28

 28

ARMED WITH A LONG POLE, Anselmo followed the course of the Cervo under a cloudy blue sky. He proceeded methodically, cursing himself and the saints as he went along. He hadn’t wanted the fire brigade to drag the rivers, despite their insistence, because he wasn’t brave enough to confront the possibility that Silvia had followed the girl’s example and drowned herself. The night before, though, after the funeral, he’d been alarmed at the thought of pulling up a stranger by sheer chance, someone young and impressionable or some wicked person. He couldn’t bear the idea of strangers seeing Silvia bruised and swollen, without her shoes on, say, or her skirt up, eyes white as hard-boiled eggs. If anyone had to face something so awful, that someone should be him.

He pushed his stick into murky creeks and between boulders, where he thought he could detect whirlpools under the water’s surface. It was the tense probing of someone who hopes not to find anything. Patches of watercress and water yarrow made his work difficult, and the stream glinted here and there like tinfoil, preventing him from seeing down to the riverbed. A shrew darted between his feet, startling him.

A little farther downstream a few houses clustered around one of the old stone bridges. It was easy to slip there: the flat planes of rocks, smooth and polished, hung over the Cervo like the edge of a gray blanket. Proceeding at a snail’s pace, leaning on his stick and making sure he wasn’t too obvious—after all, it was lunchtime and people were sitting down to eat —Anselmo heard a voice ring out above the thundering torrent.

“Can’t you see that going without food will change your mood?” A cross face appeared at a window just above him. It belonged to an old woman with freshly permed hair. She spotted Anselmo. “Well, what are you doing?”

He wished he could answer bluntly, “I’m looking for my cousin.” But instead he said, “Never mind, Signora. It’s better that way.”

Luckily she didn’t make him say it again. She was anxious to talk about herself. Nodding toward the room inside: “Love pangs. She won’t eat anymore.”

Behind her rose an indignant cry: “Grandma!”

“Oh, Grandma, Grandma,” she spluttered. “It’s the absolute truth.”

“Does she give you trouble?”

The woman agreed wholeheartedly. “Seventeen years old. At her age, I was husking rice near Vercelli, my legs in the water for ten hours and leeches this big. And that one in there”—she lowered her voice to stop her granddaughter from exploding—“can’t get a bit of roast meat down.”

“They’re all spoiled,” said Anselmo, who was always reeled in when it came to criticizing youth. Yet that day he was feeling too down, and he was uncomfortable because he knew the woman would be watching him from her window as he fiddled and stirred in the water.

Silvia, Silvia, what have you done to me? When they were children he was the troublemaker, the one who courted disaster and caused problems. Silvia tried to fix things: she secretly brought him something to eat when he was sent to bed without supper and helped him do his homework. Before she went to boarding school, they’d walked to the village school together or had a lift in their grandfather’s cart. He recalled mornings when the frost had turned the countryside into a glassy field and they crunched over thousands of tiny frozen needles, Silvia wrapped up warm but still cold, with her usual absent-minded expression.

The two cousins had the same long face, the same close-set blue eyes, identical noses and mouths. If it hadn’t been for Anselmo’s unusual height, they could have passed for twins. Yet despite all the time they spent walking side by side, eating and drinking elbow to elbow, and sleeping in the same room, Silvia remained a mystery. She’d been incomprehensible even when she was little. A closed book.

Anselmo took his leave of the woman, so anxious to offer him a coffee, and began walking down the Cervo once more. He drew a sigh of relief when the houses and bridge disappeared behind a bend. Can’t you see that going without food will change your mood? he repeated to himself.

In that spot the slabs of rock thinned out, the shore was all pebbles, and acacias arched over the water, dappled by the light filtering through the foliage. Even though it was well into October, the greenery dominated. He prepared to probe the stretch where the torrent expanded into a spring bordered by large boulders before gushing down beside a waterfall, which was about a meter high and foamy as soapsuds. There were ravines where the water stagnated and a body could get stuck. Anselmo went in up to his calves, felt his boots and woolen socks gripped by icy pincers, the torrent’s cold breath on his face. The tip of his stick struck stone, sank into the silt between the aquatic plants.

He was about to get out and thought he’d leave his stick nearby, go back up the bank to a wine bar, when he felt something large but yielding. He had to stop to regain control of his arms; the damned things hung like sausages and had no more strength. His upper body was tense and sore. His mind went to Silvia. If it was her, he’d have to pull her out of there. But he didn’t want to prod her with that pike thing. He tried to dig the mass out of the hole between large rocks, working around them; he had to step in closer, plunging right up to mid-thigh. Marbled by light and shifting mud, the water reminded him of a viper’s skin and he was disgusted, so much so that he felt like vomiting. Something was tethering the body to the bottom—he was sure now that it was a body. Otherwise, it would have come up; it would be floating.

She wouldn’t have filled her pockets with stones.

At last there was a tremor beneath the surface and bubbles shot into the air. Anselmo stepped back. He grabbed the far end of a large torso and a few seconds later, the carcass of a dog. The Cervo’s crashing filled his ears again and he realized that though his legs were burning, he could no longer feel his feet.

He hobbled up the riverbank, sat on the dry pebbles, and removed his boots and socks. The dog was slowly rotating before him, a typical sheepdog from the region with a thick white-and-gray pelt.

Anselmo was soaking wet and shaken. He’d have to go back up through the scrub and get his car, then resign himself to letting the fire brigade take care of things with sounding equipment and hooks. He was mesmerized, though, by the dog’s corpse, and he stayed to watch it being dragged toward the center of the spring, then down beside the waterfall. At last it gathered speed and disappeared.