Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

Then I realized that I had just repeated one of my father’s typical gestures. How many times had I seen him while driving lean forwards and look up at the sky? To check the state of the weather, or to study the side of a mountain, or to just admire its outline as we passed it. He placed his hands together high up on the steering wheel and rested his temple on them. I repeated the gesture, aware this time of the similarity, imagining myself as my father at forty, having just turned into the valley, with my wife sitting beside me and my son on the backseat, looking for a good place for the three of us. I imagined my son sleeping. My wife was pointing out villages and particular houses, and I was pretending to be listening. But then as soon as she was looking the other way I would lean forward and look up, heeding the powerful call of the peaks. The more towering and menacing they looked, the more I liked them. The snow up there was most promising. Yes, perhaps on that particular mountain there would be a good place for us.

The little road that climbed up to Grana had been asphalted, but as for the rest my mother was right, it seemed as if nothing had changed at all. The ruined buildings were still there, and so too were the stables, the haylofts, the piles of manure. I left the car in the usual place and went into the village on foot in the dark, letting myself be guided by the sound of the drinking fountain, finding my way to the stairs and the door of the house, its big iron key still in the lock. Once inside I was greeted by the old smell of smoke and damp. In the kitchen I opened the stove door and found a small pile of still faintly glowing embers: I put in some of the wood that had been stacked nearby and blew until the fire was kindled again.

Even my father’s concoctions were still in their usual place. He would usually bring a large bottle of white grappa and then flavor it in smaller bottles with the berries, pinecones, and herbs that he collected in the mountains. I chose a jar at random and poured some into a glass to warm myself up. It was very bitter, flavored with gentian maybe, and I sat with it next to the stove and rolled a cigarette. Smoking and looking around me in the old kitchen, I waited for the memories to come.

My mother had done a good job there over the course of twenty years: everywhere I looked I could detect her touch, that of a woman with clear ideas about how to make a house homely. She had always liked copper pans and wooden spoons, and never liked curtains that stopped you from seeing outside. On the ledge of her favorite window she had placed a bunch of dried flowers in a pitcher, together with the small radio that she listened to all day and a photo in which Bruno and I were sitting back to back on a larch stump, probably at his uncle’s farmstead, with our arms folded, looking like real tough guys. I could not remember who had taken it, or when, but we were wearing the same clothes and adopting the same ridiculous pose: anyone who saw it would have taken it for a portrait of two brothers. I also thought that it was a good photo. I finished the cigarette and threw the butt into the stove. I picked up the empty glass and got up to refill it, and it was then that I saw my father’s map still thumbtacked to the wall, though it looked quite different now from how I remembered it.

I went closer to look at it in detail. I saw at once that it had changed from being what it was before—a map of the valley’s trails—and that it had become something else altogether, something resembling a novel. Or better still perhaps, a biography: after twenty years there was not a summit, an alpeggio , a refuge that my father’s felt-tip pen had not reached, and this network of itineraries was so dense as to render the map illegible to anyone else. And now there was not just black ink there. Sometimes it had been marked with red lines, at other times with green. Occasionally the black, red, and green were used together, though most frequently it was the black ink alone that had been used to record the longest excursions. There must have been a key to this code, and I lingered there trying to figure out what it was.

After I had thought about it for a while it began to resemble one of those riddles that my father used to ask me when I was a child. I went to fill my glass and returned to scrutinize the map. If it had been a cryptographic problem like those I had studied at university I would have begun by looking for the most recurrent elements, and for the least frequent. Most frequent were the single black lines, the least frequent those lines where the three colors had been used together. It was the three colors that gave me the key, because I remembered well the time that the three of us—myself, my father, and Bruno—had got stuck on the glacier together. The red line and the green line ended at precisely this point, but the black one continued: from this I understood that my father had completed the rest of the climb alone, on another occasion. The black, of course, was him. The red accompanied him up to our four-thousanders, so could only be me. The green, by a simple process of elimination, was Bruno. My mother had told me that they’d gone walking together. I saw that there were many routes of black and green combined, perhaps even more than of black and red, and I felt a pang of jealousy. But I also felt pleased that during all those years my father had not just gone into the mountains alone. The thought occurred to me that, in some complicated way, this map that was pinned to the wall might contain a message for me.

Later I went into my old room, but it was too cold to sleep there. I took the mattress from the bed, carried it to the kitchen, and put the sleeping bag on top of it. I kept the grappa and tobacco within reach. Before turning off the light I stoked up the fire in the stove, and lay there in the dark listening to the sound of it burning for a long while, without falling asleep.

Bruno came to get me early the next morning. He was a man I no longer knew, but somewhere inside of him was the boy I knew so well.

“Thanks for the fire,” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” he said.

He shook my hand on the porch and uttered one of those conventional phrases that I had become accustomed to in the past two months, and to which I no longer paid attention. Such phrases would have been of no use between friends, but who could say what Bruno and I were to each other now. His clasp as we shook hands seemed more sincere, his right hand dry and coarse, calloused and with something else about it that was strange and that I didn’t understand at first. He sensed my unease and raised it to show me: it was a builder’s hand, with the ends of its index and middle fingers missing.

“Have you seen?” he said. “I was messing around with my father’s rifle. I wanted to shoot a fox, and boom! I blew off parts of my own fingers.”

“Did it burst in your hands?”

“Not exactly. Faulty trigger.”

“Ouch,” I said. “That must have hurt.”

Bruno shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that there were worse things in life. He looked at my chin and asked: “Don’t you ever shave?”

“I’ve had this beard for ten years,” I replied, stroking it.

“I tried to let mine grow once. But I had a girlfriend, you know how it is.”

“She didn’t like your beard?”

“That’s right. On you it looks good. You look like your father.”

He smiled as he said this. Since we were trying to break the ice I tried to pay no attention to the phrase, and returned his smile. Then closed the door and went with him.

The sky in the deep valley was low and overcast with spring clouds. It looked as if it had just stopped raining, and that it could start again at any moment. Even the smoke from the chimneys was struggling to rise: it slipped down the wet roofs and curled up in the guttering. Leaving the village in that cold light I rediscovered every shack, every henhouse, every woodshed, as if no one had touched anything since I’d left. The things that had been damaged I saw soon after, beyond the last house: down below, the bed of the river was at least twice as wide as I remembered it. It looked as if a gigantic plough had recently turned it over. It flowed between wide stony areas that gave it an anemic look, even in this season of thaw.