Mauro Piva

Where it is always Winter

The person who goes on a journey

Is not the same person who will come back.

(Chinese proverb)

Part 1:

The renegade village

Day Zero

The clouds had slipped down the mountainside, settling over the valley, while a thin layer of mist had sneaked through the trunks, brushing the gnarled trunks of the pines and the clear papyrus of the birches with its passage. The mist had made its way almost on tiptoe, caressing with its cold fingers the meadows that rested taciturn, strolling among the blades of grass, the leaves of cabbage, the tufts of the larches and the thorns of the junipers like a lonely lady seeking company.

An impalpable silvery veil had embraced the beech trees, which seemed to watch me in silence, like motionless ghosts, voiceless protectors of the small plain that must have belonged to them for centuries. Not far away, the dark of the forest could barely be glimpsed, blurred and shapeless, peeping through the slowly shifting smoke. The great eternal pines, stern guardians of that immense bush, made their presence felt through an intense scent, made of moss and resin, capable of piercing that wall of cold and colorless patina. They almost seemed to want to whisper something, with soundless words that only sensations could perceive.

We are watching you, stranger.

This is how the valley of Bassoborgo had greeted me, the day it had all begun. At that moment, in that place that seemed eternal and unchanging, had begun the terrible adventure that would lead me over the next few days to that mysterious territory called Lost Houses, a forgotten village perched on the heights of Tremenda Point.

I found myself lost, confused, and still unaware of what the future had in store for me and of the disturbing truths I would, in spite of myself, have to face, buried among the secrets of that remote and isolated place. I did not recognize those meadows, those mountains, those fields. I could not remember why I was there. Observing those spaces, I was looking for explanations.

No sound all around. Only a terrible, still, dreamlike silence that went filling every void. I could feel the blood pulsing in my ears and chest, as if the beats of my heart wanted to rival that peace in a futile battle. I was disturbed by a fine, light, pungent drizzle, typical of the wooded heights, made of tiny drops that hit my face like restless, invisible insects. I still feel them distinctly in my memories, as they annoyingly drummed every millimeter of my forehead, frosty cheeks, flushed nose and numb hands. They seemed everywhere, lingering in the clean, cold air, steeped in the scents of the forest. Sometimes they would strike me moving swiftly, horizontally, other times they seemed instead to stand there waiting for me, suspended, ready to impact my skin with every single step. Nature seemed to want to repel me and make me desist from that journey, throwing me strange warnings by the means at its disposal.

Breath came out heavy from the nostrils in dense fumes of vapor that vanished as they rose upward. Eyes were watering partly from the cold, partly from being irritated by those invisible microscopic needles. The landscape was changing slowly, respecting rules and rhythms marked by ancient natural motions. Time, up there, proceeded at a different speed, almost unwillingly. Perhaps, a little tired and bored, repeating old rituals that were always the same, season after season, year after year, in an endless cycle. What was I doing in that place?

I was looking around perplexed, trying to scrape together the confused thoughts, just as at this very moment as I am about to write these notes and recapitulate what happened in those dark days. Yet, today as then, I know how to control that phenomenon that has now haunted me for years: the estrangement syndrome.

That was how I had christened, over time, that condition of extreme disorientation that had begun almost thirty years earlier, shortly after an IED went off in my vicinity.

The bomb. Deafening thunder, thunderous and sudden. The world around rapidly receding. A sensation not unlike that of entering a tunnel at high speed, when sounds, light, the semblance of the outside world quickly flee and give way to darkness, as sight struggles to bring things back into focus and noises suddenly become muffled and gloomy.

I was eagerly rummaging through the drawers of the mind, looking for solid holds. That was the system to control my disorder and get back in touch with reality. Staying focused on oneself, repeating to the point of obsession a saving mantra.

Here, then, are some memories, some images, emerging.

Good. That process would save me from oblivion, from the labyrinths of memory, from confusion. Faded slides of dust gone wild, pebbles jumping everywhere, mud. The confusion following the bang. Iraq.

I was in my twenties and was already traveling around the world hunting for rare books. I was not in the habit, at least in my youth, of traveling to such dangerous war zones, but I was already in the region when the conflict erupted without much warning. Baghdad had been quickly put to the sword, following the invasion of Kuwait, and overnight came punitive raids by the U.S. Air Force. There, I had become acquainted with the estrangement syndrome, for the first time, as antiaircraft artillery shots echoed everywhere, losing themselves in the brightly lit sky and mingling with the thundering on the ground, the screaming, the shooting, the collapsing, the desperate crying. I was in a hotel and the wall next to me had come down as a result of the explosion. It had crumbled, raising dust everywhere. I was fortunately unharmed, but dazed.

