The Wild Boy

by Paolo Cognetti

  * * *

  Have you seen Lucky? Gabriele came to ask me. No, I hadn’t seen him. He had been missing for a day, and we heard nothing more about him until the following one. Then someone called from the dog pound to say that he’d been found aboard a bus on the return route from school, after it had emptied of boys and girls and only the driver remained, some eighteen miles away from our place. Nobody had any idea as to how he came to be there, but no doubt his excursions had taken him even farther afield. Soon we discovered that he must have had a liking for the open road as well as for mountain paths, given that he would jump on board almost any form of transport that presented him with an open door. As soon as he became adept at this, Gabriele’s number was circulated among all the kennels in the area, and along with the phone calls fines began to arrive.

  The dog’s a beatnik, I said.

  What? he asked, hardly in a mood for literary references. He was angry, and understandably so: he had picked up Lucky as a working dog and now found himself obliged to pay for his excesses. The chain became habitual, as a form of punishment. I would pass by and see him chained up, half strangling himself to get free. I was allowed to free him in order to take him for a walk, but after the madly excited greeting, the race, the chasing after marmots, snapping the clip back onto his collar made me feel guiltier than ever.

  Do you know anyone who’s looking for a dog? Gabriele began to ask me, with a detachment intended to hide his sadness. He had fallen out of love with him, but not completely. I think he secretly liked the vagabond in him. Lucky, Lucky, he seemed to be thinking, we could have been friends you and I, as he gave him last melancholy caresses. Lupo would watch this scene from his corner with his snout on the ground, teeth half-bared, his annoyance barely concealed in a low, private snarl.

  * * *

  I definitely did not want a dog; I had never wanted one. First, it would have prevented me from traveling. Second, it would have distracted me from writing. Third, fourth, and fifth, it would have deprived me of my freedom in ways that I could not even begin to imagine. And besides, how could I stomach being called its owner? So when I crossed the threshold of the hut with Lucky I was more preoccupied than happy. I thought that I would cook lunch, my way of becoming friends with the inhabitants of the mountain: I boiled water for enough pasta for two, but he was so famished that he ended up having mine as well. Having polished it off, he took possession of the shaded corner beneath the table. So I cut a piece of bread and cheese for myself, sat down at the table, and opened the notebook as I had started to like doing—scribbling a few notes while nibbling on something. With Lucky that habit of mine was short-lived. He smelled the toma cheese, got up, and came to rest his muzzle on my lap, drooling on my trouser leg. He ended up with the crust, and a little more besides. I had hardly put pen to paper before he was too bored to remain and headed toward the front door. He was staring at the door handle, looking at me, wagging his tail, then came back to the table to prompt me before returning to wait at the door again. The bell around his neck spoke eloquently of his restlessness.

  We gotta go and never stop going till we get there, Neal Cassady would say to Jack Kerouac—and Lucky to me.

  Where we going, man? we asked.

  I don’t know, but we gotta go.

  I thought that the bell no longer had any use, so removed it together with the leather collar to which it was attached, and hung the collar from a nail in the wall. This marks the end of your career as a sheepdog, Lucky, I told him. I thought he would have been pleased to no longer carry that reminder of his bondage, but he was indifferent to symbols and only interested in action. So it was that I finally opened the door and went out with him for a walk.

  Desarpa

  The last Saturday in September arrived, and from the freezing air that was blowing I sensed that I did not have many more left there. Climbing up the track I crossed a long line of slow-moving cows accompanied by dogs and young men making sure that none lagged and delayed, a man at the head of the procession and his wife at the rear, driving a tractor with a trailer full of stuff. It was the desarpa. The shepherds came down from the alpeggi, not because it was too cold but because the grass had run out. They descended silently, without needing to goad the animals or to speak among themselves, and I didn’t know if what I was reading on their faces was fatigue or melancholy. One of them greeted me. Is that your dog? he asked. He follows me about, I replied, embarrassed, unable to say or to conceive that he was actually mine.

