Enza Gandolfo - The Bridge

Bernie had two daughters: Catherine and Margaret. Their photographs were pinned to the board behind Bernie’s small, cluttered desk, with its stacks of messy files. Those girls were orphaned now.

Good men. Family men. Bernie and Slav and Bob.

After the tea they went back to helping with the rescue. Hope of finding the missing men was running out. Everything lying in the way of the bridge was pulverised. But Antonello didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to go home.

The remains of the bridge formed a rugged landscape, barren, bleak. Beneath the fallen concrete and steel, there were the relics of another world, another time, buried, already, in the past. They dug, they uncovered, they removed the rubble, but they could not resurrect that lost world.

It was well after midnight before they found Slav’s body. The weight of the discovery bore down on Antonello and he collapsed.

‘You fainted,’ the ambo told him when he came to. ‘You’ll be okay but you’re exhausted, and that knee needs to rest.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Just need a minute.’

‘Is there someone who can drive you home? Otherwise we’ll have to take you to the hospital, and they’ve already got more on their hands than they can handle.’

‘I’ll take him home.’ His father had been waiting for him. ‘Joe took your mother and Paolina home, he’ll be back with the car any minute.’

At the bungalow, Paolina ran a bath for him and heated some soup.

‘Please,’ he said to Paolina, ‘please, don’t say anything.’

‘Okay,’ she said, her hand on his shoulder as he sat at the table. ‘But eat something.’

He wasn’t hungry. He swallowed a couple of spoonfuls and pushed the bowl away, stood up, and walked into the bedroom, where he collapsed onto the bed. Sleep drew him but as soon as he closed his eyes, he saw the span falling, the men falling; heard their screams.

Things that were solid crumbled. Fell. Things that should’ve been said hadn’t been said. Problems had been ignored, wished away. The collapsing bridge, the falling men, played like a film on a big screen, over and over again in his mind, and each time, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t change the ending. He tossed restlessly for several hours. As soon as dawn broke, he climbed out of bed, careful not to wake Paolina, left her a short note, and went back to the bridge.

The dust had settled. The roadway was clear now. The bodies were gone. There was one police car and two news vans, but there were no reporters or cops in sight. On the road, not far from where Antonello was standing, an old couple held hands and watched the rescuers. A woman and her teenage son also stood close by. The boy held his mother’s hand and was trying to drag her away.

On the site, there were several crews at work removing large concrete rocks and carrying them with wheelbarrows and small trailers to the riverbank. A couple of men armed with oxyacetylene torches were cutting through the steel. There were two cranes lifting larger boulders off the site. A group of men in suits and hard hats — inspectors, Antonello assumed — were walking around the site and making notes. Two Salvation Army workers stood at a small table set up with tea and thermoses, listening to the news on the radio, where a journalist was talking about seeing the collapse from a helicopter: ‘It was as if a child had a tantrum with his construction set and bashed it to the ground.’ Antonello shuddered and moved away until the radio was only a dull murmur.

The two snaking arms of the bridge reached across the river, longing to be one. On the bank the fallen span was a twisted wreck, and the crumbled column was a mountain of rubble. The bridge was broken, mournful. If left for long enough, it would be devoured by the river.

Bob was one of three men presumed dead but not yet recovered. He was buried under tons of steel and concrete. Antonello lowered himself to the ground, bent his head, and closed his eyes. He’d known Bob for six years. Bob was his first boss; he was a mate, like family.

‘Always jobs for riggers,’ Bob had said at their first meeting. ‘You need a brain and lots of muscle. Your uncle Charlie says you’re a smart kid, a hard worker. And it’s hard work, no question about it. Not for a wuss.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Antonello’s father had instructed him to call Bob sir . But Bob was a big bloke who wore blue overalls and a green army beanie over his shoulder-length grey hair. He had a beard and a permanent tan. He didn’t look to Antonello like someone who would want to be called ‘sir’.

‘Call me Bob,’ he said. ‘Sir is for them white-collar blokes in suits, them blokes with diplomas.’ He stretched the last word out to its limit, dee-plo-mahs . ‘Those blokes are so far up their arses they can’t find themselves.’ He laughed and patted Antonello on the back. ‘I ain’t as scary as I look. You look a little scrawny, but we can build you up.’

They were standing on the footpath of a building site on a busy road in the city. There were several men working on the site, and Antonello could feel their eyes on him.

‘You’ll have to go to tech at night to get your certificates,’ Bob told him.

‘Okay.’ Antonello was nervous; most Australiani he had ever spoken to for any length of time — the doctor, his teachers, the teller at his parents’ bank — had made him feel as if he were the only one in the room that didn’t get the joke.

‘Are you sure? Can you read and write in English? You don’t seem to speak much.’ Bob winked, and Antonello noticed his eyes. They were as blue as the sea of the Stretto di Messina on the summer afternoons when he and his grandfather gazed at it from the seats in front of Fontana del Nettuno.

‘My English isn’t too bad. I think I’ll be right.’ Antonello remembered relaxing, even though he had no idea what it’d take to get his certificates and if his English would be up to it.

‘Well, you seem like a good kid.’

Antonello waited for Bob to add ‘for a wog or a dago’, but he didn’t.

‘Are you okay with heights?’

‘Heights?’ Antonello repeated.

‘Yes, heights. If you’re going to be a fucking rigger you need to be able to work up high.’ Bob pointed to the sky. ‘We spend half our bloody lives on the top of buildings, on steel beams, up high. Are you going to be okay with that?’

Antonello climbed his first ladder as a three-year-old, passing tools to his father, who was on a constant mission to fix and repair their house. First there was the stone house in Vizzini, which was old and damp and had an unending list of things to be done — loose tiles on the roof, cracked windows, broken shutters, leaves clogging up gutters… And when they bought their Australian house, he seemed to be in the process of painting and repainting either the inside or the outside every summer holidays. Antonello’s older brothers were better at staying out of sight.

‘I think I’m okay,’ he said. ‘I’m okay on the roof of our house and on ladders.’

‘The roof of your bloody house.’ Bob laughed and clapped his hands hard, and his whole body shook. ‘The roof of your house isn’t high. To a rigger, the roof of a house is like a fucking kid’s stool. I’m talking about fucking bridges, about multi-storey buildings, ship masts — though I’m not planning to do any ship work. A closed shop, that.’

‘I think I’ll be fine,’ Antonello said. He wasn’t sure — would he be fine?

‘Bonza. I’ll give you a go because Charlie’s a mate, a good bloke — best bricklayer this side of the planet — and you seem like an okay kid. But if you can’t do height work, you’ve got Buckley’s chance of bein’ a fucking rigger, remember that.’