The Eight Mountains

ONE

THE VILLAGE OF GRANA was located on the periphery of one of those valleys ignored as irrelevant by those who passed by it, sealed in as it was by iron-gray peaks above, and by a cliff that obstructed access from below. On the top of the cliff the ruins of a tower still looked out across overgrown fields. A dirt track deviated from the regional trunk road and climbed steeply, in circles, up to the foot of the tower; then, getting less steep beyond it, the track turned up the flank of the mountain and entered the great valley at its midpoint before continuing on a slight slope. It was in July of 1984 that we first took it. They were scything hay in the fields. The valley proved to be more extensive than it appeared from below, covered by forest on the side that was in shadow, and terraced on the side that was in sunlight; down below, amongst the thickets of bushes, ran a river that I glimpsed intermittently, sparkling—and this was the first thing about Grana that appealed to me. I was reading adventure stories at the time, and it was Mark Twain who had induced in me a love of rivers. I thought that down there you could fish, dive, swim, cut down some small tree and build a raft, and absorbed in such fantasies I hardly noticed the village that had come into view after a curve in the road.

“This is it,” my mother said. “Go slowly.”

My father slowed to a walking pace. Since starting out he had followed her directions obediently. He lowered his head, looking right and left through the dust raised by the car, his gaze dwelling on the stables, the chicken coops, the log-built haylofts, the charred or collapsed dwellings, the tractors at the edge of the road, the hay balers. Two black dogs wearing bells around their necks sprang out from a courtyard. Apart from a couple of newer houses, the whole village seemed to be made of the same gray rock as the mountain and clung to it like an outcrop, or an ancient landslide. A little further up, goats were grazing.

My father said nothing. My mother, who had discovered this place on her own, pointed out where to park and got out of the car to look for the owner while we unloaded the luggage. One of the dogs came towards us, barking, and my father did something I’d never seen him do before: he stretched out a hand for it to sniff, spoke to it gently, and stroked it between its ears. Perhaps he got on better with dogs than with his own kind.

“And so?” he asked me, as we unhooked the elastics from the roof rack. “What do you think of it?”

It’s beautiful, I would like to have answered. A smell of hay, stable, wood, smoke, and who knows what else had enveloped me as soon as I’d stepped out of the car, full of promise. But unsure as to whether this was the right answer or not, I had replied instead: “It’s not bad. What do you think?”

My father shrugged his shoulders. He looked up over the suitcases and glanced at the shack that stood before us. It was leaning to one side, and would surely have collapsed if it weren’t for the two poles that were propping it up. Inside, it was crammed with bales of hay, and above the hay there was a denim shirt that someone had taken off there and forgotten.

“I grew up in a place like this,” he said, without letting me know whether this was a good or a bad thing.

He grabbed the handle of a suitcase and was about to take it down when something else occurred to him. He looked at me, thinking of something that evidently caused him great amusement.

“In your opinion, can the past happen again?”

“It’s difficult,” I said, so as not to be wrong-footed. He was always asking me riddles of this kind. He saw in me an intelligence similar to his own, inclined towards logic and mathematics, and thought that it was his duty to exercise it.

“Look at that river,” he said. “Can you see it? Let’s suppose that the water is time passing. If where we are now is the present, where do you think the future is located?”

I thought about it for a moment. It seemed like an easy one. I gave the most obvious answer: “The future is where the water goes, down over there.”

“Wrong!” my father declared. “Fortunately.”

Then, as if he had freed himself from a great burden, he said “Oopala,” the word he used to use when picking something up, including me, and the first of the two suitcases fell to the ground with a thud.

The house my mother had rented was in the upper part of the village, in a courtyard set around a drinking trough. It bore the signs of two distinct periods. The first was that of its walls, balconies of blackened larch, a roof of moss-covered slates, the large soot-stained chimney, all pointing to its venerable origins. The second was merely dated: a period in which, inside the house, layers of linoleum had been used to cover the floor, floral wallpaper had been hung, fitted cabinets and the basin had been installed in the kitchen, all now damp-stained and faded. The only object that could be salvaged from this mediocrity was a black stove, made of cast iron, massive and severe, with a brass handle and four hotplates on which to cook. It must have been reclaimed from another place and time altogether. I think that what my mother liked more than anything else was what was not actually there, because she had found in effect a house that was more or less empty. She asked the proprietress if we could improve it a bit, and she had simply replied: “Do what you like.” She had not rented it out for years, and in all likelihood had not expected to do so that summer. She was brusque in her manner but not impolite. I think she was embarrassed, since she had come from working in the fields and had not had time to change. She handed to my mother a large iron key, finished saying something about the hot water, and gave a brief show of resistance before accepting the envelope that my mother had prepared.

By this time my father had made himself scarce. For him one house was much like another, and the next day he was expected back in the office. He had gone out onto the balcony for a smoke, his hands on the coarse wood of the balustrade, his eyes scrutinizing the summits. It looked as if he were surveying them in order to calculate from which angle to launch an assault. He came back in after the owner of the house had left, so as to be spared any pleasantries, in a somber mood that had come upon him in the meantime. He said that he was going out to get something for lunch, and that he wanted to be back in the car before the evening.

In that house, once my father had gone, my mother reverted to a version of herself that I had never known before. In the morning, as soon as she had got out of bed she would put some kindling in the stove, scrunch up a page of newspaper, and strike a match on the rough surface of the cast iron. She wasn’t bothered by the smoke that would then unfurl into the kitchen, or by the need to wrap ourselves in a blanket until the room warmed up, or by the milk that she would overheat and burn on the scalding hotplate. For breakfast she would give me toast and jam. She would wash me under the tap, scrubbing my face, neck, and ears before drying me with a kitchen rag and sending me on my way outdoors: out into the wind and the rain, so that I would finally lose a little of my delicate urban constitution.

On those days I would set about exploring the river. There were two boundaries that I was not allowed to cross: upstream a small wooden bridge beyond which the banks steepened increasingly and narrowed into a gully, downstream the thickets at the foot of the cliff where the water followed its course to the valley floor. This was the territory that my mother could control from the balcony of the house, but for me it was as good as having the whole river itself. That river coursed down crags at first, falling in a series of foaming rapids between huge rocks which I peered over to observe the silver reflections at the bottom. Further on it slowed and meandered, as if transformed from youth to adulthood, and cut around islets, colonized by birch trees, that I could leap across to reach the opposite bank. Further on still, a tangle of timber formed a barrier. At this point a gorge descended, and it had been an avalanche during winter that had torn down the trunks and branches that were now rotting in the water, though at the time I knew nothing of such things. In my eyes it was the moment in the life of the river when it simply encountered an obstacle, then stopped and stagnated. I would always end up sitting there, watching the weed that was undulating just below the surface of the water.

There was a young boy who grazed cows in the meadows along the banks of the river. According to my mother he was the nephew of the woman who owned the house. He always carried with him a yellow stick, made of plastic and with a curved handle, with which he would prod the cows towards the tall grass. There were seven of them, all chestnut-colored and restless. The boy would scold them when they wandered off by themselves, and would occasionally chase after one or another of them, cursing; while on the way back he would climb the slope and turn to call out to them with an Oh, oh, oh, or an Eh, eh, eh until, reluctantly, they would follow him to the stable. In the pasture he would sit down and watch them from above, carving a small piece of wood with his penknife.

“You can’t stay there,” he said, the one time that he spoke to me.

“Why not?” I asked.

“You’re trampling the grass.”

“So where can I stay?”

“Over there.”

He pointed to the other side of the river. I could not see how to reach it from where I was standing, but I did not want to ask him or to negotiate a passage through his grass. So I stepped into the water without taking off my shoes. I tried to keep upright in the current and to show no hesitation, as if fording rivers was an everyday occurrence for me. I managed to cross, sat down with my trousers soaked and my shoes streaming, but when I turned to look at the boy he was no longer paying any attention to me.

We spent a good few days in this way, on opposite banks of the river, not deigning to notice each other.

“Why don’t you try to make friends with him?” my mother asked, one evening in front of the stove. The house was impregnated with the damp of too many winters, so we would light the fire during supper and stay up warming ourselves until it was time for bed. We would both be reading our books, and every so often, between one page and another, the fire and our conversation were rekindled. The great black stove was listening to us.

“But how can I?” I answered. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You just say hello. Ask him what he’s called. Ask him what his cows are called.”

“OK, good night,” I said, pretending to be absorbed in my reading.

When it came to social interaction my mother was well ahead of me. Since there were no shops in the village, while I was exploring my river she discovered the stable where you could buy milk and cheese, the allotment that sold certain types of vegetables, and the sawmill for a supply of offcuts of wood. She had also come to an arrangement with the young man from the dairy, who every morning and evening passed by in his van to collect the milk churns, so that he would deliver to us bread and a few groceries. And I’m not sure how she did it, but by our second week she had hung flower baskets on the balcony and filled them with geraniums. Now our house could be recognized from a distance, and she was already hearing the sparse inhabitants of Grana greeting her by her name.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” I said, a minute later.

“What doesn’t matter?”

“Making friends. I also like to be on my own.”

“Oh, really?” my mother said. She raised her eyes from the page, and without smiling, as if it was a very serious matter, she added: “Are you sure about that?”

