Bruno was so pleased to see me again that he embraced me. It was a gesture so unusual between us that as he squeezed me I wondered how much he might have changed. When we separated I looked hard at his face, searching for wrinkles, gray hairs, the heaviness of age in his features. I had the impression that he was looking for the same in mine. Were we still the same? Then he sat me down at the head of the table and poured the drinks: four glasses brimming with red wine with which to toast my return.
I was no longer used to wine or meat, and soon felt intoxicated by both. I was speaking nonstop. Lara and my mother took turns to get up and look after Anita, until the little girl began to feel sleepy and there was a sign, I think, or a silent understanding between them, and my mother gathered her up in her arms and moved away cradling her. I had brought back as a gift a teapot, cups, and a packet of black tea, so after lunch I made some, Tibetan style, with butter and salt, even if the Alpine butter was not as strong or rancid as butter made from yak’s milk. While I was mixing it I told them that in Tibet they used butter in every way imaginable: they burned it in lamps, spread it as a moisturizer on women’s hair, mixed it with human bones in sky burials.
“What?” said Bruno.
I explained that on the high plateaus there wasn’t enough wood to cremate corpses: the dead were flayed and left on top of a hill so that the vultures would devour them. After a few days they would return and find the bones picked clean. The skull and the skeleton were then pounded up and mixed with butter and flour, so that this too would become food for the birds.
“How horrible,” Lara said.
“But why?” said Bruno.
“Can you imagine it? The dead person there on the ground and the vultures eating them piece by piece?”
“Well, being put in a hole in the ground is not so very different,” I said. “Something will end up eating you there as well.”
“Yes, but at least you don’t have to see it,” Lara said.
“I think it’s a great idea,” said Bruno. “Food for the birds.”
On the other hand he was disgusted by the tea, and emptied our cups as well as his own before filling them with grappa instead. The three of us were all a little drunk by now. He put his arm around Lara’s shoulders and said: “And what about the Himalayan girls? Are they as beautiful as those in the Alps?”
I became serious without meaning to and mumbled something in reply.
“You’re not turning into some kind of Buddhist monk, are you?”
But Lara had picked up on the meaning of my reticence, and answered for me: “No, no. There is someone who is keeping him company.”
Then Bruno looked at my face and smiled, seeing there that it was true, and I instinctively looked over to where my mother was, too far off to hear what we were saying.
Later on I went to lie down beneath an old larch, a solitary tree that dominated the meadows above the house. I remained stretched out there with my eyes half-closed and my hands behind my head, looking at the summits and the ridges of the Grenon through the branches and surrendering to sleep. That view always reminded me of my father. I thought that in some way, without knowing it, this strange family amongst which I had found myself had been founded by him. Who knows what he would have made of it, seeing us all together at that lunch. His wife, his son, his other son from the mountains, a young woman, and a little girl. If we had really been brothers, I thought, Bruno could be nothing other than the eldest. He was the one who made things. The builder of houses, a family, a business: the firstborn with his land, his livestock, his offspring. I was the younger brother, the squanderer. The one who does not get married, does not have children, and who travels the world without sending news for months at a time, turning up out of the blue on the day of a party, just as lunch is about to be served. Who would have thought that, eh Dad? Immersed in these alcohol-induced musings, I fell asleep in the sun.
I spent a few weeks with them that summer. Not long enough to stop feeling that I was only visiting, but too long to just sit around doing nothing. Up at Barma my two-year absence had left its mark, so much so in fact that when I saw the house again I felt like apologizing: the invasive vegetation had already begun to lay siege to her, certain roof tiles were warped or out of place, and when I left I had forgotten to remove the piece of chimney flue that stuck out of the wall, so that the snow had broken it and caused some damage inside the house as well. It would have taken only a few more years for the mountain to reclaim her, and to reduce her again to the pile of rubble that she was before. I decided to devote my remaining time there to the house, preparing her for my next departure.
Spending time with Bruno and Lara I discovered that something else had begun to deteriorate while I was away. When my mother was not there and Anita had been put to bed, the place changed from being a happy farmstead to being a business that was in the red—and my friends became squabbling financial partners. Lara talked about nothing else. She told me that the sums they made from cheese making did not even cover the mortgage repayments. The money came and went, leaving them with nothing to spare, and making no inroad on their debt with the bank. Living up there in the summer they were able to be almost self-sufficient, but in the winter, what with the rent for the stables and other costs, they were really struggling. They had needed to take out another loan. New debts with which to pay for old.
That summer Lara had decided to cut out the middleman, bypassing the distributor that I had met and selling directly to shopkeepers, even though it meant a load more work for her. Twice every week she would leave the little girl with my mother in Grana and go by car to make deliveries, leaving Bruno to manage on his own. They should have taken someone on, but this would have put them back where they started again.
He would start fuming soon after she began telling me about these things. One evening he said: “Can’t we change the subject? We hardly ever see Pietro. Do we always have to be talking about money?”
Lara took offense. “So what should we be talking about?” she said. “Let’s see, what about yaks? What do you think, Pietro, could we set up a nice business breeding yaks?”
“It’s not such a bad idea,” Bruno said.
“Listen to him,” Lara said to me. “Living up here on the mountain with his head in the clouds he doesn’t have any of the problems of us mere mortals. And then to him— But remember that it’s you who got us into this mess, right?”
“That’s right,” said Bruno. “They’re my debts. You shouldn’t take them too much to heart.”
Hearing that she glared at him furiously, got up abruptly, and left. He immediately regretted having uttered such words.
“She’s right,” he said. “But what can I do? I can’t work any harder than I am already. And thinking about money all the time solves nothing, so it’s preferable to think about something else, isn’t it?”
“But how much do you need?” I asked.
“Forget it. If I told you you’d be shocked.”
“Perhaps I can help. Perhaps I can stay here and work until the end of the season.”
“Thanks, but no.”
“You wouldn’t have to pay me of course. I’d be only too pleased to help.”
“No,” said Bruno, curtly.
In the days that were left before my departure we did not mention the subject again. Lara kept to herself, offended, worried, busying herself around the little girl. Bruno pretended that nothing had happened. I would go up and down from Grana with the materials I needed to fix the house: I had reapplied cement where it was needed, stopped up the chimney flue, cleared the weeds from the surrounding land. I’d had larch tiles cut similar to the old ones, and was on the roof replacing them when Bruno arrived to see me: perhaps he had intended us to go up the mountain together, but finding me on the roof changed his mind, and he climbed up to join me there instead.