I was climbing up the valley towards Annapurna with four Italian mountaineers. I had been sharing a tent with them for a few weeks now, together with my film camera. I was on a well-paid assignment, and from the outset it had seemed to me like a real stroke of luck. I was intrigued by the prospect of filming a documentary about mountaineering, of seeing what would happen to this group of men under extreme conditions. But what I was discovering as we neared the base camp fascinated me even more. I had already decided to stay on after the expedition, and to make my own trip around the lower levels.
On the second day of walking, at the end of the valley, the summits of the Himalayas appeared. And then I saw how mountains must have been at the world’s beginning. Mountains that were newborn, sharply cut, as if just sculpted by creation, not yet eroded by the passage of time. Their snows lit the valley from a height of six or seven thousand meters. Waterfalls plummeted from overhangs and carved the rock faces, detaching from ledges landslides of reddish earth which ended up frothing in the rivers. Up above, oblivious to the tumult below, the glaciers looked out over everything. And it was from up there that the water comes, as the man with the white whiskers had told me. They must have known this well enough in Nepal too, since they had named their mountain after the goddess of harvests and of fertility. Along the path the water was everywhere: the water of the rivers, of the fountains, of the canals, the water of the basins in which the women did their laundry, the water that I would like to have seen in spring, with the rice fields flooded and the valley transformed into a myriad of mirrors.
I don’t know if the mountaineers with whom I was climbing noticed these things or not. They were impatient to leave behind the villages and to start planting pickaxes and climbing irons in the ice that was glittering up there. Not me. I walked between porters so that I could ask them about anything that I did not understand: what kind of vegetables were grown in the plots, which kind of wood was burnt in the stoves; to whom the small shrines that we encountered along the way were dedicated. In the woods there were no fir or larch trees, but a strange contorted species that I could not identify, until one of the men told me that they were rhododendrons. Rhododendrons! My mother’s favorite plant because it flowered for just a few days, at the beginning of summer, painting the mountain with pink, lilac, and violet, and which here in Nepal produced trees five or six meters high with black bark that flaked off in scales, and had leaves that were as oily as bay leaves. And further up, when the wood came to an end, what appeared was not willow or juniper but a bamboo grove. Bamboo! Bamboo at three thousand meters. There were young men who passed us carrying bundles of swaying bamboo on their backs. In the villages they used them to make roofs, cutting them lengthwise and superimposing the two halves—one concave and one convex—to help with the runoff of rainwater during the monsoon season. The walls were made of stone cemented with mud. About their houses I already knew everything there was to know.
At each of the wayside shrines the porters left a pebble or a bud they had collected in the woods, and advised me to do the same. We were entering sacred territory, and from here on it was forbidden to slaughter or to eat an animal. Now I stopped seeing chickens outside the houses, or goats grazing. There were some other animals, wild ones that browsed on the ledges, with long hair that reached down to the ground: the blue sheep of the Himalayas, someone told me. A mountain with blue sheep; monkeys similar to baboons, glimpsed in the bamboo thickets—and against the sky, moving slowly, the eerie outlines of vultures. And yet I felt at home. Even here, I told myself, where the woods end and there’s nothing left but grass and scree, I’m at home. This is the altitude to which I belong, at which I feel best. I was thinking about this when I stepped onto the first snow.
• • •
I went back to Grana the following year with a string of prayer flags, which I hung between two larch trees and we could see through the window of the house. The flags were blue, white, red, green, and yellow—blue for ether, white for air, red for fire, green for water, yellow for the earth—and they stood out against the shade of the wood. I would often watch them of an afternoon, as they tried to come to terms with the wind of the Alps and danced between the branches of the trees. The memories that I had of Nepal were like those flags: vivid, warm, so that my old mountains now seemed more desolate than ever. I would go out walking and see nothing but derelict huts and ruins.
But something new was happening in Grana. Bruno and Lara had been together for a while now: they had not needed to explain how things had developed. He seemed more serious than before, as men can be sometimes when a woman comes into their life. She, on the other hand, had been happily transformed, shaking off the dust of the city together with that air of disappointment I remembered her as having, and of which there was no longer a trace. She had a high-toned laugh, and her skin was flushed from life lived in the open air. Bruno adored her. Here was another version of my friend that I did not know: at the table on the first night, while I was talking about my travels, he could not stop touching her, caressing her, taking every opportunity to place a hand on her leg or shoulder, and even when talking to me he was in constant physical contact with her. In his presence Lara seemed less anxious, less uncertain of herself. She needed only a gesture or a look of reassurance, and it was all: Are you there? I’m here. But really? Yes, I told you, yes. Lovers, I thought: it was good that the world contained them, but in the confines of a room they always made you feel superfluous.
During that winter not much snow had fallen, so Bruno decided to go to the alpeggio—or to the mountain, as he would say—on the first Saturday of June.
