The Eight Mountains

FIVE

MY FATHER DIED when he was sixty-two and I was thirty-one. It was only at his funeral that I realized I was the same age now as he’d been when I was born. But my thirty-one years had little enough in common with his: I had not married; I had not gone to work in a factory; I had not fathered a son; and my life seemed to me to be only partly that of a grown man, and partly still like that of an adolescent. I lived alone in a studio flat, a luxury which I struggled to afford. I would like to have made a living as a documentary filmmaker, but to pay the rent I accepted work of every kind. I too had emigrated: having inherited from my parents the idea that at a key point in one’s youth it was necessary to leave the place where you’d been born and raised in order to go and develop elsewhere, I had at twenty-three, and fresh out of military service, left Milan to join a girlfriend in Turin. My relationship with the girl did not last, but my relationship with the city did. Between its ancient rivers and in its arcade cafes I’d felt immediately at home. I was reading Hemingway, and wandered around penniless, trying to keep myself open to new encounters, to offers of work and to every possibility, with the mountains as the background to my moveable feast: even if I had never gone back there, to glimpse sight of them on my horizon every time I left the apartment seemed like a blessing.

And so it was that a hundred and twenty kilometers of rice fields now divided me from my father. It was no distance, but to cover it you had to want to do so. A couple of years previously I had given him one last great disappointment by abandoning my university studies: I had always excelled at maths, and he had always foreseen for me a future similar to his own. My father told me that I was throwing my life away; I replied that he had thrown away his before me. We didn’t speak for an entire year after that, during which time I was coming and going between home and my military barracks, returning from leave with scarcely a word in parting. It was better for both of us that I should follow my own path, invent a life different from his in some other place—and once that distance was established, neither of us was inclined to close it.

With my mother it was different. Since I was not one to speak much on the phone she took it upon herself to write me letters. She discovered soon enough that I would reply. I liked to sit down at the table of an evening, take pen and paper, and tell her what was happening with me. It was by letter that I told her of my decision to enroll in a film school. It was there that I made my first friends in Turin. I was fascinated by documentary film and felt that I had a vocation for observing and listening, so it was good to get her reassurance: Yes, you’ve always been good at that. I knew that it would take a long time to turn it into a profession, but she encouraged me from the outset. For years she would send me money, and I would send her in return everything that I was making: portraits of people and places, explorations of the city—short films that nobody ever saw but of which I was proud. I liked the life that was taking shape around me. This is what I would tell her when she asked if I was happy. I avoided answering her other questions—about the relationships with girlfriends, which never lasted more than a few months, since as soon as they became serious I would extricate myself from them.

And you? I would write.

I’m fine, my mother would answer, but your dad is working too hard, and it’s damaging his health. She would tell me more about him than about herself. The factory was in financial crisis and my father, after a thirty-year career, was redoubling his efforts instead of slowing down and biding his time before retirement. He was spending a lot of time in the car alone, driving hundreds of kilometers between one plant and another, returning home exhausted and collapsing into bed immediately after supper. His sleep was short-lived: at night he would get up and go back to work, unable to rest because of his worries, which according to my mother were not only about the factory. He’s always been anxious, but now it’s becoming an illness. He was anxious about his work, anxious about approaching old age, anxious because my mother had flu—and he was anxious about me as well. He would be jolted awake with the thought that I was unwell. So he would ask her to phone me, even if it meant getting me out of bed; she was unable to convince him to wait a few hours but tried to calm him, to get him back to sleep, to slow him down. It was not as if his own body hadn’t been giving him signs that he should do so, but he only knew how to live this way, with everything breathing down his neck: imploring him to calm down was like constraining him to go up a mountain more slowly, to avoid getting into a race with anyone, to enjoy the health-giving properties of the air.

He was only partly the man that I knew, and partly another—the one that I was discovering through my mother’s letters. I was intrigued by this other side to him. It brought to mind a certain fragility that I had only glimpsed before, certain moments of confusion which he would immediately attempt to conceal. When I would lean out over a rock and he would instinctively make a grab for my trouser belt. When I was sick on the glacier and he would be more worried about it than I was myself. It occurred to me that perhaps this other father had always been there at my side, and that I had failed to notice him, however difficult the first one was; and I began to think that in the future I should—or could—make an attempt to build bridges with him.

Then that future vanished in an instant, together with the possibilities it contained. One March evening in 2004 my mother called to tell me that my father had suffered a heart attack on the motorway. They had found him in a lay-by. He had not caused an accident; in fact he had managed to do everything correctly: he had stopped at the side of the road and put on the hazard lights, as if he had a flat tire or had run out of petrol. Instead it was his heart that had completely failed on him. Too many miles on the clock, too little maintenance: my father must have felt an acute pain in his chest and had enough time to realize what was happening. In the lay-by he had turned off the engine. But he hadn’t even unbuckled his seat belt. He had stayed sitting there, and that’s how they found him—like a racing driver who had retired from the race, the most ironic way for someone like him to go, with his hands still on the wheel, being overtaken by everyone else.

That spring I went back to Milan for a few weeks to be with my mother. Apart from the practicalities that needed to be dealt with, I felt the need to be with her for a while. After the turbulent days of the funeral, in the calm that followed, we discovered to my surprise that my father had thought thoroughly about his own death. In his desk drawer there was a list of instructions, attached to which were details of his bank accounts, and everything else that was required for us to inherit his assets. Since we were the only inheritors, he had not been obliged by Italian law to make a formal will. But on the same piece of paper on which he had specified that he left to my mother his half of the apartment in Milan, for me there was the phrase I would like Pietro to have—followed mysteriously by the property in Grana. No last words, not a line of farewell or explanation: it was all cold and practical and legalistic.

About this inheritance my mother knew next to nothing. There is a tendency to assume that one’s parents share everything that crosses their minds, especially as they get older, but I was discovering in those days that after my departure they had led more or less separate lives. He worked and was always traveling. Having retired from her own job, she was doing voluntary work as a nurse in a clinic for immigrants, helping with prenatal classes—and spent most of her other time with friends rather than with my father. She knew only that he had acquired the previous year, and for not much money, a small piece of land in the mountains. He had not sought her permission to spend the money, or even invited her to see the place—it was a long time since they had gone out walking together—and she had not objected, considering it to be some altogether private concern.

Amongst my father’s papers I found the contract of the purchase and the land registry document, neither of which enlightened me much further. I had inherited an agricultural building four meters by seven at the center of an irregular plot of land. The map was too small to work out where this place was, and too different from the ones I was used to: it did not show the altitude or the paths, only the property, and looking at it told you nothing about whether it was surrounded by woods, fields, or by anything else for that matter.

My mother said: “Bruno will know where it is.”

“Bruno?”

“They were always going off together.”

“I didn’t know that they’d even seen each other again.”

“Of course, we both saw him again. It’s quite difficult not to meet up in a place like Grana, wouldn’t you say?”

“What’s he doing now?” I asked, though what I really wanted to ask was: “How is he? Does he remember me? During all these years had he thought about me as much as I thought about him?” But I had learned by now to ask questions in the adult way, asking one thing in order to find out about another.

“He’s a bricklayer.”

“So he never moved away?”

“Bruno? And where do you think he would go? Things have not changed much in Grana, you’ll see.”

I did not know whether to believe her, since I had certainly changed a lot in the meantime. As an adult, a place that you loved as a young boy might appear entirely different to you, and turn out to be a disappointment; or it might remind you of what you once were but no longer are, becoming a cause for great sadness. I wasn’t that keen to find out how it would be. But there was this property that I had been left, and curiosity got the better of me: I went there at the end of April, alone, in my father’s car. It was evening, and climbing up the valley I could only see the areas illuminated by the lights. Even so I noticed several changes: the points at which the road had been improved and widened, the protective netting over the escarpments, the piles of felled tree trunks. Someone had started to build little villas in a Tyrolese style, while someone else had started to extract sand and gravel from the river, which was shored up now between cement banks, where it had once flowed between stones and trees. The second homes in darkness, the hotels closed out of season or shut for good, the immobile bulldozers and the excavators with their arms stuck in the ground gave the landscape an air of industrial decline, like those building sites left semi-abandoned due to bankruptcy.

Then just as I was letting myself feel depressed by these discoveries, something called out for my attention, and I leaned over towards the windscreen to look up. In the night sky some white shapes emitted a kind of aura. It took me a moment to realize that they were not clouds: they were mountains still covered in snow. I should have expected it, in April. But in the city the spring was already advanced, and I was no longer accustomed to the fact that to go up high is to go back a season. The snow up there consoled me for the squalor in the valley.

Then I realized that I had just repeated one of my father’s typical gestures. How many times had I seen him while driving lean forwards and look up at the sky? To check the state of the weather, or to study the side of a mountain, or to just admire its outline as we passed it. He placed his hands together high up on the steering wheel and rested his temple on them. I repeated the gesture, aware this time of the similarity, imagining myself as my father at forty, having just turned into the valley, with my wife sitting beside me and my son on the backseat, looking for a good place for the three of us. I imagined my son sleeping. My wife was pointing out villages and particular houses, and I was pretending to be listening. But then as soon as she was looking the other way I would lean forward and look up, heeding the powerful call of the peaks. The more towering and menacing they looked, the more I liked them. The snow up there was most promising. Yes, perhaps on that particular mountain there would be a good place for us.

The little road that climbed up to Grana had been asphalted, but as for the rest my mother was right, it seemed as if nothing had changed at all. The ruined buildings were still there, and so too were the stables, the haylofts, the piles of manure. I left the car in the usual place and went into the village on foot in the dark, letting myself be guided by the sound of the drinking fountain, finding my way to the stairs and the door of the house, its big iron key still in the lock. Once inside I was greeted by the old smell of smoke and damp. In the kitchen I opened the stove door and found a small pile of still faintly glowing embers: I put in some of the wood that had been stacked nearby and blew until the fire was kindled again.