And with that she decided to help me herself. Not everyone is of the same opinion, but my mother was firmly convinced of the necessity to intervene in the lives of others. A couple of days later, in that same kitchen, I found the cow boy sitting on my own chair having breakfast. I smelt him, in fact, before seeing him, because he exuded the same smell of the stable, of hay, curdled milk, damp earth, and wood smoke which has always been for me, from that moment onwards, the smell of the mountains—the smell that I have found in all mountains, anywhere in the world. His name was Bruno Guglielmina. Everyone in Grana had the same surname, he insisted on explaining, but the name Bruno was unique to him. He was just a few months older than me, born in November of ’72. He devoured the biscuits that my mother offered him, as if he’d never eaten biscuits in his life before. The final discovery I made was that it wasn’t just me studying him down in the pasture, while both of us pretended to be oblivious to each other. He had been studying me too.

“You like the river, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you swim?”

“A bit.”

“Fish?”

“Not really.”

“Come on, I’ll show you something.”

Saying this he jumped from the chair. I exchanged looks with my mother, then ran after him without a second thought.

Bruno took me to a place that I already knew, where the river passes through the shadow cast by the little wooden bridge. Speaking low when we had reached the riverbank he ordered me to remain as quiet and hidden as possible. Then he gradually raised himself above the rock he was crouching behind, until he was just able to peer over it. He signaled with his hand for me to wait. While I waited I looked at him: he had straw-blond hair and his neck was burnt by the sun. He wore trousers in a size not his own, rolled up at the ankles and low-slung, a caricature of a grown man. He also had the demeanor of an adult, a kind of seriousness in his voice and gestures: with a nod he commanded me to join him, and I obeyed. I peered over the rock to see what he was looking at. I did not know what I was supposed to see there: beyond the rock the river formed a small waterfall and a shadowy pool, probably knee-deep. The surface of the water was unsettled, agitated by the churning fall. At the edges floated a finger’s depth of foam, and a large trapped branch sticking out diagonally had collected grass and sodden leaves around itself. It wasn’t much of a spectacle, only water that had run there from the mountain. And yet it was spellbinding; I don’t know why.

After staring hard at the pool for a while I saw the surface break slightly and realized that there was something moving beneath it. One, two, three, and then four tapering shadows with their snouts facing into the current, with only their tails moving slowly from side to side. Occasionally one of the shadows would shift suddenly before stopping in another place; at other times it would break the surface with its back before sinking below again—but always stayed pointing in the direction of the little waterfall. We were further down the valley than they were, which was why they had not noticed us yet.

“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.

“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.

TWO

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.

We would leave early in the morning, driving up to the villages at the foot of Monte Rosa. They were more fashionable tourist spots than our own, and with sleep-filled eyes I saw rush past the strings of little villas, the hotels built in an “Alpine” style in the early twentieth century, the ugly condominiums of the sixties, the caravan sites along the river. The whole valley was still in shadow and wet with dew. My father drank a coffee in the first open bar, then flung his rucksack over his shoulder with the seriousness of an Alpine infantryman. The path would start behind a church, or after a wooden footbridge, then enter the woods and immediately steepen. Before taking it I would look up at the sky. Above our heads the glaciers sparkled, illuminated by the sun; the early morning cold raised the hairs on my arms.

On the path my father would let me walk in front. He would keep a step behind me, so that when necessary I could hear what he was saying, and hear his breathing. I had rules to follow, few but clear: one, establish a pace and keep to it without stopping; two, no talking; three, when faced with a fork in the way, always choose the uphill route. He puffed and panted more than I did, on account of his smoking and his sedentary office life, but for at least an hour he would not countenance a break; not to get our breath back, or to drink, or to look at anything. The woods were of no interest, in his eyes. It was my mother, in our wanderings around Grana, who would point out plants and trees and teach me their names, as if each one was a person with its own character; but for my father the woods merely provided access to the mountains: we climbed through them with our heads down, concentrating on the rhythm of our walking—of our legs, lungs, and hearts—in mute, private communion with our own exertions. Underfoot there were stones worn down over centuries by the passage of animals and men. Sometimes we would pass a wooden cross, or a bronze plaque engraved with a name, or a shrine with a small Madonna and some flowers, giving to those corners of the wood the somber atmosphere of a cemetery. And then the silence between us assumed a different character, as if this was the only respectful way to pass by them.

I would only look up when the trees ended. On the flank of the glacier the path became less steep, and emerging into the sun, we would come across the last of the high villages. These were abandoned or semi-abandoned places, in even worse condition than Grana, except for the odd isolated stable, a fountain that still worked, a chapel that was still maintained. Above and below the houses the ground had been flattened and the stones collected in piles, and then ditches had been dug to irrigate and fertilize and the banks of the river terraced so as to make fields and vegetable gardens: my father would show me these works and speak with admiration of the old mountain people. Those that had arrived from the north of the Alpine region during the Middle Ages were capable of cultivating land where no one else had ventured before. They had special techniques, as well as a special resistance to the cold and to deprivation. Nowadays, he said, no one could survive the winter up there, completely self-sufficient for food and for everything else, as these people had managed to do for centuries.

I looked at the crumbling houses and tried hard to imagine their inhabitants. I couldn’t even begin to understand how anyone could have chosen such a hard life. When I asked my father he answered in his usual enigmatic way: it always seemed as if he could not give me a solution, but only a few clues instead, so that I would only arrive at the truth through my own efforts.

He said: “They didn’t really choose it. If someone comes up this high, it’s because down below they won’t leave them in peace.”

“And who is bothering them there, down below?”

“Landlords. Armies. Priests. Bosses. It depends.”

I could tell from the tone of his reply that he wasn’t being entirely serious. Now he was bathing his neck with water from the fountain, and was already more cheerful than he had been first thing that morning. He shook the water from his head, wrung it from his beard, and looked up above. In the deep valleys that awaited us there was nothing impeding our view, and sooner or later we would notice someone further up ahead of us on the path. He had an eye as sharp as a hunter’s with which to pick out those small red or yellow dots—the color of a rucksack or of an anorak. The more distant they were, the more mocking the tone with which he would ask, pointing to them: “What do you think, Pietro, shall we catch them?”

“Sure,” I would answer, wherever they were.

Then our climb would be transformed into a pursuit. Our muscles were well warmed up, and we still had energy to burn. We were ascending through the August pastures, past isolated alpeggi, herds of indifferent cows, dogs that came growling around our ankles, and swathes of nettles that stung my bare legs.

“Cut across,” my father would say, where the path took a slope too gentle for his liking. “Go straight. Go up this way.”

Eventually the incline would steepen, and it was there on those merciless concluding slopes that we would catch our prey. Two or three men, about his age and dressed just like him. They confirmed my sense that there was something from another era about this way of going into the mountains, and that it obeyed outmoded codes. Even the manner they adopted when giving way to us had something ceremonious about it: they would step aside, to the edge of the path, and come to a standstill in order to let us pass. They had no doubt seen us coming, had tried to keep ahead of us, and were not pleased at being caught.

“Good day to you,” one would say. “The boy sure can run, no?”

“He sets the pace,” my father would reply. “I just follow.”

“What I’d give to have legs like his.”

“That’s right. But we did have once.”

“Oh sure. Decades ago maybe. Are you going right to the top?”

“If we can make it.”

“Good luck,” one of them would say, and with that the exchange was concluded.

We would move off in silence, just as we had arrived. Gloating was not allowed, but a little while later, when we were a good distance away, I would feel a hand on my shoulder; just a hand touching and pressing, and that was all.

Perhaps it’s true, as my mother maintained, that each of us has a favorite altitude in the mountains, a landscape that resembles us, where we feel best. Hers was no doubt that of the woods at fifteen hundred meters, that of the spruce and larch, in the shadow of which the blueberries, junipers, and rhododendrons grow, and the roe deer hide. I was more attracted to the kind of mountainscape that comes afterwards: Alpine meadows, torrents, wetlands, high-altitude herbs, grazing animals. Higher up again the vegetation disappears; snow covers everything until the beginning of summer; and the prevailing color is that of the gray rock, veined with quartz and the yellow of lichen. That was where my father’s world began. After three hours’ walking the meadows and woods would give way to scree, to lakes hidden in glacial basins, to gorges gouged by avalanches, to streams of icy water. The mountain was transformed into a harsher place, inhospitable and pure: up there he would become happy. He was rejuvenated, perhaps, going back to other mountains and other times. His very step seemed lighter, to have regained a lost agility.

I, on the other hand, was exhausted. Exertion and the lack of oxygen tightened my stomach and made me feel sick. This nausea made every meter a struggle. My father was incapable of noticing: approaching three thousand meters the path became less distinct; on the scree there remained only stone cairns and signs daubed in paint; and he would finally take his place at the head of the expedition. He wouldn’t look round to check on how I was. If he did turn, it was only so as to shout out: “Look!” pointing out, on the ridge of the crest above, the horns of the ibexes who were keeping an eye on us, like guardians of that mineral world. Looking up, the summit still seemed very far off to me. My nostrils were filled with the smell of frozen snow and flint.

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.

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.”

“A hundred? Really?” asked Bruno.

“Perhaps even more. It’s difficult to determine exactly. You’d need to know the exact degree of incline and friction. You can try an experiment first.”

“How?”

“Ah, that’s easy. Do you see those crevasses up there above? Tomorrow we’ll go there, throw in a coin, then go and sit in the river and wait for it to arrive.”

