“So what did they talk to your uncle about?”
“About me,” he replied.
Now I sat down next to him. What he was about to tell me came as no surprise. My parents had been discussing it for some time now, and I had not needed to listen behind doors in order to discover their intentions: the previous day they had suggested to Luigi Guglielmina that in September we should take Bruno with us. Take him to Milan. They had offered to take him into our home, and to enroll him in a college. In a technical or professional institute, whichever he preferred. They were thinking about a trial year: if Bruno wasn’t happy with the arrangement he would be able to give up and return to Grana next summer. If on the other hand it all worked out, then they would be happy to keep him with us until his graduation. At that point he would be free to decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
Even in the account of this given by Bruno I could recognize the voice of my mother. Happy to keep him with us. Free to decide. The rest of his life.
I said: “Your uncle will never agree to it.”
“Oh but he will,” said Bruno. “And do you know why?”
“Why?”
“For the money.”
He dug around in the ground with a finger, picked up a pebble and added: “Who’s going to pay for it? That’s all that interests my uncle. Your parents have said that they’ll take care of everything. Board and lodging, school, the lot. For him it’s a real bargain.”
“And what does your aunt say about it?”
“It’s fine by her.”
“And your mother?”
Bruno snorted. He threw the pebble into the water. It was so small that it made no sound. “What my mother always says. The usual. A big nothing.”
There was a layer of dried mud on the rocks on the bank. A black crust showing the level the lake had reached in spring. Now the snowfields that fed it had been reduced to gray stains in the gullies, and if the summer were to continue it would end up by making them disappear altogether. Without the snow, who knows what would happen to the lake.
“And what about you?” I asked.
“What about me?”
“Would you like to?”
“To come to Milan?” said Bruno. “I haven’t a clue. Do you know that ever since yesterday I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like? And I can’t do it. I have no idea what it would be like.”
We remained in silence. I, who knew only too well what it was like, did not have to imagine anything in order to be opposed to the idea. Bruno would have hated Milan, and Milan would have ruined Bruno, just like when his aunt washed and dressed him up and sent him around to us to conjugate verbs. I really could not understand why my parents were going out of their way to turn him into something that he wasn’t. What was wrong with letting him graze cows for the rest of his life? I was unaware of the selfishness of this thought, that it wasn’t really concerned with Bruno, with his own wishes and his future—but only with the use I could continue to make of him. I was thinking of my summers, my companion, my own experience of the mountain. I hoped that, up there, nothing would ever change—not even the charred shacks or mounds of manure lining the road—that he should stay the same, always, along with the piles of manure and the ruins, frozen in time and awaiting my arrival.
“Well, maybe you should tell them,” I suggested.
“Tell them what?”
“That you don’t want to go to Milan. That you want to stay here.”
Bruno turned to look at me. He raised his eyebrows. He had not expected such advice from me. Although he may have been thinking the very same thing himself, coming from me it did not seem right. “Are you crazy?” he said. “I’m not staying here. I’ve spent my whole life going up and down this mountain.”
Then he got to his feet, and there on the grass where we stood he cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted, “Oh! Can you hear me? It’s me, Bruno! I’m leaving!”
From the other side of the lake the slope of the Grenon sent back to us an echo of his cry. We heard some stones falling. His shout had startled a group of chamois that was now clambering up the scree.
It was Bruno who pointed them out to me. They were passing through rocks which made them almost invisible, but when they crossed a snowfield I was able to count them. It was a small herd of five. They climbed up that stain of snow in single file, reached the crest, and lingered there for a moment, as if to look at us for one last time before going. Then, one by one, they disappeared down the other side.
Our four-thousander that summer was meant to be the Castor. We would scale one of these each year, my father and I, on the Monte Rosa, so as to conclude the season on a high, when we were best trained up to do so. I hadn’t stopped going onto the glacier, but neither had I stopped suffering its effects: I had just become accustomed to feeling unwell and to the fact that this sickness formed a normal part of that world, like getting up before dawn, or the freeze-dried food in the refuges, or the cawing of crows on the heights. It was a way of going into the mountains that for me had lost all sense of adventure. It was a brutal putting of one foot after the other before vomiting my heart out at the top. I hated doing it, and found myself hating that white desert every time: and yet I was proud of going above four thousand meters again, as further proof of my courage. In 1985 my father’s black felt-tip ink had reached the Vincent, by 1986 the Gnifetti. He considered the ascent of these summits to be a kind of training for me. He had consulted a doctor and was convinced that I would grow out of my altitude sickness, so that over the course of three or four years we would reach the point when we could do more serious things, such as crossing the Lyskamm or the rock faces of Dufour.
But what I remember most about Castor, even more than its elongated crests, was the vigil that we shared in the refuge. A plate of pasta, a half-liter of wine on the table, the mountaineers nearby arguing amongst themselves, ruddy-faced from the sun and from fatigue. The prospect of the next day created in the room a kind of concentration. In front of me my father was leafing through the guest book, his favorite reading in a refuge. He spoke German well and understood French, and every so often he would translate a passage from these languages of the Alps. Someone had returned to a summit after thirty years and thanked God. Someone else regretted the absence of a friend. He was moved by these things, to the point where he took up the pen to make his own contribution to that collective diary.
When he got up to refill his carafe I looked at what he had written. His handwriting was dense and nervous, difficult to decipher if you were not already familiar with it. I read: I’m here with my fourteen-year-old son, Pietro. These will be my last occasions at the head of the rope, because soon he will be the one pulling me up. Don’t much feel like going back to the city, but I’ll take with me the memory of these days as the most beautiful refuge. It was signed: Giovanni Guasti.
Rather than making me feel moved, or proud, these words just annoyed me. I detected in them something that sounded false and sentimental, a rhetoric of the mountains that did not correspond to reality. If it was such a paradise then why did we not stay and live up there? Why were we taking away a friend who had been born and raised there? And if the city was so revolting, why were we forcing him to live in it with us? This is what I would like to have asked my father—and my mother as well, come to think of it. How is it that you are so sure of knowing what’s best for the course of another person’s life? How is it that you don’t have the slightest doubt—that he might know better than you?