Omo servadzo (Wild Man)

Omo servadzo (Wild Man) is a figure in Bruno’s account of mountain folklore: an ancient woods-dweller, feared by villagers but thanked for teaching them to make cheese. The story’s force extends beyond its explanation of rennet. When Pietro later sees Bruno climb a steep slope on all fours, the folkloric name returns as a way of recognizing how closely Bruno’s practiced movement seems to belong to the mountain’s animal life.

The figure in Bruno’s account

Bruno introduces Omo servadzo (Wild Man) during an evening conversation with Pietro about rennet. He explains that rennet comes from a small piece of a calf’s stomach, the part that enables the calf to digest its mother’s milk. People take that piece to make cheese. Bruno sees both the practical necessity and the disturbing cost in the process: without it, the cheese would not form. Pietro wonders who first discovered this use, and Bruno answers that it must have been Omo servadzo (Wild Man).

Bruno describes the figure as an ancient man who lived in the woods. He had long hair and a beard, and was covered in leaves. Every so often he went around the villages. People feared him, yet left food outside for him in gratitude for showing them how to use rennet. The account gives the figure a double place in village life: he is a frightening outsider, but also a source of useful knowledge on which ordinary sustenance depends. Bruno’s story does not explain how the figure discovered rennet; it gives that knowledge a mythic, forest-dwelling origin.

Asked what the figure was like, Bruno describes him as “Part man, part beast, part tree.” The phrase resists a fixed boundary between human, animal, and plant. Omo servadzo (Wild Man) is neither simply a person nor a monster in Bruno’s telling, but a being whose mixed nature fits his life outside the village. Pietro asks for the dialect name, and Bruno supplies “Omo servadzo.” The naming grounds the tale in Bruno’s local world without turning it into a formal account of a wider tradition.

Knowledge at the edge of the village

Bruno’s tale makes the woods a place not only of danger but of knowledge. The villagers fear the figure, yet the food they leave for him acknowledges a debt: an unfamiliar being has passed on a technique that allows milk to become cheese. The episode links wildness with the practical knowledge that sustains mountain life, while retaining the unease of taking part of a calf’s stomach to produce food. Bruno does not smooth away that tension. His account makes usefulness and discomfort coexist.

That tension sits beside the book’s material picture of declining village life. In Grana, Pietro and Bruno explore abandoned stables, haylofts, granaries, a shop, and an old bread oven; some buildings still contain tables, crockery, and kitchen utensils left behind. The village had fourteen residents in 1984, compared with as many as one hundred in the past. Against this evidence of depopulation, Bruno’s tale preserves a relationship between village and forest in which people still depend on knowledge attributed to an outsider. The contrast does not establish that the story is a response to Grana’s decline, but it gives the tale a setting where older forms of mountain life and their knowledge are visibly at risk of disappearing.

From folklore to Bruno’s climbing

The name becomes more than a story when Pietro watches Bruno ascend a slope on Grenon. Pietro has left the usual route and sees Bruno on a steep gorge between them. Bruno climbs rapidly on all fours, using his hands as well as his feet and instinctively selecting holds without putting his full weight on them. At times the ground gives way beneath him, but his momentum carries him onward, while small cascades of stones continue down the slope behind him. Pietro thinks of Omo servadzo (Wild Man): the tale supplies an image for a movement that looks at once human and animal, learned yet instinctive.

Pietro asks who taught Bruno to climb that way. Bruno answers, “The chamois. I watched them once and said to myself: now I’m going to try it like that too.” His explanation gives the movement a concrete source in observation and imitation, rather than supernatural instruction. The folkloric association remains, but it is recast: Bruno’s wildness is not proof that he belongs to another species; it names his capacity to learn from animals and move through difficult terrain by attending to them. When Pietro asks whether the technique works, Bruno admits, “Well . . . I’ve still got a few improvements to make.” The modest reply brings the uncanny image back to practice, experiment, and imperfection.

The motif’s limits and significance

Omo servadzo (Wild Man) connects Bruno’s account of traditional food-making with Pietro’s later perception of his climbing. In the first episode, the figure explains how village knowledge might come from beyond the village; in the second, Bruno himself seems to cross the boundary between human technique and animal movement. The repeated association does not make Bruno a literal wild man. It lets Pietro understand a quality of his friend through a locally named figure whose mixed form joins human, beast, and tree.

The motif also complicates the ideal of mountain self-sufficiency. Bruno wants to buy his uncle’s farmstead, rebuild its huts, acquire cattle, and eventually run a farm. Yet the work is financially precarious: his uncle says that small Alpine farming no longer makes economic sense except as a passion, and Bruno later refuses alternatives when the farm is no longer viable. Omo servadzo (Wild Man) belongs to a world where forest knowledge can be imagined as the origin of indispensable craft, but the story does not remove the economic pressures facing the people who inherit mountain work. Its significance lies instead in the contrast it holds open: the mountain can be a source of knowledge, intimacy, and freedom, while life sustained there remains difficult and vulnerable.