He said: “I know how to milk a cow, how to make cheese, to cut down a tree, to build a house. I would also know how to shoot an animal and eat it if I was starving. I’ve been taught these things since I was little. But who teaches you how to be a father? Not my own father, that’s for sure. In the end I had to beat him up so that he would leave me alone. Have I ever told you about that?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, that’s what happened. I was working all day on the building site; I was stronger than him. I think I must have really hurt him because I haven’t seen him since. The poor bastard.”
He looked up at the sky again. The same wind that was agitating my prayer flags was pushing the clouds over the ridges. He said: “I’m only glad that Anita’s a girl, so I can just love her and that’s that.”
I had never seen him so low. Things had not gone as he had hoped. I had the same sense of powerlessness as when we were boys and he would not utter a word for an entire day, plunged into a despondency that seemed absolute and irremediable. I would like to have had some old friend’s trick with which to raise his spirits.
Before he left, the legend of the eight mountains came to my mind, and I thought that he might like to hear it. Relating it to him I tried to remember every word and gesture with which the chicken carrier had given it to me. With a nail I scratched the mandala on a wooden tile.
“So you’re supposed to be the one who journeys to the eight mountains, and I’m the one who climbs Sumeru?”
“It looks like it.”
“And which one of us achieves something good?”
“It’s you,” I said. Not just to encourage him, but because I believed it.
Bruno said nothing. He looked at the drawing again, in order to memorize it. Then he gave me a pat on the back and jumped down from the roof.
• • •
Without having in any way planned it, I too found myself caring for children in Nepal. Not in the mountains but on the periphery of Kathmandu, a city that now sprawled across its entire valley with outskirts resembling the shanty towns to be found in so many other parts of the world. They were the children of people who had come to the city seeking their fortune. Some had lost one of their parents, some had lost both, but more often than not the father or mother lived in a shack and worked like a slave in that ants’ nest, leaving them to be raised on the streets. These children had been dealt a fate that did not exist in the mountains: in Kathmandu the child beggars, the small gangs dedicated to some kind of trafficking or other, and the dirty stupefied kids who scavenged through the city’s rubbish were as familiar a part of the urban landscape as street dogs and the monkeys in the Buddhist temples.
There were organizations that were trying to care for them, and the girl I was with was working for one of these. Given what I was seeing for myself on the streets, and hearing about from her, it was inevitable that I would begin to lend a hand too. You find your place in the world much less predictably than you’d imagine: here I was, after so much wandering, in a big city at the foot of the mountains, with a woman who was basically doing the same work as my mother did. And with whom, at every opportunity, I would escape to altitude in order to replenish the energy sapped by the city.
Walking these paths I thought often about Bruno. It wasn’t the woods or the rivers so much as the children that reminded me of him. I remembered him at their age, growing up in what remained of his dying village, with ruins as his only playground and a school that had been turned into a storehouse. There was a lot to be doing in Nepal, for someone with his skills: we taught the migrant children English and maths from textbooks, but perhaps what we should have been showing them was how to cultivate a plot, how to build a stable, raise goats—and so I would sometimes fantasize about dragging Bruno away from his dying mountain, to help teach these other mountain folk. We could have done great things together in this part of the world.
And yet if it had just been down to us we would not have contacted each other for years, as though our friendship had no need of being kept up. It was my mother who gave us news of each other, since she was all too familiar with living with men who did not communicate amongst themselves. She wrote to me about Anita, about the character that she was developing, about the way in which she was growing up wild and fearless. She had become very attached to this little girl, and it worried her to see the crisis between her parents worsening. They worked too hard, and continued to find ways of working even harder: so much so that in the summer my mother would frequently keep Anita with her at Grana, in order to free her parents from at least the burden of having to care for her too. Lara was exasperated by their debts. Bruno had retreated into mutism and into his work. My mother did not mention directly what she feared, but it was not difficult to read between the lines: we had both begun to see how things would end up.
They struggled on in this way for a little longer. Then in the autumn of 2013 Bruno declared himself bankrupt, shut down the agricultural business, and handed over the keys of the farm to the bailiff, and Lara went to live with her parents with the child. Although according to my mother, things had happened the other way round: Lara had decided to leave him, and he had given up, resigning himself to failure. Either way, it made no difference. But the tone in which she conveyed the news was not just sad but alarmed, and I could tell that she was afraid for what might happen to Bruno now. He’s lost everything, she wrote, and he is all alone. Is there anything you can do?
I read these words several times before doing something that I had never done before in Nepal: I got up from the computer, asked to use the telephone, and went into a booth to dial the code for Italy and then Bruno’s number. It was one of those places in Kathmandu where people seem permanently to be killing time. The owner was eating rice and lentils, an old man sitting next to him was watching him eat, and two children were peering into the booth at me to see what I was up to. The phone rang five or six times, at which point I began to think that Bruno would not answer it: knowing him, he might have hurled the mobile into the woods and decided not to hear from anyone ever again. Instead there was a click, a distant fumbling, and an uncertain voice that was saying:
“Hello?”
