Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

Then she called us to sing a song. It was the song that is sung when a lover of the mountains dies, the song in which you ask God to allow him to continue to go walking in the afterlife. Both Bruno and I knew it. It all seemed just right to me, all done as was fitting. There was one thing still to be said: I had been thinking about it for a while and decided to say it now so that my mother could hear it, so that there would be a witness to remember it: I said that I wanted this house not to be mine, but to be ours. Mine and Bruno’s. Both of ours. I was convinced that this was what my father had wanted, that he had left it between us. But above all I wanted it to be this way myself, because we had built it together. From that moment, I said, he should consider it to be his own home, just as much as I considered it to be mine.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I am.”

“Then it’s fine,” he said. “Thanks.”

Then he removed the embers from the stove and threw them outside. I closed the front door, took the mule’s bridle, and told my mother to lead the way, and the four of us set off towards Grana, at my mother’s pace.

IT WAS AN OLD Nepalese man who told me, afterwards, about the eight mountains. He was carrying a load of hens up the valley below Everest, heading to one of the refuges where they were destined to become chicken curry for tourists: he had a cage on his back which was divided into a dozen separate cells, and the chickens, still alive, were flustered inside them. I had not yet come across a contraption of this kind. I had seen panniers full of chocolate, biscuits, powdered milk, bottles of beer, of whisky and of Coca-Cola, going along the trails of Nepal to cater for the tastes of Westerners, but never a portable henhouse. When I asked the man if I could photograph it he put it down on a low wall, removed from his forehead the band with which he was carrying it and struck a pose, smiling, next to the chickens.

Then while he was getting his breath back we talked for a while. I’d visited the region he came from, which astonished him. He understood that I was not a casual walker, and discovering that I could even string together a few phrases in Nepalese, asked me why I was so interested in the Himalayas. I had a ready answer to that question: I told him that there was a mountain where I had grown up, and to which I was attached, and that it had fostered in me a desire to see the most beautiful mountains in the world.

“Ah,” he said. “I understand. You are doing the tour of the eight mountains.”

“The eight mountains?”

The man picked up a small stick and drew a circle with it on the ground. You could tell he was used to drawing it; he executed it so perfectly. Then, inside the circle he drew a diameter, and then another perpendicular one bisecting the first, and then a third and a fourth through the point of bisection, thus creating a wheel with eight spokes. I thought that if I had drawn that figure myself I would have started with a cross—that it was typical of an Asian to begin with a circle.

“Have you ever seen a drawing like this?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “In mandalas.”

“That’s right,” he said. “We believe that at the center of the earth there is a tremendously high mountain, Sumeru. Around Sumeru there are eight mountains and eight seas. This is the world for us.”

While he was speaking he drew outside of the wheel a small peak for each spoke, and then a little wave between one peak and the next. Eight mountains and eight seas. Finally, at the center of the wheel, he drew a crown which I thought might represent the summit of Sumeru. He assessed his work for a moment and shook his head, as if to say that this was a drawing that he had made a thousand times but that of late he had begun to lose his touch a little. Be that as it may, he pointed the stick to the center and concluded, “We ask: who has learned most, the one who has been to all eight mountains, or the one who has reached the summit of Sumeru?”

The chicken carrier looked at me and smiled. I smiled too, because the story amused me and because I thought that I had understood its meaning. He rubbed out the drawing with his hand, but I knew that I would not forget it. Well, I said to myself, this will be a good one to tell to Bruno.

The center of my world in those years was the house that I had built with Bruno. I would stay there for long periods between June and October, and sometimes would take friends who would immediately fall in love with the place. In this way I had up there the company that I lacked in the city. During the week I lived alone, reading, writing, cutting wood, and wandering around the old paths. I became accustomed to solitude. And I was at ease with it, though not entirely. But on Saturdays during the summer there was always someone who would seek me out there, and then the house ceased to resemble the hut of a hermit, becoming more like one of the refuges that I used to frequent with my father, with wine on the table, the stove lit, friends who would stay up late talking—and that shared isolation from the world that made us all brothers for a night. The refuge was warmed by the fire of this intimacy, and it seemed to me that between one visit and the next it kept its embers glowing.

Bruno was also attracted to the warmth of Barma. I would see him appear on the path towards evening carrying a piece of toma and a bottle of wine, or hear his knock on the door when it was dark already, as if it was quite normal up there, at two thousand meters, to receive a visit from a neighbor at night. If I happened to have company he would happily join us all at the table. I found him to be more talkative than usual, as if he had been silent too long and had accumulated a lot to say. In Grana he remained confined in his world of building work, books, walks in the woods, silent reflection—and I could understand the urgency with which after a day on the building site he would wash and change, ignore his tiredness and the urge to sleep, and take the path to the lake.

With these friends we would often talk about going to live in the mountains together. We were reading Murray Bookchin and dreaming, or pretending to dream, of turning one of the abandoned villages into an ecological community where we could experiment with our ideas about society. Only in the mountains would it be possible to do this. Only up there would we be left in peace. We knew of other, similar experiments that had taken place throughout the Alps: all short-lived and ending up badly, but the fact that they had failed did not stop us from fantasizing; it gave us instead plenty to discuss. How would we manage for food? What would we do about electricity? How would we build the houses? A little money would still be necessary: how would we earn it? Where would we send our children to school? Assuming, that is, that we wanted to send them to school. And how would we resolve the problem of the family, that enemy of every community—worse even than private property and power?

It was this utopian game that we would play of an evening, at weekends. Bruno, who was actually in the process of building his ideal village, amused himself by demolishing ours. He would say: without cement the houses would not stay up, and without fertilizer even the grass in the meadows won’t grow; and I’d like to see you try to cut wood without petrol for a chainsaw. What do you plan to eat during the winter, polenta and potatoes like the old folk? And he would say: it’s only you townies who use the word nature . And it’s as abstract to you as the word itself. We say wood, meadow, river, rock , things that we can actually point to. Things that can be used. If they can’t be used, we don’t bother to even give them a name: it would be pointless to do so.