To the Wedding

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.

When I see her, she’s so beautiful I want to weep.

Who told you? demands Federico.

Told me what? I’m saying she’s beautiful.

Then don’t talk about weeping.

What’s the matter with you, Federico?

Begin the eels, woman.

When the fire’s hot enough I’ll begin, not before.

A klaxon sounds, the van arrives and Roberto shouts from the driving seat to Federico standing in front of the house: Where’s the kitchen, Count?

In the next field. Come and have some coffee first.

The van has woken up the other women: Leila, Marella and Zdena. Federico was the only man to sleep in the small house that night. He slept on the sofa. How the others managed he doesn’t know. He only knows that his sister insisted upon giving Ninon her letto matrimoniale. Tonight the fiancée must be alone, she said.

When the sun is high enough above the horizon to light the grass on top of the dyke, but before there are any shadows in the village square, the other market friends of Gino will arrive in their vans: Luca, the pastry cook; Ercole, the jeweller who also sells spices; Renzo, the cheese merchant with his nana; Gisella who trades in all the silks of Asia; and Scoto who sells only watermelons and listens to them as if they were oracles. Streetsellers, whether we sell tamata or melons, scarves or meat, have certain things in common. We all know how to get attention, how to joke, how to get up early and how to set ourselves up anywhere where there’s a chance of a stream of people. When we get tired, we long for silence; yet silence we fear, as actors fear empty theatres. With my white stick I wander among Gino’s friends and feel at home.

They have parked the vans in a circle on a patch of land which makes me think of the basement where Zdena went to buy her birdsong instruments in Bratislava. This one is an open-air basement and the ceiling is the sky, but it’s lower than the sea and lower than the village square where the church and the war memorial stand. In the middle of the circle Roberto, the butcher, has begun cooking the lamb. The carcass is turning on a spit over a massive brasier of wood embers. From time to time he bastes the meat, with a spoon the size of a hat, from a bucket of marinade he has prepared. Federico occasionally works a pair of bellows. A ring of men in immaculate white shirts watch and commentate. The roasting meat smells like every feast day since feasts began. The women chatting in the vans are putting the final touches to their hats and make-up. In the house Leila has been working on the bride’s dress for two hours.

The marriage service in the church of Gorino will take place at 11:30 a.m.

Afterwards a hundred people, wedding guests and villagers, will be waiting in the square. Opposite the church porch is a massive plane tree. Around it have been arranged tables with dozens of sparkling glasses and, along one edge, dark green bottles of vino spumante. Federico is systematically turning the glasses the right way up. Certain men are born hosts and they find it difficult to be either guests or spectators. Such men often lead rather solitary lives — gangsters, deep-sea fishermen, cattle dealers. Federico is a solitary. He only put on his splendid pinstripe suit when he saw the curato go into the church and the organ started playing. Now that the ceremony is over, he pours sparkling wine into the glasses, for he knows he can do it better than either of the waiters. They spill too much.

Kids from the school have come to watch. They have never seen so many strangers in the village, not even when a stray coach arrives in the summer and the tourists get out to look at the lighthouse. Today there are women in hats like actresses wear on television. Today there are men with roses in their buttonholes. And there is jewellery everywhere.

What are they waiting for?

Nothing special.

Did you see the banquet? I went down to the tables behind the house. There’s everything you can imagine — melons and prosciutto and asparagus—

Gelati?

The sheep is cooking.

It’s a lamb.

What are they waiting for?

It’s just beginning, this is what weddings are like.

How do you know?

My sister got married. It goes on all night, all night.

One of the boys will make a fucky-fuckie sign with his fingers. The boy whose sister got married shoves his open hand up against the other one’s nose.

Friends of Ninon and Gino are standing by the church porch and their fists are full of rice to throw over the newlyweds as soon as they appear. The rice probably comes from Vercelli, the town from which Jean Ferrero’s parents emigrated in the 1930s.

Jean, standing behind Zdena, surveys the crowd like a delegate at a political meeting; throughout his whole adult life he has only worn a shirt and tie when attending Congresses. The word Comrades is on the tip of his tongue. Impulsively he puts his large hand on Zdena’s shoulder. She touches it immediately with her fingers which ache.

