The Eight Mountains

NINE

IT WAS AN OLD Nepalese man who told me, afterwards, about the eight mountains. He was carrying a load of hens up the valley below Everest, heading to one of the refuges where they were destined to become chicken curry for tourists: he had a cage on his back which was divided into a dozen separate cells, and the chickens, still alive, were flustered inside them. I had not yet come across a contraption of this kind. I had seen panniers full of chocolate, biscuits, powdered milk, bottles of beer, of whisky and of Coca-Cola, going along the trails of Nepal to cater for the tastes of Westerners, but never a portable henhouse. When I asked the man if I could photograph it he put it down on a low wall, removed from his forehead the band with which he was carrying it and struck a pose, smiling, next to the chickens.

Then while he was getting his breath back we talked for a while. I’d visited the region he came from, which astonished him. He understood that I was not a casual walker, and discovering that I could even string together a few phrases in Nepalese, asked me why I was so interested in the Himalayas. I had a ready answer to that question: I told him that there was a mountain where I had grown up, and to which I was attached, and that it had fostered in me a desire to see the most beautiful mountains in the world.

“Ah,” he said. “I understand. You are doing the tour of the eight mountains.”

“The eight mountains?”

The man picked up a small stick and drew a circle with it on the ground. You could tell he was used to drawing it; he executed it so perfectly. Then, inside the circle he drew a diameter, and then another perpendicular one bisecting the first, and then a third and a fourth through the point of bisection, thus creating a wheel with eight spokes. I thought that if I had drawn that figure myself I would have started with a cross—that it was typical of an Asian to begin with a circle.

“Have you ever seen a drawing like this?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “In mandalas.”

“That’s right,” he said. “We believe that at the center of the earth there is a tremendously high mountain, Sumeru. Around Sumeru there are eight mountains and eight seas. This is the world for us.”

While he was speaking he drew outside of the wheel a small peak for each spoke, and then a little wave between one peak and the next. Eight mountains and eight seas. Finally, at the center of the wheel, he drew a crown which I thought might represent the summit of Sumeru. He assessed his work for a moment and shook his head, as if to say that this was a drawing that he had made a thousand times but that of late he had begun to lose his touch a little. Be that as it may, he pointed the stick to the center and concluded, “We ask: who has learned most, the one who has been to all eight mountains, or the one who has reached the summit of Sumeru?”

The chicken carrier looked at me and smiled. I smiled too, because the story amused me and because I thought that I had understood its meaning. He rubbed out the drawing with his hand, but I knew that I would not forget it. Well, I said to myself, this will be a good one to tell to Bruno.

The center of my world in those years was the house that I had built with Bruno. I would stay there for long periods between June and October, and sometimes would take friends who would immediately fall in love with the place. In this way I had up there the company that I lacked in the city. During the week I lived alone, reading, writing, cutting wood, and wandering around the old paths. I became accustomed to solitude. And I was at ease with it, though not entirely. But on Saturdays during the summer there was always someone who would seek me out there, and then the house ceased to resemble the hut of a hermit, becoming more like one of the refuges that I used to frequent with my father, with wine on the table, the stove lit, friends who would stay up late talking—and that shared isolation from the world that made us all brothers for a night. The refuge was warmed by the fire of this intimacy, and it seemed to me that between one visit and the next it kept its embers glowing.

Bruno was also attracted to the warmth of Barma. I would see him appear on the path towards evening carrying a piece of toma and a bottle of wine, or hear his knock on the door when it was dark already, as if it was quite normal up there, at two thousand meters, to receive a visit from a neighbor at night. If I happened to have company he would happily join us all at the table. I found him to be more talkative than usual, as if he had been silent too long and had accumulated a lot to say. In Grana he remained confined in his world of building work, books, walks in the woods, silent reflection—and I could understand the urgency with which after a day on the building site he would wash and change, ignore his tiredness and the urge to sleep, and take the path to the lake.

With these friends we would often talk about going to live in the mountains together. We were reading Murray Bookchin and dreaming, or pretending to dream, of turning one of the abandoned villages into an ecological community where we could experiment with our ideas about society. Only in the mountains would it be possible to do this. Only up there would we be left in peace. We knew of other, similar experiments that had taken place throughout the Alps: all short-lived and ending up badly, but the fact that they had failed did not stop us from fantasizing; it gave us instead plenty to discuss. How would we manage for food? What would we do about electricity? How would we build the houses? A little money would still be necessary: how would we earn it? Where would we send our children to school? Assuming, that is, that we wanted to send them to school. And how would we resolve the problem of the family, that enemy of every community—worse even than private property and power?

It was this utopian game that we would play of an evening, at weekends. Bruno, who was actually in the process of building his ideal village, amused himself by demolishing ours. He would say: without cement the houses would not stay up, and without fertilizer even the grass in the meadows won’t grow; and I’d like to see you try to cut wood without petrol for a chainsaw. What do you plan to eat during the winter, polenta and potatoes like the old folk? And he would say: it’s only you townies who use the word nature. And it’s as abstract to you as the word itself. We say wood, meadow, river, rock, things that we can actually point to. Things that can be used. If they can’t be used, we don’t bother to even give them a name: it would be pointless to do so.

I liked to hear him talk like this. And I also liked the enthusiasm he had for certain ideas that I had picked up on my travels around the world, especially since he was the only one with the skills to put them into practice. One year he carved out the trunk of a larch tree with a chainsaw, ran fifty meters of tubing from one of the streams that feeds into the lake, and built a fountain in front of the house. In this way we had drinking water and water to wash with, but that wasn’t the main idea: under the jet from the fountain he installed a turbine that I had ordered from Germany. A plastic one no bigger than a foot in diameter, resembling a toy windmill.

“Hey, Berio,” he said, when our mill wheel started to turn. “Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember.”

The system charged a battery with which, in the house, we managed to run a radio and a lightbulb for an entire night. It worked night and day, regardless of the weather—unlike solar panels or wind turbines—and it cost nothing and consumed nothing. It was the water that came down from the mountain and flowed towards the lake that in passing by the house gave light and music to our evenings.

There was a girl who came up with me in the summer of 2007. Her name was Lara. We had only been together for a couple of months. We had reached the stage which for others would mark the start of a relationship, but which for us was already the end: I had begun to withdraw, to avoid her, and to disappear, so that she would leave me before doing so became too painful. This was a tried and tested system with me, and in those last days she forced me to own up to what I was doing. She was upset for a night, then got over it.

These were enjoyable days, just as soon as we had understood that they would be our last together. Lara really liked the house, the lake, the rocks, and the peaks of Grenon, and liked to go on long walks by herself on the paths around Barma. I was surprised to see how she walked. She was strong legged, at ease with the spartan life that we lived up there. In the end I got to know her better during the days we spent there than in the two months that we had been sleeping together. She told me that from her childhood she was used to washing with cold water and drying in front of a fire: she had come from another mountainous region, had left it behind years ago in order to study, and now missed those mountains. Not that she regretted the decision to go to the city. She felt that her relationship with Turin was something of a love story. She had fallen in love with the streets, the people, the nights, the work that she had done there, and the houses in which she had lived: a long, lovely affair that was all but over now.

I told her that I knew exactly what she meant. That something similar had happened to me. She gave me a sad look in which there was both reproof and regret. In the afternoon I watched her go down to the lake where she took off her clothes and swam naked to the rock that resembled a reef, and for a moment I felt that I might have pushed her away from me too soon. But only before remembering what I was like when in a relationship with anyone. After that, I had no second thoughts.

I invited Bruno to supper that evening. He was behind with his project by a whole year, due to delays in securing loans and planning permissions, but had now almost finished renovating the farmstead. He thought of nothing else: he had been struggling with people at the bank and with local council officials; he had two jobs in the winter to earn the money that he spent during the summer and was in that state of complete, almost obsessive, concentration familiar to me from the time I spent with him as his laborer. He spent the whole evening telling us about constructing stables that would meet building regulations, about places for making cheese and cellars for maturing it, about equipment made of copper and steel, and about washable tiles in the old sheds. Things that I already knew about well enough but that Lara did not—and the enthusiasm with which he spoke about them was directed towards her. He amused me, my old friend Bruno, since I had never before seen him trying to impress a woman: he used unusually technical vocabulary, exaggerated his gestures, and kept glancing at her to gauge her reactions.

“He likes you,” I told her, after he had left.

“And how do you know that?”

“I’ve known him for twenty years. He’s my best friend.”

“I didn’t think that you had friends,” she said. “I thought that you ran a mile as soon as you caught sight of one.”

I did not reply to that. Sarcasm was the lesser of the evils that might come my way. You need style to be left by someone, and she had it.

I was preparing to leave for a job that autumn when Bruno sought me out in Turin. I was going to the Himalayas for the first time, and I could hardly contain myself. I was surprised to hear his voice at the end of the telephone: partly because neither of us set much store by that means of communication, partly because my mind was already elsewhere.

He got straight to the point: Lara had just gone back to see him. Lara? We hadn’t seen each other since those last days in the mountains. Now she had gone up there by herself, wanting to visit the alpeggio and to find out more about his work and his plans. Bruno had told her that in the spring his agricultural business would be up and running, that he was thinking of buying thirty cows and using their milk to produce cheese rather than selling it to one of the dairies, and that to do this he would need to employ someone else. It was just what she had been hoping for: she liked the place, had been raised around cattle, and immediately offered herself for the job.

On the one hand Bruno was flattered, on the other worried. He hadn’t figured on the presence of a woman up there. When he asked what I thought, I said: “I think that she’ll do it well. She’s hard-headed.”

“I got that,” said Bruno.

“And so?”

“What I don’t know is how things are between the two of you.”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. We haven’t seen each other for two months now.”

“Have you fallen out?”

“No. There’s nothing between us anymore. I’m happy to see her going up there with you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Definitely. No problem.”

“Then it’s fine.”

He said goodbye and wished me a good trip. Here, I thought, was a man from another time: who else would have asked permission to do what he was about to do? When I hung up I already knew everything that was about to happen. I was pleased for him. And I was pleased for her. Then I stopped thinking about Bruno or Lara or anyone else, and began to prepare my rucksack for the Himalayas.

My first journey to Nepal was like a journey back in time for me. A day’s drive by car from Kathmandu and fewer than two hundred kilometers from its crowds a narrow, irregular, wooded valley began, with a river below, which you could hear but not see, and villages built up above where the slopes softened in the sunlight. They were connected by mule tracks that rose and fell steeply, and narrow rope bridges suspended over the streams that cut the flanks of the valley like blades. Around the villages the mountain was covered in terraces and rice paddies. Seen in profile, it resembled a staircase with semicircular steps, bordered by low dry stone walls and divided into a thousand smallholdings. October was the harvest season, and climbing up I watched the farmers at work: the women kneeling in the fields, the men beating the husks in the yards to separate the grain from the chaff. The rice was drying on cloths where other, older women sifted it carefully. Children were everywhere. I saw two plowing a field as if it were a game, urging on a couple of emaciated oxen with their shouts and with blows from a stick, and I remembered Bruno’s yellow cane from the first time we met. He too would have liked Nepal. Here they still had wooden plows, river stones to sharpen scythes, and wicker baskets for porters to carry on their backs. Even if I could see that the farmers were wearing trainers, and could hear the sound of radios and televisions, it seemed to me that I had rediscovered, still thriving, the old civilization that had become extinct in our own mountains. Along the route I did not see a single derelict building.

I was climbing up the valley towards Annapurna with four Italian mountaineers. I had been sharing a tent with them for a few weeks now, together with my film camera. I was on a well-paid assignment, and from the outset it had seemed to me like a real stroke of luck. I was intrigued by the prospect of filming a documentary about mountaineering, of seeing what would happen to this group of men under extreme conditions. But what I was discovering as we neared the base camp fascinated me even more. I had already decided to stay on after the expedition, and to make my own trip around the lower levels.