  Having reached the top, we did a round of the now shut up alpeggi that until recently had resounded with the sound of cowbells. Lucky was sniffing out in one place and then another the life that had just left: doors and windows barred, the dunghill empty. The small channels that brought water from the streams to the drinking troughs and the stables were all dry now. Rusty overturned bathtubs had been left to languish in the pastures. On the ground there was dried manure, the tracks left by tractor tires, the stake to which the dog had been tied. They seemed like things that had been left behind in a hurried exodus, as if a war or an epidemic had broken out. Only the nettles were thriving, but those weeds grow well where there is no one left—they signal abandonment.

  Climbing beyond the last pastures I jumped with one leap over the stream that in June I had removed my socks and shoes to ford: it had been reduced to a series of pools in which trapped trout stagnated. I could have caught them with my bare hands. The water in the lakes was leaden, almost black. A crust of frozen snow shrouded the north-facing banks. Lucky licked it, scratched it away with his teeth—something in him was made for the winter, and he sensed its approach with excitement. I was cut out for the summer instead, and was relieved on the run down to find myself once more treading on grass.

  * * *

  Reaching Gabriele’s place I thought of my friend who was warming himself with his cup of coffee, alpine butter, sugar, and red wine—an infernal concoction which I had found myself having to drink out of politeness or in order to save face. I found him in front of the stable, with wedges and sledgehammer, splitting a stack of wood taller than he was. No longer having to pretend to be brothers, Lupo and Lucky were already open enemies: they circled each other with the hairs bristling on their backs, and then the older one flipped the younger, pinned him to the ground, and sank his teeth into his shoulder and thigh. Lucky yelped with pain and terror. Lupo! shouted Gabriele, flinging a block of wood in his direction so that Lucky was able to escape and limp toward the house, while Lupo sloped off, offended like someone prevented from merely acting within their rights. I gazed at Gabriele somewhat shaken by the violence of the scene. Dogs, he said, shrugging his shoulders. Soon I would get used to it as well.

  The old larch tree must have grown twisted, and obstinately refused to become firewood: to split it you needed three or four wedges, and to expend a lot more effort than usual. Gabriele did not object to setting his tools down in order to get his breath back. When I asked him whether he was sad to see everyone leaving he feigned indifference, as if nothing would change for him when left up there alone again. As far as he was concerned, the desarpa was not something that he thought about at all; with a certain bravado he declared that it was only a question of supplies: with a full cellar he could hold on up there until Christmas. But I could see from his eyes—from the way they avoided mine—that this was only a pose, and that in reality the autumn would weigh heavily on him as well.

  What day is it, Saturday? he asked. How about it, shall we go into town and have a skinful?

  I replied in the negative, withdrawing from my role as drinking companion. I knew that I was disappointing him, but the last time that I’d “had a skinful” it had taken me two days to recover, and the drinking bout in prospect promised to be a sad and nasty one.

  I found Lucky on the balcony of the hut, licking his wounds. He had a puncture wound in his thigh that was bleeding. That will teach you to keep your distance, I said to him. Autumn is a cruel season, and it makes us cruel too.r />
  * * *

  The next day my neighbors also left. I felt sorrier that the dogs were going than the men, with whom I’d never managed to connect. I would miss the sound of the bells that announced their visit. Since Mozzo arrived walking, Billy at a trot, and Lampo at a gallop, I had learned to identify them by the different sounds they made. They left without any farewell visit, and I thought that was for the best. It’s well known that dogs do not like partings, and such rituals are not to my liking either. It was like another piece of the summer gone, withered, superseded; when nothing at all was left of it I would be ready to close the door and leave.

