When I got back to Barma I saw that two hunters had come to speak to Bruno. They had modern weapons with telescopic sights. At one point one of the two opened his rucksack and deposited a black bag at Bruno’s feet. The other one noticed my presence and nodded in my direction, and recognizing something familiar about that gesture I realized soon enough who they were: the two cousins from whom Bruno had bought the farmstead. I had not seen them for more than twenty-five years. I had not known that he was in touch with them, nor how they had found him up there. But who knows how much else there was about Grana that I could not even imagine.
From out of the black bag, after they had gone, a dead and already gutted chamois emerged. When Bruno hung it up by its back legs from the branch of a larch tree I could see that it was a female. It had its dark winter coat with a thick black line down the middle of its back, a slender neck from which its lifeless muzzle dangled, two small horns that looked like hooks. From the gash in its belly the steam was still rising in the cold morning air.
Bruno went inside to fetch a knife and sharpened it carefully before setting to work. Then he was as precise and methodical as if he had spent a lifetime doing nothing but this. He made an incision in the skin around the shins and continued along the inside of the thighs, all the way down to the groin where the two cuts joined. He went back up, detached a flap of skin from the shin, put down the knife, and grasped the flap with both hands, tugging it down violently to expose first one thigh and then the other. Under the skin there was a white, viscous layer—the fat that the chamois had put on for the winter months—and beneath the fat you could glimpse the pink of its flesh. Bruno took the knife again, made a cut in the breast and another two in the front legs, grasped again the flayed hide that was now hanging halfway down its back and tugged it hard. You need some strength to tear hide from flesh, but he used more force than was necessary, putting into it the anger that he had kept bottled up ever since I had arrived. The skin came off in one piece, like a dress. Then he grabbed hold of one of the horns with his left hand, fumbled with his knife between the vertebrae of its neck, and I heard the crack of fractured bone. The head came off with the hide and Bruno stretched it on the ground, with the fur lying on the grass and the skin facing upwards.
The chamois looked much smaller now. Skinned and decapitated, it no longer even looked like a chamois—just meat, bones, cartilage—like one of those refrigerated carcasses hanging in cold storage in supermarkets. Bruno inserted his hands into the thorax and tore out the heart and lungs, then turned the carcass around. He felt with his fingers to find the veins of the muscles along the backbone, severed them with a light cut, and then went back over the line he had followed, plunging the knife in. The flesh that was disclosed then was of a dark red color. He cut off two long cords, dark and bloody. His arms were daubed with blood now too. I’d had enough, and did not stay to witness the rest of the butchery. I just saw at the end the skeleton of the chamois hanging from the branch of the tree, reduced to next to nothing.
A few hours later I told him that I was leaving. At the table I had tried to resume our conversation from the day before, this time being more direct. I asked him what he intended to do about Anita, what arrangements he had made with Lara, and whether he intended to visit them at Christmas.
“Probably not at Christmas,” he answered.
“So when?”
“I don’t know, maybe in the spring.”
“Or maybe in the summer, right?”
“Listen, what difference does it make? It’s better that she stays with her mother, isn’t it? Or do you want me to bring her up here, to live this kind of life with me?”
He said here just as he’d always done, as if at the bottom of his valley there was an invisible border, a wall erected only for him, preventing access to the rest of the world.
“Perhaps you should go down,” I said. “Maybe you’re the one who needs to change your way of life.”
“Me?” said Bruno. “But Berio, don’t you remember who I am?”
Yes, I remembered. He was the cowherd, the bricklayer, the man of the mountains, and above all he was his father’s son: just like him he would disappear from the life of his child, and that was it. I looked at the plate in front of me. Bruno had prepared a hunter’s delicacy, the heart and lungs of the chamois cooked with wine and onions, but I had barely touched it.
“You’re not eating?” he asked, disappointed.
“It’s too strong for me,” I replied.
I pushed the plate away and added: “Today I’m going down. I’ve got a few work-related things to sort out. Perhaps I’ll come back to say goodbye before leaving.”
“Yes, of course,” said Bruno, without looking at me. He didn’t believe it and neither did I. He took my plate, opened the door, and threw its contents outside for the crows and foxes, creatures with less delicate stomachs than mine.
In December I decided to go and visit Lara. I made my way up the valley as the snow was beginning to fall, at the start of the ski season. The landscape was not so very different from that of Grana, and while driving it occurred to me that to a certain extent all mountains look the same, except that here there was nothing to remind me of myself or of someone I once loved, and that made all the difference. The way in which a place can be a custodian of your history. How you could read it there every time you went back. There could only be one mountain of this kind in anyone’s lifetime, and in comparison with that one all the others were merely minor peaks, even if they happened to be in the Himalayas.
There was a small ski resort at the head of the valley. Two or three businesses in all, of the kind that were struggling to survive, what with the economic crisis and climate change. Lara worked there in a restaurant built in the style of an Alpine lodge, near to where the ski lifts began and as fake in its way as the artificial snow on the pistes. She came forward to embrace me wearing the apron of a waitress, and with a smile that could not conceal how tired she was. She was young, Lara; she was no more than thirty—but for a good while now she had been living the life of an older woman, and it showed. There were few skiers about, so she asked one of her colleagues to cover for her and came to sit at a table with me.
While talking she showed me a photo of Anita: a blond, rather frail, smiling child who was hugging a black dog much bigger than herself. She told me that she was in her first year of school. It was difficult to convince her to conform to certain rules; when she started she was like some kind of feral child: she would get in a fight with someone, or would begin to scream, or would sit in a corner the whole day saying nothing. Now, little by little, perhaps she was becoming civilized. Lara laughed. She said: “But the thing she likes most is when I take her to some farm. There she feels at home. She lets the calves lick her hands—you know, with that rough tongue of theirs—and she isn’t afraid at all. And it’s the same with goats and with horses. She’s happy with every kind of animal. I hope that won’t change, and that she’ll never forget it.”