Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

“Does it have a name, this place?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so. According to my mother it was once called barma drola . She’s never wrong about such things; she remembers all the names.”

“So the barma is that rock over there?”

“That’s right.”

“And the drola ?”

“That means strange.”

“Strange because it’s so white?”

“I think yes.”

“The strange rock,” I said, to hear what it sounded like.

I stayed sitting there for a while, to look around me and to reflect on the meaning of this inheritance. My father, the same person who had fled from houses all his life, had cultivated a desire to build one up here. He hadn’t been able to do so. But imagining his own death, he had thought of leaving the place to me. Who knows what he wanted from me.

Bruno said: “I’m available for the summer.”

“Available for what?”

“To work, no?”

And since I did not seem to understand, he explained: “Your father designed the house, the way he wanted it. And he made me promise that I would build it. He was sitting right where you’re sitting now when he asked me.”

The revelations kept on coming. The map of the routes, the red and the green that accompanied the black—and I thought that there were many other things that Bruno had yet to tell me. As for the house, if my father had arranged everything in this way I saw no reason not to observe his wishes. Except for one, that is.

“But I don’t have any money,” I said. My inheritance had already been used up settling my disastrous finances. There was a little left, but hardly enough to build a house with, and I didn’t feel like using it for this. I had a long list of deferred wishes to fulfill.

Bruno nodded. He had expected this objection. He said: “All that we need to do is buy the materials. And even on them I think it’s possible to save quite a bit.”

“Fine, but who is going to pay you for doing the work?”

“Don’t worry about me. This isn’t the kind of job you expect to get paid for.”

He did not explain to me what he meant, and just as I was about to ask him he added: “It would be useful to have someone to lend a hand. With a laborer I’d be able to finish it in three or four months. What do you say, are you up for it?”

Down in the plains I would have laughed at the suggestion. I would have answered that I didn’t know how to do anything, and that I would have been of no help whatsoever. But I was sitting on a wall in the middle of the snow, facing a frozen lake at an altitude of two thousand meters. I had begun to feel a sense of inevitability: for reasons unknown to me my father had wanted to bring me here, to this clearing pummeled by landslides, beneath that strange rock, to work together with this man on these ruins. OK, dad, I said to myself, set me another riddle; let’s see what you’ve prepared for me. Let’s see what else there is to learn.

“Three or four months?” I asked.

“Oh sure.”

“When do you want to start then?”

“As soon as the snow melts,” Bruno replied. Then he jumped down from the wall and began to explain to me how he thought it should be done.

THE SNOW DISAPPEARED quickly that year. I returned to Grana at the beginning of June, at the height of the thawing season, with the water swelling the river and coursing down from everywhere in the valley, forming short-lived waterfalls and streams which I had never seen before. It seemed as if you could feel it beneath your feet, that snowmelt from the mountains, and even a thousand meters lower down it rendered the earth as soft as moss. As for the rain that fell daily, we decided to ignore it: one Monday morning at dawn we took from Bruno’s house a spade, a pickaxe, a large hatchet, a chainsaw, and half a tank of petrol, and with all this gear on our backs we climbed up to my property—to Barma, as we had begun to call it. Although he was carrying the heavier load, I was the one who had to stop every quarter of an hour to get my breath back. I would put down the rucksack and sit on the ground—all the errors that my father had once taught me to avoid—and we would stay there in silence, avoiding each other’s gaze while my heart slowed down.

Up above, the snow had given way to mud and dead grass, allowing me to better assess the state that the ruins were in. The walls seemed solid enough up to about a meter of their height, thanks to cornerstones that even the two of us together could not have shifted; but for a meter above that the long wall was leaning outwards, pushed by the beams of the roof before it collapsed; and the short walls were completely unstable, with the last course of stones hanging on precariously at the height of a man. Bruno said that we would have to demolish them almost down to the base. It would be useless to try to straighten skewed walls: much better to simply throw them down and start from scratch.

But first we had to prepare the building site. It was ten in the morning when we entered the ruin and began to free it of all the collapsed rubble inside.

This was mostly made up of shingles that had once been the tiles of the roof, but also of the old flooring that divided the ground floor from the first, and in the midst of all this sodden wood there were beams of six or seven meters in length still jammed into the walls or stuck in the ground. Some had withstood exposure, and Bruno checked to see if they could be reused. We labored a good deal extracting the sound ones and dragging them outside, rolling them beyond the walls on two inclined planks, while the spoiled ones were split and stored away as firewood.

Because of his truncated fingers, Bruno had learned how to use a chainsaw left-handed. He held the wood down with his foot and worked with the tip of the blade, cutting very close to his boot sole and raising a cloud of sawdust behind him. The pleasant smell of burnt wood perfumed the air. Then the piece he was cutting off would fall, and I would collect it for stacking.

I soon got tired. I was still less used to working with my arms than with my legs. At midday we came out of the ruins covered in dust and sawdust. There were four fine larch trunks beneath the big rock wall, cut down a year ago and left there to season: when the time came they would become the beams of the new roof, but for now I used one to sit on.

“I’m worn out already,” I said. “And we haven’t even started yet.”

“We’ve started all right,” Bruno said.

“We’ll need a week just to clear up. And to demolish the walls, and to clear the ground around here.”

“We might do. Who knows?”

In the meantime we had made a fireplace with stones and lit a small fire with the woodchips for kindling. As hot and sweaty as I was, it was still pleasurable to dry myself in front of a fire. I rummaged in my pockets, found the tobacco, and rolled a cigarette. I offered the packet to him, and he said: “I don’t know how. If you do it for me I’ll try one.”

When I lit it he tried hard not to cough. I could see that he wasn’t a smoker.

“Have you been a smoker for long?” he asked.

“I started one summer when I was here. So how old must I have been, sixteen or seventeen.”

“Really? I never saw you smoke.”

“Because I smoked in secret. I would go into the woods so as not to be seen. Or up onto the roof of the house.”

“And who were you hiding from? From your mother?”

“I don’t know. I would just hide, that’s all.”

Bruno sharpened the ends of two small sticks with his penknife. He took some sausage from his rucksack, cut it into pieces, and put them to grill. He also had bread, a black loaf from which he cut two large chunks and gave one to me.