Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

“In the mountains?” I asked.

“I mean in the mountain pastures. Do you know what an alpeggio is?”

I shook my head.

“And are your uncle and aunt nice to you?” my mother interrupted.

“Of course,” said Bruno. “They have a lot to do.”

“You do go to school though?”

“Oh sure.”

“Do you like it?”

Bruno shrugged. He couldn’t bring himself to say yes, even just to please her.

“And do your mother and father love each other?”

At this he looked away. He curled his lip into a grimace which might have meant no, or perhaps just a little, or that this was not a subject to stay there chatting about. The reply was enough to stop my mother from insisting further, since she had understood that there was something about the conversation that he did not like. She would never have let it drop otherwise.

When Bruno and I were alone together we never discussed our families. We wandered around the village but never strayed too far from his grazing cows. To have adventures we explored abandoned buildings. In Grana there were more of these than even we could have wished for: old stables, old haylofts and granaries, an old shop with its dust-covered, empty shelves, an ancient bread oven blackened by smoke. Everywhere there was the same kind of detritus that I had seen at the mill, as if for a good while after these buildings had fallen into disuse someone had been occupying them, badly, until they were abandoned for good. In some kitchens we would find a table and a bench still in place, a plate or one or two glasses in the larder, a frying pan still hanging above the fireplace. Fourteen people were living in Grana in 1984, but in the past there had been as many as one hundred.

The village was dominated by a building that was more modern and imposing than the houses that surrounded it: it had three white-plastered floors, an external staircase, and a courtyard enclosed by a wall that had collapsed at one point. We got in through there, stepping over the weeds that had invaded the courtyard. The door on the ground floor had only been pulled to, and when Bruno pushed it we found ourselves in a shadowy entrance hall, complete with benches and a wooden coat rack. I realized immediately where we were, perhaps because all schools resemble one another: but the school in Grana was being used now only to rear the fat, gray rabbits that peered at us fearfully from a row of cages. The schoolroom smelled of hay, animal feed, urine, and of wine that was turning to vinegar. On a wooden dais, where in the past a lectern must have stood, some empty tins had been thrown; but nobody had had the temerity to take down the crucifix from the far wall, or to make firewood from the desks that had been pushed up against it.

These were more interesting to me than the rabbits. I went to have a closer look: they were long and narrow, each with four holes for inkwells, their wood polished by all the hands that had rested there. Inside, with a knife or a nail, those same hands had carved a few letters. Initials. The G for Guglielmina appeared frequently.

“Do you know who they are?”

“Some of them, yes,” Bruno said. “Some of them I don’t know, but I’ve heard of them.”

“But when was this?”

“I don’t know. This school’s always been closed.”

I did not get a chance to ask any more questions before we heard Bruno’s aunt calling. It was thus that all of our adventures ended: the peremptory command arrived, shouted once, twice, a third time, reaching us wherever we happened to be. Bruno snorted. Then he said goodbye and rushed off. He would drop everything unfinished—a game, a conversation—and I knew that I would not see him again that day.

I stayed a little longer in the old school: I examined every desk, read all the initials, and tried to imagine the names of the children. Then, snooping further I found a more cleanly cut and recently made carving. The grooves left by the knife stood out against the gray wood as if freshly cut. I ran a finger over the G and over the B, and it was impossible to have any doubt as to the identity of their author. And so I made a connection between other things, things that I had seen but not understood in the ruins of the buildings that Bruno would take me to, and I began to understand something about the secret life of that ghost village.

July was flying past meanwhile. The grass mowed at our arrival had grown back a foot, and along the mule track the herds passed, heading for the high pastures. I would watch them disappearing up the deep valley, hearing the sound of their hooves and bells as they made their way through the woods, reappearing after a while in the distance above the treeline, like flocks of birds alighted on the mountainside. Two evenings a week my mother and I would take the path in the opposite direction, towards another village—one that was scarcely more than a handful of houses at the bottom of the valley. It would take us half an hour to arrive there on foot, and at the end of the path it seemed as if we had suddenly re- entered the modern world. The lights of a bar illuminated the bridge across the river, cars could be seen going to and fro on the trunk road, and the music blended with the voices of villagers sitting outside. Down there it was hotter, and the summer was both lively and leisurely, like summers at the seaside. A group of young men was gathered around tables: they were smoking, laughing, every so often one was picked up by passing friends, and they would drive off together towards the bar higher up the valley. My mother and I, on the other hand, would join the queue for the payphone. We would wait our turn before going together into that cabin exhausted by conversations. My parents would keep it short: even at home they were not inclined to small talk; listening to them was like overhearing old friends who needed few words to understand each other.

“So, mountain man,” he would say. “How’s it going? Climbed any good peaks lately?”

“Not yet. But I’m in training.”

“Good for you. And how’s your friend?”

“He’s fine. But he’s going up to the alpeggio soon, so I won’t be seeing him anymore. It takes an hour to get there.”

“Well, an hour away isn’t so far. I guess we’ll have to go and see him together. What do you think?”

“I’d like that. When are you coming?”

“In August,” my father would say. And before signing off he would add: “Give a kiss to your mother from me. And look after her, do you hear? Don’t let her get lonely.”

I would promise him that I would, but secretly thought that he was the one feeling alone. I could imagine him in Milan, in the empty apartment with the windows wide open to the noise of traffic. My mother was doing fine; she was happy. We would go back to Grana by the same path through the woods, over which darkness had now fallen. She would turn on a torch and direct it at her feet. She had no fear of the night. Her calmness was such that it reassured me too: we walked following her boots in that uncertain light, and after a while I would hear her singing in a low voice, as if to herself. If I knew the song I would join in, also in a low voice. The sounds of the traffic, the radios, the laughter of the young people gradually vanished behind us. The air became fresher as we climbed. I knew that I was almost there a little before seeing the lit windows, when the wind carried towards us the smell of chimney smoke.

I DO NOT KNOW what changes my father had detected in me that year, but he had already decided that the time had come to take me with him. He came up from Milan one Saturday, breaking into our routine with his battered Alfa, determined not to waste a minute of his short vacation. He had brought a map that he pinned to the wall, and a felt-tip pen with which he intended to mark routes taken, as generals do with conquests. The old military backpack, his velvet plus fours, the red jumper worn by climbers of the Dolomites: this would be his uniform. My mother preferred not to get involved, seeking refuge with her geraniums and her books. Bruno was already away in the alpine pastures, and all I could do was keep going back to our haunts alone, missing him, so I welcomed this new development: I began to learn my father’s way of being in the mountains, the nearest thing to an education that I was to get from him.