The Wild Boy Read online

  I love the larch like a brother. The larch for me is the smell of home itself, and of the fire in its hearth. A line of larch trees is what I see when I raise my eyes from the sheet of paper and look outside. On windy days they sway like ears of wheat. The larch spends long months slumbering before putting forth its buds in April, then changes color with the advancing summer, from the intense green of June to the faded one of August, to the yellow and russet of October. It loves the sun, the southern slopes of mountains, dry soil, and wind. It seeks out the light, pushing itself upward above its neighbors: that’s why the lower branches tend to dry up, as happens in life to things that we leave behind, and little effort is required then to break them and be free of them. But the fragility of the branches guarantees the solidity of the trunk: the timbers of the roofs of houses are made of larch. At the top the mountain folk customarily engrave the date of their construction: the most imposing houses of this valley go back to the beginning of the eighteenth century. While observing them I think of those venerable four-hundred-year-old larches, one still passed in the woods and the other three holding up a house—and it seems to me that this is the most noble service a tree can render to a man.

  I worship the Swiss pine like a god. The stick with which I walk is made from it: it has a white wood that does not yellow with age, and is strong and supple in the races along paths. Elsewhere it is found in woods, around here instead it is a solitary tree that grows extremely slowly. It has seeds which birds conceal in their secret larders, in crevices in rocks at high altitude. Then a little soil and a vein of rainwater is all it takes: the last outcrops of pine grow up there, on the brink of precipices, on the crests. Sometimes they assume tortuous shapes due to the acrobatics they must perform in order to grow, due to the snow that twists and bends them, and the lightning that splits them. I have found the bravest of trees at eight thousand feet, a small Swiss pine that had grown on a ledge which protected it from the wind and collected a little water for it from the sky. It seemed to me as if I had discovered a secret temple, and I must have uttered before it something like a prayer.

  Words

  Remigio used to read all sorts of things—but mostly he read “difficult” books. That year it was Sartre, Camus, and Saramago. It was astonishing to be walking along a track and to hear these names, reflecting the contrasting nature of our trajectories as readers: I, the urban graduate, had ended up rejecting intellectual authors and falling in love with American narrative of the frontier and of the street; he, having grown up in a mountain village and not completed secondary school, was at the age of forty discovering the classics. He told me about his solitary childhood, that of a shy only child without friends. Very early on he had begun to work as a bricklayer with his father. He preferred work to school and had a reflective character, and at a certain point he became aware of a serious limitation: the words that he knew were not sufficient to express how he felt.

  I stopped. We were walking in the wood at the end of August, coming across no one. What do you mean? I asked, intrigued. In the sense, Remigio explained, that he had always spoken in dialect, and the dialect had a rich and precise lexicon with which to designate places, tools, tasks, the parts of the house, animals, but was suddenly vague and imprecise when it came to feelings. Do you know what you say in dialect when you are feeling sad? he asked me. You say: It seems long to me. Which is to say, time does. It is the time that, when you are low, never seems to pass. But the expression is also appropriate for when you are suffering from nostalgia, when you feel lonely, and when you no longer like the life that you are leading. At a certain point Remigio had decided that a handful of words was not enough: he needed new ones to express how he felt, so he had set out to look for them in books. That was why he had become such a voracious reader. He was looking for the words that would allow him to speak about himself.

  * * *

  Like everyone up there, he had both a summer job and a winter one. In the summer he used to renovate old houses. In the winter he would drive a snowcat on the ski slopes. The shifts and the pay did not appeal to him at all, but the landscape did: at night, alone, with an immense white space around him, the spiers of rock at ten thousand feet lit up by the headlights, some music playing in the cabin—and outside the wind, or the thick fog, or the starlit sky.

