Thus, the last judgment will be essentially the experience by mankind of awakened conscience and completely restored memory.
The carriage transporting the Crestani family was ascending, climbing upward, proceeding solemnly in the snow. Nicola leaned out the window to observe the glittering white blanket that until then he had seen only in the exotic drawings of travel magazines. Sharp peaks pierced the sky, the clouds came closer, and the child, wrapped in the warmth of a thick coat, hat pulled down over his ears, his feet safe in padded shoes, felt the intoxication of one cold point on his warm body, a sliver of ice on the tip of his nose. His cheeks were reddened by the tingling mountain air.
“The chalet is close,” Sabina said with a caress that was also a way of pulling him back in, a gesture of love that hid her worry that, leaning out, he might lose his balance. Chalet, mountain hut: the words that had flooded Nicola’s imagination acquired real outlines. The brown of the houses, the milky clouds, the white of the glaciers: every color reminded him how black life in Reggio had been.
And yet on the Strait Nicola had seen rainbows after the rain, had dodged the yellow light of spring, had wandered in the sparkle of sudden bright spells in winter, when the air was cold—not as cold as in Valle d’Aosta—and the sky clear. The whole sun could lie easily in the sky of Reggio Calabria, while in the valleys there were too many mountain curves interrupting the horizons.
After the last turn, the carriage stopped.
The chalet had a gable roof and wood shingles, windows with white grates. Nicola was startled: it was like the houses in the Swiss village that had arisen in Messina after the earthquake. He had seen photos of it in an article, and by now he was looking for such articles with increasing curiosity, focused always on the same question: Where did the girl of the Morgana live? Every photograph was a piece of the puzzle, every description a clue. At night, before going to sleep, he imagined her walking through Messina, then closing the door of the house behind her: one time the house was a cabin in the American village, near the offices and the banks, another it was in the middle of Queen Elena, willed by the sovereign. Since he had started looking for news of Messina and Reggio, he knew everything about the reconstruction. Now it was natural for him to think of her in a chalet in the Swiss village, made up of small foreign cottages like the ones the donors inhabited in their own country.
The Valle d’Aosta, Nicola discovered, getting out of the carriage that had brought them there, resembled Switzerland, and since he wanted to assume for himself and the girl a parallel fate, he couldn’t help seeing her enter a house like his, at that precise moment. And if it wasn’t so? Who could say where visions and dashed hopes ended up if they deteriorated over time like an unsuccessful spread of tarot cards, like a wrong card from Madame. And Madame, what had happened to her? Nicola didn’t know what to wish for her. Collecting articles on the apocalypse of the Strait, he had discovered many interesting facts about fortune tellers and diviners: it seemed that in the weeks before December 28th there had been unmistakable signs. A woman had entered the court in Messina, beside herself because her son had been condemned, and cried that an earthquake “with eyes” would come, that it would see, and identify, the guilty and the evil who deserved it, and would aim at them alone, in order to save those who were good. The archbishop of Reggio Calabria had died shortly before, having written that luckily he would not witness the destruction of the city. After the catastrophe, almost everyone had a premonition, a foreboding to recount to the journalists, whether it was a warning that came from the body of the blessed Eustochia in Messina or a tongue twister that had unfortunately appeared in the issue of a magazine—but then, Nicola continued to wonder, how blind were those who had suspected nothing? Those who hadn’t seen an anomalous dip in the sea or noticed the dark atmosphere, the ochre-colored air “typical of earthquakes”? Those who, like him, were too caught up in protecting themselves and saving their lives daily to have the time and the astuteness to fantasize on other fronts, about other dangers.
“Nicola, let’s go in now, it’s too cold,” Giuseppe called him, a hint of exasperation staining his kindness.
He had waited while Nicola was absorbed in his thoughts, in front of the chalet, always careful not to force him, respecting his ongoing strange behavior. Nicola again promised himself to be a better son for that father who was freezing outside there, who had carried in the suitcases and in reproaching him seemed rather to reproach himself for being unable to do otherwise.
“You’ve never heard anything like it in the world, nothing is like the sound of a glacier,” Sabina said, pulling up Nicola’s blankets.
“The pieces of ice crack and separate during the night, and that sound is elegiac and monstrous, it doesn’t resemble any form of living being,” Giuseppe had told him one afternoon. “I was here for the first time as a child, with my parents, and now it’s my turn to bring my son,” he added, and to Nicola it seemed that his eyes were wet with emotion.
What was it like, then, this glacier? You had to keep from sleeping at any cost, or you might not hear anything. Nicola tried to stay awake as long as he could, but the journey had been tiring; he could no longer feel his legs because he’d been sitting for so long, and sleep soon had the better of him.
