By this time my father had made himself scarce. For him one house was much like another, and the next day he was expected back in the office. He had gone out onto the balcony for a smoke, his hands on the coarse wood of the balustrade, his eyes scrutinizing the summits. It looked as if he were surveying them in order to calculate from which angle to launch an assault. He came back in after the owner of the house had left, so as to be spared any pleasantries, in a somber mood that had come upon him in the meantime. He said that he was going out to get something for lunch, and that he wanted to be back in the car before the evening.
In that house, once my father had gone, my mother reverted to a version of herself that I had never known before. In the morning, as soon as she had got out of bed she would put some kindling in the stove, scrunch up a page of newspaper, and strike a match on the rough surface of the cast iron. She wasn’t bothered by the smoke that would then unfurl into the kitchen, or by the need to wrap ourselves in a blanket until the room warmed up, or by the milk that she would overheat and burn on the scalding hotplate. For breakfast she would give me toast and jam. She would wash me under the tap, scrubbing my face, neck, and ears before drying me with a kitchen rag and sending me on my way outdoors: out into the wind and the rain, so that I would finally lose a little of my delicate urban constitution.
On those days I would set about exploring the river. There were two boundaries that I was not allowed to cross: upstream a small wooden bridge beyond which the banks steepened increasingly and narrowed into a gully, downstream the thickets at the foot of the cliff where the water followed its course to the valley floor. This was the territory that my mother could control from the balcony of the house, but for me it was as good as having the whole river itself. That river coursed down crags at first, falling in a series of foaming rapids between huge rocks which I peered over to observe the silver reflections at the bottom. Further on it slowed and meandered, as if transformed from youth to adulthood, and cut around islets, colonized by birch trees, that I could leap across to reach the opposite bank. Further on still, a tangle of timber formed a barrier. At this point a gorge descended, and it had been an avalanche during winter that had torn down the trunks and branches that were now rotting in the water, though at the time I knew nothing of such things. In my eyes it was the moment in the life of the river when it simply encountered an obstacle, then stopped and stagnated. I would always end up sitting there, watching the weed that was undulating just below the surface of the water.
There was a young boy who grazed cows in the meadows along the banks of the river. According to my mother he was the nephew of the woman who owned the house. He always carried with him a yellow stick, made of plastic and with a curved handle, with which he would prod the cows towards the tall grass. There were seven of them, all chestnut-colored and restless. The boy would scold them when they wandered off by themselves, and would occasionally chase after one or another of them, cursing; while on the way back he would climb the slope and turn to call out to them with an Oh, oh, oh, or an Eh, eh, eh until, reluctantly, they would follow him to the stable. In the pasture he would sit down and watch them from above, carving a small piece of wood with his penknife.
“You can’t stay there,” he said, the one time that he spoke to me.
“Why not?” I asked.
“You’re trampling the grass.”
“So where can I stay?”
“Over there.”
He pointed to the other side of the river. I could not see how to reach it from where I was standing, but I did not want to ask him or to negotiate a passage through his grass. So I stepped into the water without taking off my shoes. I tried to keep upright in the current and to show no hesitation, as if fording rivers was an everyday occurrence for me. I managed to cross, sat down with my trousers soaked and my shoes streaming, but when I turned to look at the boy he was no longer paying any attention to me.
We spent a good few days in this way, on opposite banks of the river, not deigning to notice each other.
“Why don’t you try to make friends with him?” my mother asked, one evening in front of the stove. The house was impregnated with the damp of too many winters, so we would light the fire during supper and stay up warming ourselves until it was time for bed. We would both be reading our books, and every so often, between one page and another, the fire and our conversation were rekindled. The great black stove was listening to us.
“But how can I?” I answered. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You just say hello. Ask him what he’s called. Ask him what his cows are called.”
“OK, good night,” I said, pretending to be absorbed in my reading.
When it came to social interaction my mother was well ahead of me. Since there were no shops in the village, while I was exploring my river she discovered the stable where you could buy milk and cheese, the allotment that sold certain types of vegetables, and the sawmill for a supply of offcuts of wood. She had also come to an arrangement with the young man from the dairy, who every morning and evening passed by in his van to collect the milk churns, so that he would deliver to us bread and a few groceries. And I’m not sure how she did it, but by our second week she had hung flower baskets on the balcony and filled them with geraniums. Now our house could be recognized from a distance, and she was already hearing the sparse inhabitants of Grana greeting her by her name.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” I said, a minute later.
“What doesn’t matter?”
“Making friends. I also like to be on my own.”
“Oh, really?” my mother said. She raised her eyes from the page, and without smiling, as if it was a very serious matter, she added: “Are you sure about that?”
And with that she decided to help me herself. Not everyone is of the same opinion, but my mother was firmly convinced of the necessity to intervene in the lives of others. A couple of days later, in that same kitchen, I found the cow boy sitting on my own chair having breakfast. I smelt him, in fact, before seeing him, because he exuded the same smell of the stable, of hay, curdled milk, damp earth, and wood smoke which has always been for me, from that moment onwards, the smell of the mountains—the smell that I have found in all mountains, anywhere in the world. His name was Bruno Guglielmina. Everyone in Grana had the same surname, he insisted on explaining, but the name Bruno was unique to him. He was just a few months older than me, born in November of ’72. He devoured the biscuits that my mother offered him, as if he’d never eaten biscuits in his life before. The final discovery I made was that it wasn’t just me studying him down in the pasture, while both of us pretended to be oblivious to each other. He had been studying me too.
“You like the river, don’t you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you swim?”
“A bit.”
“Fish?”
“Not really.”
“Come on, I’ll show you something.”
Saying this he jumped from the chair. I exchanged looks with my mother, then ran after him without a second thought.
Bruno took me to a place that I already knew, where the river passes through the shadow cast by the little wooden bridge. Speaking low when we had reached the riverbank he ordered me to remain as quiet and hidden as possible. Then he gradually raised himself above the rock he was crouching behind, until he was just able to peer over it. He signaled with his hand for me to wait. While I waited I looked at him: he had straw-blond hair and his neck was burnt by the sun. He wore trousers in a size not his own, rolled up at the ankles and low-slung, a caricature of a grown man. He also had the demeanor of an adult, a kind of seriousness in his voice and gestures: with a nod he commanded me to join him, and I obeyed. I peered over the rock to see what he was looking at. I did not know what I was supposed to see there: beyond the rock the river formed a small waterfall and a shadowy pool, probably knee-deep. The surface of the water was unsettled, agitated by the churning fall. At the edges floated a finger’s depth of foam, and a large trapped branch sticking out diagonally had collected grass and sodden leaves around itself. It wasn’t much of a spectacle, only water that had run there from the mountain. And yet it was spellbinding; I don’t know why.