  Once he had almost lost his life. He was twenty-five and was working on one of the lower slopes—the one that passed nearby to my hut. At a certain point he had seen the larch trees bent down to the ground, and had time to be surprised by the force of the wind before the updraft of air had run over him as well. It wasn’t wind, it was the front of an avalanche. The air had been sufficient to shatter the windshield. Remigio had come around after who knows how long, inside the wreckage of the snowcat, which had been crushed against some trees. He was hurting all over, but he had managed to extricate himself and to drag himself down to a lower altitude. He told me that his worst enemy during the descent had not been the pain but the fatigue, the temptation to stop and rest. And he had discovered a part of himself that was ferociously attached to life, and it was this that had brought him back home. Having reached it, he lost consciousness the moment that he crossed the threshold.

  But he did not say home. Although he was obsessed with houses, when he had to refer to his own he resorted to circumlocutions. Let’s go to my place, he would say. Or: to where I live. Not once did I hear him say: to my home. I wondered why—I who after only a short time started to call home wherever I happened to be living. Perhaps it was because he did not feel at home anywhere, or because one house was as good as another since his home was the entire valley. I envied this about him: this belonging to a vaster place, to woods, to streams, to the shapes of mountains, to the piece of sky that the mountains framed, to the seasons that transition there.

  * * *

  Since he had never moved from his village, he fell in love with the people who came and went. It was something that had happened ever since he was a boy. It was with outsiders that he preferred to talk: like a stone that asks a bird what is on the other side of the mountain.

  In return, when he made friends with someone he would take them to a special place, a big gloomy lake that resembled him—and it was there that we were heading that day. He pointed places out along the way, calling them by their names, but they were not villages or peaks marked on any official map: his map consisted of a wood, a clearing, a hole in the ground, a boulder plonked in the middle of a pasture. Do you know what this place is called? he would say to me. The pian de sardognes, the pra’ pera’, the sasc murel, the borna de’ grai. These place names did not appear in any land registry. Few remembered them now: they had defined borders and properties, but as soon as the mountain had been abandoned they’d fallen into oblivion. And so Remigio, who as a young man had delighted in new words, now mourned the passing of old ones, just as he did for the ruins we would come across as we climbed. In their time these houses had also been named. Fontane, Champette, Brengatze, la Pelletzira—each house had either a name which you could eventually see the point of, or one that was a memento of someone or something no longer remembered. Then the roof came down, the walls collapsed, and the last pieces to fall were precisely the names themselves: they would disappear one after another until nobody would know what that stone was called, that clearing, that ditch, and the mountain would have freed itself not only of mankind but also of its need to give names to things. Sometimes Remigio would remember a word but not its meaning—it was only a sound that he’d heard as a child—and then he would question his mother, who was eighty years old and had five cows and two dogs, and lived outside time along with forgotten words.

  He guided me among the ruins like an archaeologist. He had spent a lifetime reconstructing houses, and had visited so many. In chests he had found documents three to four hundred years old: wills, deeds, building plans. He explained that in the distant past, when a new house was commissioned no plans were drawn; it was enough to list the rooms it wou
ld have, as if from an imaginary catalog: a stable, a hayloft, a space for threshing rye, one for cheese making, balconies for drying hay. The ruins we visited were even more simple. Remigio would point out the details: the way in which a chimney had been built, or a niche in a wall, or the arches above the windows. It was from these particulars that the building could be dated. He would explain the techniques in minute detail while I paced impatiently in the doorway, because inside it was dark and outside the sun was shining, and I much preferred the meadows and woods to those piles of damp stones with their deathly atmosphere.

  * * *

  We had discovered that we enjoyed walking together. We would set out in the late afternoon, when the few remaining hikers were heading back down. We would race up for an hour or two, and at sunset the mountain was all ours. We would stop at the foot of some scree and come up with a new route every time. There was always a stream to retrace, or a track along a gorge. Shall we go up that way? one of us would ask. Then going up we would come across chamois that stared at us surprised, before vanishing with two or three bounds. And what are you doing here at this hour? they seemed to ask. Don’t you have a home to go to?

