The Bridge

by Enza Gandolfo

  ‘I don’t know how I’m here. Or why. Why am I alive? Bernie’s dead, you know.’ Antonello hadn’t noticed Johnno until he started speaking. He was sitting on a piece of concrete, bent over, his eyes staring at the liquid in his cup. He was in Bob’s crew and Antonello thought about asking him if he’d seen Bob, but he couldn’t speak. Words seemed impossible to him. He did not know where words came from or how they might make it from his throat out into the world.

  ‘He was doing the timesheets and scheduling for next week’s shifts. I called in to tell him I was going to take a week off to go fishing with my son. I was telling Bernie about how my son isn’t the same since Vietnam. Bernie said if I wanted, I could borrow his boat, take Fred out on the bay. We talked about trout and salmon, and the best bait — we argued about bait, friendly-like; he said he’d bet me anything if I used prawn I’d catch … I promised to bring him back a fish. I left the hut just in time. I heard a screeching sound. And then popping, like gunshots. I felt it … dust and gravel, it felt like rain at first … I looked up and I saw the fucking thing falling, the whole fucking thing. I ran out of the way, but it crushed the hut. I should’ve done something, called Bernie, but there was no time. It went down so fast.’

  ‘Nothing you could do, Johnno. Too bloody quick.’

  ‘Bernie was a good bloke.’

  ‘May he rest in peace,’ another man said, making the sign of the cross.

  Bernie had two daughters: Catherine and Margaret. Their photographs were pinned to the board behind Bernie’s small, cluttered desk, with its stacks of messy files. Those girls were orphaned now.

  Good men. Family men. Bernie and Slav and Bob.

  After the tea they went back to helping with the rescue. Hope of finding the missing men was running out. Everything lying in the way of the bridge was pulverised. But Antonello didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to go home.

  The remains of the bridge formed a rugged landscape, barren, bleak. Beneath the fallen concrete and steel, there were the relics of another world, another time, buried, already, in the past. They dug, they uncovered, they removed the rubble, but they could not resurrect that lost world.

  It was well after midnight before they found Slav’s body. The weight of the discovery bore down on Antonello and he collapsed.

  ‘You fainted,’ the ambo told him when he came to. ‘You’ll be okay but you’re exhausted, and that knee needs to rest.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Just need a minute.’

  ‘Is there someone who can drive you home? Otherwise we’ll have to take you to the hospital, and they’ve already got more on their hands than they can handle.’

  ‘I’ll take him home.’ His father had been waiting for him. ‘Joe took your mother and Paolina home, he’ll be back with the car any minute.’

  At the bungalow, Paolina ran a bath for him and heated some soup.

  ‘Please,’ he said to Paolina, ‘please, don’t say anything.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, her hand on his shoulder as he sat at the table. ‘But eat something.’

  He wasn’t hungry. He swallowed a couple of spoonfuls and pushed the bowl away, stood up, and walked into the bedroom, where he collapsed onto the bed. Sleep drew him but as soon as he closed his eyes, he saw the span falling, the men falling; heard their screams.

  Chapter 3

  Things that were solid crumbled. Fell. Things that should’ve been said hadn’t been said. Problems had been ignored, wished away. The collapsing bridge, the falling men, played like a film on a big screen, over and over again in his mind, and each time, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t change the ending. He tossed restlessly for several hours. As soon as dawn broke, he climbed out of bed, careful not to wake Paolina, left her a short note, and went back to the bridge.

  The dust had settled. The roadway was clear now. The bodies were gone. There was one police car and two news vans, but there were no reporters or cops in sight. On the road, not far from where Antonello was standing, an old couple held hands and watched the rescuers. A woman and her teenage son also stood close by. The boy held his mother’s hand and was trying to drag her away.

  On the site, there were several crews at work removing large concrete rocks and carrying them with wheelbarrows and small trailers to the riverbank. A couple of men armed with oxyacetylene torches were cutting through the steel. There were two cranes lifting larger boulders off the site. A group of men in suits and hard hats — inspectors, Antonello assumed — were walking around the site and making notes. Two Salvation Army workers stood at a small table set up with tea and thermoses, listening to the news on the radio, where a journalist was talking about seeing the collapse from a helicopter: ‘It was as if a child had a tantrum with his construction set and bashed it to the ground.’ Antonello shuddered and moved away until the radio was only a dull murmur.

