The Po — a short story
The river Po steadily flows; a laborious affair, driving eastward across northern Italy. It spits up from the Earth in the Cottian Alps and slowly descends, ending its life in the distant Adriatic sea. Its journey from creation to conclusion is long, drawn out by the life it encounters and sustains along its path. Early on in the journey of its life, the Po flows through the heart of the metropolitan city of Torino, footing the large Piazza Vittorio, barely a short walk from the city centre.
It was here that Arthur found himself, in body and somewhat in spirit. He had arrived the previous evening and was wandering the city’s many winding, cobbled streets with his wife, Antonelliana. Antonelliana was born in Torino but had lived in London since she was in her early twenties, wherein she met and married Arthur, the undisputed love of her life. She vowed she would always revisit Torino before she died, even stressing to include in her will that she wanted her ashes scattered in the Po; she adored refreshing her toes in it as a child, spurning heat stroke as she roamed the city in her childhood summers. She had told her husband the story of when she once tried to swim in the Po as a child. Finding its current too strong and its whirlpools too disorienting for her untrained and childish technique, she was saved from drowning only by the chance passing of a rower who hauled her, with great strain, from the river. Arthur was a strong swimmer. He had tried many times, all in vain, to teach his wife to swim — it just wasn’t in her blood. In fact, few of the locals swam in the river — most were too scared to even dip their feet — and it became the home of a great many aquatic species, finding sanctuary in the former artery of Italian industrialism.
This was Arthur’s first time in the city. Despite being married to an Italian, he was exceedingly useless at speaking the language. He had struggled asking for directions and ended up taking a combination of trams, crisscrossing the city, in order to disembark no closer to his destination than when he had set off. The final tram had displaced Arthur in Piazza Castello, only a short walk around the corner from the hotel he had left forty minutes earlier. Had he been willing to look at a map, Arthur would have seen that the long, straight road ahead of him, conveniently also named “Po”, led directly to the river. Had he used his nose, it may have driven him towards the river’s earthen, amorous algal odour and the purer air carried with it from the mountains. But he was an old man. Arthur possessed a trait he would label determination, but others would kindly enlighten him was commonly known as stubbornness. No one seemed to notice the interchangeability of each for the other.
Arthur scanned his surroundings. A large group stood at a crossing, all assaulting his eyes with their peculiar orange baseball caps, following a woman holding aloft an equally orange umbrella; women floated about in short summer dresses — quickly reminding Arthur of the presence of his wife; tram bells rang out as the trams crossed paths with pedestrians, with whom they shared this city. Arthur spun in circles, gawking at the names of various roads, streets, and promenades filled with honking scooters and laughing Italians, jolly in the face of his bewilderment. Once he felt sufficiently lost so as to ask for directions, barking “Po?” in the best Italian accent he could muster, a flurry of arms and pointed fingers set him on the right course.
The Via Po is a long, straight road with porticos on each side and trams running the road between. Arthur slid in his wooden soled, tan brogues along the marble tiled street, his wife in arm. Striving for some sense of grip, his feet clicked and clacked with such a mechanised rhythm that many of the locals mistook him for a tram who, having slipped his rails, was on some misdirected route. They sat, the locals, leaning back in woven wicker chairs, one leg crossed over the other, sipping on their mid-morning espressos. Some were smoking cigarettes, so finely balanced between nonchalant index and middle fingers that one, should he have the notion, could have blown the cigarettes from their grip with the gentlest of puffs. One man had his cigarette so set between fingers that he was able to hook his pinkie through the handle of his espresso cup, drinking and dragging with a practiced ease. Arthur, who had given up smoking at the behest of his wife many years prior, silently cursed the man for showing off, with such lackaday, an indulgence which he longed to share. The stresses of navigating an unknown city, where the people spoke an incomprehensible language, were having their effect on Arthur. Instead of ruining his years of nicotine celibacy, he opted instead to take a coffee, remembering that his wife had told stories of drinking coffee with friends in the open air of Piazza Vittorio.
Finding a highly sought after seat, for it was now the lunch hour, Arthur furrowed his aged brow and slurped macchiato foam — it was the most peculiar cappuccino he had ever ordered. He surveyed the expanse of white stone and weathered cobbles around him. He could easily have been fooled into thinking he had landed in a city of holiday makers. Alcohol and caffeine flowed in equal measure, and bodies were craned backwards in fits of gaiety. Arthur didn’t share such notions. With each sip of his coffee, he found its taste increasingly unpleasant and his state of brief joy embittered. “Is this what you call coffee?” he laughed to his wife. “No wonder we didn’t come here sooner.” His guilt was immediate and debilitating. “I’m sorry”, he spluttered, “I didn’t mean it”. Arthur’s head hung as if only loosely stitched to his shoulders, staring at the dry, loose skinned hands of an old man, before realising that they were his own, set in his lap. Arthur had become increasingly prone to bouts of acute melancholia in recent times. Such bouts were short lasting, but steeped Arthur in the reality of his old age. As young as he felt inside his own head, the truth was contrary. People consistently made polite allowances for him; younger looking folks offered him their seats on the bus; many people spoke to him in a tone they would otherwise reserve only for young and naïve children. Antonelliana used to make him feel young. On his 80th birthday, she had baked him a cake and they danced together, she in his strengthening arms, long into the night. Together, they felt younger than they had been in their teenage years. But soon the reality, which had long been snatching at their heels, caught up to them.
