The Wild Boy

by Paolo Cognetti

  * * *

  The next morning it was still raining, and I’d decided to prepare green tagliatelle. I gathered nettle leaves and wild spinach from around the cabin, let them sweat in the pan, and then chopped them before mixing in the eggs and flour. I had begun to stretch the pasta with the rolling pin when I heard a racket of bells and the shouts of a shepherd. I looked out of the window and caught sight of two calves careering downhill. The shepherd was not one of my neighbors, but the solitary and slightly lame one who would occasionally pass by on his tractor; he was the only one who deigned to greet me, even though we had never exchanged a single word. Hampered by his leg, he had not been able to run after the fugitives. I could see him up above, in the middle of the meadow, cursing and gesticulating wildly. I took off my apron, turned off the gas under the pan of water for the pasta, then picked up my stick and went outside dusted with flour as I was. I found the calves a little lower down, in a clearing in the middle of the wood. They were grazing calmly. I did not know whether they would obey me or not, I had only watched how it was done. I moved around the first one and tapped on its flank with the stick, and very slowly, reluctantly, he began to climb back up. The other one was following behind. Proud of my success, I guided them to Fontane and shut them into a corner between the fence and the cabin, then waited for the lame shepherd, hoping that he would get there soon. He appeared after a few minutes riding pillion on a motocross bike ridden by a friend of his. He secured the calves with a hemp rope and asked me how I had managed to catch them; I replied that it had been easy, that they’d done all the work themselves. He laughed at this, and I noticed that his canine teeth were missing. He said that on reflection he might be persuaded to take me on as a watchman.

  His name was Gabriele. He was somewhere between forty and fifty years old; it was difficult to tell from his enormous hands, docker’s physique, ragged clothes, unkempt beard, and sunburned skin. Seen up close, his limp was more conspicuous: he told me that the previous year the tractor’s handbrake had failed and he had ended up under it while chopping wood, and now his left leg was held together by a metal plate and a few screws. He already knew all about me. At what time I lit the stove, how often I would go out into the vegetable patch to pull up weeds, and that I would go out walking almost every day. He would see me from above while leading the cows to pasture: his cabin was only a little farther up than mine, about fifteen minutes away by the path, and thanks to that morning’s exploit I earned myself an invitation to supper that evening.

  I wasn’t cut out to be a hermit: I’d gone up there to be alone, yet I did nothing but seek company. Or perhaps it was the situation itself that made every encounter so desirable and precious. After almost two months in the cabin, my season of solitude was coming to an end with the spring.

  At seven Mozzo came by searching for biscuits, looking me up and down while I put on my jeans and my best checked shirt. Used to seeing me in shorts and a sweater full of holes, he could not understand what was going on. What are you looking at? I asked. Can’t I be invited to dinner once in a while? Then I laced my boots, picked up the bottle of Nebbiolo that I had kept for a special occasion, and headed for the path in the direction of my appointment.

  SUMMER

  Season of Friendship and Adventure

  Shepherd, Where Are You Going?

  So you’re a subversive, he said, uncorking the wine, when I tried to explain what I had gone up there for. I had told him that I didn’t like rules or bosses, and that in the city I felt caged; if to live in my own way I needed to be alone on a mountain, so be it, I accepted the solitude in exchange for the freedom it gave me. Gabriele completely understood the sentiment. It was only when I turned it into a political issue that he grimaced. He wore army surplus jackets, loathed foreigners (despite having only seen a couple in his entire lifetime), and liked to act tough when talking about women. And yet I was convinced that he was much more anarchistic than I was: he had neither a family nor a fixed job; no television, or car, or debt to a bank; no need of money except to buy food and drink; did not vote and could not be traced on the internet. He had never been included in any kind of poll or market survey, and he was representative of nothing. A man such as he was, who had built a life on the margins and lived it his own way—he was by far the most subversive individual I could imagine in our current age, but I could hardly find a way of telling him so. Whenever I strayed into complicated areas of discussion he would scowl, and if I resorted to difficult words he would just stop listening. And so I gave in to him. Perhaps you’re right, I said. I guess I really must be a subversive.