My father laughed. Bruno continued looking at the crevasses and at the glacier where it jutted below, and you could tell that he was fascinated by the idea. For my part I was not so interested in bygone winters. I could feel in the pit of my stomach that we were about to go beyond the level at which, on previous occasions, our ascent had come to an end. The timing was also unusual: in the afternoon we had felt a few drops of rain, and now with evening falling we were heading into fog. It felt very strange to discover, at the end of the moraine, a wooden building on two stories. The smell of fumes from a generator announced its proximity, followed by voices shouting in a language I did not recognize. The wooden platform at the entrance, pockmarked by crampons, was cluttered with rucksacks, ropes, sweaters, vests, and thick socks hung out everywhere to dry; and by climbers crossing it in unlaced boots, carrying their washing.

That evening the refuge was full. No one would be turned away, but some would have to sleep on benches, or even on tables. Bruno and I were the youngest members of this gathering by far; we were amongst the first to eat, and to make room for others to do so we went immediately upstairs afterwards to the large dorm where we would be sharing a bed. Up there, fully dressed under a rough blanket, we spent a long while waiting for sleep to come. Through the window we could not see the stars or the gleam of the lights in the valley below, only the burning ends of the cigarettes of those who went outside for a smoke. We listened to the men on the ground floor: after supper they were comparing itineraries for the next day, discussing the uncertain weather conditions and recounting other nights spent in refuges, and old exploits made from them. My father had ordered a liter of wine and joined the others, and every so often I could make out his voice. Despite not having any conquest of summits in prospect, he had nevertheless made a name for himself as the guy who was taking two young boys up a glacier, and the role filled him with pride. He had encountered several people from his own neck of the woods and was exchanging jokes with them in Veneto dialect. Being shy, I felt embarrassed for him.

Bruno said: “Your father knows a thing or two, doesn’t he?”

“He sure does,” I said.

“It’s good that he teaches you about it.”

“Why, doesn’t yours?”

“I don’t know. It always seems like I irritate him.”

I thought to myself that my father was good at talking but that listening was not his strong point. Nor was paying much attention to me, otherwise he would have noticed how I was feeling: I had struggled to eat, and it would have been better to have had nothing, tormented as I now was by nausea. The smell of soup rising from the kitchen was making things worse. I was taking deep breaths to calm my stomach, and Bruno noticed: “Are you not feeling well?”

“Not really.”

“Would you like me to call your father?”

“No, no. It’ll go away in a minute.”

I was keeping my stomach warm with my hands. I would have liked more than anything to be in my own bed, and to hear my mother nearby in front of the stove. We remained in silence until at ten the supervisor announced lights-out and turned off the generator, plunging the refuge into darkness. A little while later we saw the light from the head torches of men coming upstairs in search of somewhere to sleep. My father also passed by, the grappa heavy on his breath, to see how we were: I kept my eyes shut and pretended to be asleep.

In the morning we left before daybreak. Now the fog filled the valleys below us and the sky was clear, the color of mother-of-pearl, with the last stars slowly fading out as the light spread. We had not anticipated dawn by much: the mountaineers heading for the most distant peaks had already left some time ago; we had heard them fumbling in the middle of the night and could now see some of them roped together high up, nothing more than miniature shipwrecks in a sea of white.

My father attached for us the crampons that he had hired, and roped us together at a length of five meters from each other: himself first, then Bruno, then me. He strapped our chests with a complicated arrangement of the rope around our anoraks, but he hadn’t tied such knots for years and our preparation turned out to be long-winded and laborious. We ended up being the last to leave the refuge: we had still to cover a stretch of scree which our crampons knocked against and tended to get stuck in, and the rope hampered my movement and made me feel clumsy, burdened with too much gear. But everything changed the moment I set foot on snow. From my baptism on the glacier I remember this: an unexpected strength in my legs, the steel points biting through the hard snow, the crampons that gripped to perfection.

I had woken feeling reasonably well, but after a while the warmth from the refuge dissipated, and the nausea began to grow. Up ahead my father was pulling the group on. I could see that he was in a hurry. Although he had claimed that he only wanted to have a short excursion, I suspected that he harbored a secret hope of reaching some peak or other, surprising the other climbers by turning up at the summit with the two of us in tow. But I was struggling. Between one step and the next it was as if a hand was wringing my stomach. Whenever I stopped to get my breath the rope between myself and Bruno tautened, forcing him to stop as well, the tension then reaching my father who would turn around to look at me, annoyed.

“What’s going on?” he asked. He thought that I was playing up. “Let’s get a move on.”

As the sun rose three black shadows appeared on the glacier next to us. Then the snow lost its bluish tinge and became blindingly white, and almost immediately afterwards began to give way beneath our crampons. The clouds below us were swelling with the heat of the morning, and even I understood that soon they would rise up as they had the day before. The idea of reaching anywhere was becoming more and more unrealistic, but my father was not the kind of person to admit the fact and withdraw: on the contrary, he was stubbornly determined to plow on. At a certain point we encountered a crevasse; he gauged its width carefully by eye and with one determined step got across it, planted the ice pick in the snow and wound the rope around it to reel Bruno in.

I no longer had any interest in what we were doing. The sunrise, the glacier, the chain of summits that surrounded us, the clouds that separated us from the world: I was indifferent to all of this otherworldly beauty. All I wanted was for someone to tell me how much further we had to walk. I got to the edge of the crevasse where Bruno, in front of me, was leaning out to look into it. My father told him to take a deep breath and to jump. While waiting for my turn I looked around: beneath us on one side the mountain’s incline became sheerer, and the glacier split in a steep serac; beyond the wreck of broken, collapsed, and piled up blocks, the refuge from where we had started out was being engulfed by fog. It seemed to me now that we would never get back, and when I looked at Bruno for support he was already on the other side of the crevasse. My father was slapping him on the back, congratulating him on the jump that he had executed. Not I, I would never be able to get across; my stomach gave in, and I threw up my breakfast onto the snow. And so it was that my altitude sickness was no longer a secret.

My father became frightened. He rushed to my aid in alarm, jumping back across the crevasse and in doing so tangling the ropes that held the three of us together. His fear surprised me—I had expected his anger instead—but at the time I had not realized the risks he had taken by leading us up there: eleven years old, poorly equipped and pursued by bad weather, we were being dragged up the glacier by his obstinacy. He knew that the only cure for altitude sickness was to go down to a lower level, and he did not hesitate before starting the descent. He reversed the order on the rope so that I could walk ahead and stop when I felt unwell: there was nothing left in my stomach, but every so often I was convulsed by dry retching, spitting out drool.

Soon we were entering the fog. From his end of the rope my father asked: “How are you feeling? Do you have a headache?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And how’s your stomach?”

“A bit better,” I answered, though what I felt above all was weak.

“Take this,” said Bruno. He gave me a handful of snow that he had compressed in his fist until it had turned to ice. I tried sucking it. Thanks partly to this, and partly to the relief afforded by the descent, my stomach began to calm down.

It was a morning in August in 1984, the last memory I have of that summer: the next day Bruno would return to the high pastures, and my father to Milan. But at that moment the three of us were on the glacier, together, in a way that would never happen again, with a rope that joined each of us to another, whether we wanted it to or not.

I kept stumbling over the crampons and could not walk straight. Bruno was immediately behind me, and soon I heard above the sound of our footsteps in the snow his Oh, oh, oh. It was the call with which he brought the cows back to the stable. Eh, eh, eh. Oh, oh, oh. He was using it to bring me back to the refuge, given that I could hardly stay on my feet by now: I abandoned myself to his song and let my legs adopt its rhythm and in that way no longer had to think about anything.

“But did you look into the crevasse?” he asked. “Holy shit it was deep.”

I did not answer. I still had in my eyes the image I had seen of them there, so close and triumphant, like father and son. In front of me now the fog and the snow formed a uniform whiteness, and I was concentrating only on not falling. Bruno said nothing else, and resumed his chanting.

THREE

WINTER, DURING THOSE YEARS, became for me the season of nostalgia. My father detested skiers and would not countenance mingling with them: there was something offensive to him in the game of going down the mountain without the effort required to climb it first, along a slope smoothed by snowcats and equipped with a ski lift. He despised them because they arrived in herds and left behind them nothing but ruins. Sometimes in the summer we would come across the pylon of a chairlift, or the remains of a caterpillar track stuck on a threadbare piste, or what was left of a disused cable station at altitude, a rusted wheel on a block of cement in the middle of scree.

“What this really needs is a bomb under it,” my father would say. And he was not joking.

It was the same frame of mind with which he would watch at Christmas the news items devoted to skiing holidays. Thousands of people from the cities invaded the Alpine valleys, got into queues at those stations, and hurtled down our paths—and he would disassociate himself from it all, locking himself away in the apartment in Milan. My mother once suggested that we should take a day trip to Grana, so that I could see it in the snow, and my father replied tersely: “No.” He wouldn’t like it. In the winter the mountain was not fit for humankind, and should be given a wide berth. According to his philosophy of ascending and coming down, or of going up above to escape the things that tormented you below, the climbing season needed to be followed by one of seriousness—by the period of work, of life on the flat, and of black moods.

