He who builds a “tower” to replace revelation from heaven by what he himself has fabricated, will be blasted by a thunderbolt, i.e. he will undergo the humiliation of being reduced to his own subjectivity and to terrestrial reality.
At five-twenty-one, in Messina, my desire and goal, my origin and chosen destiny, capital and antithesis of the village I was escaping, the living no longer existed. Only the dead and the living dead.
I, fallen like a sinner angel—to which category did I belong?
Bruised but whole, for long minutes in my ears I heard the echo of thunder spit out by the abyss, in my eyes smoke and ashes, under my body a dough of concrete and, above, a rain of fog. The waves that wanted to consume me retreated.
Then silence.
The girl who came down with the façade of her apartment was me. The girl carried away from the window, hurtled from a wretched third floor onto a pile of rubble, had my face, my skin. That mound with its grotesque welcome, that mound of walls and objects that had been my life, had saved my body—under me might be tables and curtains, wardrobes and human beings.
Behind an elsewhere of fallen walls the prayer rose distinctly: Arcangelu Micheli, si è pi’ mali ’nesci beni, what has come to bring me harm, let it turn instead to good. It was the prayer Grandmother and I recited when I was little, the formula invoked to drive out the evil beings that nightmares put in my bed. With that prayer, Grandmother spoke to the dreams that were dreams and the real that was real, baptized and separated truth from illusion. The exorcism didn’t work this time. Out of the hill of rubble from which it had risen, the voice stopped existing and my grandmother with it. I shouted her name, her bare name the same as mine, as if calling a different me, and I ran to dig at the point where I was sure I’d heard her, until two warm hands circled my hips and pulled me away an instant before a beam fell. Only then I understood that what had happened had happened to me.
The earth shook again, pulverized other beams, other columns. Snatching me from my grandmother’s tomb before it became mine was, I recognized, the neighbor, the mother of three girls—she was digging with hands and feet, careless of the nakedness her nightgown exposed. I myself must have appeared lewd, my legs were cold, was it a sign that I was alive? What would happen if men saw me?
The neighbor’s daughters were beneath us, but I heard no voices, heard no sound.
An evil fog obstructed my sight.
I lay down, curled up on one side, and wept. My cheeks pressed against the cold ruins, and the tears fell on what remained of my existence. In a rage I began biting and scratching pieces of floor and walls, I looked up and above me saw emerging through the smoke shreds of the façade, windows open onto nothing.
The walls shook. I ran a few meters farther on, and, finally finding the courage to look, saw what remained of the building: a lopped and imploded line. Grandmother and I used to call it ’a muragghia, the great wall, because once when I was little we had read an Oriental fable set at the foot of a very long wall, a huge wall, in fact, which in ancient times had served to isolate and fortify China. In the same way, our Palazzata, which, with its endless wall of apartments and offices, looked over the Strait, seemed to protect the city from disasters threatened by the sea: but that, too, was only an illusion.
The woman who had been our neighbor came over to me. She, like me, was weeping, she covered her face with her hands. Her magnificent curly hair, which I remembered as well brushed and soft, lay wiry and wild on her shoulders, while she shook and sobbed. I tried to embrace her.
“I kissed all the children,” she said, staring at me, as if entreating me. “All three, before I went to bed, all three, Isabella, Ada, Lina, I called them, all three, and they answered, the little one never wanted to close her eyes, you know? She was always the last to fall asleep, because I like that I still see you, Mamma, she’d say. You don’t have children, I envy you, because right now I’d like someone to rip my heart out.”
“They’ll come and help you, I swear,” I lied.
A short distance from us a chest was sticking out of the rubble, I went over and took everything I found, cloaks, dresses, I filled my arms and showed the booty to the woman, so that we could both cover ourselves, wear something over our nightgowns. She put on a coat and didn’t want anything else, I tied the rest up in a bundle, using a shawl, I would think about it later. It seemed to me more important to take care of her, it was the way to put off reckoning with my terror and my losses.
“I bore them. I carried all three in my belly,” she said, eyes staring into a void. From now on she would have to live without pieces of her own body, stripped of something I had never known, and so I couldn’t feel the lack.
I had no words for her grief, which overwhelmed me, swallowing mine. I introduced myself and asked her name, I knew only the surname of her husband.
“My name is Elvira,” she said.
I covered myself as well as I could while day rose to illuminate the devastation of everything and our nothing.
The earth shook again, yet another piece of the house fell. Instinctively we hugged each other.
“Let’s go, let’s look for a safer place,” I said to Elvira. “There must be a safer place, let’s go to the sea.”