Even my father’s concoctions were still in their usual place. He would usually bring a large bottle of white grappa and then flavor it in smaller bottles with the berries, pinecones, and herbs that he collected in the mountains. I chose a jar at random and poured some into a glass to warm myself up. It was very bitter, flavored with gentian maybe, and I sat with it next to the stove and rolled a cigarette. Smoking and looking around me in the old kitchen, I waited for the memories to come.

My mother had done a good job there over the course of twenty years: everywhere I looked I could detect her touch, that of a woman with clear ideas about how to make a house homely. She had always liked copper pans and wooden spoons, and never liked curtains that stopped you from seeing outside. On the ledge of her favorite window she had placed a bunch of dried flowers in a pitcher, together with the small radio that she listened to all day and a photo in which Bruno and I were sitting back to back on a larch stump, probably at his uncle’s farmstead, with our arms folded, looking like real tough guys. I could not remember who had taken it, or when, but we were wearing the same clothes and adopting the same ridiculous pose: anyone who saw it would have taken it for a portrait of two brothers. I also thought that it was a good photo. I finished the cigarette and threw the butt into the stove. I picked up the empty glass and got up to refill it, and it was then that I saw my father’s map still thumbtacked to the wall, though it looked quite different now from how I remembered it.

I went closer to look at it in detail. I saw at once that it had changed from being what it was before—a map of the valley’s trails—and that it had become something else altogether, something resembling a novel. Or better still perhaps, a biography: after twenty years there was not a summit, an alpeggio, a refuge that my father’s felt-tip pen had not reached, and this network of itineraries was so dense as to render the map illegible to anyone else. And now there was not just black ink there. Sometimes it had been marked with red lines, at other times with green. Occasionally the black, red, and green were used together, though most frequently it was the black ink alone that had been used to record the longest excursions. There must have been a key to this code, and I lingered there trying to figure out what it was.

After I had thought about it for a while it began to resemble one of those riddles that my father used to ask me when I was a child. I went to fill my glass and returned to scrutinize the map. If it had been a cryptographic problem like those I had studied at university I would have begun by looking for the most recurrent elements, and for the least frequent. Most frequent were the single black lines, the least frequent those lines where the three colors had been used together. It was the three colors that gave me the key, because I remembered well the time that the three of us—myself, my father, and Bruno—had got stuck on the glacier together. The red line and the green line ended at precisely this point, but the black one continued: from this I understood that my father had completed the rest of the climb alone, on another occasion. The black, of course, was him. The red accompanied him up to our four-thousanders, so could only be me. The green, by a simple process of elimination, was Bruno. My mother had told me that they’d gone walking together. I saw that there were many routes of black and green combined, perhaps even more than of black and red, and I felt a pang of jealousy. But I also felt pleased that during all those years my father had not just gone into the mountains alone. The thought occurred to me that, in some complicated way, this map that was pinned to the wall might contain a message for me.

Later I went into my old room, but it was too cold to sleep there. I took the mattress from the bed, carried it to the kitchen, and put the sleeping bag on top of it. I kept the grappa and tobacco within reach. Before turning off the light I stoked up the fire in the stove, and lay there in the dark listening to the sound of it burning for a long while, without falling asleep.

Bruno came to get me early the next morning. He was a man I no longer knew, but somewhere inside of him was the boy I knew so well.

“Thanks for the fire,” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” he said.

He shook my hand on the porch and uttered one of those conventional phrases that I had become accustomed to in the past two months, and to which I no longer paid attention. Such phrases would have been of no use between friends, but who could say what Bruno and I were to each other now. His clasp as we shook hands seemed more sincere, his right hand dry and coarse, calloused and with something else about it that was strange and that I didn’t understand at first. He sensed my unease and raised it to show me: it was a builder’s hand, with the ends of its index and middle fingers missing.

“Have you seen?” he said. “I was messing around with my father’s rifle. I wanted to shoot a fox, and boom! I blew off parts of my own fingers.”

“Did it burst in your hands?”

“Not exactly. Faulty trigger.”

“Ouch,” I said. “That must have hurt.”

Bruno shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that there were worse things in life. He looked at my chin and asked: “Don’t you ever shave?”

“I’ve had this beard for ten years,” I replied, stroking it.

“I tried to let mine grow once. But I had a girlfriend, you know how it is.”

“She didn’t like your beard?”

“That’s right. On you it looks good. You look like your father.”

He smiled as he said this. Since we were trying to break the ice I tried to pay no attention to the phrase, and returned his smile. Then closed the door and went with him.

The sky in the deep valley was low and overcast with spring clouds. It looked as if it had just stopped raining, and that it could start again at any moment. Even the smoke from the chimneys was struggling to rise: it slipped down the wet roofs and curled up in the guttering. Leaving the village in that cold light I rediscovered every shack, every henhouse, every woodshed, as if no one had touched anything since I’d left. The things that had been damaged I saw soon after, beyond the last house: down below, the bed of the river was at least twice as wide as I remembered it. It looked as if a gigantic plough had recently turned it over. It flowed between wide stony areas that gave it an anemic look, even in this season of thaw.

“Have you seen?” Bruno said.

“What happened?”

“The flood of 2000, don’t you remember? So much water came down that we had to be taken out by helicopter.”

There was a digger working down there. Where was I in the year 2000? So far away in both body and spirit that I hadn’t even been aware of the flooding in Grana. The river was still littered with tree trunks, beams, pieces of cement, wreckage of every kind dragged down from the mountain. On the bends the eroded banks exposed the roots of trees growing in search of soil that was no longer there. I felt very sorry for our poor little river.

A bit higher up, near the mill, I noticed something in the water that raised my spirits: a large white stone in the shape of a wheel.

“So was that also brought down by the water?” I asked.

“Oh no,” said Bruno, “I threw that one down before the flood.”

“When?”

“I did it to celebrate my eighteenth birthday.”

“So how did you manage it?”

“With a car jack.”

It made me smile. I imagined Bruno entering the mill with the jack, and the millstone coming out through the door and starting to roll down. I would have loved to have been there.

“Was it good?” I asked.

“It was amazing.”

Bruno smiled too. Then we headed off in search of my property.

We climbed a good deal slower than we used to, since I was not in shape at all and had ended up drinking too much the previous evening. Going up the valley devastated by the flood, where the meadows along the riverbank were reduced to sand and stones, Bruno had to turn around frequently, show his astonishment that I was so far behind, then stop and wait. Between one bout of coughing and another, I said, “Go ahead if you want. I’ll catch you up.”

“No, no,” he said, as if he had set himself a specific task and had a duty to complete it.

Not even his uncle’s farmstead looked right: when we passed by it I saw that the roof of one of the huts had caved in, pushing out the wall on which the beams rested. It looked as if a heavy fall of snow would have been enough to finish it off altogether. The bath had been left to rust outside of the stable, and the doors were off their hinges and thrown jumbled against a wall. Just as in the prophecy made by Luigi Guglielmina, the larch saplings were springing up everywhere in the pastures. Who knows how long it had taken them, and what had happened to his uncle. I would have liked to ask Bruno, but he did not stop, so we passed the farmstead and kept going without a word between us.

Beyond the cabins the flood had done the worst damage. Up above, where once the cows used to climb at the height of the season, the rain had brought down an entire piece of the mountain. The landslide had dragged down with it trees and rocks, a mess of unstable material which even after four years gave way beneath our feet. Bruno continued in silence. He led the way with his boots sinking in the mud, jumping from one rock to another, concentrating on keeping his balance while walking across fallen tree trunks, and he did not turn round. I had to run to keep behind him until we were beyond the landslide, the forest welcomed us again, and he finally recovered his speech.

“Few people used to come this way even before,” he said. “Now that the path is no longer here, I’m probably the only one who does.”

“Do you come here much?”

“Sure, in the evening.”

“In the evening?”

“When I fancy a walk after work. I take the head torch with me in case it gets dark.”

“Some people go to the bar.”

“I’ve been to the bar. Enough bars already; the woods are better.”

Then I asked the forbidden question, the one that could never be uttered while walking with my father: “Is it much further?”

“No, no. It’s just that soon we’ll find snow.”

I had already noticed it in the shadow of the rocks: old snow that had been rained on and would soon turn into slush. But further up, when I lifted my head, I saw that it stained the scree and filled broad expanses of the gorges of Grenon. On the whole of the north side it was still winter. The snow followed the shape of the mountain like a film negative, with the black of the rocks warming in the sun and the white of the snow surviving in the areas of shadow: I was thinking about this when we reached the lake. Just as it had that first time, the lake revealed itself suddenly.

“Do you remember this place?” asked Bruno.

“Of course.”

“It’s not like in the summer, eh?”

“No.”

Our lake in April was still covered by a layer of ice, by an opaque white veined with thin blue cracks, like those that form in porcelain. There was no regular geometrical aspect to this craquelure, or any comprehensible lines of fracture. Here and there slabs of ice had been raised by the force of the water, and along the banks in sunlight you could see the first darker tones, the beginning of summer.

And yet casting our eyes around the basin it seemed as if we were seeing two seasons at once. On this side was the scree, the bursts of juniper and rhododendron, on the other the woods and the snow. Over there the wake of an avalanche came down along the Grenon and ended up in the lake. Bruno headed straight for it: leaving the shore, we began to climb up the snow slope, a frozen crust that almost always held firm beneath our feet, but that sometimes suddenly gave way. When it did so we would sink thigh-deep in snow. Every false step cost us a laborious extraction, and it was only after half an hour of such halting progress that Bruno allowed us to rest: he found a stone wall that emerged from the snow, climbed on top of it, and cleaned off his boots by knocking them together. I sat down without caring about my sodden feet. I had an overwhelming desire to get back in front of the stove, to eat, and to sleep.

“Here we are,” he said.

“Where?”

“What do you mean where? At your place.”