Concentration. I needed it to re-engage with reality again.

Slowly the snapshots of the war site faded and brought me back among the haze of the valley and the silences all around. The din of the explosions was gone.

The notes of an old tune began to accompany me in that silence, as if I had a record player planted in my skull. A song I remembered well and had known for forty years at least. A staple among the confusion, coming from far back in time to keep me anchored in the present.

Here is the valley, and there is the giant

Where is the way? Where is the path?

Here I stand, my ol' friend

The promised land, I know where it is

An old American country song that had often served as a soundtrack-like backdrop to my previous travels.

Another point in my favor: the memory machine had started up again. The puzzle was coming together, weakening the intrusiveness of that insidious monster. Just a little more effort, a few more details, a few more images, memories, adventures experienced, and that disturbance would become small enough to go back to where it came from, until the next occasion when we would cross paths again. When the attacks were very strong, as on that occasion, I struggled even to remember my own name, as if in the grip of real identity crises. But that day I fought my evil well, resisting it tenaciously.

Zenon Odescalchi, as I remembered to call myself, born in Milan in the early 1970s.

I had traveled halfway around the world amidst a thousand troubles and as many adventures because of the job I had chosen for myself. I was a rare book hunter, a so-called bookworm with a passion for antiques, incunabula, seventeenth-centuries, the smell of mold on yellowed pages, eighteenth-century marbled papers, and ex libris. I had turned this passion into a profession, offering my expertise to anyone in search of an unobtainable edition, a lost book, a rarity of knowledge.

The demands of my clients had taken me everywhere over the years. I would see images of domes, pagodas, mosques, cathedrals, deserts, great capitals of the world scrolling before me. Those slides were blurring confusedly, as if they were memories from another life, side effects of the syndrome that was festering despite my efforts to keep it at bay. I knew that sooner or later I would have to face my illness in a decisive battle, to defeat it for good. I felt that day would be near.

Suddenly my thoughts were interrupted.

The distant call of an owl suddenly burst in, screeching through the meshes of the forest, and shattered those hypnotic silences, echoing through the valley like an omen, like a wake-up call. The time had come to take stock of the reasons that had led me to that place. Time, albeit slowly, was going straight on its way.

I searched the pockets of my overcoat. They were heavy and sagged, weighed down by a few items. I pulled out a book, two letters, and a map. I took a quick look at everything.

At that moment, something became unblocked; contact occurred; the monster left. Now I remembered the reasons for that trip; the crisis was over. Whatever had made that raptor sing had unwittingly been my ally.

One of my client's drivers had left me at the side of the road, as far as the car could go. From there I was to continue on foot, for several hours, until I reached a hut called Rifugio Guardiano. I would spend the night there and receive directions on how to later reach a place called Lost Houses. To get to the latter place, inaccessible because of the total lack of trails, would take me the entire next day. Once I got up there, more than two thousand five hundred meters above sea level, I would have to find the missing chapter of a manuscript that I was carrying with me and that had supposedly been there since the 1940s. The two envelopes that accompanied it contained some letters of introduction: one for the lodge I was preparing to reach before nightfall, the other intended for an individual living in that remote village. They were, in short, a sort of pass, which would guarantee me help and thus facilitate the whole affair. Apart from the physical exertion due to the many hours of walking, the mission seemed, on the surface, to be nothing more challenging than a small vacation among perched mountain villages. I thought I could do with such a sortie, a less risky adventure than usual. How wrong I was, alas.

I had received very well-detailed directions on how to reach the hut, carefully noted on the map I was carrying. Unfortunately, none of the landmarks seemed to be nearby. There was no trace whatsoever of the mule track that was supposed to cross the grazing meadows once the main road had been abandoned, and similarly, there was no note concerning that apple orchard where I was standing. Moreover, the slopes of the mountain should have been much further away than that.

The plan called for a walk of about ten kilometers, to be made at a good pace, which would take me across grassy expanses bordered by a stream. Then I was to take an alpine trail until I reached my destination, having climbed the slopes of the massif to over a thousand meters above sea level.

The road where I had been dropped off was not far behind me, but I was becoming convinced that the driver had dropped me off in the wrong place. I tried to continue ahead toward the woods, to check better, aware that the haze and the size of the mountain in front of me could play tricks, making everything seem closer and leading me to misjudge distances. Perhaps the fields and the barrow were further on, beyond the orchard, and the woods might have been farther away than they seemed.

The raptor emitted another cry. Another warning. The forest was monitoring my movements and seemed to want to warn me.

Watch out, intruder.

