“With animals there is always something new to learn,” he said. He shook his head and resumed climbing with that pace of his that nearly did for me. All the way up to the lake he continued talking about cows, milk, manure, grass, because during my absence so many things had happened that I needed to be informed about. He was thinking of bringing some rabbits and chickens up some time in the future, but he needed to build some good fences because there were foxes about. Eagles too. You might not believe it, but the eagle is even more ferocious than the fox when it comes to farmyard animals.
He didn’t ask me how I had got on in Turin or in Milan. He wasn’t interested in anything I might have been up to during the course of a whole month. He talked about foxes and eagles and rabbits and chickens, and pretended, as usual, that the city didn’t exist and that I didn’t have another life elsewhere: our friendship existed there, on that mountain, and what happened down below should not even be mentioned.
“And the business, how’s that going?” I asked, as we got our breath back at the small lake.
Bruno shrugged his shoulders. “Well,” he said.
“Are the sums adding up?”
He grimaced. He looked at me as if I had asked an annoying question, just for the pleasure of ruining his day. Then he said: “I leave the accounts to Lara. I’ve tried doing them myself, but I guess I’m no good at it.”
We climbed up the scree in thick fog, with no path, each of us finding his own way. We couldn’t see well enough to follow the cairns, losing sight of them almost immediately in fact, and letting ourselves be guided by the incline, our instincts, the lines suggested by the scree itself. We were climbing up blind, and every so often I heard the sound of stones that Bruno had dislodged above or below me, made out his outline and headed straight towards it. If we got too far from each other, one of us would call out: oh? and the other would respond with oh! We adjusted our direction like two boats in fog.
Until, at a certain point, I realized that the light was changing. Now it was casting shadows on the rocks in front of me. I looked up and saw a blue tone in the flurries of increasingly sparse fog, and after a few more steps I was through it: all at once I found myself looking around in full sunlight, with a September sky above my head and the dense white of the clouds beneath my feet. We were well above two and a half thousand meters. Only a few peaks emerged at that height, like chains of islands, like surfacing dorsals.
I also saw that we had deviated from the proper route to the Grenon’s summit, or at least from the usual one: but instead of crossing the scree at the fork I decided to reach the crest by climbing what was immediately above me. It didn’t look difficult. As I climbed I fantasized about achieving a first, something that would be recorded in the annals of the Italian Alpine Club, together with the author of such a feat: North-west crest of the Grenon: Pietro Guasti, 2008. But just a little further up, on a ledge, I found a few rusty meat or sardine tins of the kind that many years ago no one bothered to take back with them to the valley. So I discovered once again that someone had preceded me.
There was a gorge between where I was and the usual route, getting steeper and steeper up to the crest. Bruno had taken it, and on its steep slope I saw that he had developed a peculiar style of his own: he used his hands as well and climbed on all fours, rapidly, instinctively choosing the right places for his hands and feet, and never putting his whole weight on them. Sometimes the ground would give way beneath his feet or hands, but his momentum had already carried him forward, and the small cascades of stones that he dislodged continued on down, like memories of his passing through there. Omo servadzo: the wild man, I thought. Having got to the top before him, I had time to admire this new style of his from the crest.
“Who taught you to climb like that?” I asked.
“The chamois. I watched them once and said to myself: now I’m going to try it like that too.”
“And it works?”
“Well . . . I’ve still got a few improvements to make.”
“Did you know that we would get above the clouds?”
“I was hoping that we would.”
We sat down, leaning against the pile of stones where I had once found words written by my father. The sun was sculpting every edge and indentation in the rock, and doing the same to Bruno’s face: he had new crow’s feet around his eyes, shadows under his cheekbones, furrows that I did not recall him having before. His first season at the farmstead must have been hard going.
It seemed like the right moment to talk to him about my journey. I told him that in Milan I had secured enough funding to stay away for at least a year. I wanted to go around the regions of Nepal and portray the people that lived in its mountains: there were so many different groups in the valleys of the Himalayas, all distinct from each other. I would be leaving in October, near the end of the monsoon season. I had little money but many contacts—people working there who would be able to help me and put me up. I confided that I had given up my home in Turin, that I didn’t have another one there now and neither did I want one: if things went well in Nepal, I would stay there even longer.
Bruno listened in silence. When I had finished speaking he took a while to reflect on the implications of what I had told him. He was looking at Monte Rosa, and said: “Do you remember that time with your father?”
“Of course I remember.”
“I think about it sometimes, you know? Do you think the ice of that day has reached the bottom yet?”
“I don’t think so. It’s probably about halfway.”
Then he asked: “Are the Himalayas like our region at all?”
“No,” I replied. “Not at all.”
It was not easy to explain, but I wanted to try, and so I added: “You know those enormous ruined monuments, like the ones in Athens and Rome? Those ancient temples of which only a few columns are left standing, with the stones of their walls lying scattered about on the ground? Well, the Himalayas are like the original temple. It’s like being able to see it intact after having spent a lifetime only ever seeing ruins.”
I immediately regretted having spoken in this way. Bruno was gazing at the glaciers, above the clouds, and I thought that in the coming months I would remember him like this, like the custodian of that pile of rubble.
Then he got up. “Time to do the milking,” he said. “Are you coming down?”
“I think I’ll stay here a bit longer.”
“Good for you. Who would want to go back down below?”
He entered the gorge up which he’d climbed and disappeared amongst the rocks. I caught sight of him again a few minutes later, about a hundred meters further down. There was a spit of snow down there, pushed northwards, and he had crossed the scree in order to reach it. From above that small snowfield he tested its consistency with his foot. He looked up in my direction and waved, and I responded with a big gesture that might be seen from a distance. The snow must have been well frozen, because Bruno jumped on it and immediately picked up speed: he went down with his legs spread out, skiing with his work boots, waving his arms to keep his balance—and in an instant was swallowed up by the fog.