It was only then that I looked around. Although the snow altered the shape of everything, I could see that where we were standing the slope formed a kind of wooded terrace. A wall of flat, high, and unusually white rock came down onto this plateau, facing the lake. From the snow emerged the remains of three drystone walls, one of which I was sitting on, built from the same white rock. Two short walls and a longer one in front, four meters by seven, just as the land registry map had specified: the fourth wall, which supported the other three, was the rock face itself that had provided the material for their construction. Of the collapsed roof there was no trace. But inside the ruin, in the middle of the snow, a small Swiss pine had begun to grow, having found its way amongst the rubble, and reached up to the height of the walls. So there it was, my inheritance: a rock face, snow, a pile of shaped stones, a pine tree.

“When we first chanced across this place it was September,” Bruno said. “Your father said immediately: this is the one. We had seen so many, since I had been going with him on these searches for quite a while, but this one he liked at first sight.”

“Was it last year?”

“No, no. It was nearly three years ago. Then I had to find the owners and persuade them to sell. Nobody ever sells anything up here. It’s OK to keep a ruin for your entire lifetime, but not to sell it to someone who might actually do something with it.”

“And what did he want to do with it?”

“Build a house.”

“A house?”

“Sure.”

“My father always hated houses.”

“Well, it seems like he changed his mind.”

Meanwhile it had started to rain: I felt a drop on the back of my hand and saw that it was halfway between rain and snow. Even the sky seemed undecided between winter and spring. The sky hid the mountains and divested things of their mass, but even on such a morning as this I could sense the beauty of this place. A somber, bitter beauty, communicating awesome power rather than tranquillity, as well as a degree of anguish. The beauty of the reverse side.

“Does it have a name, this place?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so. According to my mother it was once called barma drola. She’s never wrong about such things; she remembers all the names.”

“So the barma is that rock over there?”

“That’s right.”

“And the drola?”

“That means strange.”

“Strange because it’s so white?”

“I think yes.”

“The strange rock,” I said, to hear what it sounded like.

I stayed sitting there for a while, to look around me and to reflect on the meaning of this inheritance. My father, the same person who had fled from houses all his life, had cultivated a desire to build one up here. He hadn’t been able to do so. But imagining his own death, he had thought of leaving the place to me. Who knows what he wanted from me.

Bruno said: “I’m available for the summer.”

“Available for what?”

“To work, no?”

And since I did not seem to understand, he explained: “Your father designed the house, the way he wanted it. And he made me promise that I would build it. He was sitting right where you’re sitting now when he asked me.”

The revelations kept on coming. The map of the routes, the red and the green that accompanied the black—and I thought that there were many other things that Bruno had yet to tell me. As for the house, if my father had arranged everything in this way I saw no reason not to observe his wishes. Except for one, that is.

“But I don’t have any money,” I said. My inheritance had already been used up settling my disastrous finances. There was a little left, but hardly enough to build a house with, and I didn’t feel like using it for this. I had a long list of deferred wishes to fulfill.

Bruno nodded. He had expected this objection. He said: “All that we need to do is buy the materials. And even on them I think it’s possible to save quite a bit.”

“Fine, but who is going to pay you for doing the work?”

“Don’t worry about me. This isn’t the kind of job you expect to get paid for.”

He did not explain to me what he meant, and just as I was about to ask him he added: “It would be useful to have someone to lend a hand. With a laborer I’d be able to finish it in three or four months. What do you say, are you up for it?”

Down in the plains I would have laughed at the suggestion. I would have answered that I didn’t know how to do anything, and that I would have been of no help whatsoever. But I was sitting on a wall in the middle of the snow, facing a frozen lake at an altitude of two thousand meters. I had begun to feel a sense of inevitability: for reasons unknown to me my father had wanted to bring me here, to this clearing pummeled by landslides, beneath that strange rock, to work together with this man on these ruins. OK, dad, I said to myself, set me another riddle; let’s see what you’ve prepared for me. Let’s see what else there is to learn.

“Three or four months?” I asked.

“Oh sure.”

“When do you want to start then?”

“As soon as the snow melts,” Bruno replied. Then he jumped down from the wall and began to explain to me how he thought it should be done.

SIX

THE SNOW DISAPPEARED quickly that year. I returned to Grana at the beginning of June, at the height of the thawing season, with the water swelling the river and coursing down from everywhere in the valley, forming short-lived waterfalls and streams which I had never seen before. It seemed as if you could feel it beneath your feet, that snowmelt from the mountains, and even a thousand meters lower down it rendered the earth as soft as moss. As for the rain that fell daily, we decided to ignore it: one Monday morning at dawn we took from Bruno’s house a spade, a pickaxe, a large hatchet, a chainsaw, and half a tank of petrol, and with all this gear on our backs we climbed up to my property—to Barma, as we had begun to call it. Although he was carrying the heavier load, I was the one who had to stop every quarter of an hour to get my breath back. I would put down the rucksack and sit on the ground—all the errors that my father had once taught me to avoid—and we would stay there in silence, avoiding each other’s gaze while my heart slowed down.

Up above, the snow had given way to mud and dead grass, allowing me to better assess the state that the ruins were in. The walls seemed solid enough up to about a meter of their height, thanks to cornerstones that even the two of us together could not have shifted; but for a meter above that the long wall was leaning outwards, pushed by the beams of the roof before it collapsed; and the short walls were completely unstable, with the last course of stones hanging on precariously at the height of a man. Bruno said that we would have to demolish them almost down to the base. It would be useless to try to straighten skewed walls: much better to simply throw them down and start from scratch.

But first we had to prepare the building site. It was ten in the morning when we entered the ruin and began to free it of all the collapsed rubble inside.

This was mostly made up of shingles that had once been the tiles of the roof, but also of the old flooring that divided the ground floor from the first, and in the midst of all this sodden wood there were beams of six or seven meters in length still jammed into the walls or stuck in the ground. Some had withstood exposure, and Bruno checked to see if they could be reused. We labored a good deal extracting the sound ones and dragging them outside, rolling them beyond the walls on two inclined planks, while the spoiled ones were split and stored away as firewood.

Because of his truncated fingers, Bruno had learned how to use a chainsaw left-handed. He held the wood down with his foot and worked with the tip of the blade, cutting very close to his boot sole and raising a cloud of sawdust behind him. The pleasant smell of burnt wood perfumed the air. Then the piece he was cutting off would fall, and I would collect it for stacking.

I soon got tired. I was still less used to working with my arms than with my legs. At midday we came out of the ruins covered in dust and sawdust. There were four fine larch trunks beneath the big rock wall, cut down a year ago and left there to season: when the time came they would become the beams of the new roof, but for now I used one to sit on.

“I’m worn out already,” I said. “And we haven’t even started yet.”

“We’ve started all right,” Bruno said.

“We’ll need a week just to clear up. And to demolish the walls, and to clear the ground around here.”

“We might do. Who knows?”

In the meantime we had made a fireplace with stones and lit a small fire with the woodchips for kindling. As hot and sweaty as I was, it was still pleasurable to dry myself in front of a fire. I rummaged in my pockets, found the tobacco, and rolled a cigarette. I offered the packet to him, and he said: “I don’t know how. If you do it for me I’ll try one.”

When I lit it he tried hard not to cough. I could see that he wasn’t a smoker.

“Have you been a smoker for long?” he asked.

“I started one summer when I was here. So how old must I have been, sixteen or seventeen.”

“Really? I never saw you smoke.”

“Because I smoked in secret. I would go into the woods so as not to be seen. Or up onto the roof of the house.”

“And who were you hiding from? From your mother?”

“I don’t know. I would just hide, that’s all.”

Bruno sharpened the ends of two small sticks with his penknife. He took some sausage from his rucksack, cut it into pieces, and put them to grill. He also had bread, a black loaf from which he cut two large chunks and gave one to me.

He said: “Look, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. If you try to think too far ahead with this kind of work it’ll drive you nuts.”

“So what should I think about?”

“About today. Look what a beautiful day it is.”

I looked around. You needed a degree of optimism to describe it in such terms. It was one of those days in late spring when the wind is always gusting in the mountains. Banks of clouds came and went, blocking the sun, and the air was still cold, as if an obstinate winter was refusing to make its departure. Down below, the lake looked like black silk rippled by the wind. But actually no, it was the other way round: the wind was like an icy hand smoothing out the movements on its surface. I felt like stretching my own out towards the fire, to steal from it a little of its heat.

In the afternoon we continued to extract the rubble until we reached the floor of the ruin: planking which clearly showed the nature of the building. On one side, against the long wall, we found the feeding troughs, while a small gutter in the dead center of the room served as a drain for the manure. The floor was made of planks the width of three fingers, polished by years of contact with the muzzles and hooves of beasts. Bruno said that we could clean them up and use them to build something else, and began to lever them out with the pickaxe. I noticed something on the floor and picked it up. It was a wooden cone, smooth and hollow, similar to the horn of an animal.

“That’s used with a scythe stone,” Bruno said, when I showed it to him.

“A scythe stone?”

“A stone for sharpening the blade. There’s probably another word for it, but who knows what it is anymore. I should ask my mother. I think it’s a river stone.”

“From the river?”

I felt like a child to whom everything has to be explained. He showed infinite patience with these questions of mine. He took the horn from my hand and held it to his side, then explained: the scythe stone is a smooth, round stone, almost black. It has to be wet to work properly. You hang this from your belt with a little water inside, so that every so often while you are scything you can moisten the stone and sharpen the blade, like this.

He made a sweeping, soft gesture with his arm, describing a half-moon above his head. I could see perfectly the imaginary scythe and the imaginary stone that was sharpening it. Only then did I realize that we were repeating one of our favorite games: I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before, since we had been in so many ruins just like this one. We would get in through holes in walls that were in danger of collapse. We walked on planks that moved beneath our feet. We would steal a few wrecked items and pretend that they were treasures. We had done it for years.

