Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains

“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.

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.