Suddenly the bride and bridegroom are there. A rain of rice. A woman claps, carried away by memories. The curato beams.

The air plucking at Ninon’s veil, her white flaring skirt with its quivering lace hems, her loose billowing sleeves buttoned tight around her wrists, the glistening silver shoes on which she walks so delicately as they come forward into the square, that she seems to be half tottering and half gliding, and the manner in which Gino places his feet, as if any one of his steps might have to suddenly anchor them both — all this suggests the force of a mysteriously gentle yet irresistible gale. Have you noticed it blowing at other weddings? At this one the expression of the couple’s eyes has been swept by the gale too.

Zdena and Jean gaze at their daughter and their son-in-law and at this moment their own faces are as astounded as children’s.

They’re married, a man shouts, Long Live the Bride!

A picture please, says the official photographer from Ferrara, a picture, please, with the bride holding her bouquet.

Fetch the bouquet! She left it in the church.

It’s blown away, whispers a little girl, not knowing why she says this.

Gino takes Ninon’s hand, moves closer, and standing side by side, her shoulder pressing against him, the two of them wait for the gale to pass.

Give him a kiss, calls out Ercole the spice man, come on, give him a kiss.

Ssshhh! They’ve a lifetime for that. Let them be. Tranquillo.

She’s so lovely, declares Mimi, the wife of Luca the pastry cook, so lovely she should have ten children! She counts the babies on her ten plump fingers.

Nobody has ten children these days, Mimi.

The young know things our parents didn’t.

It must have taken hours and hours to do her hair in all those little plaits.

What are they called?

People call them dreadlocks. But they’re wrong. Never seen so many.

The waiters are handing out glasses of sparkling wine.

Marella catches Ninon’s eye and sends her a kiss with her hand. In her own eyes there are tears.

After the last photo, Ninon pulls at her husband’s arm. The gale has abated. Her husband leans his head towards her and she says into his ear: So we’re running together, Hare, are we? I have to do everything today … everything, you understand.

He will show her the lucioperca lying on the silver platter, varnished with aspic, shining as if moonlit, every scale silver or gold, bejewelled with almonds, coriander leaves and ruby-red pimentos, and he will turn the platter so Ninon can see the lucioperca standing on her tail, waiting like a dancer in a long clinging dress for the music to begin. And at this moment Ninon will take hold of Gino’s finger, and with the finger she will slowly trace down her own body the lateral line he taught her. When she releases his finger, she will tap with the toe of her shoe on the grass under the apple trees and she will order him: Look at me, husband, I’m your wife now. And then she will laugh. A laugh which comes from another time and from a language that has been lost.

They will sit side by side at the large table, surrounded by thirty people, and she will notice everything which is happening. Nothing will escape her. Wedding feasts are the happiest because something new is beginning, and with the newness comes a reminder of appetite, even to the oldest guests.

Renzo and Ercole will carry Emanuela out of the house on their shoulders and she’ll hold, high up above her head, a plate as wide as a bicycle wheel, piled with eels cooked in her own fashion. She cuts them into thick slices and impales them on a spit with sage, bay leaves and sprigs of rosemary, and bastes them before a fierce fire with their own oil, till their skins turn almost black. Then she serves the eels on the plate as wide as a bicycle wheel with the Mostarda di Cremona which is made from mustard oil, melons, pumpkins, little oranges, apricots, according to a recipe which dates back to the time of Sikelidas. Wonderful, said the same Sikelidas, wonderful the spring winds for mariners who long to set sail …

Ninon will be the first to clap, men will cheer, and Emanuela, the widow, her face flushed from the fire, will suddenly remember her husband saying to her: If you’d like to marry me, I have this house and a boat …

The two men lower the widow to the ground and she places her dish on the table in front of the newlyweds and Ninon kisses her, and only then does Emanuela take the hem of her apron to dab at her eyes.

