“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 unwelclass="underline" 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.