He dreamed of the cats that pursued him in Reggio Calabria, the same two of that final night, the bloody one and the wounded, but they had both become gentle, tame. They looked at him without meowing, and he had a desire to touch them. Then sleep was interrupted by a series of light vibrations, they came from something that was exploding, the sound of bubbles being pricked with a toothpick. After that, creaks, roars, sonorous avalanches descending from the valleys intermittently broke the silence.
That was it, the glacier. Yes, it was majestic and frightening at the same time, Nicola was gripped by fear, he got up suddenly and bolted to his parents’ bed.
Sabina and Giuseppe welcomed him as if they’d been expecting him. In the warmth, between them, Nicola thought he had never been able to react to the night by fleeing, when his wrists were bound by ropes and his bed was a bier in the depths of a distant cellar. Now there were no ropes, no cuts on his skin, nothing kept him from asking for help and shouting his fear, he could appear fragile without being punished, ignored, or mocked.
Sabina breathed softly, Nicola huddled against her. Before falling asleep again he asked God not to give him anything more than what he already had, that love would be enough forever. Only, please, he added, don’t let there be any more earthquakes. At most one “with eyes,” which would continue to exterminate the wicked and save the three of them.
The next morning Nicola awakened to find a tray on the bed. A plate with a slice of cake, apple pancakes, fruit syrup. A glass of hot water. A cup that he uncovered immediately, anxious to discover what good thing it was hiding. The aroma, the color, and the consistency were unmistakable: hot chocolate. The same as at Caffè Spinelli, in the room dense with smoke, spices, and the scent of Fera bergamot, which the women of Reggio Calabria sprinkled on their coats, giving Nicola the impression that they all went around with his family pasted onto them. The hot chocolate of winter afternoons, rare oases of serenity, while Maria was distracted and he could enjoy in peace something he really liked. Beside it, the most recent issue of the Giornalino della Domenica. Nicola opened it, ready to give in to a comfortable happiness, and began reading the new episode of Cadetti di Guascogna, and then he moved on to an article about Easter celebrations. The sweets typical of every part of Italy were listed, and immediately Nicola looked for Calabria, finding the recipe for cudduraci, pastries in the shape of rings with two or three hard-boiled eggs set into them. Vincenzo ordered them every year for Sunday breakfast. Nicola liked to take out the eggs and eat them right away, and then scrape the pieces of shell off the cookie and eat it by itself. He turned the page again. “The Heroes Who Saved the Children of the Earthquake” was the title of a photographic essay. His hands trembled and he felt a shock to his heart. There were six pictures of sailors, six closeups, twelve eyes, six heads of hair. The fourth was him, the man from the Morgana.
Sabina entered and saw her son in tears.
“I didn’t want coming here to have this effect,” she said in alarm, but Nicola didn’t stop. “It’s my fault, I’m sorry.” Sabina saw the Giornalino open to the article about the heroes of the earthquake, closed it abruptly and threw it far away. “I have to be more careful about what you read.” She began to cry, too.
Nicola stopped. No, he shook his head. He had to tell her that she had nothing to do with it.
“It’s my fault, I don’t know how to be a mother,” she sobbed.
No, no, no, Nicola shook his head in vain, unable to console her.
“I don’t want the Devil to come and get me!”
Sabina stopped, stunned. Was that her son’s voice? The ancient and powerful voice of a creature who has traversed a thousand eras and a hundred lives resounded in her ears and in her breast.
“No devil will come,” she said, trying to soothe him.
“Off the ship, off the ship!”
“Sweetheart, we’re in the mountains, there’s no sea here.”
Sabina went over to Nicola to hug him, but she bumped the breakfast tray, which fell off the bed. The cup with the chocolate broke, and Nicola turned to look at the shards on the floor.
“It doesn’t matter. We’ll take care of it later,” Sabina soothed him.
“We’ll take care of it later,” Nicola repeated, amazed. His tone now was a child’s. The window glass was steamed up by the warm air of the stove and by the snow.
It was thus, in the shadow of the glacier, that Sabina heard from her son the story of what he had seen on the torpedo boat. She listened with a stab of pain for the secret he had carried inside him, and was upset with herself: How had she been able to concentrate exclusively on the earthquake, without considering the days of solitude that had followed? A child of eleven, suddenly alone in the world. A world of men against which he had no defenses.
“Poor girl,” she murmured. And also: “You’ll see, she managed, we women are strong, don’t you think about it anymore, don’t you think about it anymore, don’t think about it.”
Nicola fell into her arms and slowly it all grew distant, while Sabina kissed his hair, his forehead, his hands.
Soon afterward, Giuseppe entered the room thinking he’d find them absorbed in reading. Nicola and Sabina instead were sleeping, next to each other. He felt extraneous to the scene, to the intimacy of that room, and was about to leave.
“Lie down here with Mamma and me,” said the voice of his son unexpectedly.