Jean is distributing bottles of spumante in blue buckets full of broken ice: the plastic buckets are the ones Aunt Emanuela’s husband used on his fishing boat before he died. After Jean has opened a bottle and filled the nearest glasses, he sits down beside Marella. Other bottles pop as they are opened under the apple trees around them.

I’d know you were Ninon’s father anywhere, says Marella.

We look alike?

It’s the way you smile.

For a moment Jean is shy, lost for words.

You’re her best friend, he says at last.

In Modena, yes, I am. Have you noticed? Nobody can take their eyes off her, even when they’re eating.

She’s the bride, says Jean.

And she’s so determined, so determined to live. She says this quietly, their two heads close together. You have a tough daughter, Signor Ferrero.

You’ve been a great help to her.

I’m her friend, yes, and I feel closer to her than I ever have. But what could I do? I invented the word STELLA. And I told Gino to be patient. I told him she was dead. Dead. When you learn what she learnt, it kills you. I told him he had to wait and perhaps, just perhaps, she might have a second life, if he really wanted her, I added. And you know how he replied? He surprises me, Gino does, he never hesitates. Her second life, he said, will begin on our wedding day. They’d never thought of marriage before. Now look at them.

Zdena is sitting beside Scoto, the watermelon seller.

Happy? asks Scoto, are we happy?

Zdena lowers her eyes.

The sun is in your eyes? He asks, miming the dazzle and offering her his sunglasses. She shakes her head and finds her own sunglasses in her meticulously arranged handbag.

Everyone is eating and talking, joking and drinking. The cascading noise of feasts which nobody can recall until they are fortunate enough to find themselves at another.

Good? The melon seller asks Zdena.

First time, says Zdena.

Behind Scoto’s sad joker’s eyes there’s a love of questions which cannot be answered. A great mystery, he says, like everything.

Like some things.

Many things, Signora, and the most mysterious of all creatures is the anguilla.

He looks to Jean on the other side of the table, hoping he will translate.

Misterioso.

Jean translates sentence by sentence.

They have no lungs, begins Scoto, and they live for days out of water. Nobody knows how. They swim, swim very fast, and they cross overland. When they make a hole in the earth, they make it like a corkscrew tail first!

Zdena, as she listens to the story of the eels, gazes at her daughter.

The females are larger than the males and when they are ready to lay their eggs their bellies turn silver and their faces fill out and they smile … When the high tides come, they taste the saltier water and it makes them want to leave the river for the sea. This is the sacred moment for catching them. Millions of anguille swim into the traps which are called lavoriere. Yet some escape. We don’t know how. Everything about these creatures is mysterious.

If only I could take her place, whispers Zdena to Jean.

The ones who make their way to the open sea reach the Atlantic and swim across the ocean to the Sea of Sargasso, which is deeper than anybody knows, and on the ocean bed there, they lay their eggs and the male eels fertilise them.

Ninon suddenly laughs at a joke Emanuela has told her. She laughs as if laughing is the joke, and the joke is spinning the world round faster and faster so that only the joke holds and doesn’t go dizzy and gets bigger and bigger like a man’s prick, and throws off light and flecks of laughter and grains of sugar and with its head back swallows vino spumante, and plays with the bubbles and gives them to every comer with a kiss when they join her laughter.

The little eels start their long journey home, says Scoto. It takes them two, three, perhaps four years. And when they arrive here, Signora, they’re still no larger than one inch of shoelace!

And the parent eels? asks Jean.

Dead in the Sargasso Sea. The little ones come back alone.

I can’t believe it, says Zdena.

Again she hears her daughter laughing. Zdena lets her head fall back abruptly. Beyond the branches of the apple tree above her, there is the dazzle of the sky and, for one brief instant, without understanding anything, Zdena is happy.

I propose a toast, announces Federico, getting to his feet, a toast to our children’s happiness.

Happiness, Scoto says, come here happiness!

