Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

He said: “I’m learning how to make the toma .”

“Meaning what?”

“The cheese. Come.”

The cellar surprised me. It was cool and shadowy, the only really clean place in the whole alpeggio . The thick shelves made of larch had been recently washed: the cheeses were being aged there, their crusts moistened with brine. They were so polished, round, and symmetrical as to seem laid out in display for some kind of competition.

“Did you make them?” I asked.

“No, no. For now I only turn them and that’s it. They’re nice ones, no?”

“What do you mean turn them?”

“Once every week I turn them over and sprinkle them with salt. Then I wash everything down and tidy up in here.”

“They’re really nice ones,” I said.

Outside, on the other hand, lay plastic buckets, a pile of half-rotted wood, a stove made out of a diesel oil drum, a bathtub converted into a drinking trough, scattered potato peelings, and the odd bone picked clean by the dogs. It wasn’t just an absence of decorum: there was a perceptible contempt for things, a certain kind of pleasure in mistreating them and letting them go to pot that I had also begun to recognize in Grana. It was as if these places had already had their fate sealed, that it was a waste of time and effort to try to maintain them.

My father and Bruno’s uncle were already on their second glass, and we found them in the midst of a discussion about the economics of small Alpine farmsteads. My father must have initiated the conversation. When it came to other people’s lives he was more interested in their work than anything else: how many head of cattle, how many liters of milk a day, what the yield was like regarding the production of cheese. Luigi Guglielmina was more than happy to discuss it with someone who knew what they were talking about, and he made his calculations out loud to show that, what with current prices and the absurd regulations imposed by cattle breeders, his work no longer made economic sense, and was continued by him only because of his passion for it.

He said: “When I die, within ten years it will all revert to forest up here. Then they’ll be happy.”

“Don’t your children like this kind of work?” my father asked.

“Oh sure. What they don’t like is working their asses off.”

What struck me most was not hearing him talk in such terms, but his prophecy. It had never occurred to me that the pastures had once been wooded, and that they could revert to being so again. I looked at the cows scattered over the grazing, and made an effort to imagine these fields colonized by the first thick covering of weeds and shrubs, erasing every sign of what had once been there. The drainage ditches, the drystone walls, the paths, eventually even the houses themselves.

Bruno had in the meantime lit the fire in the open-air stove. Without waiting to be told, he went to the bath to fill a saucepan with water and began to peel potatoes with his penknife. There were so many things that he knew how to do: he made a pasta dish and put it on the table with the boiled potatoes, the toma , the mocetta , and the wine. At that point his cousins appeared: two tall and thickset youths, about twenty-five years old, who sat down to eat with their heads lowered, looked up at us briefly, and then went off for a siesta. Bruno’s uncle watched them going, and in the grimace contorting his lips it was clear to see that he despised them.

My father paid no heed to such things. At the end of the meal he stretched, put his hands behind his head, and looked at the sky, as if he was about to enjoy a show. And he said as much: “What a show.” His vacation was nearly over, and he had already started to look at the mountains with nostalgia. He would no longer be able to make it to certain summits that year. We had some above us: all scree, spurs, pinnacles, rivers of fallen rock, gullies of debris, and broken ridges. They looked like the ruins of an immense fortress destroyed by cannon fire, poised precariously before collapsing completely: what could indeed be considered a real show, in fact, for someone like my father.

“What are these mountains called?” he asked. A strange question, I thought, given the amount of time he spent poring over his wall map.

Bruno’s uncle glanced up as if he were looking for signs of rain, and with a vague gesture said: “Grenon.”

“Which one is Grenon?”

“This one. For us it’s the mountain of Grana.”

“All of these peaks together?”

“Of course. We don’t give names to peaks here. It’s the region.” Having eaten and drunk he was beginning to get fed up with having us around.

“Have you ever been there?” my father persisted. “Right up to the heights I mean.”

“When I was young. I used to go with my father, hunting.”

“And have you been to the glacier?”

“No. I never had the chance. But I would’ve liked to,” he admitted.

“I’m thinking of going up there tomorrow,” my father said. “I’m taking the boy to trample some snow. If it’s all right with you, we could take yours with us too.”

This is what my father had been aiming at all along. Luigi Guglielmina took a moment to understand what he was saying. Yours ? Then he remembered Bruno who was there beside me—we were playing with one of the dogs, one of that year’s puppies. But we were also hanging on every word.

“Do you feel like going?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said Bruno.

The uncle frowned. He was more used to saying no than yes. But perhaps he felt cornered by this stranger, or who knows, perhaps for once he felt sorry for the boy.

“Well, go then,” he said. Then he put the cork in the bottle and got up from the table, tired now of the effort to appear anything other than who he was.

The glacier fascinated the scientist in my father before it did the climber. It reminded him of his studies in physics and chemistry, of the mythology by which he was formed. The next day, as we climbed towards the Mezzalama refuge, he told us a story which resembled one of those myths: the glacier, he said, is the memory of past winters which the mountain safeguards for us. Above a certain altitude it stores the memory, and if we wish to know about a winter in the distant past, it’s up there that we need to go.

“It’s called the level of permanent snow cover ,” he explained. “It’s where the summer cannot melt all of the snow that falls in winter. Some of it lasts until autumn, and is buried beneath the snow of the next winter. Therefore it’s saved. Under the new snow, little by little, it gradually turns to ice. It adds a layer to the growth of the glacier, just like growth rings in tree trunks, and by counting them we can know how old it is. Except that a glacier doesn’t just stand there on top of the mountain. It moves. All the time it does nothing but slide downwards.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why do you think?”

“Because it’s heavy,” said Bruno.

“Exactly,” my father said. “The glacier is heavy, and the rock beneath it is very smooth. That’s why it slides down. Slowly, but without ever stopping. It slides down the mountain until it reaches a level that’s too warm for it. We call that the melt level . Can you see it there, down below?”

We were walking on a moraine that seemed made of sand. A spit of ice and rubble jutted out beneath us, way down below the path. It was crisscrossed by rivulets that collected into a small lake which was opaque, metallic, icy-looking.

“That water down there,” my father said, “it hasn’t come from the snow that fell this year. It’s from snow that the mountain has stored for who knows how long. Perhaps it’s from snow that fell a hundred winters ago.”