Bruno waited with the same excitement for that day to arrive. Except that I came and went, and he stayed. I think that from his vantage point in the fields he must have kept an eye out for our return, since he would come to find us within an hour of our arrival, shouting “Berio!” from the courtyard. This was the nickname with which he had baptized me. “Come on,” he would say, not bothering with any kind of greeting, or with saying anything else for that matter, as if we had last seen each other just the day before. And it was true: the intervening months were canceled in an instant, and our friendship seemed to be lived in a single uninterrupted summer.
Yet Bruno, in the meantime, had been growing up more quickly than me. He was almost always covered in dirt from the stables, and refused to come inside the house. He would wait on the balcony, leaning on the balustrade, which we almost never did ourselves, since it would move the moment you touched it, convincing us that one of these days it would collapse. He would look over his shoulder as if checking to see whether he’d been followed: he had absconded from his cows and was taking me away from my books, to have adventures which he did not want to ruin by talking about them.
“Where are we going?” I would ask while lacing my boots.
“Into the mountains,” he would limit himself to saying, with a mocking tone that he had developed, perhaps the same tone that he used when answering his uncle. He was smiling. All I needed to do was to trust him. My mother trusted me, and would often enough repeat that she didn’t worry because she knew that I would do nothing wrong. Nothing “wrong”—rather than reckless or stupid—as if she was alluding to quite other dangers that would come my way in life. She did not resort to prohibitions or to other advice before letting us leave.
Going into the mountains with Bruno had nothing to do with the peaks. Although we did follow a path into the woods, climbing quickly for half an hour, we would at some point known only to him leave the beaten track and continue along other routes. Up a gorge even, or through the thickest fir cover. It was a mystery to me how he got his bearings. He walked fast, following an internal map which indicated passageways where all I could see was a collapsed bank or a scar that looked too steep. But right at the last moment, between two twisted pines, the rock would reveal a fissure that we could get a purchase on to climb, and a ledge, which had been invisible at first, would allow us to cross it with ease. Some of these trails had been first opened up with the blows of pickaxes. When I asked him who had used them he would say, “the miners,” or, alternatively: “the woodcutters,” pointing out the telltale signs that I was incapable of noticing. The winding gear of a cable lift, rusted and overgrown with weeds. The earth that beneath a drier layer was still blackened by fire, where a charcoal works had been. The woods were littered with these excavations, mounds, and ruins, which Bruno interpreted for me as if they were phrases written in a dead language. Together with these cryptic signs he would teach me a dialect that I found less abstract than Italian: as soon as I was in the mountains it was as if I would need to substitute the concrete language of things for the abstract language of books, now that the things themselves were tangible and I could touch them with my own hands. The larch: la brenga. The spruce: la pezza; the Swiss pine: l’arula. An overhanging rock under which to take cover from the rain was a barma. A stone was a berio—and so was I, Pietro. I was very fond of that nickname. Every river cut a valley and so was called a valey; every valley had two sides with contrasting characteristics: an adret nicely exposed to the sun, where there were villages and fields, and an envers that was damp and in shadow, left to the forest and to wildlife. But of the two it was this reverse side that we preferred.
There no one could disturb us and we could go hunting for treasure. There really were mines in the woods surrounding Grana: tunnels closed off, boarded up with a few planks that had already been trespassed through before us. In the old times, according to Bruno, they had found gold there, searching for seams all over the mountains. But they had not managed to extract everything. Surely there must be a little remaining. And so we would enter into blind tunnels which ended in nothing after a few meters. And into others that went deep and were winding and pitch black inside. The ceilings were so low as to make it difficult to walk upright. The water that dripped down the walls gave the impression that the whole thing might cave in at any moment: I knew how dangerous it was, and I also knew that I was betraying my mother’s trust, since there was nothing very sensible about poking around in such deathtraps—the sense of guilt I felt ruined any pleasure there might have been in doing so. I longed to be like Bruno, to have the courage to rebel openly and to accept any punishment that might follow, with my head held high. Instead I disobeyed furtively, and was ashamed of what I had got away with. I would think about these things as my feet were soaked by the puddles of water in there. We never did find gold: sooner or later the tunnels turned out to have been blocked by a cave-in, or just became too dark to go along any further, and there was no choice but to retreat.
We made up for the disappointment by ransacking some ruins on the way home. Shepherds’ huts that we came across in the woods, constructed from whatever came to hand there, resembling burrows. Bruno would pretend to be discovering them with me. I suspect that he knew every one of those overgrown cabins, but it was more fun to be shoulder-barging open their doors as if for the first time. Inside we would purloin a dented bowl or the terminally blunted blade of a scythe, and imagine them to be valuable finds—and in the village, before parting, we would divide the spoils.
In the evening my mother would ask me where we had been.
“Just around here,” I would answer, with a shrug. In front of the stove I did not give her much satisfaction now.
“Did you find anything worth seeing?”
“Of course, Mum. The woods.”
She would give me a melancholy look, as if she were losing me. She really believed that the silence between two people was the origin of all their troubles.
“All I want to know is that you are OK,” she would say, giving up and abandoning me to my thoughts.
In the other battle she was fighting at Grana she held firm. From the beginning she had taken Bruno’s education to heart, like a personal crusade, but she knew full well that she could achieve nothing on her own: she needed to forge alliances with the women of his family. She had understood that his mother would be of no help at all, so she concentrated her efforts on his aunt. This is how my mother operated: knocking on doors and gaining entrance to homes, returning in a friendly but determined manner, not relenting until the aunt eventually committed to sending him to school during the winter—and over to our place to do homework in the summer. This was already quite an achievement. I don’t know what the uncle thought about the matter; perhaps up there in the alpeggio he was cursing the lot of us. Or perhaps, in truth, nobody in that family really cared anything about the boy.
And so it is that I remember long hours spent with Bruno in our kitchen doing history and geography revision, while outside the woods and the river and the sky beckoned. He would be sent to us three times a week, scrubbed and well dressed for the occasion. My mother would get him to read aloud from my books—Stevenson, Verne, Twain, Jack London—and would leave them with him after the lesson so that he could continue practicing while he was up in the pastures. Bruno liked reading novels, but studying grammar always sent him into a crisis: for him it was like studying a foreign language. And seeing how he got entangled with the rules of Italian, failing to spell a word correctly or stuttering over a conjunction, I felt humiliated on his behalf and annoyed with my mother. I could not see the justice of what we were forcing him to do. And yet Bruno did not utter a single word of protest or complaint. He understood how much it mattered to her, and perhaps having never experienced before what is was like to matter to someone, he struggled hard to learn.