Then they will eat the meat. The sea, which farther south becomes my Aegean, is calm. Imperceptibly between the fingers of the Po’s hands, the sea slips into the lagoon where the inhabitants fish for mussels and where the shallow waters once drove sailors crazy with the desire to leave this swamp and sail across the world. The lagoon is lapping the dyke which protects some scattered houses, the church and the village square with the bench by the bus stop. From the church tower you’d smell the meat roasting. Lower than the square and far lower than the lagoon is the orchard of three apple trees beside the house. Beyond the house is the grass basement where the vans are parked and where Roberto and Gino are carving the lamb. I hear a knife being sharpened and men’s laughter. The smell of the fire hangs everywhere. Around the table in the orchard the women guests in their finery and the men in their shoes of softest leather sit or stroll or loll, yet all of them are in orbit round the bride. She doesn’t let them go, or they don’t let her go? As with a player on a stage it is hard to know which; both are true. And her dress glimmers amongst the boughs of the apple trees.

Roberto and Gino will carry the meat, sliced and served on boards as square as an arm is long, into the orchard. Their faces are stained and streaky. With the eating of the meat something changes at the feast, a last formality gives way to something older. Rose pink, infiltrated with garlic, heady with thyme and wood smoke, the lamb has an animal taste of young flesh and fresh cropped grasses.

Eat for a lifetime! Ninon will sing out. Gino and I, we went to the mountains together, we want the one there, we said, the one with the black nose, because we’d felt her with our hands, that’s our lamb! Where has Roberto gone? Drink to Roberto who has cooked for us!

Roberto kisses the bride, holding his blackened hands behind his back so as not to dirty her dress.

Everyone at the table in the orchard sits down to eat. With the meat they will drink the dark wine of Barolo. The guests start to touch each other more often, the jokes pass quicker. When somebody forgets, somebody else remembers for him or her. They hold hands when they laugh. Some take off things they were wearing before — a tie, a scarf, a jacket, a pair of sandals which have become too tight. The cutlets on the board demand to be picked up and stripped clean with the teeth. Everybody shares.

The wedding guests are becoming a single animal who has fed well. A strange creature to find in a widow’s orchard, a creature half mythical, like a satyr with thirty heads or more. Probably as old as man’s discovery of fire, this creature never lives more than a day or two and is only reborn when there’s something more to celebrate. Which is why feasts are rare. For those who become the creature, it’s important to find a name to which it answers whilst alive, for only then can they recall, in their memory afterwards, how, for a while, they lost themselves in its happiness.

Luca will fetch the wedding cake from his van. It has five tiers and is decorated with sprays of orange blossom in icings of three colours. Written in moon-silver on the topmost face is the name: GINON.

Only five letters, he says, and you’re both there! I suddenly saw it when I finished doing the flowers. Do you know what I’m going to do, Mimi? I said. I’m going to write GINON. The two of you in one!

And this becomes forever the name of the thirty-headed creature in the orchard.

Ninon will offer a slice of the cake to everyone who has come to the wedding, offer it herself. They will make a wish, they will remember, they will relish the sweetness of it. On each piece there are sugared petals of orange blossom.

She carries the plate high against her bosom. Before each guest she stops, says nothing, smiles and lowers her eyelids with their long lashes so that the guest has the impression the bride has inclined her head. Behind the plate she is holding, the white buttons of the bodice of her dress tug in their little nooses of white cotton. The top three have come undone.

The thirty braids on her head, which bob up and down and gyrate as she walks, have taken so much patience and time to plait that she proposes to let Gino only undo one a night after they are married. Each night they will choose which little lock.

On her left hand she is wearing the turtle ring from Africa, and today the turtle is coming home, swimming towards her, his head pointing to her wrist. On her right hand is the wedding ring which has never been worn, which Gino slipped on to her finger five hours ago, and which she will die with on her hand.

Gradually everyone stops talking as they watch her. Her gait is so light and at the same time so solemn.

I’m leaving you, the poetess Anyte said, I’m leaving you, across my eyes death draws his black scarf, it is dark where I’m going.

The kids come out of school. Several tear across the square to look down into the orchard.

They’re still at it!

The bride has taken off her thingamajig! See him — the one there on the grass — he’s drunk.

At weddings there’s always people who go drunk, they wait for the excuse, my mum says.

When I get married I’m going to—

What’s she doing?

