Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

I liked to hear him talk like this. And I also liked the enthusiasm he had for certain ideas that I had picked up on my travels around the world, especially since he was the only one with the skills to put them into practice. One year he carved out the trunk of a larch tree with a chainsaw, ran fifty meters of tubing from one of the streams that feeds into the lake, and built a fountain in front of the house. In this way we had drinking water and water to wash with, but that wasn’t the main idea: under the jet from the fountain he installed a turbine that I had ordered from Germany. A plastic one no bigger than a foot in diameter, resembling a toy windmill.

“Hey, Berio,” he said, when our mill wheel started to turn. “Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember.”

The system charged a battery with which, in the house, we managed to run a radio and a lightbulb for an entire night. It worked night and day, regardless of the weather—unlike solar panels or wind turbines—and it cost nothing and consumed nothing. It was the water that came down from the mountain and flowed towards the lake that in passing by the house gave light and music to our evenings.

There was a girl who came up with me in the summer of 2007. Her name was Lara. We had only been together for a couple of months. We had reached the stage which for others would mark the start of a relationship, but which for us was already the end: I had begun to withdraw, to avoid her, and to disappear, so that she would leave me before doing so became too painful. This was a tried and tested system with me, and in those last days she forced me to own up to what I was doing. She was upset for a night, then got over it.

These were enjoyable days, just as soon as we had understood that they would be our last together. Lara really liked the house, the lake, the rocks, and the peaks of Grenon, and liked to go on long walks by herself on the paths around Barma. I was surprised to see how she walked. She was strong legged, at ease with the spartan life that we lived up there. In the end I got to know her better during the days we spent there than in the two months that we had been sleeping together. She told me that from her childhood she was used to washing with cold water and drying in front of a fire: she had come from another mountainous region, had left it behind years ago in order to study, and now missed those mountains. Not that she regretted the decision to go to the city. She felt that her relationship with Turin was something of a love story. She had fallen in love with the streets, the people, the nights, the work that she had done there, and the houses in which she had lived: a long, lovely affair that was all but over now.

I told her that I knew exactly what she meant. That something similar had happened to me. She gave me a sad look in which there was both reproof and regret. In the afternoon I watched her go down to the lake where she took off her clothes and swam naked to the rock that resembled a reef, and for a moment I felt that I might have pushed her away from me too soon. But only before remembering what I was like when in a relationship with anyone. After that, I had no second thoughts.

I invited Bruno to supper that evening. He was behind with his project by a whole year, due to delays in securing loans and planning permissions, but had now almost finished renovating the farmstead. He thought of nothing else: he had been struggling with people at the bank and with local council officials; he had two jobs in the winter to earn the money that he spent during the summer and was in that state of complete, almost obsessive, concentration familiar to me from the time I spent with him as his laborer. He spent the whole evening telling us about constructing stables that would meet building regulations, about places for making cheese and cellars for maturing it, about equipment made of copper and steel, and about washable tiles in the old sheds. Things that I already knew about well enough but that Lara did not—and the enthusiasm with which he spoke about them was directed towards her. He amused me, my old friend Bruno, since I had never before seen him trying to impress a woman: he used unusually technical vocabulary, exaggerated his gestures, and kept glancing at her to gauge her reactions.

“He likes you,” I told her, after he had left.

“And how do you know that?”

“I’ve known him for twenty years. He’s my best friend.”

“I didn’t think that you had friends,” she said. “I thought that you ran a mile as soon as you caught sight of one.”

I did not reply to that. Sarcasm was the lesser of the evils that might come my way. You need style to be left by someone, and she had it.

I was preparing to leave for a job that autumn when Bruno sought me out in Turin. I was going to the Himalayas for the first time, and I could hardly contain myself. I was surprised to hear his voice at the end of the telephone: partly because neither of us set much store by that means of communication, partly because my mind was already elsewhere.

He got straight to the point: Lara had just gone back to see him. Lara? We hadn’t seen each other since those last days in the mountains. Now she had gone up there by herself, wanting to visit the alpeggio and to find out more about his work and his plans. Bruno had told her that in the spring his agricultural business would be up and running, that he was thinking of buying thirty cows and using their milk to produce cheese rather than selling it to one of the dairies, and that to do this he would need to employ someone else. It was just what she had been hoping for: she liked the place, had been raised around cattle, and immediately offered herself for the job.

On the one hand Bruno was flattered, on the other worried. He hadn’t figured on the presence of a woman up there. When he asked what I thought, I said: “I think that she’ll do it well. She’s hard-headed.”

“I got that,” said Bruno.

“And so?”

“What I don’t know is how things are between the two of you.”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. We haven’t seen each other for two months now.”

“Have you fallen out?”

“No. There’s nothing between us anymore. I’m happy to see her going up there with you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Definitely. No problem.”

“Then it’s fine.”

He said goodbye and wished me a good trip. Here, I thought, was a man from another time: who else would have asked permission to do what he was about to do? When I hung up I already knew everything that was about to happen. I was pleased for him. And I was pleased for her. Then I stopped thinking about Bruno or Lara or anyone else, and began to prepare my rucksack for the Himalayas.

My first journey to Nepal was like a journey back in time for me. A day’s drive by car from Kathmandu and fewer than two hundred kilometers from its crowds a narrow, irregular, wooded valley began, with a river below, which you could hear but not see, and villages built up above where the slopes softened in the sunlight. They were connected by mule tracks that rose and fell steeply, and narrow rope bridges suspended over the streams that cut the flanks of the valley like blades. Around the villages the mountain was covered in terraces and rice paddies. Seen in profile, it resembled a staircase with semicircular steps, bordered by low dry stone walls and divided into a thousand smallholdings. October was the harvest season, and climbing up I watched the farmers at work: the women kneeling in the fields, the men beating the husks in the yards to separate the grain from the chaff. The rice was drying on cloths where other, older women sifted it carefully. Children were everywhere. I saw two plowing a field as if it were a game, urging on a couple of emaciated oxen with their shouts and with blows from a stick, and I remembered Bruno’s yellow cane from the first time we met. He too would have liked Nepal. Here they still had wooden plows, river stones to sharpen scythes, and wicker baskets for porters to carry on their backs. Even if I could see that the farmers were wearing trainers, and could hear the sound of radios and televisions, it seemed to me that I had rediscovered, still thriving, the old civilization that had become extinct in our own mountains. Along the route I did not see a single derelict building.