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About the Book

*Winner of the 2017 Strega Prize, the Strega Giovani Prize and the Prix Médicis étranger*

Pietro, a lonely city boy, spends his childhood summers in a secluded valley in the Alps. Bruno, the cowherd son of a local stonemason, knows the mountains intimately. Together they spend many summers exploring the mountain’s meadows and peaks, discovering the similarities and differences in their lives. As time passes, the two boys come to find the true meaning of friendship and camaraderie even as their paths diverge, Bruno’s in the mountains and Pietro’s in cities across the globe.

A modern Italian masterpiece, The Eight Mountains is a lyrical coming-of-age story spanning three decades; a novel about the power of male friendships and a meditation on loyalty, being in nature, and finding one's place in the world.

About the Author

Paolo Cognetti was born in 1978 in Milan. He divides his time between the city and his cabin 6,000 feet up in the Italian Alps. The Eight Mountains has spent a full year in the Italian bestseller lists and is published in 37 countries. The novel has won both Italy’s Premio Strega and the French Prix Médicis étranger.

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.

My mother, who had known him since he was a boy, used to say that even then he would wait for nobody, intent as he was on pursuing anyone glimpsed up ahead: it was only a strong pair of legs that could make you desirable in his eyes, and she hinted, laughing, that this was how she had seduced him. Later on, once the uphill race had begun, she preferred to sit in a meadow, or to soak her feet in a stream, or to identify by name the herbs and flowers. At the summit she liked more than anything to gaze at the distant peaks, to reflect on those of her youth, and to remember when she had reached them and with whom – while my father at that point was overcome by a kind of disappointment, and just wanted to return home.

I think that these were completely opposite reactions to the same shared sense of nostalgia. My parents had migrated to the city in their early thirties, leaving behind the Veneto countryside where my mother had been born, and where my father had been raised as an orphan of the war. Their first mountains, their first love, had been the Dolomites. They would sometimes name them in their conversations, when I was still too young to follow what they were saying but could sense how certain words rang out: special sounds that were charged with additional meaning. The Catinaccio, the Sassolungo, the Tofane, the Marmolada. All it took was for my father to utter one of these words, and my mother’s eyes would light up.

These were the places where they had fallen in love, as even I came to understand after a while: it had been a priest who had taken them there as adolescents, and it was the very same priest who had married them, one autumn morning, in front of the little chapel found at the foot of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. This marriage in the mountains was the foundational myth of our family. Boycotted by my mother’s parents, for reasons unknown to me; celebrated with a handful of friends, in anoraks instead of wedding attire, and with a bed in the Auronzo refuge for their first night as husband and wife. The snow was already sparkling on the ledges of Cima Grande. It was a Saturday in October in 1972, the end of the climbing season for that year and for many years to come. The next day they packed their leather climbing boots and plus fours into the car, together with her pregnancy and the contract for his new job, and headed for Milan.

Calmness was not a virtue my father set much store by, but in the city it was more necessary than the lungs needed for climbing. In the seventies in Milan we lived in an apartment building with a panoramic view, above a broad avenue of traffic beneath the asphalt of which, it was said, the Olona river ran. And although it is true that on rainy days the road would become flooded – and I would imagine the subterranean river roaring beneath it in the dark, so swollen as to burst from the drains – it was that other river coursing with cars, vans, scooters, lorries, buses and ambulances which seemed always to be in full spate. We lived high up, on the seventh floor, and the two ranks of identical buildings that lined the road amplified the noise. Some nights my father could stand it no longer; he would get out of bed and fling open the window as if he wanted to inveigh against the city, to compel it to be quiet, or to douse it with boiling pitch. He would stand there for a moment looking down, then slip on his coat and go out to walk around.

Through those windowpanes we could see a lot of sky. Uniformly white, oblivious to the changing seasons, marked only by the flight of birds. My mother obstinately persisted in cultivating flowers on the small balcony that was blackened by exhaust fumes and mould-stained by the rain. On that balcony, whilst tending her fragile plants, she would tell me about vineyards in August, about the countryside in which she had grown up, about the tobacco leaves hung from the racks in the drying kiln, or about the asparagus that, if it were to remain tender and white, had to be cut before it pierced the soil’s surface – requiring a rare talent to spot it whilst still underground.

