One day on the Piave
The water reflects the blue of the sky. It makes its way through the sun-burned gravel. A stony ground that exudes heat, but the light breeze “carried in the arms by the current” and the water that descends from the mountains refresh the many who venture to the banks to escape the heat bubble that has haunted us for weeks.
Here it is the “sacred river to the Fatherland” which descends almost lazily in summer and enters the province of Treviso from the Quero pass. In the rainy seasons, however, the water becomes brown and impetuous fills the entire bed that extends for hundreds of meters.
It is the Piave that cuts the province in two but does not divide it, because it is the place of identity of the Venetians who recognize themselves in the “Piave race”. Piave race, that of the infantrymen who died like flies, a century ago, coloring the water red with their blood while their inanimate bodies went to run aground in the floodplain islands, such as that of the Dead, sadly famous then, now the theater of tragedy of Elisa Campeol, still unburied after being slaughtered ten days ago for the madness of a peer who felt within himself an evil so strong that it led to do the same to his neighbor.
And the next one for Fabrizio Biscaro was precisely that girl who, like many others, had gone down to the river to find refreshment on the beach a stone’s throw from home.
“The beach of the poor” someone defines it, making the many who are not poor at all and who love in the few free moments left by work, of which the Piave breed is soaked, to turn their mouths to look for a little coolness and an advance of suntan.
Even today, just a few hours after the tragedy of Lammouchi Mhsen, 54, an immigrant from Tunisia, who had raised his family in Caerano. Lammouchi a part of that family, his 14-year-old daughter, was losing her in that blue water that invited you to dive. And to save her, even though he didn’t know how to swim, he dived into it, finding his death. Because the waters of the Piave, like those of all rivers, are treacherous. In an instant they can go from a few centimeters to a few meters in depth.
Waters that suddenly pick up speed, create eddies and above all are cold and paralyze the heart and muscles. It is no coincidence that rusty signs prohibiting bathing appear in almost all the accesses, which almost no one respects.
There is also one here behind the Cementi Rossi, where a leap of water invites you to get wet and where the current or someone’s hand has created, on a concrete curb that crosses the flow, a sort of dam of boulders , just to raise the level and allow swimmers to take a few strokes, which otherwise swimming would be impossible. Here where Lammouchi met his death, while with the strength of desperation he tried to grab the legs of the man who was carrying his daughter to safety.
The placid and cruel Piave returned it only a couple of hours later. As indifferent, he witnessed the dozens of stab wounds that Fabrizio unleashed on the innocent flesh of ELisa, letting her stones drink the blood that gushed from the girl’s severed veins.
The Piave that unites and divides murmurs only in rare seasons. It has united, or rather reunited the homeland, according to military rhetoric. Yet for centuries it has divided the geography of the dioceses, one on the right and one on the left of its course.
The province is one, but also the cadence of the dialect changes between the shores. And it divides the north and south of the Marca, now that we are thinking about how to make its floods less harmful with rolling basins that some want in Crocetta and others in Ponte di Piave, just before its course narrows and flows into the province of Venice.
The new “war of the Piave” scream the headlines. After all, bar wars, party secretariats and town halls. Which are of little interest to the Piave. He flows indifferent to the tragedies, like those of a mother in postpartum depression who last winter with her baby clasped to her chest threw herself from one of her bridges in Vidor, finding death, but miraculously saving the little one.
The Piave is not moved and “does not tell legends”, on the contrary. In a few years, five young victims have perished in its waters but he continues the journey indifferent. Natural, it will be said, it is a river, it does not feel and it does not think.
Flows, in fact. And indifferent, now used to tragic fatalities, also seem the many who yesterday, as if nothing had happened, continued to bathe and sunbathe in the exact place where the last drama took place.