  But Mozzo, Billy, and Lampo were replaced by other dogs, and they were not accompanied by a lively tinkling of bells. One morning in October I was woken up by their barking. I looked out from the doorway, holding Lucky so that he would not dart out to join the fracas, and I saw a pack of hounds running back and forth from the wood, heeding the calls of two strangers. The strangers had binoculars around their necks, shotguns slung over their shoulders, and were wearing camouflage fatigues. It had not occurred to me that one of these days the hunting season would begin. The dogs ran around hysterically, excited by the scent of prey: from that morning onward the scene repeated itself daily, and shots began to reverberate in the hours before dawn. Then Lucky would go into hiding under the bed, and I pleaded with the god of the wood that those shots would all be wide of their mark. I was thinking about the roe deer, the chamois, the stags that were so prized. During the week, at sunset, the turning place at the end of the road became a gathering place for hunters: the deer would break cover at that time to graze the edges of the pastures where the fertilized grass is lusher than in the clearing. With their binoculars the hunters monitored their movements for six days. They counted them, measured them, even selected them; they seemed to be saying: that one’s mine, I’ll take it, keep your own hands off it. The deer did not know that the seventh day would be fatal, that they should have observed the Sabbath and stayed in hiding.

  There was an old hunter who passed by the hut every morning. He would operate only in the woods nearby, perhaps because he simply couldn’t cover any more ground than this. One day I heard two shots and shortly afterward I saw him leave with a hare hanging at his side from its back legs, its long gray ears reaching to the ground. I felt instinctively that this was my friend: the hare whose footprints I had caught sight of in the spring, when I was afflicted by loneliness and my encounter with it had meant so much to me. The same hare that every evening would study me from a distance, making me hope that sooner or later, with the force of habit, it would find the courage to come closer. Now I felt ashamed of having domesticated it even to this extent: I had set a trap for it, for how could it distinguish between me and the man with the gun? Its death seemed like an intolerable crime to me, and I hated that old man with all my heart.

  In the Whiteness

  Yesterday, in the afternoon, it started to snow again. Dry, floury, winter snow that the wind whipped into spirals everywhere, and that collected on the threshold of the house and on the pile of firewood stacked against the wall.

  So what is this, October? I thought.

  Not even the larch trees had had a chance yet to drop their needles. Their branches drooped low and would sometimes suddenly snap. I no longer heard the bellowing of the stag, or the shouts of the hunters.

  * * *

  During the evening I stayed by the window, reading and gazing outside. The snowflakes were illuminated by the light from the house. I was reading a book by Sylvain Tesson, The Consolations of the Forest. Lake Baikal, cigars, vodka, thoughts of a far-off brother.

  It was still snowing, and I had just begun to cook supper when the gas in the tank ran out. The blue flame turned yellow, then flickered and was gone. Goodbye soup, I thought.

  I wrapped four potatoes in silver foil and shoved them into the embers in the stove, and an hour later I ate them, crisped and scorched, dipping them into salt, washing them down with red wine.

  * * *

  It must have been around nine when the light also deserted me. The lamp above the table went off. The song on the radio was cut short halfway through. The fridge abruptly ceased buzzing.

  The whole house was plunged into darkness and silence, apart from the crackling of the fire and the sound of the mouse that had been running around in the kitchen cupboard for the past two days. Outside, the snow fell soundlessly.

  I resigned myself to the situation. What else could I do?

  I unfolded the sofa bed, prepared it in the firelight cast by the stove, fed and stoked the fire, and got under the covers. The sound of the fire in the dark was good company.

  After a few minutes I heard the dog, who had moved from his place under the table to get onto the bed, trying to do so without making a sound, as if he could join me there without being noticed. He curled up at the bottom of the bed, and I placed my feet snugly beneath him.

  * * *

  During the night I must have dreamed of writing a story about a man who runs out of everything—gas, light, pen, and paper, as his life is suddenly reduced to the most elementary state—while above and all around me it snowed and snowed.

  * * *

  That morning the world was a blank page.

  The sky was clear, with a blue made more intense in contrast with the snow-covered woods.

  I went for a look around to see how much snow had fallen, and sank down to my knees in it as soon as I’d gotten beyond the front door.