Now that sharp eye of hers had become useful in a radically different context. In the Veneto she had been a nurse, but once in Milan she secured a position as a health worker in the ‘Elms’ district in the western outskirts of the city, in a working-class neighbourhood. It was a role that had just been created, together with the equally new family clinic in which she worked providing support for women during pregnancy and following the development of the newborn infants in their first year of life. This was my mother’s work, and she liked it. The only thing was that the area where she had been sent to carry it out made it seem more like a mission. Actual elms in these parts were few and far between: the entire toponymy of the neighbourhood, with its streets named after alders, spruce, larches and birch trees, contrasted mockingly with the twelve-storey, barrack-like housing blocks infested with social ills of every kind. Among my mother’s duties was the evaluation of the conditions in which a child was being raised, on visits that affected her deeply for days afterwards. In the most serious cases she was obliged to refer children to the juvenile court. It cost her a great deal of anguish to reach such a point, in addition to receiving a dose of insults and threats, and yet despite this she never doubted that she had reached the right decision. She was not alone in this conviction: the social workers, the educationalists, the schoolteachers were united by a deep-seated solidarity, a feminine sense of collective responsibility towards these children.

My father on the other hand had always been a loner. He worked as a chemist in a factory – with a ten-thousand-strong workforce, constantly subject to strike action and sackings – and whatever had taken place in there, he would return home in the evening full of anger. At suppertime he would stare in silence at the TV news, gripping his cutlery in mid-air, as if he expected at any moment the outbreak of another world war; and he would curse to himself at the news of every murder victim, every governmental crisis, every hike in the price of oil, every bombing by unidentified terrorists. With the few colleagues he would invite home he discussed almost exclusively political issues, and always ended up in an argument. He would cast himself as anti-communist with communists, as a radical with Catholics, as a freethinker with anyone who presumed to confine him in a church or on a list of party members. But these were not times during which you could escape all allegiance, and after a while my father’s workmates stopped coming round. Yet he continued to go to work as if he were climbing every morning into the trenches. He continued not to sleep at night, to take things too much to heart, to wear earplugs and take pills for his headaches, to explode in violent fits of rage – at which point my mother would spring into action, since along with her marital duties she had also assumed the role of pacifying him, of muffling the blows in the fight between my father and the world.

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 centre 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 well: 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 woollen 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 harboured an irrational and unshakeable fear of it: she used to say that, as far as she was concerned, the mountain ended at three thousand metres, the altitude, that is, of her own range, the Dolomites. She preferred two thousand metres 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 passer-by. 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 grey booklet of the Italian Alpine Club, and a half-filled glass of grappa which 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 novel: 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 colour, 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?

No, I could not understand. I needed to see it, this world that filled him with such joy. Years later, when we started to go there together, my father claimed to recall the precise moment at which my vocation manifested itself. One morning as my mother still slept and he was preparing to leave, he looked up from lacing his boots to see me standing there, already fully dressed and ready to follow him. I must have dressed myself whilst still in bed. I had startled him in the darkness, looking much older than my six or seven years. According to his version of the event I was already what I would become later: it was a premonition of his adult son, a ghost of the future.

Don’t you want to sleep a little longer, he asked, speaking softly so as not to wake my mother.

I want to come with you, I’d replied, or so he would claim. But perhaps it was just the phrase that he liked to remember.

1.

The village of Grana was located on the periphery of one of those valleys ignored as irrelevant by those who passed by it, sealed in as it was by iron-grey peaks above, and by a cliff which obstructed access from below. On the top of the cliff the ruins of a tower still looked out across overgrown fields. A dirt track deviated from the regional trunk road and climbed steeply, in circles, up to the foot of the tower; then, getting less steep beyond it, the track turned up the flank of the mountain and entered the great valley at its midpoint before continuing on a slight slope. It was in July of 1984 that we first took it. They were scything hay in the fields. The valley proved to be more extensive than it appeared from below, covered by forest on the side that was in shadow, and terraced on the side that was in sunlight; down below, amongst the thickets of bushes, ran a river that I glimpsed intermittently, sparkling – and this was the first thing about Grana that appealed to me. I was reading adventure stories at the time, and it was Mark Twain who had induced in me a love of rivers. I thought that down there you could fish, dive, swim, cut down some small tree and build a raft, and absorbed in such fantasies I hardly noticed the village that had come into view after a curve in the road.

– This is it, my mother said. – Go slowly.

