One morning, in the autumn of 1908, I was sitting in front of one of the windows of the albergo looking out across the harbour at the mountains of Calabria, waiting for coffee and thinking of OmertÀ. I had been spending a week in Messina with Giovanni Grasso and his company of Sicilian Players, and OmertÀ was the play they had performed the preceding evening. I remembered how at the end Giovanni had staggered in mortally wounded and refused to give the name of his murderer—though the audience guessed who it must have been—and then how he had given his knife to Pasqualino, his young brother, and with his last breath had spoken these words; “Per Don TotÒ, quando avrai diciotto anni”; and I had left the theatre wishing I could see Giovanni as Pasqualino grown up and executing the vendetta. Giovanni now uses a revolver as being a nobler weapon, but when I was with him in Messina it was a knife.

The big waiter brought the coffee and stood on my left, the little waiter followed him, and stood on my right. During the week I had often seen this boy who was not yet a real waiter, he was learning his business by waiting on the waiters, and hitherto I had respected the convention by which I was supposed to be unaware of his existence, except that when he had made way for me on the stairs we had exchanged greetings. I said to the big waiter:

“How old is this little fellow?”

“Thirteen.”

I glanced at him and saw by his smile of expansive friendliness that he was pleased to be the subject of our conversation.

“What do you call him?”

“TotÒ.”

I took my knife off the breakfast table and imitating Giovanni, as well as I could, handed it to the big waiter saying:

“For Don TotÒ when he shall be eighteen years old.”

This was perhaps wrong, it was certainly risky to play with edged tools in this way in a country where one ought not to give a handkerchief as a ricordo lest one should be supposed to be intending to pass the tears it contains. But I assumed he had seen the play and, although the quotation was not exact, expected him to recognise it, instead of which he was furious with me:

“You are not to do that. TotÒ is a very good boy and I shall not accept the knife.”

He said this so sternly that I made up my mind he could know nothing about the theatre—he must be a foreigner who had yet to learn that a Sicilian child’s confidence is not destroyed by a mere threat to stick a knife into him, the idea that anyone is going to hurt him is too preposterous to be taken seriously. Or perhaps he had invested all his imagination in superstitious securities. Or perhaps I had acted better than I knew and had seriously alarmed him. But I had not imitated Giovanni’s realism so closely as to deceive TotÒ. I looked at him. He was beaming all over his face as he shook his head and said:

“I am not afraid.”

The big waiter scowled and went away, abandoning the reckless child to his fate. TotÒ put his hand on my arm to attract my attention and emphasise what he was going to say:

“When you are at home, please will you send me a postcard with a picture of London?”

“Certainly, my boy; I’ll send you as many as you like.”

This is all the conversation I had with TotÒ before I left Messina, which I did that day, but we have corresponded. On returning to London I sent him a card with a view of Oxford Circus full of traffic and, not knowing his full name, addressed it:

A Don TotÒ,
Piccolo Cameriere all’ Albergo Trinacria,
Messina.

He replied at once, thanking me profusely for the beautiful view of what he called I Quattro Canti di Londra and promising to send me some prickly pears as soon as they were at their best, having heard that they do not mature in London. Presently I sent him another post-card secretly hoping he would show them both to the stupid big waiter. He replied at once and, among other things, asked if I should like him to come to London.

I never like them to come to London unless they are sure of some settled employment, and even then I would rather see them in their native surroundings; so I replied:

No, TotÒ. Here we already have too many Italians, Austrians, Swiss and Germans. They come because they believe that the streets of London are paved with gold, but too many of them find our streets guttered by the tears of foreign waiters who have failed to find work. You had much better stay where you are like a good boy, and I will come to Messina and see you next autumn.

Then a basket arrived containing the prickly pears in a state of pulp, exuding juice from every pore because he had not attempted to pack them, and accompanied by a card wishing me a Merry Christmas.

Early in the morning of the 28th December, 1908, Messina was destroyed by an earthquake. The newspapers particularly mentioned that the Albergo Trinacria had fallen, killing everyone who was sleeping there that night. I chanced a card to TotÒ asking whether he had escaped. On the 6th January I received a letter from him; he had evidently not received my card, which was returned to me about eight months later. This is a translation of TotÒ’s letter:

Catania,
1 Jan., 1909.

Egregious Signor Enrico,

You must have already heard of the destruction of Messina. By a miracle I am saved, also my family, except that I do not yet know the fate of two of my sisters, my father, three nephews and one brother-in-law. My father was at Reggio Calabria, which was also destroyed. The Albergo Trinacria was not merely shaken down, it was also burnt. It was my good fortune not to be on guard that night in the hotel, otherwise I too should have died. The few who have escaped have been brought to Catania naked, without a soldo. We are sleeping in the Municipio, on the floor, with a rug, a piece of bread and cheese and a glass of wine which the Municipio gives us. They have made me a present of a shirt because, as the earthquake was at five in the morning, everyone was asleep and they escaped just as they were. You may imagine in what a condition I find myself, in what misery, it is such that you will excuse my posting this letter without a stamp, but I have not a centesimo to send you the news of the disaster of Messina. On the post-card which you sent me you speak of coming in the autumn, but there will be no more coming to Messina.