“Bruno!” I shouted. “It’s me, Pietro!”
On hearing my outburst of Italian the boys burst out laughing. I pressed the receiver closer to my ear. The delay on the long-distance line added an extra hesitation, then Bruno said: “Yes, I’d hoped it would be you.”
He did not feel like talking about what had happened with Lara. I could imagine anyway how it had been. I asked him how he was, and what he planned to do.
He replied: “I’m fine. I’m just tired. They took away the farm, did you hear?”
“Yes. And what did you do with the cows?”
“Oh, I gave them away.”
“And what about Anita?”
“Anita is with Lara at her parents’. They’ve got plenty of room there. I’ve heard from them, they’re doing fine.”
Then he added: “Listen, I wanted to ask you something.”
“Tell me.”
“If I can use the house up at Barma, since at the moment I don’t really know where to go.”
“But do you really want to go up there?”
“I don’t want to see anyone; you know how it is. I’ll spend some time in the mountains.”
That’s how he said it: in the mountains. It was strange to hear his voice on a phone, in Kathmandu, a voice that arrived there hoarse and so distorted that I struggled to recognize it, but that I knew at that moment was really his. It was Bruno, my old friend.
I said: “Of course. Stay as long as you want. It’s your house.”
“Thanks.”
There was something else I wanted to say, but it was difficult. We were not used to asking each other for help, or to offering it. Without beating around the bush I asked: “Listen, would you like me to come over?”
In the past Bruno would have immediately told me to stay where I
was. When he eventually answered, he did so with a tone of voice that I had never heard before. Ironic, in part. And partly disarmed.
He said: “Well, that would be nice.”
“I’ll sort a few things out and then come, all right?”
“All right.”
It was a late afternoon in November. As I left the place from which I’d phoned, darkness was falling over the city. In that part of the world the streets are not lit, and at sunset people hurry home, and you sense an anxiety about night falling. Outside there were dogs, dust, scooters, a cow lying in the middle of the road stopping the traffic, tourists heading for restaurants and hotels, the air of an evening in late summer. In Grana it was the beginning of winter, and it occurred to me that I had never before seen that season there.
TWELVE
THE DEEP-CUT VALLEY of Grana in October was burnt by drought and frost. It had the color of ochre, of sand, of terra-cotta, and looked as if its meadows had been burnt in a fire now spent. In its woods that fire was still ablaze: on the flanks of the mountain the gold and bronze flames of the larches were lit against the dark green of the pines, and raising your eyes to the sky warmed the soul. The sun no longer reached the bottom of the valley, and the earth was hard underfoot, covered here and there with a crust of frost. At the little wooden bridge, when I bent down to drink, I saw that the autumn had cast a spell over that river of mine: the ice was forming slides and galleries, draping the wet stones with glass, trapping tufts of dry grass and transforming them into found sculptures.
Climbing towards Bruno’s farmstead I crossed paths with a group of hunters. They were wearing camouflage jackets and binoculars around their necks but had no rifles. They did not seem like locals to me, but then perhaps in the autumn even faces change, and I was the outsider here. They were talking together in dialect, and when they saw me they stopped talking, sized me up with a glance, and continued on their way. I found out soon after where they had stationed themselves: up at the farmstead, near the bench where Bruno and I would sit of an evening, I found their cigarette butts and a crumpled empty packet. They must have climbed up early in the morning in order to study the woods from that vantage point. Bruno had put everything in good order before leaving: he had sealed the stable door, closed the shutters, stacked the wood against the side of the house, overturned the drinking troughs along the wall. He had even spread the manure that was dry and odorless now in the yellowed meadows. It looked just like any other Alpine farmstead prepared for the winter months, and I lingered a while remembering how it was, full of noise and life, the last time that I had visited it. Breaking the silence I heard a belling from the other side of the valley. I had only ever heard this sound a few times before, but once would have been enough to remember it forever. It was the powerful, guttural, angry sound with which the stag intimidates his rivals in the mating season, even though it was too late now for reproduction. Perhaps the stag was just plain angry, nothing more. At this point I realized what those hunters had come looking for.
Something similar happened a little while later, up at the lake. The sun was just managing to peer over the crests of the Grenon, warming the scree facing it at midday. But the inlet at the foot of the slope remained in shadow even at this hour: a layer of ice had formed on the water, a half-moon that was polished and dark. When I tested it with a stick the ice was so thin that it broke. I took a piece of it from the water and held it up to look through, and at that moment I heard a chainsaw starting up. The revving of the motor, and then the squeal of the blade biting wood. I looked to see where it was coming from. There was a copse of larch midway up the slope, just above Barma, growing on a kind of small terrace: the naked, gray trunk of a dead tree stuck out amongst the yellow tresses of the others. I heard the chainsaw cutting into the wood, twice. Then the pause required to walk around the tree, then again the screech of the blade as it bit into the wood. I saw it slowly begin to topple before it suddenly collapsed, with a crackling rush of branches splitting as it fell.
