River of Shadows

by Valerio Varesi

  “I’ve heard it,” he said.

  Soneri did not speak for some seconds and just as he was about to reply, the old man hung up.

  As was his habit, the commissario rose immediately to his feet, and the landlord seemed to understand exactly what he was about to do. He gave a good-bye wave, and the look he received in reply seemed to convey an awareness of what was going on.

  Outside the cold was as intense as ever, but the Bonarda countered it quite satisfactorily, filling him with a lucid euphoria indispensable for nights like the one ahead. In the fog, it was as ever a struggle to find the way to San Quirico. The road he had chanced on in the afternoon now seemed impassable in the wall of mist that the bonnet of his car had to plough into. After a while he found himself suspended over the countryside, and for a moment had the impression that he was motoring among the clouds. He crawled along in second gear, his fog lights incapable of picking out the verges, and every curve brought the fear that he was about to plunge down the slope.

  He left the car not too far from the old man’s house, thinking of him lying in his bed listening to the sound of the engine being switched off at the roadside, seeing everything in his mind’s eye, as he was now obliged to follow every scene in life. The commissario wondered if the old man had heard his footsteps on the road as he passed under one of the few lamp-posts in San Quirico. He certainly could not have heard him when he almost bumped into the gate of the house opposite the spot where the mysterious car’s tyre marks stopped.

  Soneri took out his torch to examine the tracks to make sure they were fresh. The sharp definition left him in no doubt. The old man’s hearing was very keen. The house was as silent as a graveyard. There were no footprints in the pathway leading to the front door, which was still barred by a metal guard to protect it from the damp. The shutters too looked as though they had been closed for some time. He inspected the camper van but there was no sign of any movement, so all that remained was to check the back of the house. It gave on to a kitchen garden with some fruit trees overgrown by creepers. And then he noticed some ten steps leading down to a cellar door.

  He took out and cocked his pistol and stood for a few seconds in front of the door, the sound of his knuckles rapping on the wood announcing the beginning of a long night. No-one replied, so he went on knocking again and again until his patience ran out, at which point he took to beating on the door with his open palm, causing it to shake on its hinges.

  At last, he heard the sound of footsteps dragging, and in the faint light there appeared before him a stout elderly, bearded, slightly stooped man wearing an expression of tired resignation.

  Soneri stepped over the threshold, meeting no resistance from the occupant of the house, who moved to one side, just sufficiently to give the appearance of surrender. The commissario went in, stopping beside a table beneath a flickering bulb. The old man closed the door unhurriedly, as though having welcomed an expected guest, and when Soneri introduced himself, he responded with a simple nod of the head. His demeanour was grave, respectful.

  In a dark corner of the room, an electric heater was blowing warm air, while on the other side a bed with a walnut headboard stood out amid the rustic poverty of the greying, rough-plaster walls of the cellar. The commissario sat down and the other did likewise. Seated at the same level, they looked into each other’s eyes. The man, with his long beard and wrinkled skin, called to mind a well-seasoned radicchio, but what most took Soneri aback was the submissiveness he displayed towards him, a submissiveness combined with awareness.

  They sat for a few minutes face to face in an unnerving silence. Now that he was able to observe him from close up, it was plain that the old man showed all the signs of hypertension: dark blotches on the cheeks, a bulbous nose the colour of cotecchino, the sheer mass of a body perhaps capable of explosions of rage, even if now he was sitting motionless, waiting. There was no question that waiting was the right tactic, particularly since Soneri was unable to find the words to begin.

  “Was all this necessary?” he finally managed to say, realizing as soon as the words were out that they were born more of curiosity than of a line of inquiry. The inquiry was now over, but the sense of strangeness and of deviation from normal codes of behaviour remained. There were occasions, like the one he was living through at that moment, when stripping off the official uniform to assume the guise of the confidant was unavoidable. After all, the old man had no choice and was perhaps not even seeking a way out, as was clear from his state of resignation, in which Soneri perceived a sense of liberation, perhaps even of pride.

  “Was it necessary?” he insisted.

  The other man swallowed hard, but made no reply, not because he lacked the will to speak but because a pressure in his throat from having too much to say prevented his feelings from finding coherent expression. He had no more idea where to start than did Soneri, and so hesitated for a few seconds before coming out with an introduction dictated more by emotion than by reason. “If you had gone through what I have …”

  The pronunciation of the words with a Spanish accent was confirmation enough.

  “How many years have you lived in Argentina?”

  “Do your own sums. From ’47.”

  “A lifetime.”

  “True. I lived my life there.”

  “Except for your youth.”

  The old man wiped his forehead with his right hand and in so doing revealed a forearm with a tattoo of a hammer and sickle. “I’d have been happy to have done without that youth. I have lived two lives. I died and was reborn.”

  “Resuscitated,” Soneri corrected him. “You have remained the same person.”

  “Unfortunately, a man carries his past on his back. Your blood is diseased by it forever.”

