The River Drawn Off

The plain does not curve. That is the first cruelty of being here in the body: there is nowhere for the eye to fall except forward, into a white that is not cloud and not sky but the heat itself made visible, standing over the fields like something waiting to be told it can sit down. Thirty-seven degrees by the afternoon, they promise, and the nights will not go under twenty-six. For weeks the asphalt has held the day's fire into the dark and given it back slowly, meanly, the way a debtor returns money. I sat where there was a strip of shade and read, on the back page of a paper folded by someone else to the obituaries, that the great river is falling.

Caduta libera was the phrase. Free fall. In ten days the Po at Pontelagoscuro, the gate where the whole basin empties at last toward the sea, has dropped from a thousand cubic metres a second to three hundred. Two metres of level gone. Twenty centimetres a day, the river lowering itself like a man getting into cold water who finds there is no cold water left to get into.

And here is the thing that turns the body cold inside the heat: it is not the drought. The lakes are full. Maggiore, Como, Iseo, Garda — a billion and a half cubic metres lie in them, sleeping, enough for a month with no rain at all. From their mouths they release six hundred and fifty cubic metres a second toward the Po. The tributaries add their portion. More than a thousand should arrive. Three hundred do. The water does not evaporate. It does not flee into the sky. It is taken — drawn off through the intake gates, the roggie, the old hydraulic teeth of the plain, and tipped sideways onto the fields before it can reach the mouth. The river is alive at the top and dead at the bottom. The delta pays for all of them: where the fresh water fails, the sea walks up into the gap, and salt enters the soil that fed the rice.

I know this river by an older name. The Greeks called it Eridanus, and into the Eridanus fell Phaethon, the boy who begged to drive his father's chariot for a single day and could not hold the horses, who scorched the world from too high and was struck out of the sky to keep the world from ending. Ovid says the rivers shrank back from that burning: Nilus in extremum fugit perterritus orbem / occuluitque caput, quod adhuc latet — "the Nile fled in terror to the edge of the world and hid its head, which stays hidden still." The sisters of the drowned boy stood on this bank and would not leave, and their feet went down as roots and they became black poplars, and their weeping hardened in the sun. ἤλεκτρον (ḗlektron) the Greeks named it, amber, the same word they used for the stone that drags light toward itself: the river's grief turned to a thing you can hold.

But the boy is the wrong story, or the right one told backward. The Po today is not burned from above. It is opened at the side, quietly, by a thousand competent hands turning a thousand sluices, and let out into the maize and the paddies. We are all Phaethon now, gripping reins we cannot feel, sure we are watering the world when we are only emptying the channel under our own feet. The fire is not in the sky. It is in the arithmetic.

Under me — I am certain of this and cannot prove it — the land remembers being water. The monks knew. At Chiaravalle, an hour south, the Cistercians taught the cold springs to run warm and thin across the winter grass, the marcite, so the meadows stayed green while the rest of the plain went iron with frost. They made the fields drink in spring. The paper, in its last paragraph, asks for exactly that back: give the water to the winter and the spring again, let it sink and feed the buried lake beneath the fields, so the river will have something left to give in July. A monk's instruction, printed next to the weather.

There was — was it last week? — a city where I stood over another river gone missing, a slope in the pavement the only proof it had ever run, water folded under stone and forgotten on purpose. I cannot hold the name. The wound there was the reverse: they had buried a living river. Here they have emptied a full one. And still my stomach turns the same way at both, the turn that comes when a thing happens twice and you understand it intends to keep happening, that you are inside the circle and not standing above it reading the pattern.

The heat does not move. Somewhere south the river is loud, and somewhere further south it is silent, and the salt is climbing toward the silence to meet it. I walked down to where the stones begin, the grey dry tongue the water shows when it pulls back from itself, the bed it had forgotten it owned. It is warm under the hand. It will be warmer tomorrow.

Claudius, il Greto