Only on rare occasions during the summer was he allowed to come walking with us, and these were his holidays, the reward for the efforts that went into his studies: whether it was a summit we were taken to by my father, or just a field where my mother would spread out a blanket for lunch. On these occasions I would see Bruno transformed. Though undisciplined by nature, he would adapt to the rules and the rituals of our family. And whilst with me he already behaved like a grown-up, with my parents he would happily regress to his proper age. He allowed my mother to feed him, to dress him, to caress him—while my father inspired in him a respect that bordered on adulation. I could see it in the way he would follow behind him on the path, and how he would listen in rapt silence when my father started explaining something. These were perfectly ordinary moments in the life of a family, but Bruno had never experienced anything like them—and part of me felt proud of them, as if they were gifts that I myself had bestowed on him. On the other hand I would sometimes watch him with my father to try to gauge the nature of the understanding that there was between them, and I would feel that Bruno would have made a good son for him—perhaps not a better one than I was, but in a certain sense a more suitable one. Bruno was full of questions for him that he would ask naturally, without hesitation. He had the confidence that allowed him to get close to my father, and the physical strength to follow him anywhere. I would think these things but then try to suppress them, as if they were something about which I should be ashamed.
Eventually Bruno passed not only the first grade of senior school but the second and even the third, achieving an “average” mark in the exam. It was such an event in his family that his aunt phoned us immediately in Milan to give us the news. What a peculiar word, I thought, and wondered who had come up with it, since there was nothing “average” about Bruno. My mother on the other hand was simply delighted, and when we went back up to Grana she took him a prize: a box of chisels and gouges for working with wood. Then she began to ask herself what else she could do for him.
The summer of 1987 arrived: we were fourteen. We spent an entire month dedicated to a systematic exploration of the river. Not from its banks this time, or from the paths that intersected it from the woods, but in the water itself, in the current, jumping from rock to rock or wading within it. We had never heard of canyoning, if such a thing even existed at that time, but did it anyway, albeit in reverse: proceeding upstream from the bridge at Grana, climbing back up the valley. Just above the village we entered a long gorge of calm water, in the shadow of banks densely covered in vegetation. There were large pools infested with insects, tangles of submerged wood, old wary trout that would scatter at our approach. Further up, the gradient became problematic, making the river flow headlong, its progress all leaps and falls. Where we could not manage to scramble over we would rig up a rope to cross the rapids, or use a fallen tree trunk by floating it onto the water and wedging it between rocks to make a pontoon. Sometimes even a single modest waterfall would cost us hours of work. But this is what made the feat special. We planned to negotiate such passages one by one then connect them all, going up the entire length of the river on one glorious day at the end of summer.
First, though, we needed to discover its source. Towards the August bank holiday we had already gone beyond the territory of Bruno’s uncle. There was a large tributary which provided the Alpine farmsteads with water, and a little way after this fork a rudimentary bridge consisting of a few planks of wood provided a crossing. After that the river narrowed and presented us with no further difficulty. I understood from the thinning out of the tree cover that we were getting to a level of two thousand meters. The alders and birches disappeared from the banks, all other trees giving way to the larch; above our heads was that world of rock and stone that Luigi Guglielmina had called Grenon. At this point the bed of the river lost its usual appearance—that of something excavated and shaped by the water—becoming instead nothing but scree. The water literally vanished beneath our feet. It escaped beneath the stones here, amidst the contorted roots of a juniper.
This is not how I had imagined my river ending up, and I was disappointed. I turned towards Bruno, who was climbing a few steps behind me. All afternoon he had been keeping himself to himself, lost in his own thoughts. When this mood came over him the only thing I could do was follow after him in silence, hoping that it would pass.
But as soon as he caught sight of the spring he snapped out of it. He had sensed my disappointment at a glance. “Wait,” he said. He signaled to me to keep quiet and listen, and looked at the scree at our feet.
That day the air was not still, like it was at the height of summer. A cold wind blew over the tepid stones and, passing through the fading plants, carried away soft clusters of seeds and set up a rustling in the trees. By listening hard, together with this rustling I could hear water gurgling. A sound different from the ones it makes above ground, deeper and more muffled. It seemed to be coming from beneath the scree. I understood what it was and began to climb again to follow it, searching like a dowser for the water that I could hear but not see. Bruno let me go on ahead, already knowing what we would find.
What we found was a lake hidden in a basin at the foot of the Grenon. It was circular and at two or three hundred meters across was the largest that I’d ever seen in the mountains. The marvelous thing about Alpine lakes is that you never expect them, while climbing, unless you know already that they are there—that you don’t catch sight of them until the very last step over a ridge, at which point the view suddenly opens up before your eyes. The basin was all scree on its sunlit side, and as you moved your gaze gradually towards the shadows you saw that it became covered at first by willows and rhododendrons, and then by more woods. In its middle was this lake. Observing it, I was able to understand how it had been made: the ancient avalanche that could be seen from below, from Bruno’s uncle’s pastures, had sealed the valley like a dam. The lake had been formed above the dam, collecting the water that ran off from the surrounding snow, before resurfacing downhill, filtered by the scree, becoming in the process the river that we knew. I liked the fact that it was born in this way. It seemed to me an origin worthy of a great river.
“What’s this lake called?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Bruno said. “Grenon. Almost everything’s called that around here.”
His previous mood had returned. He sat down on the grass and I remained standing next to him. It was easier to look at the lake than to look at each other: a few meters in front of us a large rock emerged from the water, like a small island, and it was useful to have something to fix my gaze on.
“Your parents have spoken to my uncle,” said Bruno, after a while. “Did you know about that?”
“No,” I lied.
“Strange. I don’t understand what’s going on at all.”
“About what?”
“About the secrets you have between you.”