Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

“In what, good fortune?”

“No, in praying.”

“I don’t know. But they put me in a good mood. And that’s enough, no?”

“Yes, you’re right.”

I was reminded of our own good luck charm, and looked to see how it was getting on. The little Swiss pine was still there, as delicate and contorted as the day when it was transplanted—but still alive. By now it was heading towards its seventh winter. It too was swaying in the wind, but inspired neither peace nor harmony: tenacity, if anything. A clinging on to life. I thought that in Nepal these were not virtues—but that in the Alps, perhaps, they were.

I opened the beers. Handing one to Bruno I asked: “So how’s it going, being a father?”

“How’s it going? I’d like to know the answer to that myself.”

He raised his eyes to the sky, and then added: “For now it’s easy. I carry her in my arms and stroke her as if she were a little rabbit or a kitten. That I know how to do. I’ve always done it. The difficulty will come when I have to tell her about things.”

“But why?”

“What do I know about anything? In my life I’ve only ever known this.”

When he said this he made a gesture with his hand to encompass the lake, the woods, the meadows, and the scree that we had in front of us. I did not know if he had ever gone away from there, or if he had, how far. I had never even asked, partly in order not to offend him, partly because the answer would not have changed anything.

He said: “I know how to milk a cow, how to make cheese, to cut down a tree, to build a house. I would also know how to shoot an animal and eat it if I was starving. I’ve been taught these things since I was little. But who teaches you how to be a father? Not my own father, that’s for sure. In the end I had to beat him up so that he would leave me alone. Have I ever told you about that?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, that’s what happened. I was working all day on the building site; I was stronger than him. I think I must have really hurt him because I haven’t seen him since. The poor bastard.”

He looked up at the sky again. The same wind that was agitating my prayer flags was pushing the clouds over the ridges. He said: “I’m only glad that Anita’s a girl, so I can just love her and that’s that.”

I had never seen him so low. Things had not gone as he had hoped. I had the same sense of powerlessness as when we were boys and he would not utter a word for an entire day, plunged into a despondency that seemed absolute and irremediable. I would like to have had some old friend’s trick with which to raise his spirits.

Before he left, the legend of the eight mountains came to my mind, and I thought that he might like to hear it. Relating it to him I tried to remember every word and gesture with which the chicken carrier had given it to me. With a nail I scratched the mandala on a wooden tile.

“So you’re supposed to be the one who journeys to the eight mountains, and I’m the one who climbs Sumeru?”

“It looks like it.”

“And which one of us achieves something good?”

“It’s you,” I said. Not just to encourage him, but because I believed it.

Bruno said nothing. He looked at the drawing again, in order to memorize it. Then he gave me a pat on the back and jumped down from the roof.

Without having in any way planned it, I too found myself caring for children in Nepal. Not in the mountains but on the periphery of Kathmandu, a city that now sprawled across its entire valley with outskirts resembling the shanty towns to be found in so many other parts of the world. They were the children of people who had come to the city seeking their fortune. Some had lost one of their parents, some had lost both, but more often than not the father or mother lived in a shack and worked like a slave in that ants’ nest, leaving them to be raised on the streets. These children had been dealt a fate that did not exist in the mountains: in Kathmandu the child beggars, the small gangs dedicated to some kind of trafficking or other, and the dirty stupefied kids who scavenged through the city’s rubbish were as familiar a part of the urban landscape as street dogs and the monkeys in the Buddhist temples.

There were organizations that were trying to care for them, and the girl I was with was working for one of these. Given what I was seeing for myself on the streets, and hearing about from her, it was inevitable that I would begin to lend a hand too. You find your place in the world much less predictably than you’d imagine: here I was, after so much wandering, in a big city at the foot of the mountains, with a woman who was basically doing the same work as my mother did. And with whom, at every opportunity, I would escape to altitude in order to replenish the energy sapped by the city.

Walking these paths I thought often about Bruno. It wasn’t the woods or the rivers so much as the children that reminded me of him. I remembered him at their age, growing up in what remained of his dying village, with ruins as his only playground and a school that had been turned into a storehouse. There was a lot to be doing in Nepal, for someone with his skills: we taught the migrant children English and maths from textbooks, but perhaps what we should have been showing them was how to cultivate a plot, how to build a stable, raise goats—and so I would sometimes fantasize about dragging Bruno away from his dying mountain, to help teach these other mountain folk. We could have done great things together in this part of the world.

And yet if it had just been down to us we would not have contacted each other for years, as though our friendship had no need of being kept up. It was my mother who gave us news of each other, since she was all too familiar with living with men who did not communicate amongst themselves. She wrote to me about Anita, about the character that she was developing, about the way in which she was growing up wild and fearless. She had become very attached to this little girl, and it worried her to see the crisis between her parents worsening. They worked too hard, and continued to find ways of working even harder: so much so that in the summer my mother would frequently keep Anita with her at Grana, in order to free her parents from at least the burden of having to care for her too. Lara was exasperated by their debts. Bruno had retreated into mutism and into his work. My mother did not mention directly what she feared, but it was not difficult to read between the lines: we had both begun to see how things would end up.

They struggled on in this way for a little longer. Then in the autumn of 2013 Bruno declared himself bankrupt, shut down the agricultural business, and handed over the keys of the farm to the bailiff, and Lara went to live with her parents with the child. Although according to my mother, things had happened the other way round: Lara had decided to leave him, and he had given up, resigning himself to failure. Either way, it made no difference. But the tone in which she conveyed the news was not just sad but alarmed, and I could tell that she was afraid for what might happen to Bruno now. He’s lost everything , she wrote, and he is all alone. Is there anything you can do?

I read these words several times before doing something that I had never done before in Nepal: I got up from the computer, asked to use the telephone, and went into a booth to dial the code for Italy and then Bruno’s number. It was one of those places in Kathmandu where people seem permanently to be killing time. The owner was eating rice and lentils, an old man sitting next to him was watching him eat, and two children were peering into the booth at me to see what I was up to. The phone rang five or six times, at which point I began to think that Bruno would not answer it: knowing him, he might have hurled the mobile into the woods and decided not to hear from anyone ever again. Instead there was a click, a distant fumbling, and an uncertain voice that was saying: