Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

I carefully wrapped the notebook in the plastic, placed it back inside the box, and left it there.

In the weeks that followed I found other messages from my father. I would study the map of his routes and go in search of him on less noble peaks, those neglected ones lower down the valley. On Monte Rosa towards the August bank holiday processions of roped parties could be made out on the glaciers, and climbers from all over the world crowded into the refuges—but where I went I saw no one, except for the odd solitary climber of my father’s age or older. When I overtook them it seemed like I was meeting him. And for them I think that it was like encountering a son, since they would watch me approach and stand aside saying: “Make way for the young!” I could see that these men were pleased if I stopped for a chat, and began to do so. Sometimes I would take the opportunity of sharing a bite to eat. They had all been going back to these same mountains for thirty, forty, fifty years, and preferred just as I did the abandoned high valleys in which nothing ever seemed to change.

A man with white whiskers told me that for him it was a way of revisiting and thinking about his past life. It was as if, starting out on the same old track once a year, he was immersing himself in his recollections and climbing back up again the course of his own memory. He came from the countryside like my father, but his was the rice-growing region between Novara and Vercelli. From the house in which he was born he could see Monte Rosa above the fields, and when he was little had been told that up there was where all the water came from: water for drinking, the water in the rivers, the water with which to flood the rice fields—all the water that was used came from up there, and as long as the ice continued to glisten on the horizon there would be none of the problems caused by lack of water. I liked this old gentleman. He was a widower and missed his wife deeply. He had sunspots on his bald head and a pipe that he filled as we talked. At a certain point he took a canteen from his rucksack, poured two drops of grappa onto a sugar cube, and offered it to me.

“With this you’ll go up like a train,” he said. And then after a short pause: “Well anyway, there’s nothing like the mountains for making you remember.”

I too was beginning to realize this.

At the summit I would find a crooked cross, sometimes not even that. I would disturb ibexes that would be startled without ever really fleeing from me. The males would snort their irritation at my presence, the females and little ones sheltering behind them for safety. If I was lucky I would find the metal box hidden at the foot of the cross, or somewhere amongst the stones.

My father’s signature was in all the notebooks that I found. He was sometimes laconic, always boastful. I would find myself traveling back ten years just in order to find four words: Done this one too . Giovanni Guasti . He must have felt in particularly good shape on one occasion, and been moved by something to write: Ibexes, eagles, fresh snow. Like being young again. On another he’d written: Thick fog all the way to the summit. Old songs. Magnificent view of the interior. I knew all of those songs, and would like to have been with him, to sing them in the fog. It was part of a melancholy vein that I found in another message from the previous year: Came back up here after a very long time. It would be wonderful to just stay up here all together, without having to see anyone anymore, without ever having to go back down to the valley.

“All who?” I wondered. And where was I on that day? Who knows whether he had already begun to feel his heart weakening, or what else had happened to prompt him to write such words. Without ever having to go back down to the valley. It was the same sentiment that had made him dream of a house at the highest point possible, isolated and impervious, where you could live away from the world. Before putting the notebook back where I had found it, I copied his words and the date into my own notebook. In the books that had been left there I never added anything of my own.

Perhaps Bruno and I were actually living inside my father’s dream. We had found each other again in a pause in our lives: one of those pauses that bring one period to an end and precede another, though we hardly realized this at the time. From Barma we would see the eagles circling below us, the marmots on the lookout before the entrances to their burrows. We would occasionally spot the odd angler or two down at the lake, and the odd walker—but no one looked up in our direction to find us, and we did not descend to greet them. We would wait until everyone had gone before going down of an August afternoon for a swim. The water in the lake was freezing cold, and we would compete to see who could stay under the longest before getting out and racing around the meadows to get the blood circulating in our veins again. We also had a fishing rod, just a pole with a hook, with which I would occasionally manage to catch something using grasshoppers for bait. Then for supper there would be a trout grilled over the fire, and red wine. We would stay in front of the fire, drinking, until it got dark.

By now I was also sleeping up there. I camped out in the unfinished house, directly beneath one of the windows. The first night, I spent long hours gazing from my sleeping bag at the stars and listening to the wind. I would turn over to face inwards, and even in the dark could feel the presence of the rock face, as if it were exerting a magnetic force, or a gravitational one—or like when, with your eyes closed, someone puts a hand close to your forehead and you feel the hand’s presence. I felt as if I were sleeping in a cave excavated from the mountain itself.

Like Bruno, I soon became unaccustomed to hurry and to civilization: I reluctantly went down to the village once a week, just in order to buy supplies, and was surprised to find myself back amongst cars after a walk of only a few hours. The shop owners treated me like any other tourist—a slightly more eccentric one, perhaps—and I was content to leave it at that. I felt better when I was back on the path. I loaded the bread, vegetables, salami, cheese, and wine onto the mule, gave him a slap on the rump, and left him to find his own way along the path that he knew now by heart. Perhaps we really could have stayed up there forever without anyone even noticing.

The late August rains came. I remembered them well. These are the days that bring autumn to the mountains: when they are over and the sun comes back, its light is less warm and more oblique, casting long shadows. Those banks of slow-moving, shapeless clouds that now swallowed the peaks had once told me that it was time to leave, and I had protested to the heavens that the summer had only lasted an instant—had it not only just started?—and could not have already flown away like this.

At Barma the rain was flattening the grass in the meadows, breaking the surface of the lake. The drumming and run-off of the rain on our roof blended with the crackling of the fire. At this time we were lining one of the rooms with fir, keeping warm with the stove that I’d salvaged. We had installed it against the wall made from the rock face. The rock behind the stove would gradually warm up and radiate back heat to the rest of the room, and the wood paneling was meant to help in conserving it. But this was to be at some future date: without windows or doors in place the wind blew down our necks, and the rain came in, in diagonal gusts. With work finished for the day, it was pleasant to be inside, watching the stove and feeding the fire with wood that had once been part of the old house.