I would like to have known what Bruno was doing at that time. Had he lit the fire, or was he walking alone towards the mountain, or did he keep working until dark? In many ways the man that he had become surprised me. I had expected to find if not the double of his father then that of one of his cousins, or of the bricklayers I used to see him with at the bar. Instead he had nothing at all in common with these people. He seemed to me like someone who at a certain point in life had given up on the company of others, that he had found a corner of the world and retreated into it. He reminded me of his mother: I often came across her, in those days, when I was loading up of a morning. She showed me how to fasten the packsaddle, how to secure the planks or the tools on the flanks of the mule, how to goad him on when he refused to budge. But she had not uttered a word about my return, or about the work that I was doing with her son. Ever since I was a child it seemed that nothing in our lives was of interest to her, that she was happy in her own place, and that other people passed by her like the seasons. I wondered, though, whether she did not conceal feelings of an altogether different kind.
I would take the path along the river, and reaching Grana, would tie the mule up next to the house, light a fire, and put a saucepan of water on to boil. If I’d remembered to buy one I would open a bottle of wine. In the larder I had only pasta, conserves, and a few tins for emergencies. After the first two glasses I felt completely exhausted. Sometimes I would throw in the pasta and fall asleep while it was cooking, and find it later that night—the stove gone out, the bottle half-drunk, my supper reduced to an inedible mess. So I would open a tin of beans and devour them with a spoon, without even bothering to tip them from the tin. Then I would stretch out on my mattress beneath the table, zip myself into the sleeping bag, and instantly fall back into a deep sleep.
Towards the end of June my mother arrived with a friend. Her friends were taking turns keeping her company throughout the summer, though she did not seem to me to have the air of an inconsolable widow. Yet she told me herself that she was happy to have someone close to her, and I noticed the silent intimacy that she shared with this other woman: they spoke together infrequently in my presence, understanding each other with a glance. I saw them sharing the old house with a mutual ease that was more precious than words. After the meager funeral of my father I thought a lot about his loneliness, that kind of perpetual conflict between himself and the rest of the world: he had died in his car without leaving a single friend to mourn his absence. But with my mother I could see the fruits of a long life spent cultivating relationships, caring for them like the flowers on her balcony. I wondered if you learn and develop such a talent, or whether you just have it, or not, at birth. Whether there was still time for me to learn.
So now when I came down the mountain I found not just one but two women to care for me, the table laid, clean sheets on the bed: no more sleeping bag and beans. After supper my mother and I would linger in the kitchen to talk.
Such talk came easily to me with her, and on one occasion I told her that it was like going back to old times there together—only to discover that her own memories of those evenings we shared were quite different from mine.
In her mind, I had hardly ever spoken. She remembered me as absorbed in a world of my own that it was impossible to penetrate, and from which she rarely received any communication. She was only too happy, now, to have the opportunity to make up some ground between us.
At Barma Bruno and I had begun to build the walls. I described to my mother the way in which we were working, since she seemed keen to hear about what I was learning as a laborer. Each wall was actually made of two parallel rows of stones, separated by a space which we filled with smaller ones. Every so often a large stone was put in place across the gap, joining the two rows together. We used cement as little as possible, not for ecological reasons but because I had to carry it up there in sacks, each weighing twenty-five kilos. We would mix the cement with sand from the lake and would pour the mixture between the stones, so that from the outside it could hardly be noticed. For many days I had been going back and forth between Barma and the lake with the sand: there was a small beach on its far shore, where I would fill the mule’s saddlebags. I really liked the idea that it was this sand that was holding the house together.
My mother listened carefully, but she was not really interested in the carpentry.
“So how are you getting on with Bruno?” she asked.
“It’s strange. Sometimes I feel like I’ve known him forever, but then I think that I know next to nothing about him.”
“What’s so strange about it?”
“The way that he speaks to me. He’s very kind to me. More than kind, actually, he’s affectionate. I didn’t remember that side of him. It always strikes me as something I don’t really understand.”
I threw a piece of wood into the stove. I felt like having a cigarette. But I was embarrassed to smoke in front of my mother, and even though I would have liked to rid myself of that stupid secret, I couldn’t bring myself to do so. I went to pour myself a little grappa instead. Grappa was different; there was no embarrassment involved.
When I sat back down my mother said, “Well, you know, Bruno was very close to us during these years. At certain times he was here every evening. Dad helped him a lot.”
“Helped him in what way?”
“Not in a practical sense. How can I put it? Yes, on occasion he did lend him money, but that wasn’t it. At a certain point Bruno fell out with his own father. He never wanted to work with him again; I think he didn’t even see him for years. So if he needed any advice he would come here. He had real faith in what your father had to say.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And he always asked after you; how you were, what you were up to. I told him what you had written in your letters. I never stopped giving him news about you.”
“I didn’t know that,” I repeated.
I was finding out what happens to the person who leaves: life goes on for the others without him. I imagined their evenings together when Bruno was twenty years old, twenty-five years old, and was there in my place, talking with my father. Maybe it would not have happened if I had stayed, or perhaps we would have shared those moments; more than jealousy I felt regret for not having been there. I felt as if I had missed out on important things, busying myself with others so inconsequential that I could hardly remember what they were.
We finished the walls and went on to construct the roof. It was already July when I went to the blacksmith in the village to collect the eight steel brackets that Bruno had ordered, made to his own design, together with a few dozen foot-long expansion screws. I loaded these materials onto the mule, together with a small generator, some more petrol, and my old climbing gear. Once everything had been delivered I went to the top of the rock wall, where I had never been before then. There were four larch trees up there. I secured myself to one of the biggest and lowered myself halfway down using a double rope, armed with an electric drill—then spent the rest of the day between the instructions shouted by Bruno from below, the humming of the generator, and the deafening shriek of the drill as it penetrated the rock. Four screws were necessary for each bracket, which meant thirty-two holes in all. According to Bruno these numbers were cruciaclass="underline" the whole viability of the roof depended on them. In the winter the rock would constantly shed snow, and he had thought long and hard about the specifications, in order to construct a roof that could withstand these blows. Several times I pulled myself up the rope, shifted the anchor point a bit further on, and slid back down to where he was indicating to drill the rock. Towards evening the eight brackets had all been fixed in place, aligned at regular intervals of four meters in height.