In the afternoon we continued to extract the rubble until we reached the floor of the ruin: planking which clearly showed the nature of the building. On one side, against the long wall, we found the feeding troughs, while a small gutter in the dead center of the room served as a drain for the manure. The floor was made of planks the width of three fingers, polished by years of contact with the muzzles and hooves of beasts. Bruno said that we could clean them up and use them to build something else, and began to lever them out with the pickaxe. I noticed something on the floor and picked it up. It was a wooden cone, smooth and hollow, similar to the horn of an animal.
“That’s used with a scythe stone,” Bruno said, when I showed it to him.
“A scythe stone?”
“A stone for sharpening the blade. There’s probably another word for it, but who knows what it is anymore. I should ask my mother. I think it’s a river stone.”
“From the river?”
I felt like a child to whom everything has to be explained. He showed infinite patience with these questions of mine. He took the horn from my hand and held it to his side, then explained: the scythe stone is a smooth, round stone, almost black. It has to be wet to work properly. You hang this from your belt with a little water inside, so that every so often while you are scything you can moisten the stone and sharpen the blade, like this.
He made a sweeping, soft gesture with his arm, describing a half-moon above his head. I could see perfectly the imaginary scythe and the imaginary stone that was sharpening it. Only then did I realize that we were repeating one of our favorite games: I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before, since we had been in so many ruins just like this one. We would get in through holes in walls that were in danger of collapse. We walked on planks that moved beneath our feet. We would steal a few wrecked items and pretend that they were treasures. We had done it for years.
So I began to see the project on which we were embarked in a slightly different light. Until then I had believed that I was only there for my father’s sake: to fulfill his wishes, to assuage my guilt. But at that moment, watching Bruno sharpening the imaginary scythe, the inheritance I’d received seemed more like a compensation or a second chance for our interrupted friendship. Was that what my father had wanted to give me? Bruno took one last look at the horn and tossed it onto the pile of wood set aside for burning. I went over to retrieve it and put it away, thinking that I would find some future use for it.
I did the same with the Swiss pine that had managed to grow in the middle of the ruin. At five, when I was too tired to do anything else, I used the pickaxe to dig around the little tree and extricate it with its roots still intact. Its trunk was thin and twisted due to its efforts to reach the light from out amongst the rubble. With its roots exposed it looked moribund, and I hurried to replant it nearby. I dug a hole at the edge of the clearing, planting it where there was the best view of the lake, treading down firmly the earth that I used to cover its roots. But when I left it there, in the wind to which it was not accustomed, it was blown from side to side. Exposed to the elements from which it had been long protected, it looked like an altogether too fragile creation.
“Do you think it will make it?” I asked.
“Who knows,” said Bruno. “It’s a strange plant, that one. Strong where it decides to grow, and weak if you put it somewhere else.”
“Have you tried before?”
“A few times.”
“How did it work out?”
“Badly.”
He looked at the ground, the way he did when thinking again about some old story. “My uncle wanted a Swiss pine in front of the house. I don’t know why, maybe he thought it would bring him good luck. And he sure needed it, no doubt about that. So every year he would send me to the mountain to get a sapling. But it always ended up getting trampled by the cows, and after a while we stopped trying.”
“What do you call it here?”
“The Swiss pine? Arula.”
“That’s it. And it brings good luck?”
“So they say. Perhaps it does if you believe it.”
Whether lucky or not, I felt attached to that young tree. I sunk a stout stick next to its trunk and attached it at several points with twine. Then I went to the lake to fill a drinking bottle to water it with. When I got back I saw that Bruno had constructed a kind of low platform beneath the big wall. He had put on the ground two of the old roof beams and nailed on a few salvaged planks. Then he took from the rucksack a small rope and a rainproof sheet of the kind used in Grana to protect the hay in the fields. With two wooden stakes he attached two corners of the sheet to a crack in the rock and attached the other two to the ground, thus making a kind of shelter beneath which he put the rucksack and provisions.
“Are we leaving this stuff there?” I asked.
“We’re not leaving it, I’m staying there too.”
“What do you mean you’re staying?”
“I mean that I’m sleeping here.”
“Sleeping there?”
This time he lost patience, and replied brusquely: “I can’t just lose four working hours a day, can I? A builder stays on site Monday to Saturday. The laborer goes back and forth with the materials. That’s how it’s done.”
I looked at the bivouac that he’d constructed. Now I understood why his rucksack had been so full.
“And you want to sleep in there for four months?”
“Three months, four months, whatever it takes. It’s summer. On Saturday I can go down and sleep in a bed.”
“So shouldn’t I stay here too?”
“Maybe later. There are still a lot of materials to bring up. I’ve borrowed a mule.”
Bruno had thought long and hard about the work that was before us. I was improvising; he certainly wasn’t. He had planned every phase, both my tasks and his, all the various stages and a timetable for them. He explained where the material had been prepared, and what I would have to bring up to him the next day. His mother would show me how to load the mule.
He said: “I’ll expect you at nine in the morning. At six you’ll be free to go. If it’s all right by you, that is.”
“Of course it’s all right by me.”
“Do you think you can do it?”
“Sure.”
“Good on you. So I’ll be seeing you then.”
I looked at the time: it was six-thirty. Bruno took a towel and a bar of soap and headed uphill, to wash at some place that he knew. I looked over the ruin, which seemed just the same as we’d found it that morning, except that now it was empty inside, and outside of it there was a fine stack of wood. I thought that it wasn’t bad for a first day’s work. Then I took my rucksack, said goodbye to my tree, and began walking towards Grana.
There was an hour that I loved more than any other in this month of June, and it was precisely the one during which I descended alone at the end of the day. In the morning it was different: I was in a rush, the mule would not take my orders, my only thought was to get up there. In the evening, instead, there was no reason to hurry. I left at six or seven with the sun still high in the bottom of the valley and with no one expecting me at home. I walked calmly, with my thoughts slowed by tiredness and the mule following behind without needing any prompting from me. From the lake down to the landslide, the rhododendrons were in bloom on the flanks of the mountain. At the Guglielmina farmstead, around the deserted buildings I startled roe deer foraging in the abandoned pastures; bolt upright with their ears at attention, they would look at me in alarm for an instant, then flee to the woods like thieves. Sometimes I stopped there for a smoke. While the mule grazed, I would sit on the larch tree stump where the photo of Bruno and me had been taken. I would contemplate the farmstead and the strange contrast between the entropy of human things and the resurgence of spring: the three buildings were falling into decline—their walls curving like elderly backs, their roofs succumbing to the weight of winters—while everywhere around them was awash with burgeoning herbs and flowers.