On the second day of walking, at the end of the valley, the summits of the Himalayas appeared. And then I saw how mountains must have been at the world’s beginning. Mountains that were newborn, sharply cut, as if just sculpted by creation, not yet eroded by the passage of time. Their snows lit the valley from a height of six or seven thousand meters. Waterfalls plummeted from overhangs and carved the rock faces, detaching from ledges landslides of reddish earth which ended up frothing in the rivers. Up above, oblivious to the tumult below, the glaciers looked out over everything. And it was from up there that the water comes, as the man with the white whiskers had told me. They must have known this well enough in Nepal too, since they had named their mountain after the goddess of harvests and of fertility. Along the path the water was everywhere: the water of the rivers, of the fountains, of the canals, the water of the basins in which the women did their laundry, the water that I would like to have seen in spring, with the rice fields flooded and the valley transformed into a myriad of mirrors.

I don’t know if the mountaineers with whom I was climbing noticed these things or not. They were impatient to leave behind the villages and to start planting pickaxes and climbing irons in the ice that was glittering up there. Not me. I walked between porters so that I could ask them about anything that I did not understand: what kind of vegetables were grown in the plots, which kind of wood was burnt in the stoves; to whom the small shrines that we encountered along the way were dedicated. In the woods there were no fir or larch trees, but a strange contorted species that I could not identify, until one of the men told me that they were rhododendrons. Rhododendrons! My mother’s favorite plant because it flowered for just a few days, at the beginning of summer, painting the mountain with pink, lilac, and violet, and which here in Nepal produced trees five or six meters high with black bark that flaked off in scales, and had leaves that were as oily as bay leaves. And further up, when the wood came to an end, what appeared was not willow or juniper but a bamboo grove. Bamboo! Bamboo at three thousand meters. There were young men who passed us carrying bundles of swaying bamboo on their backs. In the villages they used them to make roofs, cutting them lengthwise and superimposing the two halves—one concave and one convex—to help with the runoff of rainwater during the monsoon season. The walls were made of stone cemented with mud. About their houses I already knew everything there was to know.

At each of the wayside shrines the porters left a pebble or a bud they had collected in the woods, and advised me to do the same. We were entering sacred territory, and from here on it was forbidden to slaughter or to eat an animal. Now I stopped seeing chickens outside the houses, or goats grazing. There were some other animals, wild ones that browsed on the ledges, with long hair that reached down to the ground: the blue sheep of the Himalayas, someone told me. A mountain with blue sheep; monkeys similar to baboons, glimpsed in the bamboo thickets—and against the sky, moving slowly, the eerie outlines of vultures. And yet I felt at home. Even here, I told myself, where the woods end and there’s nothing left but grass and scree, I’m at home. This is the altitude to which I belong, at which I feel best. I was thinking about this when I stepped onto the first snow.

I went back to Grana the following year with a string of prayer flags, which I hung between two larch trees and we could see through the window of the house. The flags were blue, white, red, green, and yellow—blue for ether, white for air, red for fire, green for water, yellow for the earth—and they stood out against the shade of the wood. I would often watch them of an afternoon, as they tried to come to terms with the wind of the Alps and danced between the branches of the trees. The memories that I had of Nepal were like those flags: vivid, warm, so that my old mountains now seemed more desolate than ever. I would go out walking and see nothing but derelict huts and ruins.

But something new was happening in Grana. Bruno and Lara had been together for a while now: they had not needed to explain how things had developed. He seemed more serious than before, as men can be sometimes when a woman comes into their life. She, on the other hand, had been happily transformed, shaking off the dust of the city together with that air of disappointment I remembered her as having, and of which there was no longer a trace. She had a high-toned laugh, and her skin was flushed from life lived in the open air. Bruno adored her. Here was another version of my friend that I did not know: at the table on the first night, while I was talking about my travels, he could not stop touching her, caressing her, taking every opportunity to place a hand on her leg or shoulder, and even when talking to me he was in constant physical contact with her. In his presence Lara seemed less anxious, less uncertain of herself. She needed only a gesture or a look of reassurance, and it was all: Are you there? I’m here. But really? Yes, I told you, yes. Lovers, I thought: it was good that the world contained them, but in the confines of a room they always made you feel superfluous.

During that winter not much snow had fallen, so Bruno decided to go to the alpeggio—or to the mountain, as he would say—on the first Saturday of June.

I lent him a hand that day. He had bought twenty-eight dairy cows, creatures that were all already pregnant when they were unloaded from a cattle truck in the piazza in Grana. They were unsettled by the journey, and hurried down the ramp lowing and poking each other with their horns. They would have scattered who knows where if Bruno, his mother, Lara, and I had not been there positioned around the square in order to contain them and calm them down. The truck left. Together with two black dogs of venerable Grana shepherding pedigree we began to climb up the mule track, Bruno in front with his “Oh, oh, oh! Eh, eh, eh!” and his mother and Lara further down the line, with me bringing up the rear, doing nothing and enjoying the spectacle. The dogs knew how to do this job to perfection, and would run to reclaim any cows that were slowing things down, barking and nipping them on the flanks until they had rejoined the group. The barking of the dogs, the bellows of protest from the cows, and the noise of their bells drowned out all other sounds, and it seemed to me I was a spectator at a carnival parade or at a kind of resurrection. The herd climbed up the valley past the derelict huts, past the stone walls riddled and undermined by weeds, past the gray stumps of felled larches—like a bloodstream that was beginning to circulate again, bringing a body back to life. I wondered if the foxes and deer that must have been watching us from the woods as we passed could share in the sense of celebration that I felt.

At a certain point in the climb Lara joined me. We had not yet had the chance to speak together, just the two of us, but I think we both thought that we needed to. I don’t know why she chose that particular moment, when our words needed to be shouted into the cloud of dust that was enveloping us. She smiled at me and said: “Who would have thought it a year ago?”

“Where were we a year ago?” I wondered. “Oh yes, in a bar in Turin, perhaps.” Or in bed together at her place.

“Are you happy?” I asked.

“Very,” she said. And smiled again.

“Then I’m happy too,” I said, and I knew that we would never raise the subject again.

At that time the dandelions were in flower. They would all open together early in the morning, and then a brilliant yellow was brushed over the mountain, as if it were the sun itself flooding over it. The cows adored these sweet flowers: when we arrived up there they scattered over the pasture as if to a banquet that had been set for them. In the autumn Bruno had uprooted all the bushes that had infested the meadow, so that now it had again the look of a well-kept garden.

“You’re not putting up the fence-line?” his mother asked him.

“The fencing’s for tomorrow. Today I’m giving them a holiday.”

“But they’ll ruin the grass,” she protested.

“Come on,” said Bruno. “They won’t ruin anything, don’t worry about it.”

His mother shook her head. I had heard her use more words that day than I had heard her utter in all the years that I’d known her. She had come up limping, with a stiff leg that she trailed a little, but keeping a good pace. I could not understand how she could be so thin: shrunk within her ample clothing she scrutinized everything, controlled everything, giving both advice and criticism, because there was a right and a wrong way in which everything should be done.

The three buildings seemed to have been restored to a previous era in their existence. A house, a stable, and a storeroom, with walls and roofs of stone, reconstructed perfectly, even though they were now the premises of a modern agricultural enterprise. Bruno went into the cellar and returned with a bottle of white wine, and I recalled the same gesture that his uncle had made all those years ago. He was the master of the place now. We had nothing to sit on. Lara said that they would make a fine table to eat at in the open air, but for now we made our toast standing, at the threshold of the stable, watching the cows as they accustomed themselves to the mountain.

TEN

BRUNO PERSISTED OBSTINATELY in milking the cows by hand. For him this was the only method properly suited to these delicate creatures, prone as they were to becoming nervous and taking fright at the slightest thing. It would take him about five minutes to obtain as many liters of milk from each one: good going, but it meant twelve cows an hour, or two and a half hours of work for the whole herd. This was what got him out of bed in the morning when it was still dark outside. There were no Saturdays or Sundays on the farm, and he could hardly remember the pleasure of sleeping in until late, or of lingering between the sheets with his girl. Yet he loved this ritual and would not see it done by anyone else: he spent the hours between night and day in the warmth of the stable, clearing the sleep from his mind as he worked—and milking the cows was like waking them one by one with a caress, until they were aware of the fragrance of the meadows and the singing of the birds and started to become restless.

Lara would come to him at seven with coffee and a few biscuits. She was the one who would take the herd out to pasture twice each day. He would pour the one hundred and fifty liters of milk together with the same amount from the previous evening, skimmed of the cream that had risen to the surface overnight. He would light the fire under the boiler and add the rennet, and by nine o’clock each morning the mixture would be ready to be strained through cloth and pressed into the wooden molds. Five or six loaves in total: three hundred liters of milk to make no more than thirty kilos of toma.

This was the most mysterious phase for Bruno, because he was never sure how it would go. Whether the cheese would form or not, whether it would turn out to be good or bad: this seemed to him an alchemical process over which he had no control. He knew only how to treat the cows well and to carry out every part of the process exactly as he had been taught. With the cream he would make butter, and then wash the boiler, the churns, the pails, the work surfaces, and finally the stables as well, throwing open the windows and sluicing the dung into the gutters.

By this time it was noon. He would eat something and throw himself into bed for an hour, dreaming of grass that wouldn’t grow, or of cows that would not give milk, or of milk that would not churn; then he’d get up with the thought of building an enclosure for the calves, or of digging a drainage ditch where the rains had waterlogged the pasture. At four the cows would be brought to the stable for the second milking. At seven Lara would take them back out again, and at that point she would take over; there was no more work to do, and life at the farmstead slowed down and eased into the calm of the evening.

That was when Bruno would tell me about these things. We would sit outside waiting for sunset, with a half-liter of wine to keep us company. We contemplated the sparse pastures on the mountain’s reverse side, where we had once gone searching for goats. At twilight a breeze would begin to blow from further down the valley, immediately chilling the air by a few degrees, carrying a fragrance of moss and damp earth, together perhaps with that of a deer wandering at the margins of the wood. One of the dogs would catch its scent and abandon the herd to pursue it: only one of the two, and not always the same one—as if they had an agreement between them to take turns hunting and guarding. The cows were calm now. The sound of the bells reached us more faintly, descending to their lower tones.

Bruno did not like to think about practical problems with me. He never talked to me about debts, bills, taxes, mortgage rates. He preferred to talk about his dreams, or about the sense of physical intimacy he felt when milking, or about the mystery of rennet.

“Rennet is a little piece of a calf’s stomach,” he explained. “Imagine: part of the stomach that enables the calf to digest its mother’s milk; we take it and use it to make cheese. It’s right to do so, don’t you think? But it’s also terrible. Without this piece of stomach, the cheese would not form.”

“I wonder who first discovered that,” I said.

“It must have been the wild man.”

“The wild man?”

“For us he was an ancient man who lived in the woods. Long hair, beard, covered in leaves. Every so often he would go around the villages, and people feared him—but they still left something outside for him to eat, to thank him for having shown them how to use rennet.”

“A man who resembled a tree?”

“Part man, part beast, part tree.”

“And what’s he called in dialect?”

“Omo servadzo.”

It was nearly nine in the evening. In the pasture the cows were little more than shadows. Lara was a shadow too, wrapped in a woolen shawl. She was standing still, attending to the herd. If a cow strayed too far she would call her by name, and the dog would charge off to collect her, needing no command.

“Is there also a wild woman?” I asked.

Bruno understood what I was thinking. “She’s really good,” he said. “She’s strong and never gets tired. You know what I don’t like? Not having the time to be together as much as I want. There’s too much work. I get up at four in the morning, and in the evening start nodding off at the table.”

“Love is for the winter,” I said.

Bruno laughed. “That’s so true. Not many mountain folk are born in spring. We’re all born in autumn, like the calves.”

It was the only allusion to sex that I had ever heard him make. “So when are you getting married?” I asked.

“Ah, if it was up to me then right away. She’s the one who doesn’t want to hear anything about marriage. Not in church, or at the registry, or anywhere else for that matter. It’s those city ways of yours; go figure.”

