Here is a woman, she is seated; she wears a three-layered tiara; a veil is suspended above her head to cover the intermediate planes that she does not want to perceive; and she is looking at an open book on her knees.
I fled the torpedo boat Morgana wondering if there existed a place on earth where I could hide forever. Of all the splinters that were still falling on my city, I had not avoided the sharpest. It had pierced me at a point near the heart and I would not be able to clean its ineradicable filth.
I had never boarded a ship before, even though I had gazed endlessly at the ferries, dreaming of embarking and escaping far away. Instead, when I set foot on one, I had been pushed back, down, lower than I had believed possible, and it was my own fault, my arrogance, the conviction that I could make it myself.
Compared with what I was living, the crash that two nights before had hurled me from the window into the street seemed a gentle breath. Then I was gravely damaged, now I was ruined irremediably.
Annihilated and limping, I looked for a street that would lead me home.
Yes, but what home? What place would I call home now? Certainly I couldn’t return to my father’s house, assuming it remained standing and assuming he was numbered among the survivors: impure and broken, I would be definitively useless. Marriage to the man whose surname I didn’t want to utter—again, if he was alive—with the loss of my purity fell off his horizon, and if I was not a dowry what could I be? Nothing good, nothing other than trouble. No, I would not have wanted to encounter my father. The news that arrived about the individual towns along the coast was sketchy and contradictory, and, besides, I had no nostalgia for Scaletta Zanclea and its ill-hung doors, among which I hadn’t been happy. Without my father, the giddy excitement of considering myself alone had urged me to walk free and bold in the city where I had lost everything but my body, and until I boarded the Morgana I thought that that body was my good fortune, because the earthquake had spared it and the sea hadn’t killed it. I was wrong.
My wholeness was a deception, the disguise of a greater abuse. I wasn’t invincible and that body wasn’t mine, in fact he who had wanted it had taken it—he who could, as soon as he could. The earthquake had been a general proof of my destruction, but the earth is never satisfied; it can’t be. Until that moment I had believed that my destiny would be sad but not impossible to face, I had saved myself from death to be present at the death of others, to be surprised by the horror of corpses dragged by streams along with the foundations of buildings, to endure the torture of knowing where my grandmother was buried without being able to dig her out. Becoming invisible had been a painful and feverish shock; it incited in me an unknown consciousness, of having survived to bear witness, perhaps even to write about what had happened. A high task, a noble fate, until, punctually, the punishment had arrived: I wasn’t dead because I would have a slow and agonizing end.
I went to the Riviera Ringo and across from the Church of Gesù e Maria del Buonviaggio found a corner of beach where I could wash. I began by scrubbing the clothes until the cloak was soaked and worn through, then I went on to clean myself forcefully under the skirt, too, on the bare skin. Finally, no longer distinguishing between the water of my tears and the water of the Strait, without even taking off my shoes, I went into the sea wishing not to emerge.
The statues of the Madonna and her son, behind me on the façade of the religious building, held oil lamps offering light for sailors leaving to go fishing, for journeys and returns. The church had survived the earthquake, and the sculptures with it. The care that God had for men always survived, I noted with hatred, and even that woman and holy mother had protected not me but them. I wept with rage and filth, I stuck my head under the water and tried to fill my lungs with liquid, hoping the current would carry me out to sea. If my sea had become a cemetery, I wanted to be one of its corpses, a body in an aquarium of bodies, a fossil in an ossuary. I stopped thinking.
Soon afterward, my back bumped against a sandy shore, and I opened my eyes more in anger than in surprise. I hadn’t left the coast. I remained unbearably alive: the sea hadn’t wanted me, I was no good even at killing myself.
A hand grabbed my face, another my hair. Jutta dragged me onto the shore, calling me by name.
She undressed me and dried me with a blanket, I was naked in front of her, she would see that I was no longer a virgin and intact. I was naked before anyone, ruined without possibility of repair. I yelled at her to leave me in peace, I wanted to die and no one would prevent me, but she dragged me farther up until the shore stopped licking my feet and the strength to oppose her failed.
It began to drizzle. A light yellowish water grimed our skin, our clothes. Jutta asked me to go with her to the church, where we would be sheltered safely.
“Someone bothered you, right?” she asked, staring at me. I shook my head no, fiercely. No one should know, not even her. She didn’t respond and threw me a pile of black material. It was a garment of strict mourning, of poor quality, used many times. If I couldn’t die I would live with death on me. I wore the widowhood of a stranger and her worn-out sorrow was superimposed on my skin.
The Ringo church was full of sacks and pieces of material used as beds. We looked for a corner for ourselves, but there were already too many people and the floor was so crowded you could barely walk, so I proposed to Jutta that we go back together to the nuns of Santa Teresa who had housed me the night before. I added that first she would have to go with me to a place, I had to look for someone. She agreed, and we set out. She was still visibly limping, and at her shins her clothes were thick with dark, by now old blood.
On the way I asked her how she had been able to find me. She had waited until she had had a terrible foreboding, a vision, as if a black door had been slammed shut before her, so she had started looking for me at the Marina and, not seeing me anywhere, had begun to stop strangers randomly, describing what I looked like. Few had paid attention to her, and those few had shaken their heads, but a woman, a woman alone, had said she knew me and yes, I had got off a torpedo boat and headed toward the Ringo. The foreboding had grown; Jutta had been tortured by murky, diabolical images. Unfortunately, she said, because of the pain in her limbs she had been unable to go as quickly as she wished and had feared she wouldn’t be in time to save me, even if she didn’t know from what.
I grabbed her arm, squeezed it hard. No one, apart from her and the nuns, had been kind to me, no one had worried if I was dead or alive, if I had food and clothing, a place for the night. No one had wanted to share an indivisible solitude or let the egoism of survival be diminished by the possibility of doing it with someone else.
“Thank you,” I said to Jutta, moved. The last time I had uttered those words I had done it to save myself, and it hadn’t worked. Now on my lips there was intention and truth, and yet I was no longer sure it was enough. But beside me was Jutta, and that was already so much.
“For love of your grandmother, I can’t leave you alone,” she said.
We continued arm in arm in the rain, she wrapped in delicate green wool and I in thick worn black cotton. Dressed as a widow, I led her to the entrance of the cemetery, and then inside, discovering that it wasn’t empty or untouched, as I’d hoped. Among the shattered graves and tombs buried by other tombs, not even the dead had been spared by death. I headed to the corner where I had dreamed so often of going, while around us people wept and prayed on the graves of their loved ones. I wasn’t the only one who’d had the idea of seeking comfort from ghosts, but we were all alone, each with our own spectres. Jutta followed me in silence, occasionally pausing at a stone to utter a blessing. An image of Letteria Montoro was sticking out from the rubble of her ruined grave: I had no need to read the name to recognize the woman who had been so important for me, cancelled as the stories of women are always cancelled. I had lost her book, Maria Landini, but one day I would find it again and be reunited with those precious pages. I searched for some surviving words, sitting to rummage among the fragments of the epigraph: “. . . oblivion will not weigh on her ashes . . . ,” “. . . she sacrificed her life in a Christian manner . . .” Here, finally: “. . . a woman of free spirit . . .” I hugged the precious phrase and put it in my pocket as if it were my due: the lost book was restored to me. The marble where those words were written was mine, and that was just. I kissed the photo, flaking but clear, and after a moment’s hesitation I put that, too, in my pocket.
“A beautiful woman, your mother,” Jutta said only then.
And I didn’t deny it and answered yes, she was.