Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

“Have you seen?” Bruno said.

“What happened?”

“The flood of 2000, don’t you remember? So much water came down that we had to be taken out by helicopter.”

There was a digger working down there. Where was I in the year 2000? So far away in both body and spirit that I hadn’t even been aware of the flooding in Grana. The river was still littered with tree trunks, beams, pieces of cement, wreckage of every kind dragged down from the mountain. On the bends the eroded banks exposed the roots of trees growing in search of soil that was no longer there. I felt very sorry for our poor little river.

A bit higher up, near the mill, I noticed something in the water that raised my spirits: a large white stone in the shape of a wheel.

“So was that also brought down by the water?” I asked.

“Oh no,” said Bruno, “I threw that one down before the flood.”

“When?”

“I did it to celebrate my eighteenth birthday.”

“So how did you manage it?”

“With a car jack.”

It made me smile. I imagined Bruno entering the mill with the jack, and the millstone coming out through the door and starting to roll down. I would have loved to have been there.

“Was it good?” I asked.

“It was amazing.”

Bruno smiled too. Then we headed off in search of my property.

We climbed a good deal slower than we used to, since I was not in shape at all and had ended up drinking too much the previous evening. Going up the valley devastated by the flood, where the meadows along the riverbank were reduced to sand and stones, Bruno had to turn around frequently, show his astonishment that I was so far behind, then stop and wait. Between one bout of coughing and another, I said, “Go ahead if you want. I’ll catch you up.”

“No, no,” he said, as if he had set himself a specific task and had a duty to complete it.

Not even his uncle’s farmstead looked right: when we passed by it I saw that the roof of one of the huts had caved in, pushing out the wall on which the beams rested. It looked as if a heavy fall of snow would have been enough to finish it off altogether. The bath had been left to rust outside of the stable, and the doors were off their hinges and thrown jumbled against a wall. Just as in the prophecy made by Luigi Guglielmina, the larch saplings were springing up everywhere in the pastures. Who knows how long it had taken them, and what had happened to his uncle. I would have liked to ask Bruno, but he did not stop, so we passed the farmstead and kept going without a word between us.

Beyond the cabins the flood had done the worst damage. Up above, where once the cows used to climb at the height of the season, the rain had brought down an entire piece of the mountain. The landslide had dragged down with it trees and rocks, a mess of unstable material which even after four years gave way beneath our feet. Bruno continued in silence. He led the way with his boots sinking in the mud, jumping from one rock to another, concentrating on keeping his balance while walking across fallen tree trunks, and he did not turn round. I had to run to keep behind him until we were beyond the landslide, the forest welcomed us again, and he finally recovered his speech.

“Few people used to come this way even before,” he said. “Now that the path is no longer here, I’m probably the only one who does.”

“Do you come here much?”

“Sure, in the evening.”

“In the evening?”

“When I fancy a walk after work. I take the head torch with me in case it gets dark.”

“Some people go to the bar.”

“I’ve been to the bar. Enough bars already; the woods are better.”

Then I asked the forbidden question, the one that could never be uttered while walking with my father: “Is it much further?”

“No, no. It’s just that soon we’ll find snow.”

I had already noticed it in the shadow of the rocks: old snow that had been rained on and would soon turn into slush. But further up, when I lifted my head, I saw that it stained the scree and filled broad expanses of the gorges of Grenon. On the whole of the north side it was still winter. The snow followed the shape of the mountain like a film negative, with the black of the rocks warming in the sun and the white of the snow surviving in the areas of shadow: I was thinking about this when we reached the lake. Just as it had that first time, the lake revealed itself suddenly.

“Do you remember this place?” asked Bruno.

“Of course.”

“It’s not like in the summer, eh?”

“No.”

Our lake in April was still covered by a layer of ice, by an opaque white veined with thin blue cracks, like those that form in porcelain. There was no regular geometrical aspect to this craquelure, or any comprehensible lines of fracture. Here and there slabs of ice had been raised by the force of the water, and along the banks in sunlight you could see the first darker tones, the beginning of summer.

And yet casting our eyes around the basin it seemed as if we were seeing two seasons at once. On this side was the scree, the bursts of juniper and rhododendron, on the other the woods and the snow. Over there the wake of an avalanche came down along the Grenon and ended up in the lake. Bruno headed straight for it: leaving the shore, we began to climb up the snow slope, a frozen crust that almost always held firm beneath our feet, but that sometimes suddenly gave way. When it did so we would sink thigh-deep in snow. Every false step cost us a laborious extraction, and it was only after half an hour of such halting progress that Bruno allowed us to rest: he found a stone wall that emerged from the snow, climbed on top of it, and cleaned off his boots by knocking them together. I sat down without caring about my sodden feet. I had an overwhelming desire to get back in front of the stove, to eat, and to sleep.

“Here we are,” he said.

“Where?”

“What do you mean where? At your place.”

It was only then that I looked around. Although the snow altered the shape of everything, I could see that where we were standing the slope formed a kind of wooded terrace. A wall of flat, high, and unusually white rock came down onto this plateau, facing the lake. From the snow emerged the remains of three drystone walls, one of which I was sitting on, built from the same white rock. Two short walls and a longer one in front, four meters by seven, just as the land registry map had specified: the fourth wall, which supported the other three, was the rock face itself that had provided the material for their construction. Of the collapsed roof there was no trace. But inside the ruin, in the middle of the snow, a small Swiss pine had begun to grow, having found its way amongst the rubble, and reached up to the height of the walls. So there it was, my inheritance: a rock face, snow, a pile of shaped stones, a pine tree.

“When we first chanced across this place it was September,” Bruno said. “Your father said immediately: this is the one. We had seen so many, since I had been going with him on these searches for quite a while, but this one he liked at first sight.”

“Was it last year?”

“No, no. It was nearly three years ago. Then I had to find the owners and persuade them to sell. Nobody ever sells anything up here. It’s OK to keep a ruin for your entire lifetime, but not to sell it to someone who might actually do something with it.”

“And what did he want to do with it?”

“Build a house.”

“A house?”

“Sure.”

“My father always hated houses.”

“Well, it seems like he changed his mind.”

Meanwhile it had started to rain: I felt a drop on the back of my hand and saw that it was halfway between rain and snow. Even the sky seemed undecided between winter and spring. The sky hid the mountains and divested things of their mass, but even on such a morning as this I could sense the beauty of this place. A somber, bitter beauty, communicating awesome power rather than tranquillity, as well as a degree of anguish. The beauty of the reverse side.