So I began to see the project on which we were embarked in a slightly different light. Until then I had believed that I was only there for my father’s sake: to fulfill his wishes, to assuage my guilt. But at that moment, watching Bruno sharpening the imaginary scythe, the inheritance I’d received seemed more like a compensation or a second chance for our interrupted friendship. Was that what my father had wanted to give me? Bruno took one last look at the horn and tossed it onto the pile of wood set aside for burning. I went over to retrieve it and put it away, thinking that I would find some future use for it.

I did the same with the Swiss pine that had managed to grow in the middle of the ruin. At five, when I was too tired to do anything else, I used the pickaxe to dig around the little tree and extricate it with its roots still intact. Its trunk was thin and twisted due to its efforts to reach the light from out amongst the rubble. With its roots exposed it looked moribund, and I hurried to replant it nearby. I dug a hole at the edge of the clearing, planting it where there was the best view of the lake, treading down firmly the earth that I used to cover its roots. But when I left it there, in the wind to which it was not accustomed, it was blown from side to side. Exposed to the elements from which it had been long protected, it looked like an altogether too fragile creation.

“Do you think it will make it?” I asked.

“Who knows,” said Bruno. “It’s a strange plant, that one. Strong where it decides to grow, and weak if you put it somewhere else.”

“Have you tried before?”

“A few times.”

“How did it work out?”

“Badly.”

He looked at the ground, the way he did when thinking again about some old story. “My uncle wanted a Swiss pine in front of the house. I don’t know why, maybe he thought it would bring him good luck. And he sure needed it, no doubt about that. So every year he would send me to the mountain to get a sapling. But it always ended up getting trampled by the cows, and after a while we stopped trying.”

“What do you call it here?”

“The Swiss pine? Arula.”

“That’s it. And it brings good luck?”

“So they say. Perhaps it does if you believe it.”

Whether lucky or not, I felt attached to that young tree. I sunk a stout stick next to its trunk and attached it at several points with twine. Then I went to the lake to fill a drinking bottle to water it with. When I got back I saw that Bruno had constructed a kind of low platform beneath the big wall. He had put on the ground two of the old roof beams and nailed on a few salvaged planks. Then he took from the rucksack a small rope and a rainproof sheet of the kind used in Grana to protect the hay in the fields. With two wooden stakes he attached two corners of the sheet to a crack in the rock and attached the other two to the ground, thus making a kind of shelter beneath which he put the rucksack and provisions.

“Are we leaving this stuff there?” I asked.

“We’re not leaving it, I’m staying there too.”

“What do you mean you’re staying?”

“I mean that I’m sleeping here.”

“Sleeping there?”

This time he lost patience, and replied brusquely: “I can’t just lose four working hours a day, can I? A builder stays on site Monday to Saturday. The laborer goes back and forth with the materials. That’s how it’s done.”

I looked at the bivouac that he’d constructed. Now I understood why his rucksack had been so full.

“And you want to sleep in there for four months?”

“Three months, four months, whatever it takes. It’s summer. On Saturday I can go down and sleep in a bed.”

“So shouldn’t I stay here too?”

“Maybe later. There are still a lot of materials to bring up. I’ve borrowed a mule.”

Bruno had thought long and hard about the work that was before us. I was improvising; he certainly wasn’t. He had planned every phase, both my tasks and his, all the various stages and a timetable for them. He explained where the material had been prepared, and what I would have to bring up to him the next day. His mother would show me how to load the mule.

He said: “I’ll expect you at nine in the morning. At six you’ll be free to go. If it’s all right by you, that is.”

“Of course it’s all right by me.”

“Do you think you can do it?”

“Sure.”

“Good on you. So I’ll be seeing you then.”

I looked at the time: it was six-thirty. Bruno took a towel and a bar of soap and headed uphill, to wash at some place that he knew. I looked over the ruin, which seemed just the same as we’d found it that morning, except that now it was empty inside, and outside of it there was a fine stack of wood. I thought that it wasn’t bad for a first day’s work. Then I took my rucksack, said goodbye to my tree, and began walking towards Grana.

There was an hour that I loved more than any other in this month of June, and it was precisely the one during which I descended alone at the end of the day. In the morning it was different: I was in a rush, the mule would not take my orders, my only thought was to get up there. In the evening, instead, there was no reason to hurry. I left at six or seven with the sun still high in the bottom of the valley and with no one expecting me at home. I walked calmly, with my thoughts slowed by tiredness and the mule following behind without needing any prompting from me. From the lake down to the landslide, the rhododendrons were in bloom on the flanks of the mountain. At the Guglielmina farmstead, around the deserted buildings I startled roe deer foraging in the abandoned pastures; bolt upright with their ears at attention, they would look at me in alarm for an instant, then flee to the woods like thieves. Sometimes I stopped there for a smoke. While the mule grazed, I would sit on the larch tree stump where the photo of Bruno and me had been taken. I would contemplate the farmstead and the strange contrast between the entropy of human things and the resurgence of spring: the three buildings were falling into decline—their walls curving like elderly backs, their roofs succumbing to the weight of winters—while everywhere around them was awash with burgeoning herbs and flowers.

I would like to have known what Bruno was doing at that time. Had he lit the fire, or was he walking alone towards the mountain, or did he keep working until dark? In many ways the man that he had become surprised me. I had expected to find if not the double of his father then that of one of his cousins, or of the bricklayers I used to see him with at the bar. Instead he had nothing at all in common with these people. He seemed to me like someone who at a certain point in life had given up on the company of others, that he had found a corner of the world and retreated into it. He reminded me of his mother: I often came across her, in those days, when I was loading up of a morning. She showed me how to fasten the packsaddle, how to secure the planks or the tools on the flanks of the mule, how to goad him on when he refused to budge. But she had not uttered a word about my return, or about the work that I was doing with her son. Ever since I was a child it seemed that nothing in our lives was of interest to her, that she was happy in her own place, and that other people passed by her like the seasons. I wondered, though, whether she did not conceal feelings of an altogether different kind.

I would take the path along the river, and reaching Grana, would tie the mule up next to the house, light a fire, and put a saucepan of water on to boil. If I’d remembered to buy one I would open a bottle of wine. In the larder I had only pasta, conserves, and a few tins for emergencies. After the first two glasses I felt completely exhausted. Sometimes I would throw in the pasta and fall asleep while it was cooking, and find it later that night—the stove gone out, the bottle half-drunk, my supper reduced to an inedible mess. So I would open a tin of beans and devour them with a spoon, without even bothering to tip them from the tin. Then I would stretch out on my mattress beneath the table, zip myself into the sleeping bag, and instantly fall back into a deep sleep.

Towards the end of June my mother arrived with a friend. Her friends were taking turns keeping her company throughout the summer, though she did not seem to me to have the air of an inconsolable widow. Yet she told me herself that she was happy to have someone close to her, and I noticed the silent intimacy that she shared with this other woman: they spoke together infrequently in my presence, understanding each other with a glance. I saw them sharing the old house with a mutual ease that was more precious than words. After the meager funeral of my father I thought a lot about his loneliness, that kind of perpetual conflict between himself and the rest of the world: he had died in his car without leaving a single friend to mourn his absence. But with my mother I could see the fruits of a long life spent cultivating relationships, caring for them like the flowers on her balcony. I wondered if you learn and develop such a talent, or whether you just have it, or not, at birth. Whether there was still time for me to learn.

So now when I came down the mountain I found not just one but two women to care for me, the table laid, clean sheets on the bed: no more sleeping bag and beans. After supper my mother and I would linger in the kitchen to talk.

Such talk came easily to me with her, and on one occasion I told her that it was like going back to old times there together—only to discover that her own memories of those evenings we shared were quite different from mine.

In her mind, I had hardly ever spoken. She remembered me as absorbed in a world of my own that it was impossible to penetrate, and from which she rarely received any communication. She was only too happy, now, to have the opportunity to make up some ground between us.

At Barma Bruno and I had begun to build the walls. I described to my mother the way in which we were working, since she seemed keen to hear about what I was learning as a laborer. Each wall was actually made of two parallel rows of stones, separated by a space which we filled with smaller ones. Every so often a large stone was put in place across the gap, joining the two rows together. We used cement as little as possible, not for ecological reasons but because I had to carry it up there in sacks, each weighing twenty-five kilos. We would mix the cement with sand from the lake and would pour the mixture between the stones, so that from the outside it could hardly be noticed. For many days I had been going back and forth between Barma and the lake with the sand: there was a small beach on its far shore, where I would fill the mule’s saddlebags. I really liked the idea that it was this sand that was holding the house together.

My mother listened carefully, but she was not really interested in the carpentry.

“So how are you getting on with Bruno?” she asked.

“It’s strange. Sometimes I feel like I’ve known him forever, but then I think that I know next to nothing about him.”

“What’s so strange about it?”

“The way that he speaks to me. He’s very kind to me. More than kind, actually, he’s affectionate. I didn’t remember that side of him. It always strikes me as something I don’t really understand.”

I threw a piece of wood into the stove. I felt like having a cigarette. But I was embarrassed to smoke in front of my mother, and even though I would have liked to rid myself of that stupid secret, I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I went to pour myself a little grappa instead. Grappa was different; there was no embarrassment involved.

When I sat back down my mother said, “Well, you know, Bruno was very close to us during these years. At certain times he was here every evening. Dad helped him a lot.”

“Helped him in what way?”

“Not in a practical sense. How can I put it? Yes, on occasion he did lend him money, but that wasn’t it. At a certain point Bruno fell out with his own father. He never wanted to work with him again; I think he didn’t even see him for years. So if he needed any advice he would come here. He had real faith in what your father had to say.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“And he always asked after you; how you were, what you were up to. I told him what you had written in your letters. I never stopped giving him news about you.”

“I didn’t know that,” I repeated.

