Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

I had come to Kathmandu at the height of the monsoon season. Every afternoon the city was whipped by a storm. Then the crazy traffic of motorbikes and bicycles would cease, the packs of street dogs would seek refuge under overhanging roofs, the streets themselves become rivers of mud and rubbish—and I would shut myself in some place or other with a phone line, in front of an ancient computer, and catch up on the latest news. I did not know whether to admire Lara most, expecting her first child in an alpeggio , or that other woman, now seventy years old, who would climb up to visit her on foot and accompany her to the hospital each month. The August scan established beyond doubt that Lara was expecting a girl. Even now she continued to pasture the cows, with a belly so big that it prevented any movement except simply walking in front of the herd, then sitting under a tree to watch over it.

Then on the last Sunday of September, with their hides brushed and shining, their embroidered leather collars and their ceremonial bells, the cows went down to the valley in a solemn end of season procession. Bruno installed them in the stable he had rented for the winter, and at that point there was nothing left to do but wait. He must have done a certain amount of calculation, in true mountain man style, because Lara gave birth soon after, as if that too was seasonal work.

I remember where I was when my mother gave me the news: in lower Dolpo, on the shore of a lake that uncannily resembled an Alpine one, surrounded by woods of red fir and Buddhist temples, together with a girl that I had met in Kathmandu. She worked at an orphanage in the city, but at that time we had taken a few days off and headed for the mountains together. In a refuge without a stove at three and a half thousand meters, the walls of which were nothing more than small shingles painted blue, we had put together our two sleeping bags and huddled inside: through the window I looked out at the star-studded sky and the pointed tops of the fir trees as she slept. At a certain point I saw the moon rise. I stayed awake a long time, thinking about my friend Bruno who had just become a father.

When I returned to Italy in 2010 I found it deep in a grotesque economic crisis. Milan announced it to me on arrival, with its airport looking virtually decommissioned: four planes on kilometers of runway, and the window displays of the high fashion brands glistening in the empty shops. From the train that took me to the city, freezing from the air conditioning on a July evening, I noticed building sites everywhere, tall cranes suspended, high-rise buildings with bizarre profiles that were taking shape on the horizon. I could not understand why all the newspapers were talking about all the money having run out when I was noticing in Milan, and also in Turin, a building boom that resembled that of a golden age. Going in search of old friends was like doing a tour of hospital wards: the production companies, the advertising agencies, and the television channels that I had worked for were shutting down due to bankruptcy, and many of those friends were at home on their sofas, doing nothing. Nearing forty, they were reduced to taking the odd day’s work and to accepting money from their retired parents. But look outside, one of them said to me, do you see the buildings sprouting up everywhere? Who is it that’s stealing what was due to us? Wherever I went I breathed in this air of disillusionment and anger, this intergenerational sense of grievance. It was a relief to have in my pocket already the ticket with which I would be able to leave.

A few days later I took a coach to the mountains, then another at the beginning of the valley, and got off at the bar where I used to go with my mother to make calls, though there was no longer any trace there of the red phone box.

I followed the path on foot, just as before. The old mule track cut through the bends of the asphalted road and soon became choked with brambles and leaves, so rather than follow it I went up through the woods, relying on my memory of the way. When I came out on the other side I discovered that next to the ruins of the tower a mobile phone mast had gone up, and that down in the gully a cement dam interrupted the flow of the river. The little artificial reservoir was full of mud from the thaw: an excavator was fishing it out of the water and dumping it on the bank, destroying with its caterpillar tracks and the muddy sand the meadows where Bruno used to graze cattle as a boy.

Then, as always, I got beyond Grana and it seemed like I was leaving every poisoned thing behind me. It was like entering the sacred valley when going to Annapurna: except that here it was not any religious precept but simply neglect that had left everything unchanged. I discovered again the clearing that as children Bruno and I called the sawmill , because two tracks remained there together with a trolley used who knows how long ago for cutting planks of wood for buildings. Nearby there was a cable lift for dispatching those planks up to the alpeggi , the steel cable wound around a larch tree that with the passage of time had engulfed it in bark. They had forgotten my childhood mountain because it wasn’t worth anything—and it was fortunate in this respect. I slowed down like the Nepalese porters who would whisper at high altitude: bistare, bistare . I did not want these moments to be over too soon. Every time I went back up there I felt like I was returning to my own self, to the place where I was most like myself again and felt best.

At the farmstead they were expecting me for lunch. Bruno, Lara, the little Anita who at less than a year old was playing on a blanket in the middle of a meadow, and my mother who did not take her eyes off her for a moment. She said: “It’s your Uncle Pietro, Anita, look!” and immediately brought her to me to get acquainted. The little girl looked at me with suspicion, intrigued by my beard; she tugged it, and making a sound that I didn’t catch started laughing at her new discovery. My mother seemed quite different from the aging woman I had said goodbye to when I left. Other things had altered too; the whole farmstead was livelier than I remembered it: the new chickens and rabbits, the mule, the cows, the dogs, a fire on which the polenta and a stew were cooking, the table laid in the open air.

Bruno was so pleased to see me again that he embraced me. It was a gesture so unusual between us that as he squeezed me I wondered how much he might have changed. When we separated I looked hard at his face, searching for wrinkles, gray hairs, the heaviness of age in his features. I had the impression that he was looking for the same in mine. Were we still the same? Then he sat me down at the head of the table and poured the drinks: four glasses brimming with red wine with which to toast my return.

I was no longer used to wine or meat, and soon felt intoxicated by both. I was speaking nonstop. Lara and my mother took turns to get up and look after Anita, until the little girl began to feel sleepy and there was a sign, I think, or a silent understanding between them, and my mother gathered her up in her arms and moved away cradling her. I had brought back as a gift a teapot, cups, and a packet of black tea, so after lunch I made some, Tibetan style, with butter and salt, even if the Alpine butter was not as strong or rancid as butter made from yak’s milk. While I was mixing it I told them that in Tibet they used butter in every way imaginable: they burned it in lamps, spread it as a moisturizer on women’s hair, mixed it with human bones in sky burials.

“What?” said Bruno.

I explained that on the high plateaus there wasn’t enough wood to cremate corpses: the dead were flayed and left on top of a hill so that the vultures would devour them. After a few days they would return and find the bones picked clean. The skull and the skeleton were then pounded up and mixed with butter and flour, so that this too would become food for the birds.