Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

The man decided that he’d had enough. Suddenly and without warning, he lowered his right hand to make a fist and hit my father on the temple. It was the first time in my life that I had seen a real punch thrown. The sound of knuckle on cheekbone was clear even from the bathroom, dry as a whack with a stick. My father took two steps back, staggered, but managed not to fall. But immediately afterwards his arms fell to his sides and his shoulders sagged a little. It was the posture of a wretched man. The other man said something else before leaving, a threat or a promise, and it did not surprise me to see him heading, in the end, towards the Guglielminas’ house. During that brief confrontation I had realized who he was.

He had come back to reclaim what was his. He did not know that he had got the wrong person. But in the end it made no difference: that blow was thrown into my father’s face in order to plant something clearly in the mind of my mother. It was the eruption of reality into her idealism, and perhaps also into her arrogance. The next day Bruno and his father were nowhere to be seen. My father’s left eye became swollen and blue. But I don’t think that was what was hurting most, when he got into his car that evening and left for Milan.

The following week was our last in Grana. Bruno’s aunt came to speak to my mother: mortified, wary, worried, perhaps above all by the prospect of losing such faithful tenants. My mother reassured her. She was already thinking about damage limitation, about how to salvage the relationships that had been so painstakingly nurtured.

For me it proved to be an interminable week. It rained constantly: a blanket of low-lying cloud cover hid the mountains from view, occasionally clearing to expose the first snow at three thousand meters. I would like to have taken one of the paths I knew and gone up to tread all over it, without asking permission from anyone. But I stayed in the village instead, replaying what I had seen and feeling guilty about what had happened. Then on Sunday we locked the house and left as well.

I COULD NOT GET that blow out of my mind until a few years later I found the courage to deliver one myself. In truth it was the first of a series, and the hardest of these I would go on to land in the valley in later years, but now it seems right that my rebellion should have begun in the mountains, like everything else that has mattered to me. The event itself was unremarkable. I was sixteen and one day my father decided to take me camping. He had bought an old heavy tent from a stall selling army surplus gear. He had this idea of putting it up on the side of a small lake, fishing for a few trout without being discovered by the forest rangers, lighting a fire at nightfall and roasting the fish on it—and afterwards, who knows, staying up late drinking and singing, warmed by its embers.

He had never shown the slightest interest in camping, so I suspected that there was something else that had been planned for me. In recent times I had withdrawn into a corner from which I observed our family life with a pitiless eye. The ineradicably fixed habits of my parents, my father’s harmless outbursts of anger and the tricks that my mother used to contain them, the little bullyings and the subterfuges that they no longer realized they were resorting to. He would be emotional, authoritarian, irascible; she would be strong and calm and conciliatory. They had a mutually reassuring way of always playing the same part, knowing that the other would play theirs: these were not real arguments; they were performances with always predictable endings, and in that cage I also ended up being caught. I had begun to feel an urgent need to escape. But I had never managed to say so: not once had I uttered a single protest about anything, and I think that it was precisely for this, to make me speak , that the damn tent had materialized.

After lunch my father spread out the equipment in the kitchen and divided it up so as to distribute its weight equally between us. The poles and pegs alone must have weighed ten kilos. With the sleeping bags, anoraks, sweaters, and food supplies on top, the rucksacks soon became full. With one knee on the kitchen floor my father began to loosen every strap and then to push, compress, pull—at war with mass and volume, and I could already feel myself sweating beneath that load in the sweltering afternoon heat. But it wasn’t only the weight that was unbearable. It was the scene that he had conjured up, or that they had: the campfire, the lake, the trout, the starry sky; all that intimacy.

“Dad,” I said. “Come on, that’s enough.”

“Wait, wait,” he said, still trying to stuff something inside the rucksack, absorbed by the effort.

“No, I mean it: it’s no good.”

My father stopped what he was doing and looked up. He had a furious expression on his face from his exertions, and the way he looked at me made me feel like another hostile rucksack, another strap that wouldn’t comply.

I shrugged.

With my father, if I kept quiet it meant that he could speak. He unfurrowed his brow and said: “Well, perhaps we can take some stuff out. Lend a hand if you feel like it.”

“No,” I replied. “I really don’t feel like doing this.”

“What don’t you feel like doing, the camping?”

“The tent, the lake, the whole thing.”

“What do you mean the whole thing ?”

“I don’t want it. I’m not coming.”

I could not have dealt him a harder blow. Refusing to follow him into the mountains: it was inevitable that it would happen sooner or later, he must have expected it. But sometimes I think that because he had no father of his own he had no experience of making certain kinds of attack, and was therefore ill-prepared to receive one. He was deeply hurt. Maybe he could have asked me a few more questions, and it would have been a good occasion to hear what I had to say—but in the event he wasn’t capable of doing so, or didn’t think it was necessary, or at that moment he just felt too offended to think. He left the rucksacks, the tent, and the sleeping bags where they were and went out for a walk by himself. For me it was a liberation.

Bruno had been dealt the opposite fate, and was now working with his father as a builder. I hardly ever saw him. They worked high up in the mountains building refuges and alpeggi , and slept up there on weekdays. I would encounter him on a Friday or Saturday, not in Grana but in some cafe bar down in the valley. I had all the time that I wanted now that I had freed myself from the obligation to climb mountains, and while my father scaled the summits I would head in the opposite direction, searching for someone my own age. It only took two or three attempts before I was admitted into the company of holidaymakers: I spent the afternoons between the benches of a tennis court and the tables of a cafe bar, hoping that no one would notice that I had no money with which to order anything. I listened to the chat, watched the girls, every so often looked up at the mountains. I recognized the pastures and the minuscule white stains that were plastered huts. The bright green of the larches that gave way to the more sombre green of the firs, the “right” side in sunlight and the “reverse” in shadow. I knew that I had little enough in common, and to share, with those young people on their holidays, but I wanted to fight against my inclination towards solitude—to try to be with others for a while and to see what might happen.

Later, towards seven, the workmen would arrive at the bar: the bricklayers, the cattle breeders. They would get out of white vans and 4x4s, filthy with mud or lime or sawdust, moving with a lolling gait that they had learned in adolescence, as if together with the weight of their own bodies they were always moving another, greater one. They would take up positions at the counter, complaining and cursing, bantering with the waitresses and ordering rounds of drinks. Bruno was with them. I could see that he had developed his muscles, and that he liked to show them off by rolling his shirtsleeves high. He owned a collection of caps and a wallet that stuck out from the back pocket of his jeans. This struck me more than anything else, given that for me, earning money was still a distant prospect. He would spend it without even counting, paying for his round with some crumpled banknote or other, imitating the others.