ITALO CALVINO
535
At that moment he saw the bridge; and from the statues and
lamps that adorned the railings, from the breadth of the arches that
touched the sky, he recognized it: he hadn't realized how far he had
come. And as he entered the opaque region of shade that the arches
cast, he remembered the rapids.About a hundred yards beyond the
bridge, the riverbed made a drop; the barge would drop down the
falls and overturn, and he would be smothered by the sand, the
water, the barge, with no hope of emerging alive. Still, even at that
moment, his greatest concern was the sand cure, whose beneficent
effects would be promptly lost.
He waited for the plunge. And it came: but it was a thud
coming upwards from below. On the brink of the falls, in that dry
season, shoals of mud had collected, some greening with slender
dumps of cane and rushes. The barge ran aground, on all its flat
keel, flinging up the whole load of sand and the man buried in it.
Marcovaldo found himself hurled into the air as if by a catapult,
and at that moment he saw the river below him. Or, rather: he
didn ' t see it at all, he saw only the teeming crowd of people who
filled the river.
On this Saturday afternoon, a great throng of swimmers
crowded that stretch of river, where the shallow water came only
up to the navel; children wallowed in it, whole classes of them,
and fat women, and gentlemen who did the dead-man's float, and
girls in bikinis, and young toughs who wrestled with each other,
and mattresses, balls, lifesavers, inner tubes, row boats, kayaks,
rubber boats, motor boats, life-saving boats, yawls from yacht
dubs, fishermen with nets, fishermen with rods, old women with
parasols, young ladies in straw hats, and dogs, dogs, dogs, from
toy poodles to Saint Bernards: you couldn't see even an inch of the
river's surface. And Marcovaldo, as he flew, was uncertain whether
he would fall onto a rubber mattress or into the arms of a Juno–
esque matron, but of one thing he was certain: that not even a
drop of water would touch him.
