“Hey,” said Bruno. “It’s about time.”
“I’m sorry. I had to spend some time with my father.”
“Is that your father? What’s he like?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s fine.”
I had started talking like him. We hadn’t seen each other in fifteen days, and we felt like old friends. My father greeted him as if he were one, and even Bruno’s uncle made an effort to seem hospitable: he disappeared into one of the huts and came out with a piece of toma cheese, some mocetta salami, and a flask of wine, but his face hardly accorded with these gestures of welcome. He was a man who seemed marked by his own worst inner thoughts, as if they were carved there in his features. He had an unkempt, bristling, and almost white beard, its moustache thicker and gray; eyebrows that were arched permanently, giving him a distrusting air; and eyes that were sky blue. The hand my father stretched out had taken him by surprise, and the movement he made to shake it seemed hesitant, unnatural; only when unstopping the wine and filling the glasses did he seem back on his own familiar territory.
Bruno had something to show me, so we left them to their drinks and went for a wander around. I took in the farmstead that he had told me so much about. It exuded an ancient dignity—whose presence you could still feel in the drystone walls, in certain enormous angular stones, in the hand-hewn roof beams—as well as a more recent air of poverty, like a layer of grease and dust over everything. The longest of the cabins was being used as a cowshed, humming with flies and encrusted with dung right up to its threshold. In the second, its broken windows stopped with bits of rag and its roof patched with metal sheets, Luigi Guglielmina and his heirs lived. The third was the cellar: Bruno took me to see it rather than the room in which he slept. Even in Grana he had never invited me into his home.
He said: “I’m learning how to make the toma.”
“Meaning what?”
“The cheese. Come.”
The cellar surprised me. It was cool and shadowy, the only really clean place in the whole alpeggio. The thick shelves made of larch had been recently washed: the cheeses were being aged there, their crusts moistened with brine. They were so polished, round, and symmetrical as to seem laid out in display for some kind of competition.
“Did you make them?” I asked.
“No, no. For now I only turn them and that’s it. They’re nice ones, no?”
“What do you mean turn them?”
“Once every week I turn them over and sprinkle them with salt. Then I wash everything down and tidy up in here.”
“They’re really nice ones,” I said.
Outside, on the other hand, lay plastic buckets, a pile of half-rotted wood, a stove made out of a diesel oil drum, a bathtub converted into a drinking trough, scattered potato peelings, and the odd bone picked clean by the dogs. It wasn’t just an absence of decorum: there was a perceptible contempt for things, a certain kind of pleasure in mistreating them and letting them go to pot that I had also begun to recognize in Grana. It was as if these places had already had their fate sealed, that it was a waste of time and effort to try to maintain them.
My father and Bruno’s uncle were already on their second glass, and we found them in the midst of a discussion about the economics of small Alpine farmsteads. My father must have initiated the conversation. When it came to other people’s lives he was more interested in their work than anything else: how many head of cattle, how many liters of milk a day, what the yield was like regarding the production of cheese. Luigi Guglielmina was more than happy to discuss it with someone who knew what they were talking about, and he made his calculations out loud to show that, what with current prices and the absurd regulations imposed by cattle breeders, his work no longer made economic sense, and was continued by him only because of his passion for it.
He said: “When I die, within ten years it will all revert to forest up here. Then they’ll be happy.”
“Don’t your children like this kind of work?” my father asked.
“Oh sure. What they don’t like is working their asses off.”
What struck me most was not hearing him talk in such terms, but his prophecy. It had never occurred to me that the pastures had once been wooded, and that they could revert to being so again. I looked at the cows scattered over the grazing, and made an effort to imagine these fields colonized by the first thick covering of weeds and shrubs, erasing every sign of what had once been there. The drainage ditches, the drystone walls, the paths, eventually even the houses themselves.
Bruno had in the meantime lit the fire in the open-air stove. Without waiting to be told, he went to the bath to fill a saucepan with water and began to peel potatoes with his penknife. There were so many things that he knew how to do: he made a pasta dish and put it on the table with the boiled potatoes, the toma, the mocetta, and the wine. At that point his cousins appeared: two tall and thickset youths, about twenty-five years old, who sat down to eat with their heads lowered, looked up at us briefly, and then went off for a siesta. Bruno’s uncle watched them going, and in the grimace contorting his lips it was clear to see that he despised them.
My father paid no heed to such things. At the end of the meal he stretched, put his hands behind his head, and looked at the sky, as if he was about to enjoy a show. And he said as much: “What a show.” His vacation was nearly over, and he had already started to look at the mountains with nostalgia. He would no longer be able to make it to certain summits that year. We had some above us: all scree, spurs, pinnacles, rivers of fallen rock, gullies of debris, and broken ridges. They looked like the ruins of an immense fortress destroyed by cannon fire, poised precariously before collapsing completely: what could indeed be considered a real show, in fact, for someone like my father.
“What are these mountains called?” he asked. A strange question, I thought, given the amount of time he spent poring over his wall map.
Bruno’s uncle glanced up as if he were looking for signs of rain, and with a vague gesture said: “Grenon.”
“Which one is Grenon?”
“This one. For us it’s the mountain of Grana.”
“All of these peaks together?”
“Of course. We don’t give names to peaks here. It’s the region.” Having eaten and drunk he was beginning to get fed up with having us around.
“Have you ever been there?” my father persisted. “Right up to the heights I mean.”
“When I was young. I used to go with my father, hunting.”
“And have you been to the glacier?”
“No. I never had the chance. But I would’ve liked to,” he admitted.
“I’m thinking of going up there tomorrow,” my father said. “I’m taking the boy to trample some snow. If it’s all right with you, we could take yours with us too.”
This is what my father had been aiming at all along. Luigi Guglielmina took a moment to understand what he was saying. Yours? Then he remembered Bruno who was there beside me—we were playing with one of the dogs, one of that year’s puppies. But we were also hanging on every word.