“My little ones are here!” she cried, and then: “Go, I want to die with them.”
She had her daughters and I had only her, a woman with whom I had never before spoken, but our houses had collapsed together. I didn’t go.
Voices and faces arrived soon afterward, when, with the lights of morning, a dark, swarming movement began.
Men and women advanced amid the ruins, clasping hands in recognition or even just in trust, seeking contact, acknowledgment. A young woman dressed in white passed, a group of boys with a priest, an old man hurrying toward the harbor. Elvira threw herself at him, imploring him to dig up her children, he glared at her and shook her off. All those people were desperate as she was, as we were, we were walking over the dead, in the midst of the dead, still without truly understanding that we were alive, unsure whether we really were. Each of us can focus more easily on a circumscribed suffering than on too much suffering at once, so Elvira’s trouble became mine; seeing her beg like that caused me pain and a voice within suggested, rest, your daughters no longer exist, save the suffering for your future life. I begged her to wait, her husband and children would make it, I don’t know why I told that lie, but then I understood that we would have to live on lies forever. Elvira gave a mean laugh, she said her husband was safe, he hadn’t come home, in order to sleep at his lover’s, didn’t I know men? Of course, you don’t know anything, you who aren’t married.
I didn’t answer. There was too much despair everywhere, there was no room in me to take in meanness. I left Elvira and began to hang around the Palazzata and the fires that were turning it red, I counted the non-dead without daring to call them living, and among them, in confusion, I tried to identify myself. If I was no longer I, maybe I could look for a place in an us? I looked, powerless, letting visions and thoughts flow. Us, silhouettes without edges in clouds of fiery smoke and debris, unable to focus even our consciousness, we struggled to discover whether a limb still responded or not, whether we still had a bone, we tried to move legs buried by kilos of bricks, to dig arms out from under furniture, remove from our nose, our forehead, the remains of dwellings and things that were ours and old. We hung from cornices and balconies, contracting muscles we didn’t even know we had, asked and gave credence to sounds that indicated below or above us the breath of another person. We wept because what those who had lost everything had was not life, and at every instant we knew we were still losing something, someone, in the holes and hollows where a voice rose and after a moment was gone.
Gradually, as sections of the Palazzata continued to crumble, it lost its linearity. Neither the streets nor the squares were the known ones, my sense of direction was useless. When I saw the white hem of Elvira’s nightgown sticking out from under a dark overcoat, I realized I had returned to the point of departure.
Two men in police uniforms arrived and attended to her, as she wept ceaselessly for her daughters. They said the priority was to search for children, they listened to her, but one of the two was staring at her breasts, and it seemed to me that he was not to be trusted; I tried to go to her aid, but she resisted violently, pushing me aside, and went on talking to them. I gave up, no one could decide for someone else what was right to do. What had been my dearest wish until the day before, to be free—well, it had been granted. Maybe Elvira was right, in me relief balanced grief, I would no longer hear my grandmother’s reproach, I would not have to ask permission for my ambitions, apologize for my behavior. Of course, I would never have suspected that freedom would be presented to me in the guise of an abyss: so little do we know about the shape of the future and the substance of desires that it’s best not to linger there too long. The hope I had lived on until then appeared in its troubling truth: it had been only one version of my collapse, I was free in a frightening and irreversible way, and I had to use that gift before it used me. There wasn’t time, “time” was a mesmerizing and dying word, and day broke in spite of everything: maybe it would rain and we would all be without shelter. That’s what I needed, shelter, while the crackling wires of the devastated tram line created a ridiculous effect like footlights.
I retreated behind a standing wall, where I took off my nightgown and put on the stolen clothes. Which of my neighbors did the warm and elegant red wool camisole I put on belong to, and that incongruous lace shawl I wrapped around my head: I half-closed my eyelids and the women of the Palazzata paraded before me, the brunette with slender legs, the redhead with the long nose and kind expression, the hateful one who looked at me disdainfully, and the others I would not see again. A cornice fell on a stove and a pile of crumbled wall exploded nearby. I escaped from the smoke, leaving behind the clothes I hadn’t put on, and gave up the idea of hiding them and retrieving them later. With an out of place elegance masking swollen eyes and bare feet, I set off through the city, and only then did there begin to be room for other thoughts.
My father, I wondered, was he alive or dead?
Had the end of the world struck him, too, or spared him?
I heard his voice in my ears as he made his way through the rubble and came toward me murmuring: Rina, Rina.
