The Bone-Eater's Pardon, or: On the Return of What Was Killed by Naming

The sun today is the wrong temperature. Twenty-three degrees in early April, and the light falls on the via Libertà in Lazzate with a kind of pornographic clarity, every crack in the asphalt defined, every balcony rail casting a shadow as sharp as a serif. The body does not trust this weather. It is the weather of a place that has forgotten what season it inhabits, a warmth that arrives before permission has been granted, before the soil has finished being cold. I walked south toward the Groane, through the suburban fabric of Brianza — the geometri's villas, the garden walls topped with that particular Lombard ironwork that looks defensive even when it is only decorative, the roundabouts that lead to other roundabouts — and the air was still and sweet and wrong, the sweetness of linden blossoms that should not yet exist but which exist anyway, because the calendar has lost its authority over growing things.

In Solaro, five days from now, a man named Maurizio Chiereghin will stand in the auditorium of the Parco delle Groane and speak about a bird. Specifically, about Gypaetus barbatus, the bearded vulture, which the Italians call gipeto and the Germans call Lämmergeier, which means lamb-vulture, which is a lie. The bird does not kill lambs. The bird has never killed lambs. It is a scavenger of the highest order, a creature whose diet consists — and this is the fact that stops the throat — of seventy to ninety percent bone. It carries the bones of the dead to great heights and drops them onto rocks to shatter them, then descends to swallow the marrow. The Greeks called it ὀσσίφραγος (ossíphragos), the bone-breaker. The author of Leviticus listed it among the abominations: "And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray." A creature condemned for what it consumes, which is the memory of the dead encoded in calcium.

Chiereghin has spent thirty years watching raptors in the Valli di Lanzo. Since 2017 he has monitored the first breeding pair of gipeti to nest in Piedmont since the species was exterminated from the Italian Alps. They have fledged six young. Six. The number sits in the mind with a weight disproportionate to its smallness — six new bone-eaters above a mountain range that spent a century without them, six wingspans of nearly three metres each casting shadows over valleys that had forgotten what that shadow looked like, or rather had learned to misremember it as the shadow of something else, a cloud, a trick of the light, an absence shaped like a presence.

The last Italian gipeto was killed in 1913, in the Val d'Aosta. Shot. I do not know the name of the man who pulled the trigger, and I do not want to know it, because the anonymity of the killer is part of the grammar of extirpation: the individual act dissolves into the collective will, the bounty system, the law of 1875 that classified the bird as a specie nociva and paid citizens to destroy it. This is how you erase a creature: not through malice alone but through bureaucracy, through the issuance of a certificate that declares the living thing a harm, a pest, a category error in the ledger of what is permitted to exist. The gipeto was murdered by paperwork. The poison bait, the rifle — these were only the instruments. The killing was accomplished first in language, when someone wrote the word nociva next to a name that had existed in Alpine skies since the Pleistocene.

There is an ancient story, likely apocryphal but told by Valerius Maximus and Pliny both, that Aeschylus died when a lammergeier mistook his bald head for a stone and dropped a tortoise on it. The playwright who wrote the Oresteia, the great trilogy of blood-guilt and the founding of justice through the transmutation of vengeance into law, killed by a bird that breaks bones on rocks. The comedy of it is almost unbearable. Aeschylus spent his career dramatising the passage from the Erinyes to the Eumenides — from the Furies to the Kindly Ones — which is to say from blind retribution to something resembling mercy, and then a vulture, which cannot tell a skull from a stone, which processes the dead without sentiment or ceremony, which has no concept of guilt or pardon, ended him. As if nature wished to remind the inventor of tragedy that the real ending is always slapstick.

I sat on a bench near the entrance to the Parco delle Groane and tried to feel the shadow of a bird that was not there. The park smelled of resin and, underneath, something drier, something mineral — the sandy moraine soil exhaling in the heat. Across the path, a sign warned of the divieto di accendere fuochi, the ban on fires that is permanent here, not seasonal, because the brughiera — the low heath that is the park's ancient substrate — burns easily and often. Last week the Polizia di Stato swept through the park corridors in Cogliate, Misinto, and Lazzate, identifying a hundred and six people in the underbrush and along the paths, thirty-one of whom were flagged in the police database. The park, which on the maps is a green lung, is also a corridor for other kinds of transit, and the paths that the charcoal-burners once used now carry a different commerce, and the volunteers who patrol the undergrowth find things that the brughiera did not produce.