  The two snaking arms of the bridge reached across the river, longing to be one. On the bank the fallen span was a twisted wreck, and the crumbled column was a mountain of rubble. The bridge was broken, mournful. If left for long enough, it would be devoured by the river.

  Bob was one of three men presumed dead but not yet recovered. He was buried under tons of steel and concrete. Antonello lowered himself to the ground, bent his head, and closed his eyes. He’d known Bob for six years. Bob was his first boss; he was a mate, like family.

  ‘Always jobs for riggers,’ Bob had said at their first meeting. ‘You need a brain and lots of muscle. Your uncle Charlie says you’re a smart kid, a hard worker. And it’s hard work, no question about it. Not for a wuss.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Antonello’s father had instructed him to call Bob sir. But Bob was a big bloke who wore blue overalls and a green army beanie over his shoulder-length grey hair. He had a beard and a permanent tan. He didn’t look to Antonello like someone who would want to be called ‘sir’.

  ‘Call me Bob,’ he said. ‘Sir is for them white-collar blokes in suits, them blokes with diplomas.’ He stretched the last word out to its limit, dee-plo-mahs. ‘Those blokes are so far up their arses they can’t find themselves.’ He laughed and patted Antonello on the back. ‘I ain’t as scary as I look. You look a little scrawny, but we can build you up.’

  They were standing on the footpath of a building site on a busy road in the city. There were several men working on the site, and Antonello could feel their eyes on him.

  ‘You’ll have to go to tech at night to get your certificates,’ Bob told him.

  ‘Okay.’ Antonello was nervous; most Australiani he had ever spoken to for any length of time — the doctor, his teachers, the teller at his parents’ bank — had made him feel as if he were the only one in the room that didn’t get the joke.

  ‘Are you sure? Can you read and write in English? You don’t seem to speak much.’ Bob winked, and Antonello noticed his eyes. They were as blue as the sea of the Stretto di Messina on the summer afternoons when he and his grandfather gazed at it from the seats in front of Fontana del Nettuno.

  ‘My English isn’t too bad. I think I’ll be right.’ Antonello remembered relaxing, even though he had no idea what it’d take to get his certificates and if his English would be up to it.

  ‘Well, you seem like a good kid.’

  Antonello waited for Bob to add ‘for a wog or a dago’, but he didn’t.

  ‘Are you okay with heights?’

  ‘Heights?’ Antonello repeated.

  ‘Yes, heights. If you’re going to be a fucking rigger you need to be able to work up high.’ Bob pointed to the sky. ‘We spend half our bloody lives on the top of buildings, on steel beams, up high. Are you going to be okay with that?’

  Antonello climbed his first ladder as a three-year-old, passing tools to his father, who was on a constant mission to fix and repair their house. First there was the stone house in Vizzini, which was old and damp and had an unending list of things
to be done — loose tiles on the roof, cracked windows, broken shutters, leaves clogging up gutters … And when they bought their Australian house, he seemed to be in the process of painting and repainting either the inside or the outside every summer holidays. Antonello’s older brothers were better at staying out of sight.

  ‘I think I’m okay,’ he said. ‘I’m okay on the roof of our house and on ladders.’

  ‘The roof of your bloody house.’ Bob laughed and clapped his hands hard, and his whole body shook. ‘The roof of your house isn’t high. To a rigger, the roof of a house is like a fucking kid’s stool. I’m talking about fucking bridges, about multi-storey buildings, ship masts — though I’m not planning to do any ship work. A closed shop, that.’

  ‘I think I’ll be fine,’ Antonello said. He wasn’t sure — would he be fine?

  ‘Bonza. I’ll give you a go because Charlie’s a mate, a good bloke — best bricklayer this side of the planet — and you seem like an okay kid. But if you can’t do height work, you’ve got Buckley’s chance of bein’ a fucking rigger, remember that.’

