Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

We climbed up the scree in thick fog, with no path, each of us finding his own way. We couldn’t see well enough to follow the cairns, losing sight of them almost immediately in fact, and letting ourselves be guided by the incline, our instincts, the lines suggested by the scree itself. We were climbing up blind, and every so often I heard the sound of stones that Bruno had dislodged above or below me, made out his outline and headed straight towards it. If we got too far from each other, one of us would call out: oh? and the other would respond with oh! We adjusted our direction like two boats in fog.

Until, at a certain point, I realized that the light was changing. Now it was casting shadows on the rocks in front of me. I looked up and saw a blue tone in the flurries of increasingly sparse fog, and after a few more steps I was through it: all at once I found myself looking around in full sunlight, with a September sky above my head and the dense white of the clouds beneath my feet. We were well above two and a half thousand meters. Only a few peaks emerged at that height, like chains of islands, like surfacing dorsals.

I also saw that we had deviated from the proper route to the Grenon’s summit, or at least from the usual one: but instead of crossing the scree at the fork I decided to reach the crest by climbing what was immediately above me. It didn’t look difficult. As I climbed I fantasized about achieving a first, something that would be recorded in the annals of the Italian Alpine Club, together with the author of such a feat: North-west crest of the Grenon: Pietro Guasti, 2008 . But just a little further up, on a ledge, I found a few rusty meat or sardine tins of the kind that many years ago no one bothered to take back with them to the valley. So I discovered once again that someone had preceded me.

There was a gorge between where I was and the usual route, getting steeper and steeper up to the crest. Bruno had taken it, and on its steep slope I saw that he had developed a peculiar style of his own: he used his hands as well and climbed on all fours, rapidly, instinctively choosing the right places for his hands and feet, and never putting his whole weight on them. Sometimes the ground would give way beneath his feet or hands, but his momentum had already carried him forward, and the small cascades of stones that he dislodged continued on down, like memories of his passing through there. Omo servadzo : the wild man, I thought. Having got to the top before him, I had time to admire this new style of his from the crest.

“Who taught you to climb like that?” I asked.

“The chamois. I watched them once and said to myself: now I’m going to try it like that too.”

“And it works?”

“Well . . . I’ve still got a few improvements to make.”

“Did you know that we would get above the clouds?”

“I was hoping that we would.”

We sat down, leaning against the pile of stones where I had once found words written by my father. The sun was sculpting every edge and indentation in the rock, and doing the same to Bruno’s face: he had new crow’s feet around his eyes, shadows under his cheekbones, furrows that I did not recall him having before. His first season at the farmstead must have been hard going.

It seemed like the right moment to talk to him about my journey. I told him that in Milan I had secured enough funding to stay away for at least a year. I wanted to go around the regions of Nepal and portray the people that lived in its mountains: there were so many different groups in the valleys of the Himalayas, all distinct from each other. I would be leaving in October, near the end of the monsoon season. I had little money but many contacts—people working there who would be able to help me and put me up. I confided that I had given up my home in Turin, that I didn’t have another one there now and neither did I want one: if things went well in Nepal, I would stay there even longer.

Bruno listened in silence. When I had finished speaking he took a while to reflect on the implications of what I had told him. He was looking at Monte Rosa, and said: “Do you remember that time with your father?”

“Of course I remember.”

“I think about it sometimes, you know? Do you think the ice of that day has reached the bottom yet?”

“I don’t think so. It’s probably about halfway.”

Then he asked: “Are the Himalayas like our region at all?”

“No,” I replied. “Not at all.”

It was not easy to explain, but I wanted to try, and so I added: “You know those enormous ruined monuments, like the ones in Athens and Rome? Those ancient temples of which only a few columns are left standing, with the stones of their walls lying scattered about on the ground? Well, the Himalayas are like the original temple. It’s like being able to see it intact after having spent a lifetime only ever seeing ruins.”

I immediately regretted having spoken in this way. Bruno was gazing at the glaciers, above the clouds, and I thought that in the coming months I would remember him like this, like the custodian of that pile of rubble.

Then he got up. “Time to do the milking,” he said. “Are you coming down?”

“I think I’ll stay here a bit longer.”

“Good for you. Who would want to go back down below?”

He entered the gorge up which he’d climbed and disappeared amongst the rocks. I caught sight of him again a few minutes later, about a hundred meters further down. There was a spit of snow down there, pushed northwards, and he had crossed the scree in order to reach it. From above that small snowfield he tested its consistency with his foot. He looked up in my direction and waved, and I responded with a big gesture that might be seen from a distance. The snow must have been well frozen, because Bruno jumped on it and immediately picked up speed: he went down with his legs spread out, skiing with his work boots, waving his arms to keep his balance—and in an instant was swallowed up by the fog.

ANITA WAS BORN in the autumn, like all mountain folk.

I was not there that year: in Nepal I had come into contact with the world of NGOs and was working with a group of them. I was filming documentaries in the villages where schools and hospitals were being built, agricultural projects or employment initiatives for women were being developed, and where sometimes camps for Tibetan refugees were being set up. I didn’t like everything that I was seeing. The managers in Kathmandu were no more than careerist politicians. But in the mountains themselves I came across people of every sort: from old hippies to students doing VSO; from volunteer medics to mountaineers who between one expedition and another would stay on to work as builders. Not even these examples of humanity were entirely free from ambition and power struggles, but what they did not lack was idealism. And I liked being amongst idealists.

I was in Mustang, in June—an arid plateau on the border with Tibet, made up of small white houses clinging to the red rock—when my mother wrote to let me know that she had just gone up to Grana and discovered that Lara was five months pregnant. She felt immediately called to do her duty. Throughout the summer she sent me updates that resembled medical reports: in June Lara had twisted her ankle while she was out in the pasture, and had continued to hobble around for days; in July, with her very pale skin, she suffered sunstroke while making hay; in August, with backache and swollen legs, she still carried down the cheese twice a week with the mule. My mother would order her to rest. Lara would not hear of it. When Bruno suggested that they should hire someone to do her work she refused, saying that the cows were all pregnant too and that no one made a fuss about it, that seeing them so calm actually helped her to relax.