Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

Then he got to his feet, and there on the grass where we stood he cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted, “Oh! Can you hear me? It’s me, Bruno! I’m leaving!”

From the other side of the lake the slope of the Grenon sent back to us an echo of his cry. We heard some stones falling. His shout had startled a group of chamois that was now clambering up the scree.

It was Bruno who pointed them out to me. They were passing through rocks which made them almost invisible, but when they crossed a snowfield I was able to count them. It was a small herd of five. They climbed up that stain of snow in single file, reached the crest, and lingered there for a moment, as if to look at us for one last time before going. Then, one by one, they disappeared down the other side.

Our four-thousander that summer was meant to be the Castor. We would scale one of these each year, my father and I, on the Monte Rosa, so as to conclude the season on a high, when we were best trained up to do so. I hadn’t stopped going onto the glacier, but neither had I stopped suffering its effects: I had just become accustomed to feeling unwell and to the fact that this sickness formed a normal part of that world, like getting up before dawn, or the freeze-dried food in the refuges, or the cawing of crows on the heights. It was a way of going into the mountains that for me had lost all sense of adventure. It was a brutal putting of one foot after the other before vomiting my heart out at the top. I hated doing it, and found myself hating that white desert every time: and yet I was proud of going above four thousand meters again, as further proof of my courage. In 1985 my father’s black felt-tip ink had reached the Vincent, by 1986 the Gnifetti. He considered the ascent of these summits to be a kind of training for me. He had consulted a doctor and was convinced that I would grow out of my altitude sickness, so that over the course of three or four years we would reach the point when we could do more serious things, such as crossing the Lyskamm or the rock faces of Dufour.

But what I remember most about Castor, even more than its elongated crests, was the vigil that we shared in the refuge. A plate of pasta, a half-liter of wine on the table, the mountaineers nearby arguing amongst themselves, ruddy-faced from the sun and from fatigue. The prospect of the next day created in the room a kind of concentration. In front of me my father was leafing through the guest book, his favorite reading in a refuge. He spoke German well and understood French, and every so often he would translate a passage from these languages of the Alps. Someone had returned to a summit after thirty years and thanked God. Someone else regretted the absence of a friend. He was moved by these things, to the point where he took up the pen to make his own contribution to that collective diary.

When he got up to refill his carafe I looked at what he had written. His handwriting was dense and nervous, difficult to decipher if you were not already familiar with it. I read: I’m here with my fourteen-year-old son, Pietro. These will be my last occasions at the head of the rope, because soon he will be the one pulling me up. Don’t much feel like going back to the city, but I’ll take with me the memory of these days as the most beautiful refuge. It was signed: Giovanni Guasti.

Rather than making me feel moved, or proud, these words just annoyed me. I detected in them something that sounded false and sentimental, a rhetoric of the mountains that did not correspond to reality. If it was such a paradise then why did we not stay and live up there? Why were we taking away a friend who had been born and raised there? And if the city was so revolting, why were we forcing him to live in it with us? This is what I would like to have asked my father—and my mother as well, come to think of it. How is it that you are so sure of knowing what’s best for the course of another person’s life? How is it that you don’t have the slightest doubt—that he might know better than you?

But when my father returned he was in high spirits. It was the third from last day of his holiday, a Friday in August of his forty-sixth year, and he was in an Alpine refuge with his only son. He had brought another glass and half-filled it for me. Perhaps, in his imagination, now that I was growing up and getting over my altitude sickness, our relationship as father and son would be transformed into something different. Climbing companions, just like he had written in the book. Drinking companions. Perhaps he really did imagine us like this in a few years’ time, sitting at a table at three and a half thousand meters drinking red wine and studying maps of the routes, with no more secrets between us.

“How’s your stomach doing?” he asked.

“It’s not bad.”

“And your legs?”

“They’re really good.”

“Excellent. Tomorrow we’ll have fun.”

My father raised his glass. I did the same, tasted the wine and felt that I liked it. While I was getting it down a guy sitting nearby burst out laughing, said something in German, and clapped me hard on the back, as if I had just been initiated into the great brotherhood of men and he was welcoming me into it.

The next evening we went back to Grana as veterans of the glacier. My father with his shirt unbuttoned and his rucksack slung over one shoulder, and with a hobbling gait due to the blisters on his feet; I as ravenous as a wolf, since as soon as we descended from altitude my stomach realized that it had been empty for two days. My mother was waiting for us with a hot bath and supper already on the table. Later on the time for telling our story would come: my father tried to describe the color of ice in the crevasses, the vertiginous nature of the north faces, the elegance of the cornices of snow on the crests; while I for my part had only blurred recollections of such visions, fogged as they were by nausea. I usually kept quiet. I had already learned a fact which my father never resigned himself to, namely, that it was impossible to convey what it feels like up there to those who have stayed below.

But that evening we did not get around to telling my mother anything. I was about to have my bath when I heard the voice of a man ranting down in the courtyard. I went to the window and pulled back the curtain: I saw a character who was gesticulating and yelling words that I could not understand. My father was the only other one out there. He had hung his thick socks on the balcony and was bathing his aching feet in the trough, getting up from where he sat on its rim to confront the stranger.

For a moment I thought it might be a farmer furious at this misuse of his water. In Grana they would leap at any pretext to take offense from an incomer. It was easy to identify the locals: they all moved in the same way, had the same marked facial features from out of which, between cheekbones and forehead, a pair of sky-blue eyes peered. This man was smaller than my father, except for the muscular arms and huge hands that were completely out of proportion to the rest of his body. With those hands he grabbed the two sides of my father’s shirt just below the collar. It looked as if he wanted to pick him up.

My father spread his arms. I was seeing him from behind and imagined that he would be saying: calm down, calm down. The man mumbled something, showing his ruined teeth. His face was also wrecked: I didn’t know by what, being still too young to recognize the face of a drinker. He made a grimace that was exactly like one of Luigi Guglielmina’s, and at that moment I realized how much he resembled him. My father began to gesture slowly. I understood that he was explaining something, and knowing him, knew also that his arguments would be unanswerable. The man lowered his gaze, just as I always did. It looked as if he was having second thoughts, but he kept hold of my father’s shirt. My father turned up the palms of his hands as if to say: OK, do we understand each other? So now what? There was something ridiculous in seeing him in this situation barefoot. On his calves the line made by his socks sharply divided his pale ankles from a narrow band of scarlet skin just below the knee—the area that his plus fours left bare. Here was the educated city-dweller, sure of himself and used to telling others what to do, who had just burned his legs on the glacier and was now trying to reason with a highlander the worse for drink.