To the Wedding

17

A long the Po there is such a heaviness in the air that the swallows are flying at knee level to collect the weighed-down insects. In the villages along the SS 343 the dust and the hens wait, one leg raised, beaks open. Everywhere there is electricity. The bar of a level crossing slowly descends, its bell ringing and its red light flashing. Jean Ferrero slows to a halt, puts both his feet on the ground and straightens his back.

Okay, Papa, why not? Take me to Athens for Easter. If I could, I’d take a trip round the world. Like that I’d know what I was leaving. You have enough money for Athens?

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.