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 traiclass="underline" 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 falclass="underline" 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.