No, I could not understand. I needed to see it, this world that filled him with such joy. Years later, when we started to go there together, my father claimed to recall the precise moment at which my vocation manifested itself. One morning as my mother still slept and he was preparing to leave, he looked up from lacing his boots to see me standing there, already fully dressed and ready to follow him. I must have dressed myself whilst still in bed. I had startled him in the darkness, looking much older than my six or seven years. According to his version of the event I was already what I would become later: it was a premonition of his adult son, a ghost of the future.
“Don’t you want to sleep a little longer?” he asked, speaking softly so as not to wake my mother.
“I want to come with you,” I’d replied, or so he would claim. But perhaps it was just the phrase that he liked to remember.
ONE
The Mountain of Childhood
ONE
THE VILLAGE OF GRANA was located on the periphery of one of those valleys ignored as irrelevant by those who passed by it, sealed in as it was by iron-gray peaks above, and by a cliff that obstructed access from below. On the top of the cliff the ruins of a tower still looked out across overgrown fields. A dirt track deviated from the regional trunk road and climbed steeply, in circles, up to the foot of the tower; then, getting less steep beyond it, the track turned up the flank of the mountain and entered the great valley at its midpoint before continuing on a slight slope. It was in July of 1984 that we first took it. They were scything hay in the fields. The valley proved to be more extensive than it appeared from below, covered by forest on the side that was in shadow, and terraced on the side that was in sunlight; down below, amongst the thickets of bushes, ran a river that I glimpsed intermittently, sparkling—and this was the first thing about Grana that appealed to me. I was reading adventure stories at the time, and it was Mark Twain who had induced in me a love of rivers. I thought that down there you could fish, dive, swim, cut down some small tree and build a raft, and absorbed in such fantasies I hardly noticed the village that had come into view after a curve in the road.
“This is it,” my mother said. “Go slowly.”
My father slowed to a walking pace. Since starting out he had followed her directions obediently. He lowered his head, looking right and left through the dust raised by the car, his gaze dwelling on the stables, the chicken coops, the log-built haylofts, the charred or collapsed dwellings, the tractors at the edge of the road, the hay balers. Two black dogs wearing bells around their necks sprang out from a courtyard. Apart from a couple of newer houses, the whole village seemed to be made of the same gray rock as the mountain and clung to it like an outcrop, or an ancient landslide. A little further up, goats were grazing.
My father said nothing. My mother, who had discovered this place on her own, pointed out where to park and got out of the car to look for the owner while we unloaded the luggage. One of the dogs came towards us, barking, and my father did something I’d never seen him do before: he stretched out a hand for it to sniff, spoke to it gently, and stroked it between its ears. Perhaps he got on better with dogs than with his own kind.
“And so?” he asked me, as we unhooked the elastics from the roof rack. “What do you think of it?”
It’s beautiful, I would like to have answered. A smell of hay, stable, wood, smoke, and who knows what else had enveloped me as soon as I’d stepped out of the car, full of promise. But unsure as to whether this was the right answer or not, I had replied instead: “It’s not bad. What do you think?”
My father shrugged his shoulders. He looked up over the suitcases and glanced at the shack that stood before us. It was leaning to one side, and would surely have collapsed if it weren’t for the two poles that were propping it up. Inside, it was crammed with bales of hay, and above the hay there was a denim shirt that someone had taken off there and forgotten.
“I grew up in a place like this,” he said, without letting me know whether this was a good or a bad thing.
He grabbed the handle of a suitcase and was about to take it down when something else occurred to him. He looked at me, thinking of something that evidently caused him great amusement.
“In your opinion, can the past happen again?”
“It’s difficult,” I said, so as not to be wrong-footed. He was always asking me riddles of this kind. He saw in me an intelligence similar to his own, inclined towards logic and mathematics, and thought that it was his duty to exercise it.
“Look at that river,” he said. “Can you see it? Let’s suppose that the water is time passing. If where we are now is the present, where do you think the future is located?”
I thought about it for a moment. It seemed like an easy one. I gave the most obvious answer: “The future is where the water goes, down over there.”
“Wrong!” my father declared. “Fortunately.”
Then, as if he had freed himself from a great burden, he said “Oopala,” the word he used to use when picking something up, including me, and the first of the two suitcases fell to the ground with a thud.
The house my mother had rented was in the upper part of the village, in a courtyard set around a drinking trough. It bore the signs of two distinct periods. The first was that of its walls, balconies of blackened larch, a roof of moss-covered slates, the large soot-stained chimney, all pointing to its venerable origins. The second was merely dated: a period in which, inside the house, layers of linoleum had been used to cover the floor, floral wallpaper had been hung, fitted cabinets and the basin had been installed in the kitchen, all now damp-stained and faded. The only object that could be salvaged from this mediocrity was a black stove, made of cast iron, massive and severe, with a brass handle and four hotplates on which to cook. It must have been reclaimed from another place and time altogether. I think that what my mother liked more than anything else was what was not actually there, because she had found in effect a house that was more or less empty. She asked the proprietress if we could improve it a bit, and she had simply replied: “Do what you like.” She had not rented it out for years, and in all likelihood had not expected to do so that summer. She was brusque in her manner but not impolite. I think she was embarrassed, since she had come from working in the fields and had not had time to change. She handed to my mother a large iron key, finished saying something about the hot water, and gave a brief show of resistance before accepting the envelope that my mother had prepared.