Enough! I could tell you in detail of many misfortunes that have overtaken me, but I have not the courage to write more.

I send you my respects. You will pardon me for being obliged to post this without a stamp.

TotÒ.

He gave me an address in Catania to which I wrote, and he replied 24th January from Naples, where he and his family had been taken.

Then he left off writing and I thought I had heard the last of him. In the spring of 1910 I went to Sicily again, and within an hour of arriving at my hotel in Catania one of the waiters came up to me and said in a friendly way:

“Good day, sir.”

“Good day,” I replied, “but I do not recognise you.”

He said, “TotÒ. Messina.”

“It is not possible! You were only thirteen at Messina, and how old are you now?”

“Eighteen.”

“How have you managed to become five years older in eighteen months? Is it an effect of the earthquake?”

“I was sixteen at Messina.”

“Then why did that stupid big waiter say you were only thirteen?”

“Ah! well, he is dead now.”

I thought of the fate of Ananias and said: “Poor fellow! Do you remember how angry he was when I wanted to give him my knife and said those words from OmertÀ?”

“Yes, but he was not really angry with you, he was only pretending.”

“No, TotÒ! Not really? Do you mean he was acting?”

“Yes. I thought you understood. He was always like that, full of fun, not stupid at all. He was a good man and very kind to me.” And poor TotÒ’s eyes filled with tears.

So it was someone else who had been stupid, and I left off thinking of Ananias and began to think of those eighteen upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell.

TotÒ told me that he was sleeping at home when the earthquake woke him up, and that he and the others in his house ran out naked as they were into the street and saw the house fall; they were only just in time. His father, who was in Reggio, was saved, but one of his sisters was killed with her husband and three children.

This is all the conversation I had with TotÒ in Catania; next day on my inquiring for him they told me he had caught cold and had not come to the Albergo. I left without seeing him again and next time I was in Catania they told me he had gone away and they did not know his address. Possibly he has disappeared for ever, but it is more probable that, like other meteoric bodies, he will cross my path again some day.

TURIDDU BALISTRIERI

Among the members of Giovanni’s company whose acquaintance I made during my week in Messina were two ladies who acted under their maiden names, viz. Marinella Bragaglia and Carolina Balistrieri; the first is married to Vittorio Marazzi and the second to Corrado Bragaglia, Corrado being the brother of Marinella. I also often saw in the theatre Turiddu (Salvatore) Balistrieri, brother of Carolina and therefore brother-in-law to Corrado and brother-in-law by marriage (or whatever the correct expression may be and, if there is no correct expression, then compare di parentela) to Vittorio and Marinella Marazzi. He was just over eleven, not a member of the company but, being at school in Messina, his sister had taken him to stay with her for the week, and we became great friends. I was thinking of him when writing about Micio buying chocolate and story-books at Castellinaria in Chapter XVIII of Diversions in Sicily. When Giovanni and the company departed from Messina to continue their tour, Turiddu and his younger brother, Gennaro, remained in Messina with their professor and, as their mother, Signora Balistrieri, was touring with another company in South America, they had no home to go to for Christmas and remained with the professor for the holidays.

On the 27th December, Giovanni and his company, after being in Egypt and in Russia, arrived at Udine, north of Venice. They heard nothing of the earthquake until the evening of the 29th December, about forty hours after the event, when the news reached them in the theatre during the performance of La Figlia di Jorio. The next day Giovanni and six of the company started for Messina; they wanted to ascertain for themselves the extent of the disaster and whether the earthquake had affected Catania, where most of their relations and friends were. Among the six were Corrado Bragaglia and Vittorio Marazzi, whose particular object was to find out what had happened to Turiddu and Gennaro. When the company came to London in the spring of 1910 Corrado gave me an account of their adventures. They arrived in Naples where they were delayed a day, which they spent in meeting fugitives, but they heard no news of the boys. They reached Messina on the 1st January and, taking a basket of provisions and medicines, started for the professor’s house, treading on dead bodies as they walked through the falling rain and fearing lest another shock might come or that at any moment some already shattered house might fall on them. The professor’s apartments were on the first and second floors of one side of a courtyard that stood between a street and a torrent; the front doors of the different apartments opened into the court as in a college building; the professor’s side of the court was nearest the torrent and did not fall, but the other three sides of the court fell and the houses on the opposite side of the street fell, so that the debris made it difficult to approach the street door of the court and still more difficult afterwards to approach the doors of the different sets of apartments.

They found the landlord of the house, and he showed them that the professor’s part of the house had not fallen and told them that the professor and his family had escaped and, he believed, had been taken to Naples or Catania, or—he did not know where. This was satisfactory, at least they no longer thought the children were buried in the ruins, but it did not give much information as to their whereabouts. They went to the station and got a permission to go to Catania. The train was crowded with fugitives, some wounded, some unhurt, and during the journey a passenger gave birth to a baby.

