Translated from the Italian by Will Schutt
Now that my friends have gone the house seems empty, silent.
Outside, the fog closes in, a mountain fog, a cold, low-slung, humid blanket pressed against the ground. Though you can’t see them, you can sense behind it, above it, back of it, the presence of valleys and peaks—which turn almost threatening at a moment’s notice—there where the eyes can’t get at, the invisible territory somehow reached by gusts of wind, passing clouds, thunderclaps, and most of all the wild, violent, savage waters.
This too is a mountain: a life of hardship at the me...