The Wild Boy Page 3
Going up the slope I reached the summit of a peak, and finally on the other side I saw the lake that I’d heard about. It was covered in a layer of ice and surrounded by snow: only the odd rock protruded every so often on the steeper banks. I had thought of reaching it, but seeing it from above like this, frozen in that overshadowed basin, made me change my mind. So I lay down on the ground and remained up there, my hands beneath my head, to contemplate the rain-swollen clouds. Glimpses of blue sky appeared between them. Two eagles wheeled around a summit, perhaps hunting the newborn young of chamois and alpine ibex. The crows, less noble and more piteous, flew over the deserted alpeggi—the high alpine pastures and summer farmsteads—searching for remains of food, or for some carcass of a rodent that had failed to survive the winter.
Then the two eagles came closer, at lower altitude, and I realized that they were not a pair but an adult and eaglet. What I was watching seemed to be a flying lesson. The adult repeated a very elaborate maneuver: it remained stationary in midair, supported on a thermal, then suddenly folding its wings and performing a body twist, horizontally, it precipitated uncontrollably. It looked like the signature move of a stunt pilot. About a foot lower down it extended its wings and braked the fall, catching the current again and returning to its original altitude. The young eagle watched attentively, and I thought that soon it would be his turn. I wondered whether the adult was the mother or the father.
* * *
On the way back it began to rain again, and it reduced the snow to slush. It was the perfect day for an outing, clearly. But with damp hair, sodden feet, and the windchill that froze them, I told myself that at least I was recovering my good humor. I came across a clearing populated by marmots, where I was welcomed by a thicket of whistles and a general stampede. There was one that seemed braver than the rest: while its companions ran for cover inside the first available hole, it lingered at the entrance of its burrow and looked back at me. Very slowly, trying not to make any sudden movements, I went toward it. When I was ten feet away it vanished into the hole, so I stopped, lay down my stick, and sat down cautiously. I thought I would sing it a song, and since it had been playing in my head all morning I chose De André: In a whirl of dust the others saw drought, and I saw Jenny’s skirt as she danced, thirty years ago.
All it took was two verses for the marmot’s snout to pop out from the burrow: it was listening to me, scenting me, trying to understand what kind of enemy I could be. I carried on singing: I felt my land vibrating with sounds, it was my heart—so why cultivate it again, why think it could be better?
Every so often the marmot would pop back in, but for the most part it just stayed there watching me. Who is this? And what’s he up to? Freedom, I’ve seen it sleep in cultivated fields, with sky and money, with sky and love, protected by a barbed wire fence. Freedom, I’ve seen it wake every time I’ve played, for a swish of girls at a dance, for a drunken friend.
I sang it three times in a row, and the marmot kept listening. Then I got up and it immediately hid. I picked up my stick and started to walk back down toward my little vegetable patch.
Night
I continued to sleep badly. Despite the fact that more than a month had passed, I still found myself waking in the middle of the night, eyes blinded but ears attuned to every creaking board, every rustle that came from outside. I have never had a good relationship with the dark. As a child I was terrified of it, spending nights prey to a sense of impending disaster. In the city the streetlights kept me company: my window faced an avenue on which the flow of traffic hardly ever ceased, and due to a mirror effect I would see on the ceiling the headlights of cars scurrying, the yellow of the streetlights flashing, the blue of ambulances, the green light of an all-night pharmacy. Every so often an alarm or a siren would sound, the high-pitched calls of birds above the continuous murmuring of the river. It calmed me to feel the life flowing around me, its noises lulling me to sleep.
In the cabin I plunged back into childhood fears: when the moon waned, the darkness was absolute, and the silence so deep as to hurt my ears, strained as they were to catch every sound. I managed to hear the water flowing in the fountain. The wind that moved the tops of the larch trees. The calling of a deer in the forest, which is not at all as one might imagine it to be. It is nothing like a bellowing—it resembles instead a fit of hoarse coughing, the barking of a dog that has lost its voice. They were the wild animals and I was the predator, but in my bed the darkness reversed these roles. At five the first light came as a relief: the birds were starting to sing, life was beginning to course again in the world, and my vigil was no longer required. Then, like a night watchman who has completed his rounds, I was overwhelmed by a leaden sleep from which I would wake befuddled midmorning.