In this way I too began to feel nostalgia for being in the mountains, the affliction to which I had seen him subjected for years without understanding its cause. Now I too found myself capable of becoming spellbound when La Grigna appeared at the end of an avenue. I would reread the pages of the Alpine Club Guide as if it were a personal diary, drinking in its antiquated prose, and it would give to me the illusion of retracing the paths it described step by step: climbing up steep grassy ridges to reach a neglected Alp . . . and from here, proceeding through scattered boulders and the residual ice field . . . to then attain the crest of the summit in the proximity of a pronounced depression. But in the meantime my legs became gradually paler, their scratches and scabs healed, and they forgot the stings of nettles, the icy sensation of fording streams without socks or shoes, and the relief afforded by cool bed sheets after an afternoon in the blazing sun. Nothing, in the winter city, could strike me with the same force. I observed it from behind a filter that rendered it faded and indistinct, just a fog of people and cars that needed to be got through twice a day; and when I looked from the window at the avenue below, the days spent in Grana seemed so far off as to make me question whether they had actually existed. Could I have invented them, just dreamed them up? But I only felt this until I noticed, in a new kind of light on the balcony, in a bud emerging in the grass between two lanes of traffic, that the spring was coming even to Milan, and my nostalgia turned to anticipation of the moment when I would go back up there again.

Bruno waited with the same excitement for that day to arrive. Except that I came and went, and he stayed. I think that from his vantage point in the fields he must have kept an eye out for our return, since he would come to find us within an hour of our arrival, shouting “Berio!” from the courtyard. This was the nickname with which he had baptized me. “Come on,” he would say, not bothering with any kind of greeting, or with saying anything else for that matter, as if we had last seen each other just the day before. And it was true: the intervening months were canceled in an instant, and our friendship seemed to be lived in a single uninterrupted summer.

Yet Bruno, in the meantime, had been growing up more quickly than me. He was almost always covered in dirt from the stables, and refused to come inside the house. He would wait on the balcony, leaning on the balustrade, which we almost never did ourselves, since it would move the moment you touched it, convincing us that one of these days it would collapse. He would look over his shoulder as if checking to see whether he’d been followed: he had absconded from his cows and was taking me away from my books, to have adventures which he did not want to ruin by talking about them.

“Where are we going?” I would ask while lacing my boots.

“Into the mountains,” he would limit himself to saying, with a mocking tone that he had developed, perhaps the same tone that he used when answering his uncle. He was smiling. All I needed to do was to trust him. My mother trusted me, and would often enough repeat that she didn’t worry because she knew that I would do nothing wrong. Nothing “wrong”—rather than reckless or stupid—as if she was alluding to quite other dangers that would come my way in life. She did not resort to prohibitions or to other advice before letting us leave.

Going into the mountains with Bruno had nothing to do with the peaks. Although we did follow a path into the woods, climbing quickly for half an hour, we would at some point known only to him leave the beaten track and continue along other routes. Up a gorge even, or through the thickest fir cover. It was a mystery to me how he got his bearings. He walked fast, following an internal map which indicated passageways where all I could see was a collapsed bank or a scar that looked too steep. But right at the last moment, between two twisted pines, the rock would reveal a fissure that we could get a purchase on to climb, and a ledge, which had been invisible at first, would allow us to cross it with ease. Some of these trails had been first opened up with the blows of pickaxes. When I asked him who had used them he would say, “the miners,” or, alternatively: “the woodcutters,” pointing out the telltale signs that I was incapable of noticing. The winding gear of a cable lift, rusted and overgrown with weeds. The earth that beneath a drier layer was still blackened by fire, where a charcoal works had been. The woods were littered with these excavations, mounds, and ruins, which Bruno interpreted for me as if they were phrases written in a dead language. Together with these cryptic signs he would teach me a dialect that I found less abstract than Italian: as soon as I was in the mountains it was as if I would need to substitute the concrete language of things for the abstract language of books, now that the things themselves were tangible and I could touch them with my own hands. The larch: la brenga. The spruce: la pezza; the Swiss pine: l’arula. An overhanging rock under which to take cover from the rain was a barma. A stone was a berio—and so was I, Pietro. I was very fond of that nickname. Every river cut a valley and so was called a valey; every valley had two sides with contrasting characteristics: an adret nicely exposed to the sun, where there were villages and fields, and an envers that was damp and in shadow, left to the forest and to wildlife. But of the two it was this reverse side that we preferred.

There no one could disturb us and we could go hunting for treasure. There really were mines in the woods surrounding Grana: tunnels closed off, boarded up with a few planks that had already been trespassed through before us. In the old times, according to Bruno, they had found gold there, searching for seams all over the mountains. But they had not managed to extract everything. Surely there must be a little remaining. And so we would enter into blind tunnels which ended in nothing after a few meters. And into others that went deep and were winding and pitch black inside. The ceilings were so low as to make it difficult to walk upright. The water that dripped down the walls gave the impression that the whole thing might cave in at any moment: I knew how dangerous it was, and I also knew that I was betraying my mother’s trust, since there was nothing very sensible about poking around in such deathtraps—the sense of guilt I felt ruined any pleasure there might have been in doing so. I longed to be like Bruno, to have the courage to rebel openly and to accept any punishment that might follow, with my head held high. Instead I disobeyed furtively, and was ashamed of what I had got away with. I would think about these things as my feet were soaked by the puddles of water in there. We never did find gold: sooner or later the tunnels turned out to have been blocked by a cave-in, or just became too dark to go along any further, and there was no choice but to retreat.

We made up for the disappointment by ransacking some ruins on the way home. Shepherds’ huts that we came across in the woods, constructed from whatever came to hand there, resembling burrows. Bruno would pretend to be discovering them with me. I suspect that he knew every one of those overgrown cabins, but it was more fun to be shoulder-barging open their doors as if for the first time. Inside we would purloin a dented bowl or the terminally blunted blade of a scythe, and imagine them to be valuable finds—and in the village, before parting, we would divide the spoils.

In the evening my mother would ask me where we had been.

“Just around here,” I would answer, with a shrug. In front of the stove I did not give her much satisfaction now.

“Did you find anything worth seeing?”

“Of course, Mum. The woods.”

She would give me a melancholy look, as if she were losing me. She really believed that the silence between two people was the origin of all their troubles.

“All I want to know is that you are OK,” she would say, giving up and abandoning me to my thoughts.

In the other battle she was fighting at Grana she held firm. From the beginning she had taken Bruno’s education to heart, like a personal crusade, but she knew full well that she could achieve nothing on her own: she needed to forge alliances with the women of his family. She had understood that his mother would be of no help at all, so she concentrated her efforts on his aunt. This is how my mother operated: knocking on doors and gaining entrance to homes, returning in a friendly but determined manner, not relenting until the aunt eventually committed to sending him to school during the winter—and over to our place to do homework in the summer. This was already quite an achievement. I don’t know what the uncle thought about the matter; perhaps up there in the alpeggio he was cursing the lot of us. Or perhaps, in truth, nobody in that family really cared anything about the boy.

And so it is that I remember long hours spent with Bruno in our kitchen doing history and geography revision, while outside the woods and the river and the sky beckoned. He would be sent to us three times a week, scrubbed and well dressed for the occasion. My mother would get him to read aloud from my books—Stevenson, Verne, Twain, Jack London—and would leave them with him after the lesson so that he could continue practicing while he was up in the pastures. Bruno liked reading novels, but studying grammar always sent him into a crisis: for him it was like studying a foreign language. And seeing how he got entangled with the rules of Italian, failing to spell a word correctly or stuttering over a conjunction, I felt humiliated on his behalf and annoyed with my mother. I could not see the justice of what we were forcing him to do. And yet Bruno did not utter a single word of protest or complaint. He understood how much it mattered to her, and perhaps having never experienced before what is was like to matter to someone, he struggled hard to learn.

Only on rare occasions during the summer was he allowed to come walking with us, and these were his holidays, the reward for the efforts that went into his studies: whether it was a summit we were taken to by my father, or just a field where my mother would spread out a blanket for lunch. On these occasions I would see Bruno transformed. Though undisciplined by nature, he would adapt to the rules and the rituals of our family. And whilst with me he already behaved like a grown-up, with my parents he would happily regress to his proper age. He allowed my mother to feed him, to dress him, to caress him—while my father inspired in him a respect that bordered on adulation. I could see it in the way he would follow behind him on the path, and how he would listen in rapt silence when my father started explaining something. These were perfectly ordinary moments in the life of a family, but Bruno had never experienced anything like them—and part of me felt proud of them, as if they were gifts that I myself had bestowed on him. On the other hand I would sometimes watch him with my father to try to gauge the nature of the understanding that there was between them, and I would feel that Bruno would have made a good son for him—perhaps not a better one than I was, but in a certain sense a more suitable one. Bruno was full of questions for him that he would ask naturally, without hesitation. He had the confidence that allowed him to get close to my father, and the physical strength to follow him anywhere. I would think these things but then try to suppress them, as if they were something about which I should be ashamed.

Eventually Bruno passed not only the first grade of senior school but the second and even the third, achieving an “average” mark in the exam. It was such an event in his family that his aunt phoned us immediately in Milan to give us the news. What a peculiar word, I thought, and wondered who had come up with it, since there was nothing “average” about Bruno. My mother on the other hand was simply delighted, and when we went back up to Grana she took him a prize: a box of chisels and gouges for working with wood. Then she began to ask herself what else she could do for him.

