Bruno

Bruno is Pietro’s childhood friend and a man who understands himself through the mountains. His life moves between other people’s efforts to draw him into shared obligations and his conviction that he belongs in the high country: first, Pietro’s mother campaigns to get him an education; later, Bruno tries to make a livelihood with Lara; finally, after the business fails, he returns to a solitary life at Barma. His disappearance during the heavy snow of 2014 leaves that final choice suspended between deliberate isolation and an unknown fate.

Identity and Early Life

Bruno grows up in Grana mountain village in a family whose circumstances give Pietro’s mother cause to worry about his schooling. She recognizes that she cannot change his prospects alone and works to enlist the women in his family. Having concluded that Bruno’s mother will not help, she concentrates on his aunt, repeatedly visiting until the aunt agrees to send him to school in winter and to Pietro’s home for homework in summer. The effort gives Bruno a regular place in Pietro’s household, not simply as a companion but as a child someone has decided is worth helping.

Three times a week, Bruno arrives scrubbed and dressed for lessons. Pietro’s mother has him read aloud from books by Stevenson, Verne, Twain, and Jack London, and lets him keep the books to practise while he is in the pastures. Bruno enjoys novels, but grammar and the rules of Italian entangle him; he struggles with spelling and conjunctions. Pietro remembers feeling embarrassed on Bruno’s behalf and resenting the pressure of the lessons. Bruno himself does not complain. He understands that the education matters to Pietro’s mother and works hard, perhaps in part because he is unused to mattering so much to someone. The episode establishes a lasting tension in his character: he can accept another person’s care, but its importance is more legible to him than any desire to ask for it.

A Life Defined by the Mountains

As an adult, Bruno describes paid work as something he can do but was not born to do. He says he was born to be a man of the mountains, a phrase he has used when speaking about the earlier inhabitants of the high country. His knowledge of that past comes from a lifetime of exploring woods, wild meadows, and abandoned houses. The farms and upland places he knows are not an untouched inheritance: the men of his family had also considered leaving them behind for work and money in the valley. His uncle eventually stopped repairing things at the farmstead, and Bruno’s father reacted angrily to the prospect of its decline. Bruno’s own sense of vocation takes shape against that history of abandonment.

Pietro’s father’s mountain map records Bruno as part of this history of shared excursions. After Pietro returns to the old house, he deciphers the map’s coloured routes: black marks Giovanni Guasti’s climbs, red accompanies him on routes with Pietro, and green identifies Bruno. Many routes join Giovanni’s black lines to Bruno’s green ones, perhaps more than those marked with Pietro. The discovery brings Pietro a pang of jealousy, but also relief that his father had not spent all those years alone. The map thus places Bruno in a relationship that extends beyond his childhood friendship with Pietro: he had continued to walk with Giovanni in the mountains.

Friendship, Work, and Family

Bruno’s connection with Pietro can survive long intervals without direct contact. The two do not necessarily seek each other out, and it is Pietro’s mother who passes news between them. Yet the mountain house they build together gives their friendship a durable, practical form. When Pietro’s mother visits the finished house, she sees Bruno and Pietro preparing supplies for the descent and takes time to look over the lake, scree, peaks of Grenon, and the house itself. Pietro tells Bruno that the place should belong to both of them, not to Pietro alone, because they built it together. Bruno asks whether Pietro is sure. The exchange makes the house a shared home by explicit choice, not merely a property inherited by one friend.

Bruno later tries to establish a livelihood with Lara. When she returns to visit the upland pasture, he tells her that he plans to start an agricultural business in spring, buy thirty cows, and make cheese rather than sell their milk to a dairy. He will need another worker, and Lara, who likes the place and grew up around cattle, offers herself for the job. Bruno is flattered but worried about having a woman there; Pietro thinks Lara will do the work well, and Bruno accepts that assessment. Their relationship develops into a close partnership. Bruno is more serious, Lara becomes more at ease in the mountain setting, and his affection is visible in his constant gestures of touch and reassurance. Their daughter, Anita, becomes part of the household and a beloved presence in the wider circle around them.

Business Failure and Return to Solitude

The farm’s economic pressures gradually change the character of life at the upland home. The cheese income does not cover mortgage payments, and money goes toward costs without reducing the bank debt. Summer allows Bruno and Lara to live almost self-sufficiently, but winter brings stable rent and other expenses; they borrow again to meet existing debts. Lara tries to improve their income by bypassing a distributor and delivering directly to shops twice a week, leaving Anita with Pietro’s mother and Bruno to manage the farm alone. The extra work does not resolve the underlying strain. Bruno grows angry when Lara talks about money and complains that they hardly see Pietro without discussing it. Their shared enterprise increasingly makes them financial partners at odds rather than a couple working toward the same future.

In autumn 2013, Bruno declares bankruptcy, closes the agricultural business, and hands the farm keys to the bailiff. Lara moves to her parents’ home with Anita. The account of how the separation unfolded differs: Pietro’s mother says Lara left first and Bruno then gave up, while another account presents the bankruptcy and closure as the decisive break. The difference does not alter the outcome. Bruno has lost the farm and his partnership, and Pietro’s mother fears that he is now alone. Her concern echoes her earlier attention to Bruno’s education: across the years, she remains a link between him and Pietro, especially when Bruno withdraws rather than communicates.

When Pietro sees Bruno again at the mountain house, Bruno speaks of his anger at having made the mistakes himself and at having tried to become a businessman despite knowing nothing about money. He imagines a different course: repairing a small place, bringing up four cows, and living simply from the start. He has concluded that he knows how to live in the mountains and can manage there alone. The value of this knowledge, he says, took him until the age of forty to recognize. Pietro is moved by the certainty of Bruno’s account, even while recognizing that such a life would seem inhuman to anyone else. Bruno’s retreat is therefore neither presented as an easy triumph nor dismissed as mere failure; it is the answer he finds after the life he built with Lara proves unsustainable.

Disappearance and Significance

In March 2014, Lara tells Pietro that Bruno cannot be found. His cousins have gone up to check on him, but snow has buried Barma’s small house. A helicopter-borne rescue team digs to the roof and opens the tiles, expecting that Bruno might be inside, but the house is empty. There are no tracks in the surrounding snow, and the pair of skis Pietro suggests checking for is also missing from the storeroom. Searchers use dogs, but deep snow and avalanche danger make the Grenon difficult to search. Pietro and Lara expect that Bruno may be found when the snow thaws; the narrative does not confirm what happened to him.

Bruno’s ending returns his story to the conflict that has shaped it: whether life in the mountains can be chosen freely, sustained materially, and shared with others. His education began through another person’s insistence that he deserved a wider future; his farm with Lara attempted to join mountain knowledge to a business and a family life; bankruptcy stripped that project away. At Barma, the house built with Pietro remains evidence that his life was not exclusively solitary. His disappearance leaves both facts in view: Bruno’s powerful attachment to the mountains and the human ties that continued to reach him there.