Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

He climbed lightly and flexibly, giving the impression of being weightless, and that his every movement was effortless. He did not need to feel around to find the right point of purchase, but just hit the mark every time. Every so often he unhooked a quickdraw from the harness, clipped it onto one of the bolts that marked the way, and would pass the rope through the carabiner; then he would plunge his hands into the bag of chalk, blow on his fingers, and start to climb again with ease. He looked very elegant. Elegance, grace, lightness, they were all qualities that I was so keen to learn from him.

His friend had no such qualities. I could see him close up, climbing, because when the Genoese arrived at the resting place he shouted down to us to climb up together, leaving just a few meters’ distance between us. And so, one pull after another, I found myself with his companion directly above my head. I had frequently to stop because my head was right beneath his shoes, at which point I would turn round to look at the world behind my shoulders: the fields yellowed at the end of August, the river sparkling in the sunlight, cars already miniaturized on the trunk road. The drop did not frighten me. Away from the ground, in the air, I felt good and the movements of the climb came naturally to my body, requiring concentration but not exceptional muscles or lungs.

My companion instead used his arms too much and his feet not enough. He clung close to the rock so was obliged to seek handholds blind, and he did not refrain from grabbing hold of a bolt when he found no alternative.

“You shouldn’t do it like that,” I told him, making a big mistake. I should have let him do it in whichever way he thought best.

He looked at me, annoyed, and said: “What do you want? Are you trying to overtake? You’re always pressing from down there.”

From that moment I had made an enemy. At the resting place he said to the other one, “Pietro’s in a hurry, he thinks it’s a race.”

I didn’t say: your friend is a cheat who hangs on the bolts. I understood that it would have ended up two against one. I kept my distance from then on, but the guy would not let it go: every so often he would make a crack at my expense, and my competitiveness became a running joke for the rest of the day. According to that joke I was running behind them, I would get to just below them and they would have to give me a few kicks to get me out from under their feet. The collector’s son laughed. When I reached the last resting place he said: “You’re going strong. Do you want to try going first?”

“Fine,” I answered. In reality I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible, so that they would leave me in peace. I already had my safety harness and all the clips; we didn’t have to make any of the usual maneuvers required to exchange places—so I looked up, saw a bolt planted in a fissure, and set off.

Finding your way is easy if you have a rope above your head: it’s something else entirely when the rope is at your feet. The bolt on which I hooked the first clip was an old ring nail, not one of the steel bolts that glinted along the rock face. I decided to ignore the fact and to advance along the fissure, as I was already making good progress. The thing was, though, that further up the crack began to narrow and soon disappeared altogether. I now had jutting out above me a black, damp roof of rock—and no idea as to how to get over it.

“Where do I go?” I shouted.

“I can’t see from here,” the Genoese shouted back. “Are there any bolts there?”

No, there were no bolts. I held fast to the last bit of the fissure, and leaned out first to one side of it and then the other, to see if I could spot any. I discovered that I had followed a false trail: the line of steel plaquettes ran up at a diagonal a few meters to my right, skirting the overhang and reaching to the top.

“I’ve taken the wrong route!” I shouted.

“Oh, really?” he shouted back in response. “And what’s it like there? Can you get over it?”

“No. It’s completely smooth.”

“Then you’ll have to come back down.” I couldn’t see them, but could hear that they were amused.

I had never climbed backwards. The fissure that I had come up looked impossible when seen from above. I felt an impulse to hold on even more tightly, and at the same time realized that the rusty iron peg was now some four or five meters away. One of my legs began to tremble: an uncontrollable trembling that began at the knee and went down to my heel. My foot no longer responded. My hands were sweating, and the rock seemed to be slipping from my grasp.

“I’m falling,” I shouted. “Hold tight!”

Then I went down. A fall of ten meters is not really anything very serious, but you need to know how to fall: push yourself away from the rock face and cushion the impact with your feet. No one had taught me how to do this and I went straight down, flaying myself on the rock in my attempt to get a grip on it. I felt a tightness in my groin when I reached the bottom. Yet this other pain was fortunate—it meant that someone had blocked the rope. Now they were not laughing anymore.

Shortly afterwards we came out on the top of the rock, and it felt strange at that point to find ourselves in the fields again, with a taut line a step from the precipice, the cows grazing, a half-derelict farmstead, a dog barking. I was shaken and in pain, I had blood everywhere, and I suspect that the two friends felt guilty, since one of them asked me: “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Sure.”

“Do you want a cigarette?”

“Thanks.”

I decided that it would be the last thing we would ever share. I smoked it lying on the grass, looking up at the sky. They said something else to me, but by that stage I wasn’t listening anymore.

Just as it did every summer the weather changed at the end of the month. It started raining and getting cold, and it was the mountain itself that prompted in you the desire to go down to the valley to enjoy the warmth of September. My father had left again. My mother began to light the stove: in brief breaks in the weather I would go into the woods to collect firewood, bending down the dry branches of larches until they broke with a sharp crack. I felt fine up there in Grana, but this time I too was anxious to return to the city. I felt that I had so many things to discover, people to go in search of, and that the near future held important changes in store for me. I lived those last days knowing that they were the last in more than one sense, as if they were memories of the mountain that were already in the past. I liked the fact that we were like this: my mother and I alone together again, the fire crackling in the kitchen, the cold of the early morning, the hours spent reading and wandering in the woods. There were no rocks to climb in Grana, but I discovered that I could train well enough by climbing the walls of derelict houses. I would go up and come down the corners methodically, avoiding the easiest handholds and trying to support myself using only the cracks and the tips of my fingers. Then I would cross from one corner to another and back. In this way I must have climbed every derelict building in the village.

One Sunday the sky was clear again. We were having breakfast when there was a knock at the door. It was Bruno. He was standing there on the balcony, smiling.

“Hey, Berio,” he said. “Coming into the mountains?”

Without any preamble he explained to me that his uncle had had the idea of acquiring some goats that summer. He would leave them to graze freely on the mountain near the alpeggio , so that he needed to do nothing except check on them through binoculars in the evening, making sure that they were all there and had not strayed from where he could keep an eye on them. The problem was that during their first few nights up there it had snowed, and now his uncle couldn’t find them. Chances were that they had sought shelter in some hole or other, or run off behind a passing herd of ibexes. Bruno spoke of it as if it was just one more example of his uncle’s harebrained schemes.