The summer of 1987 arrived: we were fourteen. We spent an entire month dedicated to a systematic exploration of the river. Not from its banks this time, or from the paths that intersected it from the woods, but in the water itself, in the current, jumping from rock to rock or wading within it. We had never heard of canyoning, if such a thing even existed at that time, but did it anyway, albeit in reverse: proceeding upstream from the bridge at Grana, climbing back up the valley. Just above the village we entered a long gorge of calm water, in the shadow of banks densely covered in vegetation. There were large pools infested with insects, tangles of submerged wood, old wary trout that would scatter at our approach. Further up, the gradient became problematic, making the river flow headlong, its progress all leaps and falls. Where we could not manage to scramble over we would rig up a rope to cross the rapids, or use a fallen tree trunk by floating it onto the water and wedging it between rocks to make a pontoon. Sometimes even a single modest waterfall would cost us hours of work. But this is what made the feat special. We planned to negotiate such passages one by one then connect them all, going up the entire length of the river on one glorious day at the end of summer.

First, though, we needed to discover its source. Towards the August bank holiday we had already gone beyond the territory of Bruno’s uncle. There was a large tributary which provided the Alpine farmsteads with water, and a little way after this fork a rudimentary bridge consisting of a few planks of wood provided a crossing. After that the river narrowed and presented us with no further difficulty. I understood from the thinning out of the tree cover that we were getting to a level of two thousand meters. The alders and birches disappeared from the banks, all other trees giving way to the larch; above our heads was that world of rock and stone that Luigi Guglielmina had called Grenon. At this point the bed of the river lost its usual appearance—that of something excavated and shaped by the water—becoming instead nothing but scree. The water literally vanished beneath our feet. It escaped beneath the stones here, amidst the contorted roots of a juniper.

This is not how I had imagined my river ending up, and I was disappointed. I turned towards Bruno, who was climbing a few steps behind me. All afternoon he had been keeping himself to himself, lost in his own thoughts. When this mood came over him the only thing I could do was follow after him in silence, hoping that it would pass.

But as soon as he caught sight of the spring he snapped out of it. He had sensed my disappointment at a glance. “Wait,” he said. He signaled to me to keep quiet and listen, and looked at the scree at our feet.

That day the air was not still, like it was at the height of summer. A cold wind blew over the tepid stones and, passing through the fading plants, carried away soft clusters of seeds and set up a rustling in the trees. By listening hard, together with this rustling I could hear water gurgling. A sound different from the ones it makes above ground, deeper and more muffled. It seemed to be coming from beneath the scree. I understood what it was and began to climb again to follow it, searching like a dowser for the water that I could hear but not see. Bruno let me go on ahead, already knowing what we would find.

What we found was a lake hidden in a basin at the foot of the Grenon. It was circular and at two or three hundred meters across was the largest that I’d ever seen in the mountains. The marvelous thing about Alpine lakes is that you never expect them, while climbing, unless you know already that they are there—that you don’t catch sight of them until the very last step over a ridge, at which point the view suddenly opens up before your eyes. The basin was all scree on its sunlit side, and as you moved your gaze gradually towards the shadows you saw that it became covered at first by willows and rhododendrons, and then by more woods. In its middle was this lake. Observing it, I was able to understand how it had been made: the ancient avalanche that could be seen from below, from Bruno’s uncle’s pastures, had sealed the valley like a dam. The lake had been formed above the dam, collecting the water that ran off from the surrounding snow, before resurfacing downhill, filtered by the scree, becoming in the process the river that we knew. I liked the fact that it was born in this way. It seemed to me an origin worthy of a great river.

“What’s this lake called?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Bruno said. “Grenon. Almost everything’s called that around here.”

His previous mood had returned. He sat down on the grass and I remained standing next to him. It was easier to look at the lake than to look at each other: a few meters in front of us a large rock emerged from the water, like a small island, and it was useful to have something to fix my gaze on.

“Your parents have spoken to my uncle,” said Bruno, after a while. “Did you know about that?”

“No,” I lied.

“Strange. I don’t understand what’s going on at all.”

“About what?”

“About the secrets you have between you.”

“So what did they talk to your uncle about?”

“About me,” he replied.

Now I sat down next to him. What he was about to tell me came as no surprise. My parents had been discussing it for some time now, and I had not needed to listen behind doors in order to discover their intentions: the previous day they had suggested to Luigi Guglielmina that in September we should take Bruno with us. Take him to Milan. They had offered to take him into our home, and to enroll him in a college. In a technical or professional institute, whichever he preferred. They were thinking about a trial year: if Bruno wasn’t happy with the arrangement he would be able to give up and return to Grana next summer. If on the other hand it all worked out, then they would be happy to keep him with us until his graduation. At that point he would be free to decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

Even in the account of this given by Bruno I could recognize the voice of my mother. Happy to keep him with us. Free to decide. The rest of his life.

I said: “Your uncle will never agree to it.”

“Oh but he will,” said Bruno. “And do you know why?”

“Why?”

“For the money.”

He dug around in the ground with a finger, picked up a pebble and added: “Who’s going to pay for it? That’s all that interests my uncle. Your parents have said that they’ll take care of everything. Board and lodging, school, the lot. For him it’s a real bargain.”

“And what does your aunt say about it?”

“It’s fine by her.”

“And your mother?”

Bruno snorted. He threw the pebble into the water. It was so small that it made no sound. “What my mother always says. The usual. A big nothing.”

There was a layer of dried mud on the rocks on the bank. A black crust showing the level the lake had reached in spring. Now the snowfields that fed it had been reduced to gray stains in the gullies, and if the summer were to continue it would end up by making them disappear altogether. Without the snow, who knows what would happen to the lake.

“And what about you?” I asked.

“What about me?”

“Would you like to?”

“To come to Milan?” said Bruno. “I haven’t a clue. Do you know that ever since yesterday I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like? And I can’t do it. I have no idea what it would be like.”

We remained in silence. I, who knew only too well what it was like, did not have to imagine anything in order to be opposed to the idea. Bruno would have hated Milan, and Milan would have ruined Bruno, just like when his aunt washed and dressed him up and sent him around to us to conjugate verbs. I really could not understand why my parents were going out of their way to turn him into something that he wasn’t. What was wrong with letting him graze cows for the rest of his life? I was unaware of the selfishness of this thought, that it wasn’t really concerned with Bruno, with his own wishes and his future—but only with the use I could continue to make of him. I was thinking of my summers, my companion, my own experience of the mountain. I hoped that, up there, nothing would ever change—not even the charred shacks or mounds of manure lining the road—that he should stay the same, always, along with the piles of manure and the ruins, frozen in time and awaiting my arrival.

“Well, maybe you should tell them,” I suggested.

“Tell them what?”

“That you don’t want to go to Milan. That you want to stay here.”

Bruno turned to look at me. He raised his eyebrows. He had not expected such advice from me. Although he may have been thinking the very same thing himself, coming from me it did not seem right. “Are you crazy?” he said. “I’m not staying here. I’ve spent my whole life going up and down this mountain.”

Then he got to his feet, and there on the grass where we stood he cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted, “Oh! Can you hear me? It’s me, Bruno! I’m leaving!”

From the other side of the lake the slope of the Grenon sent back to us an echo of his cry. We heard some stones falling. His shout had startled a group of chamois that was now clambering up the scree.

It was Bruno who pointed them out to me. They were passing through rocks which made them almost invisible, but when they crossed a snowfield I was able to count them. It was a small herd of five. They climbed up that stain of snow in single file, reached the crest, and lingered there for a moment, as if to look at us for one last time before going. Then, one by one, they disappeared down the other side.

Our four-thousander that summer was meant to be the Castor. We would scale one of these each year, my father and I, on the Monte Rosa, so as to conclude the season on a high, when we were best trained up to do so. I hadn’t stopped going onto the glacier, but neither had I stopped suffering its effects: I had just become accustomed to feeling unwell and to the fact that this sickness formed a normal part of that world, like getting up before dawn, or the freeze-dried food in the refuges, or the cawing of crows on the heights. It was a way of going into the mountains that for me had lost all sense of adventure. It was a brutal putting of one foot after the other before vomiting my heart out at the top. I hated doing it, and found myself hating that white desert every time: and yet I was proud of going above four thousand meters again, as further proof of my courage. In 1985 my father’s black felt-tip ink had reached the Vincent, by 1986 the Gnifetti. He considered the ascent of these summits to be a kind of training for me. He had consulted a doctor and was convinced that I would grow out of my altitude sickness, so that over the course of three or four years we would reach the point when we could do more serious things, such as crossing the Lyskamm or the rock faces of Dufour.

But what I remember most about Castor, even more than its elongated crests, was the vigil that we shared in the refuge. A plate of pasta, a half-liter of wine on the table, the mountaineers nearby arguing amongst themselves, ruddy-faced from the sun and from fatigue. The prospect of the next day created in the room a kind of concentration. In front of me my father was leafing through the guest book, his favorite reading in a refuge. He spoke German well and understood French, and every so often he would translate a passage from these languages of the Alps. Someone had returned to a summit after thirty years and thanked God. Someone else regretted the absence of a friend. He was moved by these things, to the point where he took up the pen to make his own contribution to that collective diary.

