Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

MY FATHER HAD his own way of going to the mountains: scarcely inclined to meditation, full of obstinacy and arrogance. He would climb headlong, without pacing himself, always competing with someone or something, and where the trail seemed overlong he would take a short cut via the steepest slope. When you were with him it was forbidden to stop—complaining about hunger or the cold was not permitted—but you were allowed to sing a good song, especially when caught in a storm or in thick fog. And to whoop whilst flinging yourself down a snowfield.

My mother, who had known him since he was a boy, used to say that even then he would wait for nobody, intent as he was on pursuing anyone glimpsed up ahead: it was only a strong pair of legs that could make you desirable in his eyes, and she hinted, laughing, that this was how she had seduced him. Later on, once the uphill race had begun, she preferred to sit in a meadow, or to soak her feet in a stream, or to identify by name the herbs and flowers. At the summit she liked more than anything to gaze at the distant peaks, to reflect on those of her youth, and to remember when she had reached them and with whom—while my father at that point was overcome by a kind of disappointment, and just wanted to return home.

I think that these were completely opposite reactions to the same shared sense of nostalgia. My parents had migrated to the city in their early thirties, leaving behind the Veneto countryside where my mother had been born, and where my father had been raised as an orphan of the war. Their first mountains, their first love, had been the Dolomites. They would sometimes name them in their conversations, when I was still too young to follow what they were saying but could sense how certain words rang out: special sounds that were charged with additional meaning. The Catinaccio, Sassolungo, Tofane, and the Marmolada. All it took was for my father to utter one of these words, and my mother’s eyes would light up.

These were the places where they had fallen in love, as even I came to understand after a while: it had been a priest who had taken them there as adolescents, and it was the very same priest who had married them, one autumn morning, in front of the little chapel found at the foot of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. This marriage in the mountains was the foundational myth of our family. Boycotted by my mother’s parents, for reasons unknown to me; celebrated with a handful of friends, in anoraks instead of wedding attire, and with a bed in the Auronzo refuge for their first night as husband and wife. The snow was already sparkling on the ledges of Cima Grande. It was a Saturday in October in 1972, the end of the climbing season for that year and for many years to come. The next day they packed their leather climbing boots and plus fours into the car, together with her pregnancy and the contract for his new job, and headed for Milan.

Calmness was not a virtue my father set much store by, but in the city it was more necessary than the lungs needed for climbing. In the seventies in Milan we lived in an apartment building with a panoramic view, above a broad avenue of traffic beneath the asphalt of which, it was said, the Olona river ran. And although it is true that on rainy days the road would become flooded—and I would imagine the subterranean river roaring beneath it in the dark, so swollen as to burst from the drains—it was that other river coursing with cars, vans, scooters, lorries, buses, and ambulances which seemed always to be in full spate. We lived high up, on the seventh floor, and the two ranks of identical buildings that lined the road amplified the noise. Some nights my father could stand it no longer; he would get out of bed and fling open the window as if he wanted to inveigh against the city, to compel it to be quiet, or to douse it with boiling pitch. He would stand there for a moment looking down, then slip on his coat and go out to walk around.

Through those windowpanes we could see a lot of sky. Uniformly white, oblivious to the changing seasons, marked only by the flight of birds. My mother obstinately persisted in cultivating flowers on the small balcony that was blackened by exhaust fumes and mold-stained by the rain. On that balcony, whilst tending her fragile plants, she would tell me about vineyards in August, about the countryside in which she had grown up, about the tobacco leaves hung from the racks in the drying kiln, or about the asparagus that, if it were to remain tender and white, had to be cut before it pierced the soil’s surface—requiring a rare talent to spot it whilst still underground.

Now that sharp eye of hers had become useful in a radically different context. In the Veneto she had been a nurse, but once in Milan she secured a position as a health worker in the “Elms” district in the western outskirts of the city, in a working-class neighborhood. It was a role that had just been created, together with the equally new family clinic in which she worked providing support for women during pregnancy and following the development of the newborn infants in their first year of life. This was my mother’s work, and she liked it. The only thing was that the area where she had been sent to carry it out made it seem more like a mission. Actual elms in these parts were few and far between: the entire toponymy of the neighborhood, with its streets named after alders, spruce, larches, and birch trees, contrasted mockingly with the twelve-story, barracklike housing blocks infested with social ills of every kind. Among my mother’s duties was the evaluation of the conditions in which a child was being raised, on visits that affected her deeply for days afterwards. In the most serious cases she was obliged to refer children to the juvenile court. It cost her a great deal of anguish to reach such a point, in addition to receiving a dose of insults and threats, and yet despite this she never doubted that she had reached the right decision. She was not alone in this conviction: the social workers, the educationalists, the schoolteachers were united by a deep-seated solidarity, a feminine sense of collective responsibility towards these children.

My father on the other hand had always been a loner. He worked as a chemist in a factory—with a ten-thousand-strong workforce, constantly subject to strike action and sackings—and whatever had taken place in there, he would return home in the evening full of anger. At suppertime he would stare in silence at the TV news, gripping his cutlery in midair, as if he expected at any moment the outbreak of another world war; and he would curse to himself at the news of every murder victim, every governmental crisis, every hike in the price of oil, every bombing by unidentified terrorists. With the few colleagues he would invite home he discussed almost exclusively political issues, and always ended up in an argument. He would cast himself as anticommunist with communists, as a radical with Catholics, as a freethinker with anyone who presumed to confine him in a church or on a list of party members. But these were not times during which you could escape all allegiance, and after a while my father’s workmates stopped coming round. Yet he continued to go to work as if he were climbing every morning into the trenches. He continued not to sleep at night, to take things too much to heart, to wear earplugs and take pills for his headaches, to explode in violent fits of rage—at which point my mother would spring into action, since along with her marital duties she had also assumed the role of pacifying him, of muffling the blows in the fight between my father and the world.