Pietro's Chosen Life of Solitude

Pietro’s chosen solitude is a way of living that he builds and repeatedly tests at Barma. The house he made with Bruno gives him a place to withdraw from the village and city, but not a life severed from other people: friends visit, Bruno comes up the path, and Pietro’s departures from the farmstead are deliberate acts of care. His solitude offers ease and freedom, while remaining a difficult relationship rather than a settled refuge.

A dwelling apart

The center of Pietro’s life in those years is the house he built with Bruno. He stays there for long periods between June and October, alone during the week and joined at times by friends who fall in love with the place. The house is both a practical dwelling and the physical form of a life apart: Pietro reads, writes, cuts wood, and wanders the old paths. He says he becomes accustomed to solitude and feels at ease with it, but qualifies that ease. He is not entirely at peace with being alone.

The house is still unfinished as this life takes shape. Pietro sleeps in it beneath a window, in a sleeping bag, looking at the stars and listening to the wind. The rock face seems so present that the space feels like a cave excavated from the mountain. In late August, rain flattens the meadow grass and breaks the lake’s surface while rainwater and wind enter through the house’s missing windows and doors. Pietro and Bruno line a room with fir and install a salvaged stove against the rock wall; the rock slowly absorbs the stove’s warmth and radiates it back. Their shelter is therefore made through labor and adaptation, but remains exposed to the weather. Its incompleteness does not prevent it from becoming the center of Pietro’s chosen life.

Solitude’s daily rhythm

Pietro goes down to the village about once a week, reluctantly, to buy supplies. After only a few hours’ walk, he is surprised to find himself among cars again. Shopkeepers treat him as a tourist, perhaps an eccentric one, and he is content to leave the encounter at that. The contrast matters: he does not describe the village as a place he must escape in fear or conflict, but as a world from which he feels increasingly distant. Back on the path, he loads bread, vegetables, salami, cheese, and wine onto the Mule, which has learned the route well enough to find its own way. Pietro imagines that he and Bruno might remain above without anyone noticing.

His sense of separation is also shaped by the turning season. The late-August rains bring autumn to the mountains; when the sun returns, its light is cooler and more oblique, and the clouds swallow the peaks. Pietro remembers protesting inwardly that summer had only just begun. At Barma, the rain drums on the roof while the fire crackles inside. Such details make solitude a rhythm of shelter and exposure, not merely an abstract preference: the weather sets the boundaries of his days, and the unfinished house makes those boundaries tangible.

Company without surrendering independence

On summer Saturdays, friends seek Pietro out. Their arrival changes the house from something like a hermit’s hut into a refuge: there is wine on the table, the stove is lit, and people stay up talking. The shared isolation makes them feel like brothers for a night. Between visits, Pietro imagines the intimacy as embers that continue to glow. Solitude, then, does not exclude hospitality. The house can hold both his weekday life alone and a brief, intense fellowship with others.

Bruno is among those drawn to Barma’s warmth. He appears near evening carrying toma and wine, or knocks after dark as if visiting a neighbor at two thousand meters were entirely ordinary. If Pietro has guests, Bruno joins them at the table. He is more talkative there than in Grana, where he is absorbed in building work, books, walks, and silent reflection. Pietro understands the urgency with which Bruno, despite fatigue after a day on a building site, washes, changes, and takes the path to the lake. Their shared house is not simply evidence of a past friendship: it continues to provide a meeting place for two people whose everyday lives otherwise take different forms.

That closeness has limits Pietro consciously maintains. Later, when he visits Bruno and Lara at the farmstead, they invite him to stay, but he says goodbye and returns by torchlight to the house at the lake. He feels that keeping a proper distance from their fledgling family is a way of respecting them and protecting himself. The walk back restores the arrangement he has made with solitude. Under a quarter-moon and the stars, he follows the path between larch trees, listening to the river’s changing sounds as it passes bends, rapids, and scree before disappearing underground. At the lake, wind moves small waves across the dark water and breaks up the reflected stars. Pietro stands still rather than disturbing the scene; in the mountain’s company, he realizes, he is not alone in the same way he is alone among people.

Choice, concern, and self-understanding

Pietro names what he is defending as his ability to live alone. It took time for solitude to become a place he could adjust to and feel good in, and he acknowledges that his relationship with it remains difficult. His repeated return to the house is therefore more than a preference for quiet: it is a way of renewing an arrangement that he has worked to make possible. The mountain path, the river, and the lake give that arrangement a setting in which solitude can feel like companionship without requiring him to give up independence.

Lara tells Pietro that Bruno worries because he is always alone and thinks he may not be well. She offers her own judgment more tentatively: she sees this life as Pietro’s choice, expects that he might eventually tire of it and find somebody, but considers the choice acceptable for now. Pietro confirms that she has understood him. The exchange makes clear that his solitude is visible to those closest to him and is not beyond question, yet it is not presented as a condition imposed on him. His life at Barma depends on distinctions he keeps negotiating: retreat without rejecting friendship, hospitality without constant company, and attachment without entering the domestic life Bruno and Lara are beginning together. Solitude remains chosen precisely because Pietro must continue to choose it.