“Bruno’s a bit worried about you,” Lara said.
“About me?”
“He says that you’re always alone. He thinks that you’re not well.”
I began to laugh. “Is that what you two talk about?”
“Every so often.”
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
She thought about it and then gave a different answer: “That it’s your choice. That sooner or later you’ll get tired of being on your own, and that you’ll find somebody. But you’ve chosen to live like this, so that’s fine.”
“That’s right,” I said.
And then, to make light of it, I added: “And do you know what he’s told me? That he’s asked you to marry him but that you won’t hear of it.”
“That lunatic?” she replied, laughing. “Never in a million years!”
“Why not?”
“Who would want to get married to someone who never wants to come down from the mountain? Someone who has spent all that he has in order to stay up there and make cheese?”
“Is it as bad as all that?”
“See for yourself. We’ve been working for a month and a half, and this is all we have to show for it,” she said, pointing to what was behind us.
She became serious. For a good while she remained silent, thinking about what troubled her. We were almost there when she said “I like what we’re doing, a lot. Even when it rains all day and I’m out in it pasturing the cows. It makes me very calm, makes me feel that I can think clearly about things, and that many of them no longer have any importance. For someone thinking about the money, it’s lunacy. But I don’t want any other life now. I want this one.”
There was a small white van in the piazza in Grana, next to a tractor, a cement mixer, and my own car that had been parked there for a month. Two workers were digging a ditch next to the road. A man who I had never seen before was waiting for us: he was around fifty, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about the scene, except for the strangeness to us of seeing cars, asphalt, and clean clothes after all those days spent with livestock.
I helped Lara unload the toma from the packsaddle, and the man inspected them one by one: feeling the crust, sniffing it, giving it a few taps with his knuckles to see if there were air bubbles inside. He seemed satisfied. In the van he had a set of scales, and as he loaded the cheeses he weighed them, noting down the weight in a ledger and a figure on a receipt which he handed to Lara. At the bottom of it their first earnings were recorded. I watched her face as she looked at that number, but got no hint of her reaction to it. She said goodbye to me through the window of my car, then took the path again with the mule and the dog. They disappeared into the wood, or the wood reclaimed them as its own.
In Turin I vacated the apartment that I’d lived in for the last ten years. It was no longer worth keeping, given how little I used it, but on leaving I experienced a certain melancholy. I remembered vividly what it had meant to go there to live, when the city seemed so full of promises for the future. I didn’t know now whether they had been just an illusion of mine, or whether the city itself had failed to keep them, but to empty in one day a home made over so many years, taking out jumbled-together things that had been brought there one by one, was like taking back an engagement ring, resigning oneself to defeat.
For a nominal rent a friend was letting me a room for my stays in Turin. I loaded other boxes of my things into the car and took them to my mother’s place in Milan. From the motorway Monte Rosa emerged above the haze like a mirage: in the city the heat was melting the asphalt, and it seemed to me that I was pointlessly shifting stuff from one place to another, going up and down stairs of apartment buildings expiating who knows what sin that I’d committed in the past.
My mother was in Grana during this period, so I spent more than a month alone in the old apartment, by day doing the rounds of the offices of the producers I was working with, and at night watching the traffic from the window, imagining the anemic river buried beneath the avenue. There was nothing that belonged to me, nothing that I felt I belonged to. I was trying to get into production a series of documentaries on the Himalayas that would keep me away for a long time. It took a lot of fruitless meetings before finding someone who had faith in me: in the end I secured funding that would cover the cost of travel and not much else. But for me it was enough.
When I went back up to Grana in September there was a cold air blowing and a few chimneys in the village were smoking. Once out of the car I noticed a smell on my body that I did not like, so at the beginning of the path I washed my face and neck in the river; and in the woods rubbed my hands with a green larch twig. These were my usual rituals, but I knew that it would take a few days to be properly clean of the city.
All along the deep valley the pastures were beginning to fade. On Bruno’s land, beyond the bridge of planks, the bank of the river was all trampled by the hooves of the herd: from there upwards the grass was finished, closely shaved and already fertilized, and there were patches of earth where the odd cow would scrape on days of bad weather, unsettled by the smell of a thunderstorm. I could smell a storm in the air right now, together with the pungent odor of dung and of wood smoke rising from Bruno’s home. This was the time when he would be making the cheese, so I decided to head straight on and come down to find him on another occasion.
Having passed the stable, I heard the cowbells and saw Lara pasturing the herd high up, far from the path, on slopes where the last grass remained; I waved to her, and having already caught sight of me, she waved back with her unopened umbrella. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall, and after all those nights made restless by the heat and by dreams, I felt overcome by exhaustion: I just wanted to get to Barma, light the stove, and sleep. There was nothing like a long sleep in my burrow inside the mountain to put me right again.
There followed three days of fog during which I hardly left the house. I would stay at the window observing the way in which the clouds rose up from the valley and insinuated themselves into the woods, passing between the branches of the larch and fading the colors of my prayer flags before swallowing them completely. In the house the low pressure extinguished the fire in the stove, smoking me as I read or wrote. Then I would go out into the fog and stretch my legs by walking to the lake. There I would throw a stone that would vanish even before producing its phantom thud, and I imagined schools of small curious fish swimming around it. In the evening I would listen to some Swiss radio station or other, thinking about the year that was in store for me. It was a period of incubation, of the kind appropriate before great exploits.
On the third day there was a knock at the door. It was Bruno. He said: “So it is true that you’re back. Want to come to the mountain?”
“Now?” I asked, since everything was shrouded in fog outside.
“Come on, I’ll show you something.”
“And the cows?”
“Let the cows be. It won’t kill them.”
And so we set off climbing back up the slope, along the path that led to the higher lake. Bruno was wearing his rubber boots, filthy with dung up to his thighs, and as we walked he told me that he had been into the slurry pit to pull out a cow that had fallen into it in the fog. He laughed. He was going up in a rush, so quickly that I was struggling to keep up. A viper had bitten one of the dogs, he said: he realized because he saw him next to water all the time, constantly thirsty, and checking him over had found the puncture marks made by the viper in his swollen belly. He was dragging himself around pitifully, and Lara was ready to put him on the mule and take him to the vet when Bruno’s mother had said to give him as much milk as he would drink, just milk and no water or food—and now he had recovered and was gradually regaining his strength.