• • •
“What can I tell you, Pietro, things went badly,” Bruno said that evening, then shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he had nothing more to add on the subject. He was drinking coffee reheated on the stove and looking out to where it was getting dark already at five o’clock. We were using candles in the house, now that our little mill wheel was stopped due to drought: I had seen two full packs of white candles in the other room, together with the sacks of cornmeal, a couple of loaves of cheese remaining from the last batch made, a reserve of tins, some potatoes, and cartons of wine. It was not the larder of someone who was in any hurry to go back down. During the month since our phone call Bruno had laid in supplies and elaborated his own kind of mourning: the farm had gone badly, the relationship with Lara had gone badly, and he spoke about these things—or rather avoided speaking about them—as if they belonged to some remote period, in both time and thought. Rather than remember them, he seemed to want to forget about them entirely.
We spent these days making firewood for the winter. In the morning we would study a slope in search of a dead tree, climb up to cut it down, divest it of its branches before Bruno took off its top with the chainsaw, then would spend hours laboring to shift it to the house. We would tie a strong rope around it and drag it down by sheer force of our own strength. We had built slides throughout the wood, using old planks like sleepers, with banks of piled branches positioned where the trunk was in danger of slipping from our grasp with the steepness of the slope—but sooner or later it would get entangled with some obstacle or other, and then the work of dislodging it from there would begin. Bruno would curse it. He handled a pickaxe as if it were one of those small hoes lumberjacks use, levering up the trunk so that it could be pivoted halfway round: he would try one side and then the other, swearing as he did so, before flinging the tool to the ground and going to pick up the chainsaw again. I had always admired his way of working, the grace that he was able to express when using any kind of tool, but all trace of that was gone now. He would wield the chainsaw furiously: stall it, over-rev it, and when sometimes he had used up its petrol, would be on the verge of flinging it away as well. He would end up solving the problem by cutting the trunk into pieces and giving us another one instead—multiple journeys carrying them back to the house. Then we would set to splitting the wood with a sledgehammer and wedges until nightfall. The strokes of iron upon iron reverberated around the mountainside, drier, shriller, meaner, when Bruno was hammering, more uncertain and discordant when I took my turn. Until the master stroke came, the trunk split, and we finished the job with the axe.
The snow was already sparse on the Grenon. What little there was allowed the scree and the bushes, the ledges and the outcrops of rock to be made out still, as if the snowfall were no more than a thin layer of frost. But towards the end of the month a cold front arrived, the temperature dropped suddenly, and the lake froze over in the course of one night. The next morning I went down to look: the ice near the shore was rendered grayish and opaque by a myriad of trapped air bubbles, and became gradually darker and then blacker the further away you went from it. With a stick I could not even dent it, so decided to risk walking on it to see if it would take my weight. I had only taken a few steps before I heard a rumbling from deep in the lake that made me retreat immediately. Safely on the shore I heard it again: an ominous rumbling, resounding like a bass drum being hit over and over, extremely slowly and rhythmically, perhaps once every minute, perhaps even slower. It could not be anything other than water, beating against the ice from below. With the coming of daylight the water seemed to want to break out of the tomb in which it had found itself encased.
At sunset our endless evenings began. The horizon at the end of the valley would be tinged red for barely a few minutes before darkness fell. From then until it was time to sleep, the light did not change again: it could be six, seven, eight, and we would be spending the hours in front of the stove in silence, each with a candle to read by,
the glow of the fire, the wine rationed to make it last, the one luxury at our suppers. During those days I cooked potatoes in every conceivable way. Boiled, roasted, grilled, fried in butter, baked with melted toma, with the candle next to the hotplate to see when they were done. We would eat them in ten minutes, then face each other for another two or three hours of silent vigil. The fact was that I was waiting for something—I didn’t know what—something that wasn’t happening. I had come back from Nepal to rescue my friend, and now my friend seemed to have no need of me. If I asked him a question he would let it drop with one of those vague responses that extinguished from the start any potential glimmer of conversation. He could spend an hour staring at the fire. And only occasionally, when I’d given up expecting him to, he spoke: but as if already midsentence, or as if he were temporarily following out loud the train of his own thoughts.
One evening he said, “I was there once, in Milan.”
“Oh really?” I said.
“But it was a long time ago; I must have been twenty. One day I had an argument with my boss and walked off the site. I had a whole afternoon free, so I said to myself: right, I’ll go there now. I took the car, went on the motorway, and arrived in the evening. I wanted to have a beer in Milan. I stopped at the first bar and had one. Then I headed back.”
“And what did you think of Milan?”
“Not much. Too many people.”
And then he added: “And I’ve also been to the sea. I went to Genoa once and saw it. I had a blanket in the car and slept there. Nobody was waiting for me at home anyway.”
“And what was the sea like?”
“A big lake.”
His accounts of things were like this; they might or might not have been true, and they went nowhere. Only once, out of the blue, he said: “It was great, wasn’t it, when we used to sit in front of the stable in the evening?”
The Eight Mountains Page 18