So it was that one evening I put on two sweaters, filled a flask with wine, grabbed my sleeping bag, and decided to camp outside. It was a kind of shock therapy. At around nine I lit a fire against a section of mule-track wall, whittled some willow sticks until they were sharply pointed, and used them as skewers for grilling pieces of sausage. For bread I had a crisped flatbread, one of those I’d cooked after kneading flour and water. Out there in front of the fire a gourmet meal was served: when the meat was ready I slipped it off the skewer with the bread and accompanied each mouthful with a sip of wine. At ten, darkness having fallen, I unrolled the sleeping bag and climbed inside. I discovered that I wasn’t sleepy at all. So I sat up without leaving the sleeping bag, feeding the fire with the kindling I’d gathered in the woods. I stayed there to finish the wine, watching the wood burn.
On that strange night another experience came back to me, from many summers ago, that had begun in a village bar with my father and uncle. After dinner my father had talked about a mountain belonging to that region which used to be climbed in the dark in order to watch the dawn from its summit. It was approximately sixty-five hundred feet above the village, a four- to five-hour trek at a good pace. So, said my uncle, when do we leave? Let’s do it. They’d had several rounds of grappa; I was fourteen and keen to prove my courage. I went with them. At midnight we took the path and spent the first hour of trekking stumbling over roots and stones, laughing and cursing, taking turns to light each other’s way with the single torch we had between us. Then the wood came to an end, and with it the effect of the grappa. The two brothers no longer spoke, now all they did was puff and pant instead. Their throats must have been parched, and their legs made rubbery by the drink—but no one wanted to be the first to suggest that we should turn back. At no more than halfway, at about three o’clock, in the middle of the pastures, it seemed to us that we could hear the sound of an organ. Then we made out the glow coming from a small window. Who was playing the organ at three o’clock in the morning, in an isolated cabin at seven thousand feet? We were tired and freezing. So as not to frighten the musician, my father and uncle decided not to knock at his door, but to make their appearance singing at the top of their voices. Even in those conditions they retained their mischievous spirit. Before the front door of the cabin they began to sing an alpine chorus; after two stanzas the music stopped, a ground-floor light came on, and the owner of the house opened the door. He was a man in his sixties. He did not seem at all pleased to see us. It was obvious that he did not welcome company, but he forced himself to be hospitable: he made us hot tea, lent us another two torches, resisted our attempts at conversation, wished us a good journey, and saw us to the door. When we were farther along the path we heard him start playing again. Finally we really did reach the summit, but I do not remember anything about the dawn. Who was the mysterious musician? How on earth had he managed to transport an organ up there? Perhaps he too did not have a very good relationship with the dark. At the time he seemed eccentric to me, if not a complete madman of the mountains; now, instead, in front of that campfire I too would like to have been able to play like him. A guitar, or at the very least a harmonica. Singing by yourself really wasn’t the same thing.
* * *
I opened my eyes again after a sleep of I didn’t know how long. Half an hour, two, maybe even three . . . ? In the sky the moon had risen, and of my fire there remained only a pile of glowing embers. I caught the smell of ash and humid earth, felt the bitter aftertaste of wine, and beneath my back the sleeping bag sodden with dew. So I got up and went to wash my face at the fountain, the freezing water of the night having the instant effect of startling me awake. I was unsure whether to go to bed or rekindle the fire and wait there for the dawn that could not have been far off now. Still that old urge to prove one’s virility; but if the enemy to be vanquished was my own self, then retreating from the fray and throwing myself under the covers might also constitute an authentic victory.
I had sat down on the steps of the cabin to decide what to do when I caught sight of a movement in the meadow. I turned toward the place where I’d been sleeping and saw the unmistakable profile of a fox. The sharp snout, the pricked ears, the bushiest of tails as long as its body. It had not noticed me: it was sniffing the ground around the campfire, searching for remnants of my supper, and I stood completely still, hoping to remain undiscovered for a little while longer. The moon above the meadow cast a gold light on everything. The fox scratched the earth near the embers and licked something, a small morsel of meat that had escaped me, or perhaps only some grease. Then suddenly, with no forewarning, perhaps because of a gust of wind carrying my scent, it raised its head and saw me. Its eyes reflected the glow of the embers. I must have been only a dark mass in the shadow cast by the house, and the fox took a few seconds to recognize me. That exchange of looks seemed to last an inordinate length of time. The fox was not frightened by it: perhaps over many nights she had become familiar with my smell. She lingered before unhurriedly trotting into the darkness. I went to collect the sleeping bag, hung it on the fence to dry, and then abandoned myself to my human bed.
* * *
Thoreau writes:
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows [ . . .]
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we might not come to open war. We meet at the post, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another [ . . . ]
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.
