Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

But then at a certain point, with the same distracted air, he would turn towards me from the counter. He knew already that he would meet my gaze. He would give a signal with his chin, and I would reply by raising the fingers of one hand. We looked at each other for a second. That was it. No one noticed; it wasn’t repeated during the course of the evening; and I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting properly the significance of this greeting. It could mean: I remember you, I miss you. Or it might be: it’s only been two years but it seems like a lifetime, doesn’t it? Or perhaps: hey Berio, what are you doing with that crowd? I didn’t know what Bruno thought about the clash between our fathers. Whether he had any regrets about how things had turned out, or if seen from his current point of view that whole story seemed as distant and as unreal as it did to me. He didn’t have the look of someone who was unhappy at all. On the other hand it could be that I did.

His father was with him in the row of drinkers, amongst those with the more irritating voices and the always-empty glasses. He treated Bruno as if he was just another of his drinking companions. I disliked this man, but envied him in one respect: there was nothing perceptible between them, not a more brusque or solicitous tone of voice, not a gesture of irritation, confidence, or embarrassment—and if you did not know it already there was nothing to indicate that they were father and son.

Not all of the young men of the valley wasted their summer in the bar. After a few days someone took me to a place on the other side of the river, a wood of wild pines which concealed some huge monoliths, as alien to that landscape as meteorites. The glacier must have pushed them to that point in some far distant past. Then the earth and the leaves and the moss had covered them, pines had grown around and on top of them—but some of these stones had been brought back to light, cleaned up with wire brushes, and even christened with individual names. The youths would challenge each other to find every possible way of climbing them. Without ropes or pegs they tried and retried approaches from about a meter above ground level, ending up by landing softly in the undergrowth. It was a pleasure to watch the two or three strongest: agile as gymnasts, with hands scoured and white with chalk, they had brought this pastime to the mountain from the city. They were happy enough to teach it to others and I asked them if I could have a go. After all, I had already climbed with Bruno every kind of rock without knowing anything, since my father had always warned me against adventuring any place where you were dependent on using your hands. And perhaps it was because of this that I decided to become good at it.

At sunset the group expanded to include those who had come to party. Someone would light a fire, someone else would bring something to smoke and something to drink. Then we would sit around, and while the bottle of wine circulated I would listen to discussions about things that were completely new to me and that fascinated me every bit as much as the girls sitting on the other side of the fire. I heard about the Californian hippies who had invented modern free-form climbing, bivouacking for entire summers beneath the rock faces of the Yosemite and climbing half-naked; or about the French climbers who trained on the sea cliffs of Provence, wore their hair long, and were accustomed to going up swiftly and light-footed—how when they moved from the sea to the gullies of Mont Blanc they would humiliate veteran climbers such as my father. Rock climbing was all about the pleasure of being together, about being free to experiment, and for this a two-meter-high stone on the bank of a river was as good as any at eight thousand meters: it had nothing whatsoever to do with the cult of difficulty, or with the conquest of summits. I listened while the woods became shrouded in darkness. The twisted trunks of the pines, the powerful fragrance of resin, the white monoliths in the light of the fire made it a more welcoming refuge than any of those on Monte Rosa. Later on somebody would begin to try a route with a cigarette between his lips, his sense of balance skewed by drink; someone else would wander off with a girl at his side.

The differences between us counted for less in the woods, perhaps because they were less evident there than elsewhere. They were wealthy young men from Milan, Genoa, and Turin. The less well-off lived in small villas high up in the valley, buildings erected in crazy haste at the foot of the ski slopes; the richest in the old-style mountain dwellings in exclusive areas, where each stone and every slate had been removed, numbered, and then placed back according to the design of an architect. I happened to go into one of these accompanying a friend who was fetching drink for the evening. From outside it looked like an old timber-built barn; inside it revealed itself to be the house of an antiques dealer, or a collector: virtually an exhibition of fine-art books, paintings, furniture, sculpture. And of bottles as well: my friend opened a cupboard and we each filled a rucksack.

“But won’t your father be angry that we’re pinching his wine?” I asked.

“My father!” he replied, as if he found the very word ridiculous. We emptied the cellar and ran for the woods.

In the meantime my own father was mortally offended. He had begun to go to the mountains again, alone, getting up at dawn and leaving before we were awake, and sometimes during his absence I would take a look at his map in order to check on his latest conquests. He had started to explore a part of the valley that we had always avoided, since you could tell from below that there was nothing up there: neither villages, nor water, nor refuges, nor stunning peaks—only bare slopes that climbed steeply for two thousand meters, and an endless expanse of scree. I think he went there to cool down his disappointment, or to find a landscape that resembled his state of mind. He never again invited me to join him. From his perspective I had become the one who needed to go to him: if I was the one who’d had the courage to say no , then the onus was on me now to say sorry and please.

The time of the glacier came round again, our two days of glory in the mid-August holiday, and I saw him preparing the crampons, the pickaxe as severe as a weapon, the water bottle dented by all the knocks it had taken. He seemed to me like the last survivor of one of those Alpine expeditions, one of those soldier-climbers who went in the thirties to die in droves on the north faces of the Alps, blindly attacking the mountain.

“You need to speak to him,” my mother said that morning. “Look how hurt he is.”

“But shouldn’t he be the one speaking to me?”

“You’re capable of doing it; he isn’t.”

“But capable of doing what?”

“Come on, you know full well. He’s only waiting for you to go and ask to come with him.”

I did know it—but I did not do it. I went to my room, and shortly afterwards watched from the window as my father walked off with a heavy tread, his rucksack stuffed with metal gear. You don’t go up the glacier on your own, and I knew that in the evening he would have to resort to a humiliating search. There was always at least one person in his predicament in the refuge: he would go from table to table, he would listen to the discussions for a while, joining the conversation, and would eventually propose joining the group the next morning, despite knowing that nobody was keen to tie a stranger to his rope. At that moment it seemed to me like the perfect punishment for him.

I tasted my own punishment too, that summer. After much training on the monoliths, I went with two youths on my first real free-form climb. One of them was the wine thief, the son of the collector, a Genoese who was amongst the strongest in the group; the other was a friend of his who had started a few months ago, probably just to be with him, since he had not much passion, dedication, or talent for climbing. The rock face was so close to the road that we only had to cross a meadow to reach the point of attack, an overhang jutting out so far that the cattle used it to shelter from the wind and rain. We put our shoes on amongst the cows, then the Genoese handed me a harness and a locking carabiner and tied the two of us to the ends of the rope with himself in the middle. Without further ceremony he told the other boy to go safely and we set off.