Valerio Varesi - River of Shadows

The rain was getting heavier still, and now the beams were reverberating.

“Have you seen it go by?” the radio operator wanted to know. “What? It’s passing right now? Look and see if you can make out anyone in the cabin. No? The light is on, but the cabin is empty? Just a while ago, someone on the embankment told us there were signs of movement inside. Yes, yes. I agree. If Tonna were in charge, it would not be sailing this way. And would not have touched the railway bridge either. Tonna? Who can tell? Perhaps he’s on board or maybe it’s his grandson who has taken over… What do you mean, have we thought of that? Of course we have, but in this weather who could have seen him run away?… Yes, I know, he’s an old fox, but the whole business still looks funny to me…”

Everyone in the room at the boat club was listening in, but no-one spoke. It was as though they were listening to a dispatch from a war zone. After glancing at the clock, Barigazzi got up and went out. It was past his time for checking the stakes. From the doorway, he looked back and grimaced. For him everything was clear.

Ghezzi went over to the window to stare out. It was as though black ink was dropping from the sky. All that could be seen was the leaden water in motion with a cargo of flotsam and jetsam on the surface. Further on stood the poplar wood, a shadowy mass against the horizon, the only relief in a flat countryside.

“The water’s on the floodplain,” he said. He could not see it and was only guessing.

“Has been for the last half an hour,” Barigazzi said.

“We can only hope it flows slowly,” Torelli said.

“It’s rising constantly, so it’ll be gradual,” Barigazzi assured them. “It’s already knee deep in the poplars. The ponds will be overflowing.”

Each one of them imagined the water gushing out over the floodplain, like water bubbling over from a pot cooking cotechino at New Year.

“By now,” Vernizzi said, “it will have drenched the monument to the partisans below the embankment.”

“It’s just giving it a blessing.”

The radio croaked back into life. At Casalmaggiore, the river had reached the “alert” level, and the houses on the floodplain were being evacuated by the military. The elderly had been carried off, sometimes forcibly, in the firemen’s dinghies. People who had barricaded themselves on the top floor were putting up some resistance. It was not so unusual for the river to come calling every so often to wet the feet of those who lived along its banks.

The jeep driven by the carabinieri made its way along the road on top of the embankment and then turned down towards the boat club. The maresciallo came in, his overcoat dripping. “I’ve received the evacuation order for everything in the main embankment zone,” he announced. Including the club, it was clearly understood. No-one said anything, and the maresciallo took the silence as a challenge.

“Do you think that after seventy years on the Po, I don’t know when it’s time to jump over the embankment?” Barigazzi said at last.

The maresciallo looked along the row of bottles behind Gianna and realized what kind of people he was dealing with. If the river had not managed to scare them off, what chance had he?

“Go and see the people who bought the poplar wood. They might need advice from the prefetto. All you’ve got here are experts, or fishermen’s huts.”

The maresciallo’s frown expressed his annoyance, and he changed tack. He pointed at the radio. “Where is he now?”

Barigazzi glanced at the clock, then said, “He’ll be near Guastalla. But don’t worry. He’s not going to collide with the bridge, because the current there’ll carry him into the middle of the stream, just right for navigation.”

“My colleagues will shut it anyway.”

“They can do what they like. It’s only a matter of hours. Sooner or later you’d have to close it off because of the flooding.”

The man uttered a curse, but against a different target, the feast of All Souls, when everybody wanted a holiday, leaving him with an empty office. And then against the flood which gave him extra work when there were only two of them left on duty.

“Every year around All Souls the river swells up,” Barigazzi told him. “It too wants to remember its dead, and goes to pay them a visit in the cemeteries. It caresses the tombstones for a few days, shows the funeral chapels their reflections in the waters it has brought up from the riverbed. It stops off inside the graveyard walls, before settling back, leaving everything clean and sparkling.”

The maresciallo listened in silence to that unpolished elder, who could turn poetical when he was talking about his own world. He observed for a moment those hard-headed men whose lives had been spent on the banks of the Po and decided it would be a waste of his time talking to them or attempting to lay down the law. They reminded him of the fishermen in his own land, in Sicily. He set off in his jeep.

The clock above the bar struck midnight and Barigazzi continued travelling in his mind along the route taken by the barge. The current would flow more slowly where the river spreads out into the floodplain. Tractors and lorries had begun to move along the embankment road. There were carts loaded with furniture covered roughly with tarpaulin to protect them from the wind and rain. The leafless poplar trees were blowing about wildly at the wide curve in the embankment, behind the stone-crushing plant, where once the stables for the cart horses had stood.

“The partisans’ monument will be well and truly underwater by now,” Vernizzi said.

“Like a sea-wall at high tide.”

“The time will come when no-one will remember it any more and the river will carry it all away. Then the stone-crusher will crush it as well,” Torelli said bitterly.

“Tonna’s being carried off by the current right now,” Barigazzi said, as though talking to himself. He reckoned that, with the current as strong as it was, he would be just about at the mouth of the Crostolo.

Meantime the radio provided an accompaniment to their talk. “It went under the arches at Boretto quite smoothly?… As though Tonna were himself at the helm?”

“It’s done that so often it could manage by itself,” Ghezzi murmured.

The telephone rang, and Gianna repeated aloud what she was hearing.

“There’s not a soul to be seen in the cabin… The light is still on. It’s much weaker now?… The barge has swung round and started listing. It ran into a whirlpool?… And now has righted itself.”

“A marvel of a hull, that one,” Barigazzi said. “It can hold the current without anyone working the helm.”

“Once you clear the Becca bridge, you can go to sleep until Porto Tolle,” Vernizzi said.

Another silence, heads nodding in wonderment. Then Barigazzi said: “I don’t believe Tonna’s piloting that boat.”

He got to his feet and went out to check the midnight level on the stakes.

On the road on top of the embankment, there was more traffic than on a Sunday. The carabinieri, blue light flashing, drove up and down several times, escorting lorries and tractors. Inside the misted-up vehicles, there seemed to be mothers holding in their arms babies wrapped in brightly coloured blankets, and men with bags over their shoulders. Voices on the radio were recommending that some kind of surveillance of the empty houses in the villages should be organized.

“Another eight centimetres,” Barigazzi told them as he came back.

The radio operator asked for a line and communicated immediately the news that the river was a good three metres above low-water level.

“Did they say anything about Tonna?” Barigazzi said.

“He’s still midstream.”