The Wild Boy

by Paolo Cognetti

  I had thought that the feeling of solitude would have grown with time, but the opposite occurred: after the first days of disorientation I was full of things to do. Studying the map of the region, cataloging animals and flowers, gathering wood from the forest, conducting experiments with the resin of firs, cutting the grass around the cabin. The melting snow gifted me many surprises: the skull of a marmot, the charcoal remains of an open-air fire, grooves left by tractor tires. The mousehole of a tiny mouse just emerged from hibernation gave me courage: if he had made it, I thought, after spending six months under the snow, then my season under the sun would be a breeze.

  * * *

  As for the map that I was unfolding, it started just on the other side of the front door and gradually extended as I discovered my surroundings. I proceeded by way of explorations, readings, archaeological findings, and uncertain deductions. The place in which I lived was a minuscule village called Fontane. I occupied the first in a row of four south-facing mountain huts, or cabins, at the top of a valley traversed by a stream without a name. Once, when these high mountain homesteads were still farms, a mule track used to reach up to a village that was inhabited all year round. It was dug into the earth and contained by drystone walls, so that the animals going along it could not invade the pastures. Now it was still visible at just a few points as a three-foot-wide trench skirting the wood, flanked every so often by piles of white stones shaped with mallet and chisel by ancient herders. The stream below, which had given rise to the village, had not merited a name on account of its brief length: I measured it in paces and counted no more than a hundred. It bubbled up from a spring in the middle of the pasture and threw itself into another stream a little farther down. It flowed over fine gravel, with blue and white reflections, remarkably similar to the bed of a river. Next to the stream, corresponding to each cabin, there was a small, stone construction. These were the cellars into which the milk was deposited after milking: the running water refrigerated it, allowing the cream that would be turned into butter to form. In my cellar I had an electric pump that took water from the stream and brought it into the house. Although I washed my hands and drank like any city dweller, that is to say by turning a tap and taking as much hot or cold water as I pleased, when doing so I always remembered that this water originated from there, from the white and blue gravel amid the grass, and in the taste of it at night it seemed like I could detect brine.

  * * *

  The land that surrounded me, rich in springs and well-positioned in the sun, had for many centuries been cleared of trees, freed from stones, and terraced where necessary—to cultivate rye and raise livestock at first, and then to create ski slopes. Up until the 1950s it was difficult to find a single tree in those parts, or to see a wild animal: I have seen old photographs in which the cultivated fields stretched up to unthinkable altitudes, and the whole mountain had the appearance of a well-kept lawn. After the war, however, the exodus from the highlands had started, and the woods had reconquered the land. The field near the cabin had been replanted about fifty years earlier: the larches were still quite young, all the same size and spaced so that the grass could continue to grow at their feet. Finally, between the 1970s and 1980s, a section of those trees had been felled to make way for the pistes that cut the flanks of the mountains like the tracks left in the wake of avalanches. The pylons of chairlifts had begun to appear, certain irregular slopes had been flattened, and the place had taken on its current appearance.

  Why did this history interest me so much? Because I needed to repeat to myself something very simple: the landscape that surrounded me, with its authentically wild appearance, with its trees, meadows, and streams, was in fact the product of human endeavor—it was a landscape as artificial as that of a city. Without human habitation, nothing up there would have had the shape that it now possessed. Not even the stream, or certain majestic trees. Even the meadow in which I would lie down to sun myself would have been thickly forested, made impenetrable by fallen trunks and branches, by moss-covered monoliths and a dense undergrowth of juniper, bilberry, and intricately entangled roots. There is no such thing as wilderness in the Alps, only a long history of human presence that is experiencing today an era of abandonment. Some suffer it like the death of a civilization; for my part I found myself actually rejoicing when finding a stone building swallowed by undergrowth, a tree that jutted where grain had once grown. But then it wasn’t my history that was disappearing. I, who fantasized that wolves and bears might return, had no roots up there, and nothing to lose if the mountain finally liberated itself from mankind.