Neighbors
In June the shepherds came and my solitude changed. They arrived in lorries, large trucks for transporting livestock that appeared one day at the end of the road. Nervous from the journey, and excited perhaps to see all those flowering meadows, the cows came rushing down the ramps, poking each other with their horns, paying no attention to the boundaries of the fields and ending up hiding among the fir trees. The shepherds left them to their own devices. Despite this motorized seasonal migration, the oldest among the shepherds still wore velvet waistcoats and felt hats, a costume that the younger ones had replaced with waterproof overalls. All of them were looking at the mountains on the horizon as if they needed to refamiliarize themselves with the landscape. They’d undergone a relocation in the full sense of the term: they changed houses for four months, transferring their animals and families up there, going to a much harder life than the one they had in wintertime, and yet there was a gaiety in their gestures. They exchanged news with each other in dialect, laughing frequently. It seemed to me that the happiness of the animals had become infectious, and that it had been transmitted to the men as well: that climbing to the higher pastures was a homecoming for them too, perhaps to the places of their childhood or to the origins of their working lives.
So now I had something to observe apart from the clouds, which during those days were carriers of interminable rain. Not far from the cabin, on the other side of the valley in which I lived, was the alpeggio that I had thought was abandoned until the arrival of its owners: on that side, at the beginning of June, the yellow dandelions reigned, and if I woke early I could spy the old shepherd who was shifting the boundary of the pasture, moving the fence about three feet forward each day, in order to ration the grass. A little later the younger shepherd would open the door of the stable, and then seven calves and about thirty adult cows would rush down toward the new strip of tall grass. They were nearly all of a Red Pied Valdaostan breed, dominated by a few more agile and muscular black cows. By evening nothing remained of that grass. While I prepared my supper, an imperious lowing arose from the stable: three or four metal churns would appear in front of the entrance, and a 4×4 would arrive soon after to take them to the dairy. Only then was the working day at an end.
But the biggest change in my daily life was due to the dogs. Because I put aside crusts of cheese for them, they would come to find me several times a day—and to tell the truth, though it was hardly in keeping with mountain ways, I would sometimes give them the odd biscuit instead of the crusts, of the kind I took to calling friends’ biscuits. Each dog had a bell hanging around its neck, thanks to which I could hear them coming from a long way off. Due to some kind of hierarchical arrangement between them, one of the three would always stay behind in the pasture, while the other two were free to roam until it was time to lead the cattle back to the stable. Then, called back by the young shepherd, they worked as a team: they circled the herd, barking, nipping the flanks of the lazier cows, and pursuing any that strayed, pushing them back toward the homestead. It was a wonderful sight to see them in action.
From the shouts of the cowherds I discovered that they were called Black, Billy, and Lampo (lightning). Black was the eldest, a great black mastiff with six toes on his back paws and his right ear torn off in one of his many fights. That’s why I decided to call him Mozzo (a maimed one) instead of Black. You could tell that he was nearing the end of his working life: he preferred the shade of the fir trees to herding cows, and the scent of game that he followed lazily in the undergrowth. Billy was a German shepherd and a tireless worker, which is why the two of us crossed paths less frequently. When he came to see me he had a guilty look about him: he would take the salami rind and bolt immediately, rarely allowing himself to be stroked. Lampo was the youngest, a border collie with a passion for chasing larch sticks thrown far for him. He loved being scratched behind his ears and left on my hands a pleasant smell redolent of the stable. He was learning his trade, but he was still a novice and every so often would get into trouble.
One morning, in the middle of a torrential downpour, the seven calves mutinied and all went beyond the boundary of the field, throwing themselves on the tall grass as if it was a table set for a feast. At this point the young shepherd gave a loud whistle. Billy immediately darted out in pursuit, Lampo saw him go and ran after him, while Mozzo stayed behind watching from my balcony, alert but detached as was the custom of this old leader. I sat next to him to enjoy watching the maneuver. In the pasture Billy was bringing back the fugitives in a group, but then Lampo got too rough with one of the calves, biting and barking at him unnecessarily so that he made
his escape again, followed by the six others. Billy rushed to retrieve them and the scene repeated itself. One of the dogs would catch them again only for the other to scare them away, and the bewildered calves kicked and ran in every direction.
By this stage Billy was soaked with rain; he looked at the calves, looked at his master, who was cursing and shaking his umbrella, then withdrew his labor and headed off toward the woods. The young shepherd was shouting his name, but Billy disappeared among the larch trees and was not seen again. Lampo was wagging his tail nearby, for him it was all a great game. The calves were having a slap-up feast in what should have been the next day’s supply of grass. The rain was coming down with such force, threatening to sweep us all away, clearing us from the mountain like dry leaves, and on the balcony Mozzo finished his biscuit, stretched his back a little, and, grumbling, resigned himself to the idea that it was his turn now.