In Catania they asked of Madama Ciccia (i.e. Signora Grasso, Giovanni’s mother), who would certainly have heard if the children had been seen in the city, but she knew nothing. They sought out the boys’ grandmother, the mother of Signora Balistrieri, but she was not at home, she had deserted her house for fear of another earthquake and had been sleeping in the piazza. They inquired at the hospital and at the institutions where fugitives had been taken. They advertised. They actually found a professor from Messina with pupils, but it was not the one they wanted. They went to Siracusa, to Malta, to Palermo, to Trapani; they got no information and returned to Catania. Then they were struck with remorse for not having entered the professor’s house in Messina—they had only spoken to the landlord—the boys might be buried there after all, alive or dead. They returned to Messina and entered the house; it was all in confusion; they looked through it, but found no trace of the children.

All this took them seven days, during which they scarcely ate and scarcely slept. They knew that if the boys had really been taken to Naples they were probably safe, and now they went there considering that they had done their best with Sicily. In Naples they inquired at the official places, at the hospitals and at the offices of the newspapers where they could see the lists of names before they were published. They found nothing and their thoughts went back to Messina; they wondered whether the children might perhaps have been crushed by a falling house in the streets, and whether they ought to return. In the evening they went to a caffÈ to read the lists, and by chance took up a Roman paper. They could hardly believe their eyes when they read the names of Turiddu and Gennaro among those who had been taken to the Instituto Vittoria Colonna in Naples. They went there at once, but it was already late at night and the place was shut. Unable to think of eating or sleeping they walked about the streets till six in the morning, when they returned and were admitted. They stated their business, inquired for the children, produced photographs and, after a little delay, Turiddu and Gennaro came running to them naked. It took some days of red tape, including a legal act whereby Corrado constituted himself their second father, before they were allowed to remove the boys. At last on the 11th January they took possession of them and dressed them in the street with clothes they had bought. Corrado had telegraphed to his wife and to the other relations, and they left Naples and rejoined the company at Udine, where they arrived on the 14th. One of the actors when he saw the children fainted and Corrado was ill for days with a fever.

Turiddu wrote to me from Naples to tell me he was saved, and by August, 1909, when I went to Sicily again, he had left Giovanni and the company and returned to Naples, where I found him and Gennaro with the professor and his family, living in two rooms of an establishment where emigrants are put to wait for their ships to take them to America. They told me their experiences. In Messina the family had consisted of the professor, his wife, his niece (a studentessa), Turiddu and Gennaro with two of their school-fellows, one named Peppino, son of a well-to-do dealer in iron bedsteads, and another named Luigi, son of a well-to-do orange-merchant, who had gone to visit his uncle for Christmas. There was also a servant girl who had gone that night to stay with her people. The parents of Peppino and Luigi were both killed in their houses; fortunately for Peppino he had not gone home or he would probably have been killed. Luigi also escaped because the house of his uncle did not fall or, if it fell, it did not kill him. The servant, who had gone home, was killed.

They puzzled me by their attempts to explain why the professor’s side of the courtyard did not fall. It seems it was partly because, being near the torrent, it had been built more strongly than the other three sides; that was not all, there was also something about a Japanese gentleman who had studied earthquakes at home and who had hurried to Messina, visited the spot and declared that the direction of the shock was from (say) east to west, had it been from west to east the side near the torrent would certainly have fallen. It may have been north to south—my thoughts had wandered again to the Tower of Siloam. Turiddu, however, had a reason for not being killed in the earthquake; he is naturally lucky because he was born with a caul; he keeps most of it at home and speaks of it as his cammisedda, which is Sicilian for camicetta, his little shirt. He carries a small piece of it in his watch-case, and offered to give it to me as a ricordo, but I thought he had better keep it all; it cannot be lucky to give away any of one’s luck.

While Turiddu was with Giovanni and the company touring in North Italy, he wrote, by desire of his professor, a sort of holiday task about the earthquake. He gave it to me afterwards, when I saw him in Naples, and I have translated it. The passages in square brackets are additions I have made from information the family gave me in Naples.

SUBJECT

Describe all that you saw before and after the earthquake.

DESCRIPTION

It was an ugly winter evening and the last day of the Christmas holidays. I was playing with nuts with my companions. About six o’clock we dined and, after we had finished, we began to play at Sette e Mezzo Reale [a game of cards]. We re-charged the acetylene lamps, for we intended to sit up late. The professor opened [the window and went out on] the balcony to see what the weather was like; observing that the sky was frightful and of a reddish colour, he said to his wife:

“My dear Nunzia, listen to these few words and bear them in mind: This is a fatal night, it is a horrible night.”

His wife asked, “What are you saying?”

Then the professor replied, “Either we shall have some kind of storm or there will be a great earthquake or a deluge.” To these words we paid no attention, but went on with our game.