  He pronounced these last words more firmly, almost with finality. A rage which had remained undiminished over the decades seemed to exert a profound influence on his thinking.

  “The disease still holds sway.”

  The old man looked at him with a mixture of amazement and irritation. “Much less now. I have done what I had to do. But if you imagine that that’s enough … I have even asked myself whether it was all worthwhile, seeing that it still has me in its grip … Only time can allow hatred to subside, and my time is almost up. I have only just managed to achieve what I had promised myself for all these years.”

  “You should have thought of yourself as well.”

  The old man considered that point for a moment, then shrugged. “It was worse for others. If I got away, it was because I did think about myself. I had nothing here. I’d have had to get out whatever happened. I made up my mind after the reprisals against my family.”

  The allusion to the reprisals caused Soneri to run over the facts – particularly the encounter between the embankments – in his mind. He looked hard at the old man and noticed a glint in his eyes, as bright as the flash of a short circuit. “That battle on the floodplain made everything clear to me,” he said. “At the beginning, I just could not formulate any hypothesis, because everything came up short against the one fact – the people who had a motive for revenge on the Tonnas were all dead, including you. But when they recounted to me how that battle in the mists had really gone, and when I found out about the disfigured bodies and the missing corpse of that Fascist …at that point I worked out how it might have gone. What I have never managed to resolve is why you, considering that you were officially dead, did not act immediately at the end of the war. After all, many on your side wasted no time in ’46.”

  The old man raised his head proudly, but then dropped it just as suddenly with a sigh.

  “Do you believe they wouldn’t have found out? I was the man who had the best of all motives for making them pay, and I had the reputation of being a hothead. Some of them already had some inkling …and anyway, the Party would never have forgiven me. Don’t forget that I had gone to the lengths of disfiguring the body of a comrade, and that they had previously disciplined me when I was in
the Garibaldi brigade. Then you’ve got to bear in mind that I had absented myself from the final phases of the fighting and the Resistance. In those days, the Communist Party was highly organized and had kept intact the Gruppo di Azione Patriottica, the partisan network closest to them. I’d been lucky once not to be found out. After the Liberation, I went into hiding for nearly two years with the connivance of some of my comrades who had fallen out with the party. They were the only ones who knew anything. Do you understand now why I was not able to act after April 25? My funeral had even taken place. I went up and down the river, living in the holds of barges or in cabins belonging to people I could trust. As I relived that life in recent weeks, it seemed as though I was reliving my boyhood. Take it from me, if I were still young, if I enjoyed the health I did then, you would never have caught me. I have been on the run all my life.”

  “And not a single one of the partisans realized what you were up to? Or perhaps some of them just pretended not to?” asked the commissario.

  “I couldn’t say. I had other things on my mind. The episode of the disfigured bodies appeared sinister and ambiguous, but the Fascists got the blame. The same ones who shot my friend, the Kite, not long afterwards. Anyway, it was payback time for them, and they got what they deserved.”

  “It took me a long time to work out that this was the key to the whole affair. You had to do it,” said the commissario. “Somebody had to take your place among the dead. So that Fascist who was recorded as missing, the savagery on the bodies of those killed in battle …it was all a set-up. You made it seem an act of hatred, you made them unrecognizable and passed off the Blackshirt as yourself.” Soneri was struggling to understand.

  The other man took up the story. “Yes. I had to set to work with my knife. I then picked up a huge rock and smashed it several times on the faces of each one of them until they were a mangled mess. I dressed the Fascist in my clothes before slashing and ripping his skin. I even took a photograph of my mother and put it in his jacket pocket to make the whole thing more credible. I was really sorry to lose that portrait, but I justified it with the thought that it would make it easier to avenge her for what she had been through. The Fascist was the same build as me, and it was all very convincing. Those were not days for faint hearts.”

  “Two lives. I can see that this was the only possible solution,” the commissario said. The light flickered on and off. “The others all died before you. The members of your brigade, I mean.”

  “I am the last one,” the old man confirmed. “And that was another reason why I felt compelled to do justice for the others …in the name of those of my comrades who were only able to live one life, and a very brief one at that.”

  “Has it been on your mind all these years?”

  “Always. Each and every morning I went over the plan as though I were to execute it a few hours later. I made contact again with my comrades here, and twice a month they updated me on my intended victims. I lived with the fear that they might die before I had the chance to murder them. I would even have defended them if they had been under threat from anyone else. Maybe that’s a kind of love, like the love you have for rabbits that you tend and look after with the sole intention of having them for dinner once they have been fattened up.”

  “Did the idea of forgetting the whole thing, of coming back here and starting over, never cross your mind? After all, nobody could have done anything to you after the amnesty,” Soneri said, lighting another cigar.

