Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

The snow began falling suddenly and heavily at the end of December. On Christmas Day it snowed even in Milan. After lunch I was looking out of the window onto the avenue of my childhood, with a few cars passing gingerly along it and one skidding at the traffic lights and coming to a halt in the middle of the crossing. There were children throwing snowballs. Egyptian children who had perhaps never seen snow before. In four days’ time I would be catching the plane that would take me back to Kathmandu, but I wasn’t thinking about Nepal now, I was thinking about Bruno. It felt like I was the only one who knew that he was up there.

My mother came to be next to me at the window. She had invited her friends to lunch, and they were chatting tipsily at the table, waiting for dessert. There was a joyful atmosphere in the house. There was the nativity scene that she set up every year with the moss she collected at Grana, the red tablecloth, wine, and good company. I envied once more her talent for friendship. She had no intention of growing old sad and alone.

She said: “In my opinion you should try again.”

“I know,” I replied. “But I don’t know if it will make any difference.”

I opened the window and stretched my hand outside. I waited for a snowflake to land on my hand: it was heavy and wet and melted instantly on contact with my skin—but I wondered what it would be like now at two thousand meters.

So the next day I bought snow chains on the motorway and a pair of snowshoes in the first shop in the valley, and joined the queues of cars that were going up from Milan and Turin. Almost all of them had skis on their roof racks: after recent seasons without much snow the skiers were rushing to the mountains as if to the reopening of an amusement park. Not one of them took the turning at the junction for Grana. After just a few bends I stopped seeing anyone else. Then, when the road curved past the rock, I entered into my old world again.

There was snow piled up against the stables and the log-built haylofts. Snow on the tractors, on the tin roofs of shacks, on the wheelbarrows and piles of manure; snow that filled the ruined buildings and almost completely concealed them. In the village someone had cleared a narrow strip of road between the houses, perhaps the two men I saw on a roof throwing down the snow that had accumulated up there. They looked up without deigning to acknowledge me. I left the car a little further on, where the snowplow had been stopped or perhaps just given up, having cleared just enough space to turn around and head back. I put on gloves, since recently my fingers tended to freeze in the slightest cold. I fixed the snowshoes to my boots, climbed over the wall of hard snow that blocked the road, and went into the fresh snow beyond it.

It took me more than four hours to cover the route that in summer would take fewer than two. Even with the snowshoes I was sinking almost knee-deep. I was finding my way only by remembering it, gauging the direction from the contours of bumps and slopes, from a still discernible passage between the snow-clad pines, without any track to follow, or any of my usual points of reference on the ground. The snow had buried the remains of the cable lift’s winding gear, the ruined walls, the piles of stones quarried from the pastures, the stumps of centuries-old larch. All that remained of the river was a hollow between the two gently sloping humps of its banks: I crossed it at a randomly chosen point with a leap into fresh snow, falling forwards onto my hands without injury. On the other side the incline became increasingly steep, and every three or four steps I would slip back, taking a small avalanche with me. Then I would have to use my hands as well, pointing the snowshoes as if they were crampons and trying again with more determination. Only on reaching Bruno’s farmstead did I fully realize just how much snow had fallen: it had reached halfway up the windows of the stable. But the gusts of wind had swept the side facing the mountain, forming a tunnel a footstep wide, and I stopped there to get my breath back. The grass in that small strip of ground was dead and dry, gray as the stone walls. There was no light—and no other color but white, gray, and black. And the snow was continuing to fall.

When I arrived at the top I discovered that the lake had disappeared along with everything else. It was only a snow-filled basin, a gentle depression at the mountain’s foot. And so, for the first time in many years, instead of going around it I headed straight across in the direction of Barma. It seemed most strange, walking over so much water. I was halfway across when I heard someone calling.

“Oh!” I heard. “Berio!”

I raised my eyes and saw Bruno much higher up the slope, a small figure above the treeline. He waved, and as soon as I waved back he threw himself down. Then I realized he must be wearing skis. He was coming down at an oblique angle, with his legs opened wide and without any style, just as he did when coming down the snowfields in the summer. He also held his arms open and his chest thrust forward, keeping a precarious balance. But in front of the first larch trees I saw him throw himself to one side and steer decisively, avoiding the wood by crossing higher up, down to the main gorge of the Grenon, where he stopped. In the summer a small stream flowed in that gorge, but now it was a broad snow-filled slide that reached, unobstructed, all the way down to the lake. Bruno assessed the steepness of the incline over the distance remaining between us, then pointed his skis in my direction and set off again. In the gorge he immediately picked up speed. I don’t know what would have happened if he had fallen there, but he kept upright, swooped into the basin and gradually braked on the flat, sliding to where I was and coming to a standstill.

He was sweaty and smiling. “Did you see that?” he said, breathing heavily. He lifted one of the skis that must have been thirty or forty years old and looked like some kind of military relic. He said: “I went down to get a shovel and found these in my uncle’s cellar. They’ve been there for years; I don’t know who they belonged to.”

“But when did you learn how to use them?”

“About a week ago. Do you know what’s hardest? Not looking at a tree if you think you’re about to collide with it. If you look, you’re sure to hit it—bull’s-eye.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. Bruno laughed and clapped me on the back. He had a long gray beard, and his eyes were lit with euphoria. He must have lost some weight, as his features were sharper than ever.

“Oh, Merry Christmas,” he said, and then: “Come, come on,” as if we had met there by chance and needed to go and toast this fortunate coincidence. He picked up the skis and, carrying them on his back, cleared a path for me on the slope along a route that he must have known from his experiments as a skier.

I almost felt compassion for our little house on the rock face, when I saw it surrounded by walls of snow almost as high as itself. Bruno had cleared the roof, and dug a trench around the house which he’d widened into a small square in front of the door. When I went inside it felt like entering into a burrow. It seemed welcoming, and more cluttered and messier than before. The window was blind now; there was nothing to look out at but layers of white on the other side of the glass—and I had barely had time to take off my wet clothes and sit myself down at the table before something fell onto the tiles of the roof with a tremendous thud. I instinctively looked up, afraid that it was about to collapse on me.

Bruno burst out laughing. He said: “Did you fix the rotten ones properly that time? Now we’ll see whether the roof holds, eh?”