When he got up to refill his carafe I looked at what he had written. His handwriting was dense and nervous, difficult to decipher if you were not already familiar with it. I read: I’m here with my fourteen-year-old son, Pietro. These will be my last occasions at the head of the rope, because soon he will be the one pulling me up. Don’t much feel like going back to the city, but I’ll take with me the memory of these days as the most beautiful refuge. It was signed: Giovanni Guasti.

Rather than making me feel moved, or proud, these words just annoyed me. I detected in them something that sounded false and sentimental, a rhetoric of the mountains that did not correspond to reality. If it was such a paradise then why did we not stay and live up there? Why were we taking away a friend who had been born and raised there? And if the city was so revolting, why were we forcing him to live in it with us? This is what I would like to have asked my father—and my mother as well, come to think of it. How is it that you are so sure of knowing what’s best for the course of another person’s life? How is it that you don’t have the slightest doubt—that he might know better than you?

But when my father returned he was in high spirits. It was the third from last day of his holiday, a Friday in August of his forty-sixth year, and he was in an Alpine refuge with his only son. He had brought another glass and half-filled it for me. Perhaps, in his imagination, now that I was growing up and getting over my altitude sickness, our relationship as father and son would be transformed into something different. Climbing companions, just like he had written in the book. Drinking companions. Perhaps he really did imagine us like this in a few years’ time, sitting at a table at three and a half thousand meters drinking red wine and studying maps of the routes, with no more secrets between us.

“How’s your stomach doing?” he asked.

“It’s not bad.”

“And your legs?”

“They’re really good.”

“Excellent. Tomorrow we’ll have fun.”

My father raised his glass. I did the same, tasted the wine and felt that I liked it. While I was getting it down a guy sitting nearby burst out laughing, said something in German, and clapped me hard on the back, as if I had just been initiated into the great brotherhood of men and he was welcoming me into it.

The next evening we went back to Grana as veterans of the glacier. My father with his shirt unbuttoned and his rucksack slung over one shoulder, and with a hobbling gait due to the blisters on his feet; I as ravenous as a wolf, since as soon as we descended from altitude my stomach realized that it had been empty for two days. My mother was waiting for us with a hot bath and supper already on the table. Later on the time for telling our story would come: my father tried to describe the color of ice in the crevasses, the vertiginous nature of the north faces, the elegance of the cornices of snow on the crests; while I for my part had only blurred recollections of such visions, fogged as they were by nausea. I usually kept quiet. I had already learned a fact which my father never resigned himself to, namely, that it was impossible to convey what it feels like up there to those who have stayed below.

But that evening we did not get around to telling my mother anything. I was about to have my bath when I heard the voice of a man ranting down in the courtyard. I went to the window and pulled back the curtain: I saw a character who was gesticulating and yelling words that I could not understand. My father was the only other one out there. He had hung his thick socks on the balcony and was bathing his aching feet in the trough, getting up from where he sat on its rim to confront the stranger.

For a moment I thought it might be a farmer furious at this misuse of his water. In Grana they would leap at any pretext to take offense from an incomer. It was easy to identify the locals: they all moved in the same way, had the same marked facial features from out of which, between cheekbones and forehead, a pair of sky-blue eyes peered. This man was smaller than my father, except for the muscular arms and huge hands that were completely out of proportion to the rest of his body. With those hands he grabbed the two sides of my father’s shirt just below the collar. It looked as if he wanted to pick him up.

My father spread his arms. I was seeing him from behind and imagined that he would be saying: calm down, calm down. The man mumbled something, showing his ruined teeth. His face was also wrecked: I didn’t know by what, being still too young to recognize the face of a drinker. He made a grimace that was exactly like one of Luigi Guglielmina’s, and at that moment I realized how much he resembled him. My father began to gesture slowly. I understood that he was explaining something, and knowing him, knew also that his arguments would be unanswerable. The man lowered his gaze, just as I always did. It looked as if he was having second thoughts, but he kept hold of my father’s shirt. My father turned up the palms of his hands as if to say: OK, do we understand each other? So now what? There was something ridiculous in seeing him in this situation barefoot. On his calves the line made by his socks sharply divided his pale ankles from a narrow band of scarlet skin just below the knee—the area that his plus fours left bare. Here was the educated city-dweller, sure of himself and used to telling others what to do, who had just burned his legs on the glacier and was now trying to reason with a highlander the worse for drink.

The man decided that he’d had enough. Suddenly and without warning, he lowered his right hand to make a fist and hit my father on the temple. It was the first time in my life that I had seen a real punch thrown. The sound of knuckle on cheekbone was clear even from the bathroom, dry as a whack with a stick. My father took two steps back, staggered, but managed not to fall. But immediately afterwards his arms fell to his sides and his shoulders sagged a little. It was the posture of a wretched man. The other man said something else before leaving, a threat or a promise, and it did not surprise me to see him heading, in the end, towards the Guglielminas’ house. During that brief confrontation I had realized who he was.

He had come back to reclaim what was his. He did not know that he had got the wrong person. But in the end it made no difference: that blow was thrown into my father’s face in order to plant something clearly in the mind of my mother. It was the eruption of reality into her idealism, and perhaps also into her arrogance. The next day Bruno and his father were nowhere to be seen. My father’s left eye became swollen and blue. But I don’t think that was what was hurting most, when he got into his car that evening and left for Milan.

The following week was our last in Grana. Bruno’s aunt came to speak to my mother: mortified, wary, worried, perhaps above all by the prospect of losing such faithful tenants. My mother reassured her. She was already thinking about damage limitation, about how to salvage the relationships that had been so painstakingly nurtured.

For me it proved to be an interminable week. It rained constantly: a blanket of low-lying cloud cover hid the mountains from view, occasionally clearing to expose the first snow at three thousand meters. I would like to have taken one of the paths I knew and gone up to tread all over it, without asking permission from anyone. But I stayed in the village instead, replaying what I had seen and feeling guilty about what had happened. Then on Sunday we locked the house and left as well.

FOUR

I COULD NOT GET that blow out of my mind until a few years later I found the courage to deliver one myself. In truth it was the first of a series, and the hardest of these I would go on to land in the valley in later years, but now it seems right that my rebellion should have begun in the mountains, like everything else that has mattered to me. The event itself was unremarkable. I was sixteen and one day my father decided to take me camping. He had bought an old heavy tent from a stall selling army surplus gear. He had this idea of putting it up on the side of a small lake, fishing for a few trout without being discovered by the forest rangers, lighting a fire at nightfall and roasting the fish on it—and afterwards, who knows, staying up late drinking and singing, warmed by its embers.

He had never shown the slightest interest in camping, so I suspected that there was something else that had been planned for me. In recent times I had withdrawn into a corner from which I observed our family life with a pitiless eye. The ineradicably fixed habits of my parents, my father’s harmless outbursts of anger and the tricks that my mother used to contain them, the little bullyings and the subterfuges that they no longer realized they were resorting to. He would be emotional, authoritarian, irascible; she would be strong and calm and conciliatory. They had a mutually reassuring way of always playing the same part, knowing that the other would play theirs: these were not real arguments; they were performances with always predictable endings, and in that cage I also ended up being caught. I had begun to feel an urgent need to escape. But I had never managed to say so: not once had I uttered a single protest about anything, and I think that it was precisely for this, to make me speak, that the damn tent had materialized.

After lunch my father spread out the equipment in the kitchen and divided it up so as to distribute its weight equally between us. The poles and pegs alone must have weighed ten kilos. With the sleeping bags, anoraks, sweaters, and food supplies on top, the rucksacks soon became full. With one knee on the kitchen floor my father began to loosen every strap and then to push, compress, pull—at war with mass and volume, and I could already feel myself sweating beneath that load in the sweltering afternoon heat. But it wasn’t only the weight that was unbearable. It was the scene that he had conjured up, or that they had: the campfire, the lake, the trout, the starry sky; all that intimacy.

“Dad,” I said. “Come on, that’s enough.”

“Wait, wait,” he said, still trying to stuff something inside the rucksack, absorbed by the effort.

“No, I mean it: it’s no good.”

My father stopped what he was doing and looked up. He had a furious expression on his face from his exertions, and the way he looked at me made me feel like another hostile rucksack, another strap that wouldn’t comply.

I shrugged.

With my father, if I kept quiet it meant that he could speak. He unfurrowed his brow and said: “Well, perhaps we can take some stuff out. Lend a hand if you feel like it.”

“No,” I replied. “I really don’t feel like doing this.”

“What don’t you feel like doing, the camping?”

“The tent, the lake, the whole thing.”

“What do you mean the whole thing?”

“I don’t want it. I’m not coming.”

I could not have dealt him a harder blow. Refusing to follow him into the mountains: it was inevitable that it would happen sooner or later, he must have expected it. But sometimes I think that because he had no father of his own he had no experience of making certain kinds of attack, and was therefore ill-prepared to receive one. He was deeply hurt. Maybe he could have asked me a few more questions, and it would have been a good occasion to hear what I had to say—but in the event he wasn’t capable of doing so, or didn’t think it was necessary, or at that moment he just felt too offended to think. He left the rucksacks, the tent, and the sleeping bags where they were and went out for a walk by himself. For me it was a liberation.