  * * *

  So my explorations took on the character of an investigation, an attempt to read the stories written on the terrain. In less poetic terms, I was collecting refuse. An old half-rotten wooden pail buried in a dunghill, a rusty lock. The history that interested me was entirely human: why, for instance, did the cabin behind mine have an extension to one side? Perhaps things had prospered at some point, and the farmer had needed a more spacious stable? It was the largest of them all, but also the most austere: tiny windows, three planks joined together to serve as a balcony. The third hut had its floor plan inverted and was turned to face north. Here too there must have been a reason for giving up the sun: a boundary dispute, perhaps? Then came the fourth cabin, which was the most well maintained and perhaps the most recent of the three. It had a small balcony with some attempt at decoration, glazed windows and even plastered external walls—a roughcast mixture with a few lumps here and there, of a dirty white that I really liked. Outside, there were two rickety enclosures for chickens, rabbits, or some other barnyard animal. Since the little village was distributed along a slight incline, the white building dominated the others from above: the one that was back to front, the one that had the large stable, and mine too, which as compensation had uninterrupted views.

  Looking at them I would sometimes wonder if there had ever really been a period when Fontane was inhabited. I struggled to imagine it, because since I was a child all I’d ever seen in the mountains were ruins. I had the impression that the present, up there, had for a long time consisted of a mound of potsherds that was now impossible to put together again. All you could do was turn them over in the palm of your hand and speculate as to what they had been used for, which was what tended to happen if I moved a rock and found beneath it a wooden handle, a large bent nail, a tangle of metal twine, a rusted shovel.

  * * *

  Even though it seemed faintly comical, each of the four huts had its own postal number. At some stage a council bureaucrat must have been given the task of registering all the buildings, and so even the dilapidated huts scattered across the mountainside had a plaque with a number on it. Mine had the number 1. One of these days, I thought, I’ll go down to the nearest town and send myself a postcard addressed to Number 1, Fontane, and then come back to wait for the postman to charge up the path. The cabin with the large stable had the number 2, the back-to-front one was 3, the white plastered one 4. But only the dormice and badgers that every so often I heard moving lived there. I was the entire population. Like Crusoe on his desert island, “I was lord of the whole manor; or, if I pleased, I might call myself king or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of.” I represented, at the same time, the most eminent inhabitant and the most fallen on hard times, the aristocratic landowner and the faithful caretaker, the innkeeper and the drunk, the judge and the village idiot. I had as a result of this many versions of myself to contend with, so would sometimes go out for a walk through the woods in the evening, in order to be on my own for a while.

  Snow

  One morning in mid-May I woke up under snow. The violets were already flowering in the meadows, but by midday everything around me had turned white again. A storm like a summer one, with thunder and lightning, had brought the winter back to those parts. I stayed the whole day indoors with the stove lit, reading and gazing outside. I was gauging the layer of snow that was accumulating on the balcon
y: one, two . . . five inches. I wondered what would become of the flowers, insects, and birds that I had seen, feeling at this abrupt interruption of spring something like a sense of injustice on their behalf. I found the passage in which Rigoni Stern classifies late snowfalls: snow of the swallow in March, cuckoo snow in April, and what for him was the latest, snow of the quail. A cloud that descends from the north, a wind, a rapid drop in temperature, and suddenly there is snow in May. It only lasts a few hours, but it is enough to disturb nesting birds, to kill bees caught outside their hives, and to stress the female deer waiting to give birth.

