Giovanni Guasti dies of a heart attack on a motorway lay-by in March 2004, just as Pietro has begun to imagine rebuilding their relationship. The sudden death closes off a reconciliation that had seemed possible and leaves Pietro to encounter his father anew through traces of his life in the mountains: a map crowded with routes, a summit entry, and a memorial at the house Pietro builds with Bruno.

The Call and the Death

The news reaches Pietro through a call from his mother one evening in March 2004. Giovanni has suffered a heart attack while on the motorway. He has not caused an accident: he has managed to pull into a lay-by and switch on the hazard lights, as a driver might do after a puncture or running out of petrol. He has even turned off the engine. His heart, rather than a collision or a failure of driving, has stopped him.

The detail that he remains buckled into his seat, hands still on the steering wheel, gives the death its starkly contained form. He has brought the car to a halt, but has not got out; other traffic continues past while he sits there. Pietro compares the scene to a racing driver forced to retire from a race, an image made bitterly apt by Giovanni’s habitual urgency and by the miles he had accumulated. In death, the man who had lived as though everything were pressing close is overtaken by everyone else.

A Reconciliation Cut Short

The loss arrives after Pietro has begun to reconsider the father he thought he knew. His mother’s letters have shown him a more vulnerable Giovanni, adding to memories in which his father instinctively reached for his trouser belt when Pietro leaned over a rock and worried more than Pietro did when he fell ill on a glacier. Pietro had started to wonder whether this attentive father had always been beside him, obscured by the difficult relationship they had lived through in the city. He had begun to think that he might try to build bridges with him. Giovanni’s death extinguishes that prospective future before the attempt can take shape.

The death therefore changes not only Pietro’s family circumstances but also the direction of his understanding. There can be no new conversation in which the two men reconcile their competing versions of the past. Instead, Pietro must piece together the mountain-going father from what Giovanni left behind and from what others tell him. His mother’s account and the objects in the family’s possession become ways of approaching a relationship whose repair is now impossible in ordinary terms.

The Mountain Map and a Hidden Life

Among those objects is the map Giovanni had kept thumbtacked to the wall. When Pietro later studies it, he finds that it has become far more than a guide to the valley’s trails: felt-tip routes cover the summits, alpine pastures, and refuges so densely that the map is almost illegible to anyone else. Black, red, and green lines record different journeys. Pietro recognizes the three colors through memories of a glacier outing with Giovanni and Bruno: black marks his father’s routes, red the climbs Pietro made with him, and green Bruno’s.

The map reveals both solitude and companionship. Some black lines continue beyond the points where Pietro and Bruno’s colored routes end, showing that Giovanni completed those climbs alone on other occasions. Yet Pietro also finds many routes traced in black and green, evidence that his father and Bruno walked together. The discovery brings a pang of jealousy, but also relief that Giovanni did not spend all those years in the mountains by himself. What once seemed to Pietro like a private record of trails begins to read as an indirect account of the people with whom his father shared them.

Records, Memorial, and Afterlife

A later visit to the summit above Pietro’s house brings him another record of Giovanni’s life. In the Grenon summit logbook, among years of climbers’ names and brief remarks, Pietro recognizes his father’s 1997 handwriting. Giovanni records that he climbed up from Grana in three hours and fifty-eight minutes and was still in great shape. The entry makes a solitary ascent visible in a few practical words and an exclamation; Pietro imagines his father timing himself and hurrying to reach the summit in under four hours. He leaves the page in place rather than tear it out, treating the notebook as something that belongs to the mountain.

The family’s response to Giovanni’s death also takes material form at the house Pietro and Bruno have built. When Pietro brings his mother there, she looks across the lake, scree, and peaks, then studies the inscription he has cut into the rock wall and painted black: “IN MEMORY IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL REFUGE”. She and the two men sing the song associated with the death of a lover of the mountains, asking that he be allowed to keep walking in the afterlife. Pietro then tells Bruno, with his mother as witness, that the house should belong to both of them. His father’s death cannot be undone, but the mountain records and the shared house let Pietro preserve a relationship to Giovanni that was inaccessible to him while his father was alive.