Bruno had been dealt the opposite fate, and was now working with his father as a builder. I hardly ever saw him. They worked high up in the mountains building refuges and alpeggi, and slept up there on weekdays. I would encounter him on a Friday or Saturday, not in Grana but in some cafe bar down in the valley. I had all the time that I wanted now that I had freed myself from the obligation to climb mountains, and while my father scaled the summits I would head in the opposite direction, searching for someone my own age. It only took two or three attempts before I was admitted into the company of holidaymakers: I spent the afternoons between the benches of a tennis court and the tables of a cafe bar, hoping that no one would notice that I had no money with which to order anything. I listened to the chat, watched the girls, every so often looked up at the mountains. I recognized the pastures and the minuscule white stains that were plastered huts. The bright green of the larches that gave way to the more sombre green of the firs, the “right” side in sunlight and the “reverse” in shadow. I knew that I had little enough in common, and to share, with those young people on their holidays, but I wanted to fight against my inclination towards solitude—to try to be with others for a while and to see what might happen.

Later, towards seven, the workmen would arrive at the bar: the bricklayers, the cattle breeders. They would get out of white vans and 4x4s, filthy with mud or lime or sawdust, moving with a lolling gait that they had learned in adolescence, as if together with the weight of their own bodies they were always moving another, greater one. They would take up positions at the counter, complaining and cursing, bantering with the waitresses and ordering rounds of drinks. Bruno was with them. I could see that he had developed his muscles, and that he liked to show them off by rolling his shirtsleeves high. He owned a collection of caps and a wallet that stuck out from the back pocket of his jeans. This struck me more than anything else, given that for me, earning money was still a distant prospect. He would spend it without even counting, paying for his round with some crumpled banknote or other, imitating the others.

But then at a certain point, with the same distracted air, he would turn towards me from the counter. He knew already that he would meet my gaze. He would give a signal with his chin, and I would reply by raising the fingers of one hand. We looked at each other for a second. That was it. No one noticed; it wasn’t repeated during the course of the evening; and I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting properly the significance of this greeting. It could mean: I remember you, I miss you. Or it might be: it’s only been two years but it seems like a lifetime, doesn’t it? Or perhaps: hey Berio, what are you doing with that crowd? I didn’t know what Bruno thought about the clash between our fathers. Whether he had any regrets about how things had turned out, or if seen from his current point of view that whole story seemed as distant and as unreal as it did to me. He didn’t have the look of someone who was unhappy at all. On the other hand it could be that I did.

His father was with him in the row of drinkers, amongst those with the more irritating voices and the always-empty glasses. He treated Bruno as if he was just another of his drinking companions. I disliked this man, but envied him in one respect: there was nothing perceptible between them, not a more brusque or solicitous tone of voice, not a gesture of irritation, confidence, or embarrassment—and if you did not know it already there was nothing to indicate that they were father and son.

Not all of the young men of the valley wasted their summer in the bar. After a few days someone took me to a place on the other side of the river, a wood of wild pines which concealed some huge monoliths, as alien to that landscape as meteorites. The glacier must have pushed them to that point in some far distant past. Then the earth and the leaves and the moss had covered them, pines had grown around and on top of them—but some of these stones had been brought back to light, cleaned up with wire brushes, and even christened with individual names. The youths would challenge each other to find every possible way of climbing them. Without ropes or pegs they tried and retried approaches from about a meter above ground level, ending up by landing softly in the undergrowth. It was a pleasure to watch the two or three strongest: agile as gymnasts, with hands scoured and white with chalk, they had brought this pastime to the mountain from the city. They were happy enough to teach it to others and I asked them if I could have a go. After all, I had already climbed with Bruno every kind of rock without knowing anything, since my father had always warned me against adventuring any place where you were dependent on using your hands. And perhaps it was because of this that I decided to become good at it.

At sunset the group expanded to include those who had come to party. Someone would light a fire, someone else would bring something to smoke and something to drink. Then we would sit around, and while the bottle of wine circulated I would listen to discussions about things that were completely new to me and that fascinated me every bit as much as the girls sitting on the other side of the fire. I heard about the Californian hippies who had invented modern free-form climbing, bivouacking for entire summers beneath the rock faces of the Yosemite and climbing half-naked; or about the French climbers who trained on the sea cliffs of Provence, wore their hair long, and were accustomed to going up swiftly and light-footed—how when they moved from the sea to the gullies of Mont Blanc they would humiliate veteran climbers such as my father. Rock climbing was all about the pleasure of being together, about being free to experiment, and for this a two-meter-high stone on the bank of a river was as good as any at eight thousand meters: it had nothing whatsoever to do with the cult of difficulty, or with the conquest of summits. I listened while the woods became shrouded in darkness. The twisted trunks of the pines, the powerful fragrance of resin, the white monoliths in the light of the fire made it a more welcoming refuge than any of those on Monte Rosa. Later on somebody would begin to try a route with a cigarette between his lips, his sense of balance skewed by drink; someone else would wander off with a girl at his side.

The differences between us counted for less in the woods, perhaps because they were less evident there than elsewhere. They were wealthy young men from Milan, Genoa, and Turin. The less well-off lived in small villas high up in the valley, buildings erected in crazy haste at the foot of the ski slopes; the richest in the old-style mountain dwellings in exclusive areas, where each stone and every slate had been removed, numbered, and then placed back according to the design of an architect. I happened to go into one of these accompanying a friend who was fetching drink for the evening. From outside it looked like an old timber-built barn; inside it revealed itself to be the house of an antiques dealer, or a collector: virtually an exhibition of fine-art books, paintings, furniture, sculpture. And of bottles as well: my friend opened a cupboard and we each filled a rucksack.

“But won’t your father be angry that we’re pinching his wine?” I asked.

“My father!” he replied, as if he found the very word ridiculous. We emptied the cellar and ran for the woods.

In the meantime my own father was mortally offended. He had begun to go to the mountains again, alone, getting up at dawn and leaving before we were awake, and sometimes during his absence I would take a look at his map in order to check on his latest conquests. He had started to explore a part of the valley that we had always avoided, since you could tell from below that there was nothing up there: neither villages, nor water, nor refuges, nor stunning peaks—only bare slopes that climbed steeply for two thousand meters, and an endless expanse of scree. I think he went there to cool down his disappointment, or to find a landscape that resembled his state of mind. He never again invited me to join him. From his perspective I had become the one who needed to go to him: if I was the one who’d had the courage to say no, then the onus was on me now to say sorry and please.

The time of the glacier came round again, our two days of glory in the mid-August holiday, and I saw him preparing the crampons, the pickaxe as severe as a weapon, the water bottle dented by all the knocks it had taken. He seemed to me like the last survivor of one of those Alpine expeditions, one of those soldier-climbers who went in the thirties to die in droves on the north faces of the Alps, blindly attacking the mountain.

“You need to speak to him,” my mother said that morning. “Look how hurt he is.”

“But shouldn’t he be the one speaking to me?”

“You’re capable of doing it; he isn’t.”

“But capable of doing what?”

“Come on, you know full well. He’s only waiting for you to go and ask to come with him.”

I did know it—but I did not do it. I went to my room, and shortly afterwards watched from the window as my father walked off with a heavy tread, his rucksack stuffed with metal gear. You don’t go up the glacier on your own, and I knew that in the evening he would have to resort to a humiliating search. There was always at least one person in his predicament in the refuge: he would go from table to table, he would listen to the discussions for a while, joining the conversation, and would eventually propose joining the group the next morning, despite knowing that nobody was keen to tie a stranger to his rope. At that moment it seemed to me like the perfect punishment for him.

I tasted my own punishment too, that summer. After much training on the monoliths, I went with two youths on my first real free-form climb. One of them was the wine thief, the son of the collector, a Genoese who was amongst the strongest in the group; the other was a friend of his who had started a few months ago, probably just to be with him, since he had not much passion, dedication, or talent for climbing. The rock face was so close to the road that we only had to cross a meadow to reach the point of attack, an overhang jutting out so far that the cattle used it to shelter from the wind and rain. We put our shoes on amongst the cows, then the Genoese handed me a harness and a locking carabiner and tied the two of us to the ends of the rope with himself in the middle. Without further ceremony he told the other boy to go safely and we set off.

He climbed lightly and flexibly, giving the impression of being weightless, and that his every movement was effortless. He did not need to feel around to find the right point of purchase, but just hit the mark every time. Every so often he unhooked a quickdraw from the harness, clipped it onto one of the bolts that marked the way, and would pass the rope through the carabiner; then he would plunge his hands into the bag of chalk, blow on his fingers, and start to climb again with ease. He looked very elegant. Elegance, grace, lightness, they were all qualities that I was so keen to learn from him.

His friend had no such qualities. I could see him close up, climbing, because when the Genoese arrived at the resting place he shouted down to us to climb up together, leaving just a few meters’ distance between us. And so, one pull after another, I found myself with his companion directly above my head. I had frequently to stop because my head was right beneath his shoes, at which point I would turn round to look at the world behind my shoulders: the fields yellowed at the end of August, the river sparkling in the sunlight, cars already miniaturized on the trunk road. The drop did not frighten me. Away from the ground, in the air, I felt good and the movements of the climb came naturally to my body, requiring concentration but not exceptional muscles or lungs.

My companion instead used his arms too much and his feet not enough. He clung close to the rock so was obliged to seek handholds blind, and he did not refrain from grabbing hold of a bolt when he found no alternative.