  Toward seven the sky cleared, and the white expanse became blinding as the sun emerged from behind the clouds shortly before sunset. I put on my jacket and climbing boots and went out to look around. In the snow I found the tracks of many wild animals: a hare, a pair of deer, countless birds, as well as other prints that I could not identify. I was struck to discover that all this activity had been going on while inside the house I had felt so mournfully alone. They had been there all the time, monitoring me, scenting me, keeping an eye on my movements, while I instead had eyes that saw nothing, gazing at the wood through my window without noticing anything. I wondered if in time I would learn how to get close to them—whether they would slowly come to trust me. For the moment all I could do was follow some tracks, choosing the hare’s for preference: they were V-shaped prints that seemed to progress by leaps, starting from a juniper bush near the mule track. They went in one direction before heading, to my astonishment, toward the cabin. The hare had circled around the old larch tree, gone to drink at the basin, and had even jumped onto the table that I’d placed on the grass. There was a single set of paw prints on it—it had needed only one leap to get up and down again. I imagined the hare looking around, reading the signs of my presence in the smoke from the chimney, in the scythe and the saw hanging by the woodshed, in the blanket draped on the balcony. Eventually, it had gone over the wooden fence, receding toward the stream. No new snow had fallen on the prints, so rather than me pursuing her, the hare had come to seek me out.

  * * *

  During the snowfall I had heard a loud crash, like a nearby clap of thunder. Later, when I went to check in the woods, I found a fallen larch. The trunk had split at the height of a man, causing a long, irregular fracture that continued for three to six feet. It had a strange effect on me, seeing that tree lying on the ground, helpless but still alive. Its bud-covered branches were sinking into the snow, and I thought I could hear its death throes like those of an animal. It was precisely the new leaves that betrayed it, the ones that had grown in the last month: in the winter the larch is bare, retaining little of the snow that falls on its branches. Now, instead, the heavy wet flakes had accumulated in huge quantities in its dense canopy of needles. So a tree that had survived the long freeze had succumbed to the last, unforeseen, and fatal snowfall of May.

  While I moved around it I saw a small bird in the snow. It was struggling to move, and I thought it must have fallen from its nest with the moribund tree. When I picked it up it tried beating its wings in my hand, then either calmed down or became paralyzed with fear, I couldn’t say which. It was the first living thing I’d had any contact with in weeks, and it moved me; I did not realize that I was condemning myself to an inevitable loss. I could feel its accelerated heartbeat in the palm of my hand, the tickling of its claws on my skin. Everything will be all right, I told it. Don’t worry, I’ll look after you. In the house I laid a rag in the bottom of a shoe box and lowered the bird onto it. What could the diet of such a small one consist of? Given the snow that was outside, I could not even go looking for an insect or worm. So I tried to feed it breadcrumbs, discovering that it accepted them and managed to swallow a couple before falling asleep. But appetite and sleep were only illusions of vital signs. When I went back to check on the bird it was lying on its side: still breathing, but in a completely unnatural position. It did not open its eyes again. Before night fell it was dead, and I put it back close to the fallen larch, where during the night it would perhaps become a meal for a fox or for a crow. Leaving it for them to take seemed more fitting than burying it in a hole in the ground.

  * * *

  The next morning I was still thinking about the bird, drinking my coffee and watching the snow melting with the first sun, when I caught sight of a man coming up the path. I leaned out of the doorway to welcome him, but my excitement was such that I might just as well have run out to greet him. It’s difficult to explain the effect a visit has when it comes after a period of complete solitude: for me it had only been two weeks, and yet my heart started to beat faster on seeing that man approach. It was Remigio, my landlord. He had come to see if the snow had caused me any problems, and if I had enough wood to keep warm. I had no idea what he made of my presence up there: during our only meeting I had told him that I wrote, and that I had come there to work. He had not seemed particularly impressed. Wasting few words, he had shaken my hand and given me the keys to the cabin as if it wasn’t even his.

  On this occasion he was more talkative. I invited him in for a coffee and we chatted for a while. When he saw the books that I’d brought with me I discovered that he was a reader too: we talked about Erri De Luca and Mauro Corona, then leafed through my guides to woodland animals and forest trees—and I ended up lending him the stories of Rigoni Stern that I was so attached to, because from the outset up there they had helped me to see and to hear. Remigio listened attentively, and when talking he chose his words carefully. He appeared to be in his forties, but his tanned skin and gray hair made for a strange contrast, giving an impression of a man who was at the same time both old and young. Getting to know him I would later discover that this was an accurate enough reflection of his character.

