ELEVEN
ANITA WAS BORN in the autumn, like all mountain folk.
I was not there that year: in Nepal I had come into contact with the world of NGOs and was working with a group of them. I was filming documentaries in the villages where schools and hospitals were being built, agricultural projects or employment initiatives for women were being developed, and where sometimes camps for Tibetan refugees were being set up. I didn’t like everything that I was seeing. The managers in Kathmandu were no more than careerist politicians. But in the mountains themselves I came across people of every sort: from old hippies to students doing VSO; from volunteer medics to mountaineers who between one expedition and another would stay on to work as builders. Not even these examples of humanity were entirely free from ambition and power struggles, but what they did not lack was idealism. And I liked being amongst idealists.
I was in Mustang, in June—an arid plateau on the border with Tibet, made up of small white houses clinging to the red rock—when my mother wrote to let me know that she had just gone up to Grana and discovered that Lara was five months pregnant. She felt immediately called to do her duty. Throughout the summer she sent me updates that resembled medical reports: in June Lara had twisted her ankle while she was out in the pasture, and had continued to hobble around for days; in July, with her very pale skin, she suffered sunstroke while making hay; in August, with backache and swollen legs, she still carried down the cheese twice a week with the mule. My mother would order her to rest. Lara would not hear of it. When Bruno suggested that they should hire someone to do her work she refused, saying that the cows were all pregnant too and that no one made a fuss about it, that seeing them so calm actually helped her to relax.
I had come to Kathmandu at the height of the monsoon season. Every afternoon the city was whipped by a storm. Then the crazy traffic of motorbikes and bicycles would cease, the packs of street dogs would seek refuge under overhanging roofs, the streets themselves become rivers of mud and rubbish—and I would shut myself in some place or other with a phone line, in front of an ancient computer, and catch up on the latest news. I did not know whether to admire Lara most, expecting her first child in an alpeggio, or that other woman, now seventy years old, who would climb up to visit her on foot and accompany her to the hospital each month. The August scan established beyond doubt that Lara was expecting a girl. Even now she continued to pasture the cows, with a belly so big that it prevented any movement except simply walking in front of the herd, then sitting under a tree to watch over it.
Then on the last Sunday of September, with their hides brushed and shining, their embroidered leather collars and their ceremonial bells, the cows went down to the valley in a solemn end of season procession. Bruno installed them in the stable he had rented for the winter, and at that point there was nothing left to do but wait. He must have done a certain amount of calculation, in true mountain man style, because Lara gave birth soon after, as if that too was seasonal work.
I remember where I was when my mother gave me the news: in lower Dolpo, on the shore of a lake that uncannily resembled an Alpine one, surrounded by woods of red fir and Buddhist temples, together with a girl that I had met in Kathmandu. She worked at an orphanage in the city, but at that time we had taken a few days off and headed for the mountains together. In a refuge without a stove at three and a half thousand meters, the walls of which were nothing more than small shingles painted blue, we had put together our two sleeping bags and huddled inside: through the window I looked out at the star-studded sky and the pointed tops of the fir trees as she slept. At a certain point I saw the moon rise. I stayed awake a long time, thinking about my friend Bruno who had just become a father.
When I returned to Italy in 2010 I found it deep in a grotesque economic crisis. Milan announced it to me on arrival, with its airport looking virtually decommissioned: four planes on kilometers of runway, and the window displays of the high fashion brands glistening in the empty shops. From the train that took me to the city, freezing from the air conditioning on a July evening, I noticed building sites everywhere, tall cranes suspended, high-rise buildings with bizarre profiles that were taking shape on the horizon. I could not understand why all the newspapers were talking about all the money having run out when I was noticing in Milan, and also in Turin, a building boom that resembled that of a golden age. Going in search of old friends was like doing a tour of hospital wards: the production companies, the advertising agencies, and the television channels that I had worked for were shutting down due to bankruptcy, and many of those friends were at home on their sofas, doing nothing. Nearing forty, they were reduced to taking the odd day’s work and to accepting money from their retired parents. But look outside, one of them said to me, do you see the buildings sprouting up everywhere? Who is it that’s stealing what was due to us? Wherever I went I breathed in this air of disillusionment and anger, this intergenerational sense of grievance. It was a relief to have in my pocket already the ticket with which I would be able to leave.
A few days later I took a coach to the mountains, then another at the beginning of the valley, and got off at the bar where I used to go with my mother to make calls, though there was no longer any trace there of the red phone box.
I followed the path on foot, just as before. The old mule track cut through the bends of the asphalted road and soon became choked with brambles and leaves, so rather than follow it I went up through the woods, relying on my memory of the way. When I came out on the other side I discovered that next to the ruins of the tower a mobile phone mast had gone up, and that down in the gully a cement dam interrupted the flow of the river. The little artificial reservoir was full of mud from the thaw: an excavator was fishing it out of the water and dumping it on the bank, destroying with its caterpillar tracks and the muddy sand the meadows where Bruno used to graze cattle as a boy.
Then, as always, I got beyond Grana and it seemed like I was leaving every poisoned thing behind me. It was like entering the sacred valley when going to Annapurna: except that here it was not any religious precept but simply neglect that had left everything unchanged. I discovered again the clearing that as children Bruno and I called the sawmill, because two tracks remained there together with a trolley used who knows how long ago for cutting planks of wood for buildings. Nearby there was a cable lift for dispatching those planks up to the alpeggi, the steel cable wound around a larch tree that with the passage of time had engulfed it in bark. They had forgotten my childhood mountain because it wasn’t worth anything—and it was fortunate in this respect. I slowed down like the Nepalese porters who would whisper at high altitude: bistare, bistare. I did not want these moments to be over too soon. Every time I went back up there I felt like I was returning to my own self, to the place where I was most like myself again and felt best.
At the farmstead they were expecting me for lunch. Bruno, Lara, the little Anita who at less than a year old was playing on a blanket in the middle of a meadow, and my mother who did not take her eyes off her for a moment. She said: “It’s your Uncle Pietro, Anita, look!” and immediately brought her to me to get acquainted. The little girl looked at me with suspicion, intrigued by my beard; she tugged it, and making a sound that I didn’t catch started laughing at her new discovery. My mother seemed quite different from the aging woman I had said goodbye to when I left. Other things had altered too; the whole farmstead was livelier than I remembered it: the new chickens and rabbits, the mule, the cows, the dogs, a fire on which the polenta and a stew were cooking, the table laid in the open air.