Pietro’s first free-climbing attempt is a fall from a ten-meter rock face that makes physical skill, safety knowledge, and social pressure collide. The climb begins with the ease of movement he hoped to learn from an accomplished partner; it ends with Pietro suspended above the ground, unable to retreat, and then dropping against the rock. His survival does not make the episode a triumph: he is hurt, shaken, and resolves that the cigarette offered afterward will be the last thing he shares with the two climbers.

The Climb and Its Social Pressure

After training on monoliths, Pietro joins two young men for his first real free-form climb. One is the son of a collector, a strong Genoese climber who leads the rope; the other is his friend, who has less evident passion or aptitude for climbing. The rock face stands close to the road, separated from it by a meadow. Its overhang shelters cattle from wind and rain, and the three put on their climbing shoes among the cows before setting off.

The Genoese climber’s movements offer Pietro a model of the grace he wants to acquire. He climbs lightly, finds holds without searching, places quickdraws on bolts, and resumes climbing after chalking his hands. Pietro, below the other friend, must stop repeatedly because the climber above him is directly overhead. Looking behind him, he sees late-August fields, the sunlit river, and cars reduced to small shapes on the road. At this point, the drop does not frighten him: away from the ground, the movements feel natural, requiring concentration rather than exceptional strength or lung capacity.

The group’s manner changes the stakes. Pietro suspects that the second climber hangs on the bolts, but keeps quiet because speaking up would leave him outnumbered. The man makes jokes at Pietro’s expense, turning his competitiveness into the day’s running amusement. When the Genoese offers him the chance to climb first, Pietro accepts less from confidence than from a wish to end the teasing. He already has his harness and clips, so the usual exchange of positions is unnecessary. He looks up at a bolt in a fissure and starts climbing.

The Fall

Leading changes the meaning of the rope. With a rope above, Pietro understands, a climber can find the route differently than when the rope trails below. His first clip goes onto an old ring nail rather than one of the newer steel bolts. He notices the difference but continues because he is making progress. Higher up, the fissure narrows and disappears beneath a black, damp roof of rock. There is no visible way over it.

The Genoese cannot see the route from below. Pietro reports that the rock is smooth and that he cannot get over the roof; his companions tell him to come back down, and he hears their amusement. Retreat proves harder than ascent. The fissure that had seemed climbable from below now looks impossible, while the rusty peg is several meters away. One leg begins to tremble uncontrollably from the knee to the heel; his foot stops responding, his hands sweat, and the rock seems to slip from his grasp. He shouts that he is falling and asks them to hold tight.

Pietro drops ten meters. The fall is survivable, but he does not know the technique that might have softened it: pushing away from the rock face and cushioning the impact with his feet. Nobody has taught him how to fall. Instead, he goes straight down, striking and scraping himself against the rock as he tries to catch hold. The resulting tightness in his groin tells him that someone has stopped the rope. The pain therefore carries an immediate sign of rescue, and the laughter below has stopped.

Aftermath and Lasting Separation

Soon afterward, the climbers reach the top and return to the fields, where the taut rope lies beside the precipice. Around them are grazing cows, a partly derelict farmstead, and a barking dog. Pietro is shaken, bleeding, and in pain. One of the two asks whether he is all right, then offers him a cigarette. Pietro accepts, lies on the grass, and smokes while looking at the sky. He decides that it will be the last thing they share. Though they speak again, he no longer listens. The fall thus ends not only the climb but his willingness to continue the day’s companionship.

The episode is followed by the familiar turn of the season: at the end of August, rain and cold return, and the mountain seems to send people down toward the warmth of September. Pietro’s father has left again. Pietro and his mother remain together in the house; he gathers larch branches for the stove, reads, and wanders in the woods. He feels ready to return to the city and expects important changes, while experiencing these last days as memories even as they unfold. With no rock faces to climb in Grana, he trains on the walls of derelict houses, methodically traversing corners and avoiding the easiest holds. That training is part of the same summer’s climbing life, though the narrative does not present it as a direct consequence of the fall.

Place in the Narrative

The first-person account renders the accident through bodily changes before any broader judgment can contain it: the leg trembles, the foot fails, the hands sweat, and the rock ceases to feel secure. Pietro had felt naturally at home in the air moments earlier; the sudden failure of control reveals how incomplete that ease was. The episode distinguishes climbing movement from climbing knowledge. He can move confidently when following a rope, but has neither a safe route forward nor the practiced technique needed to fall.

The fall also sits within a larger account in which climbing and memory return through concrete traces. Later, Pietro finds his father’s densely marked mountain map and recognizes its color code: black routes are his father’s, red accompanies Pietro, and green accompanies Bruno. At another point he discovers his father’s old summit entry in a notebook on a mountain reached by few climbers. These records describe other journeys, not the circumstances of Pietro’s fall, but they give the episode a wider narrative context: climbing is both lived bodily experience and something later recovered through marks, recollection, and places. Pietro’s first attempt remains sharply distinct within that history—a day when aspiration, peer pressure, and an unlearned safety skill converge in a fall he cannot control.