  Later he returned with a chainsaw and together we cut up the fallen larch. There was only the odd patch of snow left from the previous day. We piled the thick logs up against the cabin wall that faced west; I would split them at my leisure and stack them to dry. If summer does its work I thought, watching him go, I will have good wood to burn in September, and perhaps a friend with whom to share the pleasures of the fireside.

  Vegetable Garden

  After getting in the wood supply there was another task that I wanted to complete. I had been mulling over this idea for a while now, and the meeting with Remigio had given me a decisive push. One morning at the end of May, while waiting for his arrival with the tools, I went ahead and built a bench by hand: I took two large stones from the mule track and laid between them a plank that I’d found in the woods, gray now due to all the sun and rain that it had taken, the veins of the wood standing out like those of old men. Then I sat down to read the chapter in Walden on the field of beans:

  What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labour, I knew not. I came to love rows of beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only heaven knows. This was my curious labour all summer—to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work.

  Charmed by Thoreau’s words, I scrutinized the meadow that went down to the stream. I lit on a small patch just below the fountain: it was rich soil, fertilized annually by shepherds. It absorbed sunlight from nine in the morning until eight at night, and the water needed to irrigate it was right there, just a few steps away. Already I could almost see the red of tomatoes and the yellow of zucchini flowers. I was impatient to begin my life as a farmer.

  Remigio soon enough extinguished the colors of my fantasy. Up there I could forget about tomatoes and such, he explained, it was already quite an achievement to get leafy vegetables to grow: lettuce, cabbage, the tops of beets, spin
ach, celery. With luck I might be able to cultivate some stunted carrots, radishes, broccoli, leeks. Was this still all right? I replied that, as far as I was concerned, it was fine. Then I started a Rotavator for the first time in my life—a little motorized plow, about the size of a lawn mower, the blade of which digs into the ground about a foot deep, turns over clods of earth, and roughly crumbles them into pieces. In this way we plowed a rectangle thirteen feet by twenty.

  It was only the beginning of my labors. Having broken the crust, for the rest of the day I hoed the ground and raked the soil beneath. I removed stones and pulled up roots, discovering that those graceful flowers had powerful bulbs, hidden at great depths to survive the freeze, and were impossible to eradicate. I crumbled the more compressed clods with my hands, then went down to the village to buy some plants. To protect them from the deer I even built a fence with four larch panels. I tied a strong net around them and was satisfied at how my little vegetable plot was developing—but when I sat down at last to admire it the voice of Thoreau evaporated, and in its place the notes of Fabrizio De André’s “Il suonatore Jones” echoed. The song, that is, in which he says that liberty sleeps in cultivated fields. Suddenly the six mounds of turned earth seemed like so many grave mounds. It was my freedom that was buried there. I felt a little depressed, so I put away my hoe and rake, picked up the walking stick, and decided to go for a walk.

  I went higher than I had pushed myself as yet, and at a certain point abandoned the path, since the whole mountainside that was in shadow was still snowbound. There was no one around: the low-hanging clouds, the threat of rain, and the cold had kept hikers away. I plunged down into a fir copse, with the intention of crossing it and climbing back up the valley to the sunlit side, where the slopes were already free of snow. At the end of the wood I found a small wooden bridge, a village consisting of ten or so houses on the banks of the stream. Almost all of them had ruined roofs, the wall facing the mountain distended in that swollen-belly shape that presages collapse. Overcoming the atmosphere of abandonment, I entered one of the buildings that was still standing. In its only room I found a small wooden bed, a bench, a wonky stool. On the floor there were more recent signs: meat and sardine tins, large wine bottles, a shirt reduced to rags, the rubbish of some shepherd who had camped there without caring. There was an oppressive smell of mold, and I returned to the open air with relief.