When you get married! First you have to find a boy big enough—

She’s waving to us.

She’s telling us to come down.

They tumble down the bank, yelling and laughing. When Ninon approaches them with the plate, they become a little shy. They take a piece — yet are not sure whether to eat it now or keep it for later.

Eat! orders Federico, it’s the best you’ll taste in your lifetime.

Chico, who is twelve and the son of the Fiat garage man, stares at her so intently that he forgets to lift his hand and take a slice.

What, his eyes are asking, what is she underneath? He has never been so close to a bride before. What is she underneath? Is she the same every day? She is already half undressed. Or is she different, never the same twice? He knows how they fuck, there is nothing mysterious, he has seen enough strip cartoons, but she’s so small, she’s scarcely bigger than him and the mystery is on her skin, it shines and comes from her legs and her body and her face and her strange hair and the million things she can do with them. It shines and glistens and has a temperature and a smell and all the time it changes with the expression of her eyes and with what her fingers are touching when they touch. To the man she marries she is going to give something. If he shuts his eyes he can guess what. It’s not what you feel with the girls, when you put your finger there. If he shuts his eyes, he can guess. She’s going to give him a secret which is the bride. All the soldiers know every bride is the same. Minas dressed up, about to give their secrets to men in the big marriage beds. The thing is, each secret is a secret which nobody can guess with their eyes open. So it goes on. All of her is the secret and the secret is sweet and warm, with nothing between grazing, nothing keeping them apart and everything underneath helping. Pure like orange flowers, the bride’s secret, tasting of sugar. In the tree underneath the dress, which is undone, a little bird is telling what?

What’s your name? Ninon asks him.

Chico.

Don’t you want a piece of my wedding cake, Chico?

It is the hottest time of day. Even the butterflies perched on poppies on the bank of the dyke flutter more slowly. Scoto who sells watermelons goes to fetch some jugs of iced tea from one of the vans. Gino has found a hose with which he is filling a red plastic bath with cold water. Some kids are already plunging their heads in and shaking the water from their hair.

When Ninon passes on her way to the house, her skirt gets soaked and on her legs she feels a pattern of coolness where the lace holes of her stockings have let the water through.

In the bedroom which last night was hers, she dabs on to the back of her neck some of the perfume her father gave her. Saba. Where they will sleep tonight she doesn’t know. Gino says it’s a secret. Perhaps they don’t have to sleep …

Zdena has followed her daughter into the house.

Lie down for ten minutes, my little one, says Zdena, who has come into the room. You mustn’t get tired.

They’re honking! The musicians are coming. Ninon hums the tune: Last Friday Drives Monday Crazy. They’re as wild as Gino, she says. Drives Monday crazy …

Don’t tire yourself out, says Zdena, there’s all night still to come, dear. Lie down for ten minutes.

Tired! Today I’m tireless. I could do more today than you’ve done in all your lifetime, Mother.

That’s true.

You didn’t even marry, did you? Not even when you left and went back. Perhaps you will one day, Maman. I wish that for you. A passionate man with big shoulders whom you don’t know … and one day you’ll tell him about your daughter Ninon and her wedding in this house and the banquet in the orchard.

Zdena can’t stop the tears coming into the corners of her eyes.

Take some of Papa’s perfume. Ninon holds out the flask to her mother. Saba it’s called. Ninon is alive, you can see that. This morning Ninon was married, you can see that. Don’t talk about Ninon being tired.

A lorry will draw up by the plane tree in the square. Five men will climb out with long hair and sleeves with fringes. They seem too tired to walk or talk. Two lean against the lorry, one lies on the bench by the bus stop and the other two look up at the sky. Perhaps they are waiting for their own music to remind them of why they promised to come to play in this godforsaken square.

A long time ago, a Roman consul gave a dinner party for eighteen guests in the hollowed-out trunk of a plane tree. It was in the eternal shade of a plane tree that Zeus changed himself into a bull in order to seduce Europa. The plane tree I’m talking about in the square at Gorino was planted only a few decades ago.

