River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) (30 page)
Read River of Shadows: A Commissario Soneri Mystery (Commissario Soneri 1) Online
Authors: Valerio Varesi
“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.”
“But they too, the Tonnas, their lives were destroyed. They were never happy,” Soneri said.
“They brought it on themselves,” was Ghinelli’s furious answer. “It was other people’s lives they chose to ruin, our hopes for a more dignified future. The Party gave us that hope, because the priests never gave it to us. With a few exceptions, they too were on the other side.”
“Now the Party too is dead.”
Ghinelli clenched his fists tightly while his face turned a deeper shade of scarlet, but it lasted only seconds before quite suddenly the tension evaporated. “It’s a time of plenty, and people have forgotten the grim days of the past. In an age of prosperity, everybody hates everyone else because egoism springs up everywhere, and nowadays that’s the only foundation of the world. Mark my words, poverty will return and people will seek unity again, but it’ll have nothing to do with me. At the most, I’ll have left an example, and sooner or later someone will follow it.”
The commissario rolled that ambiguous remark around in his head, then asked: “Where you inspired by some example from the past?”
“I killed them with an ice-pick. Does that tell you anything?”
“Trotsky was no Fascist.”
“He was a dangerous visionary. I trust those who describe him in those terms. If we had paid heed to him, they would have massacred us all, each and every one of us.”
Soneri felt as though he was back at the debates he had listened to as a student. These were words he had heard de-claimed thousands of times at assemblies in occupied sports halls and cinemas, and now they left him with a bitter savour of nostalgia and of passion spent amidst the glittering well-being of today. It seemed as though a century of history had
gone by, but in fact all that had passed was the brief period separating youth from the present.
When he came back to himself, he saw Ghinelli looking at him intently, communicating thereby his need to retell his story. Soneri then felt entitled to put the question that he had been wanting to ask from the outset.
Before he got the words out, the old man resumed in a new flurry of words. “In what I did, I wanted there to be something symbolic, can you understand that? Something that would leave a mark on people’s minds. It wasn’t only the ice-pick that might make people remember me, nor the act of revenge in itself. I understood that the value of what I was doing was linked to the timing. Revenge more than fifty years later. A crime of the post-war period, left suspended but executed a half-century on.” Ghinelli went on relentlessly, warding off Soneri’s question. “Never mind curiosity about the incident and journalistic tittle-tattle. What matters is the coherence of my act. They’ll say I was mad, but I know that some people will remember me and will hold to an idea that was mine. In times like these, all you can do is keep the flame alive. When the time is right, it will act as a detonator.”
The commissario relit his cigar. “Maybe,” he said dryly, “but the majority will look on it as a crime committed among pathetic old folk.”
“I know,” Ghinelli said sadly, “but I don’t much care.”
Soneri felt there was more to be said. He had an overwhelming sense that besides the politics and the desire for revenge, there was a private motive behind Ghinelli’s flight, and once again the urge to ask the question became strong, but at the crucial moment, he found himself lost for words. What was lacking was the more intimate, the perhaps less noble but infinitely more human side of things. All he could do was whisper, “You have not told me everything.”
The old man once more peered at him with focused menace and deep rage, and this allowed the commissario finally to utter the question, the question he should have asked first, even though he also knew that if he had, he would never have found out what he now knew.
“Why after fifty years?” he said, ignoring the replies he had already been given.
His insistence implicitly meant that he wanted to know all the rest, the factors that now seemed to him the most important of all.
He watched Ghinelli’s face dissolve among its wrinkles into an expression which could produce either laughter or tears. Finally it settled into a bitter, sardonic grin, perhaps one of shame. “Because first I wanted to live,” he said.
The author would like to thank Edgardo Azzi for his expert advice on the river Po, and Simona Mamano, police assistant and organizer of literary prizes dedicated to crime novels.
The translator would like to thank Nick Gray and Maggie Armstrong for commenting on the first version of the translation, and especially for their assistance with the technical boating and bargeing terms.
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