Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City

SUMMER
6. A Saturday of sun, sand, and sleep

"For your rheumatism," the Public Health doctor had said, "this summer you should take some sand treatments." And so, one Saturday afternoon, Marcovaldo was exploring the banks of the river, looking for a place where the sand was dry and in the sun. But wherever there was sand, the river was only a clank of rusty chains; dredgers and derricks were at work: machines as old as dinosaurs digging into the river and emptying giant spoonfuls of sand into the contractors' dump-trucks parked there among the willows. The conveyor line of buckets rose erect and descended overturned, and the cranes lifted on their long neck a pelican-like gullet spilling gobbets of the black muck of the river-bed. Marcovaldo bent to touch the sand, crushed it in his palm; it was wet, a mush, a mire: even where the sun had formed a dry and crumbling crust, an inch below it was still damp.

Marcovaldo's children, whom their father had brought along hoping to put them to work covering him with sand, couldn't contain their desire to go swimming. "Papà, papà, we're going to dive! We're going to swim in the river!"

"Are you crazy? There's a sign: 'All swimming forbidden.' You'd drown, you'd sink like stones!" And he explained that, where the river-bed has been excavated by dredgers, there remain hollow funnels that suck the stream down in eddies or whirlpools.

"Whirlpools! Show us the whirlpools!" For the children, the word had a jolly sound.

"You can't see one; it grabs you by the foot, while you're swimming, and drags you down."

"What about that? Why doesn't it go down? Is it a fish?"

"No, it's a dead cat," Marcovaldo explained. "It floats because its belly is full of water."

"Does the whirlpool catch the cat by its tail?" Michelino asked.

The slope of the grassy bank, at a certain point, opened out in a rather flat clearing where a big sifter had been set up. Two men were sifting a pile of sand, using shovels, and with the same shovels they then loaded it on a black, shallow barge, a kind of raft, which floated there, tied to a willow. The two bearded men worked under the fierce sun wearing hats and jackets, but torn and moldy, and trousers ending in shreds at the knee, leaving legs and feet bare.

In that sand, left to dry for days and days, fine, cleansed of impurities, pale as the sand at the seaside, Marcovaldo recognized what was needed for him. But he had discovered it too late: they were already loading it onto that barge, to take it away…

No, not yet: the sandmen, having completed their loading, broke out a flask of wine, and after passing it back and forth a couple of times drinking in gulps, they lay down in the shade of the willows while the hour of greatest heat passed.

"As long as they are sleeping, I can lie down in their sand and have a sand pack!" Marcovaldo thought, and he ordered the children, in a low voice: "Quick, help me!"

He jumped on the barge, took off shirt, trousers and shoes, and burrowed into the sand. "Cover me! With the shovel!" he said to the children. "No, not my head; I need that to breathe with. It has to stay outside. All the rest!"

For the children it was like building a sand-castle. "Shall we make sand-pies? No, a castle with ramparts! No, no, it makes a nice track for marbles!"

"Go away now!" Marcovaldo huffed, from beneath his sarcophagus of sand. "No, first put a paper hat over my forehead and eyes. And then jump ashore and go play a bit farther off, otherwise the men will wake up and drive me away."

"We can tow you down the river, pulling the barge-rope from the shore," Filippetto suggested, when he had already half-untied the mooring.

Marcovaldo, immobilized, twisted his mouth and eyes to scold them. "If you don't go away right now, if you make me get up from here, I'll beat you with the shovel!" The kids ran off.

The sun blazed, the sand burned, and Marcovaldo, dripping sweat under his paper hat, felt, as he lay there motionless, enduring the baking, the sense of satisfaction produced by painful treatments or nasty medicines, when you think: "The worse it is, the more good it's doing me."

He dozed off, rocked by the slight current that first tautened the mooring a little, then loosened it. In this pulling to and fro, the knot, which Filippetto had already half undone, became undone altogether. And the barge laden with sand moved down the river, free.

It was the hottest hour of the afternoon. Everything slept: the man buried in the sand, the arbors over the little jetties, the deserted bridges, the houses rising, windows shuttered, above the embankments. The river was low, but the barge, driven by the current, skirted the muddy shoals which rose now and then; otherwise, a light bump on the bottom was enough to send it back into the flow of water, gradually becoming deeper.

One of these bumps made Marcovaldo open his eyes. He saw the sky charged with sunlight, the low summer clouds passing. "How they run," he thought, of the clouds, "and there isn't a breath of wind!" Then he saw some electric wires: they too were running, like the clouds. He looked to one side, as much as he could, with the hundredweight of sand on top of him. The right bank was far away, green, and it was running; the left was gray, far off, also in flight. He realized he was in the midst of the river, voyaging. Nobody answered: he was alone, buried on a sand barge, adrift, without oars or rudder. He knew he should get up, try to land, call for help; but at the same time the thought that sand-packs require absolute immobility held him, made him feel committed to stay there as long as he could, so as not to lose precious instants of his cure.

At that moment he saw the bridge; and from the statues and lamps that adorned the railings, from the breadth of the arches that touched the sky, he recognized it: he hadn't realized how far he had come. And as he entered the opaque region of shade that the arches cast, he remembered the rapids. About a hundred yards beyond the bridge, the riverbed made a drop; the barge would drop down the falls and overturn, and he would be smothered by the sand, the water, the barge, with no hope of emerging alive. Still, even at that moment, his greatest concern was the sand cure, whose beneficent effects would be promptly lost.

He waited for the plunge. And it came: but it was a thud coming upwards from below. On the brink of the falls, in that dry season, shoals of mud had collected, some greening with slender clumps of cane and rushes. The barge ran aground, on all its flat keel, flinging up the whole load of sand and the man buried in it. Marcovaldo found himself hurled into the air as if by a catapult, and at that moment he saw the river below him. Or rather: he didn't see it at all, he saw only the teeming crowd of people who filled the river.

On this Saturday afternoon, a great throng of swimmers crowded that stretch of river, where the shallow water came only up to the navel; children wallowed in it, whole classes of them, and fat women, and gentlemen who did the deadman's float, and girls in bikinis, and young toughs who wrestled with each other, and mattresses, balls, life-savers, inner-tubes, row boats, kayaks, rubber boats, motor boats, life-saving boats, yawls from yacht clubs, fishermen with nets, fishermen with rods, old women with parasols, young ladies in straw hats, and dogs, dogs, dogs, from toy poodles to Saint Bernards: you couldn't see even an inch of the river's surface. And Marcovaldo, as he flew, was uncertain whether he would fall onto a rubber mattress or into the arms of a Junoesque matron, but of one thing he was certain: not even a drop of water would touch him.