During that winter not much snow had fallen, so Bruno decided to go to the alpeggio—or to the mountain, as he would say—on the first Saturday of June.
I lent him a hand that day. He had bought twenty-eight dairy cows, creatures that were all already pregnant when they were unloaded from a cattle truck in the piazza in Grana. They were unsettled by the journey, and hurried down the ramp lowing and poking each other with their horns. They would have scattered who knows where if Bruno, his mother, Lara, and I had not been there positioned around the square in order to contain them and calm them down. The truck left. Together with two black dogs of venerable Grana shepherding pedigree we began to climb up the mule track, Bruno in front with his “Oh, oh, oh! Eh, eh, eh!” and his mother and Lara further down the line, with me bringing up the rear, doing nothing and enjoying the spectacle. The dogs knew how to do this job to perfection, and would run to reclaim any cows that were slowing things down, barking and nipping them on the flanks until they had rejoined the group. The barking of the dogs, the bellows of protest from the cows, and the noise of their bells drowned out all other sounds, and it seemed to me I was a spectator at a carnival parade or at a kind of resurrection. The herd climbed up the valley past the derelict huts, past the stone walls riddled and undermined by weeds, past the gray stumps of felled larches—like a bloodstream that was beginning to circulate again, bringing a body back to life. I wondered if the foxes and deer that must have been watching us from the woods as we passed could share in the sense of celebration that I felt.
At a certain point in the climb Lara joined me. We had not yet had the chance to speak together, just the two of us, but I think we both thought that we needed to. I don’t know why she chose that particular moment, when our words needed to be shouted into the cloud of dust that was enveloping us. She smiled at me and said: “Who would have thought it a year ago?”
“Where were we a year ago?” I wondered. “Oh yes, in a bar in Turin, perhaps.” Or in bed together at her place.
“Are you happy?” I asked.
“Very,” she said. And smiled again.
“Then I’m happy too,” I said, and I knew that we would never raise the subject again.
At that time the dandelions were in flower. They would all open together early in the morning, and then a brilliant yellow was brushed over the mountain, as if it were the sun itself flooding over it. The cows adored these sweet flowers: when we arrived up there they scattered over the pasture as if to a banquet that had been set for them. In the autumn Bruno had uprooted all the bushes that had infested the meadow, so that now it had again the look of a well-kept garden.
“You’re not putting up the fence-line?” his mother asked him.
“The fencing’s for tomorrow. Today I’m giving them a holiday.”
“But they’ll ruin the grass,” she protested.
“Come on,” said Bruno. “They won’t ruin anything, don’t worry about it.”
His mother shook her head. I had heard her use more words that day than I had heard her utter in all the years that I’d known her. She had come up limping, with a stiff leg that she trailed a little, but keeping a good pace. I could not understand how she could be so thin: shrunk within her ample clothing she scrutinized everything, controlled everything, giving both advice and criticism, because there was a right and a wrong way in which everything should be done.
The three buildings seemed to have been restored to a previous era in their existence. A house, a stable, and a storeroom, with walls and roofs of stone, reconstructed perfectly, even though they were now the premises of a modern agricultural enterprise. Bruno went into the cellar and returned with a bottle of white wine, and I recalled the same gesture that his uncle had made all those years ago. He was the master of the place now. We had nothing to sit on. Lara said that they would make a fine table to eat at in the open air, but for now we made our toast standing, at the threshold of the stable, watching the cows as they accustomed themselves to the mountain.
TEN
BRUNO PERSISTED OBSTINATELY in milking the cows by hand. For him this was the only method properly suited to these delicate creatures, prone as they were to becoming nervous and taking fright at the slightest thing. It would take him about five minutes to obtain as many liters of milk from each one: good going, but it meant twelve cows an hour, or two and a half hours of work for the whole herd. This was what got him out of bed in the morning when it was still dark outside. There were no Saturdays or Sundays on the farm, and he could hardly remember the pleasure of sleeping in until late, or of lingering between the sheets with his girl. Yet he loved this ritual and would not see it done by anyone else: he spent the hours between night and day in the warmth of the stable, clearing the sleep from his mind as he worked—and milking the cows was like waking them one by one with a caress, until they were aware of the fragrance of the meadows and the singing of the birds and started to become restless.
Lara would come to him at seven with coffee and a few biscuits. She was the one who would take the herd out to pasture twice each day. He would pour the one hundred and fifty liters of milk together with the same amount from the previous evening, skimmed of the cream that had risen to the surface overnight. He would light the fire under the boiler and add the rennet, and by nine o’clock each morning the mixture would be ready to be strained through cloth and pressed into the wooden molds. Five or six loaves in totaclass="underline" three hundred liters of milk to make no more than thirty kilos of toma.
This was the most mysterious phase for Bruno, because he was never sure how it would go. Whether the cheese would form or not, whether it would turn out to be good or bad: this seemed to him an alchemical process over which he had no control. He knew only how to treat the cows well and to carry out every part of the process exactly as he had been taught. With the cream he would make butter, and then wash the boiler, the churns, the pails, the work surfaces, and finally the stables as well, throwing open the windows and sluicing the dung into the gutters.
By this time it was noon. He would eat something and throw himself into bed for an hour, dreaming of grass that wouldn’t grow, or of cows that would not give milk, or of milk that would not churn; then he’d get up with the thought of building an enclosure for the calves, or of digging a drainage ditch where the rains had waterlogged the pasture. At four the cows would be brought to the stable for the second milking. At seven Lara would take them back out again, and at that point she would take over; there was no more work to do, and life at the farmstead slowed down and eased into the calm of the evening.
That was when Bruno would tell me about these things. We would sit outside waiting for sunset, with a half-liter of wine to keep us company. We contemplated the sparse pastures on the mountain’s reverse side, where we had once gone searching for goats. At twilight a breeze would begin to blow from further down the valley, immediately chilling the air by a few degrees, carrying a fragrance of moss and damp earth, together perhaps with that of a deer wandering at the margins of the wood. One of the dogs would catch its scent and abandon the herd to pursue it: only one of the two, and not always the same one—as if they had an agreement between them to take turns hunting and guarding. The cows were calm now. The sound of the bells reached us more faintly, descending to their lower tones.