“What can I tell you, Pietro, things went badly,” Bruno said that evening, then shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he had nothing more to add on the subject. He was drinking coffee reheated on the stove and looking out to where it was getting dark already at five o’clock. We were using candles in the house, now that our little mill wheel was stopped due to drought: I had seen two full packs of white candles in the other room, together with the sacks of cornmeal, a couple of loaves of cheese remaining from the last batch made, a reserve of tins, some potatoes, and cartons of wine. It was not the larder of someone who was in any hurry to go back down. During the month since our phone call Bruno had laid in supplies and elaborated his own kind of mourning: the farm had gone badly, the relationship with Lara had gone badly, and he spoke about these things—or rather avoided speaking about them—as if they belonged to some remote period, in both time and thought. Rather than remember them, he seemed to want to forget about them entirely.
We spent these days making firewood for the winter. In the morning we would study a slope in search of a dead tree, climb up to cut it down, divest it of its branches before Bruno took off its top with the chainsaw, then would spend hours laboring to shift it to the house. We would tie a strong rope around it and drag it down by sheer force of our own strength. We had built slides throughout the wood, using old planks like sleepers, with banks of piled branches positioned where the trunk was in danger of slipping from our grasp with the steepness of the slope—but sooner or later it would get entangled with some obstacle or other, and then the work of dislodging it from there would begin. Bruno would curse it. He handled a pickaxe as if it were one of those small hoes lumberjacks use, levering up the trunk so that it could be pivoted halfway round: he would try one side and then the other, swearing as he did so, before flinging the tool to the ground and going to pick up the chainsaw again. I had always admired his way of working, the grace that he was able to express when using any kind of tool, but all trace of that was gone now. He would wield the chainsaw furiously: stall it, over-rev it, and when sometimes he had used up its petrol, would be on the verge of flinging it away as well. He would end up solving the problem by cutting the trunk into pieces and giving us another one instead—multiple journeys carrying them back to the house. Then we would set to splitting the wood with a sledgehammer and wedges until nightfall. The strokes of iron upon iron reverberated around the mountainside, drier, shriller, meaner, when Bruno was hammering, more uncertain and discordant when I took my turn. Until the master stroke came, the trunk split, and we finished the job with the axe.
The snow was already sparse on the Grenon. What little there was allowed the scree and the bushes, the ledges and the outcrops of rock to be made out still, as if the snowfall were no more than a thin layer of frost. But towards the end of the month a cold front arrived, the temperature dropped suddenly, and the lake froze over in the course of one night. The next morning I went down to look: the ice near the shore was rendered grayish and opaque by a myriad of trapped air bubbles, and became gradually darker and then blacker the further away you went from it. With a stick I could not even dent it, so decided to risk walking on it to see if it would take my weight. I had only taken a few steps before I heard a rumbling from deep in the lake that made me retreat immediately. Safely on the shore I heard it again: an ominous rumbling, resounding like a bass drum being hit over and over, extremely slowly and rhythmically, perhaps once every minute, perhaps even slower. It could not be anything other than water, beating against the ice from below. With the coming of daylight the water seemed to want to break out of the tomb in which it had found itself encased.
At sunset our endless evenings began. The horizon at the end of the valley would be tinged red for barely a few minutes before darkness fell. From then until it was time to sleep, the light did not change again: it could be six, seven, eight, and we would be spending the hours in front of the stove in silence, each with a candle to read by, the glow of the fire, the wine rationed to make it last, the one luxury at our suppers. During those days I cooked potatoes in every conceivable way. Boiled, roasted, grilled, fried in butter, baked with melted toma, with the candle next to the hotplate to see when they were done. We would eat them in ten minutes, then face each other for another two or three hours of silent vigil. The fact was that I was waiting for something—I didn’t know what—something that wasn’t happening. I had come back from Nepal to rescue my friend, and now my friend seemed to have no need of me. If I asked him a question he would let it drop with one of those vague responses that extinguished from the start any potential glimmer of conversation. He could spend an hour staring at the fire. And only occasionally, when I’d given up expecting him to, he spoke: but as if already midsentence, or as if he were temporarily following out loud the train of his own thoughts.
One evening he said, “I was there once, in Milan.”
“Oh really?” I said.
“But it was a long time ago; I must have been twenty. One day I had an argument with my boss and walked off the site. I had a whole afternoon free, so I said to myself: right, I’ll go there now. I took the car, went on the motorway, and arrived in the evening. I wanted to have a beer in Milan. I stopped at the first bar and had one. Then I headed back.”
“And what did you think of Milan?”
“Not much. Too many people.”
And then he added: “And I’ve also been to the sea. I went to Genoa once and saw it. I had a blanket in the car and slept there. Nobody was waiting for me at home anyway.”
“And what was the sea like?”
“A big lake.”
His accounts of things were like this; they might or might not have been true, and they went nowhere. Only once, out of the blue, he said: “It was great, wasn’t it, when we used to sit in front of the stable in the evening?”
I put down the book I was reading and responded: “Yes, really great.”
“The way night fell in July, the calm descended, do you remember? It was the hour I liked best, and then when I got up to milk the cows it was still dark. The two of them were still sleeping, and I felt as if I were watching over everything, as if they could sleep peacefully because I was there.”
Then he added: “It’s stupid, no? But that’s how I felt.”
“I don’t see anything stupid about it.”
“It’s stupid because no one can look after anyone else. It’s hard enough to look after yourself. Men are designed to always cope, if they’re clever, but if they think they’re too clever they end up being ruined.”
“Is starting a family being too clever?”
“Perhaps it is, for some.”
“Well, perhaps some should think twice before bringing children into the world.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Bruno said.
I stared at him in the semidarkness, trying to understand what was going through his mind. One half of his face was yellowed by the light from the stove, the other completely dark.
“So what are you saying?” I asked. He stared at the fire as if I were no longer even there.
I felt an increasing impatience that drove me outside into the dark, craving a cigarette for company. I stayed outside looking for the stars that were not visible, and asking myself what I was doing back here, until I realized that my teeth were chattering. Then I went back into the warm, dark, smoky room. Bruno had not moved. I warmed my feet in front of the stove, then went up to shut myself into my sleeping bag.
The next morning I was the first to get up. In the light of day I did not feel like sharing that small room, so skipped coffee and went out for a walk. I went down to look at the lake and found it covered by an overnight frost that the wind was sweeping here and there—lifting it in flurries, puffs, and miniature whirlwinds that appeared and disappeared in an instant, like restless spirits. Beneath the frost the ice was black and looked like stone. As I stood there looking at it, a shot echoed in the valley, rebounding from one side to the other so that it was difficult to tell whether it came from below, in the woods, or from the crests above. But I instinctively looked upwards for its origin, scouring the scree and the slopes for any sign of movement.