I put down the book I was reading and responded: “Yes, really great.”
“The way night fell in July, the calm descended, do you remember? It was the hour I liked best, and then when I got up to milk the cows it was still dark. The two of them were still sleeping, and I felt as if I were watching over everything, as if they could sleep peacefully because I was there.”
Then he added: “It’s stupid, no? But that’s how I felt.”
“I don’t see anything stupid about it.”
“It’s stupid because no one can look after anyone else. It’s hard enough to look after yourself. Men are designed to always cope, if they’re clever, but if they think they’re too clever they end up being ruined.”
“Is starting a family being too clever?”
“Perhaps it is, for some.”
“Well, perhaps some should think twice before bringing children into the world.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Bruno said.
I stared at him in the semidarkness, trying to understand what was going through his mind. One half of his face was yellowed by the light from the stove, the other completely dark.
“So what are you saying?” I asked. He stared at the fire as if I were no longer even there.
I felt an increasing impatience that drove me outside into the dark, craving a cigarette for company. I stayed outside looking for the stars that were not visible, and asking myself what I was doing back here, until I realized that my teeth were chattering. Then I went back into the warm, dark, smoky room. Bruno had not moved. I warmed my feet in front of the stove, then went up to shut myself into my sleeping bag.
The next morning I was the first to get up. In the light of day I did not feel like sharing that small room, so skipped coffee and went out for a walk. I went down to look at the lake and found it covered by an overnight frost that the wind was sweeping here and there—lifting it in flurries, puffs, and miniature whirlwinds that appeared and disappeared in an instant, like restless spirits. Beneath the frost the ice was black and looked like stone. As I stood there looking at it, a shot echoed in the valley, rebounding from one side to the other so that it was difficult to tell whether it came from below, in the woods, or from the crests above. But I instinctively looked upwards for its origin, scouring the scree and the slopes for any sign of movement.
When I got back to Barma I saw that two hunters had come to speak to Bruno. They had modern weapons with telescopic sights. At one point one of the two opened his rucksack and deposited a black bag at Bruno’s feet. The other one noticed my presence and nodded in my direction, and recognizing something familiar about that gesture I realized soon enough who they were: the two cousins from whom Bruno had bought the farmstead. I had not seen them for more than twenty-five years. I had not known that he was in touch with them, nor how they had found him up there. But who knows how much else there was about Grana that I could not even imagine.
From out of the black bag, after they had gone, a dead and already gutted chamois emerged. When Bruno hung it up by its back legs from the branch of a larch tree I could see that it was a female. It had its dark winter coat with a thick black line down the middle of its back, a slender neck from which its lifeless muzzle dangled, two small horns that looked like hooks. From the gash in its belly the steam was still rising in the cold morning air.
Bruno went inside to fetch a knife and sharpened it carefully before setting to work. Then he was as precise and methodical as if he had spent a lifetime doing nothing but this. He made an incision in the skin around the shins and continued along the inside of the thighs, all the way down to the groin where the two cuts joined. He went back up, detached a flap of skin from the shin, put down the knife, and grasped the flap with both hands, tugging it down violently to expose first one thigh and then the other. Under the skin there was a white, viscous layer—the fat that the chamois had put on for the winter months—and beneath the fat you could glimpse the pink of its flesh. Bruno took the knife again, made a cut in the breast and another two in the front legs, grasped again the flayed hide that was now hanging halfway down its back and tugged it hard. You need some strength to tear hide from flesh, but he used more force than was necessary, putting into it the anger that he had kept bottled up ever since I had arrived. The skin came off in one piece, like a dress. Then he grabbed hold of one of the horns with his left hand, fumbled with his knife between the vertebrae of its neck, and I heard the crack of fractured bone. The head came off with the hide and Bruno stretched it on the ground, with the fur lying on the grass and the skin facing upwards.
The chamois looked much smaller now. Skinned and decapitated, it no longer even looked like a chamois—just meat, bones, cartilage—like one of those refrigerated carcasses hanging in cold storage in supermarkets. Bruno inserted his hands into the thorax and tore out the heart and lungs, then turned the carcass around. He felt with his fingers to find the veins of the muscles along the backbone, severed them with a light cut, and then went back over the line he had followed, plunging the knife in. The flesh that was disclosed then was of a dark red color. He cut off two long cords, dark and bloody. His arms were daubed with blood now too. I’d had enough, and did not stay to witness the rest of the butchery. I just saw at the end the skeleton of the chamois hanging from the branch of the tree, reduced to next to nothing.
A few hours later I told him that I was leaving. At the table I had tried to resume our conversation from the day before, this time being more direct. I asked him what he intended to do about Anita, what arrangements he had made with Lara, and whether he intended to visit them at Christmas.
“Probably not at Christmas,” he answered.
“So when?”
“I don’t know, maybe in the spring.”
“Or maybe in the summer, right?”
“Listen, what difference does it make? It’s better that she stays with her mother, isn’t it? Or do you want me to bring her up here, to live this kind of life with me?”