We were finishing the wine. Then we got up to go to the stable before it was completely dark. Lara was bringing back the herd with the help of one of the dogs, and now the other one also appeared from somewhere, returning to duty at the sound of the cowbells. Without any hurry the cows formed a line that came down through the pasture and stopped at the drinking trough. In the stable each one found its proper position for the night, while Bruno chained up their collars and I tied their tails to a rope, strung high so that they would not get too dirty when they lay down. There was a knot that I had learned to tie with a quick twist of the fingers. We would close the door and go to eat while the cows began to ruminate in the darkness.

Later on I would go back to Barma by the light of a torch. There was room at the farmstead, and Bruno and Lara always invited me to stay, but something pushed me to say goodbye to them and to take the path for the lake. It was as if I were seeking a proper distance from that fledgling family, and that leaving was a way of respecting them, and of protecting myself.

What I had to protect in myself was my ability to live alone. It had taken time to get used to solitude, to turn it into a place that I could adjust myself to and feel good in; and yet I felt that the relationship between us was always a difficult one. And so I would head back towards the house as if to reestablish our understanding. If the sky was not overcast I would soon switch off the head torch. I needed no more than a quarter-moon, and the stars, to make my way along the path between the larch trees. Nothing was stirring at that hour, only my footfall and the river that continued to splash and gurgle as the wood slept. In the silence its voice was clearest, and I could make out the sound peculiar to each bend, rapid, waterfall—muffled by the vegetation, then becoming gradually sharper over scree.

Higher up even the river went quiet. This was the point at which it disappeared beneath the rocks and ran underground. I began to hear a much lower sound, of the wind that was blowing in the basin. The lake was a nocturnal sky in motion; the wind was pushing flurries of small waves from one side to another, and as it changed direction it extinguished and rekindled along its lines of force the gleams of stars reflected in the black water. I stood still, watching these patterns. It seemed to me to recall the life of the mountain before mankind. I did not disturb it; I was a welcome guest. I realized again that in this company I would never be alone.

One morning towards the end of July I went down to the village with Lara. I was heading back to Turin for a while; she was taking down the first batch of cheese which had matured for six weeks. There was a mule that Bruno had acquired for the job: not the gray male that I’d used years ago to transport the cement, but a female with a thick, dark coat; smaller and more suited to the life of the farmstead. He had made a wooden packsaddle, on which he had stacked twelve loaves of cheese, sixty kilos in total, the first precious load that was being dispatched to the valley.

It was a momentous event for him, and for us. After securing the load he gave a kiss to Lara, a pat on the flank to the mule, and nodded in my direction, saying: “Berio, you know the way.” He said goodbye to us and went to clean the stable. Just as on the building site he had decided that transportation was no kind of work for him: the mountain man stayed in the mountains, the mountain man’s woman went up and down with things. He would not go down until the time came to leave the farmstead for the winter.

We started out on the path in single file, myself in front and Lara behind with the mule—and behind them one of the dogs who followed her everywhere. At first the mule advanced unsteadily, adjusting herself to the load. With her you had to proceed more carefully going down than when climbing back up, because the packsaddle unbalanced her with its weight bearing forwards on her front legs, and you needed to help her on the steepest slopes by holding firm to the rope tied around her neck. Further down, at the bottom of the pasture, the path crossed the river and flattened out. It was the spot where I had watched Bruno disappear on his motorbike, before losing sight of him altogether for all those years. From here on Lara and I were able to walk side by side, with the dog going in and out of the wood hunting for game, and the mule following just behind us, her breathing and the sound made by her shod hooves becoming a calm presence at our backs.

“What does he mean when he calls you that?” asked Lara.

“Calls me what?”

“Berio.”

“Ah, he wants to remind me of something, I think. It was the name he gave me when I was a boy.”

“And what are you meant to remember?”

“The road. Jesus, how many times I’ve gone up and down it. In August I would come up from Grana every day, and he would leave the pasture to bunk off with me. Then he’d take quite a beating from his uncle, but he couldn’t care less. Twenty years ago. And now here we are carrying down his cheese. Everything has changed, and yet everything is the same.”

“What has changed most?”

“The farmstead for sure. And the river. It was very different then. Did you know that we used to play down there?”

“Yes,” Lara said. “The river game.”

I kept quiet for a while. Thinking about the path had brought to mind that first time with my father, when we’d gone to meet Bruno’s uncle. And as Lara and I descended I thought I saw coming out of the past a young boy walking in front of his father. The father was wearing a red jumper and plus fours, puffing like a bellows and spurring his son on. Good day to you! I imagined myself saying to him. The boy sure can run, eh! Who knows whether my father would have stopped to greet this man who was coming down from the future with a girl, a mule, a dog, and a load of cheese.

“Bruno’s a bit worried about you,” Lara said.

“About me?”

“He says that you’re always alone. He thinks that you’re not well.”

I began to laugh. “Is that what you two talk about?”

“Every so often.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

She thought about it and then gave a different answer: “That it’s your choice. That sooner or later you’ll get tired of being on your own, and that you’ll find somebody. But you’ve chosen to live like this, so that’s fine.”

“That’s right,” I said.

And then, to make light of it, I added: “And do you know what he’s told me? That he’s asked you to marry him but that you won’t hear of it.”

“That lunatic?” she replied, laughing. “Never in a million years!”

“Why not?”

“Who would want to get married to someone who never wants to come down from the mountain? Someone who has spent all that he has in order to stay up there and make cheese?”

“Is it as bad as all that?”

“See for yourself. We’ve been working for a month and a half, and this is all we have to show for it,” she said, pointing to what was behind us.

She became serious. For a good while she remained silent, thinking about what troubled her. We were almost there when she said “I like what we’re doing, a lot. Even when it rains all day and I’m out in it pasturing the cows. It makes me very calm, makes me feel that I can think clearly about things, and that many of them no longer have any importance. For someone thinking about the money, it’s lunacy. But I don’t want any other life now. I want this one.”

There was a small white van in the piazza in Grana, next to a tractor, a cement mixer, and my own car that had been parked there for a month. Two workers were digging a ditch next to the road. A man who I had never seen before was waiting for us: he was around fifty, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about the scene, except for the strangeness to us of seeing cars, asphalt, and clean clothes after all those days spent with livestock.

I helped Lara unload the toma from the packsaddle, and the man inspected them one by one: feeling the crust, sniffing it, giving it a few taps with his knuckles to see if there were air bubbles inside. He seemed satisfied. In the van he had a set of scales, and as he loaded the cheeses he weighed them, noting down the weight in a ledger and a figure on a receipt which he handed to Lara. At the bottom of it their first earnings were recorded. I watched her face as she looked at that number, but got no hint of her reaction to it. She said goodbye to me through the window of my car, then took the path again with the mule and the dog. They disappeared into the wood, or the wood reclaimed them as its own.

In Turin I vacated the apartment that I’d lived in for the last ten years. It was no longer worth keeping, given how little I used it, but on leaving I experienced a certain melancholy. I remembered vividly what it had meant to go there to live, when the city seemed so full of promises for the future. I didn’t know now whether they had been just an illusion of mine, or whether the city itself had failed to keep them, but to empty in one day a home made over so many years, taking out jumbled-together things that had been brought there one by one, was like taking back an engagement ring, resigning oneself to defeat.

For a nominal rent a friend was letting me a room for my stays in Turin. I loaded other boxes of my things into the car and took them to my mother’s place in Milan. From the motorway Monte Rosa emerged above the haze like a mirage: in the city the heat was melting the asphalt, and it seemed to me that I was pointlessly shifting stuff from one place to another, going up and down stairs of apartment buildings expiating who knows what sin that I’d committed in the past.

My mother was in Grana during this period, so I spent more than a month alone in the old apartment, by day doing the rounds of the offices of the producers I was working with, and at night watching the traffic from the window, imagining the anemic river buried beneath the avenue. There was nothing that belonged to me, nothing that I felt I belonged to. I was trying to get into production a series of documentaries on the Himalayas that would keep me away for a long time. It took a lot of fruitless meetings before finding someone who had faith in me: in the end I secured funding that would cover the cost of travel and not much else. But for me it was enough.

When I went back up to Grana in September there was a cold air blowing and a few chimneys in the village were smoking. Once out of the car I noticed a smell on my body that I did not like, so at the beginning of the path I washed my face and neck in the river; and in the woods rubbed my hands with a green larch twig. These were my usual rituals, but I knew that it would take a few days to be properly clean of the city.

All along the deep valley the pastures were beginning to fade. On Bruno’s land, beyond the bridge of planks, the bank of the river was all trampled by the hooves of the herd: from there upwards the grass was finished, closely shaved and already fertilized, and there were patches of earth where the odd cow would scrape on days of bad weather, unsettled by the smell of a thunderstorm. I could smell a storm in the air right now, together with the pungent odor of dung and of wood smoke rising from Bruno’s home. This was the time when he would be making the cheese, so I decided to head straight on and come down to find him on another occasion.

Having passed the stable, I heard the cowbells and saw Lara pasturing the herd high up, far from the path, on slopes where the last grass remained; I waved to her, and having already caught sight of me, she waved back with her unopened umbrella. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall, and after all those nights made restless by the heat and by dreams, I felt overcome by exhaustion: I just wanted to get to Barma, light the stove, and sleep. There was nothing like a long sleep in my burrow inside the mountain to put me right again.

There followed three days of fog during which I hardly left the house. I would stay at the window observing the way in which the clouds rose up from the valley and insinuated themselves into the woods, passing between the branches of the larch and fading the colors of my prayer flags before swallowing them completely. In the house the low pressure extinguished the fire in the stove, smoking me as I read or wrote. Then I would go out into the fog and stretch my legs by walking to the lake. There I would throw a stone that would vanish even before producing its phantom thud, and I imagined schools of small curious fish swimming around it. In the evening I would listen to some Swiss radio station or other, thinking about the year that was in store for me. It was a period of incubation, of the kind appropriate before great exploits.

On the third day there was a knock at the door. It was Bruno. He said: “So it is true that you’re back. Want to come to the mountain?”

“Now?” I asked, since everything was shrouded in fog outside.

“Come on, I’ll show you something.”

“And the cows?”

“Let the cows be. It won’t kill them.”

And so we set off climbing back up the slope, along the path that led to the higher lake. Bruno was wearing his rubber boots, filthy with dung up to his thighs, and as we walked he told me that he had been into the slurry pit to pull out a cow that had fallen into it in the fog. He laughed. He was going up in a rush, so quickly that I was struggling to keep up. A viper had bitten one of the dogs, he said: he realized because he saw him next to water all the time, constantly thirsty, and checking him over had found the puncture marks made by the viper in his swollen belly. He was dragging himself around pitifully, and Lara was ready to put him on the mule and take him to the vet when Bruno’s mother had said to give him as much milk as he would drink, just milk and no water or food—and now he had recovered and was gradually regaining his strength.

“With animals there is always something new to learn,” he said. He shook his head and resumed climbing with that pace of his that nearly did for me. All the way up to the lake he continued talking about cows, milk, manure, grass, because during my absence so many things had happened that I needed to be informed about. He was thinking of bringing some rabbits and chickens up some time in the future, but he needed to build some good fences because there were foxes about. Eagles too. You might not believe it, but the eagle is even more ferocious than the fox when it comes to farmyard animals.

He didn’t ask me how I had got on in Turin or in Milan. He wasn’t interested in anything I might have been up to during the course of a whole month. He talked about foxes and eagles and rabbits and chickens, and pretended, as usual, that the city didn’t exist and that I didn’t have another life elsewhere: our friendship existed there, on that mountain, and what happened down below should not even be mentioned.

“And the business, how’s that going?” I asked, as we got our breath back at the small lake.

Bruno shrugged his shoulders. “Well,” he said.

“Are the sums adding up?”

He grimaced. He looked at me as if I had asked an annoying question, just for the pleasure of ruining his day. Then he said: “I leave the accounts to Lara. I’ve tried doing them myself, but I guess I’m no good at it.”