I reached the end of that expanse of fruit trees without encountering any grazing meadows. The pines came forward, anticipating the dark scrub vegetation that had become steep and dense just beyond. My footsteps finally began to make some sounds, crackling on the carpet of dried-up needles that, from that point on, covered the ground. I had absolute certainty that I was in the wrong place when I saw a wooden sign, shaped like an arrow, bearing a tourist sign:

Old gold mines of Bassoborgo,

visitable Sat-Sun from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in summer months only

No such attraction was indicated on the map I was supposed to follow. There was no longer any doubt in my mind; I was way off track. I should have turned back and reached the center of Bassoborgo to ask for directions and, at worst, scrape together a ride should I find myself very far from the correct path. I should have hurried, to boot.

I turned quickly, ending up impacting a dark silhouette that had emerged from the fog, making no sound. It caught me off guard, causing me to gasp. It had materialized as if from nowhere, moving in the opposite direction from me. It was a man.

He apostrophized me in a deep, hoarse, hissing voice. «The mines are wrong!»

I watched that figure for a moment. His eyes were spirited, squinted; he seemed out of his mind. He looked like a homeless man, a vagrant, or at least that's what I thought. He was dressed in old rags, dark and worn, his head covered by a frayed hood. He might as well have been a shepherd, or one of those men who don't pay too much attention to personal cleanliness. Over those frumpy clothes he wore a heavy sheepskin vest, smelly, made of worn and yellowed wool. It gave off an acrid, intense and annoying odor.

He stared at me with those watery, yellowish, bloodshot eyes, almost expecting something from yours truly. He did not look old; he could have been in his thirties or forties, although his appearance was lying about his real age because of the poor condition with which he presented himself. His face was dirty with soot, his beard long and unkempt. Dark hair descended from the hood in a greasy, shapeless tangle.

I was lost for a moment. «Can you show me the way to Guardian Shelter?»

At that request, the expression on my improvised interlocutor's face changed and took on tones that were almost serious, grave and worried at the same time. He did not seem to have bad intentions. He seemed, instead, to want to protect me from something. His gaze became attentive, gentle, like that of an apprehensive friend. He grabbed me firmly by the shoulders with both hands, staring at me without blinking.

«Don't go to Lost Houses! Don't go there! It's all wrong up there!»

At those words I was stunned. I had not mentioned my destination, only the name of the cabin I was about to reach as my first stop. It seemed that the bizarre character had read me inside, that he knew something. Before I could add anything else, he continued in what ended up sounding like a sinister rant, tugging at me vehemently.

«If you don't want to end up like me, don't go there! Go back to where you came from!»

«Who are you? What do you mean?»

«I... I am no one! That place.... They're all dead up there... That place steals the past from the living! They did things up there! Wrong things! Come back, stranger! Or you'll never come back!»

I had to get him off my back. «Okay, man, you've convinced me. I'm going back on my way, then. Thanks for the warning!»

«Stay away from the mines, the mines are evil!»

I hurried away, without another word, making my way back toward Bassoborgo, the nearest town. The guy had creeped me out. I only turned around when I was a few dozen meters away and saw the man still standing there staring at me, the outlines of his figure mingling with the haze. He had seemed genuinely terrified of something but, at the same time, I had the impression that he was prey to some strange hallucination.

«He'll steal your past!» he shouted again, when he was now reduced to a small, dark, undefined silhouette at the edge of the woods. I saw him vanish into thin air.

***

After leaving the expanse of apple trees, I found myself in an area of vegetable gardens, neat and well squared. They seemed to be made up mostly of broad-leaved, neatly lined cabbages, one after the other. The main road was not far away, but it seemed far from busy. It was certainly not a place of heavy traffic, as no car noise came from that way. In spite of everything, I heard geese quacking and was happy to finally be surrounded by sounds with a semblance of life.

Not far from the vegetable gardens was a small farmyard, enclosed by a small wall of irregular stones, fitted together with some skill. It was the courtyard of an old wood and brick house, with a dark pitched roof and pots of geraniums on the windowsills. Smoke was coming out of the chimney, and that could only be another positive note. I could have asked for information and help.

I approached and noticed that at the back of the building a man was intent on splitting wood. The dull, rhythmic sound of the blows, planted on the stump, was partially covered by the cries of the ducks, who were milling in the small courtyard in front. The wrought-iron gate was ajar, so I took the liberty of pushing it forward, to get closer and be heard by the man. The metal hinges squeaked with a sharp sound. The palmipeds took to running everywhere, perhaps because they were agitated by my presence, thus attracting the landlord's attention. The man laid down his axe, after turning to look at me, and came toward me. He was an elderly gentleman, tall and lanky, with thick silver hair and a face furrowed with the signs of age. He looked at me with those clear eyes of his, serene and piercing at the same time, rubbing his calloused, reddened hands.