My father slowed to a walking pace. Since starting out he had followed her directions obediently. He lowered his head, looking right and left through the dust raised by the car, his gaze dwelling on the stables, the chicken coops, the log-built haylofts, the charred or collapsed dwellings, the tractors at the edge of the road, the hay balers. Two black dogs wearing bells around their necks sprang out from a courtyard. Apart from a couple of newer houses, the whole village seemed to be made of the same grey rock as the mountain and clung to it like an outcrop, or an ancient landslide. A little further up, goats were grazing.

My father said nothing. My mother, who had discovered this place on her own, pointed out where to park and got out of the car to look for the owner while we unloaded the luggage. One of the dogs came towards us, barking, and my father did something I’d never seen him do before: he stretched out a hand for it to sniff, spoke to it gently and stroked it between its ears. Perhaps he got on better with dogs than with his own kind.

– And so? – he asked me, as we unhooked the elastics from the roof rack. – What do you think of it?

It’s beautiful, I would like to have answered. A smell of hay, stable, wood, smoke and who knows what else had enveloped me as soon as I’d stepped out of the car, full of promise. But unsure as to whether this was the right answer or not, I had replied instead: – It’s not bad. What do you think?

My father shrugged his shoulders. He looked up over the suitcases and glanced at the shack that stood before us. It was leaning to one side, and would surely have collapsed if it weren’t for the two poles that were propping it up. Inside, it was crammed with bales of hay, and above the hay there was a denim shirt that someone had taken off there and forgotten.

– I grew up in a place like this, he said, without letting me know whether this was a good or a bad thing.

He grabbed the handle of a suitcase and was about to take it down when something else occurred to him. He looked at me, thinking of something that evidently caused him great amusement.

– In your opinion, can the past happen again?

– It’s difficult, I said, so as not to be wrong-footed. He was always asking me riddles of this kind. He saw in me an intelligence similar to his own, inclined towards logic and mathematics, and thought that it was his duty to exercise it.

– Look at that river, he said. – Can you see it? Let’s suppose that the water is time passing. If where we are now is the present, where do you think the future is located?

I thought about it for a moment. It seemed like an easy one. I gave the most obvious answer: – The future is where the water goes, down over there.

– Wrong! – my father declared. – Fortunately.

Then, as if he had freed himself from a great burden, he said – Oopala – the word he used to use when picking something up, including me, and the first of the two suitcases fell to the ground with a thud.

The house my mother had rented was in the upper part of the village, in a courtyard set around a drinking trough. It bore the signs of two distinct periods. The first was that of its walls, balconies of blackened larch, a roof of moss-covered slates, the large soot-stained chimney, all pointing to its venerable origins. The second was merely dated: a period in which, inside the house, layers of linoleum had been used to cover the floor, floral wallpaper had been hung, fitted cabinets and the basin had been installed in the kitchen, all now damp-stained and faded. The only object that could be salvaged from this mediocrity was a black stove, made of cast iron, massive and severe, with a brass handle and four hotplates on which to cook. It must have been reclaimed from another place and time altogether. I think that what my mother liked more than anything else was what was not actually there, because she had found in effect a house that was more or less empty. She asked the proprietress if we could improve it a bit, and she had simply replied: – Do what you like. She had not rented it out for years, and in all likelihood had not expected to do so that summer. She was brusque in her manner but not impolite. I think she was embarrassed, since she had come from working in the fields and had not had time to change. She handed to my mother a large iron key, finished saying something about the hot water, and gave a brief show of resistance before accepting the envelope that my mother had prepared.

By this time my father had made himself scarce. For him one house was much like another, and the next day he was expected back in the office. He had gone out onto the balcony for a smoke, his hands on the coarse wood of the balustrade, his eyes scrutinizing the summits. It looked as if he were surveying them in order to calculate from which angle to launch an assault. He came back in after the owner of the house had left, so as to be spared any pleasantries, in a sombre mood that had come upon him in the meantime. He said that he was going out to get something for lunch, and that he wanted to be back in the car before the evening.

In that house, once my father had gone, my mother reverted to a version of herself that I had never known before. In the morning, as soon as she had got out of bed she would put some kindling in the stove, scrunch up a page of newspaper and strike a match on the rough surface of the cast iron. She wasn’t bothered by the smoke that would then unfurl into the kitchen, or by the need to wrap ourselves in a blanket until the room warmed up, or by the milk that she would overheat and burn on the scalding hotplate. For breakfast she would give me toast and jam. She would wash me under the tap, scrubbing my face, neck and ears before drying me with a kitchen rag and sending me on my way outdoors: out into the wind and the rain, so that I would finally lose a little of my delicate urban constitution.