At one o’clock after midnight we extinguished the acetylene gas and went to bed, where we immediately fell asleep.

At half-past five after midnight there came a great earthquake. I and my companions began to cry and recommend ourselves to God who can save from every calamity.

After the earthquake was over we dressed in haste and frenzy and went out [into the courtyard], but we could not pass the front door [into the street] because it was blocked with ruins. Presently our professor crawled out through a hole and we followed him.

In the piazza we saw sights that tore our hearts, and we wept as we thought of those poor unhappy children left without parents or relations. And we thanked God who had saved us from such a great disaster. Every few moments there came more shocks, and there were we weeping and recommending ourselves to the Lord.

As day broke we saw many wretched creatures being dragged out from under the heaps of rubbish and being put on carts or laid on the ground.

We began to feel hungry and begged our professor to buy us some bread, but he replied:

“There is no place where bread can be bought, we must therefore take courage, climb back into the house and get a few nuts.”

[This re-entering the house was dangerous because it might have fallen when they were inside, but they managed it in safety and returned with some maccaroni and bread, also some nuts and two sticks of dried figs which were there for the festa of Christmas.]

We began to eat the food and, seeing some children near us who also were hungry, were moved to compassion for their condition and gave them each something.

In this way we supported life for two days, but on the third day the food was finished.

[During these two days they were in the ruins of a fish-market, which was better than being out in the open, but not much because the roof was broken. They only had such clothes as they had snatched up in their haste and these were wet through and saturated with mud up to the knees. They caught colds and the professor was ill for months.]

All day long, bodies were being extricated from the ruins and we could hardly bear the stench; to make matters worse it was raining, the houses were on fire, the air was heavy with smoke and there were constant shocks of earthquake. It seemed like the end of the world.

On the third day I went with our professor to the port to inquire whether the survivors would be taken to Naples. The captain replied “Yes.” We returned to the market and our path lay among the wounded and the dead.

When we had reached shelter our professor said:

“Let us take courage and return into the house to bring out some clothes and linen and the certificates of my niece.” We went to the house, but the door was jammed by reason of the earthquake. While we were shaking it, there came another shock. We remembered another door, which we opened, we went in and found the certificates and brought away all such other things as we thought likely to be useful for the moment and gradually carried them down. Our professor’s niece made the things up into bundles and put them on our shoulders and so, passing the heaps of dead bodies, of rubbish and ruins, we went to the railway station.

Here they made us get into a second-class carriage, which we supposed would start for Catania, and we had nothing to eat but oranges, which were given us by a soldier.

[It must have been while they were in this carriage that Corrado and Vittorio went to the station and took train for Catania, passing quite close to them and not seeing them. There were twelve waggon-loads of oranges which had come from Catania before the disaster in the course of trade, and orders were given that they were to be distributed among the survivors. Thus the waggons were emptied and people could be put into them.]

Opposite us was a waggon full of soldiers and sailors. Our professor’s niece called a soldier and begged him not to forget us. He immediately brought us three loaves of bread, five flasks of wine, three tins of preserved meat and some sausage.

Imagine our happiness when we saw that meat after those days of hunger! We drank the wine at once because we had nowhere else to put it and the soldiers wanted their flasks back. We were eating oranges all the time, because they gave us plenty.

After we had been in this waggon two days, one of the railway-men told us that there had come a German steamer which would take us to Naples. We took with us some bread, some oranges and a little salame which we had over, and went to the port, where, fortunately, we found a boat which took us to the steamer.

At five minutes past eleven on the sixth day as the steamer departed from Messina, the professor, his wife and his niece began to cry.

The German sailors prepared bread and also basins of soup with pasta in it, and when the bell sounded at noon they distributed the food among us all.

When we had eaten it, we went below to see whether the women required anything.

At half-past four they gave us soup with rice in it and plenty of meat. Then the captain ordered that the fugitives should go below. We were taken into the second-class cabin which was set apart for the women and children.

Next day when we arrived at Naples they would not let us disembark till we had had coffee, after which we all collected and were landed in boats. First, however, they made all the men descend into one boat and in another boat all the women.

When we had disembarked at Naples they at once wanted all our names and then took us to an institution called “Vittoria Colonna,” where in order to restore us we were each given a good cup of coffee and milk.

this little description
of
28 december 1908
written at bologna 27. 1. 09
is presented to
mr. henry festing jones
who will preserve it as a lasting record
of
turiddu balistrieri
fugitive from messina

While they were in Messina the children and the niece slept at night, but the professor and his wife did not sleep at all, and for two of the days the professor and his wife ate nothing and drank nothing. They were able to collect drops of rain water, especially when they were in the railway carriage where they had a roof, and they sometimes collected a little wood and made a fire. Earthquake shocks were continually occurring.

