But when my father returned he was in high spirits. It was the third from last day of his holiday, a Friday in August of his forty-sixth year, and he was in an Alpine refuge with his only son. He had brought another glass and half-filled it for me. Perhaps, in his imagination, now that I was growing up and getting over my altitude sickness, our relationship as father and son would be transformed into something different. Climbing companions, just like he had written in the book. Drinking companions. Perhaps he really did imagine us like this in a few years’ time, sitting at a table at three and a half thousand meters drinking red wine and studying maps of the routes, with no more secrets between us.
“How’s your stomach doing?” he asked.
“It’s not bad.”
“And your legs?”
“They’re really good.”
“Excellent. Tomorrow we’ll have fun.”
My father raised his glass. I did the same, tasted the wine and felt that I liked it. While I was getting it down a guy sitting nearby burst out laughing, said something in German, and clapped me hard on the back, as if I had just been initiated into the great brotherhood of men and he was welcoming me into it.
The next evening we went back to Grana as veterans of the glacier. My father with his shirt unbuttoned and his rucksack slung over one shoulder, and with a hobbling gait due to the blisters on his feet; I as ravenous as a wolf, since as soon as we descended from altitude my stomach realized that it had been empty for two days. My mother was waiting for us with a hot bath and supper already on the table. Later on the time for telling our story would come: my father tried to describe the color of ice in the crevasses, the vertiginous nature of the north faces, the elegance of the cornices of snow on the crests; while I for my part had only blurred recollections of such visions, fogged as they were by nausea. I usually kept quiet. I had already learned a fact which my father never resigned himself to, namely, that it was impossible to convey what it feels like up there to those who have stayed below.
But that evening we did not get around to telling my mother anything. I was about to have my bath when I heard the voice of a man ranting down in the courtyard. I went to the window and pulled back the curtain: I saw a character who was gesticulating and yelling words that I could not understand. My father was the only other one out there. He had hung his thick socks on the balcony and was bathing his aching feet in the trough, getting up from where he sat on its rim to confront the stranger.
For a moment I thought it might be a farmer furious at this misuse of his water. In Grana they would leap at any pretext to take offense from an incomer. It was easy to identify the locals: they all moved in the same way, had the same marked facial features from out of which, between cheekbones and forehead, a pair of sky-blue eyes peered. This man was smaller than my father, except for the muscular arms and huge hands that were completely out of proportion to the rest of his body. With those hands he grabbed the two sides of my father’s shirt just below the collar. It looked as if he wanted to pick him up.
My father spread his arms. I was seeing him from behind and imagined that he would be saying: calm down, calm down. The man mumbled something, showing his ruined teeth. His face was also wrecked: I didn’t know by what, being still too young to recognize the face of a drinker. He made a grimace that was exactly like one of Luigi Guglielmina’s, and at that moment I realized how much he resembled him. My father began to gesture slowly. I understood that he was explaining something, and knowing him, knew also that his arguments would be unanswerable. The man lowered his gaze, just as I always did. It looked as if he was having second thoughts, but he kept hold of my father’s shirt. My father turned up the palms of his hands as if to say: OK, do we understand each other? So now what? There was something ridiculous in seeing him in this situation barefoot. On his calves the line made by his socks sharply divided his pale ankles from a narrow band of scarlet skin just below the knee—the area that his plus fours left bare. Here was the educated city-dweller, sure of himself and used to telling others what to do, who had just burned his legs on the glacier and was now trying to reason with a highlander the worse for drink.
The man decided that he’d had enough. Suddenly and without warning, he lowered his right hand to make a fist and hit my father on the temple. It was the first time in my life that I had seen a real punch thrown. The sound of knuckle on cheekbone was clear even from the bathroom, dry as a whack with a stick. My father took two steps back, staggered, but managed not to fall. But immediately afterwards his arms fell to his sides and his shoulders sagged a little. It was the posture of a wretched man. The other man said something else before leaving, a threat or a promise, and it did not surprise me to see him heading, in the end, towards the Guglielminas’ house. During that brief confrontation I had realized who he was.
He had come back to reclaim what was his. He did not know that he had got the wrong person. But in the end it made no difference: that blow was thrown into my father’s face in order to plant something clearly in the mind of my mother. It was the eruption of reality into her idealism, and perhaps also into her arrogance. The next day Bruno and his father were nowhere to be seen. My father’s left eye became swollen and blue. But I don’t think that was what was hurting most, when he got into his car that evening and left for Milan.
The following week was our last in Grana. Bruno’s aunt came to speak to my mother: mortified, wary, worried, perhaps above all by the prospect of losing such faithful tenants. My mother reassured her. She was already thinking about damage limitation, about how to salvage the relationships that had been so painstakingly nurtured.
For me it proved to be an interminable week. It rained constantly: a blanket of low-lying cloud cover hid the mountains from view, occasionally clearing to expose the first snow at three thousand meters. I would like to have taken one of the paths I knew and gone up to tread all over it, without asking permission from anyone. But I stayed in the village instead, replaying what I had seen and feeling guilty about what had happened. Then on Sunday we locked the house and left as well.
FOUR
I COULD NOT GET that blow out of my mind until a few years later I found the courage to deliver one myself. In truth it was the first of a series, and the hardest of these I would go on to land in the valley in later years, but now it seems right that my rebellion should have begun in the mountains, like everything else that has mattered to me. The event itself was unremarkable. I was sixteen and one day my father decided to take me camping. He had bought an old heavy tent from a stall selling army surplus gear. He had this idea of putting it up on the side of a small lake, fishing for a few trout without being discovered by the forest rangers, lighting a fire at nightfall and roasting the fish on it—and afterwards, who knows, staying up late drinking and singing, warmed by its embers.
He had never shown the slightest interest in camping, so I suspected that there was something else that had been planned for me. In recent times I had withdrawn into a corner from which I observed our family life with a pitiless eye. The ineradicably fixed habits of my parents, my father’s harmless outbursts of anger and the tricks that my mother used to contain them, the little bullyings and the subterfuges that they no longer realized they were resorting to. He would be emotional, authoritarian, irascible; she would be strong and calm and conciliatory. They had a mutually reassuring way of always playing the same part, knowing that the other would play theirs: these were not real arguments; they were performances with always predictable endings, and in that cage I also ended up being caught. I had begun to feel an urgent need to escape. But I had never managed to say so: not once had I uttered a single protest about anything, and I think that it was precisely for this, to make me speak, that the damn tent had materialized.