I hated that name, and yet in spite of myself I longed for it madly, it would have made me feel safe, as we’re safe in what’s keeping us in prison, and when the prison opens we are left unprotected.
But no, I wasn’t Rina, I was Barbara: in Messina and forever. My father’s principal effort had been to hinder every kind of happiness in order to sacrifice me to a distorted idea of safety. And yet it wasn’t he who had saved me but the city that he wished to keep me from, and that even while it collapsed and died had spared me. Rina, Rina: I would never respond to the diminutive, only to my full name and with no added surnames.
Barefoot, I walked through the ruins of the city my father had rejected and I had never stopped believing in; every scrap, every place or thing he despised or didn’t know had been for me a source of interest. All my life I had looked where he wouldn’t look, wished to walk along streets that he avoided, and yet now that my bare feet were treading the dust, and the devastations wounding my ankles, I wished for the shell and protection of his shoes. Strong shoes, charmless work shoes, shoes that my grandmother looked at with despair because they were the symbol of that renunciation of urbanity that she couldn’t understand or tolerate: if only I had been able to dig up a similar pair, belonging to a man like him, then my progress would have been different. Instead I advanced hesitantly in the ghost city, I myself became a ghost, and Messina was a putrescent body, a large mouth with rotten smoky breath. Every corner stank of the dead, of broken aqueducts, of food spewed out of pantries that had no master, yet I continued my pilgrimage toward the cathedral, sure that it had remained standing, and that the good people would have found shelter there; the wish to kneel before the altar and pray for my buried world impelled me to go forward without stopping. Every so often, in the groups of wanderers, I could distinguish faces of people I had perhaps encountered, but I was never certain—I didn’t know many people in Messina. The buildings, those yes, I knew them perfectly, friezes and doorways that populated my solitary walks stood out clearly in my memory, although in the outside world they no longer existed: in vain I sought them in empty spaces and gaps.
No longer aligned, undamaged houses and destroyed ones alternated without sense or reason; some had been spared and others flattened according to mysterious designs of fate and urban planning. That night, God had sat at a gaming table, one of many set up for the Christmas celebrations; he had won and lost, had drunk toasts and got angry, had thrown down in no order everything within reach.
I was relieved to see a corner of the façade of the Vittorio Emanuele: the theater where just a few hours before I’d seen Aida had been saved, I rejoiced. I thought of Vittorio, of his emerald eyes, which I felt had observed me in a way unknown in my family; tears rose and I had to stop, and suddenly I felt a new warmth. The heat worked its way between my ankles, and a cry roused me: the fur of a kitten rubbing against my feet, under the skirt. I caressed it, the first living animal I’d met since the world collapsed. It studied me sadly; once it understood that I had nothing to feed it, it went away.
The souls of the dogs, cats, birds, and all the other dead animals, swept away by the water from the streams and consumed by the sea, would continue to live with those of the human beings.
I forced myself to start walking again. At the theater I would find someone. I had the illusion that the magic of the past evening had held up the entire building, as if nothing had happened.
The light of that false confidence faded as I approached: little more than the theater’s façade remained, as in performances of plays that had been staged there. The entire city was a wing in the theater, the faces of buildings endured, concealing behind their backs ripped-out beams, broken furniture, crippled armoires and beds; the outsides were plaques behind which tombs and bones were mixed, as in the cemetery. Messina, a dying body, was bleeding from shattered windows and, despite the bleeding, wouldn’t die but endured, stinking of discomfort and manure. In front of the Duomo I gave up. In what religion would its fate have been different?
Only the door of the cathedral was left, miraculously spared beneath the façade that had crumpled and fallen on itself, its fragments scattered over the pavement of Sundays. Splinters of the façade had ended up in the stagnant water of the Fountain of Orion; every so often the sun was obscured and brief, muggy discharges of rain came down, which didn’t put out the fires but soaked my clothes.
Not far away a mound was burning. I was afraid of those fires, which ignited out of nothing in the rubble, I moved away and headed toward Piazza Pantadattilo. If houses and churches were mostly destroyed, fountains and statues survived in the inferno with an audacity that made them seem proud or merciful, according to whether they looked up or down, talked with God or were moved to pity us mortals.
The tall statue of the Madonna Immacolata aimed at the sky with disconsolate eyes and hands in prayer; the putti under her no longer seemed satisfied, happy children but small, lost, imploring angels. One of the Virgin’s feet trampled a serpent and the other rested on a crescent moon. I clung to that vision with my last strength: the night star under Maria’s left heel replaced the altar buried under the ruins of the cathedral. I knelt to that trampled moon and addressed to it my liturgy.