We climbed up the scree in thick fog, with no path, each of us finding his own way. We couldn’t see well enough to follow the cairns, losing sight of them almost immediately in fact, and letting ourselves be guided by the incline, our instincts, the lines suggested by the scree itself. We were climbing up blind, and every so often I heard the sound of stones that Bruno had dislodged above or below me, made out his outline and headed straight towards it. If we got too far from each other, one of us would call out: oh? and the other would respond with oh! We adjusted our direction like two boats in fog.

Until, at a certain point, I realized that the light was changing. Now it was casting shadows on the rocks in front of me. I looked up and saw a blue tone in the flurries of increasingly sparse fog, and after a few more steps I was through it: all at once I found myself looking around in full sunlight, with a September sky above my head and the dense white of the clouds beneath my feet. We were well above two and a half thousand meters. Only a few peaks emerged at that height, like chains of islands, like surfacing dorsals.

I also saw that we had deviated from the proper route to the Grenon’s summit, or at least from the usual one: but instead of crossing the scree at the fork I decided to reach the crest by climbing what was immediately above me. It didn’t look difficult. As I climbed I fantasized about achieving a first, something that would be recorded in the annals of the Italian Alpine Club, together with the author of such a feat: North-west crest of the Grenon: Pietro Guasti, 2008. But just a little further up, on a ledge, I found a few rusty meat or sardine tins of the kind that many years ago no one bothered to take back with them to the valley. So I discovered once again that someone had preceded me.

There was a gorge between where I was and the usual route, getting steeper and steeper up to the crest. Bruno had taken it, and on its steep slope I saw that he had developed a peculiar style of his own: he used his hands as well and climbed on all fours, rapidly, instinctively choosing the right places for his hands and feet, and never putting his whole weight on them. Sometimes the ground would give way beneath his feet or hands, but his momentum had already carried him forward, and the small cascades of stones that he dislodged continued on down, like memories of his passing through there. Omo servadzo: the wild man, I thought. Having got to the top before him, I had time to admire this new style of his from the crest.

“Who taught you to climb like that?” I asked.

“The chamois. I watched them once and said to myself: now I’m going to try it like that too.”

“And it works?”

“Well . . . I’ve still got a few improvements to make.”

“Did you know that we would get above the clouds?”

“I was hoping that we would.”

We sat down, leaning against the pile of stones where I had once found words written by my father. The sun was sculpting every edge and indentation in the rock, and doing the same to Bruno’s face: he had new crow’s feet around his eyes, shadows under his cheekbones, furrows that I did not recall him having before. His first season at the farmstead must have been hard going.

It seemed like the right moment to talk to him about my journey. I told him that in Milan I had secured enough funding to stay away for at least a year. I wanted to go around the regions of Nepal and portray the people that lived in its mountains: there were so many different groups in the valleys of the Himalayas, all distinct from each other. I would be leaving in October, near the end of the monsoon season. I had little money but many contacts—people working there who would be able to help me and put me up. I confided that I had given up my home in Turin, that I didn’t have another one there now and neither did I want one: if things went well in Nepal, I would stay there even longer.

Bruno listened in silence. When I had finished speaking he took a while to reflect on the implications of what I had told him. He was looking at Monte Rosa, and said: “Do you remember that time with your father?”

“Of course I remember.”

“I think about it sometimes, you know? Do you think the ice of that day has reached the bottom yet?”

“I don’t think so. It’s probably about halfway.”

Then he asked: “Are the Himalayas like our region at all?”

“No,” I replied. “Not at all.”

It was not easy to explain, but I wanted to try, and so I added: “You know those enormous ruined monuments, like the ones in Athens and Rome? Those ancient temples of which only a few columns are left standing, with the stones of their walls lying scattered about on the ground? Well, the Himalayas are like the original temple. It’s like being able to see it intact after having spent a lifetime only ever seeing ruins.”

I immediately regretted having spoken in this way. Bruno was gazing at the glaciers, above the clouds, and I thought that in the coming months I would remember him like this, like the custodian of that pile of rubble.

Then he got up. “Time to do the milking,” he said. “Are you coming down?”

“I think I’ll stay here a bit longer.”

“Good for you. Who would want to go back down below?”

He entered the gorge up which he’d climbed and disappeared amongst the rocks. I caught sight of him again a few minutes later, about a hundred meters further down. There was a spit of snow down there, pushed northwards, and he had crossed the scree in order to reach it. From above that small snowfield he tested its consistency with his foot. He looked up in my direction and waved, and I responded with a big gesture that might be seen from a distance. The snow must have been well frozen, because Bruno jumped on it and immediately picked up speed: he went down with his legs spread out, skiing with his work boots, waving his arms to keep his balance—and in an instant was swallowed up by the fog.

ELEVEN

ANITA WAS BORN in the autumn, like all mountain folk.

I was not there that year: in Nepal I had come into contact with the world of NGOs and was working with a group of them. I was filming documentaries in the villages where schools and hospitals were being built, agricultural projects or employment initiatives for women were being developed, and where sometimes camps for Tibetan refugees were being set up. I didn’t like everything that I was seeing. The managers in Kathmandu were no more than careerist politicians. But in the mountains themselves I came across people of every sort: from old hippies to students doing VSO; from volunteer medics to mountaineers who between one expedition and another would stay on to work as builders. Not even these examples of humanity were entirely free from ambition and power struggles, but what they did not lack was idealism. And I liked being amongst idealists.

I was in Mustang, in June—an arid plateau on the border with Tibet, made up of small white houses clinging to the red rock—when my mother wrote to let me know that she had just gone up to Grana and discovered that Lara was five months pregnant. She felt immediately called to do her duty. Throughout the summer she sent me updates that resembled medical reports: in June Lara had twisted her ankle while she was out in the pasture, and had continued to hobble around for days; in July, with her very pale skin, she suffered sunstroke while making hay; in August, with backache and swollen legs, she still carried down the cheese twice a week with the mule. My mother would order her to rest. Lara would not hear of it. When Bruno suggested that they should hire someone to do her work she refused, saying that the cows were all pregnant too and that no one made a fuss about it, that seeing them so calm actually helped her to relax.

I had come to Kathmandu at the height of the monsoon season. Every afternoon the city was whipped by a storm. Then the crazy traffic of motorbikes and bicycles would cease, the packs of street dogs would seek refuge under overhanging roofs, the streets themselves become rivers of mud and rubbish—and I would shut myself in some place or other with a phone line, in front of an ancient computer, and catch up on the latest news. I did not know whether to admire Lara most, expecting her first child in an alpeggio, or that other woman, now seventy years old, who would climb up to visit her on foot and accompany her to the hospital each month. The August scan established beyond doubt that Lara was expecting a girl. Even now she continued to pasture the cows, with a belly so big that it prevented any movement except simply walking in front of the herd, then sitting under a tree to watch over it.

Then on the last Sunday of September, with their hides brushed and shining, their embroidered leather collars and their ceremonial bells, the cows went down to the valley in a solemn end of season procession. Bruno installed them in the stable he had rented for the winter, and at that point there was nothing left to do but wait. He must have done a certain amount of calculation, in true mountain man style, because Lara gave birth soon after, as if that too was seasonal work.

I remember where I was when my mother gave me the news: in lower Dolpo, on the shore of a lake that uncannily resembled an Alpine one, surrounded by woods of red fir and Buddhist temples, together with a girl that I had met in Kathmandu. She worked at an orphanage in the city, but at that time we had taken a few days off and headed for the mountains together. In a refuge without a stove at three and a half thousand meters, the walls of which were nothing more than small shingles painted blue, we had put together our two sleeping bags and huddled inside: through the window I looked out at the star-studded sky and the pointed tops of the fir trees as she slept. At a certain point I saw the moon rise. I stayed awake a long time, thinking about my friend Bruno who had just become a father.

When I returned to Italy in 2010 I found it deep in a grotesque economic crisis. Milan announced it to me on arrival, with its airport looking virtually decommissioned: four planes on kilometers of runway, and the window displays of the high fashion brands glistening in the empty shops. From the train that took me to the city, freezing from the air conditioning on a July evening, I noticed building sites everywhere, tall cranes suspended, high-rise buildings with bizarre profiles that were taking shape on the horizon. I could not understand why all the newspapers were talking about all the money having run out when I was noticing in Milan, and also in Turin, a building boom that resembled that of a golden age. Going in search of old friends was like doing a tour of hospital wards: the production companies, the advertising agencies, and the television channels that I had worked for were shutting down due to bankruptcy, and many of those friends were at home on their sofas, doing nothing. Nearing forty, they were reduced to taking the odd day’s work and to accepting money from their retired parents. But look outside, one of them said to me, do you see the buildings sprouting up everywhere? Who is it that’s stealing what was due to us? Wherever I went I breathed in this air of disillusionment and anger, this intergenerational sense of grievance. It was a relief to have in my pocket already the ticket with which I would be able to leave.

A few days later I took a coach to the mountains, then another at the beginning of the valley, and got off at the bar where I used to go with my mother to make calls, though there was no longer any trace there of the red phone box.

I followed the path on foot, just as before. The old mule track cut through the bends of the asphalted road and soon became choked with brambles and leaves, so rather than follow it I went up through the woods, relying on my memory of the way. When I came out on the other side I discovered that next to the ruins of the tower a mobile phone mast had gone up, and that down in the gully a cement dam interrupted the flow of the river. The little artificial reservoir was full of mud from the thaw: an excavator was fishing it out of the water and dumping it on the bank, destroying with its caterpillar tracks and the muddy sand the meadows where Bruno used to graze cattle as a boy.

Then, as always, I got beyond Grana and it seemed like I was leaving every poisoned thing behind me. It was like entering the sacred valley when going to Annapurna: except that here it was not any religious precept but simply neglect that had left everything unchanged. I discovered again the clearing that as children Bruno and I called the sawmill, because two tracks remained there together with a trolley used who knows how long ago for cutting planks of wood for buildings. Nearby there was a cable lift for dispatching those planks up to the alpeggi, the steel cable wound around a larch tree that with the passage of time had engulfed it in bark. They had forgotten my childhood mountain because it wasn’t worth anything—and it was fortunate in this respect. I slowed down like the Nepalese porters who would whisper at high altitude: bistare, bistare. I did not want these moments to be over too soon. Every time I went back up there I felt like I was returning to my own self, to the place where I was most like myself again and felt best.

At the farmstead they were expecting me for lunch. Bruno, Lara, the little Anita who at less than a year old was playing on a blanket in the middle of a meadow, and my mother who did not take her eyes off her for a moment. She said: “It’s your Uncle Pietro, Anita, look!” and immediately brought her to me to get acquainted. The little girl looked at me with suspicion, intrigued by my beard; she tugged it, and making a sound that I didn’t catch started laughing at her new discovery. My mother seemed quite different from the aging woman I had said goodbye to when I left. Other things had altered too; the whole farmstead was livelier than I remembered it: the new chickens and rabbits, the mule, the cows, the dogs, a fire on which the polenta and a stew were cooking, the table laid in the open air.

Bruno was so pleased to see me again that he embraced me. It was a gesture so unusual between us that as he squeezed me I wondered how much he might have changed. When we separated I looked hard at his face, searching for wrinkles, gray hairs, the heaviness of age in his features. I had the impression that he was looking for the same in mine. Were we still the same? Then he sat me down at the head of the table and poured the drinks: four glasses brimming with red wine with which to toast my return.

I was no longer used to wine or meat, and soon felt intoxicated by both. I was speaking nonstop. Lara and my mother took turns to get up and look after Anita, until the little girl began to feel sleepy and there was a sign, I think, or a silent understanding between them, and my mother gathered her up in her arms and moved away cradling her. I had brought back as a gift a teapot, cups, and a packet of black tea, so after lunch I made some, Tibetan style, with butter and salt, even if the Alpine butter was not as strong or rancid as butter made from yak’s milk. While I was mixing it I told them that in Tibet they used butter in every way imaginable: they burned it in lamps, spread it as a moisturizer on women’s hair, mixed it with human bones in sky burials.

