“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 unusuaclass="underline" 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.