The musicians unwind their cables, plug in their circuits. One of them climbs up into the tree. Musicians, like streetsellers, seek crowds, set up their stands, perform and drive on. The difference is that what they offer, nobody can put in a bag. It’s in the air. Yet for it to have a chance of being there, an electronic precision is needed: levels, points, mikes — all have to be carefully checked. This evening the five men go through their routine sluggishly, as though obliged to work for somebody else. Maybe for the gods on whom they can’t depend.

Never come so far, complains the singer, our next gig will be on a raft at sea! The knuckles of his left hand are bruised and in places the skin is broken. He neighs into a mike, testing it.

Can fish hear? asks the guitarist. The guitarist wears thick glasses and has myopic eyes. I don’t think fish can hear, he says, answering his own question. Then he strums on his guitar and looks questioningly at their driver who works the mixing desk.

“Where the Po ble ble blee runs into the sea shoo see shee,” hums the singer, who had a fistfight last night. He adjusts the height of the mike.

“It’s the end of the world,” grooves the bass, the only one of them who has a jacket.

The hell it is! yells back the singer at him. Gino’s got family here. I was at school with Gino, and for him we’d play in Kathmandu if he wanted. We’re in Gorino, right?

Ninon comes across the square towards the five men. In some places sand has been blown on to the tarmac, in other places grass grows through its eruptions and fissures, yet she walks towards them as though she were crossing the tiled courtyard of her palace. Her composure is such that nobody can judge her.

Thank you, she says, for coming tonight.

She fixes her eyes on the drummer called Fats. He has the striking leanness that sometimes goes with percussion. To play a battery well, a man listens all the time to silence, until it splits itself open into rhythms, eventually into every conceivable rhythm. It does this because time is not a flow but a sequence of pulses. Listening to that silence often makes a man’s body thin.

Before any of the others can answer, the drummer takes his sticks and does a shuffle on his toms.

The back rhythm of his run — like a child running very short-legged and very fast down several corridors — will recall to Ninon her plan, when she was a child, to have a house in which every window would have a view on to the sea. The run goes on and on.

When he finally brings it to an end with a cymbal crash and the last echo is lost, and they hear again the cicadas sizzling in the abundant grass behind the church, Ninon says: Come and see your friend Gino, my husband.

And Fats the drummer adds two words: Tonight stars …

Gino and Ninon will be the first to dance. The bride, she will announce to him, is going to dance, would my husband like to join me? And they dance alone for everybody to see and remember.

Soon other couples join them. The music is loud. It brings the village to the square. The waiters serve wine. Federico is organizing a game of leapfrog on the grass for the youngest kids. The sun is low in the west, and more and more people dance on the deck: a platform of planks which has been laid on the square in front of the band so that the dancing floor is level. The boards were borrowed from the fish market in Comacchio. There are many spectators, including a man in a wheelchair. Only when Gino and Ninon are lost in the crowd does the music come close to them.

What have you done to me? she whispers and touches his face to bring him closer too.

It is strange how the place, where music comes from, changes. Sometimes it enters the body. It no longer comes in through the ears. It takes up residence there. When two bodies dance, this can happen swiftly. What is being played is then heard by the dancers as if it were a recording, a millionth of a second late, of the music already beating in their bodies. With music, hope too enters the body. All this I learnt in Piraeus.

On the deck in the square in Gorino the dancers dance under the night sky. Fats has found in the silence the fastest pulse yet.

Zdena dances in the arms of the signalman who, because of his resemblance to a certain actor in a Czech film, is destined, she believes, to become her friend. Wherever Jean leaves a foot trace, hers is beside it.

The guitarist leans backwards to prevent his guitar flying off like a toucan into the night sky.

Tonight Zdena’s fingers don’t ache. Her hips and shoulders talk wordlessly to Jean’s of everything which hasn’t happened. Later she will tell him about the thrushes and ask his advice about whether or not she should give the bird-calls to Ninon.