  Lucky was in his element: he went ahead of me in bounds; he dived, filled his mouth with it, rolled around in the fresh snow. Maybe you were a sled dog in a previous life, I told him—you’re not a car thief, you’re a prospector for gold.

  The larch trees freed themselves at the first sign of the sun, sloughing their loads—and beneath they were green and yellow.

  * * *

  Because I liked the trees, the snow, and the sky, if I’d had a camera I would have framed my pictures portrait rather than landscape. There is something solemn about a snow-covered larch in morning light. I thought of Pavese: “For my part I believe that a tree, a stone silhouetted against the sky were gods from the very beginning.”

  At home I scraped the ice off some wood, lit the fire, then remembered that I’d run out of gas. The electricity had not returned. So I made coffee in the embers, Turkish style, blackening the bottom of the small saucepan in the process.

  When I sat down at the table my notebook was there waiting for me—stopped yesterday, stopped years ago, on that very line, at the exact point where I had left it just before it started to snow.

  A Last Drink

  “The end is important in everything,” says the Hagakure of Yamamoto Tsunetomo, and I spent the last day up there thinking about this, that I wanted it to end well. In the morning Lucky would wake me up by licking my face, and we would go to check on what the ice had done: I would snap off the long stalactite of ice that hung from the fountain, would clench it in my hand until it stuck to my skin, then let it float and melt among the larch needles that had fallen into the water. If it had been a clear night the thermometer would show five below (about 20º Fahrenheit). I would light the stove, prepare the coffee, follow the tracks left by the mouse who was keeping me company. During the night it had explored the bench in the kitchen, the rings on the cooker, the basin, circling the shelf where the pasta and rice were stored, digging between the floorboards to extract crumbs of bread. I no longer knew what to do with him: at first he had been shy, venturing out only in the middle of the night. Then he had understood that he was tolerated by the master of this house, and he had begun to take liberties, so that now I sometimes saw him even when I was cooking. We can’t go on like this, I would say to myself, as I cleaned up the evidence of his activity throughout the hut. I should have accessed the rough mountain man in me, picked up the broom, and exterminated him. I had just recently broken my walking stick while crossing a stream. Its metal tip had got stuck betw
een two boulders, and as I pulled to release it there was a sharp crack. I had decided not to look for a new one, since I would have no use for it. But I had kept the pieces of the old one: this Swiss stone pine, peeled with Opinel and dried in the sun, scratched by the stones of scree slopes and polished with sweat, this companion of many adventures throughout that long summer, would end up in the fireplace on the last night. And perhaps afterward I would stop getting attached to mice, sticks, and the shoes on my feet that were falling to pieces.

  Gabriele continued to maintain that he would go down when his wine ran out. Very amusing, but I had learned to recognize his jokes. The demijohns had been empty for some time already, and we had been reduced to buying boxes of wine from the supermarket. The truth was, that without consulting each other, the three of us—Gabriele, Remigio, and me—had all decided to leave at the end of October. There was snow on the way, the real kind this time. So one of us had found a room to rent in the village, and was emptying it of its old furniture in order to install a stove, a cot, and a table; another would move to his winter home, even if he would never call it home either; and I would go back to the city, to looking at the mountains from a car window, while in traffic on the Ghisolfa Bridge. But first I had a last project to realize. For a long time I had wanted to spend an evening with both of them, but they were both quick to evade my invitations. Despite knowing each other forever they had for some reason never become friends, and this saddened me given how attached I was to both of them. One day in October I tackled this head-on and said, Listen, I’m cooking tonight so bring something to drink and no excuses—think of the evening as your present to me. And they really did make a gift of it. Slightly embarrassed, both in their best clothes and each carrying a bottle of wine, they presented themselves at my door just as it was getting dark. “In the house I had three chairs,” wrote Thoreau, “the first for solitude, the second for friendship, the third for society.” I was just in time to experience this myself, in our little mountain community. If I achieved anything worthwhile up there, if I had to choose one thing of which I am proud, it would be that I managed to get my friends to sit at the same table, and enjoyed my time with them before leaving.