Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

The snow was already sparse on the Grenon. What little there was allowed the scree and the bushes, the ledges and the outcrops of rock to be made out still, as if the snowfall were no more than a thin layer of frost. But towards the end of the month a cold front arrived, the temperature dropped suddenly, and the lake froze over in the course of one night. The next morning I went down to look: the ice near the shore was rendered grayish and opaque by a myriad of trapped air bubbles, and became gradually darker and then blacker the further away you went from it. With a stick I could not even dent it, so decided to risk walking on it to see if it would take my weight. I had only taken a few steps before I heard a rumbling from deep in the lake that made me retreat immediately. Safely on the shore I heard it again: an ominous rumbling, resounding like a bass drum being hit over and over, extremely slowly and rhythmically, perhaps once every minute, perhaps even slower. It could not be anything other than water, beating against the ice from below. With the coming of daylight the water seemed to want to break out of the tomb in which it had found itself encased.

At sunset our endless evenings began. The horizon at the end of the valley would be tinged red for barely a few minutes before darkness fell. From then until it was time to sleep, the light did not change again: it could be six, seven, eight, and we would be spending the hours in front of the stove in silence, each with a candle to read by, the glow of the fire, the wine rationed to make it last, the one luxury at our suppers. During those days I cooked potatoes in every conceivable way. Boiled, roasted, grilled, fried in butter, baked with melted toma , with the candle next to the hotplate to see when they were done. We would eat them in ten minutes, then face each other for another two or three hours of silent vigil. The fact was that I was waiting for something—I didn’t know what—something that wasn’t happening. I had come back from Nepal to rescue my friend, and now my friend seemed to have no need of me. If I asked him a question he would let it drop with one of those vague responses that extinguished from the start any potential glimmer of conversation. He could spend an hour staring at the fire. And only occasionally, when I’d given up expecting him to, he spoke: but as if already midsentence, or as if he were temporarily following out loud the train of his own thoughts.

One evening he said, “I was there once, in Milan.”

“Oh really?” I said.

“But it was a long time ago; I must have been twenty. One day I had an argument with my boss and walked off the site. I had a whole afternoon free, so I said to myself: right, I’ll go there now. I took the car, went on the motorway, and arrived in the evening. I wanted to have a beer in Milan. I stopped at the first bar and had one. Then I headed back.”

“And what did you think of Milan?”

“Not much. Too many people.”

And then he added: “And I’ve also been to the sea. I went to Genoa once and saw it. I had a blanket in the car and slept there. Nobody was waiting for me at home anyway.”

“And what was the sea like?”

“A big lake.”

His accounts of things were like this; they might or might not have been true, and they went nowhere. Only once, out of the blue, he said: “It was great, wasn’t it, when we used to sit in front of the stable in the evening?”

I put down the book I was reading and responded: “Yes, really great.”

“The way night fell in July, the calm descended, do you remember? It was the hour I liked best, and then when I got up to milk the cows it was still dark. The two of them were still sleeping, and I felt as if I were watching over everything, as if they could sleep peacefully because I was there.”

Then he added: “It’s stupid, no? But that’s how I felt.”

“I don’t see anything stupid about it.”

“It’s stupid because no one can look after anyone else. It’s hard enough to look after yourself. Men are designed to always cope, if they’re clever, but if they think they’re too clever they end up being ruined.”

“Is starting a family being too clever?”

“Perhaps it is, for some.”

“Well, perhaps some should think twice before bringing children into the world.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Bruno said.

I stared at him in the semidarkness, trying to understand what was going through his mind. One half of his face was yellowed by the light from the stove, the other completely dark.

“So what are you saying?” I asked. He stared at the fire as if I were no longer even there.

I felt an increasing impatience that drove me outside into the dark, craving a cigarette for company. I stayed outside looking for the stars that were not visible, and asking myself what I was doing back here, until I realized that my teeth were chattering. Then I went back into the warm, dark, smoky room. Bruno had not moved. I warmed my feet in front of the stove, then went up to shut myself into my sleeping bag.

The next morning I was the first to get up. In the light of day I did not feel like sharing that small room, so skipped coffee and went out for a walk. I went down to look at the lake and found it covered by an overnight frost that the wind was sweeping here and there—lifting it in flurries, puffs, and miniature whirlwinds that appeared and disappeared in an instant, like restless spirits. Beneath the frost the ice was black and looked like stone. As I stood there looking at it, a shot echoed in the valley, rebounding from one side to the other so that it was difficult to tell whether it came from below, in the woods, or from the crests above. But I instinctively looked upwards for its origin, scouring the scree and the slopes for any sign of movement.

When I got back to Barma I saw that two hunters had come to speak to Bruno. They had modern weapons with telescopic sights. At one point one of the two opened his rucksack and deposited a black bag at Bruno’s feet. The other one noticed my presence and nodded in my direction, and recognizing something familiar about that gesture I realized soon enough who they were: the two cousins from whom Bruno had bought the farmstead. I had not seen them for more than twenty-five years. I had not known that he was in touch with them, nor how they had found him up there. But who knows how much else there was about Grana that I could not even imagine.

From out of the black bag, after they had gone, a dead and already gutted chamois emerged. When Bruno hung it up by its back legs from the branch of a larch tree I could see that it was a female. It had its dark winter coat with a thick black line down the middle of its back, a slender neck from which its lifeless muzzle dangled, two small horns that looked like hooks. From the gash in its belly the steam was still rising in the cold morning air.

Bruno went inside to fetch a knife and sharpened it carefully before setting to work. Then he was as precise and methodical as if he had spent a lifetime doing nothing but this. He made an incision in the skin around the shins and continued along the inside of the thighs, all the way down to the groin where the two cuts joined. He went back up, detached a flap of skin from the shin, put down the knife, and grasped the flap with both hands, tugging it down violently to expose first one thigh and then the other. Under the skin there was a white, viscous layer—the fat that the chamois had put on for the winter months—and beneath the fat you could glimpse the pink of its flesh. Bruno took the knife again, made a cut in the breast and another two in the front legs, grasped again the flayed hide that was now hanging halfway down its back and tugged it hard. You need some strength to tear hide from flesh, but he used more force than was necessary, putting into it the anger that he had kept bottled up ever since I had arrived. The skin came off in one piece, like a dress. Then he grabbed hold of one of the horns with his left hand, fumbled with his knife between the vertebrae of its neck, and I heard the crack of fractured bone. The head came off with the hide and Bruno stretched it on the ground, with the fur lying on the grass and the skin facing upwards.