I was finding out what happens to the person who leaves: life goes on for the others without him. I imagined their evenings together when Bruno was twenty years old, twenty-five years old, and was there in my place, talking with my father. Maybe it would not have happened if I had stayed, or perhaps we would have shared those moments; more than jealousy I felt regret for not having been there. I felt as if I had missed out on important things, busying myself with others so inconsequential that I could hardly remember what they were.

We finished the walls and went on to construct the roof. It was already July when I went to the blacksmith in the village to collect the eight steel brackets that Bruno had ordered, made to his own design, together with a few dozen foot-long expansion screws. I loaded these materials onto the mule, together with a small generator, some more petrol, and my old climbing gear. Once everything had been delivered I went to the top of the rock wall, where I had never been before then. There were four larch trees up there. I secured myself to one of the biggest and lowered myself halfway down using a double rope, armed with an electric drill—then spent the rest of the day between the instructions shouted by Bruno from below, the humming of the generator, and the deafening shriek of the drill as it penetrated the rock. Four screws were necessary for each bracket, which meant thirty-two holes in all. According to Bruno these numbers were crucial: the whole viability of the roof depended on them. In the winter the rock would constantly shed snow, and he had thought long and hard about the specifications, in order to construct a roof that could withstand these blows. Several times I pulled myself up the rope, shifted the anchor point a bit further on, and slid back down to where he was indicating to drill the rock. Towards evening the eight brackets had all been fixed in place, aligned at regular intervals of four meters in height.

Our days would end with the beer that I now squeezed into the rucksack in the morning along with our provisions. We sat down in front of the fireplace that was blackened by ash and embers. I, in contrast to it, was white: covered in dust, hands aching from using the rock drill. I was proud that Bruno had decided to entrust me with that work.

“The problem with snow is that you never know how heavy it might get,” he said. “There are calculations with which you can work out the load borne, but it’s best to double everything.”

“What calculations?”

“Well, a cubic meter of water weighs ten quintals, right? Snow can weigh between three and seven, depending on how much air it contains. So if a roof was to withstand snow to a depth of two meters, you would have to allow for a weight of fourteen quintals. I double it.”

“So how did they used to work that out in the past?”

“In the past they used to shore everything up. In the autumn, before leaving. They would fill the house with poles reinforcing the roof. Remember those short, thick trunks that we found? But it looks as if one winter even the poles failed to do the job, or who knows, perhaps they forgot to put them in place properly.”

I looked at the tops of the walls. I tried to imagine the snow that had accumulated up there suddenly becoming detached and falling. It was some fall.

“Your father really enjoyed discussing this kind of problem.”

“Oh, really?”

“How wide a plank needs to be, at what distance from each other they need to be spaced, what is the best wood to use. Pine isn’t right because it’s too soft. Larch is stronger. It wasn’t enough for him to be told what was to be used; he always wanted to know the reasons behind everything. The fact is that one grows in the shade, the other in the sun: it’s the sun that hardens the wood; shade and water make it soft and unsuitable for beams.”

“Yes, I can believe that he liked to know such things.”

“He had even bought himself a book. I would tell him: don’t bother, Gianni, we can go and ask some old builder. I took him to see my old boss once. We took our plans to him, and your father brought along a notebook in which he wrote everything down. Though I suspect that afterwards he went to double-check everything with his book, since he didn’t trust people much, did he?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he did.”

I hadn’t heard my father’s name since the day of the funeral. I was glad to hear it uttered by Bruno, even though it seemed to me at times that we had known two altogether different people.

“Are we raising the beams tomorrow?” I asked.

“First we’ve got to cut them to size. And shape them to fit the brackets. To lift them we’ll need the mule; let’s see how it goes.”

“Do you think it will take a long time?”

“I don’t know. One thing at a time, no? First the beer.”

“OK. First the beer.”

In the meantime I had been getting back in shape. After a month of taking the road down every morning I was beginning to rediscover my former speed. It seemed to me that the grass in the fields along the way was getting thicker each day, the river water calmer, the green of the larches more vivid: and that for the woods the arrival of summer was like the end of a turbulent adolescence. It was also the period in which I used to arrive, as a boy. The mountain took on again the aspect with which I was most familiar, from the time when I thought that the seasons hardly changed up there and that there was a permanent summer awaiting my return. In Grana I would find the workers preparing the stables, moving things around with tractors. In a few days’ time they would take the herds up, and the lower reaches of the valley would be repopulated again.

Now nobody would be going higher anymore. There were another two ruins near the lake, not far from the road that I used going to and fro. The first, besieged by nettles, was in the same state as I had found my own property in the spring. But the roof had only partially collapsed, and taking a look inside, I found the same sad spectacle: its one small room had been vandalized, as if the owner had wanted on leaving it to take revenge for the miserable life lived there, or as if successive visitors had searched fruitlessly for anything of value. There remained a table, a wonky stool, crockery thrown amongst the rubbish, and a stove that still looked good to me, and that I intended to go back and salvage before everything was buried under another collapse. The second ruin, on the other hand, was barely the memory of a much older and more sophisticated building: the first could not have been more than a hundred years old; this one must have been built at least three centuries ago. It wasn’t a simple, small stable building but a large Alpine farmstead made up of separate structures, almost like an entire small village, with external stone staircases and roof beams of mysteriously imposing dimensions—mysterious because the trees big enough to make them grew hundreds of meters lower down, and I couldn’t imagine how they had been carried there. There was nothing left inside the houses except the walls that remained standing, scoured by the rain. Compared to the shacks I was familiar with, these ruins seemed to speak of a more aristocratic civilization that had exhausted itself in a period of decadence before becoming extinguished altogether.

Going up, I liked to stop for a moment on the shore of the lake. I would bend down to touch the water and test the temperature with my hand. The sun which illuminated the summits of the Grenon had not yet reached the basin, and the lake still had a nocturnal aspect, like a sky no longer dark but not yet light. I could no longer remember clearly why I had distanced myself from the mountain, or what else I had found to love when I had ceased to love it there—but it seemed to me, going back up alone every morning, that I had gradually begun to make my peace with it.

In those July days Barma resembled a sawmill. I had delivered various loads of planks, and now the terrace was crowded with stacked wood: two-meter-long planks of pine still white and perfumed with resin. The eight beams were suspended between the rock face and the long wall, fixed to the iron brackets, inclined at thirty degrees and supported in the middle by a long beam of larch. Now that the skeleton of the roof was in place I could imagine the finished house: its door faced west and it had two fine north-facing windows that looked towards the lake. Bruno had wanted them to be arched, losing entire days shaping with mallet and chisel the stones that surrounded them. Inside there would be two rooms, one per window. From the two floors of the old building, with the stable below and living room above, we wanted to make only one that would be taller and more spacious. Though it proved to be beyond me as yet, I would sometimes try to visualize the light that would come into it.

On arriving, I would rekindle the embers in the fireplace by throwing in a few dry twigs, fill a small pan with water, and put it on the fire. From the rucksack I would take out fresh bread and a single tomato—one of those that Bruno’s mother had managed to grow miraculously at an altitude of thirteen hundred meters. In search of the coffee I would poke my head inside the bivouac and find the sleeping bag disheveled, a candle stump melted onto a plank, a half-open book. Glancing at the cover I smiled at seeing the name of its author: Conrad. From all the schooling that my mother had given him, Bruno had retained a passion for novels about the sea.

He would come out of the house as soon as the smell of the fire reached him. He was in there measuring and cutting the rafters for the roof. He looked wilder as the week progressed, and if I had lost my sense of time I could tell what day of the week it was by the length of his stubble. At nine he was already deep into his work, absorbed by thoughts from which he would only emerge with difficulty.

“Oh,” he would say, “you’re here.”

He would raise his hand and give me his truncated salute, then join me for breakfast. With his knife he would cut a chunk of bread and a slice of toma. The tomato he ate as it was—without cutting it and without salt or anything else—staring at the building site and thinking about the work that lay ahead.

SEVEN

IT WAS THE SEASON of return and of reconciliation, two words I thought about frequently as the summer ran its course. One evening my mother told me a story about herself, my father, and the mountain, about the way in which they had met and ended up marrying. It was odd to be hearing about it so late, given that it was the story of how our family originated, and therefore of how I came to be born. But when a boy I was too young for this kind of story, and after that had stopped wanting to hear: at twenty I would have put my hands over my ears rather than listen to family reminiscences, and even on this evening my first reaction was one of reluctance. Yet one side of me looked with affection on these things that were unknown to me. As I listened I gazed out at the opposite flank of the valley, in the penumbra of nine in the evening. It was thick with fir trees on that side, a wood without clearings that descended emphatically all the way to the river. Only a long gorge cut through it with a lighter line, and it was this that held my eye.

As my mother’s story unfolded I began to feel something quite different. I know this story already, I thought. And it was true that in my own way I did know it. For years I had collected fragments of it, like someone who possesses pages torn from a book and has read them thousands of times in random order. I had seen photographs, listened to conversations. I had observed my parents and their way of dealing with things. I knew which arguments ended abruptly in silence, which others were drawn out, and which names from the past had the power to sadden or to move them. I had all the elements of the story at my disposal but had never managed to reconstruct the narrative in its entirety.

After I had been looking outside for a while I saw the does that were waiting there on the other side. In the gorge there must have been a vein of water, and every evening just before dark they would leave the wood to drink from it. From this distance I could not see the water, but the deer showed that it was there. They came and went along their own track, and I watched them until it was too dark to see anything anymore.

This was the story: in the fifties my father was the best friend of my mother’s brother, my uncle Piero. They had both been born in 1942, and were five years younger than she was. They had met as children, on the campsite to which the village priest would take them. In the summer they would spend a whole month in the Dolomites. They slept in a tent, played in the woods, learned how to be in the mountains and to fend for themselves, and this was the life that had made them such close friends. I could understand that, no? my mother said. Yes, it was not at all difficult to imagine them.

