Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

The thuds continued, but he took no notice of them. When I too had got more used to them I began to notice the changes that had been made to the room. Bruno had put up some more shelves by placing them on nails hammered into the walls, and had filled them with his books, clothes, and tools, giving to the place the air of something that it had never had before—that of a lived-in house.

He poured two glasses of wine. He said to me: “I’ve got to apologize. I’m sorry things went as they did last time. I’m glad that you’ve come back, I’d given up hope. We’re still friends, right?”

“Of course,” I said.

While I started to relax he rekindled the fire in the stove. He went outside with the bucket and brought it back filled with snow, then put it to melt to make the polenta with. He asked me if I felt like having a bit of meat for supper, and I told him that after that slog I would be happy to eat anything—so he took out pieces of chamois that he had cured in salt and put them in a pan with butter and wine. When the water in the pail reached boiling point he threw in a few handfuls of cornmeal. He took out another liter of red to keep us company while we waited, and after the first couple of glasses, as the room filled with the pungent smell of game, I began to feel good again too.

Bruno said: “I was angry. And what made me even angrier was that I had no one else to blame. The fact is that I made all the mistakes myself. Nobody led me into them. What was I thinking, trying to become a businessman? Someone like me who knows nothing about money. I should have fixed up a little place like this one, brought four cows up here, and lived like this from the start.”

I kept quiet, listening to him. I understood that he had thought long and hard, and had found the answers he had been looking for. He said, “You have to do what life has taught you to do. Perhaps when you’re still very young you can choose, maybe, to change the course of your life. But at a certain point you have to stop and say to yourself: fine, this is what I’m capable of doing and this is what I can’t do. This is what I asked myself. And the answer? I know how to live in the mountains. Put me up here by myself and I can cope. That’s something, don’t you think? But it took me until I was forty years old to realize the value of it.”

I was exhausted and was settling down into the warmth of the wine, and even though I would not have admitted it I liked hearing him speak like this. There was something absolute about Bruno that had always fascinated me. A certain integrity and purity that I had admired in him ever since we were boys. I was almost persuaded to believe him, up there in the little house that we had built together: that the best way of living his life was that one, alone in the middle of winter with nothing but a little food, left to his own devices and his own thoughts—even though it would have seemed inhuman for anyone else.

It was the mountain itself that woke me from this fantasy. I heard a sound that was different from the usual thudding on the roof. It began like the roar of an airplane, or like distant thunder—but then got immediately closer, deafening, a rumbling that shook the glasses on the table. We looked at each other, and I could see at that moment that he was no more prepared for this than I was, and no less terrified. To the rumbling another sound was added, that of a crash, something colliding and exploding, and immediately after it the sounds diminished in intensity. Then we began to realize that the avalanche could not have passed over us. It had passed nearby, but elsewhere. More material fell; we felt another, weaker fall, then the silence returned just as suddenly as it had been broken. When everything had stopped moving we went out to try to see what had happened, but by now it was night; there was no moon, and there was nothing to see but the dark. When we went back indoors Bruno did not feel like talking anymore, and neither did I. We went to bed, but an hour later I heard him get up, throw wood into the stove, and pour himself a drink.

Emerging from the burrow in the morning we found ourselves in the light that follows prolonged snowfall. Behind us the sun was shining and the mountain in front of us dazzled the basin. We immediately saw what had happened: the main gorge of the Grenon, the one that Bruno had skied down just hours before, had discharged an avalanche that had started three or four hundred meters further up, at the steepest point of the slope. On plunging down, the snow had dug deep into the ground, so much so as to strip the rock beneath and drag the earth and gravel down with it. The gorge looked like a dark wound now. Crashing into the basin after falling for five hundred meters, the avalanche had gathered enough force to smash through the frozen surface of the lake. That must have been the second sound that we heard. Now at the base of the gorge there was nothing left of the lake’s soft expanse, just a mass of dirty snow and blocks of ice, like a serac. The mountain crows were circling above and alighting within it. I could not work out what was attracting them there. It was a terrible and fascinating sight, and we did not need to say anything before going to take a closer look.

The carrion that the crows were sharing was the corpses of dead fish. Small silver trout caught in the midst of their winter hibernation, flung out of the dense dark water in which they slept, up onto a bed of snow. Who knows whether they had time to be aware of what was happening. It must have been like a bomb exploding: from the upturned and shattered slabs I could see that the ice must have been half a meter thick on the surface of the lake. Underneath, the water had already begun to freeze over again. This was only a thin layer as yet, dark but transparent, like the one I had seen in autumn. Some crows were squabbling over a trout nearby, and finding it at that moment an insufferable spectacle of greed I scattered them with a couple of steps and a kick. All that was left behind on the snow was a pink mush.

“Sky burial,” said Bruno.

“Have you seen anything like this before?” I asked.

“No, I certainly haven’t,” he replied. He seemed impressed.

I heard the sound of a helicopter approaching. There was not a cloud in the sky that morning. With the first warmth from the sun, clumps of snow began to fall from every overhang of Grenon, and from the guttering small avalanches fell. It was as if the mountain were starting to free itself from that prolonged snowfall. The helicopter flew above without noticing us and passed on, and then it occurred to me that we were barely a few kilometers from the ski slopes on Monte Rosa, on December 27, on a morning of sunshine and fresh snow. It was a perfect day for skiing. Perhaps they were watching the traffic from up there. I imagined from above the lines of cars, the overflowing car parks, the establishments working to full capacity without a break—and just there, over a nearby ridge, on the side that was in shadow, two men standing at the foot of a landslide surrounded by dead fish.

“I’m going,” I said, for the second time in just a few weeks. Twice I had tried, and twice I had failed to rescue him.

“Yes, it seems like the right thing to do,” said Bruno.

“You should come down with me.”

“Again?”

I looked at him. Something had occurred to him that caused him to smile. He said: “How long have we been friends?”

“I think that next year it will be thirty years.”

“And haven’t you been trying to get me down from here for the last thirty years?” Then he added: “You mustn’t worry about me. This mountain has never done me any harm.”

I remember little else about that morning. I was shaken, and too sad to think clearly. I remember that I could not wait to leave the lake and the avalanche behind me—but that later on, once I was down in the valley, I began to enjoy the descent. I found the route by which I’d come up, and discovered that with the snowshoes I could go down in great leaps even at the steepest points, as the fresh snow did not give way beneath my feet. The steeper the incline, in fact, the more I could launch myself and let myself go. I stopped only once, when crossing the river, because I had thought of something and wanted to see if it was true. I climbed down between its snow-covered banks and dug in the snow with my gloves. Just below it I found the ice, a thin transparent layer that broke easily. I discovered that this thin crust protected a vein of water. You could not see it or hear it from the path, but my river was still there, coursing beneath the snow.