What crosses her today is no longer that river of mud that in Sant’Agata sul Santerno turned her life upside down in the middle of the night, taking away her husband and destroying her house. She is rather a river of memories, certainly no less devastating.
A year after that night in which the torrent swallowed up the town, the widow Giuliana Bordini struggles to understand how it could happen that her husband – the historic barber of the town Giovanni Sella, 89 years old – left in just a few minutes her after an entire life spent together.
While he makes us sit in the house, yesterday the rain begins to fall from the sky, which then becomes a deluge and in a few minutes floods many streets of the town, the same as a year ago. As if to rage and increase the anger in that lady who is about to tell us about the year that has just passed and that every time it rains a little harder she relives the terror. In fact, that night, around 4pm on May 17th, a deadly mixture of water and mud entered their home, a few steps from the square, disintegrating the window of the room in which the elderly man was bedridden.
And so, in those moments in which the water level rose at an impressive speed to over two meters, the husband was unable to climb those six steps that would have brought him to safety. The foreign carer who assisted them, unfortunately, was on holiday for a few weeks, and perhaps with her help the two women would have gotten him out of bed, as the violence of the water did instead. However, his wife made it – clinging with the strength of desperation to the handrail and waiting for the divers to arrive several hours later – but today she still despairs, perhaps regretting having saved herself on that ramp. She repeated it too yesterday afternoon, when her lucidity was overwhelmed by her pain and despair. «I cry every day – the old woman says while outside the raindrops begin to become more and more insistent -. I miss her company and our daily life: eating together watching television, reading the newspaper a little. Being among us, as we have done all our lives. No one will ever give it back to me.”
For the elderly widow, who did not spare criticism of the institutions on the day of the funeral, it was not enough to have restored the house – as she had promised in front of her husband’s coffin, underlining that she would make it more beautiful than before – and to return to live there afterwards few months. There inside her, where it all began and where last year in a few minutes a part of her went away. But life goes on, you just have to persist in wanting it. Giuliana knows it, now at the age of 89 she still wants to have the right to complain. As that red rose seems to know, one year after the tragedy it managed to bloom where there was nothing left. Where the bulldozers had passed several times to load and take away tons of mud and rubble, but also of indelible memories. Tomorrow a year will have passed since that night in Sant’Agata in which, in addition to Giovanni Sella, another elderly woman, Neride Pollini, aged 95, also with serious walking problems, lost her life. She lived alone on the ground floor of a house near the river. The one that overwhelmed her without leaving her escape.