The professor is also an imbalsamatore and, as an example of his skill, gave me a stuffed bird which I was to take to London. He said it was a kind of quail, a bird that reposes near Messina when migrating. His niece, the studentessa, gave me as a ricordo a pin-cushion; on one side it has an advertisement of a shop in Messina and on the other a picture of a lady trying on a new garter, which has been bought at the shop and which fits perfectly to the delight of her maid and the astonishment of her grandmother. They had saved these things after the earthquake. One does not look a gift-horse in the mouth, but I have sometimes wondered whether the buffo’s Cold Dawn had followed the professor and the studentessa in their flight and whispered to them that they had saved the wrong objects. Still, a pin-cushion is always useful.

RAILWAY PORTERS

Some years ago the station porter who attended to my luggage at Messina gave me his name and address, saying that if I would send him a post-card next time I came, he would meet me and look after me. Since then I have passed through Messina once, and sometimes twice, a year and he has always met me. I wrote to him from London after the earthquake inquiring whether he was alive or dead, but he did not receive my card till nearly eight months later, after it had been returned to me and I had sent it to him again. I had in the meantime heard, in an indirect way, that he was one of the station porters who had survived. In the August following the earthquake I sent him a card to say I was coming by steamer from Naples, and he was in a little boat in the port to meet me.

There was a difference in his manner and a new look in his eyes. When he had been talking some time, I mentioned it, and he admitted that he felt different since the earthquake. His house fell and he lay buried in the ruins with nothing to eat or drink and seriously wounded. A friend came looking for him and after three days he was extricated, restored to life and properly taken care of. But his wife and child were killed and his home destroyed. He has been born again naked into the world, no wonder there is a strange look in his eyes. We were joined by his cousin, another porter, who was seven days in the ruins, starved into unconsciousness. When the soldiers rescued him they thought he was dead, but they took him where the doctors gradually brought him back to life. He did not mind the dying after it had once set in, everything gave way to the indolent pleasure of irresponsible drifting, but the restoration was a difficult and exhausting business. He will be thought to be dead again some day, and will be allowed to continue his sleep in peace without any troublesome awakening.

I looked in the eyes of the men who were hanging about among the temporary wooden sheds in the piazza in front of the station, and saw in many of them the expression that was in my porter’s eyes, the expression that betrays those who are the figli del terremoto, those who have been born again with the earthquake for their second mother, and I remembered that the same expression was in the eyes of Turiddu’s professor in Naples. I had supposed it to be normal with the professor, but it was the first time I had seen him; now I understood that it was not there before. They have not all this look. Turiddu has not got it, nor has my porter’s cousin. The professor is sixty-two, Turiddu is only twelve and was able to sleep. My porter is about forty-two, his cousin is not yet thirty. Again, the professor had the responsibility of his party; Turiddu had none. My porter has lost his wife and child; his cousin is unmarried.

These two porters told me a great deal that I had read in the papers in England; to hear it from them on the spot made it more real, and especially to see their gestures describing how the earthquake took the houses and worried them as a terrier worries a rat. Few houses were not wrecked. I pointed to one which I knew to be the Palazzo dei Carabinieri at a corner of a street leading out of the station piazza, but my porter replied:

“You are looking at a corner of it and can only see two walls. The other walls and the floors have fallen. If the shutters were open you would see the sky where the rooms ought to be.”

At the other corner of the street used to stand the Albergo di Francia, where I stayed once when all the other hotels were full because the wind was so strong that the ferry-boat could not get out of the harbour to take the travellers across the straits. The albergo was lying in a heap on the ground; in its fall it had crushed and killed and buried the young landlord, Michele;—“God rest his soul in heaven, so merry!”

I uttered some banality about their having passed through a terrible time. They accepted my remark as a final summing up and said it was better not to talk about it. It was evidently a relief to them to talk of something else.

Before Messina can be rebuilt on its old site, the ruins must be cleared away and the disputes about the boundaries must be settled, and this will take time. Meanwhile the people are living in the wooden bungalows of a New Messina which is growing up outside the old town. I spent two days there in the spring of 1910 and again in 1911. The Viale San Martino is the principal street. There are hotels, bookshops, sweet-shops, tobacconists, jewellers, butchers, restaurants with tables ready spread, and the lottery offices are open. Most of the huts have no upper storey and some are no bigger than half a dozen sentry boxes knocked into one. It is very dusty. The boys are crying papers up and down the street, there are barbers’ saloni and shops with silver-topped canes. The earthquake seems to be forgotten in the intensity of the bubbling life. As I passed the Municipio in a side street, I saw a wedding party going in. One evening I went to the theatre and saw Feudalismo with Giovanni Grasso, a homonymous cousin of the great Giovanni, in the principal part and Turiddu’s mother, Signora Balistrieri, as one of the women.

The first time I was in Messina after the earthquake all this was only beginning and many of the people were living in railway waggons in the sidings, of which few now remain. It was strange to see rows of railway carriages with curtains to the windows and some with steps up to the door and a little terrace outside with creepers growing over it. The cabins and the waggons are supposed to be safe, because they would not crush their tenants in another earthquake. But they do not seriously fear another earthquake; Messina has been so thoroughly destroyed that it must now be the turn of some other town.