The beat enters Ninon’s bloodstream defying the number of lymphocytes, NKs, Beta 2s. Music in my knees for Gino, her body says, music under my shoulder blades, across my pelvis, between each of my white teeth, up my arse, in my holes, in the curly black parsley on my crotch, under my arms, down my oesophagus, everywhere in my lungs, in my bowel which goes down and my bowel which comes up, there is music for Gino, music in the little bones of my fingers, in my pancreas and in my virus which will kill, in all we fucking can’t do, and in the unanswerable questions my eyes ask, there is music playing with yours, Gino.

The band stops and Gino faces Ninon and he says: We can do it, without a word about happiness, can’t we?

She hesitates, then she kisses him full on the mouth, tears of happiness in her eyes.

What shall we do before eternity?

Take our time.

Dance without shoes?

She throws her shoes off the deck. Then, turning back her sleeves and spreading her dress discreetly around her, she sits down and puts her arms under her skirt to unfasten her white lace stockings and unroll them off her legs. Whereupon without music she dances barefoot on the boards which the fishwives at Comacchio have scrubbed so many times that they are as smooth as a tabletop. Dancing like this Ninon is more vagabond than bride. As if some rider had come to take her away on a horse, as the bald man, in the coach going to Venice, had predicted.

Marella and Leila are pouring out more spumante. The singer wipes his head with a towel. The guitarist examines his right hand; there is a smear of blood across his plucking fingers. The drummer is walking alone along the eastern dyke. The stars are out. Dante says: Within its deep infinity I saw ingathered and bound by love in one volume the scattered leaves of all the universe.

Ninon finds her father and kisses him — as if with him and him alone she can be a girl again.

Papa, tomorrow the first day of my married life, will you take me for a ride on your bike?

I brought a spare helmet.

Fast?

Fast, if you want.

I’m never frightened with you.

More villagers will come on to the deck. The musicians will play again. Pairs of old women will dance together so as to feel the music in their bodies one more time.

Music began — all the rembetes know it — with a howl lamenting a loss. The howl became a prayer and from the hope in the prayer started music, which can never forget its origin. In it, hope and loss are a pair.

Why do they have to play so loud? asks a fisherman who has put on an immaculate white vest and on whose shoulder an eagle is tattooed. When I was young we danced to an accordion. It was enough. They’ll go deaf all these young people. Gesù Maria, look at how she dances!

They play loud, says the man in the wheelchair beside him, to keep out the din of the world. That’s the truth.

What? demands the fisherman.

It’s you who are deaf!

Look at her!

The crippled man swivels his wheelchair round to face his habitual opponent who is also his brother-in-law. Today, he repeats, they have to shout down the din of the world! They have to block it out by putting the volume up. He swivels the chair back to watch the dancers with enchantment. Only then can they say what they have to say. There wasn’t the same din when we were young. We didn’t have to block anything out. The world was quiet, wasn’t it? Here it was very quiet.

Gesù! She’s meant to be the bride, isn’t she?

She’s in love! says the man in the wheelchair as if on the point of breaking into song, in love, Raimondo!

More like a tart. Puttana!

Ninon is dancing barefoot with her arms round Gino’s waist and her fingers under his belt. All her braids revolve and twist like games for them both.

When she has her first attack of pneumonia and she is at home in bed after Gino has gone to market, she will pray to God: The world is wicked — how can anybody not see it? — the world is wicked. And Christ is the salvation of the world, her soul will say wordlessly, not was, not will be, is. In a space larger than the universe, the space made by all of us with our eyes shut, all people living, all people who lived, all people who will live, there in the darkest hole, filling a space larger than the universe, he dies and saves. The air is touching my whole body, hurting it. It’s still early, the cars are starting up. Gino will be home at four.

From his stool, the drummer hits constellation after constellation. The guests tell each other they have never been to such a wedding. Ninon raises her arms and puts her hands into Gino’s hair. Both are on tiptoe.

Gino will push her in a wheelchair like the one the fisherman’s brother-in-law has, when she doesn’t any more have the strength in her legs to walk, and Federico will invent and weld on to its armrests a special table so she will be able to eat in the chair.

Now she touches Gino’s cheek and turns to dance alone for him. Poised like a bird facing the wind, she lets herself veer and be swept back over the same spot again and again and again whilst her hands pluck the rhythms from the air.

