Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

And you? I would write.

I’m fine , my mother would answer, but your dad is working too hard , and it’s damaging his health . She would tell me more about him than about herself. The factory was in financial crisis and my father, after a thirty-year career, was redoubling his efforts instead of slowing down and biding his time before retirement. He was spending a lot of time in the car alone, driving hundreds of kilometers between one plant and another, returning home exhausted and collapsing into bed immediately after supper. His sleep was short-lived: at night he would get up and go back to work, unable to rest because of his worries, which according to my mother were not only about the factory. He’s always been anxious, but now it’s becoming an illness. He was anxious about his work, anxious about approaching old age, anxious because my mother had flu—and he was anxious about me as well. He would be jolted awake with the thought that I was unwell. So he would ask her to phone me, even if it meant getting me out of bed; she was unable to convince him to wait a few hours but tried to calm him, to get him back to sleep, to slow him down. It was not as if his own body hadn’t been giving him signs that he should do so, but he only knew how to live this way, with everything breathing down his neck: imploring him to calm down was like constraining him to go up a mountain more slowly , to avoid getting into a race with anyone, to enjoy the health-giving properties of the air.

He was only partly the man that I knew, and partly another—the one that I was discovering through my mother’s letters. I was intrigued by this other side to him. It brought to mind a certain fragility that I had only glimpsed before, certain moments of confusion which he would immediately attempt to conceal. When I would lean out over a rock and he would instinctively make a grab for my trouser belt. When I was sick on the glacier and he would be more worried about it than I was myself. It occurred to me that perhaps this other father had always been there at my side, and that I had failed to notice him, however difficult the first one was; and I began to think that in the future I should—or could—make an attempt to build bridges with him.

Then that future vanished in an instant, together with the possibilities it contained. One March evening in 2004 my mother called to tell me that my father had suffered a heart attack on the motorway. They had found him in a lay-by. He had not caused an accident; in fact he had managed to do everything correctly: he had stopped at the side of the road and put on the hazard lights, as if he had a flat tire or had run out of petrol. Instead it was his heart that had completely failed on him. Too many miles on the clock, too little maintenance: my father must have felt an acute pain in his chest and had enough time to realize what was happening. In the lay-by he had turned off the engine. But he hadn’t even unbuckled his seat belt. He had stayed sitting there, and that’s how they found him—like a racing driver who had retired from the race, the most ironic way for someone like him to go, with his hands still on the wheel, being overtaken by everyone else.

That spring I went back to Milan for a few weeks to be with my mother. Apart from the practicalities that needed to be dealt with, I felt the need to be with her for a while. After the turbulent days of the funeral, in the calm that followed, we discovered to my surprise that my father had thought thoroughly about his own death. In his desk drawer there was a list of instructions, attached to which were details of his bank accounts, and everything else that was required for us to inherit his assets. Since we were the only inheritors, he had not been obliged by Italian law to make a formal will. But on the same piece of paper on which he had specified that he left to my mother his half of the apartment in Milan, for me there was the phrase I would like Pietro to have —followed mysteriously by the property in Grana . No last words, not a line of farewell or explanation: it was all cold and practical and legalistic.

About this inheritance my mother knew next to nothing. There is a tendency to assume that one’s parents share everything that crosses their minds, especially as they get older, but I was discovering in those days that after my departure they had led more or less separate lives. He worked and was always traveling. Having retired from her own job, she was doing voluntary work as a nurse in a clinic for immigrants, helping with prenatal classes—and spent most of her other time with friends rather than with my father. She knew only that he had acquired the previous year, and for not much money, a small piece of land in the mountains. He had not sought her permission to spend the money, or even invited her to see the place—it was a long time since they had gone out walking together—and she had not objected, considering it to be some altogether private concern.

Amongst my father’s papers I found the contract of the purchase and the land registry document, neither of which enlightened me much further. I had inherited an agricultural building four meters by seven at the center of an irregular plot of land. The map was too small to work out where this place was, and too different from the ones I was used to: it did not show the altitude or the paths, only the property, and looking at it told you nothing about whether it was surrounded by woods, fields, or by anything else for that matter.

My mother said: “Bruno will know where it is.”

“Bruno?”

“They were always going off together.”

“I didn’t know that they’d even seen each other again.”

“Of course, we both saw him again. It’s quite difficult not to meet up in a place like Grana, wouldn’t you say?”

“What’s he doing now?” I asked, though what I really wanted to ask was: “How is he? Does he remember me? During all these years had he thought about me as much as I thought about him?” But I had learned by now to ask questions in the adult way, asking one thing in order to find out about another.

“He’s a bricklayer.”

“So he never moved away?”

“Bruno? And where do you think he would go? Things have not changed much in Grana, you’ll see.”

I did not know whether to believe her, since I had certainly changed a lot in the meantime. As an adult, a place that you loved as a young boy might appear entirely different to you, and turn out to be a disappointment; or it might remind you of what you once were but no longer are, becoming a cause for great sadness. I wasn’t that keen to find out how it would be. But there was this property that I had been left, and curiosity got the better of me: I went there at the end of April, alone, in my father’s car. It was evening, and climbing up the valley I could only see the areas illuminated by the lights. Even so I noticed several changes: the points at which the road had been improved and widened, the protective netting over the escarpments, the piles of felled tree trunks. Someone had started to build little villas in a Tyrolese style, while someone else had started to extract sand and gravel from the river, which was shored up now between cement banks, where it had once flowed between stones and trees. The second homes in darkness, the hotels closed out of season or shut for good, the immobile bulldozers and the excavators with their arms stuck in the ground gave the landscape an air of industrial decline, like those building sites left semi-abandoned due to bankruptcy.

Then just as I was letting myself feel depressed by these discoveries, something called out for my attention, and I leaned over towards the windscreen to look up. In the night sky some white shapes emitted a kind of aura. It took me a moment to realize that they were not clouds: they were mountains still covered in snow. I should have expected it, in April. But in the city the spring was already advanced, and I was no longer accustomed to the fact that to go up high is to go back a season. The snow up there consoled me for the squalor in the valley.