He darted to reach the opening, but it
closed again and caught his arm in a stony grip. Hours seemed to
pass - the pain was past enduring; then the kindly cleft yawned once
more, allowing him to jump into the garden below. Simultaneously he
heard a crash as the inner rooms of the house fell; then climbed aloft,
and for four days wandered among the bleak, wet hills. Thousands were in
the same plight.
I asked what he found to eat.
"Erba, Signore. We all did. You could not touch property; a single
orange, and they would have killed you."
Grass!
He bore a name renowned in the past, but his home being turned into a
dust-heap under which his money, papers and furniture, his two parents
and brothers, are still lying, he now gains a livelihood by carrying
vegetables and fruit from the harbour to the collection of sheds
honoured by the name of market. Later in the day we happened to walk
past the very mansion, which lies near the quay. "Here is my house and
my family," he remarked, indicating, with a gesture of antique
resignation, a pile of wreckage.
Hard by, among the ruins, there sat a young woman with dishevelled hair,
singing rapturously. "Her husband was crushed to death," he said, "and
it unhinged her wits. Strange, is it not, sir? They used to fight like
fiends, and now - she sings to him night and day to come back."
Love - so the Greeks fabled - was the child of Chaos.
In this part of the town stands the civic museum, which all readers of
Gissing's "Ionian Sea" will remember as the closing note of those
harmonious pages. It is shattered, like everything else that he visited
in Reggio; like the hotel where he lodged; like the cathedral whose
proud superscription Circumlegentes devenimus Rhegium impressed him so
deeply; like that "singular bit of advanced civilization, which gave me
an odd sense of having strayed into the world of those romancers who
forecast the future - a public slaughter-house of tasteful architecture,
set in a grove of lemon trees and palms, suggesting the dreamy ideal of
some reformer whose palate shrinks from vegetarianism." We went the
round of all these places, not forgetting the house which bears the
tablet commemorating the death of a young soldier who fell fighting
against the Bourbons. From its contorted iron balcony there hangs a rope
by which the inmates may have tried to let themselves down.
A friend of mine, Baron C - - of Stilo, is a member of that same
patriotic family, and gave me the following strange account. He was
absent from Reggio at the time of the catastrophe, but three others of
them were staying there. On the first shock they rushed together,
panic-stricken, into one room; the floor gave way, and they suddenly
found themselves sitting in their motor-car which happened to be placed
exactly below them. They escaped with a few cuts and bruises.
An inscription on a neighbouring ruin runs to the effect that the
mansion having been severely damaged in the earthquake of 1783, its
owner had rebuilt it on lines calculated to defy future shattering!
Whether he would rebuild it yet again?
Nevertheless, there seems to be some chance for the revival of Reggio;
its prognosis is not utterly hopeless.
But Messina is in desperate case.
That haughty sea-front, with its long line of imposing edifices - imagine
a painted theatre decoration of cardboard through which some sportive
behemoth has been jumping with frantic glee; there you have it. And
within, all is desolation; the wreckage reaches to the windows; you must
clamber over it as best you can. What an all-absorbing post-tertiary
deposit for future generations, for the crafty antiquarian who deciphers
the history of mankind out of kitchen-middens and deformed heaps of
forgotten trash! The whole social life of the citizens, their arts,
domestic economy, and pastimes, lies embedded in that rubbish. "A
musical race," he will conclude, observing the number of decayed
pianofortes, guitars, and mandolines. The climate of Messina, he will
further arene, must have been a wet one, inasmuch as there are umbrellas
everywhere, standing upright among the debris, leaning all forlorn
against the ruins, or peering dismally from under them. It rained much
during those awful days, and umbrellas were at a premium. Yet fifty of
them would not have purchased a loaf of bread.
It was Goethe who, speaking of Pompeii, said that of the many
catastrophes which have afflicted mankind few have given greater
pleasure to posterity. The same will never be said of Messina, whose
relics, for the most part, are squalid and mean. The German poet, by the
way, visited this town shortly after the disaster of 1783, and describes
its zackige Ruinenwueste - words whose very sound is suggestive of
shatterings and dislocations. Nevertheless, the place revived again.
But what was 1783?
A mere rehearsal, an amateur performance.
Wandering about in this world of ghosts, I passed the old restaurant
where the sword-fish had once tasted so good - an accumulation of stones
and mortar - and reached the cathedral. It is laid low, all save the
Gargantuan mosaic figures that stare down from behind the altar in
futile benediction of Chaos; inane, terrific. This, then, is the house
of that feudal lady of the fortiter in re, who sent an earthquake and
called it love. Womanlike, she doted on gold and precious stones, and
they recovered her fabulous hoard, together with a copy of a Latin
letter she sent to the Christians of Messina by the hand of Saint Paul.
And not long afterwards - how came it to pass? - my steps were guided amid
that wilderness towards a narrow street containing the ruins of a
palazzo that bore, on a tablet over the ample doorway, an inscription
which arrested my attention.
