The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti

Author:Paolo Cognetti
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Atria Books

SEVEN

IT WAS THE SEASON of return and of reconciliation, two words I thought about frequently as the summer ran its course. One evening my mother told me a story about herself, my father, and the mountain, about the way in which they had met and ended up marrying. It was odd to be hearing about it so late, given that it was the story of how our family originated, and therefore of how I came to be born. But when a boy I was too young for this kind of story, and after that had stopped wanting to hear: at twenty I would have put my hands over my ears rather than listen to family reminiscences, and even on this evening my first reaction was one of reluctance. Yet one side of me looked with affection on these things that were unknown to me. As I listened I gazed out at the opposite flank of the valley, in the penumbra of nine in the evening. It was thick with fir trees on that side, a wood without clearings that descended emphatically all the way to the river. Only a long gorge cut through it with a lighter line, and it was this that held my eye.

As my mother’s story unfolded I began to feel something quite different. I know this story already, I thought. And it was true that in my own way I did know it. For years I had collected fragments of it, like someone who possesses pages torn from a book and has read them thousands of times in random order. I had seen photographs, listened to conversations. I had observed my parents and their way of dealing with things. I knew which arguments ended abruptly in silence, which others were drawn out, and which names from the past had the power to sadden or to move them. I had all the elements of the story at my disposal but had never managed to reconstruct the narrative in its entirety.

After I had been looking outside for a while I saw the does that were waiting there on the other side. In the gorge there must have been a vein of water, and every evening just before dark they would leave the wood to drink from it. From this distance I could not see the water, but the deer showed that it was there. They came and went along their own track, and I watched them until it was too dark to see anything anymore.

• • •

This was the story: in the fifties my father was the best friend of my mother’s brother, my uncle Piero. They had both been born in 1942, and were five years younger than she was. They had met as children, on the campsite to which the village priest would take them. In the summer they would spend a whole month in the Dolomites. They slept in a tent, played in the woods, learned how to be in the mountains and to fend for themselves, and this was the life that had made them such close friends.

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