Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

“Are they trout?” I whispered.

“Fish,” said Bruno.

“Do they always stay here?”

“Not always. Sometimes they change hole.”

“But what are they doing?”

“Hunting,” he replied, as if to him it was the most obvious thing. I, on the other hand, was learning about it for the first time. I had always thought that fish swam with the current, which seemed easiest, and not that they would use up their energy by going against it. The trout moved their tails just enough to remain stationary. I would like to have known what they were hunting. Perhaps it was the gnats that I could see skimming the surface before stopping as if trapped by it. I observed the scene carefully for a while, trying to understand it better, before Bruno suddenly lost interest and leapt to his feet, waving his arms so that the trout sped away in an instant. I went to have a look. They had fled from the center of the pool in every direction. I looked into the pool and all that I could see was the white and blue gravel at the bottom—and then I had to abandon it to follow Bruno as he rushed up the opposite bank of the river.

A little further on a solitary building loomed above the bank like the house of a watchman. It was falling to ruin amongst the nettles, the brambles, the wasps’ nests desiccating in the sun. In this countryside there were so many ruins just like this one. Bruno placed his hands on the walls, at a point where they met in a corner that was all cracks, pulled himself up, and with two quick movements reached the first-floor window.

“Come on!” he said, peering out from above. But then neglected to wait for me. Perhaps to him there seemed no difficulty in my following, and it did not occur to him that I might need help. Or perhaps he was just accustomed to this: that whether easy or difficult, it was every man for himself. I copied him as best as I could. I scraped my arms on the sill of the small window, looked inside, and saw Bruno lowering himself through the trapdoor of the attic on a ladder that led to the lower room. I think I had already decided that I would follow him anywhere.

Down below in the semi-darkness there was a space subdivided by low walls into four rooms of equal size, resembling tanks. In the air hung a stagnant smell of mold and rotten wood. As my eyes gradually adjusted to the dark I saw that the floor was littered with cans, bottles, old newspapers, shirts in rags, four wrecked shoes, bits of rusty equipment. Bruno had bent down next to a large white polished stone in the shape of a wheel that was placed in a corner of one room.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The grindstone,” he said. Then added: “The stone of the mill.”

I bent down next to him to look. I knew what a grindstone was, but had never seen one with my own eyes before. I stretched out my hand. The stone was cold, slimy, and in the hole at its center moss that adhered to your fingertips like green mud had gathered. I felt my arms smarting with the scratches from the window ledge.

“We need to stand it up,” Bruno said.

“Why?”

“So that it can roll.”

“But where to?”

“What do you mean where to? Down, no?”

I shook my head, because I did not understand. Bruno explained, patiently: “We stand it upright. We push it outside. And then we roll it down into the river. Then the fish will leap out of the river and we can eat them.”

The idea seemed both awesome and impossible. That boulder-like weight was too much for us. But it was so lovely to imagine it rolling down, and to imagine that the two of us were capable of such a feat, that I decided to offer no objection. Someone must have already tried to move it, since between the stone and the floor two woodcutter’s wedges had been inserted. They had gone under it just enough to raise it from the ground. Bruno picked up a stout stick, the handle of a pickaxe or a spade, and with a stone began to hammer it into that gap like a nail. When the end of it had wedged in, he worked the handle beneath the stone and stopped it with his foot.

“Now help me,” he said.

“What should I do?”

I moved next to him. We were supposed to both push downwards, using the combined weight of our bodies to raise the millstone. So we clung together on the handle, and when my feet left the ground I felt, for a moment, that the great stone moved. Bruno had devised the right method, and with a better lever it might have worked, but that piece of old wood bent under our weight, creaking before eventually snapping in two and flinging us to the ground. One of his hands was injured. He let out a resounding curse.

“Have you hurt yourself?” I asked.

“Shitty stone,” he said, sucking his wound. “Sooner or later, I’ll move you from there.” He climbed up the stepladder and disappeared above, moving furiously, and moments later I heard him jump down from the window and run away.

That evening I struggled to get to sleep. It was excitement that kept me awake: mine was a solitary childhood, and I wasn’t used to doing things with others. In this respect too, I believed, I was just like my father. But that day I had felt something, an unexpected sense of intimacy that both attracted and frightened me, like an opening into unknown territory. To calm myself I sought for a mental image. I thought of the river: of the pool, of the small waterfall, of the trout that moved their tails to remain stationary, of the leaves and twigs that flowed elsewhere. And then of the trout darting to meet their prey. I began to understand a fact, namely that all things, for a river fish, come from upstream: insects, branches, leaves, everything. That’s why it looks upstream, waiting for things to come. If the point at which you immerse yourself in the river is the present, I thought, then the past is the water that has flowed past you, that which has gone downstream and where there is nothing left for you; whereas the future is the water that comes down from above, bringing dangers and surprises. The past is in the valley, the future in the mountains. This is how I should have replied to my father. Whatever destiny may be, it resides in the mountains that tower over us.

Then gradually these thoughts also dispersed, and I lay awake listening. I was used by now to the sounds of the night, and could recognize them one after another. This, I thought, is the water flowing into the drinking trough. This is the bell on the collar of a dog on its nocturnal wanderings. This is the buzzing of Grana’s solitary electric street lamp. I wondered whether Bruno in his own bed would be listening to the same sounds. My mother turned a page in the kitchen, while the crackle of the stove lulled me to sleep.

For the rest of that July not a day passed without us meeting up. Either I joined him in the pasture or Bruno strung a wire around his cows, connected it to a car battery, and turned up in our kitchen. More than the biscuits I think that it was my mother that he liked. He liked the attention she paid to him. She would question him openly, without preliminaries, as she was used to doing in her work, and he would answer, proud of the fact that his own story could be of interest to such a nice lady from the city. He told us that he was the youngest inhabitant of Grana, as well as the last boy left in the village, given that there was no prospect of any others. His father was away for the best part of the year, would turn up rarely and only in winter; and as soon as he sensed the arrival of spring in the air he would set off again for France or Switzerland, or wherever he could find a building site in need of workers. By contrast his mother had never moved from the village: in the fields above the houses she had a vegetable garden, a henhouse, two goats, beehives; her sole interest was in watching over this little kingdom. When he described her I recognized immediately who she was. A woman I had frequently seen passing me by, pushing a wheelbarrow or carrying a hoe and a rake; she would overtake me with her head down, seemingly oblivious to my existence. She lived with Bruno at an uncle’s house; he was the husband of our landlady and the owner of some pastures and dairy cows. This uncle was in the mountains with his older cousins: Bruno gestured towards the window, through which at that moment I could only see woods and scree, and added that he would join them up there in August with the younger cows that had been left down below.