Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

The chamois looked much smaller now. Skinned and decapitated, it no longer even looked like a chamois—just meat, bones, cartilage—like one of those refrigerated carcasses hanging in cold storage in supermarkets. Bruno inserted his hands into the thorax and tore out the heart and lungs, then turned the carcass around. He felt with his fingers to find the veins of the muscles along the backbone, severed them with a light cut, and then went back over the line he had followed, plunging the knife in. The flesh that was disclosed then was of a dark red color. He cut off two long cords, dark and bloody. His arms were daubed with blood now too. I’d had enough, and did not stay to witness the rest of the butchery. I just saw at the end the skeleton of the chamois hanging from the branch of the tree, reduced to next to nothing.

A few hours later I told him that I was leaving. At the table I had tried to resume our conversation from the day before, this time being more direct. I asked him what he intended to do about Anita, what arrangements he had made with Lara, and whether he intended to visit them at Christmas.

“Probably not at Christmas,” he answered.

“So when?”

“I don’t know, maybe in the spring.”

“Or maybe in the summer, right?”

“Listen, what difference does it make? It’s better that she stays with her mother, isn’t it? Or do you want me to bring her up here, to live this kind of life with me?”

He said here just as he’d always done, as if at the bottom of his valley there was an invisible border, a wall erected only for him, preventing access to the rest of the world.

“Perhaps you should go down,” I said. “Maybe you’re the one who needs to change your way of life.”

“Me?” said Bruno. “But Berio, don’t you remember who I am?”

Yes, I remembered. He was the cowherd, the bricklayer, the man of the mountains, and above all he was his father’s son: just like him he would disappear from the life of his child, and that was it. I looked at the plate in front of me. Bruno had prepared a hunter’s delicacy, the heart and lungs of the chamois cooked with wine and onions, but I had barely touched it.

“You’re not eating?” he asked, disappointed.

“It’s too strong for me,” I replied.

I pushed the plate away and added: “Today I’m going down. I’ve got a few work-related things to sort out. Perhaps I’ll come back to say goodbye before leaving.”

“Yes, of course,” said Bruno, without looking at me. He didn’t believe it and neither did I. He took my plate, opened the door, and threw its contents outside for the crows and foxes, creatures with less delicate stomachs than mine.

In December I decided to go and visit Lara. I made my way up the valley as the snow was beginning to fall, at the start of the ski season. The landscape was not so very different from that of Grana, and while driving it occurred to me that to a certain extent all mountains look the same, except that here there was nothing to remind me of myself or of someone I once loved, and that made all the difference. The way in which a place can be a custodian of your history. How you could read it there every time you went back. There could only be one mountain of this kind in anyone’s lifetime, and in comparison with that one all the others were merely minor peaks, even if they happened to be in the Himalayas.

There was a small ski resort at the head of the valley. Two or three businesses in all, of the kind that were struggling to survive, what with the economic crisis and climate change. Lara worked there in a restaurant built in the style of an Alpine lodge, near to where the ski lifts began and as fake in its way as the artificial snow on the pistes. She came forward to embrace me wearing the apron of a waitress, and with a smile that could not conceal how tired she was. She was young, Lara; she was no more than thirty—but for a good while now she had been living the life of an older woman, and it showed. There were few skiers about, so she asked one of her colleagues to cover for her and came to sit at a table with me.

While talking she showed me a photo of Anita: a blond, rather frail, smiling child who was hugging a black dog much bigger than herself. She told me that she was in her first year of school. It was difficult to convince her to conform to certain rules; when she started she was like some kind of feral child: she would get in a fight with someone, or would begin to scream, or would sit in a corner the whole day saying nothing. Now, little by little, perhaps she was becoming civilized. Lara laughed. She said: “But the thing she likes most is when I take her to some farm. There she feels at home. She lets the calves lick her hands—you know, with that rough tongue of theirs—and she isn’t afraid at all. And it’s the same with goats and with horses. She’s happy with every kind of animal. I hope that won’t change, and that she’ll never forget it.”

She stopped to sip some of her tea. I saw that her fingers around the cup were red, her nails bitten down to the quick. She looked around the restaurant and said: “You know I also worked here when I was sixteen. All winter, Saturdays and Sundays while my friends went skiing. How I hated them.”

“It’s not such a bad place,” I said.

“Oh yes it is. I never thought I’d come back here. But as they say: sometimes you have to take a step backwards in order to move forwards. That is if you have the humility to admit it to yourself.”

Now she was referring to Bruno. As soon as we got onto the subject she came down hard on him. She told me that two or three years previously, when it was clear that the farm was not viable, they still would have been able to find solutions. Sell the cows, rent out the farmstead, both look for jobs. Bruno would have been quickly taken on at a building site or dairy processing unit, or even on the ski slopes. She could have worked as a shop assistant or waitress. She was ready to make this choice, to lead a more ordinary life until the situation improved. Bruno, on the other hand, did not want to know about it. In his mind there was no possibility of alternative lives. And at a certain point she realized that neither she nor Anita, nor what she had believed they were building up there together, were as important as his precious mountain, whatever that really meant to him. The moment she realized this, the relationship was over for her. From the very next day she had begun to imagine a future far away from there, with her little girl but without him.

She said: “Sometimes love exhausts itself gradually, and sometimes it comes to an end suddenly: isn’t that how it goes?”

“Well, I don’t know anything about love,” I replied.

“Oh right, I’d forgotten.”

“I went to see him. He’s up at Barma now. He wants to stay there; he’s not coming down.”

“I know,” said Lara. “The last of the mountain men.”

“I don’t know how to help him.”

“Forget it. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Leave him there where he wants to be.”

Saying this she glanced at her watch, exchanged a look with her colleague at the counter, and got up to go back to work. Lara the waitress. I remembered when she used to guard the cows beneath the rain, proud, still, with her black umbrella.

“Say hello to Anita for me,” I said.

“Come and see her before she’s twenty,” she said, and then she embraced me a little more tightly than before. There was something in that embrace that her words had not communicated. Emotional turmoil perhaps, or nostalgia. I left as the first skiers were arriving for lunch, with their helmets and their all-in-one suits and their plastic boots, looking like aliens.