Be that as it may, the charioteer of the Arcanum “The Chariot” is the victor over trials, i.e. the temptations, and if he is master, then it is thanks to himself. He is alone, standing in his chariot; no one is present to applaud him or to pay homage to him; he has no weapons—the sceptre that he holds not being a weapon. If he is master, his mastership was acquired in solitude and he owes it to the trials alone, and not to anyone or anything external to himself.
Maybe the problem was names.
He had to find other ones, cancel the old titles of things and places, rewrite the dictionary and the geography book, think up and print as soon as possible a map with a new set of names. Maybe what at one time was for Nicola “home” would have a less frightening aspect if from now on he called it something different. Maybe, maybe, maybe: the ideas arrived insecurely and skewed, attempts rather than certainties, superimpositions of memory on the gaze, and the two things never came together. The memory was always excessive or deficient: where before there had been a church now there was nothing, where there had been nothing were ruins. The road to the port was a hurdle in a disconnected present. On the way one encountered only creatures who, like Nicola, were walking toward the sea carrying a few clothes, small bags. Among them he recognized Dalila, a dark, shapely woman who had married an employee of Vincenzo’s. Every so often she and her husband came to dinner at the Fera house; they didn’t have children and made vulgar comments about children and the couples who had them, but Nicola’s parents were permissive with them, laughing at remarks they would not have forgiven in others. On those nights he didn’t exist, but when he had to go to bed Maria, too, rose from the table: Excuse me, but if I don’t go with him he won’t sleep, my son can’t do anything without me. The illusion of not existing ended as usual with the ropes tight around his wrists, pulling him down into night, while above his head the adults’ din was slow to end. But Dalila was alive and Maria was no longer there. Nicola went up to her as if to cling to that last residue of mother.
“Do you have anything to eat?” he implored. She reacted as if a bloodsucker had attacked her arm.
“You’re the only one of your family saved?”
Nicola nodded, and the woman said to her group: “You who doubt the devil, do you want another proof? You remember the Fera bergamot, that very honest Vincenzo and his wonderful small, shy wife from the continent? In the house they had a nightmare, a creature from the inferno, the poor woman used to help her husband, then she had to give it up to stay with him. What do you want, she was good, she wouldn’t leave the child.” And, almost screaming: “She told me he was possessed by the Devil. She lost sleep and money because she loved him more than her life, with the new year an expert priest was supposed to come from Cosenza to do an exorcism, but see what an end they came to?”
Nicola was paralyzed.
“And out of the whole family who survived? Those who carried high the name of Reggio throughout Italy are no longer here, and the picciriddu sent by the devil is alive!”
A man with a mustache approached Nicola. “Did you take your father’s money, too? Let’s see.” He moved to stick his hands in Nicola’s pockets. Nicola fled and the man chased him. Only after climbing over ruins and dodging fires, after leaving behind agitated voices that shouted at him that the earthquake was his fault, his, that he would have to die to free them from the evil eye, after fearing that his head and lungs would go along with his breath, that Dalila’s friends would shoot him or that he would stumble and die incinerated, was Nicola able to slip through an open doorway. Not even then did he feel safe, but his breath slowed and his blood began flowing. He spat on the ground and decided to go in, even if nothing appeared really secure, neither roof nor walls. He might as well die in a collapse, and in a moment he was at the top of the stairs, but the floor above no longer existed, the steps led nowhere, he was forced to come down. He entered one of the rooms on the ground floor, an undamaged living room where there was a couch, upholstered chairs, a sideboard with decorated glass. On a small low table a tray of oranges and cookies appeared: Nicola pounced on the food and began stuffing himself. The more he ate the more upset his stomach was, he ate with primitive hunger, as if he were consuming the last meal on Earth, he ate until nausea stopped him, and he was still eating when the first waves of vomiting arrived with the smell of citrus. After he threw up he was more lucid, and he cleaned himself off with the napkin that covered the basket. He opened the drawers of the sideboard and found the silverware. He took the cover off a pillow and, with that material, made a bag, stuck in it every piece of silver he could grab, and stuffed cookies in his pockets until they were reduced to a mush. One more look at the apartment and he was off, running toward the port.
Amid the fumes of excrement rose an unmistakable odor of salt. The Strait, in spite of everything, still existed. Suddenly in the distance he saw the silhouette of Dalila again, as if she were about to enter a theater, Nicola stopped. He wasn’t afraid so much of her as of the men who were with her; they were hefty men and could hurt him, so he scratched his back against a wall as he waited to decide the best move, and when he heard steps he turned, frightened.
“Are you alone?” asked a man in a torn shirt and sagging pants. Nicola shook his head no. “Where are your mother and father?”
He wasn’t ready for that question. He thought no one would ask it, now that everyone was dead, and he needed an excuse, any kind, to keep the man from thinking he had no one, from hurting him. What was the quickest, the likeliest? They had gone in search of a boat to carry them all to safety? To pee, to recover a precious object under the ruins. They were around the corner, right there, they were about to arrive. They were at home, but they would be here soon. So, what could he invent about his parents?
“I’m alone, too. I had a wife and four children, the oldest like you. Twelve?”
“Eleven.”
“His name was Marco. Marco Giuseppe, the name of an uncle of my wife, Carla, and of my cousin who died at sea. Names are important. They’re all that remains to us.”
So adults also wept. Nicola had never seen an adult so shattered.
“What’s your name?”
