“I saw you running off, but I didn’t have time to…”
“The sprint was never your strong point.”
“Listen, I wanted to tell you something that I forgot earlier on. A small detail, just to fill you in.”
“What is it?”
“In the firefight, there were three Fascists killed as well, but one of them, a man from Brescia, they never found his body. The story went that he might have fallen into the Po and that his body got caught up in the sands or was devoured by the fish.”
Soneri drove on in the mist, deep in thought. The encounter between the two embankments took place in mid-November. In the first days of the same month they had burned down the houses at San Quirico
…and that body that was never found…the circulation of documents among the partisans of the G.A.P… the dead bodies savaged by knives
…”A murky business”, the partisan bulletins had defined it some years later as they strove to reconstruct what had happened along the Po, perhaps on a day of mists like today.
On the way, he saw signs for San Quirico and turned on to the high, narrow road with a ditch on either side which ran above the countryside. He found the old man in the same position as on the previous occasion, as though he had not moved in the interim. He was still staring straight ahead, hands cupped over his walking stick. His wife saw the commissario and opened the door without a word of greeting. When he was close beside him, the old man became aware of his presence and began to explore the space around in search of him, but when Soneri took a seat beside him, he turned to peer once again into the mist. The woman stayed to observe them for a few moments, and then discreetly withdrew.
“Do you remember the battle of ’44, the one that took place in the floodplain between the embankments?”
The old man abruptly raised one arm. It was obvious that he remembered it perfectly.
“Was it ever known with certainty what happened?”
“The only people who know that were those who were there, but they are all dead.”
“Did you, any of you, ever speak about it in the past?”
“There was a lot of talk, yes,” replied the man, still gazing in front of him into the mist. “Do you think we wouldn’t have spoken about it? On the feast of All Souls, the Fascists had burned down the houses in San Quirico and the Blackshirts marched up and down the plains of the Po like masters. People accused the partisans of staying in hiding, like rabbits. It was then that Ghinelli and the others decided to make them pay.”
“An ambush?”
“Along the embankment, near Torricella. They thought they had the Po to help them retreat, and the brush on the floodplain to hide them. They knew them both intimately.”
“Was Ghinelli in command?”
“He was the most decisive one. It was his idea to carry out the ambush. The other commanders were not much in agreement because it might have exposed civilians to reprisals. And anyway, it was very risky.”
“Why were they defaced in that way?”
The old man raised both hands as he had done previously, letting go of the walking stick which fell against him. “Nobody knows, nobody was ever able to explain that. Perhaps they had accounts to settle with Ghinelli and the others from earlier times. Hatred added to hatred, but none of the Blackshirts ever admitted to having desecrated the dead, and anyway there was the mist all around, like today. Sometimes that’s your salvation, other times it’s your destruction. Like life itself, you never know if it’s going to protect you or not. It went very badly for poor Gorni, who had got separated from the rest and was making his way back under the embankment on foot. They came out of nowhere.”
“Is he the one they called ‘the Kite’?”
“As far as I knew he was called ‘Arrow’, but the partisans around here changed their names all the time.”
They remained in silence for a few minutes. After the last sentence the old man made a circling gesture with his hands, indicating some kind of confusion, so the commissario said: “So nobody ever found out anything about the Fascist who went missing?”
The man shook his head.
“He was from Brescia…” was all he could say, but then, after a pause, he added: “Maybe he was injured and ended up in the Po as he tried to make his escape. They’re mountain people and they drown easily.”
“But the body was never found…”
“Normally the river always restores what it has taken, but around here they say that someone who has not learned to swim when he’s alive doesn’t float when he’s dead.”
Soneri tried to imagine what was going through the old man’s mind, what he was watching in that mist he had been observing day after day as though it were a screen on which a nostalgic film of past years was being projected.
“Very few people know what happens in the mist,” he said. “And the question is whether those few people have any inclination to tell. In this case the matter is closed.”
It was not the first time that Soneri found himself facing the irremediable. Death was the most unwavering of all forms of reticence. “Perhaps that’s why there are so many rumours going around…”
The old man repeated the jerky gesture with his hand. “There are some people who even say that maybe one of those who was there did not die,” he said, apparently to fill the silence.
The hypothesis aroused Soneri’s interest and once again set his imagination working overtime, but not at the same rate as that of the old man who the moment he stopped talking began once again to observe with a sort of avidity the grey emptiness that surrounded him. Soneri too did his best to absorb himself in an imaginary film, staring into a space stretching from somewhere above the low roofs of the houses before them to unfathomable depths in which it was possible to glimpse everything or nothing. He was trying to stage in his mind all that might have occurred under the main embankment on that land won back from the water, where everything appears precarious.
The ambush, shadows facing shadows, the rounds of gunfire shot at random at ghosts made of air and little else, the awareness of the dying that they were falling without knowing the identity of their killers, the flight in any direction for refuge in the same mist which had made the ambush possible, then the silence after the gunfire in the damp air which had served to muffle the shots, the attempt to listen for the enemy in every blade of grass that rustled, the stumbling over corpses, and the undergrowth growing more dense in a world of dancing wisps of mist. Anything at all could have happened, including the possibility that one of them had not died and so
…perhaps then the ferocity perpetrated on the bodies should not be attributed to Fascist vengeance. But after seeing the body of the Kite savaged by the torture so minutely described in the partisans’ bulletins, who could give credence to any conflicting hypothesis? Eyes pushed in by relentless punching, face swollen and dark like garnet-coloured quince and made to look like sausage meat. And finally the burns, the fingernails wrenched out, the testicles a bloody mess.
Certainly no-one had been identified. It required the intervention of the entire Garibaldi detachment to decide which corpse was which. The pike could not have done worse in a month. And then there was the question of the man from Brescia who had disappeared. A missing body represents an unsolved case, always and everywhere. He was thinking of all this when he turned gently to the old man and saw him concentrate on that unmoving grey.
“What do you think happened?”
“It always seemed strange to me.”
“You don’t believe that it was the Blackshirts?”
The old man shook his head. “They only did those things in their barracks. They wanted to look bold, but in fact they were shit-scared. They were terrified, and anyway, in ’44 they knew their time was up.”
Soneri made no reply and the silence seemed to him deep enough to enable him to hear the sound of the specks of ice falling one by one on the dry leaves. He rose to his feet quite abruptly, as he always did. The old man was startled and turned to look and see where he was. The mist over his eyes must have been populated by something new superimposed on his recollections. When he felt the commissario’s hand on his shoulder, he turned rapidly and tried to stare at him with eyes which were now filled only with apparitions.
“You know how to peer into the depths,” Soneri said, preparing to leave. It was a sentence which might have seemed foolish or jeering, but that was not how it was meant.
