• • •
When it was finished, in September, the house was like this: it had one room made of wood, and one of stone. The wooden room was larger and warmer with the stove, the table, two stools, and a larder. Some of this furniture came from other ruins, salvaged and cleaned up by me with elbow grease and sandpaper; some had been made by Bruno from the old floor planks. Under the roof, against the rock face, there was a loft that could be reached with a ladder—the warmest and most enclosed corner of the house—while the table was placed right under the window, so that you could look outside when sitting there. The stone room was small and cool, and we intended to use it as a cellar, a workshop, and a storeroom. We left in there most of the equipment that we had used, and all of the leftover wood. There was no bathroom, no running water, no electricity, but we had thick panes in the windows and a sturdy front door with a latch but no lock. Only the stone room was under lock and key. The lock was needed to prevent the equipment from being stolen, but the wooden room remained open as was customary in the mountain refuges, in case anyone passing that way should get into difficulty and need shelter. The grass around the house had been mown like a garden’s now; the firewood was stacked under a lean-to and my little pine tree looked out towards the lake, even though it did not seem any healthier or more robust to me than on the day that I replanted it there.
On the last day, I went to Grana to collect my mother. She laced on the leather hiking boots that I’d seen her use since I was a child: she had never had another pair. I thought that she would get tired climbing up there, but she went up slowly, at her own pace, without stopping once, and from behind I could see how she was walking. She kept the same slow but sure rhythm for two hours. She gave the impression that she would never slip or lose her balance.
It made her very happy to see the house that Bruno and I had built. It was a short September day, with little water remaining in the rivers, the grass drying in the meadows, the air no longer the warm air of August. Bruno had lit the stove, and it felt good to be indoors, drinking tea in front of the window. My mother liked the window, and she stayed there gazing out while Bruno and I organized the material that had to be taken down with us. Then I saw her go onto the terrace and look carefully at everything, so that she would remember it: the lake, the scree, the peaks of Grenon, the look of the house. She stood for a good while looking at the inscription that the day before, with mallet and chisel, I had made in the rock wall. I had gone over it with black paint, and it read:
GIOVANNI GUASTI
1942–2004
IN MEMORY IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL REFUGE
Then she called us to sing a song. It was the song that is sung when a lover of the mountains dies, the song in which you ask God to allow him to continue to go walking in the afterlife. Both Bruno and I knew it. It all seemed just right to me, all done as was fitting. There was one thing still to be said: I had been thinking about it for a while and decided to say it now so that my mother could hear it, so that there would be a witness to remember it: I said that I wanted this house not to be mine, but to be ours. Mine and Bruno’s. Both of ours. I was convinced that this was what my father had wanted, that he had left it between us. But above all I wanted it to be this way myself, because we had built it together. From that moment, I said, he should consider it to be his own home, just as much as I considered it to be mine.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“I am.”
“Then it’s fine,” he said. “Thanks.”
Then he removed the embers from the stove and threw them outside. I closed the front door, took the mule’s bridle, and told my mother to lead the way, and the four of us set off towards Grana, at my mother’s pace.
THREE
A Friend in Winter
NINE
IT WAS AN OLD Nepalese man who told me, afterwards, about the eight mountains. He was carrying a load of hens up the valley below Everest, heading to one of the refuges where they were destined to become chicken curry for tourists: he had a cage on his back which was divided into a dozen separate cells, and the chickens, still alive, were flustered inside them. I had not yet come across a contraption of this kind. I had seen panniers full of chocolate, biscuits, powdered milk, bottles of beer, of whisky and of Coca-Cola, going along the trails of Nepal to cater for the tastes of Westerners, but never a portable henhouse. When I asked the man if I could photograph it he put it down on a low wall, removed from his forehead the band with which he was carrying it and struck a pose, smiling, next to the chickens.
Then while he was getting his breath back we talked for a while. I’d visited the region he came from, which astonished him. He understood that I was not a casual walker, and discovering that I could even string together a few phrases in Nepalese, asked me why I was so interested in the Himalayas. I had a ready answer to that question: I told him that there was a mountain where I had grown up, and to which I was attached, and that it had fostered in me a desire to see the most beautiful mountains in the world.
“Ah,” he said. “I understand. You are doing the tour of the eight mountains.”
“The eight mountains?”
The man picked up a small stick and drew a circle with it on the ground. You could tell he was used to drawing it; he executed it so perfectly. Then, inside the circle he drew a diameter, and then another perpendicular one bisecting the first, and then a third and a fourth through the point of bisection, thus creating a wheel with eight spokes. I thought that if I had drawn that figure myself I would have started with a cross—that it was typical of an Asian to begin with a circle.
“Have you ever seen a drawing like this?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “In mandalas.”
“That’s right,” he said. “We believe that at the center of the earth there is a tremendously high mountain, Sumeru. Around Sumeru there are eight mountains and eight seas. This is the world for us.”
