The Lovers by Paolo Cognetti

Author:Paolo Cognetti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

20

The Loggers

In the woods, though, there were no exotic Nepalese, there were men from Bergamo and Valtellina, and Moldovans who spoke Italian with a Bergamo or Valtellina accent. Fausto climbed toward the site among hundreds of trees marked red by the forestry department because they were broken, crooked, sick, or at risk of falling, and he listened to the woodsmen shout. Even the chain saws had a language: after a month he had learned to recognize the voice of a Stihl, a Husqvarna, the cut on one side of the trunk and the main cut on the other. One of the saws had a drier sound, as if someone had gotten the fuel mix wrong. A cut was interrupted by the blows of a mallet against the wedge slipped in so the trunk wouldn’t bite the blade. Then came the cry: Timber! and Fausto stopped. He heard the crackle of the fracture, a sinister noise that made you look for shelter, and finally the thud of the fall. A thud muffled by June’s already thick foliage. Now he saw where the tree had fallen, not far from him; between the branches of those left standing a piece of the sky that hadn’t been there before opened, and the sun lit up the undergrowth.

He reached the shipping container that served as a kitchen and removed the fresh bread and groceries from his rucksack. In the middle of four blackened stones he piled larch sprigs picked up along the path. He took a sheet of newspaper, crumpled it and set it on fire, then slipped it under the twigs and stayed there blowing until the flame kindled to life. When that beard of moss growing on the trees was dry, it caught fire better than paper. For Fausto the smell of burning larch was the best: a scent of childhood summers that always brought him back home.

The chef has arrived, one worker said, sniffing the air.

Ciao, chef! another shouted from a distance.

The loggers had the same tastes as the chairlift workers, always pasta, meat, and potatoes. Still, Fausto liked to change things up with his variations and make himself liked. That day he made potatoes alla Mario, a recipe taken from a story by Mario Rigoni Stern: he boiled them in the copper pot until they almost fell apart, then he fried up four chopped onions in a lake of butter and threw the potatoes in. He let the steaks go on the stove with rosemary. The pot was used again to cook two kilos of spaghetti; he threw them in at a quarter to noon. There was also a call for lunch that the guys from Bergamo, who were sticklers for punctuality, taught him. It’s hard! he shouted at noon, meaning the polenta was firm, though that day there was spaghetti alla carbonara, then he drained the pasta and threw it into the frying pancetta. The chain saws fell silent one after the other, it was as if they could smell the aroma.

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