  Remigio would take photographs of them. This was something that remained of his father’s “passion.” They were herds made up of between fifteen and twenty individuals; the joy of our races culminated there, not at the summit crosses or among the tables of a refuge, but in the midst of rocks as the sun was going down, exchanging glances with chamois. We would like to have told them not to run away, since we were only passing through. The fear they had for us was the one insurmountable obstacle: we could bathe in a lake, feed on blackberries and bilberries, sleep in a meadow, but the wild animals took to their heels, reminding us that we were not and would never be one of them.

  I felt better beneath the waterfalls or by the side of streams, near to running water; Remigio preferred the still. Furthermore, his lake was particularly gloomy. On one side the mountain had collapsed, and the scree reached down to the water’s edge, forming a kind of cliff. On the other bank there was a slope which had been colonized by willows and rhododendrons, cut by a stream that surfaced a little farther above, and which fed the lake. Clinging at mid-height, where the slope softened into a pasture or two, some huts were still holding out. One of them belonged to Remigio. It had been built against the rock face, so that only three walls were needed instead of four, and it had natural shelter from the avalanches. He pointed it out to me from below, guiding me step by step with his index finger along an imaginary path. Eventually I thought I could make out something in front of a rock wall, the same color as the rock.

  Can you see it? he asked.

  Yes, I said, lying.

  Would you like to go up and see?

  Of course, I said, let’s go up there.

  A Visit to the Hut

  In September someone came up to see how I was. We hadn’t seen each other for some time. We spent two days together that seemed quite long, due to the degree of concentration they required of me. When he left, I picked up my notebook and wrote:

  I’ve seen a hand and a foot belonging to my father sticking out from the sheets this morning. How strange it was to have him there, on my sofa bed, a guest in my home. My father is a man who has always slept little. Yet this morning on the floor there was an empty glass and yesterday’s Corriere, its pages messed up, disordered like all newspapers that have been read from back to front. He must have been studying it the whole night through, drinking the Scotch whisky he’d brought for me before falling asleep when it was already getting light outside. Due to the light that was filtering through the skylight he had pulled the sheets over his eyes, and this is how I found him.

  How many other times had I seen my father in bed? The last time must have been a Sunday afternoon in Milan. When our arguments had woken him up he would summon me and my sister to his bedroom. In the darkness he would establish who the guilty party was, and would pronounce their name in a loud voice: the accused would tremble, the other was safe. He didn’t even sleep later when I would get back at night and find him in the kitchen with his grappa and newspaper, and would have preferred him to say with words what he said with his eyes, so I’d have had the chance to reply: Listen, it’s my life.

  And it was still my life now, as was the sofa on which he was sleeping, the glass from which he had drunk, my father being nothing more than a guest in my house. His hand at sixty-four was the same as his hand at forty. Gnarled, dark, all knuckles, with the wedding ring that could no longer be slipped off its finger. The foot sticking out from beneath the sheet resembles the hand, except for the nail of the big toe which is thick and yellow, a bony nail broken during downhill races along mountain tracks. My father has never found the correct boot for his right foot. Among the songs he taught me, my favorite seemed to speak precisely about this. With shoes or without shoes, I want my alpine troops beside me. He had done his military service in the mountains, and when I was a child he would sing of the Great War. The stories of shoes, trains, sweethearts, and wine in those songs were a part of us.

  So I imagined lifting the sheet and finding him like this: coal-black hair and beard, demonic gaze—and feeling those goose bumps again I put on the coffee and went out.

  Outside I washed my face in the fountain and collected the bowl that the dogs had licked clean during the night. When I went back in, my father wasn’t there.

  Later, after he’d left, I found a larch tree up above in the woods which had been stripped bare by lightning, and to which a very strange thing had happened. A single branch near the base was still alive. The lightning strike had damaged the trunk but helped the branch, which had somehow changed direction, beginning to grow vertically and already forming almost another trunk. So there were currently two versions of that old larch: one that was charred and denuded, the other full of birds.

