At home they still spoke the dialect of the Veneto. To my ears it sounded like a secret language that they shared, the echo of a mysterious previous life. A remnant of the past, just like the three photographs my mother had displayed on a small table in the entrance hall. I would often stop to look at them. The first was a portrait of her parents in Venice, during the only trip they had ever taken, a gift from my grandfather to my grandmother to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. In the second her entire family had posed for the camera during the grape harvest: my grandparents sat at the center of the group, three girls and a young man standing around them, the baskets filled with grapes in the courtyard of the barn. In the third my grandparents’ only male offspring, my uncle, smiled together with my father next to a summit cross, dressed in mountaineering gear and with a rope wound round his shoulder. My uncle had died young, and that was why I bore his name, though I was called Pietro and he was Piero, in our family lexicon. And yet of all these people I had known none. I was never taken to visit them, nor did they ever turn up for a visit in Milan. A few times a year my mother would take a train of a Saturday morning, and come back Sunday evening a little sadder than she’d left. Then she would get over it and life would continue. There was too much to be done, and too many people to care for, to indulge in melancholy.
But that past had a way of leaping out at you when you least expected it. Long car journeys were necessary to take me to school, my mother to the clinic, and my father to the factory, and on certain mornings she would sing an old song. She would begin the first verse in the traffic, and soon after we would join in. These songs were set in the mountains during the Great War: “The Troop Train,” “The Sugana Valley,” “The Captain’s Testament.” They told stories that I, too, now knew by heart: twenty-seven had departed for the front, and only five had returned. Down there on the battlefield of the Piave stood a cross for a mother who would sooner or later come in search of it. Far away a betrothed waited, sighing, then tired of waiting and married another—the dying man would send her a kiss, and ask for a flower in return. I understood from the words of dialect in these songs that my parents had carried them from their previous life, but I also sensed something different and strange—that is to say that these songs also spoke directly about the two of them, who knows how. I mean about the two of them specifically: how else to explain the degree of emotion that their voices so clearly betrayed?
Then on certain rare windy days, in autumn or spring, at the end of Milanese streets, the mountains would appear. It would happen after a bend in the road, above an overpass, suddenly, and the gaze of both my parents would immediately switch there, without one needing to point out anything to the other. The peaks were white, the sky a rare blue, the sensation as of a miracle. Down below, where we lived, were factories in turmoil, overcrowded social housing, riots in the piazza, abused children, teenage mothers: up there, the snow. My mother would ask then which mountains were in view, and my father would look around as if navigating the urban geography with a compass. Which avenue is this: Monza, Zara? Then it must be La Grigna, he would say, having thought about it a bit. Yes, I’m sure that it is really her. I remembered the story welclass="underline" La Grigna was a most beautiful and cruel warrior who had killed with her arrows the knights who climbed to declare their love for her—so God had punished her by turning her into a mountain. And now she was there, through the windscreen, allowing herself to be admired by the three of us, each one with a different, silent thought. Then the lights changed, a pedestrian would run across, someone sounded the horn, my father would tell them where to get off and change gear furiously, accelerating away from that moment of grace.
The end of the seventies arrived, and while Milan was burning the two of them put on their climbing boots again. They did not head east, from where they had come, but west, as if continuing their flight, towards the Ossola, the Valsesia, the Val d’Aosta; towards mountains that were still higher and more severe. My mother would later tell me that at first she had been overcome by an unexpected feeling of oppression. Compared to the gentle contours of the Veneto and the Trentino these western valleys seemed narrow, dark, enclosed like gorges; the rock was damp and black, streams and waterfalls plunging down from everywhere. So much water, she thought. It must rain a lot here. She had not realized that all of that water originated in an exceptional source, nor that she and my father were heading straight for it. They climbed up one of the valleys until they were high enough to emerge again into sunlight: from there the landscape suddenly opened up, and before their eyes stood Monte Rosa. An Arctic world, a permanent winter, looming over the summer pastures. It frightened my mother. But my father would say that for him it had been like discovering a new scale of grandeur: like arriving from the mountains of men to find yourself in the mountains of giants. And naturally he fell in love with them at first sight.
I don’t know exactly where they were on that day. Whether it was Macugnaga, Alagna, Gressoney, Ayas. At that time we would holiday in a different place each year, following my father on his restless wandering all around the mountain that had conquered him. Better than the valleys I remember the houses in which we stayed, if you could call them houses: we would rent a bungalow in a campsite, or a room in a hostel, and stay there for a couple of weeks. There was never enough room to make these places homely, or time enough to become attached to anything, but my father did not care for or even notice such things.
As soon as we arrived he would get changed—take from his bag the checked shirt, the corduroy trousers, the woolen jumper—and, wearing these old clothes again, he became a different man. He would spend the short vacation exploring the mountain paths, leaving early in the morning and returning in the evening, or even the next day—covered in dust, burnt by the sun, tired and happy. Over supper he would talk of the chamois and the Alpine ibexes, of nights spent bivouacked, of starlit skies, of snow that at such altitude fell even in August, and when he was most happy he would end by saying: I really wish that you could have been there with me.
The fact of the matter is that my mother refused to climb the glacier. She harbored an irrational and unshakable fear of it: she used to say that, as far as she was concerned, the mountain ended at three thousand meters, the altitude, that is, of her own range, the Dolomites. She preferred two thousand meters to three—the meadows, rivers, woods—and deeply loved one thousand too, the life there of those villages of wood and stone. When my father was away she liked to go for walks with me, to drink a coffee in the square, to sit in a meadow and read to me from a book, to exchange a few words with a passerby. She reluctantly endured our constant changes of place. She often pleaded with my father that she would prefer a house that she could make her own, and a village to return to, and he would tell her that there wasn’t enough money for another rent, in addition to that of the apartment in Milan. But she managed to negotiate with him a budget that was within their means, and finally he allowed her to begin searching for a place of our own.
In the evenings, as soon as the remains of supper had been cleared away, my father would unfold a map onto the table and begin planning the next day’s route. He had beside him the gray booklet of the Italian Alpine Club and a half-filled glass of grappa that he would occasionally sip from. My mother would take advantage of her own moment of freedom by sitting in an armchair or on the bed and immersing herself in a noveclass="underline" for an hour or two she would disappear into its pages, as if she were elsewhere. It was then that I would climb onto my father’s lap to see what he was up to. I would find him to be cheerful and talkative, the complete opposite of the father I was used to in the city. He was happy to show me the map and how to read it. This is a glacial stream, he would point out to me, this is a lake, and this is a group of mountain huts. Here you can distinguish the forest by its color, the alpine meadow, the scree, the glacier. These curved lines indicate the altitude: the closer together they are, the steeper the mountain, up to the point where it is impossible to climb further; and here where the lines are further apart the incline is gentler and the paths follow it, can you see? These triangles accompanied by a figure for the altitude represent the summits. And it’s to the summits that we’re going. We only start descending when it’s impossible to climb higher. Understand?