“Sky burial,” said Bruno.
“Have you seen anything like this before?” I asked.
“No, I certainly haven’t,” he replied. He seemed impressed.
I heard the sound of a helicopter approaching. There was not a cloud in the sky that morning. With the first warmth from the sun, clumps of snow began to fall from every overhang of Grenon, and from the guttering small avalanches fell. It was as if the mountain were starting to free itself from that prolonged snowfall. The helicopter flew above without noticing us and passed on, and then it occurred to me that we were barely a few kilometers from the ski slopes on Monte Rosa, on December 27, on a morning of sunshine and fresh snow. It was a perfect day for skiing. Perhaps they were watching the traffic from up there. I imagined from above the lines of cars, the overflowing car parks, the establishments working to full capacity without a break—and just there, over a nearby ridge, on the side that was in shadow, two men standing at the foot of a landslide surrounded by dead fish.
“I’m going,” I said, for the second time in just a few weeks. Twice I had tried, and twice I had failed to rescue him.
“Yes, it seems like the right thing to do,” said Bruno.
“You should come down with me.”
“Again?”
I looked at him. Something had occurred to him that caused him to smile. He said: “How long have we been friends?”
“I think that next year it will be thirty years.”
“And haven’t you been trying to get me down from here for the last thirty years?” Then he added: “You mustn’t worry about me. This mountain has never done me any harm.”
I remember little else about that morning. I was shaken, and too sad to think clearly. I remember that I could not wait to leave the lake and the avalanche behind me—but that later on, once I was down in the valley, I began to enjoy the descent. I found the route by which I’d come up, and discovered that with the snowshoes I could go down in great leaps even at the steepest points, as the fresh snow did not give way beneath my feet. The steeper the incline, in fact, the more I could launch myself and let myself go. I stopped only once, when crossing the river, because I had thought of something and wanted to see if it was true. I climbed down between its snow-covered banks and dug in the snow with my gloves. Just below it I found the ice, a thin transparent layer that broke easily. I discovered that this thin crust protected a vein of water. You could not see it or hear it from the path, but my river was still there, coursing beneath the snow.
It turned out that in the winter of 2014 the Western Alps had the heaviest snow for half a century. In the highest ski resorts they recorded three meters of snow at the end of December, six at the end of January, eight by the end of February. Reading these figures in Nepal I could hardly begin to imagine what eight meters of snow would look like in the high mountains. It was enough to bury the woods. So much more than was needed to bury a house.
One day in March Lara wrote to me asking me to phone her as soon as possible. She then told me that Bruno could not be found. His cousins had gone up to check on him, but at Barma nobody had been clearing the snow for some time: the little house had disappeared beneath it, and even the rock face was barely visible. The cousins had called for help, and a rescue team taken up by helicopter had dug down to the roof. They had made a hole in the tiles, and at that point had expected to find him—as sometimes happened with the old mountain folk—having taken to his bed with a sudden illness and died there of hypothermia. But there was no one in the house. Nor could any tracks be found in the surrounding area after the recent snowfalls. Lara asked me if I had any ideas, since I had been the last one to see him, and I said that they should check if there was still a pair of skis in the storeroom. No, they were not there either.
The mountain rescue team began to search the area with dogs, so for a week I called every day, hoping for news, but there was too much snow on the Grenon, and with spring the worst period for avalanches arrived. In March the Alps suffered many: and after the events of that winter, in which the death toll on the Italian mountainsides had reached twenty-two, nobody took much interest in a local man lost from view in a deep valley above his own home. It hardly seemed necessary to Lara or to me to keep insisting that they should prolong the search. They would find Bruno with the first thaw. He would turn up in some gorge in the middle of the summer, and the crows would be the first to find him.
“Do you think that this is what he wanted?” Lara asked me over the phone.
“No, I don’t think so,” I lied.
“You managed to understand him, didn’t you? You understood each other.”
“I hope we did.”
“Because it sometimes seems to me that I never knew him.”
And then I asked myself who was it that had known him on this earth except me? And if what was between us was kept secret, that which we had shared, what was left now that one of us was no longer there?
When those days came to an end, and the city became unbearable, I decided to take a tour in the mountains on my own. Spring is a wonderful season in the Himalayas: the green of the rice paddies dominates the sides of the valleys; a little above them the rhododendrons are in flower. But I didn’t want to go back to a familiar place, or to retrace the path of any memory—so I chose a region where I had never been before, bought a map, and set off. I had not felt the joys of freedom and discovery for a long time now. I found myself leaving the trail, climbing up a hillside to reach a ridge, just out of curiosity, to see what was on the other side, lingering in a village without having planned to, spending a whole afternoon amidst the pools of a river. That was our way of being in the mountains, Bruno’s and mine. I thought that would be a way of preserving our secret in the years to come. It also came to mind that there was a house up there at Barma with a hole in its roof, and that it would not survive like that for very long. And I thought this as if from very far off.
From my father I had learnt, long after I had stopped following him along the paths, that in certain lives there are mountains to which we may never return. That in lives like his and mine you cannot go back to the mountain that is in the center of all the rest, and at the beginning of your own story. And that wandering around the eight mountains is all that remains for those who, like us, on the first and highest have lost a friend.
An Atria Reading Club Guide
This reading group guide for The Eight Mountains includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
For fans of Elena Ferrante and Paulo Coelho comes the international sensation about a friendship between two Italian boys from different backgrounds and how their connection evolves and challenges them throughout their lives.