18
Zdena 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.
19
The 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.
I was going to sleep in Milano at a girl friend of Marella’s, so before taking the metro out to the suburbs, suburbs are the same everywhere, I said to myself: Why not make a trip to the centre? I’d never been there. You took me, Papa, on the bike to Genoa when I was a kid, and this year to Athens, but never to Milano. The Duomo was flood-lit and it made me think it had just landed, landed there in the empty piazza.
I guess it looked the same when it was first built — maybe more so with the masonry and the spires and statues all new, but in those days nobody would have been able to describe it like this, for they didn’t know about outer space and had never heard of things as big as cathedrals flying and landing! All they could do was to whistle at the new cathedral, or bow their head, or sell things to the crowds who flocked to stare up at the new wonder of the world. Or they could pray.
I went in and I lit a candle for all of us who have it. When I came out it was dark so I strolled through the arcades. The boutiques were closed and there were few people about. I was wondering whether to have an ice cream in a bar which was still open, when a dog bounded up and pawed me. Not a dangerous dog, simply heavy and difficult to push away. I patted him, I lifted his hound’s paws up and I shoved.
He won’t hurt you! a man said. The man had a dog’s lead and wore one of those fake yachting caps that Gino calls Boaters’ Bananas.
Simpler to keep him on your leash, no?
He spotted my accent. You’re a visitor to our city? Let me offer you a glass of the best champagne.
I drink with friends only. And I pushed him off like I pushed off the dog.
Exactly! he said, only with friends! We’ll go to Daniele’s over there, he keeps the Widow on ice for me.
I’m going nowhere with you.
A coup de champagne, what’s the harm? He grasped my arm.
I think you’d better let go. He had his jaw and mouth thrust forward and his fur collar hid his neck. Let go!
Give me one good reason.
Because I’m asking you to.
You’ll be asking me something else in a moment, Beautiful, and by the end of the evening, you’ll be asking me many things.
Get off! I said.
Give me a good reason.
Get off, I have SIDA.
The force with which he threw me to the ground startled me so much — my head hit the mosaics. I think, Papa, I lost consciousness. When I came to, the man was standing above me. Somewhere behind him were a middle-aged couple. They must have been walking home through the arcade. I remember the window of a pen shop.