Grenon rises above Barma as both a physical challenge and a repository of family memory. Its paths connect the house Pietro and Bruno build to a summit where Pietro rediscovers his climbing skills and encounters his father’s handwriting; its terrain also gives form to the two versions of his father that Pietro has struggled to reconcile.

Setting and Routes

From Barma, Grenon dominates the view and draws Pietro upward after the house’s roof is finished. Bruno describes a route from the lake: it climbs through alder thicket, crosses swampy ground, and reappears among new grass. Beyond another basin and a smaller lake, the slope becomes scree, with only scattered piles of stones or chamois tracks to suggest a way. Bruno advises Pietro to keep sight of a residual snowfield in a notch near the crest.

The ascent reveals sharply contrasting sides of the mountain. From the small snowfield, Pietro looks across sunlit meadow toward huts and grazing cattle, while behind him the damp rock and remaining snow lie in shadow. The two lakes appear twinned from above, but the house he and Bruno are building cannot be picked out against the mountain that supplied its materials. Grenon’s terrain makes the nearby worlds feel distinct even as the ridge holds them in one view.

A Mountain Read Through Its Records

Grenon also connects Pietro to the routes his father travelled. On returning to the old kitchen, Pietro studies his father’s map, which has grown over twenty years from a valley-trail map into a dense network of itineraries. Its black, red, and green lines initially seem like a code. Remembering the three of them caught together on a glacier, Pietro works out that black marks his father’s routes, red accompanies Pietro to the four-thousand-meter peaks, and green represents Bruno. The map shows that his father continued to explore alone, but also walked extensively with Bruno; that discovery brings Pietro jealousy and relief at once.

At Grenon’s summit, Pietro finds a metal box containing a notebook in a plastic bag. Its weather-damaged pages record the few climbers who reach the barren mountain, usually no more than ten a year. Among the entries he recognizes one from 1997, signed by Giovanni Guasti: the climb from Grana took three hours and fifty-eight minutes, and Giovanni noted that he was still in great shape. Pietro imagines his father hurrying to reach the summit in under four hours, pleased by his strength and by the mountain’s familiar brightness. He leaves the page in the notebook, unwilling to remove it from its place.

Climbing and Recognition

Pietro’s first solo ascent in the account marks a return to movement he has not attempted for years. On the easy rock below the summit, he must concentrate on each handhold and foothold, balancing rather than relying on force. Absorbed in the immediate work of climbing, he loses awareness of the surrounding mountains and the two contrasting slopes below. Only when the rock stops him does he realize he has reached the top. Monte Rosa appears beyond a mound of stones, but the summit brings neither triumph nor relief; Pietro stays long enough to smoke and take leave of what he thinks of as his father’s mountain.

A later ascent with Bruno takes place in thick fog, without a visible path. The pair lose sight of the cairns and steer by the slope and the scree, calling to one another when they drift too far apart. Above two and a half thousand meters, they emerge into sunlight over a sea of clouds. Pietro deviates from the usual route, imagining that he might make a first ascent on Grenon’s northwest crest, but rusty tins on a ledge show that someone has already passed that way. Bruno climbs a steep section rapidly on hands and feet, choosing holds instinctively; watching him, Pietro thinks of the wild man. Grenon thus becomes a place where the two friends’ different ways of moving through the mountains remain visible even as they climb together.

Memory and Memorial

Grenon’s glaciers help Pietro understand what his father meant when he said that summer erases memories while a glacier preserves the snow of winters long past. After hearing his mother’s account of the family past, Pietro recognizes his father in the mountains as a man different from the distant stranger he knew in the city: a walker who followed behind him on paths and loved glaciers. The ruin at Barma becomes work through which Pietro can remember that other father.

When Pietro’s mother visits the completed house, she looks carefully at the lake, scree, peaks, and building, as if fixing the scene in memory. She also studies Giovanni Guasti’s rock inscription, which names him, gives the years 1942–2004, and calls memory the most beautiful refuge. The inscription places an act of remembrance in the mountain itself. Grenon’s paths and records have already brought Pietro into contact with his father’s traces; the memorial makes that private recovery part of the landscape shared by Pietro, Bruno, and his mother.