Anita

Anita, the daughter of Bruno and Lara, is born in autumn and spends her earliest months amid the animals and work of her parents’ farm at Grana. Her childhood is shown mainly through Pietro’s visits and his mother’s reports: she is at once a child at home among farm animals and a young pupil learning to adapt to school, while the collapse of her parents’ business changes where she lives and who cares for her.

Birth and Early Setting

Anita’s birth takes place while Pietro is away in Nepal. In June, in Mustang, his mother writes to tell him that Lara is five months pregnant. Through the summer she sends updates with the precision of medical reports: 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. Pietro’s mother urges her to rest, but Lara refuses. She compares the pregnant cows to herself, reasoning that their calm presence helps her remain calm too. Bruno proposes hiring someone to take over her work, but Lara will not agree.

Pietro’s mother accompanies Lara through the pregnancy, visiting on foot and going with her to the hospital each month. An August scan confirms that the child will be a girl. Even with her pregnancy advanced, Lara continues to pasture the cows, now able only to walk in front of the herd and then sit beneath a tree to watch it. At the end of September, the cows descend to the valley in a formal procession, their coats brushed and shining, their embroidered leather collars and ceremonial bells marking the change of season. Bruno settles them in a rented winter stable; Anita is born soon afterward. The timing makes her arrival seem, in Pietro’s telling, part of the seasonal order of farm life.

A Childhood Among Animals

When Pietro returns to Grana, Anita is not yet a year old. He finds her playing on a blanket in a meadow at the farmstead, while his mother watches her closely. His mother introduces Pietro as Anita’s uncle and brings the child over to meet him. Anita regards the bearded visitor with suspicion, tugs at his beard, and then laughs at the discovery. The encounter gives Pietro a first, immediate impression of her as an alert and curious infant, and it marks his return to a household changed by her presence.

The farmstead itself has become livelier: chickens and rabbits have joined the mule, cows, and dogs, while polenta and stew cook over a fire and a table is laid outdoors. Anita is not separate from this working landscape; it is the setting of her earliest life. Pietro’s mother remains attentive to her throughout the visit, and later takes her in her arms when she grows sleepy. Lara and Pietro’s mother share the work of looking after her, responding to her needs without making a display of it. For Pietro, the child’s arrival also changes his relationship to the farm: a place associated with his own childhood now contains a new generation.

Pietro’s mother becomes deeply attached to Anita. During the summers she often keeps the child at Grana, easing the pressure on Anita’s parents by taking on some of her care. Her concern is practical as well as affectionate: from a distance, she follows Anita’s development and worries about what the strain on the family may mean for her. This care belongs to a wider pattern in Pietro’s mother’s life. In Milan she had worked as a health worker supporting women during pregnancy and monitoring newborn children; in Grana she likewise notices children’s needs and commits herself to helping, though Anita’s care is personal and familial.

Family Crisis and Separation

As Anita grows, the pressures on her parents intensify. Bruno and Lara work too hard and continue finding ways to take on more work, while debt weighs on Lara and Bruno withdraws into silence and labor. Pietro’s mother keeps Pietro informed about Anita’s developing character, describing her as wild and fearless, but her updates also convey her growing alarm about the deteriorating relationship between the child’s parents. The family crisis reaches a decisive point in the autumn of 2013. Bruno declares himself bankrupt, closes the agricultural business, and hands the farm’s keys to the bailiff; Lara goes to live with her parents with Anita.

The account preserves some uncertainty about how the separation unfolded. Pietro’s mother describes events as Lara deciding to leave Bruno, after which he gives up and accepts failure. Bruno later presents the sequence differently: Lara is already living with her parents, and Anita is with her there. Whichever account is followed, the outcome is clear. The farm and its business are lost, Lara and Anita leave, and Bruno is left alone. Pietro’s mother fears for Bruno, but her reports also make clear that Anita’s immediate care is being provided by Lara and Lara’s family.

School and the Pull of Farm Life

When Pietro visits Lara in December, she is working as a waitress at a small ski resort and shows him a photograph of Anita. The child is blond, rather frail, and smiling as she hugs a black dog much larger than herself. Lara says that Anita is in her first year of school and finds it difficult to conform to some of its rules. At the beginning, she may fight with another child, scream, or spend the day alone in a corner without speaking. Lara sees gradual change, but school adjustment remains a process rather than a settled achievement.

The photograph and Lara’s account also show where Anita feels most at ease. She likes visits to farms, where calves lick her hands and she is unafraid of goats and horses. Lara says Anita is happy with every kind of animal and hopes that this affinity will last, that her daughter will not forget it. The contrast is not presented as a simple rejection of school: Anita is beginning to adapt, even as farm life continues to offer a familiar setting in which she seems comfortable. Her response to animals links her childhood after the family’s separation to the mountain farm world in which she spent infancy.

Narrative Role and Inheritance

Anita’s story is conveyed largely at a distance. During her birth and infancy Pietro is abroad, first working among development projects in Nepal and later hearing about the family through his mother. Her reports bridge the distance between the wandering narrator and Bruno’s household; after Pietro returns, a visit and a photograph give him a more direct view of the child. This mediated perspective means Anita is not given an independent account of her thoughts. Instead, the reader encounters her through observed gestures, her mother’s descriptions, and the care others provide.

Within that limited perspective, Anita connects generations and places without resolving the conflicts around her. Pietro’s mother, who once supported Bruno’s education and now helps care for his daughter, sustains a relationship with the family through practical attention. Pietro’s meeting with Anita at the farmstead brings him into a household transformed since his childhood, while Lara’s later account shows the child adapting to life after the farm’s closure. Anita’s ease among animals preserves a concrete connection to that lost farm life, but the evidence leaves her future open: Lara hopes she will retain that attachment, and no later outcome is given.