“What?” said Bruno.

I explained that on the high plateaus there wasn’t enough wood to cremate corpses: the dead were flayed and left on top of a hill so that the vultures would devour them. After a few days they would return and find the bones picked clean. The skull and the skeleton were then pounded up and mixed with butter and flour, so that this too would become food for the birds.

“How horrible,” Lara said.

“But why?” said Bruno.

“Can you imagine it? The dead person there on the ground and the vultures eating them piece by piece?”

“Well, being put in a hole in the ground is not so very different,” I said. “Something will end up eating you there as well.”

“Yes, but at least you don’t have to see it,” Lara said.

“I think it’s a great idea,” said Bruno. “Food for the birds.”

On the other hand he was disgusted by the tea, and emptied our cups as well as his own before filling them with grappa instead. The three of us were all a little drunk by now. He put his arm around Lara’s shoulders and said: “And what about the Himalayan girls? Are they as beautiful as those in the Alps?”

I became serious without meaning to and mumbled something in reply.

“You’re not turning into some kind of Buddhist monk, are you?”

But Lara had picked up on the meaning of my reticence, and answered for me: “No, no. There is someone who is keeping him company.”

Then Bruno looked at my face and smiled, seeing there that it was true, and I instinctively looked over to where my mother was, too far off to hear what we were saying.

Later on I went to lie down beneath an old larch, a solitary tree that dominated the meadows above the house. I remained stretched out there with my eyes half-closed and my hands behind my head, looking at the summits and the ridges of the Grenon through the branches and surrendering to sleep. That view always reminded me of my father. I thought that in some way, without knowing it, this strange family amongst which I had found myself had been founded by him. Who knows what he would have made of it, seeing us all together at that lunch. His wife, his son, his other son from the mountains, a young woman, and a little girl. If we had really been brothers, I thought, Bruno could be nothing other than the eldest. He was the one who made things. The builder of houses, a family, a business: the firstborn with his land, his livestock, his offspring. I was the younger brother, the squanderer. The one who does not get married, does not have children, and who travels the world without sending news for months at a time, turning up out of the blue on the day of a party, just as lunch is about to be served. Who would have thought that, eh Dad? Immersed in these alcohol-induced musings, I fell asleep in the sun.

I spent a few weeks with them that summer. Not long enough to stop feeling that I was only visiting, but too long to just sit around doing nothing. Up at Barma my two-year absence had left its mark, so much so in fact that when I saw the house again I felt like apologizing: the invasive vegetation had already begun to lay siege to her, certain roof tiles were warped or out of place, and when I left I had forgotten to remove the piece of chimney flue that stuck out of the wall, so that the snow had broken it and caused some damage inside the house as well. It would have taken only a few more years for the mountain to reclaim her, and to reduce her again to the pile of rubble that she was before. I decided to devote my remaining time there to the house, preparing her for my next departure.

Spending time with Bruno and Lara I discovered that something else had begun to deteriorate while I was away. When my mother was not there and Anita had been put to bed, the place changed from being a happy farmstead to being a business that was in the red—and my friends became squabbling financial partners. Lara talked about nothing else. She told me that the sums they made from cheese making did not even cover the mortgage repayments. The money came and went, leaving them with nothing to spare, and making no inroad on their debt with the bank. Living up there in the summer they were able to be almost self-sufficient, but in the winter, what with the rent for the stables and other costs, they were really struggling. They had needed to take out another loan. New debts with which to pay for old.

That summer Lara had decided to cut out the middleman, bypassing the distributor that I had met and selling directly to shopkeepers, even though it meant a load more work for her. Twice every week she would leave the little girl with my mother in Grana and go by car to make deliveries, leaving Bruno to manage on his own. They should have taken someone on, but this would have put them back where they started again.

He would start fuming soon after she began telling me about these things. One evening he said: “Can’t we change the subject? We hardly ever see Pietro. Do we always have to be talking about money?”

Lara took offense. “So what should we be talking about?” she said. “Let’s see, what about yaks? What do you think, Pietro, could we set up a nice business breeding yaks?”

“It’s not such a bad idea,” Bruno said.

“Listen to him,” Lara said to me. “Living up here on the mountain with his head in the clouds he doesn’t have any of the problems of us mere mortals. And then to him— But remember that it’s you who got us into this mess, right?”

“That’s right,” said Bruno. “They’re my debts. You shouldn’t take them too much to heart.”

Hearing that she glared at him furiously, got up abruptly, and left. He immediately regretted having uttered such words.

“She’s right,” he said. “But what can I do? I can’t work any harder than I am already. And thinking about money all the time solves nothing, so it’s preferable to think about something else, isn’t it?”

“But how much do you need?” I asked.

“Forget it. If I told you you’d be shocked.”

“Perhaps I can help. Perhaps I can stay here and work until the end of the season.”

“Thanks, but no.”

“You wouldn’t have to pay me of course. I’d be only too pleased to help.”

“No,” said Bruno, curtly.

In the days that were left before my departure we did not mention the subject again. Lara kept to herself, offended, worried, busying herself around the little girl. Bruno pretended that nothing had happened. I would go up and down from Grana with the materials I needed to fix the house: I had reapplied cement where it was needed, stopped up the chimney flue, cleared the weeds from the surrounding land. I’d had larch tiles cut similar to the old ones, and was on the roof replacing them when Bruno arrived to see me: perhaps he had intended us to go up the mountain together, but finding me on the roof changed his mind, and he climbed up to join me there instead.

It was a job that we had already done, six years ago now. We quickly found our old rhythm. Bruno removed the old nails and I threw them down onto the grass, then I put the new tile into place and held it firm while he hammered it down. There was no need to say anything. For an hour it seemed as if we had gone back to that summer, when our lives still had direction and we had nothing to worry about other than building a wall or raising a beam. It was over too quickly. In the end the roof was like new, and I went to the fountain to get two beers that I kept cold there in its icy water.

That morning I had taken down the prayer flags, faded by the sun and rain and torn by the wind, and had burned them in the stove. Then I hung up some new ones, stringing them this time between the rock face and a corner of the house rather than between trees, thinking about the stupas that I had seen in Nepal. Now they were dancing in the wind above my father’s epitaph, seeming to be blessing him. Bruno was watching them when I went back onto the roof.

“What’s written on those things?” he asked.

“They’re prayers asking for good fortune,” I said. “Prosperity. Peace. Harmony.”

“And do you believe in that?”

“In what, good fortune?”

“No, in praying.”

“I don’t know. But they put me in a good mood. And that’s enough, no?”

“Yes, you’re right.”

I was reminded of our own good luck charm, and looked to see how it was getting on. The little Swiss pine was still there, as delicate and contorted as the day when it was transplanted—but still alive. By now it was heading towards its seventh winter. It too was swaying in the wind, but inspired neither peace nor harmony: tenacity, if anything. A clinging on to life. I thought that in Nepal these were not virtues—but that in the Alps, perhaps, they were.

I opened the beers. Handing one to Bruno I asked: “So how’s it going, being a father?”

“How’s it going? I’d like to know the answer to that myself.”

He raised his eyes to the sky, and then added: “For now it’s easy. I carry her in my arms and stroke her as if she were a little rabbit or a kitten. That I know how to do. I’ve always done it. The difficulty will come when I have to tell her about things.”

“But why?”

“What do I know about anything? In my life I’ve only ever known this.”

When he said this he made a gesture with his hand to encompass the lake, the woods, the meadows, and the scree that we had in front of us. I did not know if he had ever gone away from there, or if he had, how far. I had never even asked, partly in order not to offend him, partly because the answer would not have changed anything.

He said: “I know how to milk a cow, how to make cheese, to cut down a tree, to build a house. I would also know how to shoot an animal and eat it if I was starving. I’ve been taught these things since I was little. But who teaches you how to be a father? Not my own father, that’s for sure. In the end I had to beat him up so that he would leave me alone. Have I ever told you about that?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, that’s what happened. I was working all day on the building site; I was stronger than him. I think I must have really hurt him because I haven’t seen him since. The poor bastard.”

He looked up at the sky again. The same wind that was agitating my prayer flags was pushing the clouds over the ridges. He said: “I’m only glad that Anita’s a girl, so I can just love her and that’s that.”

I had never seen him so low. Things had not gone as he had hoped. I had the same sense of powerlessness as when we were boys and he would not utter a word for an entire day, plunged into a despondency that seemed absolute and irremediable. I would like to have had some old friend’s trick with which to raise his spirits.

Before he left, the legend of the eight mountains came to my mind, and I thought that he might like to hear it. Relating it to him I tried to remember every word and gesture with which the chicken carrier had given it to me. With a nail I scratched the mandala on a wooden tile.

“So you’re supposed to be the one who journeys to the eight mountains, and I’m the one who climbs Sumeru?”

“It looks like it.”

“And which one of us achieves something good?”

“It’s you,” I said. Not just to encourage him, but because I believed it.

Bruno said nothing. He looked at the drawing again, in order to memorize it. Then he gave me a pat on the back and jumped down from the roof.

Without having in any way planned it, I too found myself caring for children in Nepal. Not in the mountains but on the periphery of Kathmandu, a city that now sprawled across its entire valley with outskirts resembling the shanty towns to be found in so many other parts of the world. They were the children of people who had come to the city seeking their fortune. Some had lost one of their parents, some had lost both, but more often than not the father or mother lived in a shack and worked like a slave in that ants’ nest, leaving them to be raised on the streets. These children had been dealt a fate that did not exist in the mountains: in Kathmandu the child beggars, the small gangs dedicated to some kind of trafficking or other, and the dirty stupefied kids who scavenged through the city’s rubbish were as familiar a part of the urban landscape as street dogs and the monkeys in the Buddhist temples.

There were organizations that were trying to care for them, and the girl I was with was working for one of these. Given what I was seeing for myself on the streets, and hearing about from her, it was inevitable that I would begin to lend a hand too. You find your place in the world much less predictably than you’d imagine: here I was, after so much wandering, in a big city at the foot of the mountains, with a woman who was basically doing the same work as my mother did. And with whom, at every opportunity, I would escape to altitude in order to replenish the energy sapped by the city.

Walking these paths I thought often about Bruno. It wasn’t the woods or the rivers so much as the children that reminded me of him. I remembered him at their age, growing up in what remained of his dying village, with ruins as his only playground and a school that had been turned into a storehouse. There was a lot to be doing in Nepal, for someone with his skills: we taught the migrant children English and maths from textbooks, but perhaps what we should have been showing them was how to cultivate a plot, how to build a stable, raise goats—and so I would sometimes fantasize about dragging Bruno away from his dying mountain, to help teach these other mountain folk. We could have done great things together in this part of the world.

And yet if it had just been down to us we would not have contacted each other for years, as though our friendship had no need of being kept up. It was my mother who gave us news of each other, since she was all too familiar with living with men who did not communicate amongst themselves. She wrote to me about Anita, about the character that she was developing, about the way in which she was growing up wild and fearless. She had become very attached to this little girl, and it worried her to see the crisis between her parents worsening. They worked too hard, and continued to find ways of working even harder: so much so that in the summer my mother would frequently keep Anita with her at Grana, in order to free her parents from at least the burden of having to care for her too. Lara was exasperated by their debts. Bruno had retreated into mutism and into his work. My mother did not mention directly what she feared, but it was not difficult to read between the lines: we had both begun to see how things would end up.

They struggled on in this way for a little longer. Then in the autumn of 2013 Bruno declared himself bankrupt, shut down the agricultural business, and handed over the keys of the farm to the bailiff, and Lara went to live with her parents with the child. Although according to my mother, things had happened the other way round: Lara had decided to leave him, and he had given up, resigning himself to failure. Either way, it made no difference. But the tone in which she conveyed the news was not just sad but alarmed, and I could tell that she was afraid for what might happen to Bruno now. He’s lost everything, she wrote, and he is all alone. Is there anything you can do?