  It wasn’t until a month or so later that Antonello did his first real height job. They were working on a half-built office block. On the ground the crane driver was waiting to lift the next set of steel frames to the twelfth floor. Bob instructed the crew to make their way along the narrow steel beams to the edge of the building, where the crane driver was waiting for their signal. Antonello was on the right side of the building, following Bob. He was fine until he looked down at the ground and froze. He couldn’t move, or speak. He was hot and flushed, and his forehead was covered in sweat; drops ran down his face and into his eyes, but he dared not raise his arms to wipe it off. His body swayed and rocked, and he couldn’t make it stop.

  ‘Are you okay, Nello?’ Bob asked.

  When Antonello didn’t respond, Bob went over to him. ‘Don’t fucking look down,’ he said.

  Slowly and with care, he placed Antonello’s right hand on his shoulder. ‘Hold on to me. Breathe. Don’t hold your breath.’

  ‘I can’t move.’

  ‘You can move. I won’t let you fall. One step at a time, don’t go freaking out on me.’

  Light-headed and nauseous, Antonello made it back onto the ground. His knees were trembling; his heart was thumping. He threw up his breakfast into a bin they used for wood scraps.

  ‘Bloody hell. Can’t be taking that home to Sandy for the fire.’

  ‘What’s up with you two?’ the crane driver called out. ‘Are we doing this or what?’

  ‘Let’s do it after lunch,’ Bob said.

  ‘Whatever. Thought you were in a fucking hurry.’

  But Bob didn’t say anything to anybody, and thirty minutes later, he insisted Antonello go up again. ‘You got two fucking choices, mate: either you get over it or bloody give it away and find another job. Rigging is height work. It is fucking dangerous, that’s true, but there are plenty of old riggers around. We’re careful — one hand for the boss, one hand for yourself — and we keep an eye out for ourselves and our mates.’

  ‘Not sure if I can go back up there.’

  ‘You need to get back on the fucking bike. You’re a good kid. I’ve got used to you and I don’t want to break in some new guy.’

  Antonello went back up.

  By the time they were working on the bridge, Bob told everyone that Antonello was ‘not a bad rigger, not bad at all, built up some muscles, not too shabby’. Bob would wink at Antonello and they’d both remember the day on the steel scaffolding when he nearly quit.

  ‘Nello, Nello, are you okay?’ It was Sam, standing above him, his arm in a cast. Sam lowered himself to the ground. ‘Back’s a bit stiff.’ His voice was hoarse.

  Before Antonello could respond, Sam continued, ‘I thought I might find you here. Paolina’s worried.’

  ‘She rang you?’

  ‘No, I dropped in to see you.’

  ‘They haven’t found Bob yet,’ Antonello said.

  ‘I know, mate, but you can’t sit here all day waiting. It’s almost lunchtime.’

  ‘Why not? If it was us, Bob’d be in there, digging.’

  ‘Some of us are going to mass this afternoon, a special mass at St Augustine’s. Come with us.’

  ‘No,’ Antonello said, shaking his head.

  ‘It might help,’ Sam said, reaching out to put his good arm around Antonello’s shoulder.

  ‘I don’t want to go to church. I don’t want to have anything to do with God.’ Antonello was surprised by his own words, but he knew as soon as he said them that they were true.

  ‘You don’t mean that, Antonello,’ Sam said.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘When the bridge started to shake and they couldn’t put the bolts back in, I knew the span was going to fall, and I started praying. I closed my eyes and I prayed. I could feel myself falling, but I kept my eyes closed and kept praying —’

  ‘Stop it, Sam. Stop it. I don’t want to hear it. So you’re grateful God saved you … but I bet every single man was praying in those last moments and it didn’t fucking do most of them any good. Think about Bernie; you couldn’t get more devout than Bernie. He would’ve been praying. And Slav too, bet even Bob … Do you think you or me — do you think God heard us and not them, not Slav or Bob, are we so special?’

