Valerio Varesi - River of Shadows

Ghezzi looked out at the enormous sheet of water and felt almost afraid. “Where will he be by now?”

“Maybe at the mouth of the Enza,” Barigazzi said. “If my boat were in decent shape, I’d go after him. Maybe I’d manage to draw alongside

…”

“I don’t think we’d find anything good,” Barigazzi murmured.

No-one spoke. The black waters of the swollen river were flowing ever more rapidly, and the sandbank in the middle of the river was all but submerged. It was hard to see far beyond the moorings, but in the liquid darkness the impression was that the great basin, altogether visible in the days of low water, was already overflowing. The water level was just below their line of vision. It was possible to observe the current from above only from the main embankment itself, and the town alongside the river, with a vast mass of water looming threateningly over the houses, gave every appearance of being already inundated.

Several cars arrived and a dozen or so young men came in to ask what had happened to Tonna. They listened, then made their way back out, letting in a gust of damp air. They would follow the boat from the embankment in their cars, they said they could go faster than the current. By now the barge had made the flood a matter of secondary interest.

“Yes, I’m here… Are you sure? He hit the railway bridge? A quarter of an hour ago?”

Silence fell. There was no need for the boy to repeat what he was being told. Everyone instinctively grasped the situation.

“It’s what I was saying. He hasn’t even got as far as Reggio,” Barigazzi spluttered. “The riverbed widens there and the water is more sluggish.”

“The way things are going, they must have sounded the alarm all the way downstream to Mantua,” Vernizzi said.

A couple of car doors slammed shut, and the vehicles set off at speed up the embankment. In the beam of the headlights, the rain looked to be heavier still.

“If there’s a hole in the hull…” Ghezzi said hesitantly, “Tonna’s done for. He’s food for the pike.”

“With all the wheat he has in the hold, they’ll be flocking down all the way from Piedmont.”

“It was only a bump,” Barigazzi said. “It’s a tough old craft. If it goes into a spin, he’s in big trouble. It all depends on the rudder. And on the grip of whoever’s on the tiller.”

“If it starts spinning, the game’s up. The first bridge he hits side on, he’s going to get jammed, and he’ll be pulled under,” Torelli said.

“With some bridges, you only need to nudge the prow against them. With all the weight that’s aboard, he’ll bring the columns down on top of him,” the old boatman said.

“He’s passing in front of the mouth of the Enza,” the radio operator informed them.

“Let’s hope the extra current doesn’t push him over to the Lombard side,” Barigazzi said, as he peered into the emptiness by the jetty.

The conversation drifted on, one guess after another, each man in his mind’s eye going over that stretch of water which Tonna would have reached by then. Beneath it all lay one more troubling thought, as insistent as the rain which continued to fall or as the current which dragged everything in its wake. Finally it was Vernizzi who gave voice to a doubt which seemed dictated by a will not his own: “But he set off in such a great rush, and with that crazy manoeuvre…”

There followed a long silence, broken only by the sound of water dripping from the roof beams, until Gianna said: “Maybe it wasn’t Tonna at the helm.”

“It’s most certainly not like Tonna to collide with bridges…” Barigazzi said, his voice trailing off.

No-one drew any conclusions. Everything was so confused. The telephone rang: it was one of the youths who had gone off in a car. “Every town is on the look-out and a lot of people have climbed the embankment to watch the barge careering past,” he whispered into Vernizzi’s ear.

“You saw it?”

“Yeah, a short while ago. It seemed out of control, swinging about crazily, sometimes listing to one side, but the current’s keeping it on course. You can see where the paint came off on the side where it hit the bridge.”

“Is the cabin light still on?”

“Yes, still on. When the barge comes close to the bank, you can see in, but it’s hard to make anything out. Somebody said they had seen a man at the helm, but I don’t think there’s anyone there.”

Barigazzi sat calmly, absorbed in his own thoughts, resting his head on his left hand, going over the course of the river as though he could see it from Tonna’s bow. He imagined where it was at that moment, he saw the bridges looming out of the night, dark skeletons afloat on the immensity of the current. The conversation on the radio broadly confirmed his hypotheses.

“The carabinieri have what?… Closed all the bridges as far as Revere? The only one open is the railway bridge? They’re ready to suspend all shipping?”

“He won’t knock into anything,” Barigazzi murmured, who seemed to be elsewhere.

“He’ll crash into the iron arches at Pontelagoscuro,” Vernizzi said. “But in that case it’ll be tomorrow around mid-day before we get to hear about it.”

Silence fell again in the room. And they became aware of the rain falling even more heavily on the tiles.

Barigazzi was shaking his head, in the manner of the horses in the Po valley. “He’ll never get near Ferrara. Tonna will avoid the delta in these conditions. He’ll stop before then.”

Meantime, the telephone had rung again and Gianna was in conversation with the young men who were tracking the barge. “When?… One or more than one?”

Ghezzi had moved over beside her and seemed on the point of grabbing the telephone from her hand.

“They say that in the light from the cabin they’ve seen some shadows moving about. Maybe more than one, but it seems they haven’t been able to identify Tonna,” Gianna told the room.

Barigazzi’s imagination was still fixed on the river, so wide midstream that the banks were out of sight, on the craft tossed about on the surface of the water as carelessly as a leaf, on the unending groan of the hull, on the blind drift of the barge as it was battered from all sides, on the darkness. He imagined crowds of locals standing like sentinels along the banks in the rain, greeting the little light on the river even if it was no more visible than a bicycle lamp slowly passing along the embankment road on a foggy night. He felt the sideways jerk of the barge every time it ran into a tree trunk or into a stretch of swirling waters, and felt too the list it took on for a time before righting itself and straightening in the fast-flowing current.

He would not be able to see a thing because there was zero visibility. The Luzzara curve is wide and bent like the bondiola sausage. That was the most hazardous point, especially if the barge were indeed in the hands of some novice who had taken over from Tonna. There the current and the deep waters could throw anyone off course. Sluggish on the surface, the water, following the channels in the sands, flows faster below and pushes against the embankment. Without an engine, it would be impossible to avoid running aground, except by making a pre-emptive manoeuvre 300 metres upstream, hugging close to the bank on the Lombard side and holding tight. With anyone lacking the expertise, the barge would crash into the embankment like a stake being driven into the ground.

“Tell them to go and wait for it at Luzzara,” Barigazzi muttered. “It’ll be there by three in the morning.”

But he spoke so softly that no-one picked up his words. A gust of wind and rain shook the windows. “The libeccio, from the south-west,” Vernizzi said. “Always a bad sign.”