I read these words several times before doing something that I had never done before in Nepal: I got up from the computer, asked to use the telephone, and went into a booth to dial the code for Italy and then Bruno’s number. It was one of those places in Kathmandu where people seem permanently to be killing time. The owner was eating rice and lentils, an old man sitting next to him was watching him eat, and two children were peering into the booth at me to see what I was up to. The phone rang five or six times, at which point I began to think that Bruno would not answer it: knowing him, he might have hurled the mobile into the woods and decided not to hear from anyone ever again. Instead there was a click, a distant fumbling, and an uncertain voice that was saying:

“Hello?”

“Bruno!” I shouted. “It’s me, Pietro!”

On hearing my outburst of Italian the boys burst out laughing. I pressed the receiver closer to my ear. The delay on the long-distance line added an extra hesitation, then Bruno said: “Yes, I’d hoped it would be you.”

He did not feel like talking about what had happened with Lara. I could imagine anyway how it had been. I asked him how he was, and what he planned to do.

He replied: “I’m fine. I’m just tired. They took away the farm, did you hear?”

“Yes. And what did you do with the cows?”

“Oh, I gave them away.”

“And what about Anita?”

“Anita is with Lara at her parents’. They’ve got plenty of room there. I’ve heard from them, they’re doing fine.”

Then he added: “Listen, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Tell me.”

“If I can use the house up at Barma, since at the moment I don’t really know where to go.”

“But do you really want to go up there?”

“I don’t want to see anyone; you know how it is. I’ll spend some time in the mountains.”

That’s how he said it: in the mountains. It was strange to hear his voice on a phone, in Kathmandu, a voice that arrived there hoarse and so distorted that I struggled to recognize it, but that I knew at that moment was really his. It was Bruno, my old friend.

I said: “Of course. Stay as long as you want. It’s your house.”

“Thanks.”

There was something else I wanted to say, but it was difficult. We were not used to asking each other for help, or to offering it. Without beating around the bush I asked: “Listen, would you like me to come over?”

In the past Bruno would have immediately told me to stay where I was. When he eventually answered, he did so with a tone of voice that I had never heard before. Ironic, in part. And partly disarmed.

He said: “Well, that would be nice.”

“I’ll sort a few things out and then come, all right?”

“All right.”

It was a late afternoon in November. As I left the place from which I’d phoned, darkness was falling over the city. In that part of the world the streets are not lit, and at sunset people hurry home, and you sense an anxiety about night falling. Outside there were dogs, dust, scooters, a cow lying in the middle of the road stopping the traffic, tourists heading for restaurants and hotels, the air of an evening in late summer. In Grana it was the beginning of winter, and it occurred to me that I had never before seen that season there.

TWELVE

THE DEEP-CUT VALLEY of Grana in October was burnt by drought and frost. It had the color of ochre, of sand, of terra-cotta, and looked as if its meadows had been burnt in a fire now spent. In its woods that fire was still ablaze: on the flanks of the mountain the gold and bronze flames of the larches were lit against the dark green of the pines, and raising your eyes to the sky warmed the soul. The sun no longer reached the bottom of the valley, and the earth was hard underfoot, covered here and there with a crust of frost. At the little wooden bridge, when I bent down to drink, I saw that the autumn had cast a spell over that river of mine: the ice was forming slides and galleries, draping the wet stones with glass, trapping tufts of dry grass and transforming them into found sculptures.

Climbing towards Bruno’s farmstead I crossed paths with a group of hunters. They were wearing camouflage jackets and binoculars around their necks but had no rifles. They did not seem like locals to me, but then perhaps in the autumn even faces change, and I was the outsider here. They were talking together in dialect, and when they saw me they stopped talking, sized me up with a glance, and continued on their way. I found out soon after where they had stationed themselves: up at the farmstead, near the bench where Bruno and I would sit of an evening, I found their cigarette butts and a crumpled empty packet. They must have climbed up early in the morning in order to study the woods from that vantage point. Bruno had put everything in good order before leaving: he had sealed the stable door, closed the shutters, stacked the wood against the side of the house, overturned the drinking troughs along the wall. He had even spread the manure that was dry and odorless now in the yellowed meadows. It looked just like any other Alpine farmstead prepared for the winter months, and I lingered a while remembering how it was, full of noise and life, the last time that I had visited it. Breaking the silence I heard a belling from the other side of the valley. I had only ever heard this sound a few times before, but once would have been enough to remember it forever. It was the powerful, guttural, angry sound with which the stag intimidates his rivals in the mating season, even though it was too late now for reproduction. Perhaps the stag was just plain angry, nothing more. At this point I realized what those hunters had come looking for.

Something similar happened a little while later, up at the lake. The sun was just managing to peer over the crests of the Grenon, warming the scree facing it at midday. But the inlet at the foot of the slope remained in shadow even at this hour: a layer of ice had formed on the water, a half-moon that was polished and dark. When I tested it with a stick the ice was so thin that it broke. I took a piece of it from the water and held it up to look through, and at that moment I heard a chainsaw starting up. The revving of the motor, and then the squeal of the blade biting wood. I looked to see where it was coming from. There was a copse of larch midway up the slope, just above Barma, growing on a kind of small terrace: the naked, gray trunk of a dead tree stuck out amongst the yellow tresses of the others. I heard the chainsaw cutting into the wood, twice. Then the pause required to walk around the tree, then again the screech of the blade as it bit into the wood. I saw it slowly begin to topple before it suddenly collapsed, with a crackling rush of branches splitting as it fell.

“What can I tell you, Pietro, things went badly,” Bruno said that evening, then shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he had nothing more to add on the subject. He was drinking coffee reheated on the stove and looking out to where it was getting dark already at five o’clock. We were using candles in the house, now that our little mill wheel was stopped due to drought: I had seen two full packs of white candles in the other room, together with the sacks of cornmeal, a couple of loaves of cheese remaining from the last batch made, a reserve of tins, some potatoes, and cartons of wine. It was not the larder of someone who was in any hurry to go back down. During the month since our phone call Bruno had laid in supplies and elaborated his own kind of mourning: the farm had gone badly, the relationship with Lara had gone badly, and he spoke about these things—or rather avoided speaking about them—as if they belonged to some remote period, in both time and thought. Rather than remember them, he seemed to want to forget about them entirely.

We spent these days making firewood for the winter. In the morning we would study a slope in search of a dead tree, climb up to cut it down, divest it of its branches before Bruno took off its top with the chainsaw, then would spend hours laboring to shift it to the house. We would tie a strong rope around it and drag it down by sheer force of our own strength. We had built slides throughout the wood, using old planks like sleepers, with banks of piled branches positioned where the trunk was in danger of slipping from our grasp with the steepness of the slope—but sooner or later it would get entangled with some obstacle or other, and then the work of dislodging it from there would begin. Bruno would curse it. He handled a pickaxe as if it were one of those small hoes lumberjacks use, levering up the trunk so that it could be pivoted halfway round: he would try one side and then the other, swearing as he did so, before flinging the tool to the ground and going to pick up the chainsaw again. I had always admired his way of working, the grace that he was able to express when using any kind of tool, but all trace of that was gone now. He would wield the chainsaw furiously: stall it, over-rev it, and when sometimes he had used up its petrol, would be on the verge of flinging it away as well. He would end up solving the problem by cutting the trunk into pieces and giving us another one instead—multiple journeys carrying them back to the house. Then we would set to splitting the wood with a sledgehammer and wedges until nightfall. The strokes of iron upon iron reverberated around the mountainside, drier, shriller, meaner, when Bruno was hammering, more uncertain and discordant when I took my turn. Until the master stroke came, the trunk split, and we finished the job with the axe.

The snow was already sparse on the Grenon. What little there was allowed the scree and the bushes, the ledges and the outcrops of rock to be made out still, as if the snowfall were no more than a thin layer of frost. But towards the end of the month a cold front arrived, the temperature dropped suddenly, and the lake froze over in the course of one night. The next morning I went down to look: the ice near the shore was rendered grayish and opaque by a myriad of trapped air bubbles, and became gradually darker and then blacker the further away you went from it. With a stick I could not even dent it, so decided to risk walking on it to see if it would take my weight. I had only taken a few steps before I heard a rumbling from deep in the lake that made me retreat immediately. Safely on the shore I heard it again: an ominous rumbling, resounding like a bass drum being hit over and over, extremely slowly and rhythmically, perhaps once every minute, perhaps even slower. It could not be anything other than water, beating against the ice from below. With the coming of daylight the water seemed to want to break out of the tomb in which it had found itself encased.

At sunset our endless evenings began. The horizon at the end of the valley would be tinged red for barely a few minutes before darkness fell. From then until it was time to sleep, the light did not change again: it could be six, seven, eight, and we would be spending the hours in front of the stove in silence, each with a candle to read by, the glow of the fire, the wine rationed to make it last, the one luxury at our suppers. During those days I cooked potatoes in every conceivable way. Boiled, roasted, grilled, fried in butter, baked with melted toma, with the candle next to the hotplate to see when they were done. We would eat them in ten minutes, then face each other for another two or three hours of silent vigil. The fact was that I was waiting for something—I didn’t know what—something that wasn’t happening. I had come back from Nepal to rescue my friend, and now my friend seemed to have no need of me. If I asked him a question he would let it drop with one of those vague responses that extinguished from the start any potential glimmer of conversation. He could spend an hour staring at the fire. And only occasionally, when I’d given up expecting him to, he spoke: but as if already midsentence, or as if he were temporarily following out loud the train of his own thoughts.

One evening he said, “I was there once, in Milan.”

“Oh really?” I said.

“But it was a long time ago; I must have been twenty. One day I had an argument with my boss and walked off the site. I had a whole afternoon free, so I said to myself: right, I’ll go there now. I took the car, went on the motorway, and arrived in the evening. I wanted to have a beer in Milan. I stopped at the first bar and had one. Then I headed back.”

“And what did you think of Milan?”

“Not much. Too many people.”

And then he added: “And I’ve also been to the sea. I went to Genoa once and saw it. I had a blanket in the car and slept there. Nobody was waiting for me at home anyway.”

“And what was the sea like?”

“A big lake.”

His accounts of things were like this; they might or might not have been true, and they went nowhere. Only once, out of the blue, he said: “It was great, wasn’t it, when we used to sit in front of the stable in the evening?”

I put down the book I was reading and responded: “Yes, really great.”

“The way night fell in July, the calm descended, do you remember? It was the hour I liked best, and then when I got up to milk the cows it was still dark. The two of them were still sleeping, and I felt as if I were watching over everything, as if they could sleep peacefully because I was there.”

Then he added: “It’s stupid, no? But that’s how I felt.”

“I don’t see anything stupid about it.”

“It’s stupid because no one can look after anyone else. It’s hard enough to look after yourself. Men are designed to always cope, if they’re clever, but if they think they’re too clever they end up being ruined.”

“Is starting a family being too clever?”

“Perhaps it is, for some.”

“Well, perhaps some should think twice before bringing children into the world.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Bruno said.

I stared at him in the semidarkness, trying to understand what was going through his mind. One half of his face was yellowed by the light from the stove, the other completely dark.

“So what are you saying?” I asked. He stared at the fire as if I were no longer even there.

I felt an increasing impatience that drove me outside into the dark, craving a cigarette for company. I stayed outside looking for the stars that were not visible, and asking myself what I was doing back here, until I realized that my teeth were chattering. Then I went back into the warm, dark, smoky room. Bruno had not moved. I warmed my feet in front of the stove, then went up to shut myself into my sleeping bag.

The next morning I was the first to get up. In the light of day I did not feel like sharing that small room, so skipped coffee and went out for a walk. I went down to look at the lake and found it covered by an overnight frost that the wind was sweeping here and there—lifting it in flurries, puffs, and miniature whirlwinds that appeared and disappeared in an instant, like restless spirits. Beneath the frost the ice was black and looked like stone. As I stood there looking at it, a shot echoed in the valley, rebounding from one side to the other so that it was difficult to tell whether it came from below, in the woods, or from the crests above. But I instinctively looked upwards for its origin, scouring the scree and the slopes for any sign of movement.