While he was speaking he drew outside of the wheel a small peak for each spoke, and then a little wave between one peak and the next. Eight mountains and eight seas. Finally, at the center of the wheel, he drew a crown which I thought might represent the summit of Sumeru. He assessed his work for a moment and shook his head, as if to say that this was a drawing that he had made a thousand times but that of late he had begun to lose his touch a little. Be that as it may, he pointed the stick to the center and concluded, “We ask: who has learned most, the one who has been to all eight mountains, or the one who has reached the summit of Sumeru?”
The chicken carrier looked at me and smiled. I smiled too, because the story amused me and because I thought that I had understood its meaning. He rubbed out the drawing with his hand, but I knew that I would not forget it. Well, I said to myself, this will be a good one to tell to Bruno.
• • •
The center of my world in those years was the house that I had built with Bruno. I would stay there for long periods between June and October, and sometimes would take friends who would immediately fall in love with the place. In this way I had up there the company that I lacked in the city. During the week I lived alone, reading, writing, cutting wood, and wandering around the old paths. I became accustomed to solitude. And I was at ease with it, though not entirely. But on Saturdays during the summer there was always someone who would seek me out there, and then the house ceased to resemble the hut of a hermit, becoming more like one of the refuges that I used to frequent with my father, with wine on the table, the stove lit, friends who would stay up late talking—and that shared isolation from the world that made us all brothers for a night. The refuge was warmed by the fire of this intimacy, and it seemed to me that between one visit and the next it kept its embers glowing.
Bruno was also attracted to the warmth of Barma. I would see him appear on the path towards evening carrying a piece of toma and a bottle of wine, or hear his knock on the door when it was dark already, as if it was quite normal up there, at two thousand meters, to receive a visit from a neig
hbor at night. If I happened to have company he would happily join us all at the table. I found him to be more talkative than usual, as if he had been silent too long and had accumulated a lot to say. In Grana he remained confined in his world of building work, books, walks in the woods, silent reflection—and I could understand the urgency with which after a day on the building site he would wash and change, ignore his tiredness and the urge to sleep, and take the path to the lake.
With these friends we would often talk about going to live in the mountains together. We were reading Murray Bookchin and dreaming, or pretending to dream, of turning one of the abandoned villages into an ecological community where we could experiment with our ideas about society. Only in the mountains would it be possible to do this. Only up there would we be left in peace. We knew of other, similar experiments that had taken place throughout the Alps: all short-lived and ending up badly, but the fact that they had failed did not stop us from fantasizing; it gave us instead plenty to discuss. How would we manage for food? What would we do about electricity? How would we build the houses? A little money would still be necessary: how would we earn it? Where would we send our children to school? Assuming, that is, that we wanted to send them to school. And how would we resolve the problem of the family, that enemy of every community—worse even than private property and power?
It was this utopian game that we would play of an evening, at weekends. Bruno, who was actually in the process of building his ideal village, amused himself by demolishing ours. He would say: without cement the houses would not stay up, and without fertilizer even the grass in the meadows won’t grow; and I’d like to see you try to cut wood without petrol for a chainsaw. What do you plan to eat during the winter, polenta and potatoes like the old folk? And he would say: it’s only you townies who use the word nature. And it’s as abstract to you as the word itself. We say wood, meadow, river, rock, things that we can actually point to. Things that can be used. If they can’t be used, we don’t bother to even give them a name: it would be pointless to do so.
I liked to hear him talk like this. And I also liked the enthusiasm he had for certain ideas that I had picked up on my travels around the world, especially since he was the only one with the skills to put them into practice. One year he carved out the trunk of a larch tree with a chainsaw, ran fifty meters of tubing from one of the streams that feeds into the lake, and built a fountain in front of the house. In this way we had drinking water and water to wash with, but that wasn’t the main idea: under the jet from the fountain he installed a turbine that I had ordered from Germany. A plastic one no bigger than a foot in diameter, resembling a toy windmill.
“Hey, Berio,” he said, when our mill wheel started to turn. “Do you remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
The system charged a battery with which, in the house, we managed to run a radio and a lightbulb for an entire night. It worked night and day, regardless of the weather—unlike solar panels or wind turbines—and it cost nothing and consumed nothing. It was the water that came down from the mountain and flowed towards the lake that in passing by the house gave light and music to our evenings.
• • •
There was a girl who came up with me in the summer of 2007. Her name was Lara. We had only been together for a couple of months. We had reached the stage which for others would mark the start of a relationship, but which for us was already the end: I had begun to withdraw, to avoid her, and to disappear, so that she would leave me before doing so became too painful. This was a tried and tested system with me, and in those last days she forced me to own up to what I was doing. She was upset for a night, then got over it.
