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.