To the Wedding (12 page)

A goods train passes. The signalman counts sixty-four wagons. Then the first drops of rain arrive. Very sparsely to begin with, each one like a water-berry which explodes on hitting the tarmac, scattering tiny water-seeds in every direction. He leans forward on the petrol tank and he lets the bike surge away. As they gather speed, the rain too falls faster and faster. The Po is so pock-marked the boatmen can’t see across. He is obliged to open his visor for he can see nothing. The rain hits his eyes and the skin around them as he reads PIADENA, the name of the town he’s entering.

The piazza is deserted. He dismounts and hurries into the nearest doorway for shelter. Once there, he shakes the rain off himself, and a class of school kids, who are waiting in the entrance hall for the storm to pass, watch him as if he were a comedian.

That’s rain, he says.

We’re used to it. It pisses and pisses on us here.

Is this your school?

Museum here.

Museum?

Museo Archeologico. We come here for our injections,
punture
. Out at the back there’s a Red Cross post.

Sometimes the Po floods! another kid shouts, floods and floods!

When the Po breaks a dyke here, nothing can stop it!

The last time was eleven years ago!

Fourteen!

Eleven!

Where’s the museum?

Through the big door there.

He pushes it open and steps into a long, dimly lit, deserted gallery, where he walks along a line of statues. The gallery has a roof of skylights, and the rain, which has turned to hail, clatters so fiercely that he puts his crash helmet back on his head for fear that the hailstones will smash the glass of the skylight.

He passes trays of ancient coins and shelves of pottery. Then he goes towards a display case and, after peering into it, he holds it between his arms as if it were a pinball machine and had flippers to operate on its sides.

Inside is a gold necklace lying on a scrap of dusty brown velvet. A typewritten card gives a date of 1500
B.C
. And adds a question mark.

The necklace is of golden tubes strung on a thread. Each tube is no longer than a child’s fingernail is wide. After each third tube, a beech leaf hangs from the thread, a leaf the same size as a real one. But the leaves of the necklace are of a gold beaten thinner than any natural leaf could be. And on them the leaf’s veins are incised, each incision shining like a platinum hair.

Worn around the neck, the leaves would flutter against her sternum and collarbone as she walked. When she stood still, they would stir as she breathed, light and metallic, with a crisp sound. To wear this necklace would be to feel protected by every leaf of every tree in the world.

The signalman searches for the hinges of the glass lid and its lock. He takes out a knife from his pocket. He examines the underneath of the case. He hesitates. Finally he lifts the whole thing off its legs. Inside, the leaves of the necklace stir. With his arms around the case he takes several steps with the glass case against his chest.

I heard a woman’s voice in Homeric Greek: It’s so long, Kallias, since you sailed. Where are you? Come close. I undress and I take off my necklace, my gold necklace of leaves, and much later—after everything I choose not to remember whilst you are away, perhaps after we have fallen asleep once—I lie on my back, my hair over the cushions, and I turn so my left shoulder’s in the air and my right cheek’s against the sheet, like this you are beside me and behind me, and you lie with your left thigh raised between my two, and it presses upwards so I ride on it, and my right leg I trail behind me till it finds your left calf and, our ankles touching, we cross our two feet and your left arm comes under mine to hold my breast and the hand of your other arm comes over me to hold the other one, with your mouth on the nape of my neck and your nose in the hollow of my occipital, like the two of us are one, Kallias, my left hand holding your arse … Kallias.

The signalman in the museum puts the case down. He would like to steal the necklace. He’d like to buy it. He’d like his daughter to wear it. He’d like to give it to her. He’d like her to have it forever. And it will stay nevertheless in the ramshackle museum of Piadena.

The streets outside smell of dust washed away. The swallows are flying as high as the bell tower of the white church in the piazza, and, as happens after a thunderstorm, people have come out of their houses to examine what’s there as if a new era had dawned.

Three youngsters have taken possession of one of the stone benches: two young men in white T-shirts and a woman wearing a quilted waistcoat. They smile, they hug their knees, they lean a little against one another and they wait together, as they often wait. In small towns like Piadena on this plain, where the skyline hides nothing, they wait for the moments during which life counts. When they arrive, these moments, they come and they pass quickly. Afterwards, nothing is quite the same and they wait once more. Time here is often like time for athletes who prepare for months or years for a performance which lasts less than a minute. Now they watch the motorcyclist drive across the piazza and leave their town.

