Sul Grappa dopo la vittoria

A boy, barely eleven years old, hikes the cliffs of Monte Grappa. His father sent him up there to retrieve copper, lead, canned goods, because the famine has become frightening in the valley of Sant’Eulalia. Along the way, the scrubs of mugo pines and the meadows he used to see when he visited with his father before the war are gone. Climbing up Monte Grappa after the victory is a disorienting experience. The green has vanished, everything is dominated by the white broken rocks and the black scourged earth. The tunnels and trenches are the scars of a wounded mountain. Just like his father is wounded: he is no longer the giant who used to dominate the trails, he is a quiet and tired man who walks hunched under an invisible weight. Maybe that is why he made his son into a retriever. Rather than a full bag, his father is more interested in making his son see and understand what his war actually meant. On Monte Grappa’s summit, the corpses are covered in snow along with iron from the barbed wire, tin from the mess tins, leather from the boots. The boy doesn’t see heroes in those pale simulacrums of humans, only victims of a massive meat-grinding machinery, created and powered by man. Now that he has seen the horror, he understands why his father is silent. But the time has come to move on. It is time to put the war behind him and go along with the frenzy of youth and its appetite for life. It is time to go back to seeing Monte Grappa as beautiful and defenseless as all the other mountains.