I replied: “Yes, the Veil of S. Agata preserved Catania this time, but it may desert her next time as the Letter of the Madonna deserted you last winter. By the by, what has become of that miraculous Letter? Was it destroyed or did anyone save it?”

They did not know and muttered something about “stupidagini,” and perhaps there will be no need to trouble oneself with any such thoughts when one is living the life after death. Later on, in another part of the island, I asked a dignitary of the Church, who had not been through the earthquake, what had become of the Madonna’s Letter and he assured me that it had been preserved. I had pretty well made up my mind that this would be his answer before putting the question; but if the earthquake had destroyed Girgenti and I had asked him about the letter from the Devil, which is said to be preserved in the cathedral there, I should have expected him to tell me that that letter had not survived the shock.

GIUSEPPE PLATANIA

In Catania I saw my friend Lieutenant Giuseppe Platania, who was quartered in Messina during the winter of 1908-9. He was away for Christmas and returned about midnight on the 27th December and went to bed at two in the morning on the 28th. He was awakened by the falling of a picture, which hit him. He guessed the reason, covered his head with the pillows and lay still, waiting. He had to wait fifty-seven seconds—at least many people told me the earthquake lasted fifty-seven seconds, but the recording instruments were broken, so it is not certain how long it lasted. When the room left off rocking, Giuseppe put out his hand for the match-box, but the table was no longer by his bedside. He heard cries for help, and a man who was sleeping in the next room came with a light, then he saw that the floor of his room had fallen, but not under his bed, which was in a corner. He and the man with the light managed to get to the window and let themselves down into a side street, but they saw no way out because the exit was closed by the fallen houses. Their window was on the first floor and they climbed back into the house, helped another man who was there, got themselves some clothes and returned into the side street. Here they felt no better off and were afraid of the houses falling on them, but Giuseppe’s soldier servant, Giulio Giuli, a contadino of Nocera, appeared among them. He had come to look for his master and crept through the ruins into the side street. He told them that Messina was destroyed, which they would not believe; everyone seems to have supposed at first that the earthquake had only damaged his own house. Giulio showed them the way out, and so they got into the town and realised the extent of the disaster. If Giulio had not come, Giuseppe and his friends would probably have been destroyed by more houses falling into their narrow street before they could have found a way out.

Giuseppe had changed his bedroom about ten days previously. The house he used to live in was completely destroyed, he showed me a photograph of its ruins. His mother and his brother Giovanni, in Catania, heard of the disaster, but could get no particulars because communication was broken. Giovanni went to Messina to inquire for his brother, not knowing where his new room was, but he knew the number of his regiment. He stopped a soldier in the street who was wearing the number in his cap and who told him where to find Giuseppe. In the meantime Giulio had walked about fifteen miles to AlÌ, whence he took the train to Catania, told the mother her son was safe, and returned to Messina to help in the work of rescuing victims.

Giuseppe directed his soldiers in the rescue work and afterwards received a medal “Per speciali benemerenze.” While at work they saw a hand among the ruins and began to dig round it, all the time in fear lest the disturbing of the rubbish might make matters worse for the victim and for themselves. The hand belonged to a woman whose head had been protected by being under a wooden staircase. She showed no sign of life and it was already four days since the disaster. They wetted her lips with marsala and poured some into her mouth and thus restored her. Giuseppe told me that nothing made more impression on him than seeing this woman’s breast begin to heave as life returned.

The soldiers had to shoot the horses and dogs for eating the corpses, and the thieves for pilfering. The horses had escaped from their stables, which were broken by the earthquake, and the dogs had come in from the country. And besides the pilfering they told me of other things the doing of which had better be ignored by those who seriously cultivate the belief that civilisation and education have already so transformed human nature that all restraints may be safely removed, things which, nevertheless, were done by human beings in Messina while the houses were tottering during the closing days of 1908 and the opening weeks of 1909. I inquired whether the townspeople were themselves guilty of these horrors and they said: No. The bad things were done by people who came into the city from the country, like the dogs, and across the straits from Calabria to take advantage of the catastrophe. As my friend Peppino Fazio in Catania put it:

“The earthquake was very judiciously managed; it killed only the wicked townspeople; it did not touch the good ones, they all escaped.”

Giuseppe’s brother, Giovanni Platania, is a scientific man and a professor; he went often from Catania to Messina during the early part of 1909 to study the behaviour of the sea during the earthquake—the maremoto. He has embodied the results of his researches in an opuscolo on the subject Il Maremoto dello Stretto di Messina del 28 Dicembre 1908 (Modena. SocietÀ Tipografica Modenese, 1909). It took him twelve hours to return to Catania from one of his first visits; the journey in ordinary times is performed by the express in two hours and a half. There was no charge for the tickets because it was the policy of the authorities to empty the town; in this way malefactors who escaped from the prison got easily away. In the train was a woman who talked, saying that no one could blame her for travelling to Catania free, especially as she had not deserved to be put in prison—she had been put there for nothing. There was also a man who did not exactly say he was a thief, but he informed his fellow-travellers that the bundle he had with him had been confided to his care by the padrone of his house. There was no reason why he should have told them this, no one had asked him about his bundle, and Giovanni drew his own conclusions.