Piero did extremely well at school; my father had stronger legs and a stronger character. Actually, though, the contrast was not so simple: in some respects my father was the more fragile of the two, and he was also the one who could touch others with his enthusiasm—he was the most imaginative as well as the most restless. His high spirits when in company were infectious, and partly because of this, partly because he was living at boarding school, he soon became a regular at my mother’s home. To her he had seemed like a boy with too much energy to burn, like someone who needed to run faster than others in order to use it up. The fact that he was an orphan counted for nothing in those days. It was so common after the war, just as it was common to take in somebody else’s son—the son of a relative, perhaps, or of someone who had emigrated, who knows where. In the farmhouse there was no shortage of room, or of work either.

It was not that my father was in need of a practical arrangement. He didn’t lack a roof over his head: what he lacked was a family. And so it was that at sixteen or seventeen years old he was always there, Saturdays and Sundays—and every day in the summer for the harvest, the winemaking, the hay cutting, the woodcutting in the forest. He liked to study. But he also liked the outdoor life. My mother told me about when they had challenged each other to press I don’t know how many hundreds of kilos of grapes with their feet, of their youthful discovery of wine and of the day they had been found hiding in the cellar, completely drunk. There were so many anecdotes of this kind, she said, but she wanted to make one thing clear: this relationship did not begin and develop by chance. There was a specific mover behind it. The priest, the one from the mountain who was a friend of my grandfather, had for years taken girls and boys camping, and had kept a keen eye on my father to see if he would bond with the others. My grandfather had in turn agreed to welcome this orphan into his own home. It would also be a way of providing for his future.

Piero was similar to me, my mother said. He was taciturn, reflective. He had a sensitivity that made him able to understand others, and which at the same time made him a bit vulnerable around anyone with a character stronger than his own. When the time came to go to university, he was in no doubt as to his choice of subject: he had always wanted more than anything else to become a doctor. And he would have made a good doctor, my mother said. He had what it took to be one, a talent for compassion and for listening. My father on the other hand was less interested in people than he was in the material world: in earth, fire, air, water; he liked the idea of being able to plunge his hands into its material components and to find out what they were made of. Yes, I thought, that was him all right. That was how I remembered him, fascinated by every grain of sand and crystal of ice, altogether indifferent to people. I could easily imagine the passion with which, at nineteen, he had embarked on his study of chemistry.

In the meantime he and Piero had begun to go into the mountains by themselves. Almost every Saturday, from June to September, they would take the bus for Trento or Belluno, then hitchhike back up the mountain. They spent the nights in meadows, or sometimes in a hayloft. They had no money with which to buy anything. But then neither did anyone else who went into the mountains in those days, my mother said: the Alps were a poor man’s North Pole or Pacific Ocean, the destination of young people like them who were in search of adventure. Of the two it was my father who studied the maps and planned new routes. Piero was more cautious, but also more obstinate. He was difficult to convince in the first place, but even more difficult to dissuade halfway, and was the ideal companion for my father, who had a tendency to give up as soon as things did not go according to plan.

Then their paths in life diverged. The chemistry degree was shorter than the one in medicine: my father graduated first, and in ’67 went to do his military service. He ended up in the Alpine artillery, dragging cannon and mortar up the mule tracks of the Great War. His degree earned him the rank of NCO, or Sergeant of Mules, as he called it: he didn’t spend much time in barracks that year, but spent almost the entire time moving from valley to valley with his company. He discovered that he did not dislike this kind of life at all. Whenever he came back he seemed older, both in comparison to the young man who had left and to Piero, who was still spending whole days buried in his books. It was as if he had been the first to taste something harder and more real, and that he liked the taste. He had experienced, albeit in a grappa-induced fog, the long marches and encampments in the snow. And it was about the snow that he would talk to Piero when on leave. About its different forms, its mutable character, its language. In one of those bursts of enthusiasm to which he was prone as a young chemist, he had fallen in love with a new element. He would say that the mountain in winter was another world entirely, and that they should go there together.

And so it was that during the Christmas of ’68, soon after his discharge from the military, he and Piero inaugurated their first winter season. They managed to borrow from someone the skis and sealskins. They began by going again to the places they knew best, except that now, rather than staying out under the stars, they had to pay to sleep at the refuges. My father was super fit, my uncle much less so since he had spent the last year preparing for his final exams. But he was as enthusiastic as my father about making new discoveries. They barely had enough money for food and board, let alone to employ an Alpine guide, so their technique was what it was. And in any case, according to my father, going up was just a question of having good legs—and you could always find a way of getting down. Little by little they were even developing a style of their own. Until, that is, they decided to head in March for a fork of the Sassolungo, and found themselves crossing a slope in the afternoon sun.

I could see vividly the scene that my mother was describing, however many times she must have told it before. My father was up ahead a short distance, and had removed a ski to prepare for the assault, when he felt the ground giving way beneath his feet. He heard a rustling, like the sound that a wave makes retreating over sand. And it really did seem as if the whole slope that they had just traversed was in the process of retreating downwards. Very slowly, at first: my father went down a meter, shifted to the side, and managed to grab hold of a rock, and watched his ski continue sliding on down. Piero, who had been on the steepest and smoothest part of the slope, was going down too. My father saw him lose his balance and slide on his belly, looking up, with his hands scrabbling for purchase that was not there. Then the bank of snow gathered speed and momentum. This was not the dry snow of winter which plummets in powdery clouds—it was the damp spring snow that goes down rolling. Rolling and gathering until it encounters an obstacle, and it buried Piero with hardly an impact: it just went over him and continued its descent. Two hundred meters below the slope flattened out, and it was only there that the avalanche stopped.

Even before it had done so my father ran down in search of his friend, but could not find him. Now the snow was hard: heavy snow compacted by the fall. He wandered on the avalanche calling out, searching everywhere for any sign of movement. But the snow was completely still again, even though it was less than a minute since it had moved. In the months that followed my father would tell it like this: it was as if some great beast had been disturbed in its sleep, merely growled, and then shaken off its irritation before settling down to sleep again in a more comfortable place. As far as the mountain was concerned, nothing had happened.

The only hope, something that happens in a few rare cases, was that Piero had created an air pocket beneath the snow in which he was still able to breathe. In any case my father did not have a shovel, so he took the only sensible course of action open to him: he started towards the refuge where they had slept, only to find himself sinking in softer snow. So he turned round again, retrieved the one remaining ski, and managed somehow to get down with it—despite sliding in short bursts and frequently falling, it was still much better than sinking at every step. He reached the refuge midafternoon and called the emergency services. By the time they got there it was already dark, and they found my uncle the next morning, dead beneath a meter of avalanche, suffocated by the snow.

It was immediately clear to everyone that it was all my father’s fault. Who else could they have blamed? Two facts proved the extent to which they were badly underprepared for winter: they were ill-equipped and had been up there at completely the wrong time. It had recently snowed. It was far too warm to attempt the crossing of a slope. As the more experienced of the two, my father should have known this—should have avoided the crossing and been the first to retreat. My grandfather found something unforgivable in his mistakes, and rather than diminishing with time his rage became more deeply rooted. He did not go so far as to shut my father from the house, but he was no longer pleased to see him, and his whole demeanor altered whenever he turned up. Then he started to avoid him. Even a year afterwards, at the memorial Mass for his son, he made sure to sit on the other side of the church from him. At a certain point my father gave up and ceased to disturb him.

And it is precisely at this point in the story that my mother enters the stage. Though in fact she had always been a part of it, albeit as a spectator. She had known my father for what seemed like a lifetime, even if at first she had merely thought of him as the friend of her brother. Then, gradually, he had become her friend as well. They had sung, drunk, walked, harvested grapes, side by side together so many times that, after the accident, they began to meet up to talk: my father was in a terrible state, and to my mother it did not seem fair. It did not seem fair that he had been given the blame for everything and then left alone to shoulder it. They ended up falling for each other, and about a year later they were married. The entire family refused their invitations to the wedding. So they were married without any relatives present, already prepared to leave for Milan where their lives would begin again. With a new house, new jobs, new friends, new mountains. I was also part of this new life: in fact, my mother said, this was what made sense of all the rest. I with my old-fashioned name: a family name.

That was all. When my mother had finished her account, I thought about the glaciers. The way in which my father would speak about them to me.

He was not one for retracing his own steps and did not like thinking again about unhappy times, but on certain occasions in the mountains—even on those virginal mountains where no friend had died—he would look at the glacier and something would resurface and come back to him. He put it like this: that the summer erases memories, just like it melts the snow; but the glacier is the snow of winters long past; it is a memory of winter that does not wish to be forgotten. Only now did I understand what he was talking about. And I knew once and for all that I had two fathers: the first had been the stranger with whom I had lived for twenty years in the city, and then burnt my bridges with for another ten; the second was my father as he was in the mountains, the one I had only glimpsed but still knew better than the first: the man who walked behind me on the paths, the lover of glaciers. This other father had left me a ruin to rebuild. So I decided to forget all about the first, and to complete that work to remember him by.

EIGHT

BY AUGUST WE HAD finished the roof of the house. It was made up of two layers of planks separated by a metal sheet and insulation. On the outside it was covered with shingles of larch, superimposed one over another and traversed by grooves down which the water could run off; inside there were matchboards made of spruce. The larch would protect the house from the rain; the spruce would retain the heat. We had decided not to make a hole in it for a skylight so that even at the height of summer the interior would be shaded. The north-facing windows received no direct light, but looking out of them you could see the mountains in front of you, rising on the other side of the lake, shining almost white. Their outcrops of rock and scree were blinding in this season. The light which entered the windows came from there, as if from a mirror. This is how a house built on the reverse side works.

I went outside to look at the far mountains in sunlight. Then turned towards our own, the Grenon, which covered the sky on the other side. I wanted to climb to its top and see what Barma looked like from up there. It had been looming above me every day for two months, but I had not thought of doing this until now: I think that my legs themselves were fostering the desire in me, together with the heat of summer. They were restless again, having regained their strength, and the summer was drawing me towards the heights.

