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 official 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 _dépravation 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 Dìo!_ 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? My companion’s case was miraculous
enough. Awakened from sleep with the first shock, he saw, by the dim
light of the lamp which burns in all their bedrooms, the wall at his
bedside weirdly gaping asunder. 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.