“You shouldn’t do it like that,” I told him, making a big mistake. I should have let him do it in whichever way he thought best.

He looked at me, annoyed, and said: “What do you want? Are you trying to overtake? You’re always pressing from down there.”

From that moment I had made an enemy. At the resting place he said to the other one, “Pietro’s in a hurry, he thinks it’s a race.”

I didn’t say: your friend is a cheat who hangs on the bolts. I understood that it would have ended up two against one. I kept my distance from then on, but the guy would not let it go: every so often he would make a crack at my expense, and my competitiveness became a running joke for the rest of the day. According to that joke I was running behind them, I would get to just below them and they would have to give me a few kicks to get me out from under their feet. The collector’s son laughed. When I reached the last resting place he said: “You’re going strong. Do you want to try going first?”

“Fine,” I answered. In reality I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible, so that they would leave me in peace. I already had my safety harness and all the clips; we didn’t have to make any of the usual maneuvers required to exchange places—so I looked up, saw a bolt planted in a fissure, and set off.

Finding your way is easy if you have a rope above your head: it’s something else entirely when the rope is at your feet. The bolt on which I hooked the first clip was an old ring nail, not one of the steel bolts that glinted along the rock face. I decided to ignore the fact and to advance along the fissure, as I was already making good progress. The thing was, though, that further up the crack began to narrow and soon disappeared altogether. I now had jutting out above me a black, damp roof of rock—and no idea as to how to get over it.

“Where do I go?” I shouted.

“I can’t see from here,” the Genoese shouted back. “Are there any bolts there?”

No, there were no bolts. I held fast to the last bit of the fissure, and leaned out first to one side of it and then the other, to see if I could spot any. I discovered that I had followed a false trail: the line of steel plaquettes ran up at a diagonal a few meters to my right, skirting the overhang and reaching to the top.

“I’ve taken the wrong route!” I shouted.

“Oh, really?” he shouted back in response. “And what’s it like there? Can you get over it?”

“No. It’s completely smooth.”

“Then you’ll have to come back down.” I couldn’t see them, but could hear that they were amused.

I had never climbed backwards. The fissure that I had come up looked impossible when seen from above. I felt an impulse to hold on even more tightly, and at the same time realized that the rusty iron peg was now some four or five meters away. One of my legs began to tremble: an uncontrollable trembling that began at the knee and went down to my heel. My foot no longer responded. My hands were sweating, and the rock seemed to be slipping from my grasp.

“I’m falling,” I shouted. “Hold tight!”

Then I went down. A fall of ten meters is not really anything very serious, but you need to know how to fall: push yourself away from the rock face and cushion the impact with your feet. No one had taught me how to do this and I went straight down, flaying myself on the rock in my attempt to get a grip on it. I felt a tightness in my groin when I reached the bottom. Yet this other pain was fortunate—it meant that someone had blocked the rope. Now they were not laughing anymore.

Shortly afterwards we came out on the top of the rock, and it felt strange at that point to find ourselves in the fields again, with a taut line a step from the precipice, the cows grazing, a half-derelict farmstead, a dog barking. I was shaken and in pain, I had blood everywhere, and I suspect that the two friends felt guilty, since one of them asked me: “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Sure.”

“Do you want a cigarette?”

“Thanks.”

I decided that it would be the last thing we would ever share. I smoked it lying on the grass, looking up at the sky. They said something else to me, but by that stage I wasn’t listening anymore.

Just as it did every summer the weather changed at the end of the month. It started raining and getting cold, and it was the mountain itself that prompted in you the desire to go down to the valley to enjoy the warmth of September. My father had left again. My mother began to light the stove: in brief breaks in the weather I would go into the woods to collect firewood, bending down the dry branches of larches until they broke with a sharp crack. I felt fine up there in Grana, but this time I too was anxious to return to the city. I felt that I had so many things to discover, people to go in search of, and that the near future held important changes in store for me. I lived those last days knowing that they were the last in more than one sense, as if they were memories of the mountain that were already in the past. I liked the fact that we were like this: my mother and I alone together again, the fire crackling in the kitchen, the cold of the early morning, the hours spent reading and wandering in the woods. There were no rocks to climb in Grana, but I discovered that I could train well enough by climbing the walls of derelict houses. I would go up and come down the corners methodically, avoiding the easiest handholds and trying to support myself using only the cracks and the tips of my fingers. Then I would cross from one corner to another and back. In this way I must have climbed every derelict building in the village.

One Sunday the sky was clear again. We were having breakfast when there was a knock at the door. It was Bruno. He was standing there on the balcony, smiling.

“Hey, Berio,” he said. “Coming into the mountains?”

Without any preamble he explained to me that his uncle had had the idea of acquiring some goats that summer. He would leave them to graze freely on the mountain near the alpeggio, so that he needed to do nothing except check on them through binoculars in the evening, making sure that they were all there and had not strayed from where he could keep an eye on them. The problem was that during their first few nights up there it had snowed, and now his uncle couldn’t find them. Chances were that they had sought shelter in some hole or other, or run off behind a passing herd of ibexes. Bruno spoke of it as if it was just one more example of his uncle’s harebrained schemes.

He owned a motorbike now, an old rusted one without number plates, and with this we took the road leading up to the farmstead, dodging the lowest branches of the larches and getting covered in mud going through puddles. I liked gripping his back riding pillion, and sensed no embarrassment on his part. On the other side of his uncle’s meadows we took a straight track at a good speed: in this patchy and stony grass the goats’ droppings were everywhere. Following them, we climbed up a bank of rhododendrons and of fallen rock where a nearly dry river ran. Then the snow began.

Up to that moment I had known only one of the mountains’ seasons: a short-lived summer that resembled spring at the beginning of July, and autumn at the end of August. About winter I knew next to nothing. Bruno and I used to speak about it often enough as children, when my return to the city was approaching and I became melancholy and imagined what it would be like to live up there with him all the year round.

“But you don’t know what it’s like up here in the winter,” he would say. “There’s nothing but snow.”

“I’d love to see it,” I would reply.

And now here it was. This wasn’t the frozen snow of the gorges at three thousand meters: it was fresh soft snow that got into your shoes and soaked your feet, and it was strange to lift them and to see, compressed in your footprint, the wildflowers of August. The snow barely reached to my ankles, but it was deep enough to have covered all traces of the track. It covered the bushes, the holes and stones, so that every step was a potential trap, and with my lack of experience walking on such snow I could only follow Bruno by stepping into his footprints. As when we were younger, I could not understand by what memory or instinct he was guided. I just followed.

We reached the ridge that overlooked the other side, and as soon as the wind turned it carried to us the sound of bells. The goats had taken shelter lower down, beneath the first rocks. Reaching them was simple enough: they were huddling in groups of three or four, the mothers with their kids around them, in clearings in the snow. Counting them Bruno saw that there was not a single one missing. They were less obedient than cattle, some feral after a summer spent on the mountain, and climbing back over our own tracks he had to shout to keep them together, throwing snowballs at any that strayed and cursing his uncle and his brilliant ideas. Eventually we reached the crest again, and went down onto the snow in unruly and noisy procession.

It must have been midday by the time we had the grass beneath our feet. Suddenly it was summer again. The goats, famished, scattered over the meadow. For our part we began to rush down, not because we were in any particular hurry but because this was the only way we knew of being in the mountains, and the descent had always exhilarated us.

When we reached the motorbike Bruno said: “I saw you while you were rock climbing. You’re good.”

“I started this summer.”

“And do you like it?”

“A lot.”

“As much as the river game?”

I laughed. “No,” I said. “Not that much.”

“This summer I’ve built a wall.”

“Where?”

“Up in the mountains, in a stable. It was falling down and we had to rebuild it completely. The problem was, there was no road, and I went back and forth on the bike. We had to work like in the old times: spade, bucket, and pickaxe.”

“And do you enjoy it?”

“Yes,” he said, after mulling it over a bit. “The work, yes. It’s difficult to build a wall in that way.”

There was something else that he didn’t like, but he didn’t tell me what and I didn’t ask him. I didn’t ask him how he was getting on with his father, or how much money he was earning, or if he had a girlfriend or any plans for the future, or about what he thought of what had happened between us. Nor did he ask me anything. He didn’t ask how I was, or how my parents were, and I didn’t reply: my mother’s well, my father’s still fucked off with me. That things had changed a bit that summer. I thought that I had found some friends, but I was mistaken. I had kissed two girls in one evening.

Instead I just told him that I would go back to Grana on foot.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m leaving tomorrow and I feel like walking.”

“Right. Be seeing you then.”

It was my end of summer ritual: a last wander around alone to say goodbye to the mountains. I watched as Bruno straddled the motorcycle and started it after a few attempts, with a puff of black smoke from the exhaust. He had a certain style as a motorcyclist. He raised a hand in farewell and revved the engine. I returned his wave, even though he was no longer looking at me.

I had no way of knowing it then, but we would not meet up again for a very long time. The next year I turned seventeen and would only return to Grana for a few days, and would then stop going there altogether. The future would take me away from this mountain of my childhood; it was a sad, a beautiful, and an inevitable fact that I had already become fully aware of. When Bruno and his motorcycle disappeared into the wood I turned towards the slope we had come down, staying there a while before leaving, looking at the long line of our tracks in the snow.