Pietro climbs Castor with his father as part of a yearly high-altitude routine that is meant to train him, but the remembered climb is defined less by its summit than by a refuge vigil and the private record Giovanni leaves behind. The episode brings their physical effort, their different ideas about mountain life, and Giovanni’s hope for a changed relationship into the same confined scene.

A planned test of endurance

Each summer, Pietro and Giovanni aim to climb a four-thousander on Monte Rosa near the end of the season, when they are best trained. Castor is their objective that year. Giovanni treats the progression as preparation for more serious mountaineering: he has consulted a doctor about Pietro’s altitude sickness and believes his son will eventually grow out of it. In his longer view, the annual summits might lead to traversing the Lyskamm or climbing the rock faces of Dufour.

For Pietro, however, the routine has little of the adventure his father seems to expect from it. He has not stopped going onto glaciers, but has become accustomed to feeling ill there. Sickness has come to seem like one more ordinary feature of the high mountains, alongside pre-dawn starts, freeze-dried refuge food, and crows calling on the heights. The climb means putting one foot in front of the other until he vomits at the top. He hates the ordeal and the white desert, yet takes pride in getting above four thousand metres again, as evidence of his courage. His participation therefore contains a contradiction: he resents the experience but still values what enduring it says about him.

The refuge and the guestbook

The memory that stands out most strongly is the evening in the refuge before the ascent. Over a plate of pasta and half a litre of wine, the climbers nearby argue, their faces reddened by sun and fatigue. The approaching day lends the room a shared concentration. Giovanni, who enjoys reading refuge guestbooks, turns through its entries and translates passages from German and French. The accounts move him: one climber has returned to a summit after thirty years and thanked God; another regrets the absence of a friend. Giovanni adds his own entry to this collective record.

When Giovanni steps away to refill his carafe, Pietro reads what he has written: “I’m here with my fourteen-year-old son, Pietro. These will be my last occasions at the head of the rope, because soon he will be the one pulling me up. Don’t much feel like going back to the city, but I’ll take with me the memory of these days as the most beautiful refuge.” The entry, signed Giovanni Guasti, turns a private father-son outing into a statement addressed to future climbers. It records not only their presence but Giovanni’s anticipation of a reversal: the experienced father at the rope’s head expects his son eventually to lead him.

Affection and resistance

Pietro does not receive the entry as an uncomplicated expression of love. Its sentiment strikes him as false, a mountain rhetoric at odds with the choices that have shaped their lives. If the mountains are paradise, he wonders, why do they not stay there? Why has his father taken a friend born and raised in the mountains away to live in the city? And if the city is so repellent, why impose that life on him? These questions extend beyond the guestbook’s phrasing to the family’s decisions, including the assumption that one person can know what is best for another. Pietro thinks that he would have liked to put these questions to both his father and his mother.

The difference between their outlooks does not prevent Giovanni from imagining a future closeness. On the third-to-last day of his holiday, a Friday in August, he is forty-six and sharing a refuge with his only son. As Pietro grows up and seems to be overcoming his sickness, Giovanni may picture them as climbing companions and drinking companions, returning to high refuges to drink red wine and study route maps without secrets between them. He pours Pietro a glass. When the boy says his stomach and legs are doing well, Giovanni answers, “Excellent. Tomorrow we’ll have fun.” Pietro tastes the wine and likes it; a man nearby laughs in German and claps him hard on the back, as if welcoming him into a brotherhood of men. The small gestures suggest an initiation, though they do not settle the deeper distance Pietro feels.

A memory preserved in mountain records

The climb belongs to a larger pattern in which mountain journeys become records of family history. Years later, Pietro finds that Giovanni’s map, once a map of valley trails, has become a dense account of twenty years of routes, marked in black, red, and green. Read against the memory of the three of them stranded on a glacier, the colored lines distinguish journeys shared by Giovanni, Pietro, and Bruno from routes Giovanni completed alone. The map makes visible how many separate excursions accumulated around the family’s mountain life; it also shows that the years on the mountain were not limited to the father-son climbs.

Pietro’s later understanding of his father likewise changes through remembered mountain experience. He recalls Giovanni’s way of describing glaciers as the snow of winters long past, preserving a memory that summer’s melting cannot erase. That image clarifies why the refuge guestbook matters: its entries, like the map, hold experience beyond the moment in which it occurred. Giovanni’s Castor entry preserves an expectation of future companionship, even though Pietro, reading it at the time, feels irritation rather than pride. The ascent thus becomes a record of both connection and mismatch—one father imagining what they may become, and one son questioning the sentiment that makes the hope sound so simple.