Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

I was climbing up the valley towards Annapurna with four Italian mountaineers. I had been sharing a tent with them for a few weeks now, together with my film camera. I was on a well-paid assignment, and from the outset it had seemed to me like a real stroke of luck. I was intrigued by the prospect of filming a documentary about mountaineering, of seeing what would happen to this group of men under extreme conditions. But what I was discovering as we neared the base camp fascinated me even more. I had already decided to stay on after the expedition, and to make my own trip around the lower levels.

On the second day of walking, at the end of the valley, the summits of the Himalayas appeared. And then I saw how mountains must have been at the world’s beginning. Mountains that were newborn, sharply cut, as if just sculpted by creation, not yet eroded by the passage of time. Their snows lit the valley from a height of six or seven thousand meters. Waterfalls plummeted from overhangs and carved the rock faces, detaching from ledges landslides of reddish earth which ended up frothing in the rivers. Up above, oblivious to the tumult below, the glaciers looked out over everything. And it was from up there that the water comes, as the man with the white whiskers had told me. They must have known this well enough in Nepal too, since they had named their mountain after the goddess of harvests and of fertility. Along the path the water was everywhere: the water of the rivers, of the fountains, of the canals, the water of the basins in which the women did their laundry, the water that I would like to have seen in spring, with the rice fields flooded and the valley transformed into a myriad of mirrors.

I don’t know if the mountaineers with whom I was climbing noticed these things or not. They were impatient to leave behind the villages and to start planting pickaxes and climbing irons in the ice that was glittering up there. Not me. I walked between porters so that I could ask them about anything that I did not understand: what kind of vegetables were grown in the plots, which kind of wood was burnt in the stoves; to whom the small shrines that we encountered along the way were dedicated. In the woods there were no fir or larch trees, but a strange contorted species that I could not identify, until one of the men told me that they were rhododendrons. Rhododendrons! My mother’s favorite plant because it flowered for just a few days, at the beginning of summer, painting the mountain with pink, lilac, and violet, and which here in Nepal produced trees five or six meters high with black bark that flaked off in scales, and had leaves that were as oily as bay leaves. And further up, when the wood came to an end, what appeared was not willow or juniper but a bamboo grove. Bamboo! Bamboo at three thousand meters. There were young men who passed us carrying bundles of swaying bamboo on their backs. In the villages they used them to make roofs, cutting them lengthwise and superimposing the two halves—one concave and one convex—to help with the runoff of rainwater during the monsoon season. The walls were made of stone cemented with mud. About their houses I already knew everything there was to know.

At each of the wayside shrines the porters left a pebble or a bud they had collected in the woods, and advised me to do the same. We were entering sacred territory, and from here on it was forbidden to slaughter or to eat an animal. Now I stopped seeing chickens outside the houses, or goats grazing. There were some other animals, wild ones that browsed on the ledges, with long hair that reached down to the ground: the blue sheep of the Himalayas, someone told me. A mountain with blue sheep; monkeys similar to baboons, glimpsed in the bamboo thickets—and against the sky, moving slowly, the eerie outlines of vultures. And yet I felt at home. Even here, I told myself, where the woods end and there’s nothing left but grass and scree, I’m at home. This is the altitude to which I belong, at which I feel best. I was thinking about this when I stepped onto the first snow.

I went back to Grana the following year with a string of prayer flags, which I hung between two larch trees and we could see through the window of the house. The flags were blue, white, red, green, and yellow—blue for ether, white for air, red for fire, green for water, yellow for the earth—and they stood out against the shade of the wood. I would often watch them of an afternoon, as they tried to come to terms with the wind of the Alps and danced between the branches of the trees. The memories that I had of Nepal were like those flags: vivid, warm, so that my old mountains now seemed more desolate than ever. I would go out walking and see nothing but derelict huts and ruins.

But something new was happening in Grana. Bruno and Lara had been together for a while now: they had not needed to explain how things had developed. He seemed more serious than before, as men can be sometimes when a woman comes into their life. She, on the other hand, had been happily transformed, shaking off the dust of the city together with that air of disappointment I remembered her as having, and of which there was no longer a trace. She had a high-toned laugh, and her skin was flushed from life lived in the open air. Bruno adored her. Here was another version of my friend that I did not know: at the table on the first night, while I was talking about my travels, he could not stop touching her, caressing her, taking every opportunity to place a hand on her leg or shoulder, and even when talking to me he was in constant physical contact with her. In his presence Lara seemed less anxious, less uncertain of herself. She needed only a gesture or a look of reassurance, and it was all: Are you there? I’m here. But really? Yes, I told you, yes. Lovers, I thought: it was good that the world contained them, but in the confines of a room they always made you feel superfluous.

During that winter not much snow had fallen, so Bruno decided to go to the alpeggio —or to the mountain, as he would say—on the first Saturday of June.

I lent him a hand that day. He had bought twenty-eight dairy cows, creatures that were all already pregnant when they were unloaded from a cattle truck in the piazza in Grana. They were unsettled by the journey, and hurried down the ramp lowing and poking each other with their horns. They would have scattered who knows where if Bruno, his mother, Lara, and I had not been there positioned around the square in order to contain them and calm them down. The truck left. Together with two black dogs of venerable Grana shepherding pedigree we began to climb up the mule track, Bruno in front with his “ Oh, oh, oh! Eh, eh, eh!” and his mother and Lara further down the line, with me bringing up the rear, doing nothing and enjoying the spectacle. The dogs knew how to do this job to perfection, and would run to reclaim any cows that were slowing things down, barking and nipping them on the flanks until they had rejoined the group. The barking of the dogs, the bellows of protest from the cows, and the noise of their bells drowned out all other sounds, and it seemed to me I was a spectator at a carnival parade or at a kind of resurrection. The herd climbed up the valley past the derelict huts, past the stone walls riddled and undermined by weeds, past the gray stumps of felled larches—like a bloodstream that was beginning to circulate again, bringing a body back to life. I wondered if the foxes and deer that must have been watching us from the woods as we passed could share in the sense of celebration that I felt.

At a certain point in the climb Lara joined me. We had not yet had the chance to speak together, just the two of us, but I think we both thought that we needed to. I don’t know why she chose that particular moment, when our words needed to be shouted into the cloud of dust that was enveloping us. She smiled at me and said: “Who would have thought it a year ago?”