Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

One evening Bruno talked to me about a project that he had in mind. He wanted to buy his uncle’s farmstead. He had been putting aside money for a good while now. His cousins, who were more than happy to rid themselves of the place and their bad memories of it, had come up with a price: Bruno had spent everything he had on a down payment, hoping to borrow the rest from the bank. These months spent in Barma had served as a kind of trial run: now he knew that he could cope. If everything went according to plan he would spend the next summer working in the same way there: he wanted to rebuild the huts, buy some cattle, and in a few years hoped to have the farm up and running.

“It’s a nice idea,” I said.

“Cows don’t cost much now,” he said.

“And does it pay to keep them?”

“Not a lot. But that doesn’t matter. If it was just about the money I’d stay as a builder.”

“You don’t like working as one anymore?”

“Sure, I like it. But I always knew that it was a temporary thing. It’s something that I can do, but it’s not something I was born to do.”

“So what were you born to do?”

“To be a man of the mountains.”

Uttering this phrase he became serious. I’d only ever heard him use it a few times before, when speaking of his ancestors: the old inhabitants of the mountain that he knew through the woods, the wild meadows, the derelict houses that he had spent a lifetime exploring. Abandoning them had once seemed inevitable to him too, when the only life he could see for himself was the same as for the men of the valley. You had to look down, to where the money was and the work—and not up, to where there was nothing but weeds and ruins. He told me that in the end, on the farmstead, his uncle had stopped fixing anything. If a chair broke he just burned it in the stove. If he saw an invasive plant in the meadow he couldn’t be bothered to bend down and uproot it. His father would start cursing if you so much as mentioned the place to him: he would gladly have turned his rifle on the cattle, and the thought that everything there was going to rack and ruin gave him a twisted kind of pleasure.

But Bruno felt himself to be different from this. So different from his father, his uncle, and his cousins that at a certain point he had understood who it was that he did in fact resemble, and from where he had got his desire to heed the call of the mountains.

“From your mother,” I said. But not because it had ever occurred to me before: I only saw it now, at this moment.

“Yes,” said Bruno. “We’re just like each other, me and her.”

He paused so I could reflect properly on what he’d said, and then he added: “Except that she’s a woman. If I decide to go and stay in the woods no one says anything about it. If a woman does it, she’s taken for a witch. If I keep quiet, what problem is there with that? I’m only a man who chooses not to speak. A woman who doesn’t speak must be half-crazy.”

It was true: we had all thought this about her. I myself had never exchanged with her more than a couple of words. Even now, when I passed by Grana and she gave me potatoes, tomatoes, and toma to take back up. A little more stooped and thinner than I remembered, she was nevertheless still for me the strange figure that I had seen up there in the vegetable garden as a boy.

Bruno said: “If my mother had been a man she would have had the life she wanted. I guess that she wasn’t really cut out for marriage. Definitely not for marriage with my father. Her only bit of good luck was getting free from him.”

“And how did she do that?”

“By keeping her mouth shut. And by staying up there with the chickens. You can’t get so angry with someone like that; sooner or later you leave them in peace.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“No. Or perhaps she did, in a way. It doesn’t matter whether she told me or not, I worked it out for myself.”

I knew that Bruno was right. I had understood something similar about my own parents. I began to think over that phrase— her only bit of good luck was getting free from him —and wondered whether it could be applied to my mother too. It was always possible, given what I knew about her. Perhaps not really a stroke of luck, but maybe more like a relief. My father had always been a man who filled the room. He was bossy, and he was hard work. When he was around, no one else mattered but him: his character demanded that all of our lives should revolve around his.

“And you?” Bruno asked me after a while.

“What about me?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Oh, I’m going away, I think. If I can manage it.”

“Where to?”

“To Asia maybe. I don’t know yet.”

I had hardly ever spoken to him about my longing to travel. I was tired of being penniless, especially so since I needed money in order to leave: in the past few years I had spent all my energy just struggling to make ends meet. I didn’t miss any of the things that I didn’t have, except for the freedom to travel the world. With my father’s small inheritance I had paid off my debts and wanted to devise a project that would take me far away from home. I felt like taking a flight somewhere and staying away for a few months, without any clear idea as to what I would do, just to see if I could find some story to tell. I had never done anything like this before.

“It must be great to leave like that,” Bruno said.

“Would you like to come?” I asked. I was joking, but not entirely. I was sorry that the work had come to an end. Never before had I felt so at ease with anyone.

“No, it’s not for me,” he said. “You’re the one who comes and goes. I’m the one who stays put. Same as always, right?”

When it was finished, in September, the house was like this: it had one room made of wood, and one of stone. The wooden room was larger and warmer with the stove, the table, two stools, and a larder. Some of this furniture came from other ruins, salvaged and cleaned up by me with elbow grease and sandpaper; some had been made by Bruno from the old floor planks. Under the roof, against the rock face, there was a loft that could be reached with a ladder—the warmest and most enclosed corner of the house—while the table was placed right under the window, so that you could look outside when sitting there. The stone room was small and cool, and we intended to use it as a cellar, a workshop, and a storeroom. We left in there most of the equipment that we had used, and all of the leftover wood. There was no bathroom, no running water, no electricity, but we had thick panes in the windows and a sturdy front door with a latch but no lock. Only the stone room was under lock and key. The lock was needed to prevent the equipment from being stolen, but the wooden room remained open as was customary in the mountain refuges, in case anyone passing that way should get into difficulty and need shelter. The grass around the house had been mown like a garden’s now; the firewood was stacked under a lean-to and my little pine tree looked out towards the lake, even though it did not seem any healthier or more robust to me than on the day that I replanted it there.

On the last day, I went to Grana to collect my mother. She laced on the leather hiking boots that I’d seen her use since I was a child: she had never had another pair. I thought that she would get tired climbing up there, but she went up slowly, at her own pace, without stopping once, and from behind I could see how she was walking. She kept the same slow but sure rhythm for two hours. She gave the impression that she would never slip or lose her balance.

It made her very happy to see the house that Bruno and I had built. It was a short September day, with little water remaining in the rivers, the grass drying in the meadows, the air no longer the warm air of August. Bruno had lit the stove, and it felt good to be indoors, drinking tea in front of the window. My mother liked the window, and she stayed there gazing out while Bruno and I organized the material that had to be taken down with us. Then I saw her go onto the terrace and look carefully at everything, so that she would remember it: the lake, the scree, the peaks of Grenon, the look of the house. She stood for a good while looking at the inscription that the day before, with mallet and chisel, I had made in the rock wall. I had gone over it with black paint, and it read: