Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

He owned a motorbike now, an old rusted one without number plates, and with this we took the road leading up to the farmstead, dodging the lowest branches of the larches and getting covered in mud going through puddles. I liked gripping his back riding pillion, and sensed no embarrassment on his part. On the other side of his uncle’s meadows we took a straight track at a good speed: in this patchy and stony grass the goats’ droppings were everywhere. Following them, we climbed up a bank of rhododendrons and of fallen rock where a nearly dry river ran. Then the snow began.

Up to that moment I had known only one of the mountains’ seasons: a short-lived summer that resembled spring at the beginning of July, and autumn at the end of August. About winter I knew next to nothing. Bruno and I used to speak about it often enough as children, when my return to the city was approaching and I became melancholy and imagined what it would be like to live up there with him all the year round.

“But you don’t know what it’s like up here in the winter,” he would say. “There’s nothing but snow.”

“I’d love to see it,” I would reply.

And now here it was. This wasn’t the frozen snow of the gorges at three thousand meters: it was fresh soft snow that got into your shoes and soaked your feet, and it was strange to lift them and to see, compressed in your footprint, the wildflowers of August. The snow barely reached to my ankles, but it was deep enough to have covered all traces of the track. It covered the bushes, the holes and stones, so that every step was a potential trap, and with my lack of experience walking on such snow I could only follow Bruno by stepping into his footprints. As when we were younger, I could not understand by what memory or instinct he was guided. I just followed.

We reached the ridge that overlooked the other side, and as soon as the wind turned it carried to us the sound of bells. The goats had taken shelter lower down, beneath the first rocks. Reaching them was simple enough: they were huddling in groups of three or four, the mothers with their kids around them, in clearings in the snow. Counting them Bruno saw that there was not a single one missing. They were less obedient than cattle, some feral after a summer spent on the mountain, and climbing back over our own tracks he had to shout to keep them together, throwing snowballs at any that strayed and cursing his uncle and his brilliant ideas. Eventually we reached the crest again, and went down onto the snow in unruly and noisy procession.

It must have been midday by the time we had the grass beneath our feet. Suddenly it was summer again. The goats, famished, scattered over the meadow. For our part we began to rush down, not because we were in any particular hurry but because this was the only way we knew of being in the mountains, and the descent had always exhilarated us.

When we reached the motorbike Bruno said: “I saw you while you were rock climbing. You’re good.”

“I started this summer.”

“And do you like it?”

“A lot.”

“As much as the river game?”

I laughed. “No,” I said. “Not that much.”

“This summer I’ve built a wall.”

“Where?”

“Up in the mountains, in a stable. It was falling down and we had to rebuild it completely. The problem was, there was no road, and I went back and forth on the bike. We had to work like in the old times: spade, bucket, and pickaxe.”

“And do you enjoy it?”

“Yes,” he said, after mulling it over a bit. “The work, yes. It’s difficult to build a wall in that way.”

There was something else that he didn’t like, but he didn’t tell me what and I didn’t ask him. I didn’t ask him how he was getting on with his father, or how much money he was earning, or if he had a girlfriend or any plans for the future, or about what he thought of what had happened between us. Nor did he ask me anything. He didn’t ask how I was, or how my parents were, and I didn’t reply: my mother’s well, my father’s still fucked off with me. That things had changed a bit that summer. I thought that I had found some friends, but I was mistaken. I had kissed two girls in one evening.

Instead I just told him that I would go back to Grana on foot.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m leaving tomorrow and I feel like walking.”

“Right. Be seeing you then.”

It was my end of summer ritual: a last wander around alone to say goodbye to the mountains. I watched as Bruno straddled the motorcycle and started it after a few attempts, with a puff of black smoke from the exhaust. He had a certain style as a motorcyclist. He raised a hand in farewell and revved the engine. I returned his wave, even though he was no longer looking at me.

I had no way of knowing it then, but we would not meet up again for a very long time. The next year I turned seventeen and would only return to Grana for a few days, and would then stop going there altogether. The future would take me away from this mountain of my childhood; it was a sad, a beautiful, and an inevitable fact that I had already become fully aware of. When Bruno and his motorcycle disappeared into the wood I turned towards the slope we had come down, staying there a while before leaving, looking at the long line of our tracks in the snow.

MY FATHER DIED when he was sixty-two and I was thirty-one. It was only at his funeral that I realized I was the same age now as he’d been when I was born. But my thirty-one years had little enough in common with his: I had not married; I had not gone to work in a factory; I had not fathered a son; and my life seemed to me to be only partly that of a grown man, and partly still like that of an adolescent. I lived alone in a studio flat, a luxury which I struggled to afford. I would like to have made a living as a documentary filmmaker, but to pay the rent I accepted work of every kind. I too had emigrated: having inherited from my parents the idea that at a key point in one’s youth it was necessary to leave the place where you’d been born and raised in order to go and develop elsewhere, I had at twenty-three, and fresh out of military service, left Milan to join a girlfriend in Turin. My relationship with the girl did not last, but my relationship with the city did. Between its ancient rivers and in its arcade cafes I’d felt immediately at home. I was reading Hemingway, and wandered around penniless, trying to keep myself open to new encounters, to offers of work and to every possibility, with the mountains as the background to my moveable feast: even if I had never gone back there, to glimpse sight of them on my horizon every time I left the apartment seemed like a blessing.

And so it was that a hundred and twenty kilometers of rice fields now divided me from my father. It was no distance, but to cover it you had to want to do so. A couple of years previously I had given him one last great disappointment by abandoning my university studies: I had always excelled at maths, and he had always foreseen for me a future similar to his own. My father told me that I was throwing my life away; I replied that he had thrown away his before me. We didn’t speak for an entire year after that, during which time I was coming and going between home and my military barracks, returning from leave with scarcely a word in parting. It was better for both of us that I should follow my own path, invent a life different from his in some other place—and once that distance was established, neither of us was inclined to close it.

With my mother it was different. Since I was not one to speak much on the phone she took it upon herself to write me letters. She discovered soon enough that I would reply. I liked to sit down at the table of an evening, take pen and paper, and tell her what was happening with me. It was by letter that I told her of my decision to enroll in a film school. It was there that I made my first friends in Turin. I was fascinated by documentary film and felt that I had a vocation for observing and listening, so it was good to get her reassurance: Yes, you’ve always been good at that . I knew that it would take a long time to turn it into a profession, but she encouraged me from the outset. For years she would send me money, and I would send her in return everything that I was making: portraits of people and places, explorations of the city—short films that nobody ever saw but of which I was proud. I liked the life that was taking shape around me. This is what I would tell her when she asked if I was happy. I avoided answering her other questions—about the relationships with girlfriends, which never lasted more than a few months, since as soon as they became serious I would extricate myself from them.