Bruno did not like to think about practical problems with me. He never talked to me about debts, bills, taxes, mortgage rates. He preferred to talk about his dreams, or about the sense of physical intimacy he felt when milking, or about the mystery of rennet.
“Rennet is a little piece of a calf’s stomach,” he explained. “Imagine: part of the stomach that enables the calf to digest its mother’s milk; we take it and use it to make cheese. It’s right to do so, don’t you think? But it’s also terrible. Without this piece of stomach, the cheese would not form.”
“I wonder who first discovered that,” I said.
“It must have been the wild man.”
“The wild man?”
“For us he was an ancient man who lived in the woods. Long hair, beard, covered in leaves. Every so often he would go around the villages, and people feared him—but they still left something outside for him to eat, to thank him for having shown them how to use rennet.”
“A man who resembled a tree?”
“Part man, part beast, part tree.”
“And what’s he called in dialect?”
“Omo servadzo.”
It was nearly nine in the evening. In the pasture the cows were little more than shadows. Lara was a shadow too, wrapped in a woolen shawl. She was standing still, attending to the herd. If a cow strayed too far she would call her by name, and the dog would charge off to collect her, needing no command.
“Is there also a wild woman?” I asked.
Bruno understood what I was thinking. “She’s really good,” he said. “She’s strong and never gets tired. You know what I don’t like? Not having the time to be together as much as I want. There’s too much work. I get up at four in the morning, and in the evening start nodding off at the table.”
“Love is for the winter,” I said.
Bruno laughed. “That’s so true. Not many mountain folk are born in spring. We’re all born in autumn, like the calves.”
It was the only allusion to sex that I had ever heard him make. “So when are you getting married?” I asked.
“Ah, if it was up to me then right away. She’s the one who doesn’t want to hear anything about marriage. Not in church, or at the registry, or anywhere else for that matter. It’s those city ways of yours; go figure.”
We were finishing the wine. Then we got up to go to the stable before it was completely dark. Lara was bringing back the herd with the help of one of the dogs, and now the other one also appeared from somewhere, returning to duty at the sound of the cowbells. Without any hurry the cows formed a line that came down through the pasture and stopped at the drinking trough. In the stable each one found its proper position for the night, while Bruno chained up their collars and I tied their tails to a rope, strung high so that they would not get too dirty when they lay down. There was a knot that I had learned to tie with a quick twist of the fingers. We would close the door and go to eat while the cows began to ruminate in the darkness.
Later on I would go back to Barma by the light of a torch. There was room at the farmstead, and Bruno and Lara always invited me to stay, but something pushed me to say goodbye to them and to take the path for the lake. It was as if I were seeking a proper distance from that fledgling family, and that leaving was a way of respecting them, and of protecting myself.
What I had to protect in myself was my ability to live alone. It had taken time to get used to solitude, to turn it into a place that I could adjust myself to and feel good in; and yet I felt that the relationship between us was always a difficult one. And so I would head back towards the house as if to reestablish our understanding. If the sky was not overcast I would soon switch off the head torch. I needed no more than a quarter-moon, and the stars, to make my way along the path between the larch trees. Nothing was stirring at that hour, only my footfall and the river that continued to splash and gurgle as the wood slept. In the silence its voice was clearest, and I could make out the sound peculiar to each bend, rapid, waterfall—muffled by the vegetation, then becoming gradually sharper over scree.
Higher up even the river went quiet. This was the point at which it disappeared beneath the rocks and ran underground. I began to hear a much lower sound, of the wind that was blowing in the basin. The lake was a nocturnal sky in motion; the wind was pushing flurries of small waves from one side to another, and as it changed direction it extinguished and rekindled along its lines of force the gleams of stars reflected in the black water. I stood still, watching these patterns. It seemed to me to recall the life of the mountain before mankind. I did not disturb it; I was a welcome guest. I realized again that in this company I would never be alone.
One morning towards the end of July I went down to the village with Lara. I was heading back to Turin for a while; she was taking down the first batch of cheese which had matured for six weeks. There was a mule that Bruno had acquired for the job: not the gray male that I’d used years ago to transport the cement, but a female with a thick, dark coat; smaller and more suited to the life of the farmstead. He had made a wooden packsaddle, on which he had stacked twelve loaves of cheese, sixty kilos in total, the first precious load that was being dispatched to the valley.
It was a momentous event for him, and for us. After securing the load he gave a kiss to Lara, a pat on the flank to the mule, and nodded in my direction, saying: “Berio, you know the way.” He said goodbye to us and went to clean the stable. Just as on the building site he had decided that transportation was no kind of work for him: the mountain man stayed in the mountains, the mountain man’s woman went up and down with things. He would not go down until the time came to leave the farmstead for the winter.
We started out on the path in single file, myself in front and Lara behind with the mule—and behind them one of the dogs who followed her everywhere. At first the mule advanced unsteadily, adjusting herself to the load. With her you had to proceed more carefully going down than when climbing back up, because the packsaddle unbalanced her with its weight bearing forwards on her front legs, and you needed to help her on the steepest slopes by holding firm to the rope tied around her neck. Further down, at the bottom of the pasture, the path crossed the river and flattened out. It was the spot where I had watched Bruno disappear on his motorbike, before losing sight of him altogether for all those years. From here on Lara and I were able to walk side by side, with the dog going in and out of the wood hunting for game, and the mule following just behind us, her breathing and the sound made by her shod hooves becoming a calm presence at our backs.
“What does he mean when he calls you that?” asked Lara.
“Calls me what?”
“Berio.”
“Ah, he wants to remind me of something, I think. It was the name he gave me when I was a boy.”
“And what are you meant to remember?”
“The road. Jesus, how many times I’ve gone up and down it. In August I would come up from Grana every day, and he would leave the pasture to bunk off with me. Then he’d take quite a beating from his uncle, but he couldn’t care less. Twenty years ago. And now here we are carrying down his cheese. Everything has changed, and yet everything is the same.”
“What has changed most?”
“The farmstead for sure. And the river. It was very different then. Did you know that we used to play down there?”
“Yes,” Lara said. “The river game.”
I kept quiet for a while. Thinking about the path had brought to mind that first time with my father, when we’d gone to meet Bruno’s uncle. And as Lara and I descended I thought I saw coming out of the past a young boy walking in front of his father. The father was wearing a red jumper and plus fours, puffing like a bellows and spurring his son on. Good day to you! I imagined myself saying to him. The boy sure can run, eh! Who knows whether my father would have stopped to greet this man who was coming down from the future with a girl, a mule, a dog, and a load of cheese.