Our days would end with the beer that I now squeezed into the rucksack in the morning along with our provisions. We sat down in front of the fireplace that was blackened by ash and embers. I, in contrast to it, was white: covered in dust, hands aching from using the rock drill. I was proud that Bruno had decided to entrust me with that work.
“The problem with snow is that you never know how heavy it might get,” he said. “There are calculations with which you can work out the load borne, but it’s best to double everything.”
“What calculations?”
“Well, a cubic meter of water weighs ten quintals, right? Snow can weigh between three and seven, depending on how much air it contains. So if a roof was to withstand snow to a depth of two meters, you would have to allow for a weight of fourteen quintals. I double it.”
“So how did they used to work that out in the past?”
“In the past they used to shore everything up. In the autumn, before leaving. They would fill the house with poles reinforcing the roof. Remember those short, thick trunks that we found? But it looks as if one winter even the poles failed to do the job, or who knows, perhaps they forgot to put them in place properly.”
I looked at the tops of the walls. I tried to imagine the snow that had accumulated up there suddenly becoming detached and falling. It was some fall.
“Your father really enjoyed discussing this kind of problem.”
“Oh, really?”
“How wide a plank needs to be, at what distance from each other they need to be spaced, what is the best wood to use. Pine isn’t right because it’s too soft. Larch is stronger. It wasn’t enough for him to be told what was to be used; he always wanted to know the reasons behind everything. The fact is that one grows in the shade, the other in the sun: it’s the sun that hardens the wood; shade and water make it soft and unsuitable for beams.”
“Yes, I can believe that he liked to know such things.”
“He had even bought himself a book. I would tell him: don’t bother, Gianni, we can go and ask some old builder. I took him to see my old boss once. We took our plans to him, and your father brought along a notebook in which he wrote everything down. Though I suspect that afterwards he went to double-check everything with his book, since he didn’t trust people much, did he?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he did.”
I hadn’t heard my father’s name since the day of the funeral. I was glad to hear it uttered by Bruno, even though it seemed to me at times that we had known two altogether different people.
“Are we raising the beams tomorrow?” I asked.
“First we’ve got to cut them to size. And shape them to fit the brackets. To lift them we’ll need the mule; let’s see how it goes.”
“Do you think it will take a long time?”
“I don’t know. One thing at a time, no? First the beer.”
“OK. First the beer.”
In the meantime I had been getting back in shape. After a month of taking the road down every morning I was beginning to rediscover my former speed. It seemed to me that the grass in the fields along the way was getting thicker each day, the river water calmer, the green of the larches more vivid: and that for the woods the arrival of summer was like the end of a turbulent adolescence. It was also the period in which I used to arrive, as a boy. The mountain took on again the aspect with which I was most familiar, from the time when I thought that the seasons hardly changed up there and that there was a permanent summer awaiting my return. In Grana I would find the workers preparing the stables, moving things around with tractors. In a few days’ time they would take the herds up, and the lower reaches of the valley would be repopulated again.
Now nobody would be going higher anymore. There were another two ruins near the lake, not far from the road that I used going to and fro. The first, besieged by nettles, was in the same state as I had found my own property in the spring. But the roof had only partially collapsed, and taking a look inside, I found the same sad spectacle: its one small room had been vandalized, as if the owner had wanted on leaving it to take revenge for the miserable life lived there, or as if successive visitors had searched fruitlessly for anything of value. There remained a table, a wonky stool, crockery thrown amongst the rubbish, and a stove that still looked good to me, and that I intended to go back and salvage before everything was buried under another collapse. The second ruin, on the other hand, was barely the memory of a much older and more sophisticated building: the first could not have been more than a hundred years old; this one must have been built at least three centuries ago. It wasn’t a simple, small stable building but a large Alpine farmstead made up of separate structures, almost like an entire small village, with external stone staircases and roof beams of mysteriously imposing dimensions—mysterious because the trees big enough to make them grew hundreds of meters lower down, and I couldn’t imagine how they had been carried there. There was nothing left inside the houses except the walls that remained standing, scoured by the rain. Compared to the shacks I was familiar with, these ruins seemed to speak of a more aristocratic civilization that had exhausted itself in a period of decadence before becoming extinguished altogether.
Going up, I liked to stop for a moment on the shore of the lake. I would bend down to touch the water and test the temperature with my hand. The sun which illuminated the summits of the Grenon had not yet reached the basin, and the lake still had a nocturnal aspect, like a sky no longer dark but not yet light. I could no longer remember clearly why I had distanced myself from the mountain, or what else I had found to love when I had ceased to love it there—but it seemed to me, going back up alone every morning, that I had gradually begun to make my peace with it.
In those July days Barma resembled a sawmill. I had delivered various loads of planks, and now the terrace was crowded with stacked wood: two-meter-long planks of pine still white and perfumed with resin. The eight beams were suspended between the rock face and the long wall, fixed to the iron brackets, inclined at thirty degrees and supported in the middle by a long beam of larch. Now that the skeleton of the roof was in place I could imagine the finished house: its door faced west and it had two fine north-facing windows that looked towards the lake. Bruno had wanted them to be arched, losing entire days shaping with mallet and chisel the stones that surrounded them. Inside there would be two rooms, one per window. From the two floors of the old building, with the stable below and living room above, we wanted to make only one that would be taller and more spacious. Though it proved to be beyond me as yet, I would sometimes try to visualize the light that would come into it.
On arriving, I would rekindle the embers in the fireplace by throwing in a few dry twigs, fill a small pan with water, and put it on the fire. From the rucksack I would take out fresh bread and a single tomato—one of those that Bruno’s mother had managed to grow miraculously at an altitude of thirteen hundred meters. In search of the coffee I would poke my head inside the bivouac and find the sleeping bag disheveled, a candle stump melted onto a plank, a half-open book. Glancing at the cover I smiled at seeing the name of its author: Conrad. From all the schooling that my mother had given him, Bruno had retained a passion for novels about the sea.