GIULIO ADAMO

In Trapani I talked with another friend, a doctor, Giulio Adamo of Calatafimi. Communication was broken and it was not until the evening of the 29th that they began to know in Trapani that there had been an earthquake in Messina. Giulio went with others by train to Milazzo and the train could go no further. They continued the journey by boat from Milazzo to Messina, where he arrived on the 30th. When they approached the city and saw the row of houses facing the harbour where the Albergo Trinacria was, they thought the disaster could not have been so very great. But it was only the facciata that was standing, the houses behind were down. There was great disorder, heaps of bodies, no water to drink because the pipes were broken, and for the three days Giulio was there they only had bread from Palermo and the oranges which were in the railway-waggons.

CECÈ LUNA

In Palermo I talked with another doctor, CecÈ (Francesco) Luna, of Trapani, whose acquaintance I made many years ago on Monte Erice when he was there as a student in villeggiatura. In September, 1909, I found him in the children’s hospital at Palermo. As soon as news of the earthquake reached the city, the Regina Margherita was fitted out to help the wounded and CecÈ went in her among the doctors. When they arrived at Messina, they could neither enter the harbour nor take anyone on board because they had to obey orders. It was raining, the sea was rough and covered with little boats full of fugitives, some unhurt, some wounded. One boat contained a young man holding an umbrella over his mother, who was wounded and lying on two tables.

“I am strong. I can wait seven or eight days without food, it is not for me, it is for my mother.”

He cried and prayed till the orders came and she was taken on board.

CecÈ, who was put in charge of the taking on board of the fugitives, ordered that the wounded were to be taken first. He was somewhat surprised that this order was attended to; it was so, however, the wounded were taken in without confusion; but afterwards among the unwounded there was confusion. There was a boy who tried to get on board first, CecÈ pulled the boy’s cap off and threw it away, intending it to fall in the sea, but it fell in another boat and the boy went after his cap and gave no more trouble.

The earthquake was at about 5.20 a.m. on 28th December; the Regina Margherita arrived at Messina at 8 a.m. on the 30th December. As soon as CecÈ landed, he began searching with others and at 10 a.m. found, in a well-furnished house, a woman dead in bed, killed by a beam which had fallen across her. Under the beam, close to her body, lay a baby girl, very dirty but alive and untouched. It was impossible to say precisely when the child had been born, but certainly only a few hours before the earthquake, just time enough for the midwife to leave the house, for they found no trace of her. CecÈ took the baby to the steamer and gave it sugar and water, and when they returned to Palermo they got it a wet-nurse and it was baptised Maria in the children’s hospital. If one has an earthquake in one’s horoscope, surely it could not be placed at a less inconvenient part of one’s life. New-born babies can live three or four days without food; but if this child had not been born before the earthquake, she would not have been born at all, and if she had been born earlier, she would have died of starvation or exposure before she was found. As it happened she was sheltered and her life preserved by the beam which killed her mother. Maria was adopted by a lady of Palermo, and in April, 1910, CecÈ told me he had lately seen her and she was beginning to walk.

CecÈ had had twenty earthquake babies in his hospital, all with fathers and mothers unknown, and, of course, other hospitals were equally full. When I was at Palermo in 1909 he had only seven of the twenty, the rest having been taken away, some by their fathers and mothers, others by people who adopted them. Travelling back to England I saw in the railway stations at Rome, Milan, and other places, frames of photographs of unclaimed babies put up in the hope that they might be recognised by chance travellers.

The Regina Margherita stayed at Messina one day, loading, and then returned to Palermo with five hundred unwounded and eighty-two wounded. CecÈ remained in Messina, searching, but joined the ship when she returned to Messina, where she took up her station in port as a floating hospital.

He told me of a woman who was in the ruins, alive but unable to move. Her daughter lay dead beside her. It was raining, there was a dripping and she was getting wet. With the morning light she saw it was not the rain that was wetting her, but the blood of her husband and two grown-up sons who were dead in the room above.

He told me of a law-student in Palermo, twenty-four years old, engaged to a young lady who lived in Messina; this young man went to pass his Christmas holidays with his betrothed. He was not in the same house and the earthquake did him no harm; as soon as it was over his first thought was for his fidanzata. He got into the street and made for her house, paying no attention to the cries that issued from the ruins. But, like a wandering knight on his way to assist his lady and embarrassed by meeting other adventures, he was stopped and forced to help in searching a particular house, from which he extricated a beautiful girl, nineteen years of age, unhurt. She would not let him go till he had saved her mother. All the others in the house were killed. Still the girl would not let him go.

“Are you rich?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then take this ring and tell me who you are.”