One night she will say: I am going to die.

So am I, Gino will reply.

Not so soon as me. I’ve done nothing with my life.

You’ve made many people happy.

I want to drink, Gino.

Orange juice?

No. Gin! A whole bottle!

The band is playing Last Friday Drives Monday Crazy. Ninon is in Gino’s arms. The pain in the slow number carries in its heart centuries of irrepressible hope.

In some Italian market town, a mother pushes a pram on her way to the butcher, her legs not yet tanned. She stops to say hello to Marella who peeks into the pram — the hood is up and has a white lace fringe which she cut from her wedding dress to keep the sun out of the baby’s eyes — and Marella makes a chirping noise through her pouted lips and says with a smile: He’s the spitting image of Gino, isn’t he? This, which will never happen, is in the music she’s dancing to on her wedding day.

When time is pulse, as music makes it, eternity is in the gaps between.

She will be reclining under the arcades in the hospital garden and her friend Filippo in his cherry-red velvet cap will look at her with his soft irritated eyes and say: What’s hardest is not being condemned to die. What’s hardest is how we’re old. I walk like an old man. I pull myself up the stairs like an old man. I clutch my stomach like one. Listen to me and shut your beautiful eyes, Ninon. An old fool of eighty, you’d say, stumbling over his words. Between one spring and one autumn we age fifty years. That’s the hardest, and that’s the work of our little troop of diseases, each one of them pitiless. Till they find one of us, Ninon, they’re regular, uniformed illnesses, almost innocent. When they find us they plunder and massacre. And Filippo will look at her, his hands trembling, his eyes tender. They don’t attack us, they hate us, Ninon. These ones — the SIDA cases — can’t defend themselves, the illnesses tell each other, they’re shit, these ones. And Filippo will take off his cherry-red cap and put it back on his head at a more debonair angle than ever. And so we age so terribly. For the rest, don’t worry, love, it’s all right. For the rest, Filippo will say sadly, we’re pure light.

Ninon’s front, from chin to toe, is touching Gino’s and it is she who moves his legs, with her arms hanging straight down.

She will try to comb her hair and each morning she will ask for her wristwatch to be put on, she will have a morphine drip and with her eyes closed her skin will feel his hand stroking away the fear and his hand will feel the warmth which is all that will remain like a kiss around the bones of her loved body. She will weigh seventeen kilos and her eyes, with their long lashes in their dark hollow sockets, will gaze into his.

Through a cascade of sounds in which everything slows down, the singer, who had a fistfight last night, screams out: “… drives Monday crazy.”

Let’s do an eel, Gino, we can dance the eel! Hop from boulder to boulder, lay me down in the field and follow the bank, skateboard down the steps of the station where our friends are on strike, hip-hop into the van and leap with all the gear into bed, squat in the café behind the market, climb the pyramid, twist in my arms sweet, cut a rug down the train with the dead soldiers who have come to our wedding, tear along the corridor of offices that don’t want to know us, fly between water and sky across my mouth, which said I do, I take this man to dance with, squat so our thighs make a step and stepping on the step you can reach the light in our kitchen to change the bulb, dance till our guests are gone, do the eel again, for ever and ever, Gino.

She will not be able to speak any more. To put a few drops of water into her dried mouth he will have to use a syringe. She will not have the strength to move anything, except her eyes, which will question him, and the tip of her tongue to touch the drops of water. He will lie beside her. And one afternoon she will find the strength to raise her arm so that her hand rests in the air. He will take her hand in his. The turtle ring will be on her fourth finger. Both their hands will stay in the air. The turtle will be swimming outwards, away. And his eyes will follow her into ever.

The musicians are packing up. One or two couples dance to the music still in their heads. Ninon stands before Gino. A little before he was carrying her against his chest and he had a hard-on. Her wedding dress is soiled like a flag after a battle. Her skin glistens. Her feet are black. She shakes her head as if shaking water out of her hair. Her thirty little locks go wild. She stops. They no longer gyrate, only quiver. Now, she says, now’s the time for you to undo one …