When I got back to Barma I saw that two hunters had come to speak to Bruno. They had modern weapons with telescopic sights. At one point one of the two opened his rucksack and deposited a black bag at Bruno’s feet. The other one noticed my presence and nodded in my direction, and recognizing something familiar about that gesture I realized soon enough who they were: the two cousins from whom Bruno had bought the farmstead. I had not seen them for more than twenty-five years. I had not known that he was in touch with them, nor how they had found him up there. But who knows how much else there was about Grana that I could not even imagine.

From out of the black bag, after they had gone, a dead and already gutted chamois emerged. When Bruno hung it up by its back legs from the branch of a larch tree I could see that it was a female. It had its dark winter coat with a thick black line down the middle of its back, a slender neck from which its lifeless muzzle dangled, two small horns that looked like hooks. From the gash in its belly the steam was still rising in the cold morning air.

Bruno went inside to fetch a knife and sharpened it carefully before setting to work. Then he was as precise and methodical as if he had spent a lifetime doing nothing but this. He made an incision in the skin around the shins and continued along the inside of the thighs, all the way down to the groin where the two cuts joined. He went back up, detached a flap of skin from the shin, put down the knife, and grasped the flap with both hands, tugging it down violently to expose first one thigh and then the other. Under the skin there was a white, viscous layer—the fat that the chamois had put on for the winter months—and beneath the fat you could glimpse the pink of its flesh. Bruno took the knife again, made a cut in the breast and another two in the front legs, grasped again the flayed hide that was now hanging halfway down its back and tugged it hard. You need some strength to tear hide from flesh, but he used more force than was necessary, putting into it the anger that he had kept bottled up ever since I had arrived. The skin came off in one piece, like a dress. Then he grabbed hold of one of the horns with his left hand, fumbled with his knife between the vertebrae of its neck, and I heard the crack of fractured bone. The head came off with the hide and Bruno stretched it on the ground, with the fur lying on the grass and the skin facing upwards.

The chamois looked much smaller now. Skinned and decapitated, it no longer even looked like a chamois—just meat, bones, cartilage—like one of those refrigerated carcasses hanging in cold storage in supermarkets. Bruno inserted his hands into the thorax and tore out the heart and lungs, then turned the carcass around. He felt with his fingers to find the veins of the muscles along the backbone, severed them with a light cut, and then went back over the line he had followed, plunging the knife in. The flesh that was disclosed then was of a dark red color. He cut off two long cords, dark and bloody. His arms were daubed with blood now too. I’d had enough, and did not stay to witness the rest of the butchery. I just saw at the end the skeleton of the chamois hanging from the branch of the tree, reduced to next to nothing.

A few hours later I told him that I was leaving. At the table I had tried to resume our conversation from the day before, this time being more direct. I asked him what he intended to do about Anita, what arrangements he had made with Lara, and whether he intended to visit them at Christmas.

“Probably not at Christmas,” he answered.

“So when?”

“I don’t know, maybe in the spring.”

“Or maybe in the summer, right?”

“Listen, what difference does it make? It’s better that she stays with her mother, isn’t it? Or do you want me to bring her up here, to live this kind of life with me?”

He said here just as he’d always done, as if at the bottom of his valley there was an invisible border, a wall erected only for him, preventing access to the rest of the world.

“Perhaps you should go down,” I said. “Maybe you’re the one who needs to change your way of life.”

“Me?” said Bruno. “But Berio, don’t you remember who I am?”

Yes, I remembered. He was the cowherd, the bricklayer, the man of the mountains, and above all he was his father’s son: just like him he would disappear from the life of his child, and that was it. I looked at the plate in front of me. Bruno had prepared a hunter’s delicacy, the heart and lungs of the chamois cooked with wine and onions, but I had barely touched it.

“You’re not eating?” he asked, disappointed.

“It’s too strong for me,” I replied.

I pushed the plate away and added: “Today I’m going down. I’ve got a few work-related things to sort out. Perhaps I’ll come back to say goodbye before leaving.”

“Yes, of course,” said Bruno, without looking at me. He didn’t believe it and neither did I. He took my plate, opened the door, and threw its contents outside for the crows and foxes, creatures with less delicate stomachs than mine.

In December I decided to go and visit Lara. I made my way up the valley as the snow was beginning to fall, at the start of the ski season. The landscape was not so very different from that of Grana, and while driving it occurred to me that to a certain extent all mountains look the same, except that here there was nothing to remind me of myself or of someone I once loved, and that made all the difference. The way in which a place can be a custodian of your history. How you could read it there every time you went back. There could only be one mountain of this kind in anyone’s lifetime, and in comparison with that one all the others were merely minor peaks, even if they happened to be in the Himalayas.

There was a small ski resort at the head of the valley. Two or three businesses in all, of the kind that were struggling to survive, what with the economic crisis and climate change. Lara worked there in a restaurant built in the style of an Alpine lodge, near to where the ski lifts began and as fake in its way as the artificial snow on the pistes. She came forward to embrace me wearing the apron of a waitress, and with a smile that could not conceal how tired she was. She was young, Lara; she was no more than thirty—but for a good while now she had been living the life of an older woman, and it showed. There were few skiers about, so she asked one of her colleagues to cover for her and came to sit at a table with me.

While talking she showed me a photo of Anita: a blond, rather frail, smiling child who was hugging a black dog much bigger than herself. She told me that she was in her first year of school. It was difficult to convince her to conform to certain rules; when she started she was like some kind of feral child: she would get in a fight with someone, or would begin to scream, or would sit in a corner the whole day saying nothing. Now, little by little, perhaps she was becoming civilized. Lara laughed. She said: “But the thing she likes most is when I take her to some farm. There she feels at home. She lets the calves lick her hands—you know, with that rough tongue of theirs—and she isn’t afraid at all. And it’s the same with goats and with horses. She’s happy with every kind of animal. I hope that won’t change, and that she’ll never forget it.”

She stopped to sip some of her tea. I saw that her fingers around the cup were red, her nails bitten down to the quick. She looked around the restaurant and said: “You know I also worked here when I was sixteen. All winter, Saturdays and Sundays while my friends went skiing. How I hated them.”

“It’s not such a bad place,” I said.

“Oh yes it is. I never thought I’d come back here. But as they say: sometimes you have to take a step backwards in order to move forwards. That is if you have the humility to admit it to yourself.”

Now she was referring to Bruno. As soon as we got onto the subject she came down hard on him. She told me that two or three years previously, when it was clear that the farm was not viable, they still would have been able to find solutions. Sell the cows, rent out the farmstead, both look for jobs. Bruno would have been quickly taken on at a building site or dairy processing unit, or even on the ski slopes. She could have worked as a shop assistant or waitress. She was ready to make this choice, to lead a more ordinary life until the situation improved. Bruno, on the other hand, did not want to know about it. In his mind there was no possibility of alternative lives. And at a certain point she realized that neither she nor Anita, nor what she had believed they were building up there together, were as important as his precious mountain, whatever that really meant to him. The moment she realized this, the relationship was over for her. From the very next day she had begun to imagine a future far away from there, with her little girl but without him.

She said: “Sometimes love exhausts itself gradually, and sometimes it comes to an end suddenly: isn’t that how it goes?”

“Well, I don’t know anything about love,” I replied.

“Oh right, I’d forgotten.”

“I went to see him. He’s up at Barma now. He wants to stay there; he’s not coming down.”

“I know,” said Lara. “The last of the mountain men.”

“I don’t know how to help him.”

“Forget it. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Leave him there where he wants to be.”

Saying this she glanced at her watch, exchanged a look with her colleague at the counter, and got up to go back to work. Lara the waitress. I remembered when she used to guard the cows beneath the rain, proud, still, with her black umbrella.

“Say hello to Anita for me,” I said.

“Come and see her before she’s twenty,” she said, and then she embraced me a little more tightly than before. There was something in that embrace that her words had not communicated. Emotional turmoil perhaps, or nostalgia. I left as the first skiers were arriving for lunch, with their helmets and their all-in-one suits and their plastic boots, looking like aliens.

The snow began falling suddenly and heavily at the end of December. On Christmas Day it snowed even in Milan. After lunch I was looking out of the window onto the avenue of my childhood, with a few cars passing gingerly along it and one skidding at the traffic lights and coming to a halt in the middle of the crossing. There were children throwing snowballs. Egyptian children who had perhaps never seen snow before. In four days’ time I would be catching the plane that would take me back to Kathmandu, but I wasn’t thinking about Nepal now, I was thinking about Bruno. It felt like I was the only one who knew that he was up there.

My mother came to be next to me at the window. She had invited her friends to lunch, and they were chatting tipsily at the table, waiting for dessert. There was a joyful atmosphere in the house. There was the nativity scene that she set up every year with the moss she collected at Grana, the red tablecloth, wine, and good company. I envied once more her talent for friendship. She had no intention of growing old sad and alone.

She said: “In my opinion you should try again.”

“I know,” I replied. “But I don’t know if it will make any difference.”

I opened the window and stretched my hand outside. I waited for a snowflake to land on my hand: it was heavy and wet and melted instantly on contact with my skin—but I wondered what it would be like now at two thousand meters.

So the next day I bought snow chains on the motorway and a pair of snowshoes in the first shop in the valley, and joined the queues of cars that were going up from Milan and Turin. Almost all of them had skis on their roof racks: after recent seasons without much snow the skiers were rushing to the mountains as if to the reopening of an amusement park. Not one of them took the turning at the junction for Grana. After just a few bends I stopped seeing anyone else. Then, when the road curved past the rock, I entered into my old world again.

There was snow piled up against the stables and the log-built haylofts. Snow on the tractors, on the tin roofs of shacks, on the wheelbarrows and piles of manure; snow that filled the ruined buildings and almost completely concealed them. In the village someone had cleared a narrow strip of road between the houses, perhaps the two men I saw on a roof throwing down the snow that had accumulated up there. They looked up without deigning to acknowledge me. I left the car a little further on, where the snowplow had been stopped or perhaps just given up, having cleared just enough space to turn around and head back. I put on gloves, since recently my fingers tended to freeze in the slightest cold. I fixed the snowshoes to my boots, climbed over the wall of hard snow that blocked the road, and went into the fresh snow beyond it.

It took me more than four hours to cover the route that in summer would take fewer than two. Even with the snowshoes I was sinking almost knee-deep. I was finding my way only by remembering it, gauging the direction from the contours of bumps and slopes, from a still discernible passage between the snow-clad pines, without any track to follow, or any of my usual points of reference on the ground. The snow had buried the remains of the cable lift’s winding gear, the ruined walls, the piles of stones quarried from the pastures, the stumps of centuries-old larch. All that remained of the river was a hollow between the two gently sloping humps of its banks: I crossed it at a randomly chosen point with a leap into fresh snow, falling forwards onto my hands without injury. On the other side the incline became increasingly steep, and every three or four steps I would slip back, taking a small avalanche with me. Then I would have to use my hands as well, pointing the snowshoes as if they were crampons and trying again with more determination. Only on reaching Bruno’s farmstead did I fully realize just how much snow had fallen: it had reached halfway up the windows of the stable. But the gusts of wind had swept the side facing the mountain, forming a tunnel a footstep wide, and I stopped there to get my breath back. The grass in that small strip of ground was dead and dry, gray as the stone walls. There was no light—and no other color but white, gray, and black. And the snow was continuing to fall.

When I arrived at the top I discovered that the lake had disappeared along with everything else. It was only a snow-filled basin, a gentle depression at the mountain’s foot. And so, for the first time in many years, instead of going around it I headed straight across in the direction of Barma. It seemed most strange, walking over so much water. I was halfway across when I heard someone calling.

“Oh!” I heard. “Berio!”