He said here just as he’d always done, as if at the bottom of his valley there was an invisible border, a wall erected only for him, preventing access to the rest of the world.
“Perhaps you should go down,” I said. “Maybe you’re the one who needs to change your way of life.”
“Me?” said Bruno. “But Berio, don’t you remember who I am?”
Yes, I remembered. He was the cowherd, the bricklayer, the man of the mountains, and above all he was his father’s son: just like him he would disappear from the life of his child, and that was it. I looked at the plate in front of me. Bruno had prepared a hunter’s delicacy, the heart and lungs of the chamois cooked with wine and onions, but I had barely touched it.
“You’re not eating?” he asked, disappointed.
“It’s too strong for me,” I replied.
I pushed the plate away and added: “Today I’m going down. I’ve got a few work-related things to sort out. Perhaps I’ll come back to say goodbye before leaving.”
“Yes, of course,” said Bruno, without looking at me. He didn’t believe it and neither did I. He took my plate, opened the door, and threw its contents outside for the crows and foxes, creatures with less delicate stomachs than mine.
• • •
In December I decided to go and visit Lara. I made my way up the valley as the snow was beginning to fall, at the start of the ski season. The landscape was not so very different from that of Grana, and while driving it occurred to me that to a certain extent all mountains look the same, except that here there was nothing to remind me of myself or of someone I once loved, and that made all the difference. The way in which a place can be a custodian of your history. How you could read it there every time you went back. There could only be one mountain of this kind in anyone’s lifetime, and in comparison with that one all the others were merely minor peaks, even if they happened to be in the Himalayas.
There was a small ski resort at the head of the valley. Two or three businesses in all, of the kind
that were struggling to survive, what with the economic crisis and climate change. Lara worked there in a restaurant built in the style of an Alpine lodge, near to where the ski lifts began and as fake in its way as the artificial snow on the pistes. She came forward to embrace me wearing the apron of a waitress, and with a smile that could not conceal how tired she was. She was young, Lara; she was no more than thirty—but for a good while now she had been living the life of an older woman, and it showed. There were few skiers about, so she asked one of her colleagues to cover for her and came to sit at a table with me.
While talking she showed me a photo of Anita: a blond, rather frail, smiling child who was hugging a black dog much bigger than herself. She told me that she was in her first year of school. It was difficult to convince her to conform to certain rules; when she started she was like some kind of feral child: she would get in a fight with someone, or would begin to scream, or would sit in a corner the whole day saying nothing. Now, little by little, perhaps she was becoming civilized. Lara laughed. She said: “But the thing she likes most is when I take her to some farm. There she feels at home. She lets the calves lick her hands—you know, with that rough tongue of theirs—and she isn’t afraid at all. And it’s the same with goats and with horses. She’s happy with every kind of animal. I hope that won’t change, and that she’ll never forget it.”
She stopped to sip some of her tea. I saw that her fingers around the cup were red, her nails bitten down to the quick. She looked around the restaurant and said: “You know I also worked here when I was sixteen. All winter, Saturdays and Sundays while my friends went skiing. How I hated them.”
“It’s not such a bad place,” I said.
“Oh yes it is. I never thought I’d come back here. But as they say: sometimes you have to take a step backwards in order to move forwards. That is if you have the humility to admit it to yourself.”
Now she was referring to Bruno. As soon as we got onto the subject she came down hard on him. She told me that two or three years previously, when it was clear that the farm was not viable, they still would have been able to find solutions. Sell the cows, rent out the farmstead, both look for jobs. Bruno would have been quickly taken on at a building site or dairy processing unit, or even on the ski slopes. She could have worked as a shop assistant or waitress. She was ready to make this choice, to lead a more ordinary life until the situation improved. Bruno, on the other hand, did not want to know about it. In his mind there was no possibility of alternative lives. And at a certain point she realized that neither she nor Anita, nor what she had believed they were building up there together, were as important as his precious mountain, whatever that really meant to him. The moment she realized this, the relationship was over for her. From the very next day she had begun to imagine a future far away from there, with her little girl but without him.
She said: “Sometimes love exhausts itself gradually, and sometimes it comes to an end suddenly: isn’t that how it goes?”
“Well, I don’t know anything about love,” I replied.
“Oh right, I’d forgotten.”
“I went to see him. He’s up at Barma now. He wants to stay there; he’s not coming down.”
“I know,” said Lara. “The last of the mountain men.”
“I don’t know how to help him.”
“Forget it. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Leave him there where he wants to be.”
Saying this she glanced at her watch, exchanged a look with her colleague at the counter, and got up to go back to work. Lara the waitress. I remembered when she used to guard the cows beneath the rain, proud, still, with her black umbrella.
“Say hello to Anita for me,” I said.
“Come and see her before she’s twenty,” she said, and then she embraced me a little more tightly than before. There was something in that embrace that her words had not communicated. Emotional turmoil perhaps, or nostalgia. I left as the first skiers were arriving for lunch, with their helmets and their all-in-one suits and their plastic boots, looking like aliens.
