And so it was that during the Christmas of ’68, soon after his discharge from the military, he and Piero inaugurated their first winter season. They managed to borrow from someone the skis and sealskins. They began by going again to the places they knew best, except that now, rather than staying out under the stars, they had to pay to sleep at the refuges. My father was super fit, my uncle much less so since he had spent the last year preparing for his final exams. But he was as enthusiastic as my father about making new discoveries. They barely had enough money for food and board, let alone to employ an Alpine guide, so their technique was what it was. And in any case, according to my father, going up was just a question of having good legs—and you could always find a way of getting down. Little by little they were even developing a style of their own. Until, that is, they decided to head in March for a fork of the Sassolungo, and found themselves crossing a slope in the afternoon sun.
I could see vividly the scene that my mother was describing, however many times she must have told it before. My father was up ahead a short distance, and had removed a ski to prepare for the assault, when he felt the ground giving way beneath his feet. He heard a rustling, like the sound that a wave makes retreating over sand. And it really did seem as if the whole slope that they had just traversed was in the process of retreating downwards. Very slowly, at first: my father went down a meter, shifted to the side, and managed to grab hold of a rock, and watched his ski continue sliding on down. Piero, who had been on the steepest and smoothest part of the slope, was going down too. My father saw him lose his balance and slide on his belly, looking up, with his hands scrabbling for purchase that was not there. Then the bank of snow gathered speed and momentum. This was not the dry snow of winter which plummets in powdery clouds—it was the damp spring snow that goes down rolling. Rolling and gathering until it encounters an obstacle, and it buried Piero with hardly an impact: it just went over him and continued its descent. Two hundred meters below the slope flattened out, and it was only there that the avalanche stopped.
Even before it had done so my father ran down in search of his friend, but could not find him. Now the snow was hard: heavy snow compacted by the fall. He wandered on the avalanche calling out, searching everywhere for any sign of movement. But the snow was completely still again, even though it was less than a minute since it had moved. In the months that followed my father would tell it like this: it was as if some great beast had been disturbed in its sleep, merely growled, and then shaken off its irritation before settling down to sleep again in a more comfortable place. As far as the mountain was concerned, nothing had happened.
The only hope, something that happens in a few rare cases, was that Piero had created an air pocket beneath the snow in which he was still able to breathe. In any case my father did not have a shovel, so he took the only sensible course of action open to him: he started towards the refuge where they had slept, only to find himself sinking in softer snow. So he turned round again, retrieved the one remaining ski, and managed somehow to get down with it—despite sliding in short bursts and frequently falling, it was still much better than sinking at every step. He reached the refuge midafternoon and called the emergency services. By the time they got there it was already dark, and they found my uncle the next morning, dead beneath a meter of avalanche, suffocated by the snow.
It was immediately clear to everyone that it was all my father’s fault. Who else could they have blamed? Two facts proved the extent to which they were badly underprepared for winter: they were ill-equipped and had been up there at completely the wrong time. It had recently snowed. It was far too warm to attempt the crossing of a slope. As the more experienced of the two, my father should have known this—should have avoided the crossing and been the first to retreat. My grandfather found something unforgivable in his mistakes, and rather than diminishing with time his rage became more deeply rooted. He did not go so far as to shut my father from the house, but he was no longer pleased to see him, and his whole demeanor altered whenever he turned up. Then he started to avoid him. Even a year afterwards, at the memorial Mass for his son, he made sure to sit on the other side of the church from him. At a certain point my father gave up and ceased to disturb him.
And it is precisely at this point in the story that my mother enters the stage. Though in fact she had always been a part of it, albeit as a spectator. She had known my father for what seemed like a lifetime, even if at first she had merely thought of him as the friend of her brother. Then, gradually, he had become her friend as well. They had sung, drunk, walked, harvested grapes, side by side together so many times that, after the accident, they began to meet up to talk: my father was in a terrible state, and to my mother it did not seem fair. It did not seem fair that he had been given the blame for everything and then left alone to shoulder it. They ended up falling for each other, and about a year later they were married. The entire family refused their invitations to the wedding. So they were married without any relatives present, already prepared to leave for Milan where their lives would begin again. With a new house, new jobs, new friends, new mountains. I was also part of this new life: in fact, my mother said, this was what made sense of all the rest. I with my old-fashioned name: a family name.
That was all. When my mother had finished her account, I thought about the glaciers. The way in which my father would speak about them to me.
He was not one for retracing his own steps and did not like thinking again about unhappy times, but on certain occasions in the mountains—even on those virginal mountains where no friend had died—he would look at the glacier and something would resurface and come back to him. He put it like this: that the summer erases memories, just like it melts the snow; but the glacier is the snow of winters long past; it is a memory of winter that does not wish to be forgotten. Only now did I understand what he was talking about. And I knew once and for all that I had two fathers: the first had been the stranger with whom I had lived for twenty years in the city, and then burnt my bridges with for another ten; the second was my father as he was in the mountains, the one I had only glimpsed but still knew better than the first: the man who walked behind me on the paths, the lover of glaciers. This other father had left me a ruin to rebuild. So I decided to forget all about the first, and to complete that work to remember him by.
EIGHT
BY AUGUST WE HAD finished the roof of the house. It was made up of two layers of planks separated by a metal sheet and insulation. On the outside it was covered with shingles of larch, superimposed one over another and traversed by grooves down which the water could run off; inside there were matchboards made of spruce. The larch would protect the house from the rain; the spruce would retain the heat. We had decided not to make a hole in it for a skylight so that even at the height of summer the interior would be shaded. The north-facing windows received no direct light, but looking out of them you could see the mountains in front of you, rising on the other side of the lake, shining almost white. Their outcrops of rock and scree were blinding in this season. The light which entered the windows came from there, as if from a mirror. This is how a house built on the reverse side works.