I lent him a hand that day. He had bought twenty-eight dairy cows, creatures that were all already pregnant when they were unloaded from a cattle truck in the piazza in Grana. They were unsettled by the journey, and hurried down the ramp lowing and poking each other with their horns. They would have scattered who knows where if Bruno, his mother, Lara, and I had not been there positioned around the square in order to contain them and calm them down. The truck left. Together with two black dogs of venerable Grana shepherding pedigree we began to climb up the mule track, Bruno in front with his “Oh, oh, oh! Eh, eh, eh!” and his mother and Lara further down the line, with me bringing up the rear, doing nothing and enjoying the spectacle. The dogs knew how to do this job to perfection, and would run to reclaim any cows that were slowing things down, barking and nipping them on the flanks until they had rejoined the group. The barking of the dogs, the bellows of protest from the cows, and the noise of their bells drowned out all other sounds, and it seemed to me I was a spectator at a carnival parade or at a kind of resurrection. The herd climbed up the valley past the derelict huts, past the stone walls riddled and undermined by weeds, past the gray stumps of felled larches—like a bloodstream that was beginning to circulate again, bringing a body back to life. I wondered if the foxes and deer that must have been watching us from the woods as we passed could share in the sense of celebration that I felt.
At a certain point in the climb Lara joined me. We had not yet had the chance to speak together, just the two of us, but I think we both thought that we needed to. I don’t know why she chose that particular moment, when our words needed to be shouted into the cloud of dust that was enveloping us. She smiled at me and said: “Who would have thought it a year ago?”
“Where were we a year ago?” I wondered. “Oh yes, in a bar in Turin, perhaps.” Or in bed together at her place.
“Are you happy?” I asked.
“Very,” she said. And smiled again.
“Then I’m happy too,” I said, and I knew that we would never raise the subject again.
At that time the dandelions were in flower. They would all open together early in the morning, and then a brilliant yellow was brushed over the mountain, as if it were the sun itself flooding over it. The cows adored these sweet flowers: when we arrived up there they scattered over the pasture as if to a banquet that had been set for them. In the autumn
Bruno had uprooted all the bushes that had infested the meadow, so that now it had again the look of a well-kept garden.
“You’re not putting up the fence-line?” his mother asked him.
“The fencing’s for tomorrow. Today I’m giving them a holiday.”
“But they’ll ruin the grass,” she protested.
“Come on,” said Bruno. “They won’t ruin anything, don’t worry about it.”
His mother shook her head. I had heard her use more words that day than I had heard her utter in all the years that I’d known her. She had come up limping, with a stiff leg that she trailed a little, but keeping a good pace. I could not understand how she could be so thin: shrunk within her ample clothing she scrutinized everything, controlled everything, giving both advice and criticism, because there was a right and a wrong way in which everything should be done.
The three buildings seemed to have been restored to a previous era in their existence. A house, a stable, and a storeroom, with walls and roofs of stone, reconstructed perfectly, even though they were now the premises of a modern agricultural enterprise. Bruno went into the cellar and returned with a bottle of white wine, and I recalled the same gesture that his uncle had made all those years ago. He was the master of the place now. We had nothing to sit on. Lara said that they would make a fine table to eat at in the open air, but for now we made our toast standing, at the threshold of the stable, watching the cows as they accustomed themselves to the mountain.
TEN
BRUNO PERSISTED OBSTINATELY in milking the cows by hand. For him this was the only method properly suited to these delicate creatures, prone as they were to becoming nervous and taking fright at the slightest thing. It would take him about five minutes to obtain as many liters of milk from each one: good going, but it meant twelve cows an hour, or two and a half hours of work for the whole herd. This was what got him out of bed in the morning when it was still dark outside. There were no Saturdays or Sundays on the farm, and he could hardly remember the pleasure of sleeping in until late, or of lingering between the sheets with his girl. Yet he loved this ritual and would not see it done by anyone else: he spent the hours between night and day in the warmth of the stable, clearing the sleep from his mind as he worked—and milking the cows was like waking them one by one with a caress, until they were aware of the fragrance of the meadows and the singing of the birds and started to become restless.
Lara would come to him at seven with coffee and a few biscuits. She was the one who would take the herd out to pasture twice each day. He would pour the one hundred and fifty liters of milk together with the same amount from the previous evening, skimmed of the cream that had risen to the surface overnight. He would light the fire under the boiler and add the rennet, and by nine o’clock each morning the mixture would be ready to be strained through cloth and pressed into the wooden molds. Five or six loaves in total: three hundred liters of milk to make no more than thirty kilos of toma.
This was the most mysterious phase for Bruno, because he was never sure how it would go. Whether the cheese would form or not, whether it would turn out to be good or bad: this seemed to him an alchemical process over which he had no control. He knew only how to treat the cows well and to carry out every part of the process exactly as he had been taught. With the cream he would make butter, and then wash the boiler, the churns, the pails, the work surfaces, and finally the stables as well, throwing open the windows and sluicing the dung into the gutters.
By this time it was noon. He would eat something and throw himself into bed for an hour, dreaming of grass that wouldn’t grow, or of cows that would not give milk, or of milk that would not churn; then he’d get up with the thought of building an enclosure for the calves, or of digging a drainage ditch where the rains had waterlogged the pasture. At four the cows would be brought to the stable for the second milking. At seven Lara would take them back out again, and at that point she would take over; there was no more work to do, and life at the farmstead slowed down and eased into the calm of the evening.
