To know where the big fish are, you have to know the river, you have to feel the river’s instincts. The fish are doing exactly the same thing in their way. More times than not, they outwit you, le carpe, i lucci.
Can you see there, where the silver scales go a little darker like a narrow path, along his flank? That’s called his lateral line and with it he listens to the river.
I tell Ninon she has a lateral line too and I trace it with my finger. With her it begins under her ear, goes under her arm, circles the little hill of her breast, runs down the steps of her ribs, keeps equidistant between navel and hip, slips by the border of her bosco and tears down the soft inside of her thigh to her ankle. For months she couldn’t laugh. For months she wouldn’t let me near her.
You have two lateral lines, I tease her, left and right and they have eyelashes all the way along them!
You’re going mad, Gino, she says, this fucking illness has sent you out of your mind.
So I hold her in my arms and tell her how under the silver scales there are pores which have little buds like our taste-buds in the mouth, only these ones on the lateral line have tiny tears at their ends and around the tear duct there are lashes, some soft and some stiff and they record every quiver in the current, they send messages about any change in the water, the slightest stir of another body moving, or a stone diverting the flow of water. The lashes are real, I tell her, no madness. Ninon has eyes which are sometimes green and sometimes golden.
I told a doctor I met in the market about the dates and her last lymphocyte count and, according to him, the medico in Parma, we can perhaps count on two, three, three and a half years of clapping — provided she has things to clap for! After that the sickness begins. Nobody can be sure.
Tie together the court-bouillon of bay leaves and thyme and fennel, add white wine, peppercorns, sliced onions and a little lemon peel. The fish saucepan is Aunt Emanuela’s — you could cook a tuna in it.
It’s the biggest lucioperca I’ve ever seen caught anywhere. I knew they were there, the big carnivores, this morning. Don’t ask me how. Up against the bank where a larch had fallen into the river and had been shaved by the water of all its bark. A bad place for casting, for the line could easily tangle with the tree. Be careful, I told myself. Go slow. Me, the crazy man watching his line sink, one, two, three, three and a half metres down till the little lead earring touched the riverbed. I was using a cunning sliver of roach as bait and this I played, jerking the bait to jump like a living gudgeon, little leaps along the silt, as if wounded, never allowing the line to go too slack, little leaps like from one black note to another on a piano, and Lucioperca believes it’s a wounded gudgeon, he opens his enormous mouth and he swallows the hook. The carnivore outwitted. Then the fight is to stop him winding me round the tree. Each time I forestall him. Foreseeing his every move. I forget everything else. Look at him now on the kitchen table!
We’re going to live the years with craziness and cunning and care. All three. The three Cs. Matteo, the boxer, says I’m mad. He says I’m throwing my life away. That’s what most people do, I say, not me.
The fishes, I tell her, listen through their flanks to the river they were born into. I told her this and she fell asleep, smiling.
31
The signalman was waiting on the quayside at Chioggia when the motonave arrived. Jean Ferrero and Zdena Holecek spotted each other before the ship was tied up, but they didn’t wave. She came down the gangplank and walked across the paving stones to where he was standing beside his bike, by a white bridge which is like the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, except that it is not roofed. He has taken off his helmet.
They look into one another’s eyes and, seeing the same pain, fall forward into each other’s arms.
Jean! And her voice, so helplessly expressive, carries his name across an entire continent.
Zdena! he whispers.
On the bike, as they drive along the road to Gomacchio, their sorrow becomes a little lighter. Like any pilot with a passenger behind, he feels her weight inclined against his back. Like any pillion, she has placed her life in his hands, and this somehow relieves the pain a little.
I turn and I turn and I can see it in the mirror. It’ll take your breath away, my wedding dress!
32
The wedding in Gorino hasn’t taken place yet. But the future of a story, as Sophocles knew, is always present. The wedding hasn’t begun. I will tell you about it. Everybody is still asleep.
The sky is clear and the moon almost full. I think Ninon, staying in the house of Gino’s aunt Emanuela, will be the first to wake, long before it is light. She will wrap a towel round her head like a turban and wash her body. Afterwards she will stand before the tall mirror and touch herself as if searching for a pain or a blemish. She will find none. She holds her turbaned head like Nefertiti.
As the river Po approaches the sea, it becomes two hands, its waters dividing into ten fingers. Yet it depends a little on how one counts. One could say four hands with twenty fingers. The waters change all the while and stay the same only on the map. The land is often lower than the river or the sea. In places where the land has been drained, tomatoes and tobacco have been planted. On the wilder strips, plants grow with little pods instead of leaves: antediluvian plants, the cousins of seaweed. The area is sparsely populated — for it is scarcely a place. The village of Gorino is on the branch of the river which is called the Po di Goro.
The ancients believed that the first act of creation was the separation of earth and sky and this was difficult, for earth and sky desired one another and did not want to separate. Around Gorino the land has become water to stay as close as possible to the sky, to reflect it as in a mirror.
The houses where the people of the Po delta live are small and makeshift. Salt eats away their building materials. Many of them, instead of a garden, have a net stretched on a frame as large as the house, and this net can be lowered by a winch to catch fish. The sky is full of birds — cormorants, grebes, terns, herons, ducks, little egrets, gulls, who eat fish.
In Emanuela’s small house, Federico is the next one to wake and, as the waters reflect the first light, he starts to carry benches and trestles and wooden planks out of the house into an adjoining field where there are three apple trees. Later he will fetch Gino’s market parasols with their wooden spokes, each one with a diameter of over three metres.
Aunt Emanuela, her hair in curlers, is making coffee in the kitchen. Today’s the day! she says, smoothing the ground coffee flat with a teaspoon in the machine, today’s the day!
Through the dark kitchen window shine the distant headlights of a vehicle approaching along the dyke, above the roof of the house, like an airplane coming in to land.
Better be Roberto, Federico says to his sister, we should start cooking soon, it needs a good four hours even five to cook a lamb properly.
Roberto knows his job, Federico.
Best butcher in Modena, Gino told me, his scaloppini are leaves from the Bible!
I’m glad Gino didn’t sleep here, one of you is enough.
You cook your eels, Emanuela, and look after the women.