  * * *

  He did not say le mucche (the cows), he said le baracche (the old wrecks). Or if he was angry with them, le baldracche (the loose women). Not even these belonged to him: they sent them up to him from the plains to pasture in the mountains for the summer. In this way Gabriele turned a profit from the only things he had: a cabin, a tractor, a stable, some meadowland that was covered in snow for six months of the year. In wintertime he lived in a small room in the village and adjusted to being an employee, working on the ski slopes. But he disliked being down in the valley: he was too feral for urban life. He spoke only by shouting, as if there was always some actual distance between himself and everyone else. He could do nothing quietly. Just one of his fingers was as thick as two of mine, and everything became fragile in his hands. Sometimes he would be hired in the village, by the day, to demolish a wall or split a few cords of wood, but before nightfall he would return with his tractor to his cabin at seven thousand feet. Only up there did he find the space that he needed: he seemed to belong to the mountain in the same way that a random boulder or century-old larch did, raised in the middle of a pasture, exposed to the sun and wind.

  Let’s put the baracche to bed, he would say as evening approached. Then he would open the stable door wide and make a gap in the electric fence before patiently calling out to them. Come hi, come hi, come hi. One by one the animals would lethargically respond. For the next half hour, insults and loud slaps could be heard issuing from the stable: as soon as they were tethered the cows would begin to revolt, get into skewed positions and change places with each other, making it necessary to shove them into position with shoulder barges and drag them by their collars, in oppressive heat made humid by their breath and sweat. Then, luckily, Gabriele had a couple to milk and so calmed down again. It was a ritual that really helped him to relax. There are those who milk with their thumbs folded into the fist, he explained to me, using the knuckle to squeeze the udder—but he did not like this method because it was too crude. He preferred to use the palm of his hand. He would then leave the milk pail for the calves and the dog, keeping only a drop for himself, for his morning coffee. At that point we would finally shut the stable door and go to supper.

  * * *

  His home consisted of a wood-paneled room, ten feet by ten, a camp bed, a stove, no running water, and no bathroom. Around it there were six or seven dilapidated stone huts, one of which he used as a cellar, another as a woodshed. Inside, the room was bedecked with objects: on the walls a collection of cowbells and collars, cups won at the cattle show (or “battle of the cows”), naked pinups from the calendar of a tractor dealership. A small glass cabinet, a small piece of sixties furniture made of chipboard (sawed in half because it didn’t fit), a much older cupboard, also small, consisting of just two shutters and a latch to enclose a niche in the rock. Wooden plates, a copper cauldron. Hanging above the stove were the tools for making cheese.

  At supper he would frequently talk about past times. He was a naturally lively person, but abandonment made him melancholy: he remembered when he used to go up there with his mother and sisters, and now he was alone. Among the photos hung on the wall there was one of him with his wife and children—but fearing that this would be a painful trigger I preferred not to touch it. I asked instead about the photo of the black cow in which he was smiling with his arms around its neck. That was Morgana, his favorite, d
ispatched to the slaughterhouse many years ago now. The only thing she lacked, he told me, was the ability to speak. Now he had Lupo to keep him company, a sheepdog that followed him everywhere: sharp, reserved, affectionate, the most intelligent he’d ever had. Hearing himself mentioned by name, Lupo’s ears pricked up from his bed near the stove, and looking up at us he came over for a pat and the crusts of the toma cheese.

  In Gabriele’s stories a lost world lived on—one in which, there in the village, each of the houses was inhabited and a hub of work. Men at work in the fields and in the stables, young boys in the pasture, women busying themselves with the farmyard animals. It was two hours by mule track to get to the village, and there was polenta and milk for both lunch and dinner. Hence his hatred for polenta, which he could not bear to eat anymore. Only a few days were required to forget civilization, to shed shoes and clothes and return to a more feral state. And yet he insisted on explaining that the shepherd, the berger, is the one with the sheep, and that there is a different word for the one who has cows: vacher, or cowherd. It’s a not insignificant difference. The shepherd is nomadic, grazing and sleeping where chance takes him—the cowherd, on the other hand, is sedentary, with his own fields, a house, and a stable.