These were enjoyable days, just as soon as we had understood that they would be our last together. Lara really liked the house, the lake, the rocks, and the peaks of Grenon, and liked to go on long walks by herself on the paths around Barma. I was surprised to see how she walked. She was strong legged, at ease with the spartan life that we lived up there. In the end I got to know her better during the days we spent there than in the two months that we had been sleeping together. She told me that from her childhood she was used to washing with cold water and drying in front of a fire: she had come from another mountainous region, had left it behind years ago in order to study, and now missed those mountains. Not that she regretted the decision to go to the city. She felt that her relationship with Turin was something of a love story. She had fallen in love with the streets, the people, the nights, the work that she had done there, and the houses in which she had lived: a long, lovely affair that was all but over now.
I told her that I knew exactly what she meant. That something similar had happened to me. She gave me a sad look in which there was both reproof and regret. In the afternoon I watched her go down to the lake where she took off her clothes and swam naked to the rock that resembled a reef, and for a moment I felt that I might have pushed her away from me too soon. But only before remembering what I was like when in a relationship with anyone. After that, I had no second thoughts.
I invited Bruno to supper that evening. He was behind with his project by a whole year, due to delays in securing loans and planning permissions, but had now almost finished renovating the farmstead. He thought of nothing else: he had been struggling with people at the bank and with local council officials; he had two jobs in the winter to earn the money that he spent during the summer and was in that state of complete, almost obsessive, concentration familiar to me from the time I spent with him as his laborer. He spent the whole evening telling us about constructing stables that would meet building regulations, about places for making cheese and cellars for maturing it, about equipment made of copper and steel, and about washable tiles in the old sheds. Things that I already knew about well enough but that Lara did not—and the enthusiasm with which he spoke about them was directed towards her. He amused me, my old friend Bruno, since I had never before seen him trying to impress a woman: he used unusually technical vocabulary, exaggerated his gestures, and kept glancing at her to gauge her reactions.
“He likes you,” I told her, after he had left.
“And how do you know that?”
“I’ve known him for twenty years. He’s my best friend.”
“I didn’t think that you had friends,” she said. “I thought that you ran a mile as soon as you caught sight of one.”
I did not reply to that. Sarcasm was the lesser of the evils that might come my way. You need style to be left by someone, and she had it.
• • •
I was preparing to leave for a job that autumn when Bruno sought me out in Turin. I was going to the Himalayas for the first time, and I could hardly contain myself. I was surprised to hear his voice at the end of the telephone: partly because neither of us set much store by that means of communication, partly because my mind was already elsewhere.
He got straight to the point: Lara had just gone back to see him. Lara? We hadn’t seen each other since those last days in the mountains. Now she had gone up there by herself, wanting to visit the alpeggio and to find out more about his work and his plans. Bruno had told her that in the spring his agricultural business would be up and running, that he was thinking of buying thirty cows and using their milk to produce cheese rather than selling it to one of the dairies, and that to do this he would need to employ someone else. It was just what she had been hoping for: she liked the place, had been raised around cattle, and immediately offered herself for the job.
On the one hand Bruno was flattered, on the other worried. He hadn’t figured on the presence of a woman up there. When he asked what I thought, I said: “I think that she’ll do it well. She’s hard-headed.”
“I got that,” said Bruno.
“And so?”
“What I don’t know is how things are between the two of you.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. We haven’t seen each other for two months now.”
“Have you fallen out?”
“N
o. There’s nothing between us anymore. I’m happy to see her going up there with you.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Definitely. No problem.”
“Then it’s fine.”
He said goodbye and wished me a good trip. Here, I thought, was a man from another time: who else would have asked permission to do what he was about to do? When I hung up I already knew everything that was about to happen. I was pleased for him. And I was pleased for her. Then I stopped thinking about Bruno or Lara or anyone else, and began to prepare my rucksack for the Himalayas.
• • •
My first journey to Nepal was like a journey back in time for me. A day’s drive by car from Kathmandu and fewer than two hundred kilometers from its crowds a narrow, irregular, wooded valley began, with a river below, which you could hear but not see, and villages built up above where the slopes softened in the sunlight. They were connected by mule tracks that rose and fell steeply, and narrow rope bridges suspended over the streams that cut the flanks of the valley like blades. Around the villages the mountain was covered in terraces and rice paddies. Seen in profile, it resembled a staircase with semicircular steps, bordered by low dry stone walls and divided into a thousand smallholdings. October was the harvest season, and climbing up I watched the farmers at work: the women kneeling in the fields, the men beating the husks in the yards to separate the grain from the chaff. The rice was drying on cloths where other, older women sifted it carefully. Children were everywhere. I saw two plowing a field as if it were a game, urging on a couple of emaciated oxen with their shouts and with blows from a stick, and I remembered Bruno’s yellow cane from the first time we met. He too would have liked Nepal. Here they still had wooden plows, river stones to sharpen scythes, and wicker baskets for porters to carry on their backs. Even if I could see that the farmers were wearing trainers, and could hear the sound of radios and televisions, it seemed to me that I had rediscovered, still thriving, the old civilization that had become extinct in our own mountains. Along the route I did not see a single derelict building.
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