That was when Bruno would tell me about these things. We would sit outside waiting for sunset, with a half-liter of wine to keep us company. We contemplated the sparse pastures on the mountain’s reverse side, where we had once gone searching for goats. At twilight a breeze would begin to blow from further down the valley, immediately chilling the air by a few degrees, carrying a fragrance of moss and damp earth, together perhaps with that of a deer wandering at the margins of the wood. One of the dogs would catch its scent and abandon the herd to pursue it: only one of the two, and not always the same one—as if they had an agreement between them to take turns hunting and guarding. The cows were calm now. The sound of the bells reached us more faintly, descending to their lower tones.
Bruno did not like to think about practical problems with me. He never talked to me about debts, bills, taxes, mortgage rates. He preferred to talk about his dreams, or about the sense of physical intimacy he felt when milking, or about the mystery of rennet.
“Rennet is a little piece of a calf’s stomach,” he explained. “Imagine: part of the stomach that enables the calf to digest its mother’s milk; we take it and use it to make cheese. It’s right to do so, don’t you think? But it’s also terrible. Without this piece of stomach, the cheese would not form.”
“I wonder who first discovered that,” I said.
“It must have been the wild man.”
“The wild man?”
“For us he was an ancient man who lived in the woods. Long hair, beard, covered in leaves. Every so often he would go around the villages, and people feared him—but they still left something outside for him to eat, to thank him for having shown them how to use rennet.”
“A man who resembled a tree?”
“Part man, part beast, part tree.”
“And what’s he called in dialect?”
“Omo servadzo.”
It was nearly nine in the evening. In the pasture the cows were little more than shadows. Lara was a shadow too, wrapped in a woolen shawl. She was standing still, attending to the herd. If a cow strayed too far she would call her by name, and the dog would charge off to collect her, needing no command.
“Is there also a wild woman?” I asked.
Bruno understood what I was thinking. “She’s really good,” he said. “She’s strong and never gets tired. You know what I don’t like? Not having the time to be together as much as I want. There’s too much work. I get up at four in the morning, and in the evening start nodding off at the table.”
“Love is for the winter,” I said.
Bruno laughed. “That’s so true. Not many mountain folk are born in spring. We’re all born in autumn, like the calves.”
It was the only allusion to sex that I had ever heard him make. “So when are you getting married?” I asked.
“Ah, if it was up to me then right away. She’s the one who doesn’t want to hear anything about marriage. Not in church, or at the registry, or anywhere else for that matter. It’s those city ways of yours; go figure.”
We were finishing the wine. Then we got up to go to the stable before it was completely dark. Lara was bringing back the herd with the help of one of the dogs, and now the other one also appeared from somewhere, returning to duty at the sound of the cowbells. Without any hurry the cows formed a line that came down through the pasture and stopped at the drinking trough. In the stable each one found its proper position for the night, while Bruno chained up their collars and I tied their tails to a rope, strung high so that they would not get too dirty when they lay down. There was a knot that I had learned to tie with a quick twist of the fingers. We would close the door and go to eat while the cows began to ruminate in the darkness.
• • •
Later on I would go back to Barma by the light of a torch. There was room at the farmstead, and Bruno and Lara always invited me to stay, but something pushed me to say goodbye to them and to take the path for the lake. It was as if I were seeking
a proper distance from that fledgling family, and that leaving was a way of respecting them, and of protecting myself.
What I had to protect in myself was my ability to live alone. It had taken time to get used to solitude, to turn it into a place that I could adjust myself to and feel good in; and yet I felt that the relationship between us was always a difficult one. And so I would head back towards the house as if to reestablish our understanding. If the sky was not overcast I would soon switch off the head torch. I needed no more than a quarter-moon, and the stars, to make my way along the path between the larch trees. Nothing was stirring at that hour, only my footfall and the river that continued to splash and gurgle as the wood slept. In the silence its voice was clearest, and I could make out the sound peculiar to each bend, rapid, waterfall—muffled by the vegetation, then becoming gradually sharper over scree.
Higher up even the river went quiet. This was the point at which it disappeared beneath the rocks and ran underground. I began to hear a much lower sound, of the wind that was blowing in the basin. The lake was a nocturnal sky in motion; the wind was pushing flurries of small waves from one side to another, and as it changed direction it extinguished and rekindled along its lines of force the gleams of stars reflected in the black water. I stood still, watching these patterns. It seemed to me to recall the life of the mountain before mankind. I did not disturb it; I was a welcome guest. I realized again that in this company I would never be alone.
• • •
One morning towards the end of July I went down to the village with Lara. I was heading back to Turin for a while; she was taking down the first batch of cheese which had matured for six weeks. There was a mule that Bruno had acquired for the job: not the gray male that I’d used years ago to transport the cement, but a female with a thick, dark coat; smaller and more suited to the life of the farmstead. He had made a wooden packsaddle, on which he had stacked twelve loaves of cheese, sixty kilos in total, the first precious load that was being dispatched to the valley.
The Eight Mountains Page 15