The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti, translated by Simon Carnell & Erica Segre
My father had his own way of going to the mountains: scarcely inclined to meditation, full of obstinacy and arrogance. He would climb headlong, without pacing himself, always competing with someone or something, and where the trail seemed overlong he would take a short cut via the steepest slope. When you were with him it was forbidden to stop — complaining about hunger or the cold was not permitted — but you were allowed to sing a good song, especially when caught in a storm or in thick fog. And to whoop whilst flinging yourself down a snowfield. (p. 1)
***
I did the same with the Swiss pine that had managed to grow in the middle of the ruin. At five, when I was too tired to do anything else, I used the pickaxe to dig around the little tree and extricate it with its roots still intact. Its trunk was thin and twisted due to its efforts to reach the light from out amongst the rubble. With its roots exposed it looked moribund, and I hurried to replant it nearby. I dug a hole at the edge of the clearing, planting it where there was the best view of the lake, treading down firmly the earth that I used to cover its roots. But when I left it there, in the wind to which it was not accustomed, it was blown from side to side. Exposed to the elements from which it had been long protected, it looked like an altogether too fragile creation.
- Do you think it will make it? - I asked.
— Who knows, said Bruno. — It's a strange plant, that one. Strong where it decides to grow, and weak if you put it somewhere else.
— Have you tried before?
— A few times.
— How did it work out?
 — Badly. (pp. 129-30)
***
I was finding out what happens to the person who leaves: life goes on for the others without him. (p. 137)
***
One evening Bruno talked to me about a project that he had in mind. He wanted to buy his uncle's farmstead. He had been putting aside money for a good while now. His cousins, who were more than happy to rid themselves of the place and their bad memories of it, had come up with a price: Bruno had spent everything he had on a down payment, hoping to borrow the rest from the bank. These months spent in Barma had served as a kind of trial run: now he knew that he could cope. If everything went according to plan he would spend the next summer working in the same way there: he wanted to rebuild the huts, buy some cattle, and in a few years hoped to have the farm up and running.
— It's a nice idea, I said.
— Cows don't cost much now, he said.
— And does it pay to keep them?
— Not a lot. But that doesn't matter. If it was just about the money I'd stay as a builder.
— You don't like working as one any more?
— Sure, I like it. But I always knew that it was a temporary thing. It's something that I can do, but it's not something I was born to do.
— So what were you born to do?
— To be a man of the mountains.
Uttering this phrase he became serious. I'd only ever heard him use it a few times before, when speaking of his ancestors: the old inhabitants of the mountain that he knew through the woods, the wild meadows, the derelict houses that he had spent a lifetime exploring. Abandoning them had once seemed inevitable to him too, when the only life he could see for himself was the same as for the men of the valley. You had to look down, to where the money was and the work — and not up, to where there was nothing but weeds and ruins. He told me that in the end, on the farmstead, his uncle had stopped fixing anything. If a chair broke he just burned it in the stove. If he saw an invasive plant in the meadow he couldn't be bothered to bend down and uproot it. His father would start cursing if you so much as mentioned the place to him: he would gladly have turned his rifle on the cattle, and the thought that everything there was going to rack and ruin gave him a twisted kind of pleasure.
But Bruno felt himself to be different from this. So different from his father, his uncle and his cousins that at a certain point he had understood who it was that he did in fact resemble, and from where he had got his desire to heed the call of the mountains.
— From your mother, I said. But not because it had ever occurred to me before: I only saw it now, at this moment.
— Yes, said Bruno. — We're just like each other, me and her.
He paused so I could reflect properly on what he'd said, and then he added: — Except that she's a woman. If I decide to go and stay in the woods no one says anything about it. If a woman does it, she's taken for a witch. If I keep quiet, what problem is there with that? I'm only a man who chooses not to speak. A woman who doesn't speak must be half-crazy.
It was true: we had all thought this about her. I myself had never exchanged with her more than a couple of words. Even now, when I passed by Grana and she gave me potatoes, tomatoes and toma to take back up. A little more stooped and thinner than I remembered, she was nevertheless still for me the strange figure that I had seen up there in the vegetable garden as a boy.
Bruno said: — If my mother had been a man she would have had the life she wanted. I guess that she wasn't really cut out for marriage. Definitely not for marriage with my father. Her only bit of good luck was getting free from him.
— And how did she do that?
— By keeping her mouth shut. And by staying up there with the chickens. You can't get so angry with someone like that; sooner or later you leave them in peace. (pp. 165-67)
***
It was an old Nepalese man who told me, afterwards, about the eight mountains. He was carrying a load of hens up the valley below Everest, heading to one of the refuges where they were destined to become chicken curry for tourists: he had a cage on his back which was divided into a dozen separate cells, and the chickens, still alive, were flustered inside them. I had not yet come across a contraption of this kind. I had seen panniers full of chocolate, biscuits, powdered milk, bottles of beer, of whisky and of Coca-Cola, going along the trails of Nepal to cater for the tastes of Westerners, but never a portable henhouse. When I asked the man if I could photograph it he put it down on a low wall, removed from his forehead the band with which he was carrying it and struck a pose, smiling, next to the chickens.
Then while he was getting his breath back we talked for a while. I'd visited the region he came from, which astonished him. He understood that I was not a casual walker, and discovering that I could even string together a few phrases in Nepalese, asked me why I was so interested in the Himalayas. I had a ready answer to that question: I told him that there was a mountain where I had grown up, and to which I was attached, and that it had fostered in me a desire to see the most beautiful mountains in the world.
— Ah, he said. — I understand. You are doing the tour of the eight mountains.
— The eight mountains?
The man picked up a small stick and drew a circle with it on the ground. You could tell he was used to drawing it; he executed it so perfectly. Then, inside the circle he drew a diameter, and then another perpendicular one bisecting the first, and then a third and a fourth through the point of bisection, thus creating a wheel with eight spokes. I thought that if I had drawn that figure myself I would have started with a cross - that it was typical of an Asian to begin with a circle.
— Have you ever seen a drawing like this? - he asked.
— Yes, I replied. In mandalas.
‚ That's right, he said. — We believe that at the centre of the earth there is a tremendously high mountain, Sumeru. Around Sumeru there are eight mountains and eight seas. This is the world for us.
While he was speaking he drew outside of the wheel a small peak for each spoke, and then a little wave between one peak and the next. Eight mountains and eight seas.
Finally, at the centre of the wheel, he drew a crown which I thought might represent the summit of Sumeru. He assessed his work for a moment and shook his head, as if to say that this was a drawing that he had made a thousand times but that of late he had begun to lose his touch a little. Be that as it may, he pointed the stick to the centre and concluded — We ask: who has learned most, the one who has been to all eight mountains, or the one who has reached the summit of Sumeru?