  Then I discovered while chatting that he had never really witnessed that vanished world. The village was already deserted when he was a child. He played his games in its abandoned houses, with the help of the odd companion from some neighboring alpeggio. The populated mountain was not a memory of his, but a legend of a golden age with which to inspire dreams of happiness: he would like to have come up with his two sons of nineteen and twenty years old who worked as bricklayers, and to bring chickens, a donkey, a couple of goats, and a pig to butcher in the autumn. He often talked of buying some animals, so as to have the wherewithal to be self-sufficient. All he had, instead, was grass with which he fattened other people’s cows, and endless nights of wide-eyed dreams.

  * * *

  Since I liked cooking and he didn’t, and neither of us really minded having company at dinner, we would sometimes arrange things in the following way: I would climb up to his house at around seven, retrieve the big key from its place under a rock, and go inside to light the stove. Then I would go to wash the dishes in the fountain where Gabriele had placed a bath to use as a basin for himself, his clothes, and for the pots and pans. There I would find soap, a brush, a metal scourer. It had a strange effect on me to be scrubbing the pans in the light of the sunset, and using freezing cold water and no soap meant that there was a lot of scrubbing to do. But where could I have found a better washing place? The marmots scrutinized me while I filled a pan with water for the pasta. From the wood the muzzle of a deer emerged. When I went back into the house the stove was well lit and I would turn on the radio, put the water on to boil, and sit down to peel the potatoes. Spaghetti with a tomato sauce, boiled potatoes and cheese, and the occasional piece of sausage made up our daily diet. On his way back from the stable Gabriele would pass by the cellar where he stored four demijohns of Barbera—enough for the whole summer if one of them hadn’t been smashed in an attempt to uncork it with a punch. The same thing happened to the windshield of the tractor, turning it into a coupe. These, for him, were typical misadventures.

  When it was his turn to come down to me, he would always sit in the same place, on the bench with his shoulders against the wall so as to have a good look at the house. You really know how to live well, he would say, as he looked around—because I had a real kitchen, a fridge, and even a sofa, a bathroom, running water, walls that were upright, and a roof that was intact, so that I did not have to take shelter under the table when it rained. He always brought me a piece of cheese and a large bottle of wine. Once he arrived with a roast chicken picked up who knows where. Another time, when he’d been working for a friend down in the valley, he came back with eleven pounds of rice and a repertoire of brand-new anecdotes: the evening spent at the nightclub with the Russian girls, the line of John Deere tractors that he had seen at the farm, the boy who had made him laugh by asking why they called him Rambo, and was it because he was so strong.

  At the end of the evening he had an elaborate way of leaving. It was a kind of ceremony, and it took me some time to figure out how it worked. The first time he said: Good, I think I’ll go now; so I would get up to open the door and say goodbye. He gave me an odd look and asked: Are you in a hurry?

  Me?—No, I said. I shut the door and sat back down again.

  That night I discovered that before actually leaving he had to say I’ll be off now at least five or six times, and in the meantime an hour might pass, with another story, another bottle of wine. And naturally I learned to do the same. When I was up at his place, at a certain point in the evening I would stretch a little, glance toward the darkness outside, and say: I’ll be off now.

  Have another piece of cheese, Gabriele would reply, completely ignoring what I’d said. Shall we drain another bottle?

  Why not, I would say (up there, food and drink regress to an elemental state: you murder pork ribs, you drain a bottle of wine), and I would delay my departure by a few more glasses.

  * * *

  On the 29th of June, St. Peter’s day, the patron saint of alpeggi, we climbed up to the stable together after supper. Gabriele had spent the afternoon loading the trailer with dried branches that were now stacked up next to a huge boulder. There was a heap over three feet high. Toward ten o’clock he lit the fire in the style of mountain folk: he poured half a jerrican of gas over it and struck a match. The fire blazed instantly. With the deep silence around us I realized for the first time how deafening a fire can become, how unbearably hot within a radius of about ten feet. We sat on the grass to watch the dark outlines of the mountains, looking out for other fires like our own. We counted three, four, five, some of them in places that we could not even name. Those trembling yellow pilot lights seemed to say I am here And so am I, so am I, so am I. A constellation made up of solitudes that barely shone for a few moments, then became fainter and were extinguished, one after another. Our fire too was silenced. I began to feel the breeze in the grass again, the gurgling of the stream, the sighs of the cows ruminating in the stable.

