close to my father, and the physical strength to follow him anywhere. I would think these things but then try to suppress them, as if they were something about which I should be ashamed.

Eventually Bruno passed not only the first grade of senior school but the second and even the third, achieving an “average” mark in the exam. It was such an event in his family that his aunt phoned us immediately in Milan to give us the news. What a peculiar word, I thought, and wondered who had come up with it, since there was nothing “average” about Bruno. My mother on the other hand was simply delighted, and when we went back up to Grana she took him a prize: a box of chisels and gouges for working with wood. Then she began to ask herself what else she could do for him.

The summer of 1987 arrived: we were fourteen. We spent an entire month dedicated to a systematic exploration of the river. Not from its banks this time, or from the paths that intersected it from the woods, but in the water itself, in the current, jumping from rock to rock or wading within it. We had never heard of canyoning, if such a thing even existed at that time, but did it anyway, albeit in reverse: proceeding upstream from the bridge at Grana, climbing back up the valley. Just above the village we entered a long gorge of calm water, in the shadow of banks densely covered in vegetation. There were large pools infested with insects, tangles of submerged wood, old wary trout that would scatter at our approach. Further up, the gradient became problematic, making the river flow headlong, its progress all leaps and falls. Where we could not manage to scramble over we would rig up a rope to cross the rapids, or use a fallen tree trunk by floating it onto the water and wedging it between rocks to make a pontoon. Sometimes even a single modest waterfall would cost us hours of work. But this is what made the feat special. We planned to negotiate such passages one by one then connect them all, going up the entire length of the river on one glorious day at the end of summer.