Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

The end of this torture would arrive unexpectedly. I would make one last leap, go round a rocky outcrop, and suddenly find myself before a pile of stones, or a lightning-stricken iron cross—my father’s rucksack flung on the ground, beyond it nothing but sky. It was more of a relief than a cause for elation. There was no reward awaiting us up there: apart from the fact that we could climb no further, there was nothing really special about the summit. I would have been happier reaching a river, or a village.

On the summit my father became reflective. He would take off his shirt and vest and hang them on the cross to dry. It was only on rare occasions that I saw him like this, and bare-chested his body had something vulnerable about it—with his reddened forearms, his strong white shoulders, the small gold chain that he never took off, his neck also red and covered in dust. We would sit down to eat bread and cheese, and to contemplate the panoramic view. In front of us stood the entire massif of Monte Rosa, so close that we could make out the refuges, the cable cars, the artificial lakes, the long procession of roped figures on their way back from the Margherita Hut. My father would then unstop his canteen of wine and smoke his single morning cigarette.

“It isn’t called Rosa because it’s pink,” he would say. “It comes from an old word for ice. The ice mountain.”

Then he would list the “four-thousanders”—the peaks above four thousand meters—from east to west, saying them over again because before going there it was important to know them, to have cultivated a long-standing desire for them: the modest Punta Giordani, the Piramide Vincent towering over it, the Balmenhorn on which the great Christ of the Summits rises, the Parrot, with an outline so gentle that it’s almost invisible; then the noble peaks of the three sharp-pointed sisters—Gnifetti, Zumstein, and Dufour; the two Lyskamm with the ridge that joins them, the “Devourer of Men”; and at the end the elegantly curved profile of Castor, the rugged Pollux, the deeply carved Black Rock, the Breithorn with its seemingly innocuous air. Finally, to the west, sculpted and solitary, the Matterhorn, which my father called the Big Nose , as if it were an elderly aunt of his. He did not willingly turn south, towards the plains: down there the August haze hung heavily, and somewhere beneath that gray blanket Milan was sweltering.

“It all looks so small, doesn’t it?” he would say, and I did not understand. I could not understand in what possible sense that magisterial panorama could seem small to him. Perhaps it was other things that seemed small, things that came back to him when he was up there. But his melancholy did not last for long. His cigarette finished, he would extract himself from the mire of his thoughts, collect his things and say: “Shall we go?”

We took the descent at a run, going down every slope at breakneck speed, letting out war cries and American Indian howls, and in less than two hours would be soaking our feet in some village fountain.

In Grana my mother had made progress with her investigations. I would often spot her in the field where Bruno’s mother spent her days. If you glanced up in that direction you would always see her there, a bony woman wearing a yellow beret, bent over, tending her onions and potatoes. She never exchanged a word with anyone, and no one would seek her out there until my mother decided to do so: one of them in the allotment, the other sitting on a tree stump nearby. From a distance it seemed as if they had been chatting there for hours.

“So she does speak then,” said my father, who had heard from us about this strange woman.

“Of course she speaks. I’ve never known anyone who was mute,” my mother replied.

“More’s the pity,” he remarked, but she wasn’t in the mood for jokes. She had discovered that Bruno had not advanced beyond primary school that year, and she was furious about it. He had not been to school since April. It was clear that if no one intervened then his education was already at an end, and this was the kind of thing that made my mother indignant, every bit as much in a small mountain village as in Milan.

“You can’t always be rescuing everyone,” my father said.

“But someone rescued you, or am I wrong?”

“True enough. But then I had to rescue myself from them.”

“But you did get to study. They didn’t force you to herd cows when you were eleven years old. At eleven you should be going to school.”

“I’m just saying that it’s different in this case. He does have parents, luckily.”

“Some luck,” my mother concluded, and my father did not respond. They almost never touched upon the subject of his own childhood, and on those rare occasions he would shake his head and let the subject drop.

And so it was that we were sent, my father and I, as an advance party to forge links with the men of the Guglielmina family. The alpeggio or farmstead where they spent the summer consisted of a group of three mountain shacks about an hour’s distance from Grana along the track that climbed up the deep valley. We caught sight of them from a distance, perched on its right flank, where the mountain became less steep just before plunging down again until it reached the same stream that flowed through the village. I was already very fond of that little river. I was pleased to meet up with it again there. At this point the valley seemed to close, as if an immense landslide had blocked it upstream, and it ended in a basin watered by small streams and overrun with ferns, bushes of rhubarb, and nettles. Passing through it the way became boggy. Then, leaving behind the wetland, the path went beyond the river and climbed into the sunshine and onto dry ground, towards the huts. From the river onwards all the pastures were well maintained.

“Hey,” said Bruno. “It’s about time.”

“I’m sorry. I had to spend some time with my father.”

“Is that your father? What’s he like?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s fine.”

I had started talking like him. We hadn’t seen each other in fifteen days, and we felt like old friends. My father greeted him as if he were one, and even Bruno’s uncle made an effort to seem hospitable: he disappeared into one of the huts and came out with a piece of toma cheese, some mocetta salami, and a flask of wine, but his face hardly accorded with these gestures of welcome. He was a man who seemed marked by his own worst inner thoughts, as if they were carved there in his features. He had an unkempt, bristling, and almost white beard, its moustache thicker and gray; eyebrows that were arched permanently, giving him a distrusting air; and eyes that were sky blue. The hand my father stretched out had taken him by surprise, and the movement he made to shake it seemed hesitant, unnatural; only when unstopping the wine and filling the glasses did he seem back on his own familiar territory.

Bruno had something to show me, so we left them to their drinks and went for a wander around. I took in the farmstead that he had told me so much about. It exuded an ancient dignity—whose presence you could still feel in the drystone walls, in certain enormous angular stones, in the hand-hewn roof beams—as well as a more recent air of poverty, like a layer of grease and dust over everything. The longest of the cabins was being used as a cowshed, humming with flies and encrusted with dung right up to its threshold. In the second, its broken windows stopped with bits of rag and its roof patched with metal sheets, Luigi Guglielmina and his heirs lived. The third was the cellar: Bruno took me to see it rather than the room in which he slept. Even in Grana he had never invited me into his home.