  Now that I had become accustomed to the warmth of the fire I also realized that it was getting cold. As we were saying goodbye Gabriele loaned me a sweater and said: Go ahead, cut through the meadows. It was a great honor that he was granting me. Following the path would have resulted in a roundabout route, whereas by the meadows I would go straight down to Fontane. I descended in the dark, stretching my arms wide in the wind and feeling the grass spikes tickling the palms of my hands. Hurling their raucous calls the roe deer chased each other in the wood.

  Hay

  The month of July came. When the grass had become waist high and started to yellow, all over the meadows, mowers, tractors, trailers, hay-balers began to appear. Everyone worked at hay-baling, from the old to the youngsters of the alpeggi: a collective mobilization in the presence of which it was impossible to stand idly by, so I began to help Remigio and his mother. It wasn’t that I was missing the family left behind in the plains. She was almost eighty, thin as a rake, tireless, gnarled like the bark of a tree; I was a well-meaning city-dweller with delicate skin: we made an odd couple behind the tractor that her son was driving. We baled the hay in the late afternoon, when the hay mown the day before had been dried by the sun. These days it was worth less than the effort it cost, but I could see how precious it was from her actions: she went behind the tractor with a rake and did not leave behind a single blade of grass, while scolding me for all those I was losing. From behind the wheel Remigio grinned. He didn’t much mind that someone else should be subjected to this treatment instead of him. To begin with, his mother pointed out where I was going wrong, but then concluded that I just didn’t know how to rake and assigned heavier work to me instead—loading the hay bales onto the trailer. This was work that suited me better: by the twine that cut into my h
ands I would lift two at a time and fling them on board before quickly jumping up after them to stack them properly. In this way I earned a little respect, sweating and covering myself in dust, acquiring a laborer’s calluses and a farmer’s sunburned neck, my skin irritated by the hay that scratched it.

  Between one load and the next I would raise my head and look at the surrounding fields. The reddish brown of those not yet mowed, the gold where the hay was drying in the sun, the soft green that eventually replaced it. It was lovely to see the mountain tended like a garden, with the crocuses poking back up through the new grass, believing that spring had returned. Except that the crocuses of the thaw were white like the clouds of April, whereas these were violet and lilac like the skies of July, and now there were no larvae left—just the buzzing of insects in the full heat of summer. Every so often Remigio’s mother would go to fetch some refreshments from the bar: an orange soda or some other fizzy drink, an ice-cream for herself.

  Can’t we have a beer? Remigio complained. Sitting on a bale of hay, surrounded by the chittering of grasshoppers, he regarded the can as if he hardly knew which side of it to open.

  I hope you don’t plan to get drunk, his mother would tersely reply. I was formally included in this sentiment, as perhaps were all men in general.

  * * *

  There was a hill in front of the place where we were working, a wide and gently sloping passage along which one walked to the neighboring valley, which I would occasionally glance at, thinking meanwhile of a certain person. He must still be living there, and still working as an alpine guide since I could not imagine him doing any other kind of job. His name was Lorenzo, Renzo for short, named after the patron saint of August and of many villages, and he was my mountaineering guru—the first to have tied me to his rope, to have shown me where to place my hands on the rock face, with a pair of crampons clasped to my feet so that I could follow him onto the glacier. But more than a school focused on equipment and techniques, alpinism had been for me as a child a way of confronting fear, exhaustion, and cold: it was about being far from home. It was also about physical pain, since as soon as I went above ninety-eight hundred feet I began to get altitude sickness: nausea churned my stomach, my eyes would glaze over, and I would be overwhelmed by great nostalgia, by something like a sense of being abandoned, that for me was the real mountain sickness. Renzo shared those moments with me. While I sobbed and vomited, he was the person who would speak kindly to me and convince me to go on. He was so good at this that I would have followed him anywhere.