“Nicola Vincenzo Maria Fera. My name, the name of my father, the name of my mother and the Madonna.”
“Fera? Like the perfume?”
“My father invented it.”
“You were rich, then. I had nothing. In reality I had everything and didn’t realize it, I was desperate because I wasn’t always able to feed my children. The boat wasn’t enough, some days the sea was really schifusazzu, disgusting.”
Nicola lowered his gaze, mortified, though that wealth that took away from others wasn’t his fault or his family’s.
“The waves consumed the boat before my eyes, and the earth the house behind me. I was in the middle and was saved. Unfortunately.”
Nicola opened the bag he’d made from the pillowcase and showed the fisherman the silver taken from the house that had collapsed.
“Take it, I have a lot. Take it.”
The man didn’t seem interested. “The world is over. You have all life ahead, you shouldn’t stay here with us. At the port there’s a line for the ships. Bye, Marco. Marco Giuseppe. Save yourself.”
The fisherman began weeping again: that meeting seemed to have been only a parenthesis between old tears and new. He was the first adult Nicola hadn’t had to protect himself from and, under the influence of an uncertain form of gratitude, he felt a desire to embrace him. He pulled out a handful of cookies and put them in the man’s hands along with a silver spoon. Then the earth shook again, lightly, and, while the jolt made his feet dance, the child resumed his journey.
When he was able to see the entire Strait, it appeared in its cruel majesty, the waters here black, there faded, elsewhere still of an intense blue, indifferent to the disaster.
And so Nicola reached the port, yet another name to change. That place had been life and movement, festive and bustling, but now it was a catacomb: relics of departures could be imagined in the depths, steamships and sailboats struck and sent flying, while the uprooted buoys had swum toward land or the open sea. Muddy tangles of carts, barrels, wheels, bits of houses, bannisters, fragments of boats dragged by the mad waves had been rolled onto the pier, jolts of land and water had gone wild creating gaps and cracks in the street. In place of the Marina, with its two broad straight roads to the north and the south, twisting paths originated amid the wreckage. The fountain that ornamented the road along the sea had been swept away, like the bathhouses on stilts beloved of swimmers. The beach where Nicola would have liked to learn to swim and Maria had never taken him had disappeared; near the bathhouse was an open space bigger than others, and a group of men were lining up bodies in piles, some covered with water, some with lime. Urban dust buried life.
“Messina is worse than Reggio, why would you go to Messina?”
A sailor tried to hold back the crowd of people who wanted to get in his torpedo boat, while colleagues distributed food and water before setting off.
“Go get the train! To Naples, to Italy!”
In the crowd, fragments of conversation, varying between men and women, impossible to catch more than a few words in a row, a reasonable sentence, track who said what. There’s a train leaving for Naples . . . They won’t let us get on . . . They want to kill us all . . . They’ve given orders to bomb the city . . . I have a cousin in Cannitello . . . Do you have any news of my husband . . . The railroad was demolished . . . There are no tracks . . . Messina is burning . . . Summon the king! Summon the Pope! . . . Do you have a little water for me . . .
People were heading toward the station, the sailors had been immovable. Among those who turned their back on the sea to hurry to the station was Dalila; her gait had changed, now she rudely took off and left her companions behind, shoving anyone who got in her way, as if only she had to be saved. Nicola waited until he couldn’t see her anymore. Finally, when he was sure he was alone, he turned to the sailor.
“Can I come with you?”
“You don’t have anyone to go and take the train with you?”
“They told me to go to the port and get on a ship.”
“Sicily is destroyed. We’re going to Messina to bring aid to people who are worse off than here—what do you want? Do you have someone to take care of you?”
“An aunt,” Nicola lied. He couldn’t risk either wasting more time or taking the same train as the woman who had incited those terrifying men against him. He had to get on that boat at any cost, and Messina was the only city he knew, apart from his own.
The sailor wasn’t convinced, but Nicola wouldn’t move.
“It’s not just my mother’s sister, there’s her family, too. My cousins, aunts and uncles, someone must have survived, they all love me, they’ll be worried, maybe they’ll want to come, better for me to go right away.”
Seeing that words were not enough, he took two pieces of silverware out of his sack.
“Get in,” the sailor ordered, looking around, but without taking them.
Standing on the bridge of the torpedo boat Morgana, Nicola crossed a dark, delirious Strait in silence. From the sea loomed the spectacle of Messina in ashes. At Capo Peloro, the lighthouse tower appeared split, as if a giant had struck it with an axe, the metal bent and twisted in the form of a serpent. Of the low, cheerful habitations of the villages on the shore solitary walls remained, among the white walls the frescoed ones indicated that there had been a church: even the houses of God had come down. The Palazzata was a toothless jaw breathing smoke, sometimes red from the flames. Only the Hills of Neptune, with their radiant green woods, seemed to have been spared by death.
A little before landing, the sailor showed up again.
“What neighborhood does your aunt live in?”
“In the Palazzata,” Nicola answered quickly, fearful that if he mentioned a more distant area the man would offer to go with him.
The sailor stared at him. He looked at his shiny leather shoes, his refined clothes.
“Is she wealthy like you?”
Nicola understood immediately where he wanted to strike.
“I don’t think those objects you have there will be of use to her. But I have to work for a living—I could die saving the children, buried by another aftershock.”
Only after handing over to that man the bag with the silver that he had taken with him for the days to come, Nicola descended from the torpedo boat Morgana and touched island soil.