I raised my eyes and saw Bruno much higher up the slope, a small figure above the treeline. He waved, and as soon as I waved back he threw himself down. Then I realized he must be wearing skis. He was coming down at an oblique angle, with his legs opened wide and without any style, just as he did when coming down the snowfields in the summer. He also held his arms open and his chest thrust forward, keeping a precarious balance. But in front of the first larch trees I saw him throw himself to one side and steer decisively, avoiding the wood by crossing higher up, down to the main gorge of the Grenon, where he stopped. In the summer a small stream flowed in that gorge, but now it was a broad snow-filled slide that reached, unobstructed, all the way down to the lake. Bruno assessed the steepness of the incline over the distance remaining between us, then pointed his skis in my direction and set off again. In the gorge he immediately picked up speed. I don’t know what would have happened if he had fallen there, but he kept upright, swooped into the basin and gradually braked on the flat, sliding to where I was and coming to a standstill.

He was sweaty and smiling. “Did you see that?” he said, breathing heavily. He lifted one of the skis that must have been thirty or forty years old and looked like some kind of military relic. He said: “I went down to get a shovel and found these in my uncle’s cellar. They’ve been there for years; I don’t know who they belonged to.”

“But when did you learn how to use them?”

“About a week ago. Do you know what’s hardest? Not looking at a tree if you think you’re about to collide with it. If you look, you’re sure to hit it—bull’s-eye.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. Bruno laughed and clapped me on the back. He had a long gray beard, and his eyes were lit with euphoria. He must have lost some weight, as his features were sharper than ever.

“Oh, Merry Christmas,” he said, and then: “Come, come on,” as if we had met there by chance and needed to go and toast this fortunate coincidence. He picked up the skis and, carrying them on his back, cleared a path for me on the slope along a route that he must have known from his experiments as a skier.

I almost felt compassion for our little house on the rock face, when I saw it surrounded by walls of snow almost as high as itself. Bruno had cleared the roof, and dug a trench around the house which he’d widened into a small square in front of the door. When I went inside it felt like entering into a burrow. It seemed welcoming, and more cluttered and messier than before. The window was blind now; there was nothing to look out at but layers of white on the other side of the glass—and I had barely had time to take off my wet clothes and sit myself down at the table before something fell onto the tiles of the roof with a tremendous thud. I instinctively looked up, afraid that it was about to collapse on me.

Bruno burst out laughing. He said: “Did you fix the rotten ones properly that time? Now we’ll see whether the roof holds, eh?”

The thuds continued, but he took no notice of them. When I too had got more used to them I began to notice the changes that had been made to the room. Bruno had put up some more shelves by placing them on nails hammered into the walls, and had filled them with his books, clothes, and tools, giving to the place the air of something that it had never had before—that of a lived-in house.

He poured two glasses of wine. He said to me: “I’ve got to apologize. I’m sorry things went as they did last time. I’m glad that you’ve come back, I’d given up hope. We’re still friends, right?”

“Of course,” I said.

While I started to relax he rekindled the fire in the stove. He went outside with the bucket and brought it back filled with snow, then put it to melt to make the polenta with. He asked me if I felt like having a bit of meat for supper, and I told him that after that slog I would be happy to eat anything—so he took out pieces of chamois that he had cured in salt and put them in a pan with butter and wine. When the water in the pail reached boiling point he threw in a few handfuls of cornmeal. He took out another liter of red to keep us company while we waited, and after the first couple of glasses, as the room filled with the pungent smell of game, I began to feel good again too.

Bruno said: “I was angry. And what made me even angrier was that I had no one else to blame. The fact is that I made all the mistakes myself. Nobody led me into them. What was I thinking, trying to become a businessman? Someone like me who knows nothing about money. I should have fixed up a little place like this one, brought four cows up here, and lived like this from the start.”

I kept quiet, listening to him. I understood that he had thought long and hard, and had found the answers he had been looking for. He said, “You have to do what life has taught you to do. Perhaps when you’re still very young you can choose, maybe, to change the course of your life. But at a certain point you have to stop and say to yourself: fine, this is what I’m capable of doing and this is what I can’t do. This is what I asked myself. And the answer? I know how to live in the mountains. Put me up here by myself and I can cope. That’s something, don’t you think? But it took me until I was forty years old to realize the value of it.”

I was exhausted and was settling down into the warmth of the wine, and even though I would not have admitted it I liked hearing him speak like this. There was something absolute about Bruno that had always fascinated me. A certain integrity and purity that I had admired in him ever since we were boys. I was almost persuaded to believe him, up there in the little house that we had built together: that the best way of living his life was that one, alone in the middle of winter with nothing but a little food, left to his own devices and his own thoughts—even though it would have seemed inhuman for anyone else.

It was the mountain itself that woke me from this fantasy. I heard a sound that was different from the usual thudding on the roof. It began like the roar of an airplane, or like distant thunder—but then got immediately closer, deafening, a rumbling that shook the glasses on the table. We looked at each other, and I could see at that moment that he was no more prepared for this than I was, and no less terrified. To the rumbling another sound was added, that of a crash, something colliding and exploding, and immediately after it the sounds diminished in intensity. Then we began to realize that the avalanche could not have passed over us. It had passed nearby, but elsewhere. More material fell; we felt another, weaker fall, then the silence returned just as suddenly as it had been broken. When everything had stopped moving we went out to try to see what had happened, but by now it was night; there was no moon, and there was nothing to see but the dark. When we went back indoors Bruno did not feel like talking anymore, and neither did I. We went to bed, but an hour later I heard him get up, throw wood into the stove, and pour himself a drink.

Emerging from the burrow in the morning we found ourselves in the light that follows prolonged snowfall. Behind us the sun was shining and the mountain in front of us dazzled the basin. We immediately saw what had happened: the main gorge of the Grenon, the one that Bruno had skied down just hours before, had discharged an avalanche that had started three or four hundred meters further up, at the steepest point of the slope. On plunging down, the snow had dug deep into the ground, so much so as to strip the rock beneath and drag the earth and gravel down with it. The gorge looked like a dark wound now. Crashing into the basin after falling for five hundred meters, the avalanche had gathered enough force to smash through the frozen surface of the lake. That must have been the second sound that we heard. Now at the base of the gorge there was nothing left of the lake’s soft expanse, just a mass of dirty snow and blocks of ice, like a serac. The mountain crows were circling above and alighting within it. I could not work out what was attracting them there. It was a terrible and fascinating sight, and we did not need to say anything before going to take a closer look.

The carrion that the crows were sharing was the corpses of dead fish. Small silver trout caught in the midst of their winter hibernation, flung out of the dense dark water in which they slept, up onto a bed of snow. Who knows whether they had time to be aware of what was happening. It must have been like a bomb exploding: from the upturned and shattered slabs I could see that the ice must have been half a meter thick on the surface of the lake. Underneath, the water had already begun to freeze over again. This was only a thin layer as yet, dark but transparent, like the one I had seen in autumn. Some crows were squabbling over a trout nearby, and finding it at that moment an insufferable spectacle of greed I scattered them with a couple of steps and a kick. All that was left behind on the snow was a pink mush.

“Sky burial,” said Bruno.

“Have you seen anything like this before?” I asked.

“No, I certainly haven’t,” he replied. He seemed impressed.

I heard the sound of a helicopter approaching. There was not a cloud in the sky that morning. With the first warmth from the sun, clumps of snow began to fall from every overhang of Grenon, and from the guttering small avalanches fell. It was as if the mountain were starting to free itself from that prolonged snowfall. The helicopter flew above without noticing us and passed on, and then it occurred to me that we were barely a few kilometers from the ski slopes on Monte Rosa, on December 27, on a morning of sunshine and fresh snow. It was a perfect day for skiing. Perhaps they were watching the traffic from up there. I imagined from above the lines of cars, the overflowing car parks, the establishments working to full capacity without a break—and just there, over a nearby ridge, on the side that was in shadow, two men standing at the foot of a landslide surrounded by dead fish.

“I’m going,” I said, for the second time in just a few weeks. Twice I had tried, and twice I had failed to rescue him.

“Yes, it seems like the right thing to do,” said Bruno.

“You should come down with me.”

“Again?”

I looked at him. Something had occurred to him that caused him to smile. He said: “How long have we been friends?”

“I think that next year it will be thirty years.”

“And haven’t you been trying to get me down from here for the last thirty years?” Then he added: “You mustn’t worry about me. This mountain has never done me any harm.”

I remember little else about that morning. I was shaken, and too sad to think clearly. I remember that I could not wait to leave the lake and the avalanche behind me—but that later on, once I was down in the valley, I began to enjoy the descent. I found the route by which I’d come up, and discovered that with the snowshoes I could go down in great leaps even at the steepest points, as the fresh snow did not give way beneath my feet. The steeper the incline, in fact, the more I could launch myself and let myself go. I stopped only once, when crossing the river, because I had thought of something and wanted to see if it was true. I climbed down between its snow-covered banks and dug in the snow with my gloves. Just below it I found the ice, a thin transparent layer that broke easily. I discovered that this thin crust protected a vein of water. You could not see it or hear it from the path, but my river was still there, coursing beneath the snow.

It turned out that in the winter of 2014 the Western Alps had the heaviest snow for half a century. In the highest ski resorts they recorded three meters of snow at the end of December, six at the end of January, eight by the end of February. Reading these figures in Nepal I could hardly begin to imagine what eight meters of snow would look like in the high mountains. It was enough to bury the woods. So much more than was needed to bury a house.

One day in March Lara wrote to me asking me to phone her as soon as possible. She then told me that Bruno could not be found. His cousins had gone up to check on him, but at Barma nobody had been clearing the snow for some time: the little house had disappeared beneath it, and even the rock face was barely visible. The cousins had called for help, and a rescue team taken up by helicopter had dug down to the roof. They had made a hole in the tiles, and at that point had expected to find him—as sometimes happened with the old mountain folk—having taken to his bed with a sudden illness and died there of hypothermia. But there was no one in the house. Nor could any tracks be found in the surrounding area after the recent snowfalls. Lara asked me if I had any ideas, since I had been the last one to see him, and I said that they should check if there was still a pair of skis in the storeroom. No, they were not there either.

The mountain rescue team began to search the area with dogs, so for a week I called every day, hoping for news, but there was too much snow on the Grenon, and with spring the worst period for avalanches arrived. In March the Alps suffered many: and after the events of that winter, in which the death toll on the Italian mountainsides had reached twenty-two, nobody took much interest in a local man lost from view in a deep valley above his own home. It hardly seemed necessary to Lara or to me to keep insisting that they should prolong the search. They would find Bruno with the first thaw. He would turn up in some gorge in the middle of the summer, and the crows would be the first to find him.

“Do you think that this is what he wanted?” Lara asked me over the phone.

“No, I don’t think so,” I lied.

“You managed to understand him, didn’t you? You understood each other.”

“I hope we did.”

“Because it sometimes seems to me that I never knew him.”

And then I asked myself who was it that had known him on this earth except me? And if what was between us was kept secret, that which we had shared, what was left now that one of us was no longer there?

When those days came to an end, and the city became unbearable, I decided to take a tour in the mountains on my own. Spring is a wonderful season in the Himalayas: the green of the rice paddies dominates the sides of the valleys; a little above them the rhododendrons are in flower. But I didn’t want to go back to a familiar place, or to retrace the path of any memory—so I chose a region where I had never been before, bought a map, and set off. I had not felt the joys of freedom and discovery for a long time now. I found myself leaving the trail, climbing up a hillside to reach a ridge, just out of curiosity, to see what was on the other side, lingering in a village without having planned to, spending a whole afternoon amidst the pools of a river. That was our way of being in the mountains, Bruno’s and mine. I thought that would be a way of preserving our secret in the years to come. It also came to mind that there was a house up there at Barma with a hole in its roof, and that it would not survive like that for very long. And I thought this as if from very far off.

From my father I had learnt, long after I had stopped following him along the paths, that in certain lives there are mountains to which we may never return. That in lives like his and mine you cannot go back to the mountain that is in the center of all the rest, and at the beginning of your own story. And that wandering around the eight mountains is all that remains for those who, like us, on the first and highest have lost a friend.