The Invisible Mountain Read Online Free PDF

turned and saw him nowhere. The air was heavy, humid. Voices rattled and screeched out singsong strings of Spanish words. People bustled everywhere: sailors, vendor women, grimy little children picking at dead fish. A boy looked up at him from the fish bins he was scrubbing. The boy’s nose sloped widely to either side, and black eyes looked out of a face more darkly hued than he had ever seen. Pietro had assured him that Uruguay was full of Europeans and their descendants. A civilized place, he’d said. Ignazio’s eyes met the boy’s. He felt a surge of—what? fear? fascination? shame? It struck him, then—the obvious and unthinkable fact that he was in a strange land, worlds and worlds and long blue worlds away from home. His ribs tightened inside him. He longed for his only friend. He searched, pushing past women’s wide baskets and sailors’ hard smiles, until he finally found him, smoking a cigarette (how had he found one?) and leaning nonchalantly against a stucco wall. “Don’t worry,” Pietro said. “We’ll get used to it.” He laughed. “Here, have a smoke. What do you say we find a place to eat, a woman or two? We can think about jobs and rooms in the morning.”
He slapped Ignazio’s back, and they began to navigate the brackish din of Montevideo.
    Monte. Vide. Eu. I see a mountain, said a Portuguese man, among the first Europeans to sight this terrain from sea.
    Monte. Vide. Eu. But Ignazio saw no mountain at all, just flat, cobbled streets.
    Monte. Vide. Eu. City of sailors and workers, of wool and steak, of gray stones and long nights, biting-cold winters and Januaries so humid you could swim through hot air. City of seekers. Port of a hundred flags. Heart and edge of Uruguay.
    It was El Cerro they’d been talking about. Those Portuguese. They had glimpsed El Cerro from their ship, and spawned the city’s name. Monte
. What an exaggeration. Ignazio beheld it every day from his work at the port: a mound the shape of a huge fried egg, spread long and low across the other side of the bay. It was absurd, barely a hill, pathetic, and he should know, coming from a nation with true, majestic mountains, the Alps, the Dolomiti, the Apennines, Vesuvius, Presanella, Cornizzolo, real mountains that he himself had never seen but could be trusted to exist, to have weight and height and substance, not like this thing they called El Cerro he stole glances at all day as he worked, aloft on a steel crane, remembering those first fools to have seen Uruguay from sea.
Many things looked different from the top of a crane. Boats. Mountains. Smooth water below. The long, heaving arc of a day’s work. Cranes were new to Montevideo; the first ones had arrived the same week as Ignazio. He quickly learned their language, the hoist of pulleys, the lever’s growl, the careful gait along their big steel snouts, exposure to damp cold and scorch of sun, the metal muscle of modernity, the thrill in lifting giant crates into the air.
    At dusk, Ignazio walked on streets lined with wrought-iron balconies and ornate doors to Calle Ejido, where he lived in the shadow of cannons that had once guarded La Ciudad Vieja when it was not just the Old City but the whole of the city itself. Strange, that the first settlers here had built their little town with an armed wall around it. They’d built a port wide open to the waters, yet closed to surrounding land. What had lurked in the earth around them? What lay around them now? Just across the wall, in the newer part of the city, roads turned into packed earth, lined with huts like humble boxes made of wood, surrounded by wild and sudden space. There were strange things about this city. Amethysts used as doorstops, leather used for everything, a stone wall between Old City and New. An obsession with the president, a man called Batlle y Ordóñez, who had promised schools, and workers’ rights, and hospitals (secular ones, scandalously so, with crucifixes banned from the walls). All the