With his eyes still firmly fixed on the hands in his lap, Arthur felt the presence of another looming by his shoulder. He looked up to a silhouette standing before a halo of bright sunlight. It was his time, he thought. Something unholy had come to cart him off to his grave. But when his frantic eyes spied the notepad in the silhouette’s hand and his ears tuned into its ringing Italian voice, Arthur snapped back.
“Scusa” Arthur’s voice broke. “Non…uhm…speak Italiano?”
The waiter smiled with the same expression he would lend to a nervous child.
“Another coffee?” asked the waiter in a perfect accent.
“Oh…no thank you” Arthur forcedly chuckled, trying to make a joke of himself before others could. The waiter left; Arthur peered forward at the remnants of his lunch. He had sucked up all the coffee froth he was willing to — unprepared to scrape it from the tiny cup with his finger, as seemed to be the local custom. And so, Arthur took his wife in his arm and set to walking the small distance to the bridge above the river Po.
The heat of the midday sun blinded; so hot it wailed in the ears. So when Arthur stepped out in front of a tram he neither saw nor heard, the driver fumed, spouting the most obscene Italian — which Arthur recognised from the many years with his wife. He jumped onto the path, offering only apologetic waves before the tram wasn’t much more than a flash of orange, clicking, clacking, rattling onwards.
They soon arrived at the bridge. Beneath, the Po steadily flowed; above, it dragged with it a brisk and cooling breeze all the way from the mountains. It was a warning, even in these last days of August, that Autumn was creeping ever nearer. Soon, the midday sun would grow sicker; colder. The falling of leaves would precede that of snow, and the city would fall into days of mist and darkness. When he was almost half way across the bridge, Arthur’s weary legs brought him to a stop. Around him, the bridge was a bottle neck of commotion. Cars of varying bright colours flashed past, reflecting the gaze of the sun and passers-by in equal measure. Such passers-by paid Arthur brief attention, though their legs never stopped carrying them onwards to infinite random destinations, unknowable to him. The hot air of their conversations fried his reddened ears, as though two bacon rashers had been slapped to each side of his head with adhesive grease. His attention was elsewhere, anticipating a winter still months in the making, before a distant crackle of mountain thunder snapped his bridged thoughts back to his actual whereabouts.
“It must be time” Arthur resigned to himself, broken. He took his wife from under his arm and propped her on the wall of the bridge — that is, the urn wherein lay her ashes. The instructions in her will had been clear. Arthur stood by her, unmoving. He stood for so long that the back of his balding head became burnt, before confessing to his wife that he couldn’t do it. Arthur was an old man. His marriage had brought him no children and, once he had carried out his wife’s final wish, he would have nothing in this world he cared for. With all that remained of him, Arthur pressed his face to the urn, still cool in spite of the afternoon heat, and whispered: “I cannot live without you”. His body slumped around the urn, barely able to stand but entirely capable of wrapping consoling arms around his wife. He let the day pass him by, imagining the footslog back to the hotel without his wife. If, by chance, something were to bestow upon him the strength to adhere to her final wish, then he would surely fail to find again the hotel that he had left this morning. Even as dust, his wife was a store of strength for Arthur to draw upon in times of helplessness. In tossing her into the flow, Arthur would toss with her all that made him strong.
A shocking thought infiltrated Arthur’s mind; an impulsive joy which was quickly accompanied by a brightening of his eyes. He moved with urgency; hauling his cumbersome body onto the wall next to his wife. His feet dangled over the river, now treading only on air and his almost uncontrollable anticipation. Arthur held his wife close, counted down from three to prepare her and, with the vigour of a much younger man, leapt from the bridge.
The Po embraced them both, soothing Arthur’s burns; seeping into Antonelliana so that she and the river became one and the same. Arthur rolled onto his back — mouth, nose and belly protruding from the flow, keeping him afloat, while the sun burned an amorous red through his closed eyelids. Those onlookers who heard the commotion would look down to see an old man, still in buttoned shirt and brogues, smiling; as if sleeping and instilled with an intense joy by his dreams. Arthur and Antonelliana floated together, she in his arms, slowly; steadily towards the Adriatic. They would conclude their journey on the river, together. It was the happiest Arthur could remember being.
