How to conquer the sky by getting lost in the mountains

At the opening of this literary and mountaineer memoir by Alberto Rollo there is a father with a fiery red Guzzi and a baby son who has always thought that the mountains were waiting for him. Of why it is not said, and the search for this promised and often missed peak is the thread that holds the narrative together The big sky (in the Passi series, published by Ponte alle Grazie in collaboration with Cai, the Italian Alpine Club). The subtitle warns us that this is the sentimental education of a hiker and is a clear ideal reference to A Milanese education (Manni) with whom Rollo, a man of publishing and books, was a finalist at the Premo Strega 2017.

There the metalworker father with the Guzzi whizzed over the Ghisolfa bridge and opened glimpses into the metropolitan landscape of an industrial and proletarian Milan, where the epic of work merged with class consciousness and became a Bildungsroman for an entire generation, from postwar in the late 1970s. Here the question becomes more intimate and also concerns a pair of boots, because to go to the mountains you need to be well-shod. But the baby son and then the boy son never have the right shoes and the Alps remain a dream to caress and to ford from afar, from the places where the paternal Guzzi stops on Sunday outings: at the entrance to the paths, at the limit of the great woods, where the peaks can be glimpsed and can be imagined but not trampled. “Now we can’t,” says the father. Workers don’t go up to the mountains, that’s bourgeois stuff. The son can only passively look up to the big blue sky calling him. He knows that sooner or later he will get there; he never he will do it with the father. Waiting becomes desire and creates imaginaries. The son wears his eyes on maps, fables of excursions, traces the curves of the slopes with his finger, waiting for the right shoes. These boots, a metaphor for the inadequacy that one always feels when approaching life, will arrive at some point. But before him will come the holiday in the Pre-Alps, with his mother and sister, in villages of farmers and breeders. A taste of what the discovery of the real mountain will be like.

Walking in the mountains, uphill, is a form of discovery and the important thing is the pace. Rollo’s, slow and cadenced, is not a sporting practice but a continuous revelation. Whether they are the friends with whom he shares the path or the cairns of stones that the mountain walker meets along the path, in any case necessary but never intrusive presences. There isn’t a call of the forest nor the aspiration for the wild, because “wilderness” – according to Rollo – ended with Arthur Rimbaud’s soles of wind and there are no others left of rebels. There are many literary references in the book – from Dino Buzzati to Antonia Pozzi, from Goethe to Testori and many others – arduous passages, pain and flashes of happiness. Few, in truth, and all linked to family affections. There is Rosaria, the Ro, a beloved woman whose heart and leg are tested in the mountains. There is the effrontery of the dog Billy, indomitable and courageous until the last day. There are Elena, the daughter who came from the plains who also knows how to climb to the top and Isaac, the son sought with hope and sacrifice at the top of the mountain and never arrived. In the memories of artistic and hiking life, in these small episodes and cameos that dot the book, also read through the filter of painting, music, oral stories, one always hears in the background the anguish of the passing of time, the disappointments and the disillusionments, the heaviness of the bodies, the fatigue of the climb that consumes, how consumes living. Even in the sizzle of forty years, when much of life is still ahead, mountain outings are proof of existence and resistance and never a balm.

Although now equipped with leather boots, Rollo always tends to the great sky where you never get, you can’t get to. However, he learns to get lost, in the awareness that one discovers what a path is when one loses track of it. “The mountain does not cure good humor,” he writes. “The real crux of our lives is the distance that separates us from youth.” Him unsuitable shoes, missed destinations and a tired chamois, who was king of the chamois – as in the story by Erri De Luca, The weight of the butterfly – but now lonely and proud, he seeks the embrace of some other chamois king, even to the point of pity of a mortal embrace. The old man who looks at the boy who was, sitting at a table drinking coffee, is left with the feeling of not having the right shoes on his feet. Despite all the way done.