So we discussed the world, while the music played under the starlit
southern night.
It must have been midnight ere a final frenzied galop on the part of the
indefatigable band announced the close of the entertainment. I walked a
few paces beside the lame "proprietor" who, supported on the arms of his
nephews, made his way to the spot where the cabs were waiting - his
rheumatism, he explained, obliging him to drive. How he had enjoyed
walking as a youth, and what pleasure it would now have given him to
protract, during a promenade to my hotel, our delightful conversation!
But infirmities teach us to curtail our pleasures, and many things that
seem natural to man's bodily configuration are found to be unattainable.
He seldom left his rooms; the stairs - the diabolical stairs! Would I at
least accept his card and rest assured how gladly he would receive me
and do all in his power to make my stay agreeable?
That card has gone the way of numberless others which the traveller in
Southern Europe gathers about him. I have also forgotten the old man's
name. But the palazzo in which he lived bore a certain historical
title which happened to be very familiar to me. I remember wondering how
it came to reach Messina.
In the olden days, of course, the days of splendour.
Will they ever return?
It struck me that the sufferings of the survivors would be alleviated if
all the sheds in which they are living could be painted white or
pearl-grey in order to protect them, as far as possible, from the
burning rays of the sun. I mentioned the idea to an overseer.
"We are painting as fast as we can," he replied. "An expensive matter,
however. The Villagio Elena alone has cost us, in this respect, twenty
thousand francs - with the greatest economy."
This will give some notion of the scale on which things have to be done.
The settlement in question contains some two hundred sheds - two hundred
out of over ten thousand.
But I was alluding not to these groups of hygienic bungalows erected by
public munificence and supplied with schools, laboratories, orphanages,
hospitals, and all that can make life endurable, but to the
others - those which the refugees built for themselves - ill-contrived
hovels, patched together with ropes, potato-sacks, petroleum cans and
miscellaneous odds and ends. A coat of whitewash, at least, inside and
out. ... I was thinking, too, of those still stranger dwellings, the
disused railway trucks which the government has placed at the disposal
of homeless families. At many Stations along the line may be seen
strings of these picturesque wigwams crowded with poor folk who have
installed themselves within, apparently for ever. They are cultivating
their favourite flowers and herbs in gaudy rows along the wooden
platforms of the carriages; the little children, all dressed in black,
play about in the shade underneath. The people will suffer in these
narrow tenements under the fierce southern sun, after their cool
courtyards and high-vaulted chambers! There will be diseases, too;
typhoids from the disturbed drainage and insufficient water-supply; eye
troubles, caused by the swarms of flies and tons of accumulated dust.
The ruins are also overrun with hordes of mangy cats and dogs which
ought to be exterminated without delay.
If, as seems likely, those rudely improvised sheds are to be inhabited
indefinitely, we may look forward to an interesting phenomenon, a
reversion to a corresponding type of man. The lack of the most ordinary
appliances of civilization, such as linen, washing-basins and cooking
utensils, will reduce them to the condition of savages who view these
things with indifference or simple curiosity; they will forget that they
ever had any use for them. And life in these huts where human beings are
herded together after the manner of beasts - one might almost say fitted
in, like the fragments of a mosaic pavement - cannot but be harmful to
the development of growing children.
The Calabrians, I was told, distinguished themselves by unearthly
ferocity; Reggio was given over to a legion of fiends that descended
from the heights during the week of confusion. "They tore the rings and
brooches off the dead," said a young officiai to me. "They strangled the
wounded and dying, in order to despoil them more comfortably. Here, and
at Messina, the mutilated corpses were past computation; but the
Calabrians were the worst."
Vampires, offspring of Night and Chaos.
So Dolomieu, speaking of the depravation incroyable des moeurs which
accompanied the earthquake of 1783, recounts the case of a householder
of Polistena who was pinned down under some masonry, his legs emerging
out of the ruins; his servant came and took the silver buckles off his
shoes and then fled, without attempting to free him. We have seen
something of this kind more recently at San Francisco.
"After despoiling the corpses, they ransacked the dwellings. Five
thousand beds, sir, were carried up from Reggio into the mountains."
"Five thousand beds! Per Dio! It seems a considerable number."
A young fellow, one of the survivors, attached himself to me in the
capacity of guide through the ruins of Reggio. He wore the
characteristic earthquake look, a dazed and bewildered expression of
countenance; he spoke in a singularly deliberate manner. Knowing the
country, I was soon bending my steps in the direction of the cemetery,
chiefly for the sake of the exquisite view from those windswept heights,
and to breathe more freely after the dust and desolation of the lower
parts. This burial-ground is in the same state as that of Messina, once
the pride of its citizens; the insane frolic of nature has not respected
the slumber of the dead or their commemorative shrines; it has made a
mockery of the place, twisting the solemn monuments into repulsive and
irreverential shapes.
But who can recount the freaks of stone and iron during those
moments - the hair-breadth escapes?