Bruno came down from the roof where he was working on a painstaking job. A layer of lead needed to be fixed between the rock face and the roof, so that the water draining down on rainy days would not find its way into the house. The lining needed to be molded one piece at a time with a hammer, so that it would follow and adhere to every hollow and protrusion. The lead was soft, and with careful work it looked in the end almost as if it had been soldered to the rock, or as if it were one of its own dark veins. In this way the roof and the rock became a single surface.

I asked Bruno about the path leading to the Grenon, and he pointed to a track that went up from the lake along the slope. It disappeared in a thicket of alder, crossed a swampy area, and reappeared further on between flounces of new grass. Behind there, he said, what looked like a ridge actually hid another basin, and another lake smaller than our own. From the lake onwards it was all scree. There wasn’t really a path to follow when climbing it, perhaps just a few piled stones indicating the way, or some track used by chamois. But in any case, he said, pointing to a notch in the crest of the summit where a residual snowfield stood out, by keeping my eye fixed on that snow I couldn’t go wrong.

“I’d like to take a trip up there,” I said. “On Saturday or Sunday maybe if it’s sunny.”

“Why not go now,” he said. “I can do this on my own.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course. Take a day off. Go on, go.”

The lake higher up was different from ours. The last few Swiss pines and larch trees, the last clumps of willow and alder gradually disappeared from the slope, and beyond the ridge the rarefied air of the mountain already blew. The lake was only a greenish pool surrounded by meager grazing and expanses of blueberries. Twenty or so unattended goats were huddled near a ruin and ignored my presence, or almost. The path ended there, amongst the false trails made by the passage of cattle, where the threadbare grass gave way to slabs of scree. I could see clearly the snowfield up above, and I remembered my father’s rules: I imagined a straight line between myself and the snow and took it. I could hear his voice in my ears, saying: straight, go up this way.

It had been a long time since I had walked above the treeline. I had never done so alone—but must have learned well, as I still felt at ease moving across the scree. I would see a pile of stones up ahead and make directly for it, moving from stone to stone, instinctively choosing the largest and most stable and avoiding the unstable ones. I felt a kind of give from the rocks, which did not absorb your step like earth or grass but returned some of the force to your legs, enhancing your momentum. So as soon as I had placed a foot on a stone and pushed my weight forwards and upwards the other foot began to move forwards too, and I soon found myself running and leaping across the scree, almost ceding control to my legs and letting them do the work for me. I felt that I could trust them, and that I could not go wrong. I remembered the joy that my father showed as soon as we had left behind the Alpine meadows and entered into the world of rock. The same joy that I felt now, coursing through my own body.

When I reached the small snowfield I was breathing heavily from the run. I stopped to touch that August snow. It was icy and granular, so hard that you needed to scrape it with your nails, and I gathered together a handful to wipe over my forehead and neck to cool myself down. I sucked on it until I felt my lips sting, then climbed across the last section of scree up to the crest. Now the view opened up for me on the other side of the Grenon, the side that was in the sun, where beneath my feet after a section of rock a long meadow sloped gently down to a group of huts, and to grazing dotted by cattle. It seemed as if I had suddenly descended a thousand meters, or had found myself in another season. In front of me the full light of summer and the sound of the lively cattle; behind me, when I looked back, a shadowy, sombre autumn of damp rock and patches of snow. From up here the two lakes were twinned by the perspective. I looked for the house that Bruno and I were building, but perhaps I was too high up—or perhaps it was too well blended-in to be distinguished from the mountain that supplied the material from which it was made.

The piles of stone markers continued beneath the ridge, along a good ledge. But I felt like climbing, and seeing no great difficulties ahead of me decided to reach the summit this way. For the first time in years I placed my hand on the rock, selected footholds, and heaved myself up. Although it was an easy climb, the old maneuvers demanded my complete concentration. I had to think again about exactly where to place each hand and foot, using balance rather than force, trying to stay light. I soon lost all sense of time. I was oblivious to the surrounding mountains, and to the two contrasting worlds that plummeted beneath me: only the rock face directly in front of me existed, only my feet and my hands. Until I reached a point at which it was impossible to climb further, and only then did I realize that I was at the summit.

Now what? I thought. There was a mound of stones on the crest. Beyond this rudimentary monument Monte Rosa had appeared, its glaciers outlined against the sky. Perhaps I should have had a beer with me with which to celebrate, but feeling neither exultation nor relief I decided to stay only as long as it would take to smoke a cigarette, bid farewell to my father’s mountain, and then head back down.

I still knew how to recognize each one of the peaks. I observed them while smoking, from east to west, and remembered all of their names. I wondered how high I’d reached, and thinking that I must have passed the three thousand meter mark without any adverse effects on my stomach, I began to look around for any marker giving the altitude. I saw that jammed into a mound of stones there was a metal box. I knew immediately what would be inside. I opened the lid and found a notebook inside a plastic bag, which had not wholly succeeded in protecting it. Its ruled pages had the texture of paper that had dried after getting wet. There were also a couple of pens inside, with which those rare climbers to this point had left a thought, or sometimes just a name and date. The last entry had been made over a week ago. I leafed through its pages and saw that no more than ten people a year had climbed this barren mountain, which cast its shadow over my house and which I already thought of as mine, and that its record of these climbers therefore went back over many years. I read many names, and hardly impressive comments. It seemed to be the case that after so much exertion nobody could find the words with which to express what they felt: those who tried left only some poetic or “spiritual” banality. I leafed backwards through the notebook somewhat irritated by humankind, and did not know what I was looking for until I found it: two lines, from 1997. I recognized the handwriting. And the spirit behind the words. He had written: Climbed up from Grana in 3 hours and 58 minutes. Still in great shape! Giovanni Guasti.

I spent a long time staring at my father’s words. The ink blurred by water, the signature less legible than the two phrases that preceded it. It was the signature of a man who had been used to signing his name frequently—no longer really a name, just an automatic gesture. Concentrated into the exclamation mark was all the good humor that he had felt that day. He had been alone, or so it seemed from the notebook, and so I imagined him climbing over the scree and coming out on the summit just as I had done. I was sure that he must have been keeping an eye on the time, and that at some point he must have started to hurry. He would have wanted at all costs to get there in under four hours. He felt good up there at the top, proud of the strength of his legs and elated to see his luminous mountain again. I thought of tearing out the page to keep, but then it seemed as sacrilegious as taking away a stone from the summit.

I carefully wrapped the notebook in the plastic, placed it back inside the box, and left it there.

In the weeks that followed I found other messages from my father. I would study the map of his routes and go in search of him on less noble peaks, those neglected ones lower down the valley. On Monte Rosa towards the August bank holiday processions of roped parties could be made out on the glaciers, and climbers from all over the world crowded into the refuges—but where I went I saw no one, except for the odd solitary climber of my father’s age or older. When I overtook them it seemed like I was meeting him. And for them I think that it was like encountering a son, since they would watch me approach and stand aside saying: “Make way for the young!” I could see that these men were pleased if I stopped for a chat, and began to do so. Sometimes I would take the opportunity of sharing a bite to eat. They had all been going back to these same mountains for thirty, forty, fifty years, and preferred just as I did the abandoned high valleys in which nothing ever seemed to change.

A man with white whiskers told me that for him it was a way of revisiting and thinking about his past life. It was as if, starting out on the same old track once a year, he was immersing himself in his recollections and climbing back up again the course of his own memory. He came from the countryside like my father, but his was the rice-growing region between Novara and Vercelli. From the house in which he was born he could see Monte Rosa above the fields, and when he was little had been told that up there was where all the water came from: water for drinking, the water in the rivers, the water with which to flood the rice fields—all the water that was used came from up there, and as long as the ice continued to glisten on the horizon there would be none of the problems caused by lack of water. I liked this old gentleman. He was a widower and missed his wife deeply. He had sunspots on his bald head and a pipe that he filled as we talked. At a certain point he took a canteen from his rucksack, poured two drops of grappa onto a sugar cube, and offered it to me.

“With this you’ll go up like a train,” he said. And then after a short pause: “Well anyway, there’s nothing like the mountains for making you remember.”

I too was beginning to realize this.

At the summit I would find a crooked cross, sometimes not even that. I would disturb ibexes that would be startled without ever really fleeing from me. The males would snort their irritation at my presence, the females and little ones sheltering behind them for safety. If I was lucky I would find the metal box hidden at the foot of the cross, or somewhere amongst the stones.

My father’s signature was in all the notebooks that I found. He was sometimes laconic, always boastful. I would find myself traveling back ten years just in order to find four words: Done this one too. Giovanni Guasti. He must have felt in particularly good shape on one occasion, and been moved by something to write: Ibexes, eagles, fresh snow. Like being young again. On another he’d written: Thick fog all the way to the summit. Old songs. Magnificent view of the interior. I knew all of those songs, and would like to have been with him, to sing them in the fog. It was part of a melancholy vein that I found in another message from the previous year: Came back up here after a very long time. It would be wonderful to just stay up here all together, without having to see anyone anymore, without ever having to go back down to the valley.

“All who?” I wondered. And where was I on that day? Who knows whether he had already begun to feel his heart weakening, or what else had happened to prompt him to write such words. Without ever having to go back down to the valley. It was the same sentiment that had made him dream of a house at the highest point possible, isolated and impervious, where you could live away from the world. Before putting the notebook back where I had found it, I copied his words and the date into my own notebook. In the books that had been left there I never added anything of my own.