  Like most Sicilians, Antonello had invested a great deal of time and energy in God. Not just going to mass every week, not just the hours of his childhood spent as an altar boy, at Sunday school, lining up during Easter parades, and helping out at the local holy festivals for one of the three patron saints of his village, but the hours of prayer, and the whispered confessions, the pouring out of secret hopes and dreams. Blind faith, stupid blind faith, given over in a pious submission to a God who was supposed to be better than man, more loving and kind. But all this had been wasted. God was cruel.

  ‘It wasn’t God’s fault, Nello, you know that.’

  Antonello imagined God as a monstrous man in full tantrum, bashing the bridge to the ground. Like a toddler with a construction set, the radio journalist had said. ‘No, I don’t know that. I don’t know.’ He shook Sam’s hand off his shoulder. ‘If he exists and he’s almighty and all-seeing, and fucking everywhere, why didn’t he stop it, and stop all the other awful things happening in the world? If he watches and does nothing, that makes him cruel and sadistic. I prefer to think he doesn’t exist at all. I’ve wasted enough time praying and going to church and giving him pennies I can’t afford to give.’

  In the days that followed, the newspapers printed the first lists of the dead. The men’s names, their ages, the names of their streets and suburbs. They also listed the injured and their physical conditions, categorised as either satisfactory or serious, and in some cases explicated with will be operated on today, might go home tomorrow, improving — as if they were hospital staff giving updates to worried relatives. Not named were the missing, the unidentified, their wives and girlfriends, their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters, waiting in the hope their loved one will be the exception, the one found alive.

  The front pages of the paper featured the survivors. The men who rode the bridge down holding on to a girder or bouncing in the internal cavity of the span, the ones who were able to outrun it — with the help of a gust of wind created by the collapse itself — the ones who caught the last or second-last lift down and made it to the ground, the ones who moved out of the lunch or first-aid hut just before the weight of the bridge crushed it to the ground, the ones who fell into the river and weren’t pounded by falling metal or concrete, the ones who were able to find shelter behind a crane or truck, and the ones who woke up in hospital with broken bones and deep scars, their eyes glued together with thick black oil and no memory beyond the initial collapse. Antonello was described as a twenty-two-year-old rigger, from Footscray. A Sicilian migrant with a pret
ty young wife. They printed a photograph of him and Paolina on their wedding day, which he found out later his mother had given the reporter. The caption read, Lucky escape for newlyweds.

  Emilia wanted to give thanks to God: it was a miracle that Antonello was alive. On the day of the bridge collapse, waiting for the news, she had pledged offerings to San Giuseppe, to Sant’Antonio, and to the Madonna della Lettera, the patron saint of Messina. Afterwards, she insisted Franco drive her across the city to St Anthony’s Shrine Catholic Church in Hawthorn to light candles and make the promised donations. She went to her local church, St Augustine’s, and lit row after row of candles; she sent her mother money to give to the Madonna’s church in Messina. She understood that if God and the saints listened to your prayers, you had to pay your debts. Antonello was the lucky one, but luck couldn’t be taken for granted. And on the day the bridge fell, there were several hours when she thought his luck had run out.

  She was a forty-three-year-old mother of four when she discovered she was pregnant with Antonello. She was furious. Each of her children’s births had been more difficult than the last, and in between there were six miscarriages. Her periods were less regular and lighter and she considered herself no longer fertile, able to enjoy sex with Franco without anxiety. But Antonello was a healthy, happy baby, born at the end of the war, into a world at peace. You had to be grateful for that.

  In Vizzini, the war had been a distant ogre. Occasionally there were bombings in the nearby hills, sending people scattering into church basements, but the village was never targeted. However, they had their losses too. Vizzini sent its sons to fight, and Emilia’s favourite uncle was one of thirty-three local boys killed. She remembered her mother’s youngest brother as jovial and kind, always willing to carry his young niece on his shoulders, to spin her in circles, to tickle her until she laughed so much the tears rolled down her cheeks. Starving in a prisoner-of-war camp near the Italian and German border, he and a friend had escaped. They were caught and beaten so badly that several of his ribs were broken and his lungs collapsed. Two days later, the war was over and he lay in a hospital bed, dying. Emilia’s grandparents travelled non-stop for two days, but by the time they reached the hospital he was dead, and all they could do for their youngest child was buy a cheap suit and weep over his grave.