  Due to what had happened in the last few days, I thought at first that the new trunk could be me, and the old one my father. But then it occurred to me instead that I might be both trunks, the old and the new, and that the lightning was really the thing that I had been waiting for, the fire that kills your old self so that the new one can emerge. In this case my father was just another tree in the wood. I turned around to face him, startled.

  A Lucky Dog

  I swear that if I am ever reborn I will come back as a dog, Gabriele said, watching the puppy he had adopted that summer being showered with kisses and hugs by every passing girl. Someone—not he—had named him Lucky. He had been born in the village from a border collie mother and an unknown father, and had been taken up to the alpeggio to learn from Lupo how to work as a sheepdog. But perhaps his fly-by-night father had bequeathed him a vocation along with his inverted colors: white with black markings, the lithe flanks of one born to run, the bell around his neck audible as he followed every walker that passed. Gabriele would shake his head as he watched him wandering off again. That dog had no interest whatsoever in cows, only in people. Sometimes the walker in question was me, and I would try to dissuade him: no, come on, don’t follow me, stay with your owner! Lucky would wag his tail. If I scolded him and tried to escape, he took it for a game and would follow me even farther. I resigned myself to taking him with me, to test his mountaineering potential. To the best of my knowledge dogs are not natural climbers: he would clamber onto the crests and go fleet-footed along the ridges like a young chamois, and had nothing in common with those menacing guard dogs that in the pastures would growl at intruders. Where did you come from? I would ask him as he proudly heaved himself onto a rock to survey the valleys, adopting the pose of an ibex. Just having him around was enough to put me into a good mood. Down at Gabriele’s there was a small chain hanging from the wall, and on my return, with a heavy heart, I would tie him there so that he wouldn’t follow me home. Then Lucky would broadcast into the sky all his sorrow (Will you listen to that voice, Gabriele would say), while Lupo headed to faithfully guide the cows back into the stab
le, as if nothing else in the world interested him as much as that task. They were stepbrothers destined to hate each other, the only son and the adopted one, the stay-at-home and the nomad. I would cover my ears going down to Fontane, in order to avoid the sound of that howling.

  * * *

  Autumn announced its arrival with small signs, and not only with the darkness that seemed to fall a little earlier each night. It was there in the dew on the lawn in front of the house when I went out with my morning coffee. In the shadows of the larch trees that I saw lengthened at noon. In the wild animals that, once people had disappeared, started to show themselves again: the roe deer would come at sunset to graze the pastures, the fox would come closer in search of food. The wood vibrated with activity that I could glimpse when I went to cut firewood—the dart of a squirrel on a trunk, the leap of a hare in juniper, shadows moving. Mario Rigoni Stern used to say that of all the seasons the one he liked least was summer, because life hides itself from man as if it wasn’t there at all—whereas he loved the autumn because it urges us to sharpen our sight, to open our ears and listen. But he did not speak of the somnolence that I felt enveloping the mountain. Of the dry riverbeds, the grass scorched by nightly frosts, the scents that each day faded a little more: no more hay, no more resin, no moss. In the air the smell of woodsmoke was beginning to spread, and that of the manure that the shepherds were spreading before leaving. After the nightly rain I was beginning to see snow whiten the mountain summits—then to appear lower at eighty-three hundred feet, eighty-two hundred, eighty-one hundred—only to melt again in the afternoon sun. With the thinning of the vegetation the sounds seemed to travel farther: so sometimes I would hear a tractor and then see it going along the road a mile away down in the valley. To the scream of the chainsaws in the distance was added the voices of the potato pickers bent double in vegetable allotments, extracting the fruits of the soil. Every evening, from above I would hear: Lucky! Lucky! And sometimes, but not always, the bell on his collar as he responded to the call.