I didn’t think I’d find a friend like Bruno in life.
nor that friendship was a place where you put your roots
and what is waiting for you.
I was raised as an only child in a city apartment.
I wasn’t used to doing things in twos.
But in the summer of 1984
my parents rented a house in a mountain town,
where, ironically, there was only one little boy living at the time.
Bruno.
10:00
FATHERS APARTMENT
According to my father
for every season of lightness
there follows one of gravity,
work time, of the plain and black mood.
AT SCHOOL
Meanwhile, my legs turned pale,
the scraps and scabs healed and they forgot the itch of the nettles.
The days of Grana seemed so far away,
I wondered if they really existed.
THE GLACIER
The glacier fascinated the man of science that was my father.
It reminded him of his studies in chemistry and physics,
The mythology on which it was formed.
He told us that the glacier is the memory of past winters
That mountain holds on to for us.
Above a certain height, it retains the memory
And if we want to know of a distant winter,
That’s where we must go.
25:50
The next day my father returned to Turin,
BUt the memory of that morning would remain with me forever.
Together on glacier, just the three of us.
Like it would never happen again.
My parents’ urgency to help Bruno,
To educate him
Had saperated us
While I was bored In the summer
he worked with his father on construction sites.
is adult life started when he was 13.
Mine, who knows!
I don’t think he knew what adolescence was.
He nodded his head.
I raised my hand
and then nothing else.
I didn’t ask him how he was,
how much he earned,
If he had a girlfriend,
what he wanted from the future,
what he thought of what had happened.
he didn’t ask me how I was,
how my family were
and I didn’t answer:
“My mother’s well, my father I’ve no idea.”
36:13
The following year I returned to the mountains just for a few days,
after that, I stopped going there altogether.
Bruno and I would never see each other again for 15 years.
49:22
My father died when he was 62 and I was 31,
the age when he was when I was born.
But I wasn’t married,
I hadn’t had a child,
I didn’t even have a steady job.
My life seemed to me half that of a man.
and half that of a boy.
What was my father’s wish?
He, who never succeeded in stopping work.
and that hardly a summer day passed in mountains.
What was I to do with his lost dream
and with a promise that wasn’t mine?
I must be the red marker
because he’s always been the black one.
This is when we went on the glacier with Bruno,
So Bruno must be the green marker.
[continue and merged with phone call]
1:01:12
I imagine evenings there among them when Bruno was 20, 25 years old,
and he was there talking with my father instead of me.
may be it wouldn’t have happened if I had stayed,
or may be we would share those moments.
I felt like I lost the most important things,
while I was busy with others,
so trivial that I don’t even remember them.
1:10:00
Too bad the summer is over.
[interruption with dialogues]
[shekoti cha scene]
1:26:07
For Bruno there were neither Saturdays nor Sundays in the mountain postures.
Even if it took a long time,
he persisted in milking the cows by hand.
There was a right way in his life to do everything.
the summer that followed Lara was pregnant.
I saw her grazing the cows, alone in the wind,
with a round belly and thick ankles.
More and more a creature of the mountain.
The following year she went out to pasture with a little girl in her arms.
Even if Bruno and Lara always invited me to stop there,
something pushed me to say hello to that family
and to take the path to the Barma.
Sometimes I wanted to talk with my father.
“Did you see, Dad?”
One of your children found its way to him.”
The other on hasn’t.”
I was tired of that old me.
I wanted to transform, evolve, leave
for a new, brand-new Pietro.
[cut to new contry]
INTO THE MOUNTAINS-
1:32:00
I was wondering what Bruno would have thought of the houses,
how they built them
of their way of working the land,
in the hands of women,
of children’s games among the cattle.
Perhaps he would have thought the mountain people of the world are all one.
He would have liked the Himalayas too.
1:48:00
Diary reading-
“This will be my last as lead climber, because in a while he’ll pull me up.”
“I will always carry the memory of these days as the most beautiful refuge.”
“Giovanni Guasti, August 1984.”
Self narrating+diary?
“Went up from Grana in two hours and 37 minutes. Great run.”
“Sighted six ibexes and an eagle.”
“Today I’m 21 again, like my companion here.”
“John Gusti and Bruno Guglielmina, July 1994.”
Then I found what must be the last message from him.
“It would be nice to stay up here forever,”
“Without saying anyone, without having to go down to the valley again.”
Here is the sentiment that had made him dream of a home away from the world.
Only now did I understand. I had two fathers.
The first was the stranger with whom I had lived 20 years in the city.
The second was the mountain father.
Whoom I had only glimpsed, yet known better.
This other father left me a ruin to rebuild,
but may be he didn’t know it would be another’s greatest gift.
1:55:31
CHANGED!
Even if sometimes I would have liked to talk to him when we were apart,
Bruno and I felt very little, As if our friendship didn’t need any help.
It was my mother gave us news of each other.
She was used to living among silent men.
1:17:30
LAST – BRUNO’S DEATH
I said no, but I was lying.
I wondered who had known him besides me on Earth,
An dwho had known me besides Bruno.
If it was only ours what we had shared,
what was left of it now that one of us was gone?
Then it accured to me,
that there was a house up in the mountains with a hole in the roof.
That wouldn’t give her long to live
and I felt she was no longer of any use,
because in some lives there are mountains to which it is not possible to return.
One cannot go back to the mountain which is at the centre of all the others,
as well as the beginning of its own history.
All that remains is to wander the eight mountains,
for someone like me,
on the first and highest,
I lost as a friend.