Z
dena is on the fifth-floor landing of the wide staircase which has neither carpet nor wallpaper but a polished wooden handrail. She has already put her suitcase by the head of the stairs. Through the half-open door of her flat, her glance lingers on the mirror and her desk and the lace curtains of the grand windows and the armchairs in which her friends sprawl and talk, and on her coffee tables chaotic with papers. Wearing a smart gabardine trench coat, she turns the key in the lock very slowly so as to make the least possible noise, like a mother leaving a room on tiptoe when she has put her child to sleep.

Gino wants us to get married. I have told him a hundred times—No. Last week I said: All right. I remembered Gino’s grass. It hangs above my bed.

Afterwards we’ll go on a trip together, he said.

Where?

I haven’t decided, and if I had, I wouldn’t tell you. It’ll be a secret. A surprise, he said.

I know where I want to be married.

Tell me.

Where the river Po goes into the sea!

Sì, he said.

We’ll hold hands! I said, that’s it, that’s all.

I have an aunt who lives in a place called Gorino. You can’t be farther into the sea. We’ll get married from her house.

In June, I said.

June the seventh.

Gino knows what day of the week every date in the year is. It comes from working the markets.

Friday, June the seventh, in Gorino, he said.

T
he way Jean Ferrero is driving makes me remember Nikos. Nikos from Gyzi. We used to swim together—this was before I went blind. Nikos particularly liked diving into the sea from the rocks at Varkiza. When he walked solemnly to the edge and stood there, his two feet together, taking a deep breath, it was as if he had left his body. He was absent from it. He had given his body to a diver and he, Nikos, was elsewhere. After he had dived, when he clambered out of the water in order to dive again, it was the diver who was wet, not him. Nikos was still somewhere in the air watching the sea, the diver, the rocks and the sun. And it’s the same with the signalman as he rides between Viadana and Bergantino. He has left the saddle, he is in the air, and he is watching his bike, the
road and the pilot. The road is a small one on the north bank of the Po.

We climb the mountain above the school, we place our feet very carefully so no stones roll and we make no noise except our breathing, then the sentinel won’t hear us coming, and when we’ve climbed to the ridge if they’re there today, we’ll see the marmots. The teacher says they woke up last week. They wake up when the snow melts. Without it they feel cold, they feel hungry too, they haven’t eaten anything for five months, they’ve used up all their fat and their bones ache. So, they rub their eyes and their blood comes pounding back. The marmot sentinel is standing up. He is going to whistle. He has seen us. Who goes there? he asks. Friend, I say.

When the sentinel asks now: Who goes there? I answer: The Plague.

Signalman and bike as they flow and turn beside the great river have become a single creature, the gap between command and action no more than that of a synapse, and this single creature, elbows and wrists relaxed, black thorax joining red torso, toes down and soles of the feet facing the road behind, is still watched over by Jean Ferrero who, in the sky, carries the pain he will never lose, even if at
this moment, looking down at his own driving, he feels free.

Papa’s bike is very large. Large as a goose, wide and low on the ground. I love his bike and I sit behind him. When my neck is tired, I rest my head against his back. It’s our bike which makes the earth tilt as we go past the sawmill in Maurienne, fast, fast.

Near the ferry at San Benedetto Jean Ferrero stops, locks the bike and walks towards the river. It is a kilometre wide. By the bank runs a dyke. When such dykes were built during the last century, they were patrolled whenever there was a risk of flooding. A patrol consisted of two men, provided with a shovel, a sack, a hunting horn and, in the night, a lantern.

Jean climbs the dyke. On the other side, more or less level with the river, runs a track like a towpath with a grass verge and small trees. He runs down, and there he is cut off from all sound except that of the water.

When the Po flooded in 1872, four thousand men, and one hundred women, who sewed pieces of canvas together, worked for seven weeks to close the breach.

Jean Ferrero comes to a row of tip-up cinema seats fixed into the earth a few metres from the water. They are
stained with bird-shit and their metal fittings are rusty, but the seats still tilt up and down. He sits in one, leans back and gazes at the Po. A blackbird sings in a tree a little downstream.

It was worse than the soldiers in the train, Papa. It was after we’d been to Athens. I heard from Filippo, a friend whom I met at the hospital and who was sick, dead-sick like I am, that in Milano they’re dispensing a new drug to replace AZT, and I wanted to find out more about it. Gino was going to come with me and, at the last moment, he couldn’t because he had to go and buy at an auction of Indian sandals, the importer had gone bust and Gino thought he could get a bargain. So I went alone. I saw a doctor at the end of the afternoon after I’d waited all day. He told me to leave my papers with my latest blood count, the number of lymphocytes CD4, etc.