On those days I would set about exploring the river. There were two boundaries that I was not allowed to cross: upstream a small wooden bridge beyond which the banks steepened increasingly and narrowed into a gully, downstream the thickets at the foot of the cliff where the water followed its course to the valley floor. This was the territory that my mother could control from the balcony of the house, but for me it was as good as having the whole river itself. That river coursed down crags at first, falling in a series of foaming rapids between huge rocks which I peered over to observe the silver reflections at the bottom. Further on it slowed and meandered, as if transformed from youth to adulthood, and cut around islets, colonized by birch trees, that I could leap across to reach the opposite bank. Further on still, a tangle of timber formed a barrier. At this point a gorge descended, and it had been an avalanche during winter that had torn down the trunks and branches that were now rotting in the water, though at the time I knew nothing of such things. In my eyes it was the moment in the life of the river when it simply encountered an obstacle, then stopped and stagnated. I would always end up sitting there, watching the weed that was undulating just below the surface of the water.

There was a young boy who grazed cows in the meadows along the banks of the river. According to my mother he was the nephew of the woman who owned the house. He always carried with him a yellow stick, made of plastic and with a curved handle, with which he would prod the cows towards the tall grass. There were seven of them, all chestnut-coloured and restless. The boy would scold them when they wandered off by themselves, and would occasionally chase after one or another of them, cursing; while on the way back he would climb the slope and turn to call out to them with an Oh, oh, oh, or an Eh, eh, eh until, reluctantly, they would follow him to the stable. In the pasture he would sit down and watch them from above, carving a small piece of wood with his penknife.

– You can’t stay there, he said, the one time that he spoke to me.

– Why not? – I asked.

– You’re trampling the grass.

– So where can I stay?

– Over there.

He pointed to the other side of the river. I could not see how to reach it from where I was standing, but I did not want to ask him or to negotiate a passage through his grass. So I stepped into the water without taking off my shoes. I tried to keep upright in the current, and to show no hesitation, as if fording rivers was an everyday occurrence for me. I managed to cross, sat down with my trousers soaked and my shoes streaming, but when I turned to look at the boy he was no longer paying any attention to me.

We spent a good few days in this way, on opposite banks of the river, not deigning to notice each other.

– Why don’t you try to make friends with him? – my mother asked, one evening in front of the stove. The house was impregnated with the damp of too many winters, so we would light the fire during supper and stay up warming ourselves until it was time for bed. We would both be reading our books, and every so often, between one page and another, the fire and our conversation was rekindled. The great black stove was listening to us.

– But how can I? – I answered. – I don’t know what to say.

– You just say hello. Ask him what he’s called. Ask him what his cows are called.

– OK, goodnight, I said, pretending to be absorbed in my reading.

When it came to social interaction my mother was well ahead of me. Since there were no shops in the village, while I was exploring my river she discovered the stable where you could buy milk and cheese, the allotment that sold certain types of vegetables, and the sawmill for a supply of offcuts of wood. She had also come to an arrangement with the young man from the dairy, who every morning and evening passed by in his van to collect the milk churns, so that he would deliver to us bread and a few groceries. And I’m not sure how she did it, but by our second week she had hung flower baskets on the balcony and filled them with geraniums. Now our house could be recognized from a distance, and she was already hearing the sparse inhabitants of Grana greeting her by her name.

– Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I said, a minute later.

– What doesn’t matter?

– Making friends. I also like to be on my own.

– Oh, really? – my mother said. She raised her eyes from the page, and without smiling, as if it was a very serious matter, she added: – Are you sure about that?

And with that she decided to help me herself. Not everyone is of the same opinion, but my mother was firmly convinced of the necessity to intervene in the lives of others. A couple of days later, in that same kitchen, I found the cow boy sitting on my own chair having breakfast. I smelt him, in fact, before seeing him, because he exuded the same smell of the stable, of hay, curdled milk, damp earth and woodsmoke which has always been for me, from that moment onwards, the smell of the mountains – the smell that I have found in all mountains, anywhere in the world. His name was Bruno Guglielmina. Everyone in Grana had the same surname, he insisted on explaining, but the name Bruno was unique to him. He was just a few months older than me, born in November of ’72. He devoured the biscuits that my mother offered him, as if he’d never eaten biscuits in his life before. The final discovery I made was that it wasn’t just me studying him down in the pasture, while both of us pretended to be oblivious to each other. He had been studying me too.

