Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

“Hello?”

“Bruno!” I shouted. “It’s me, Pietro!”

On hearing my outburst of Italian the boys burst out laughing. I pressed the receiver closer to my ear. The delay on the long-distance line added an extra hesitation, then Bruno said: “Yes, I’d hoped it would be you.”

He did not feel like talking about what had happened with Lara. I could imagine anyway how it had been. I asked him how he was, and what he planned to do.

He replied: “I’m fine. I’m just tired. They took away the farm, did you hear?”

“Yes. And what did you do with the cows?”

“Oh, I gave them away.”

“And what about Anita?”

“Anita is with Lara at her parents’. They’ve got plenty of room there. I’ve heard from them, they’re doing fine.”

Then he added: “Listen, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Tell me.”

“If I can use the house up at Barma, since at the moment I don’t really know where to go.”

“But do you really want to go up there?”

“I don’t want to see anyone; you know how it is. I’ll spend some time in the mountains.”

That’s how he said it: in the mountains . It was strange to hear his voice on a phone, in Kathmandu, a voice that arrived there hoarse and so distorted that I struggled to recognize it, but that I knew at that moment was really his. It was Bruno, my old friend.

I said: “Of course. Stay as long as you want. It’s your house.”

“Thanks.”

There was something else I wanted to say, but it was difficult. We were not used to asking each other for help, or to offering it. Without beating around the bush I asked: “Listen, would you like me to come over?”

In the past Bruno would have immediately told me to stay where I was. When he eventually answered, he did so with a tone of voice that I had never heard before. Ironic, in part. And partly disarmed.

He said: “Well, that would be nice.”

“I’ll sort a few things out and then come, all right?”

“All right.”

It was a late afternoon in November. As I left the place from which I’d phoned, darkness was falling over the city. In that part of the world the streets are not lit, and at sunset people hurry home, and you sense an anxiety about night falling. Outside there were dogs, dust, scooters, a cow lying in the middle of the road stopping the traffic, tourists heading for restaurants and hotels, the air of an evening in late summer. In Grana it was the beginning of winter, and it occurred to me that I had never before seen that season there.

THE DEEP-CUT VALLEY of Grana in October was burnt by drought and frost. It had the color of ochre, of sand, of terra-cotta, and looked as if its meadows had been burnt in a fire now spent. In its woods that fire was still ablaze: on the flanks of the mountain the gold and bronze flames of the larches were lit against the dark green of the pines, and raising your eyes to the sky warmed the soul. The sun no longer reached the bottom of the valley, and the earth was hard underfoot, covered here and there with a crust of frost. At the little wooden bridge, when I bent down to drink, I saw that the autumn had cast a spell over that river of mine: the ice was forming slides and galleries, draping the wet stones with glass, trapping tufts of dry grass and transforming them into found sculptures.

Climbing towards Bruno’s farmstead I crossed paths with a group of hunters. They were wearing camouflage jackets and binoculars around their necks but had no rifles. They did not seem like locals to me, but then perhaps in the autumn even faces change, and I was the outsider here. They were talking together in dialect, and when they saw me they stopped talking, sized me up with a glance, and continued on their way. I found out soon after where they had stationed themselves: up at the farmstead, near the bench where Bruno and I would sit of an evening, I found their cigarette butts and a crumpled empty packet. They must have climbed up early in the morning in order to study the woods from that vantage point. Bruno had put everything in good order before leaving: he had sealed the stable door, closed the shutters, stacked the wood against the side of the house, overturned the drinking troughs along the wall. He had even spread the manure that was dry and odorless now in the yellowed meadows. It looked just like any other Alpine farmstead prepared for the winter months, and I lingered a while remembering how it was, full of noise and life, the last time that I had visited it. Breaking the silence I heard a belling from the other side of the valley. I had only ever heard this sound a few times before, but once would have been enough to remember it forever. It was the powerful, guttural, angry sound with which the stag intimidates his rivals in the mating season, even though it was too late now for reproduction. Perhaps the stag was just plain angry, nothing more. At this point I realized what those hunters had come looking for.

Something similar happened a little while later, up at the lake. The sun was just managing to peer over the crests of the Grenon, warming the scree facing it at midday. But the inlet at the foot of the slope remained in shadow even at this hour: a layer of ice had formed on the water, a half-moon that was polished and dark. When I tested it with a stick the ice was so thin that it broke. I took a piece of it from the water and held it up to look through, and at that moment I heard a chainsaw starting up. The revving of the motor, and then the squeal of the blade biting wood. I looked to see where it was coming from. There was a copse of larch midway up the slope, just above Barma, growing on a kind of small terrace: the naked, gray trunk of a dead tree stuck out amongst the yellow tresses of the others. I heard the chainsaw cutting into the wood, twice. Then the pause required to walk around the tree, then again the screech of the blade as it bit into the wood. I saw it slowly begin to topple before it suddenly collapsed, with a crackling rush of branches splitting as it fell.

“What can I tell you, Pietro, things went badly,” Bruno said that evening, then shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he had nothing more to add on the subject. He was drinking coffee reheated on the stove and looking out to where it was getting dark already at five o’clock. We were using candles in the house, now that our little mill wheel was stopped due to drought: I had seen two full packs of white candles in the other room, together with the sacks of cornmeal, a couple of loaves of cheese remaining from the last batch made, a reserve of tins, some potatoes, and cartons of wine. It was not the larder of someone who was in any hurry to go back down. During the month since our phone call Bruno had laid in supplies and elaborated his own kind of mourning: the farm had gone badly, the relationship with Lara had gone badly, and he spoke about these things—or rather avoided speaking about them—as if they belonged to some remote period, in both time and thought. Rather than remember them, he seemed to want to forget about them entirely.

We spent these days making firewood for the winter. In the morning we would study a slope in search of a dead tree, climb up to cut it down, divest it of its branches before Bruno took off its top with the chainsaw, then would spend hours laboring to shift it to the house. We would tie a strong rope around it and drag it down by sheer force of our own strength. We had built slides throughout the wood, using old planks like sleepers, with banks of piled branches positioned where the trunk was in danger of slipping from our grasp with the steepness of the slope—but sooner or later it would get entangled with some obstacle or other, and then the work of dislodging it from there would begin. Bruno would curse it. He handled a pickaxe as if it were one of those small hoes lumberjacks use, levering up the trunk so that it could be pivoted halfway round: he would try one side and then the other, swearing as he did so, before flinging the tool to the ground and going to pick up the chainsaw again. I had always admired his way of working, the grace that he was able to express when using any kind of tool, but all trace of that was gone now. He would wield the chainsaw furiously: stall it, over-rev it, and when sometimes he had used up its petrol, would be on the verge of flinging it away as well. He would end up solving the problem by cutting the trunk into pieces and giving us another one instead—multiple journeys carrying them back to the house. Then we would set to splitting the wood with a sledgehammer and wedges until nightfall. The strokes of iron upon iron reverberated around the mountainside, drier, shriller, meaner, when Bruno was hammering, more uncertain and discordant when I took my turn. Until the master stroke came, the trunk split, and we finished the job with the axe.