• • •
The snow began falling suddenly and heavily at the end of December. On Christmas Day it snowed even in Milan. After lunch I was looking out of the window onto the avenue of my childhood, with a few cars passing gingerly along it and one skidding at the traffic lights and coming to a halt in the middle of the crossing. There were children throwing snowballs. Egyptian children who had perhaps never seen snow before. In four days’ time I would be catching the plane that would take me back to Kathmandu, but I wasn’t thinking about Nepal now, I was thinking about Bruno. It felt like I was the only one who knew that he was up there.
My mother came to be next to me at the window. She had invited her friends to lunch, and they were chatting tipsily at the table, waiting for dessert. There was a joyful atmosphere in the house. There was the nativity scene that she set up every year with the moss she collected at Grana, the red tablecloth, wine, and good company. I envied once more her talent for friendship. She had no intention of growing old sad and alone.
She said: “In my opinion you should try again.”
“I know,” I replied. “But I don’t know if it will make any difference.”
I opened the window and stretched my hand outside. I waited for a snowflake to land on my hand: it was heavy and wet and melted instantly on contact with my skin—but I wondered what it would be like now at two thousand meters.
So the next day I bought snow chains on the motorway and a pair of snowshoes in the first shop in the valley, and joined the queues of cars that were going up from Milan and Turin. Almost all of them had skis on their roof racks: after recent seasons without much snow the skiers were rushing to the mountains as if to the reopening of an amusement park. Not one of them took the turning at the junction for Grana. After just a few bends I stopped seeing anyone else. Then, when the road curved past the rock, I entered into my old world again.
There was snow piled up against the stables and the log-built haylofts. Snow on the tractors, on the tin roofs of shacks, on the wheelbarrows and piles of manure; snow that filled the ruined buildings and almost completely concealed them. In the village someone had cleared a narrow strip of road between the houses, perhaps the two men I saw on a roof throwing down the snow that had accumulated up there. They looked up without deigning to acknowledge me. I left the car a little further on, where the snowplow had been stopped or perhaps just given up, having cleared just enough space to turn around and head back. I put on gloves, since recently my fingers tended to freeze in the slightest cold. I fixed the snowshoes to my boots, climbed over the wall of hard snow that blocked the road, and went into the fresh snow beyond it.
It took me more than four hours to cover the route that in summer would take fewer than two. Even with the snowshoes I was sinking almost knee-deep. I was finding my way only by remembering it, gauging the direction from the contours of bumps and slopes, from a still discernible passage between the snow-clad pines, without any track to follow, or any of my usual points of reference on the ground. The snow had buried the remains of the cable lift’s winding gear, the ruined walls, the piles of stones quarried from the pastures, the stumps of centuries-old larch. All that remained of the river was a hollow between the two gently sloping humps of its banks: I crossed it at a randomly chosen point with a leap into fresh snow, falling forwards onto my hands without injury. On the other side the incline became increasingly steep, and every three or four steps I would slip back, taking a small avalanche with me. Then I would have to use my hands as well, pointing the snowshoes as if they were crampons and trying again with more determination. Only on reaching Bruno’s farmstead did I fully realize just how much snow had fallen: it had reached halfway up the windows of the stable. But the gusts of wind had swept the side facing the mountain, forming a tunnel a footstep wide, and I stopped there to get my breath back. The grass in that small strip of ground was dead and dry, gray as the stone walls. There was
no light—and no other color but white, gray, and black. And the snow was continuing to fall.
When I arrived at the top I discovered that the lake had disappeared along with everything else. It was only a snow-filled basin, a gentle depression at the mountain’s foot. And so, for the first time in many years, instead of going around it I headed straight across in the direction of Barma. It seemed most strange, walking over so much water. I was halfway across when I heard someone calling.
“Oh!” I heard. “Berio!”
I raised my eyes and saw Bruno much higher up the slope, a small figure above the treeline. He waved, and as soon as I waved back he threw himself down. Then I realized he must be wearing skis. He was coming down at an oblique angle, with his legs opened wide and without any style, just as he did when coming down the snowfields in the summer. He also held his arms open and his chest thrust forward, keeping a precarious balance. But in front of the first larch trees I saw him throw himself to one side and steer decisively, avoiding the wood by crossing higher up, down to the main gorge of the Grenon, where he stopped. In the summer a small stream flowed in that gorge, but now it was a broad snow-filled slide that reached, unobstructed, all the way down to the lake. Bruno assessed the steepness of the incline over the distance remaining between us, then pointed his skis in my direction and set off again. In the gorge he immediately picked up speed. I don’t know what would have happened if he had fallen there, but he kept upright, swooped into the basin and gradually braked on the flat, sliding to where I was and coming to a standstill.
He was sweaty and smiling. “Did you see that?” he said, breathing heavily. He lifted one of the skis that must have been thirty or forty years old and looked like some kind of military relic. He said: “I went down to get a shovel and found these in my uncle’s cellar. They’ve been there for years; I don’t know who they belonged to.”
“But when did you learn how to use them?”
The Eight Mountains Page 19
