Pietro Inherits Barma and Begins Rebuilding with Bruno

Pietro Inherits Barma and Begins Rebuilding with Bruno is the turning point through which an obscure bequest becomes both a physical undertaking and a reconsideration of family and friendship. Giovanni Guasti leaves Pietro a small mountain property without explaining why; the ruin’s meaning emerges only as Pietro returns to Grana mountain village, deciphers his father’s map, and agrees to work there with Bruno. Building Barma becomes a way to remember Giovanni, but also a choice Pietro makes for himself and with his friend.

The Bequest and the Map

After the funeral, Pietro returns to Milan to spend time with his mother and help settle practical matters. In Giovanni’s desk is a list of instructions, with bank details and the information needed to inherit his assets. Since Pietro and his mother are the only inheritors, Giovanni had not needed to make a formal will. The paper leaves his half of the Milan apartment to his wife and says that Pietro is to have the property in Grana, but offers no farewell or explanation. Its legal, matter-of-fact phrasing makes the mountain bequest feel less like a message than a puzzle.

Pietro’s mother knows little about it. Giovanni had bought a small piece of mountain land the previous year without seeking her permission or inviting her to see it. The purchase and land-registry papers identify Pietro’s inheritance as an agricultural building measuring four by seven meters, set within an irregular plot. The map accompanying the documents shows the property but gives no altitude or paths, so Pietro cannot tell what kind of place it is. His mother’s assurance that Bruno will know where it is points him toward a friendship—and a past—he has not yet fully recovered.

When Pietro returns to Grana mountain village, little seems to have changed. He enters the dark village on foot, guided by the sound of the drinking fountain, and finds the house’s large iron key still in the door. In the kitchen, he rekindles the fire among the faintly glowing embers and finds Giovanni’s homemade grappa, flavored with berries, pinecones, or herbs gathered in the mountains. Among the familiar objects, his mother’s photograph of Pietro and Bruno sitting back to back on a larch stump resembles a portrait of brothers. Then he notices Giovanni’s map, still thumbtacked to the wall but transformed by twenty years of additions.

The map has become so dense with routes to summits, pastures, and refuges that it is nearly illegible to anyone else. Pietro works out its colors from a remembered glacier outing: black marks Giovanni’s routes, red accompanies Pietro, and green marks Bruno. Where the red and green lines stop but the black continues, Giovanni had completed the climb alone later. The many routes in black and green show that his father had spent substantial time walking with Bruno, a discovery that stirs jealousy as well as relief. The map supplies no explicit explanation, but its interwoven journeys seem to Pietro to contain a message.

Finding the Site and Accepting the Work

Bruno comes to fetch Pietro the next morning. At the property, snow partly conceals a wooded terrace facing the lake, a white rock face, and the remains of three dry-stone walls. The fourth side of the four-by-seven-meter structure is the rock itself, which supplied the building stone. Its roof has disappeared, and a Swiss pine has taken root among the rubble. This is the inheritance Giovanni had left: rock, snow, shaped stones, and a living tree.

Bruno explains that he had accompanied Giovanni on searches for a suitable place and that Giovanni had chosen this one at first sight. Pietro sees the contradiction in his father’s bequest: the man who had spent his life fleeing houses had wanted to build one there, but had not managed to do so. Bruno offers to work through the summer and says he does not expect payment. He asks for help, estimating that with a laborer the job could be finished in three or four months. Pietro’s first instinct is that he has no useful skills, but, sitting on a wall above a frozen lake at two thousand meters, he accepts the invitation as an opportunity to undertake the work and discover what his father intended.

When the snow melts quickly, Pietro returns in early June. The two men carry a spade, pickaxe, large hatchet, chainsaw, and half a tank of petrol up to the property. Though Bruno bears the heavier load, Pietro repeatedly has to stop for breath. At the ruin, the walls prove unevenly sound: their lower meter is held by massive cornerstones, while the upper long wall leans outward and the shorter walls are unstable. Bruno decides they must demolish the unsafe sections nearly to their foundations rather than try to straighten them. They begin by clearing collapsed roof shingles, flooring, and long beams from inside. Bruno tests the beams for reuse; sound pieces are dragged out on inclined planks, while rotten wood is split for firewood. Because his fingers are truncated, he operates the chainsaw left-handed, bracing the wood with his foot as Pietro gathers the cut pieces.

A Second Chance in the Ruins

The work changes meaning through the small acts of attention it requires. When Bruno explains how to use a scythe stone, his patient demonstration recalls a game the two boys used to play in ruined buildings: entering through holes in unsafe walls, walking on shifting planks, and treating wrecked objects as treasure. Pietro had thought he was rebuilding only for Giovanni, to fulfill his wishes and assuage his guilt. Watching Bruno mime the sharpening of an imaginary scythe, he begins to see the project instead as compensation, or a second chance for their interrupted friendship. He retrieves a discarded horn rather than let it be burned, keeping it for possible future use.

Pietro also rescues the pine that had grown in the ruin. He digs it out with its roots intact and replants it at the edge of the clearing, where it can look toward the lake. Its thin, twisted trunk and exposed roots make it seem fragile in the wind. The tree’s precarious survival gives the rebuilding a living counterpart: both the house and the pine have to be moved from the shelter of rubble into a more exposed future.

Pietro’s understanding of Giovanni deepens through other traces left in the mountains. His mother’s account of the past leads him back to his father’s image of the glacier as the snow of winters long gone, holding memories that summer seems to erase. Pietro recognizes that he had known two versions of Giovanni: the stranger with whom he lived in the city, and the mountain walker who followed him on paths and loved glaciers. He resolves to complete the ruin in order to remember this second father. On a later ascent of the mountain above the house, he finds Giovanni’s 1997 entry in the summit logbook: “Climbed up from Grana in 3 hours and 58 minutes. Still in great shape!” The brief, buoyant record makes his father’s solitary climb present again, in a form that neither the inheritance papers nor the route map could provide alone.

The House as Shared Memory

By September, Pietro and Bruno have built a house at the site. The grass has been cut, firewood is stacked under a lean-to, and the pine still faces the lake, though it appears no sturdier than when Pietro replanted it. The house’s arrangements extend the work beyond the two builders: its wooden room is left unlocked, as in mountain refuges, so that a passerby in difficulty can find shelter, while the stone room is locked to protect the equipment. Barma is therefore not simply a private memorial; part of it remains open to other people who may need it.

Pietro brings his mother up to see the house. She climbs for two hours at her own steady pace, wearing the leather hiking boots she has used since his childhood, and is delighted by what Pietro and Bruno have built. She looks out from the window, then studies the lake, scree, peaks, and house from the terrace, as if committing them to memory. Pietro has carved Giovanni’s name and dates into the rock wall and painted the inscription black: “IN MEMORY IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL REFUGE.” His mother pauses before it; afterward, she calls Pietro and Bruno to sing the song for a mountain lover who has died, asking that he continue walking in the afterlife.

With his mother there as a witness, Pietro says that the house should not belong to him alone: it should be theirs, his and Bruno’s, because they built it together. He believes this is what Giovanni intended, but stresses that he wants the shared ownership himself. The bequest thus reaches an ending its formal wording could not supply. A property left to one son becomes a home made jointly with the friend whose routes already crossed Giovanni’s on the map. The map, the summit entry, the rock inscription, and the rebuilt refuge preserve different parts of a life; together, they let Pietro make a relationship in the present out of a father’s traces and a friendship given another chance.