– You like the river, don’t you? – he asked.

– Yes.

– Can you swim?

– A bit.

– Fish?

– Not really.

– Come on, I’ll show you something.

Saying this he jumped from the chair, I exchanged looks with my mother, then ran after him without a second thought.

Bruno took me to a place that I already knew, where the river passes through the shadow cast by the little wooden bridge. Speaking low when we had reached the riverbank he ordered me to remain as quiet and hidden as possible. Then he gradually raised himself above the rock he was crouching behind, until he was just able to peer over it. He signalled with his hand for me to wait. While I waited I looked at him: he had straw-blond hair and his neck was burnt by the sun. He wore trousers in a size not his own, rolled up at the ankles and low-slung, a caricature of a grown man. He also had the demeanour of an adult, a kind of seriousness in his voice and gestures: with a nod he commanded me to join him, and I obeyed. I peered over the rock to see what he was looking at. I did not know what I was supposed to see there: beyond the rock the river formed a small waterfall and a shadowy pool, probably knee-deep. The surface of the water was unsettled, agitated by the churning fall. At the edges floated a finger’s depth of foam, and a large trapped branch sticking out diagonally had collected grass and sodden leaves around itself. It wasn’t much of a spectacle, only water that had run there from the mountain. And yet it was spellbinding; I don’t know why.

After staring hard at the pool for a while I saw the surface break slightly and realized that there was something moving beneath it. One, two, three and then four tapering shadows with their snouts facing into the current, with only their tails moving slowly from side to side. Occasionally one of the shadows would shift suddenly before stopping in another place; at other times it would break the surface with its back before sinking below again – but always stayed pointing in the direction of the little waterfall. We were further down the valley than they were, which was why they had not noticed us yet.

– Are they trout? – I whispered.

– Fish, said Bruno.

– Do they always stay here?

– Not always. Sometimes they change hole.

– But what are they doing?

– Hunting, he replied, as if to him it was the most obvious thing. I, on the other hand, was learning about it for the first time. I had always thought that fish swam with the current, which seemed easiest, and that they would use up their energy by going against it. The trout moved their tails just enough to remain stationary. I would like to have known what they were hunting. Perhaps it was the gnats that I could see skimming the surface before stopping as if trapped by it. I observed the scene carefully for a while, trying to understand it better, before Bruno suddenly lost interest and leapt to his feet, waving his arms so that the trout sped away in an instant. I went to have a look. They had fled from the centre of the pool in every direction. I looked into the pool and all that I could see was the white and blue gravel at the bottom – and then I had to abandon it to follow Bruno as he rushed up the opposite bank of the river.

A little further on a solitary building loomed above the bank like the house of a watchman. It was falling to ruin amongst the nettles, the brambles, the wasps’ nests desiccating in the sun. In this countryside there were so many ruins just like this one. Bruno placed his hands on the walls, at a point where they met in a corner that was all cracks, pulled himself up and with two quick movements reached the first-floor window.

– Come on! – he said, peering out from above. But then neglected to wait for me. Perhaps to him there seemed no difficulty in my following, and it did not occur to him that I might need help. Or perhaps he was just accustomed to this: that whether easy or difficult, it was every man for himself. I copied him as best as I could. I scraped my arms on the sill of the small window, looked inside and saw Bruno lowering himself through the trapdoor of the attic on a ladder that led to the lower room. I think I had already decided that I would follow him anywhere.

Down below in the semi-darkness there was a space subdivided by low walls into four rooms of equal size, resembling tanks. In the air hung a stagnant smell of mould and rotten wood. As my eyes gradually adjusted to the dark I saw that the floor was littered with cans, bottles, old newspapers, shirts in rags, four wrecked shoes, bits of rusty equipment. Bruno had bent down next to a large white polished stone in the shape of a wheel that was placed in a corner of one room.

– What is it? – I asked.

– The grindstone, he said. Then added: – The stone of the mill.

I bent down next to him to look. I knew what a grindstone was, but had never seen one with my own eyes before. I stretched out my hand. The stone was cold, slimy, and in the hole at its centre moss that adhered to your fingertips like green mud had gathered. I felt my arms smarting with the scratches from the window ledge.

– We need to stand it up, Bruno said.

– Why?

– So that it can roll.

– But where to?

– What do you mean where to? Down, no?

I