He took the ring and after giving her all the information she required was allowed to proceed. When he came to the house of his betrothed he found that she and all her family had perished. He returned to Palermo weeping.

Two months later he received a letter:

I asked if you were rich; you replied “No” and I gave you my ring. You saved my mother and you saved me. My mother has since died from the effects of the shock. If you are free I am ready to marry you and I have money enough for both.

On this they became engaged and after a suitable time intend to marry. CecÈ wanted to apologise for the conventionality of this story, but I begged him not to trouble; if unassisted nature were to be always original, the occupation of poets and romancers would be gone.

In one house was a servant, a Roman woman; she was devoted to a young lady of the family and all the family were buried in the ruins, but the Roman servant was unhurt. She could get no help, the house was on the outskirts of the city and such passers-by as there were would not stop. She set to work searching for her young mistress and incidentally saved the whole family. It took her twenty-four hours; they were all wounded and her young mistress was the last she found.

A woman kept a small shop opposite another shop kept by a man who sold coal. The woman had saved money and the carbonajo knew she had her money in her house. He entered the woman’s house after the earthquake, accompanied by another malefactor. The woman’s daughter was killed, but the woman was under the ruins alive and they pulled her out. She exclaimed:

“I do not know you.”

But she did know the carbonajo quite well, or at least well enough to know he was a bad man and to suspect his intention. They asked her where her money was concealed. She only repeated:

“I do not know you.”

They believed her, thinking she was confused by the shock of the earthquake; this was what she intended, otherwise she feared they would have killed her. They threatened her, and at last she told them where the money was, still protesting that she did not know them. They took her money and then, being afraid she might give the alarm and they might be caught before they could escape, they pinned her down with a large piece of the ruins on her left arm and departed, taking the risk of her being rescued later and saying she had been robbed by unknown men. She was rescued and brought to Palermo. In the hospital she begged CecÈ to put an end to her:

“What is the use of living? My daughter is dead, my arm is gangrened, my money is stolen. Let me die and have done with it.”

CecÈ did not kill her, he chloroformed her and amputated her arm. She gave information about the carbonajo, who was arrested in Messina. His accomplice escaped, but the woman got back her money and thanked CecÈ for amputating her arm instead of killing her.

FUGITIVES AND VICTIMS

At Caltanissetta they told me that the trains were bringing fugitives from Messina all day and all night. The fugitives were mostly naked and all very dirty, some with rugs, some with cloaks, some with rags. A woman got out of the train clothed, like Monna Vanna, in nothing but a cloak which a soldier had given her. They asked her:

“What do you want done for you?”

She opened her cloak and showed that she wanted everything.

Another woman came with her daughter whose leg was broken and they were both naked. The doctor said to the mother:

“And what do you want?”

“Help for my daughter.”

To another destitute woman: “And you?”

“Shoes for my baby.”

Michele, a young man, was known to be in Reggio where he was employed in the Municipio. His father went from Caltanissetta to look for him and returned after four days, during which he had searched for his son and suffered mental anguish and physical discomfort. His friends went to the station to meet him. He talked politics to them and asked their opinion about the rotation of crops.

“And Michele?” they inquired.

“Oh! Michele,” here he began to laugh: “Michele; yes, he is buried under the ruins of a house three storeys high.”

They could get nothing more out of him except laughter and that Michele was lying under a house three storeys high. A few months later, Michele’s body was found, with no traces of decay, brought to Caltanissetta and buried. Then his friends wrote elegies in verse about him and handed them round for approval.

Plenty of people went mad besides Michele’s father. The streets of Messina were full of mad people. They told me of one who lost his wife. Within a fortnight he married a widow whose husband had been destroyed. This happy couple spent their honeymoon in digging out the bodies of their previous spouses and having them suitably buried.

When I say they married, a widow may not legally marry for ten months after the death of her husband, but this couple married on credit, as they call it. There were many fugitives who found a temporary asylum in a prison in Catania and who similarly married on credit, intending to return later and contribute to the population of the new Messina.

There was a family living on the top floor of a house close to the railway station near the port in Reggio. They were not hurt, but they could not get down because the earthquake had destroyed the stairs. The man made a rope of sheets, with the help of which he carried his wife down, then he went up and fetched his children one after another, three or four children. He went up again to fetch his money and while in his room the house fell with him, killing and burying him in the ruins. But he had saved his wife and children.

They told me of a victim, pinned down in a cellar, unable to rise; a chicken, whose coop had been broken, escaped and passed near; the victim caught the chicken, killed it, plucked it and ate it raw. They told me of others, not pinned down but imprisoned in rooms, who ate what they found in cupboards—oil, biscuits, salame, uncooked maccaroni. These victims were saved and lived to recount their sufferings. But there were others, pinned down and imprisoned, whose bodies were not extricated till they had lain for weeks and months beside their emptied cupboards, no longer on the watch for escaping chickens. I was in Catania about a year and a half after the earthquake and saw the funeral of one whose body had recently been found; it was not the last.