Bruno and His Daughter Anita's Father-Daughter Relationship

Bruno’s relationship with his daughter Anita is shaped by a striking contrast: he can hold and comfort her with ease, yet doubts his ability to guide her beyond the mountain life he has always known. Her birth briefly makes him a father in the most immediate sense, but the later collapse of his farm and partnership with Lara leaves Anita living apart from him. Through that separation, the narrative links Bruno’s fears about fatherhood to the painful pattern of distance between fathers and children in his own family.

The Family and Its Setting

Anita is born in autumn, while Bruno and Lara are living and working in the high pastures. Pietro is away in Nepal and learns about the pregnancy through letters from his mother, who has gone to the Grana mountain village. Her reports make Lara’s pregnancy part of the demanding seasonal work of the farm: Lara twists an ankle while out in the pasture, suffers sunstroke while making hay, and continues carrying cheese down twice a week despite backache and swollen legs. Bruno suggests hiring help, but Lara refuses, saying that the herd is pregnant too and that its calm reassures her. The details place the coming child within a household where care and labor are closely intertwined, and where pregnancy does not bring Lara’s work to a halt.

Pietro’s mother becomes an important presence around the young family. Having worked as a health worker supporting women through pregnancy and following newborns in their first year, she responds to Lara’s pregnancy as a responsibility she should take up. She visits, sends updates to Pietro, and urges Lara to rest, even though Lara does not follow that advice. The mother’s involvement continues after the birth: she becomes strongly attached to Anita and often keeps her at Grana during the summer, giving Bruno and Lara some relief from caring for their daughter while they work. She is not described as a relative, but her attention supplies a dependable layer of support around the child.

Birth and Bruno’s First Experience of Fatherhood

The farm’s calendar sets the immediate circumstances of Anita’s arrival. On the last Sunday of September, Bruno brings the herd down to the valley in its formal end-of-season procession and installs it in a stable he has rented for the winter. Anita is born soon afterward. Pietro, still away, receives the news while traveling in Dolpo with a woman he has met in Kathmandu. That night, in a mountain refuge, he thinks about Bruno becoming a father. The birth thus reaches the story across distance: Pietro cannot share the event in person, but it draws his attention back to the friend whose life has remained rooted in the Alps.

When Pietro later asks how fatherhood is going, Bruno answers with uncertainty rather than confidence. He can carry Anita and stroke her, he says, because that kind of tenderness is familiar to him. What troubles him is the future moment when he will have to explain things to her. His doubt is not about whether he can care for an infant in the present; it concerns the knowledge and guidance a parent is expected to provide as a child grows.

Bruno measures that uncertainty against the practical skills he possesses. He knows how to milk a cow, make cheese, cut down a tree, and build a house; he has been taught these things since childhood. He cannot identify an equivalent instruction in how to be a father. The contrast is especially sharp because his own father did not teach him that role. Bruno says he eventually had to confront his father so that he would leave him alone, and that he has not seen him since. Fatherhood therefore begins for Bruno with both an affectionate capacity and a conspicuous absence of a reassuring example.

Care Around Anita

Bruno’s hesitation exists alongside his evident tenderness toward his daughter. He describes an ordinary form of care—holding and stroking her—as something he already knows how to do. The passage does not present him as indifferent to Anita; instead, it distinguishes the comfort he can offer now from his anxiety about what he will be able to offer later. His question is how to become a father beyond the tasks and skills supplied by the mountain household.

Pietro’s mother helps make Anita’s early life a shared responsibility. She follows the pregnancy closely, remains attached to the child after her birth, and frequently has Anita stay with her at Grana in summer. This practical help matters increasingly as pressure grows between Anita’s parents. Bruno and Lara work too hard and keep finding ways to work harder; Lara is exasperated by debt, while Bruno withdraws into silence and labor. The mother’s care gives Anita time with a trusted adult outside the strain of the farm and temporarily eases her parents’ burden.

Pietro himself is separated from these developments for long periods, first by his work in Nepal and later by his travels. His mother becomes the channel through which he learns how Anita is growing up, including her increasingly wild and fearless character. She worries as the crisis between Bruno and Lara worsens, and the news she sends allows Pietro to understand that the family’s difficulties are not simply financial. The relationship is therefore shown not only through Bruno’s direct contact with Anita, but also through the network of observers and caregivers who keep her present in the lives of her father and his friend.

Separation and Its Consequences

In autumn 2013, Bruno declares bankruptcy, closes the agricultural business, and hands the farm keys to the bailiff. Lara goes to live with her parents, taking Anita with her. Pietro’s mother and Bruno give different accounts of how the separation unfolded: according to her, Lara decided to leave and Bruno gave up; the report of the bankruptcy describes the farm’s closure and Lara’s departure as the sequence of events. The narrative does not resolve that difference, emphasizing instead the resulting break in the family’s shared life.

When Pietro reaches Bruno by telephone, Bruno does not want to discuss what happened with Lara. He says that he is tired and confirms that the farm has been taken away. Asked about the herd, he says he gave the animals away; asked about Anita, he says that she is with Lara at her parents’ home, where there is plenty of room, and that they are doing well. His answer establishes the immediate arrangement: Anita lives with her mother, while Bruno remains apart from them after losing the farm that had organized his work and home.

Later, as Pietro suggests that Bruno might come down from the mountain, Bruno raises the possibility of bringing Anita up to live with him there. He immediately questions whether that would be right, asking whether it is better for her to stay with her mother than to share his life in the mountains. The exchange brings his earlier uncertainty into sharper focus. He does not describe a plan that would reunite the household; instead, he recognizes that his familiar world may not be the right setting for his daughter. Pietro urges him to change his way of life, but Bruno’s response turns on his conviction that the mountain identity is inseparable from who he is.

Inheritance and the Limits of Fatherhood

Pietro understands Bruno as a cowherd, bricklayer, and man of the mountains, but also as his father’s son. The comparison makes Bruno’s estrangement from his own father more than a separate episode in his past: it becomes a troubling precedent for his relationship with Anita. Bruno had been left without a model for fatherhood; now, after losing his livelihood and separating from Lara, he risks repeating the distance that marked his own childhood relationship. The parallel is not presented as a settled destiny, but as a possibility Pietro recognizes and Bruno’s circumstances bring into view.

The closing exchange does not resolve the question of whether Bruno will change his life or become more present in Anita’s. Instead, it leaves the relationship suspended between affection and absence. Bruno’s care for his infant daughter is real, and his concern about what he can teach her is explicit; yet Anita remains with Lara, and Bruno continues to define himself through the mountain life that has narrowed his choices. Their father-daughter relationship thus gathers the book’s larger tensions between inherited ways of living, practical care, and the responsibilities that cannot be learned from work alone.