Perhaps Bruno and I were actually living inside my father’s dream. We had found each other again in a pause in our lives: one of those pauses that bring one period to an end and precede another, though we hardly realized this at the time. From Barma we would see the eagles circling below us, the marmots on the lookout before the entrances to their burrows. We would occasionally spot the odd angler or two down at the lake, and the odd walker—but no one looked up in our direction to find us, and we did not descend to greet them. We would wait until everyone had gone before going down of an August afternoon for a swim. The water in the lake was freezing cold, and we would compete to see who could stay under the longest before getting out and racing around the meadows to get the blood circulating in our veins again. We also had a fishing rod, just a pole with a hook, with which I would occasionally manage to catch something using grasshoppers for bait. Then for supper there would be a trout grilled over the fire, and red wine. We would stay in front of the fire, drinking, until it got dark.

By now I was also sleeping up there. I camped out in the unfinished house, directly beneath one of the windows. The first night, I spent long hours gazing from my sleeping bag at the stars and listening to the wind. I would turn over to face inwards, and even in the dark could feel the presence of the rock face, as if it were exerting a magnetic force, or a gravitational one—or like when, with your eyes closed, someone puts a hand close to your forehead and you feel the hand’s presence. I felt as if I were sleeping in a cave excavated from the mountain itself.

Like Bruno, I soon became unaccustomed to hurry and to civilization: I reluctantly went down to the village once a week, just in order to buy supplies, and was surprised to find myself back amongst cars after a walk of only a few hours. The shop owners treated me like any other tourist—a slightly more eccentric one, perhaps—and I was content to leave it at that. I felt better when I was back on the path. I loaded the bread, vegetables, salami, cheese, and wine onto the mule, gave him a slap on the rump, and left him to find his own way along the path that he knew now by heart. Perhaps we really could have stayed up there forever without anyone even noticing.

The late August rains came. I remembered them well. These are the days that bring autumn to the mountains: when they are over and the sun comes back, its light is less warm and more oblique, casting long shadows. Those banks of slow-moving, shapeless clouds that now swallowed the peaks had once told me that it was time to leave, and I had protested to the heavens that the summer had only lasted an instant—had it not only just started?—and could not have already flown away like this.

At Barma the rain was flattening the grass in the meadows, breaking the surface of the lake. The drumming and run-off of the rain on our roof blended with the crackling of the fire. At this time we were lining one of the rooms with fir, keeping warm with the stove that I’d salvaged. We had installed it against the wall made from the rock face. The rock behind the stove would gradually warm up and radiate back heat to the rest of the room, and the wood paneling was meant to help in conserving it. But this was to be at some future date: without windows or doors in place the wind blew down our necks, and the rain came in, in diagonal gusts. With work finished for the day, it was pleasant to be inside, watching the stove and feeding the fire with wood that had once been part of the old house.

One evening Bruno talked to me about a project that he had in mind. He wanted to buy his uncle’s farmstead. He had been putting aside money for a good while now. His cousins, who were more than happy to rid themselves of the place and their bad memories of it, had come up with a price: Bruno had spent everything he had on a down payment, hoping to borrow the rest from the bank. These months spent in Barma had served as a kind of trial run: now he knew that he could cope. If everything went according to plan he would spend the next summer working in the same way there: he wanted to rebuild the huts, buy some cattle, and in a few years hoped to have the farm up and running.

“It’s a nice idea,” I said.

“Cows don’t cost much now,” he said.

“And does it pay to keep them?”

“Not a lot. But that doesn’t matter. If it was just about the money I’d stay as a builder.”

“You don’t like working as one anymore?”

“Sure, I like it. But I always knew that it was a temporary thing. It’s something that I can do, but it’s not something I was born to do.”

“So what were you born to do?”

“To be a man of the mountains.”

Uttering this phrase he became serious. I’d only ever heard him use it a few times before, when speaking of his ancestors: the old inhabitants of the mountain that he knew through the woods, the wild meadows, the derelict houses that he had spent a lifetime exploring. Abandoning them had once seemed inevitable to him too, when the only life he could see for himself was the same as for the men of the valley. You had to look down, to where the money was and the work—and not up, to where there was nothing but weeds and ruins. He told me that in the end, on the farmstead, his uncle had stopped fixing anything. If a chair broke he just burned it in the stove. If he saw an invasive plant in the meadow he couldn’t be bothered to bend down and uproot it. His father would start cursing if you so much as mentioned the place to him: he would gladly have turned his rifle on the cattle, and the thought that everything there was going to rack and ruin gave him a twisted kind of pleasure.

But Bruno felt himself to be different from this. So different from his father, his uncle, and his cousins that at a certain point he had understood who it was that he did in fact resemble, and from where he had got his desire to heed the call of the mountains.

“From your mother,” I said. But not because it had ever occurred to me before: I only saw it now, at this moment.

“Yes,” said Bruno. “We’re just like each other, me and her.”

He paused so I could reflect properly on what he’d said, and then he added: “Except that she’s a woman. If I decide to go and stay in the woods no one says anything about it. If a woman does it, she’s taken for a witch. If I keep quiet, what problem is there with that? I’m only a man who chooses not to speak. A woman who doesn’t speak must be half-crazy.”

It was true: we had all thought this about her. I myself had never exchanged with her more than a couple of words. Even now, when I passed by Grana and she gave me potatoes, tomatoes, and toma to take back up. A little more stooped and thinner than I remembered, she was nevertheless still for me the strange figure that I had seen up there in the vegetable garden as a boy.

Bruno said: “If my mother had been a man she would have had the life she wanted. I guess that she wasn’t really cut out for marriage. Definitely not for marriage with my father. Her only bit of good luck was getting free from him.”

“And how did she do that?”

“By keeping her mouth shut. And by staying up there with the chickens. You can’t get so angry with someone like that; sooner or later you leave them in peace.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“No. Or perhaps she did, in a way. It doesn’t matter whether she told me or not, I worked it out for myself.”

I knew that Bruno was right. I had understood something similar about my own parents. I began to think over that phrase—her only bit of good luck was getting free from him—and wondered whether it could be applied to my mother too. It was always possible, given what I knew about her. Perhaps not really a stroke of luck, but maybe more like a relief. My father had always been a man who filled the room. He was bossy, and he was hard work. When he was around, no one else mattered but him: his character demanded that all of our lives should revolve around his.

“And you?” Bruno asked me after a while.

“What about me?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Oh, I’m going away, I think. If I can manage it.”

“Where to?”

“To Asia maybe. I don’t know yet.”

I had hardly ever spoken to him about my longing to travel. I was tired of being penniless, especially so since I needed money in order to leave: in the past few years I had spent all my energy just struggling to make ends meet. I didn’t miss any of the things that I didn’t have, except for the freedom to travel the world. With my father’s small inheritance I had paid off my debts and wanted to devise a project that would take me far away from home. I felt like taking a flight somewhere and staying away for a few months, without any clear idea as to what I would do, just to see if I could find some story to tell. I had never done anything like this before.

“It must be great to leave like that,” Bruno said.

“Would you like to come?” I asked. I was joking, but not entirely. I was sorry that the work had come to an end. Never before had I felt so at ease with anyone.

“No, it’s not for me,” he said. “You’re the one who comes and goes. I’m the one who stays put. Same as always, right?”

When it was finished, in September, the house was like this: it had one room made of wood, and one of stone. The wooden room was larger and warmer with the stove, the table, two stools, and a larder. Some of this furniture came from other ruins, salvaged and cleaned up by me with elbow grease and sandpaper; some had been made by Bruno from the old floor planks. Under the roof, against the rock face, there was a loft that could be reached with a ladder—the warmest and most enclosed corner of the house—while the table was placed right under the window, so that you could look outside when sitting there. The stone room was small and cool, and we intended to use it as a cellar, a workshop, and a storeroom. We left in there most of the equipment that we had used, and all of the leftover wood. There was no bathroom, no running water, no electricity, but we had thick panes in the windows and a sturdy front door with a latch but no lock. Only the stone room was under lock and key. The lock was needed to prevent the equipment from being stolen, but the wooden room remained open as was customary in the mountain refuges, in case anyone passing that way should get into difficulty and need shelter. The grass around the house had been mown like a garden’s now; the firewood was stacked under a lean-to and my little pine tree looked out towards the lake, even though it did not seem any healthier or more robust to me than on the day that I replanted it there.

On the last day, I went to Grana to collect my mother. She laced on the leather hiking boots that I’d seen her use since I was a child: she had never had another pair. I thought that she would get tired climbing up there, but she went up slowly, at her own pace, without stopping once, and from behind I could see how she was walking. She kept the same slow but sure rhythm for two hours. She gave the impression that she would never slip or lose her balance.

It made her very happy to see the house that Bruno and I had built. It was a short September day, with little water remaining in the rivers, the grass drying in the meadows, the air no longer the warm air of August. Bruno had lit the stove, and it felt good to be indoors, drinking tea in front of the window. My mother liked the window, and she stayed there gazing out while Bruno and I organized the material that had to be taken down with us. Then I saw her go onto the terrace and look carefully at everything, so that she would remember it: the lake, the scree, the peaks of Grenon, the look of the house. She stood for a good while looking at the inscription that the day before, with mallet and chisel, I had made in the rock wall. I had gone over it with black paint, and it read:

Then she called us to sing a song. It was the song that is sung when a lover of the mountains dies, the song in which you ask God to allow him to continue to go walking in the afterlife. Both Bruno and I knew it. It all seemed just right to me, all done as was fitting. There was one thing still to be said: I had been thinking about it for a while and decided to say it now so that my mother could hear it, so that there would be a witness to remember it: I said that I wanted this house not to be mine, but to be ours. Mine and Bruno’s. Both of ours. I was convinced that this was what my father had wanted, that he had left it between us. But above all I wanted it to be this way myself, because we had built it together. From that moment, I said, he should consider it to be his own home, just as much as I considered it to be mine.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I am.”

“Then it’s fine,” he said. “Thanks.”

Then he removed the embers from the stove and threw them outside. I closed the front door, took the mule’s bridle, and told my mother to lead the way, and the four of us set off towards Grana, at my mother’s pace.