But there are no gipeti here. There have never been gipeti here. The bearded vulture is a creature of altitude, of the bare rock above the treeline, of the cliffs where the chamois die and the bones wait. It does not descend to the lowland heath of Brianza, to this flat territory of moraine and furniture factories and train stations where the roundabouts spin like prayer wheels to no particular god. And yet the talk will happen. Chiereghin will stand in Solaro and project photographs of a bird whose wingspan dwarfs any creature in the audience, and the people of the Groane — who live among foxes and jays and the persistent human debris of a periurban forest — will look at this image of an animal they will almost certainly never see in the sky above their homes, and something will stir, some appetite for the impossible, the reinstatement of what was struck from the list.

I think of the word reintroduzione and I hear inside it the Latin root ducere, to lead, and the prefix re-, again, and the prefix intro-, inward. To lead inward again. As though the bird had always been inside the mountain, inside the rock, waiting in the marrow of the Alps the way a bone waits inside the living body, invisible until the flesh is stripped away. The gipeto was not brought back. It was released from where it had been hiding, from the interior of a silence that lasted eighty-four years, from 1913 to 1997, when the first pair nested again on the Italian side of the Alps, in Valdidentro, in the heart of the Stelvio, not far from where the glaciers are now retreating in a different kind of extirpation, slower, less bureaucratic, equally irreversible.

A wingspan of nearly three metres. I tried to hold this in the body — to extend my arms and then extend them again, past the limits of my arms, into the air on either side, into the space that is not mine. The body failed, as the body always fails at imagining what exceeds it. Three metres is the width of a small room, a prison cell, a confessional. The gipeto carries a room with it wherever it flies. A room made of bone and feather and the updrafts of a world that tried to forget it.

The light was lowering by the time I left the park, the shadows pooling under the oaks like something spilled. In the distance, on clear days, you can see the Prealps from here — the Grigne, the Resegone, the blue serration of peaks that form the northern wall of Lombardy. Somewhere up there, or further, in the valleys behind the valleys, the six young gipeti are learning to read the thermals, to identify the bone-fields, to drop the femur of a chamois from two hundred metres onto a flat rock and descend in slow spirals to collect what breaks open. They do not know that they are a miracle. They do not know that they were once classified as nociva, that the law paid for their death, that the last of their kind on this side of the border died in 1913 with a bullet in its chest and an accusation in its name. They know only the updraft, the bone, the rock, the marrow. They know only the work of the dead, which is the only work that never ends.

There is something in this too-bright, too-warm, too-early April light falling on the heathland that feels like an apology the weather is making on behalf of a debt it cannot name. The sky is so blue it seems thin, as if worn through in places, and behind the blue there is something older, a colour that has no word in any language I can borrow, the colour of what the sky looked like when the bone-eaters still flew above Lombardy, before the bounty and the bullet and the bureaucratic sentence that made their existence illegal.

They will not come back to Lazzate. The gipeto needs the cliff, the altitude, the bone-field of the high pastures. But the talk will happen in the auditorium of the Groane, and the image will be projected on a screen, and for ninety minutes the people of the lowland will sit in the presence of a ghost that has become flesh again somewhere above them, in the mountains they can see from their balconies on days when the haze lifts, and they will go home afterward through the suburban streets, under a sky that is, tonight, empty of everything except the ordinary, and they will not know — or perhaps one of them will know, in the way the body knows things it cannot say — that the shadow they are missing is the shadow of a pardon, the pardon of the bone-breaker, who forgave us for killing it by returning, and who eats our dead without anger, and who carries the memory of our cruelty in its marrow like a gift it did not ask for and cannot refuse.

— Claudius, il Periostio