  “As far as people here were concerned, I was dead. That was true of the Party as well,” the old man said with a shrug. “They would not have looked me straight in the eye, and I would have lived year after year in isolation, a stranger, so I was just as well off being a real stranger elsewhere. Until fifteen years ago, what they took to be my body was buried in the graveyard. Thirty years after my disappearance, they dug it up, but since there was no-one here to pay to have it transferred to the ossuary, all trace of it has been lost. The Party said the records in the National Association for Italian Partisans and the stone on the floodplain were monument enough, so I had no doubt that the one amnesty I would never have received was the one from the Party. As I’ve already said: they had no qualms, they were pitiless.”

  “You would have had to explain too many things and mix personal histories with the political struggle,” the commissario said.

  “That’s not all. I felt myself still too young to …” He stopped in mid sentence, overcome by conflicting emotions. “Now,” he began again, the words tumbling over each other, “now I’m of an age when I have nothing to lose.”

  Soneri peered at him through the bluish smoke which acted as a lens. He was able to feel what the man wanted to express, but not to put it adequately into words. He feared that too direct a question might stem the old man’s flow. The discussion ought not to be an interrogation so much as a series of prompts for a confession and so, lingering over certain details, he raised queries which aimed to strip away the mystery, layer by layer.

  “Did you feel any remorse over those boys whose faces you made unrecognizable that day down by the river?”

  The old man sighed. “How would you feel after smashing the head of someone you grew up with, someone you had shared your best years with? I knew that I was saying good-bye to all hope of happiness and consigning myself to the loneliness of an existence far from my own home. Do you think I didn’t miss the Po? My dialect? All the time I was away, I always forced myself to think in dialect, but I had nothing left here. I would have been an ordinary emigrant, like so many others. I deluded myself into believing that with a new identity I could be more free, but the desire for revenge never left me.”

  “And your life in Argentina?”

  “I did what I could to get by, enjoying all that I could enjoy. I didn’t lack for anything, women, the good life, holidays …but when you live like that, you have to be careful not to put down roots, because otherwise the present covers the past and is in its turn, day after day, ground down by boredom.”

  “What about your family? Did you ever think of them?”

  The old man gave another start, threw his arms in the air and then let them fall heavily on the table in front of him. The bulb began to sway once more and the stagnant smoke was disturbed by the ripples and currents of air.

  “My family!” he said sadly, more to himself than to Soneri. “Did I ever think of them? Of course I thought of them, but I thought of them as dead or violated. Ida, the eldest, they dragged her round the back of the house …there were seven of them …the middle sister managed to escape down to the river, but was chased by the Blackshirts. She threw herself in to get away from the bastards, but the current pulled her under. My father tried to save the women in the family …he came out with an axe, but they killed him with one burst of gunfire. The only one that got away was my sister Franca, the youngest of the family. Ida was left distraught and filled with shame and she disappeared. No-one heard from her again. The sister who jumped into the Po was washed up at Boretto and was brought back home on the cart of some travelling puppeteers. My mother died of a broken heart a few months later at her sister’s house, since ours had been burned down.” He had laid both his hands, palms down, on the table, and the two enormous hands seemed like the paws of some wild beast ready to spring. Then he lifted them, clenching them into fists, muttering in a broken voice: “Nothing, nothing left.”

  Soneri went on gazing at him, an old man scarred by a deep, incurable wound. As he pondered the condition of those who, like him, had been caught up in violence and had sought in vain all their lives for some escape route, he had no difficulty in locating the kernel of genuine humanity behind a thick cover of hatred. In the wrinkled face he could still detect the trauma of the boy who, with one terrible leap into hatred, had become an adult.

  All the while, the commissario felt a powerful need to put the one question that he nevertheless suppressed, afraid that it might yet be premature. He preferred to allow the discussion
to drift in the hope that in the account it would slip out. He looked at the old man sunk in memories which had hardened into a fixation many years earlier, and which could not now be loosened. He knew almost everything now, specifically who had killed the Tonnas and what the motive was. In his role as commissario, he could relax and think of the case as closed, but curiosity held him in a tense grip which would give him no respite until it was satisfied.

  “Ghinelli, Spartaco Ghinelli,” he said softly, as though the name had been whispered from a dark corner of the cellar.

  The old man looked up and peered at him intently. It was his way of offering confirmation.

  “Ghinelli,” Soneri repeated, “Argentina must be very beautiful …did you never think of …”

  The other man understood and replied frankly. “No. One of the beautiful things about Argentina is that there’s plenty of space for everyone, and you’re not always treading on other people’s toes. The cities are very big as well, so if you want to lose yourself in them, you can. But I was there only provisionally.”

  “Was there never some woman who asked you to start living again?”

  “From the moment they came into my life, I removed any illusion they might have had. How could I do otherwise? Every time I thought about it my family came back to mind, and I would have been a coward if I had forgotten. The Fascists would have won. And that Tonna who carried on sailing up and down the river, while on riverbanks on the other side of the world I looked in vain for something similar to what he had … Oh, I wanted a life, that’s true, but I could not erase the past.”