“You can’t make me go, boy,” Luigi said.
“Yes, I can,” Pino said, angry and moving fast toward the man, “and I will.” He loomed over the smoker, whose eyes widened. Even at seventeen, Pino was much bigger than Luigi. He could see those facts playing on the cigar trader’s face, which contorted in fear when he glanced again at the steep walls of the cirque.
“Don’t you understand?” he said in a defeated tone. “I really can’t. I have no faith I can make it—”
“But I do,” Pino said, trying to put a growl in his voice.
“Please?”
“No,” Pino said. “I promise you you’re getting to the top and over into Val di Lei if I have to carry you myself.”
Luigi appeared convinced by the resolve in Pino’s face. With a quivering lip he said, “Promise?”
“Promise,” Pino said, and shook his hand.
He had them rope up again with Luigi right behind him, followed by Maria and her husband.
“You sure I won’t fall?” the cigar trader asked, clearly terrified. “I’ve never done anything remotely like this. I’ve . . . always lived in Rome.”
Pino thought, said, “Okay, so you’ve climbed around in the Roman ruins?”
“Yes, but—”
“How about those steep, narrow steps in the Colosseum?”
Luigi nodded. “Many times.”
“This is no worse than that.”
“It is.”
“It isn’t,” Pino said. “Just imagine that you’re in the Colosseum and you’re cutting back and forth across the seats and steps. You’ll be fine.”
Luigi seemed skeptical, but he did not fight the rope when Pino started up the first leg. Pino kept up a running banter with the smoker, telling him how he was going to let him have two cigarettes when he reached the top, and advising him to keep the fingers of his inside hand trailing along the slope as they climbed.
“Take your time,” he said. “Look ahead, not down.”
When the going got rough and the wall turned nearly sheer, Pino distracted Luigi with the story of how he and his brother had survived the first night of bombing in Milan and come home to find music playing.
“Your father is a wise man,” the cigar trader said. “Music. Wine. A cigar. The small luxuries of life are how we survive what the mind can’t fathom.”
“You sound like you do a lot of thinking in your shop,” Pino said, wiping the sweat from his eyes.
Luigi laughed. “A lot of thinking. A lot of talking. A lot of reading. It is . . .” The joy left his voice. “It was my home.”
They were well up the wall of the cirque now, and the trickiest part of the climb was just ahead, where the way cut hard right for two meters and then hard left for three in a cleft in the face of the slope that dropped away sharply. The challenge was a psychological one because the trail through the cleft was plenty wide. But the thirty meters of air right there off the trail could rattle even a veteran climber’s confidence if looked at too long.
Pino decided not to warn them and said, “Tell me about your shop.”
“Oh, it was a beautiful place,” Luigi said. “Just off the Piazza di Spagna at the bottom of the Spanish Steps. Do you know the area?”
“I have been to the Spanish Steps,” Pino said, pleased that Luigi had not hesitated to follow him. “That’s a fine neighborhood, many elegant stores.”
“A wonderful place for business,” Luigi said.
Pino walked through the back of the V. He and the cigar smoker were on opposite sides of the cleft now. If Luigi was ever going to look down, it was now. When Pino saw Luigi turn his head to do just that, he said, “Describe your store to me.”
Luigi’s eyes found Pino’s. “Oil-rubbed wood floors and counters,” he said, chuckling and taking the turn with ease. “Tufted leather chairs. And an octagonal humidor that my late wife and I designed ourselves.”
“I bet the store smelled good.”
“The best. I had cigars and tobaccos from all over the world in there. And dried lavender, mints, and Sen-Sen. And fine brandy for my favored customers. I had so many good and loyal customers. They were my friends, really. The shop was like a club until quite recently. Even the filthy Germans came in to buy.”
They were all through the cleft and climbing diagonally toward the rim again.
“Tell me about your wife,” Pino said.
There was a brief silence behind him, and he felt resistance on the rope before Luigi said, “My Ruth was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known. We met at temple when we were twelve. Why she chose me, I’ll never know, but she did. It turned out we couldn’t have kids, but we spent twenty wonderful years together before she just got sick one day, and sicker the next, and the next. The doctors said her digestive system had reversed, and they couldn’t stop it from poisoning her to death.”
Pino flashed with a pang on Mrs. Beltramini and wondered how she was, how Carletto was, and his father.
“I’m sorry,” Pino said, climbing up over the rim.
“It’s been six years,” Luigi said as Pino helped him up and then the couple. “And not an hour goes by when I don’t think of her.”
Pino clapped the cigar trader on the back and grinned. “You did it. We’re at the top.”
“What?” Luigi said, gazing around in wonder. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Pino said.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Luigi said, and looked to the sky with relief.
“Told you. We can rest ahead. There’s something I want you to see first.”
He led them to where they could look over the back side of the Groppera.
“Welcome to Val di Lei,” he said.
The slope of the alpine valley there was gentle compared to the front side of the mountain and was covered with low, wind-stunted mountain shrubs with leaves turning rust, orange, and yellow. Far down the valley, they could see its namesake. Fewer than two hundred meters wide and perhaps eight hundred long, the alpine lake ran north-south toward that triangle of woods Father Re had described.
The lake surface was silver blue normally, but that day it reflected and radiated the flaming colors of fall. Beyond the lake, a bulwark of stone rose and ran off to the south a long way toward Passo Angeloga, and the stone cairn where Pino had turned around his first day of training. They began to hike down along a game path that ran along a creek fed by glaciated snow still clinging to the highest peaks.
I did it, Pino thought, feeling happy and satisfied. They listened to me, and I got them over the Groppera.
“I’ve never been anywhere more beautiful than this,” Maria said when they reached the lake. “It’s incredible. It feels like . . .”
“Freedom,” Ricardo said.
“A moment to cherish,” Luigi said.
“Are we in Switzerland, already?” Maria asked.
“Almost,” Pino said. “We go into the woods there a ways to reach the border.”