He would come out of the house as soon as the smell of the fire reached him. He was in there measuring and cutting the rafters for the roof. He looked wilder as the week progressed, and if I had lost my sense of time I could tell what day of the week it was by the length of his stubble. At nine he was already deep into his work, absorbed by thoughts from which he would only emerge with difficulty.
“Oh,” he would say, “you’re here.”
He would raise his hand and give me his truncated salute, then join me for breakfast. With his knife he would cut a chunk of bread and a slice of toma. The tomato he ate as it was—without cutting it and without salt or anything else—staring at the building site and thinking about the work that lay ahead.
SEVEN
IT WAS THE SEASON of return and of reconciliation, two words I thought about frequently as the summer ran its course. One evening my mother told me a story about herself, my father, and the mountain, about the way in which they had met and ended up marrying. It was odd to be hearing about it so late, given that it was the story of how our family originated, and therefore of how I came to be born. But when a boy I was too young for this kind of story, and after that had stopped wanting to hear: at twenty I would have put my hands over my ears rather than listen to family reminiscences, and even on this evening my first reaction was one of reluctance. Yet one side of me looked with affection on these things that were unknown to me. As I listened I gazed out at the opposite flank of the valley, in the penumbra of nine in the evening. It was thick with fir trees on that side, a wood without clearings that descended emphatically all the way to the river. Only a long gorge cut through it with a lighter line, and it was this that held my eye.
As my mother’s story unfolded I began to feel something quite different. I know this story already, I thought. And it was true that in my own way I did know it. For years I had collected fragments of it, like someone who possesses pages torn from a book and has read them thousands of times in random order. I had seen photographs, listened to conversations. I had observed my parents and their way of dealing with things. I knew which arguments ended abruptly in silence, which others were drawn out, and which names from the past had the power to sadden or to move them. I had all the elements of the story at my disposal but had never managed to reconstruct the narrative in its entirety.
After I had been looking outside for a while I saw the does that were waiting there on the other side. In the gorge there must have been a vein of water, and every evening just before dark they would leave the wood to drink from it. From this distance I could not see the water, but the deer showed that it was there. They came and went along their own track, and I watched them until it was too dark to see anything anymore.
This was the story: in the fifties my father was the best friend of my mother’s brother, my uncle Piero. They had both been born in 1942, and were five years younger than she was. They had met as children, on the campsite to which the village priest would take them. In the summer they would spend a whole month in the Dolomites. They slept in a tent, played in the woods, learned how to be in the mountains and to fend for themselves, and this was the life that had made them such close friends. I could understand that, no? my mother said. Yes, it was not at all difficult to imagine them.
Piero did extremely well at school; my father had stronger legs and a stronger character. Actually, though, the contrast was not so simple: in some respects my father was the more fragile of the two, and he was also the one who could touch others with his enthusiasm—he was the most imaginative as well as the most restless. His high spirits when in company were infectious, and partly because of this, partly because he was living at boarding school, he soon became a regular at my mother’s home. To her he had seemed like a boy with too much energy to burn, like someone who needed to run faster than others in order to use it up. The fact that he was an orphan counted for nothing in those days. It was so common after the war, just as it was common to take in somebody else’s son—the son of a relative, perhaps, or of someone who had emigrated, who knows where. In the farmhouse there was no shortage of room, or of work either.
It was not that my father was in need of a practical arrangement. He didn’t lack a roof over his head: what he lacked was a family. And so it was that at sixteen or seventeen years old he was always there, Saturdays and Sundays—and every day in the summer for the harvest, the winemaking, the hay cutting, the woodcutting in the forest. He liked to study. But he also liked the outdoor life. My mother told me about when they had challenged each other to press I don’t know how many hundreds of kilos of grapes with their feet, of their youthful discovery of wine and of the day they had been found hiding in the cellar, completely drunk. There were so many anecdotes of this kind, she said, but she wanted to make one thing clear: this relationship did not begin and develop by chance. There was a specific mover behind it. The priest, the one from the mountain who was a friend of my grandfather, had for years taken girls and boys camping, and had kept a keen eye on my father to see if he would bond with the others. My grandfather had in turn agreed to welcome this orphan into his own home. It would also be a way of providing for his future.
Piero was similar to me, my mother said. He was taciturn, reflective. He had a sensitivity that made him able to understand others, and which at the same time made him a bit vulnerable around anyone with a character stronger than his own. When the time came to go to university, he was in no doubt as to his choice of subject: he had always wanted more than anything else to become a doctor. And he would have made a good doctor, my mother said. He had what it took to be one, a talent for compassion and for listening. My father on the other hand was less interested in people than he was in the material world: in earth, fire, air, water; he liked the idea of being able to plunge his hands into its material components and to find out what they were made of. Yes, I thought, that was him all right. That was how I remembered him, fascinated by every grain of sand and crystal of ice, altogether indifferent to people. I could easily imagine the passion with which, at nineteen, he had embarked on his study of chemistry.
In the meantime he and Piero had begun to go into the mountains by themselves. Almost every Saturday, from June to September, they would take the bus for Trento or Belluno, then hitchhike back up the mountain. They spent the nights in meadows, or sometimes in a hayloft. They had no money with which to buy anything. But then neither did anyone else who went into the mountains in those days, my mother said: the Alps were a poor man’s North Pole or Pacific Ocean, the destination of young people like them who were in search of adventure. Of the two it was my father who studied the maps and planned new routes. Piero was more cautious, but also more obstinate. He was difficult to convince in the first place, but even more difficult to dissuade halfway, and was the ideal companion for my father, who had a tendency to give up as soon as things did not go according to plan.
Then their paths in life diverged. The chemistry degree was shorter than the one in medicine: my father graduated first, and in ’67 went to do his military service. He ended up in the Alpine artillery, dragging cannon and mortar up the mule tracks of the Great War. His degree earned him the rank of NCO, or Sergeant of Mules, as he called it: he didn’t spend much time in barracks that year, but spent almost the entire time moving from valley to valley with his company. He discovered that he did not dislike this kind of life at all. Whenever he came back he seemed older, both in comparison to the young man who had left and to Piero, who was still spending whole days buried in his books. It was as if he had been the first to taste something harder and more real, and that he liked the taste. He had experienced, albeit in a grappa-induced fog, the long marches and encampments in the snow. And it was about the snow that he would talk to Piero when on leave. About its different forms, its mutable character, its language. In one of those bursts of enthusiasm to which he was prone as a young chemist, he had fallen in love with a new element. He would say that the mountain in winter was another world entirely, and that they should go there together.