The Villa at the Edge of the Empire

by Farrell, Fiona

  Or perhaps the Earth simply ages and erodes, causing tremors when falling material encounters something solid, just as a ball does, bouncing off a hard surface on unexpected trajectories or, if landing in water, sending out waves on impact.

  Perhaps the Earth is like a human body, in which water functions like blood and wind functions like breath. When we are well, the body is tranquil. When we become unwell, we pant and gasp, our pulse rate increases, and in just that fashion does the Earth also become agitated.

  Seneca is most convinced by the theory of breath, of which there is ‘nothing more powerful in nature’. This breath nourishes all life: trees from below, and the sun and moon and stars above for whom the Earth’s exhalations are food. It gathers in ‘roomy caves’ below ground. Provided it meets no underground obstacle, it remains tranquil, but should it be blocked in any fashion, ‘it roars around its prison walls — when it has gone round examining every bit of its prison and been unable to get out, it rebounds from the place that it has dashed against with greatest force and bursts forth.’

  Aftershocks he attributes to the continued but dwindling exhalation of breath, quoting the observations of ‘a very distinguished man’ who was in the bath at the time of the Pompeiian quake and noticed the mosaic on the floor of the bathroom move apart and come together and how the water that was drawn down into the cracks was forced back up again. And that, too, sounds familiar: the weird detail that people I have met mention when they recall the experience of being caught up in an earthquake. One recalls the flexing of the deck railing out at Sumner, another the tiny silt cone that exploded among the silverbeet in Halswell, another the sight of cars riding up and over a wave as it rolled the length of the main street in Akaroa. Great forces are experienced in such close focus, in the detail of a man in his bath, watching the tesserae in motion on breath or water or fire.

  WITH A MIND MADE STRONG by the study of nature, comprehending why natural events like earthquakes occur, Seneca proposes that we will be equipped to live without fear and face death with courage.

  What else do I need to do but encourage my

  soul on its way out and send it off with good

  omens? Go bravely, go with good fortune! Do

  not hesitate. You are being given back. There

  is no question about the fact, only about the

  timing … nature that gave birth to you, is

  waiting for you …

  He had not long to wait to live up to this ideal. A few months after completing Natural Questions, he killed himself on the emperor’s orders. Nero had been an attentive student of the philosopher in his youth, but in maturity, he proved slightly less than the ideal proponent of stoic rationality. When a group of senators led by Piso was detected planning his assassination, Nero’s revenge was swift. Seneca was implicated, on the basis of an ambiguous comment to a secret imperial informer that his ‘life depended on Piso’s safety’. That was enough for Nero. He sent an order that Seneca was to commit suicide, which the philosopher proceeded to do, calmly and rationally, first drawing up a will, then cutting the veins in his arms and legs, talking to his friends all the while, as Socrates had done while he waited for the hemlock chill to rise from feet to thighs to abdomen. Seneca’s wife, Pompeia Paulina, followed suit, going off into another room so that they would not cause each other to lose courage. Nero somehow had word of this, Tacitus records, and ordered her not to kill herself, so she was bandaged up and survived her husband but ‘with a countenance and frame white to a degree of pallor which denoted a loss of much vital energy’.

  The Questions, however, survived, with their engaging speculation, their thoughts about how we might respond to the overwhelming expression of planetary power. I have lost my father’s copy. Only Xenophon survived the cuts of shifting house and illness, old age, death, a lifetime of packing and repacking. I have another copy here on the shelf beside me as I write. It is much smarter, translated by Harry M. Hine, but still sporting a grey jacket. I like such texts. I like the creative speculation of Seneca’s questions, working out from the observation of a bouncing ball to a theory explaining seismic upheaval. I prefer them in some way to scientific certainty, for the same reason that I like the cartoons of paintings rather than the glossy result, the charcoal sketch of a Madonna where the artist’s hand seems to be moving at speed over paper or fresh plaster. You can see him thinking. I like the inventions that precede success: those images of swan’s wings and little boats to be paddled through the air or machines of paper and bamboo. They crash and kill and, of course, should I be embarking on a journey, I’d prefer to be seated in Row 66B on a jumbo jet, inflight entertainment console to hand and tonnes of complex engineering steering me heavenward, but there is something so warmly human in the hopeful optimism of the paddles and the wire.

  I take a kind of deep comfort in reading thoughts prompted by an earthquake 2000 years ago and thousands of kilometres away. I like the vision of the world as a squirming thing filled with breath, not so far from the Polynesian vision of the great woman lying on her back with us all, naked as newborn kits, upon her belly. And to be honest, as I was flung from bed while the roaring grew and the walls jolted, it did indeed feel as if something live had me in its grip. That felt as true as the science of plates and vertical forces and gravity.

  There is a gap between the felt experience and its written description. I have read one scientific site trying to explain that the February damage in central Christchurch was because a ‘previously unknown fault that ruptured under the northern edge of the Port Hills was sloping back like the back of a south-east facing lounge suite pointing straight at the city’. Another tries to explain the motion of horizontal layers of earth rising under immense force, the upper layers weaker, so travelling upward faster than the denser lower layers, then falling back and bouncing, as a process comparable to a ‘slap-down’ and ‘like a trampoline’. An immense physical force is difficult to convey in either figures or words.

  Seneca, of course, was writing from a distance. He had not actually been in Campania, sitting in his bath watching the tiles move. Had that been the case, he might have reached a different conclusion. In that instant, some of us do indeed react with startling calm. I have a friend, a man who, in 2011, was the arts editor of the local newspaper. He was in his office in the Square when a force rose vertically beneath his feet at a peak acceleration 1.8 to 2.2 times gravity, among the highest ever recorded in an urban environment. He found himself in a building that was flung into the air, then bounced back, and around him floors collapsed and dust rose in choking clouds.

  I have asked Chris what he did and he says that, as a fire warden on that floor, he and the other warden had set about finding a way out for their colleagues, pausing to rescue the cartoonist, who lay trapped in foetal position beneath fallen bookshelves. Once outside, he had walked through the city to Hagley Park, where he hoped to find his wife

  On the way he had passed a fallen verandah. A man’s feet protruded from beneath its wreckage. His shoes, says Chris, were so very brightly polished.

  He walked through this juddering city. In Victoria Square he was flung face down by an aftershock and lay watching as a cone rose a few centimetres from his head, bubbling water and white silt. It felt strange, unreal.

  He walked past a van. He doesn’t tell me about this part of the journey until just before we go: we have been talking in a crowded café against a background rattle of cups and chatter. He had walked past a van on his way to the park, and a man had been trapped inside. When the door was levered open, the man had fallen into his arms and he had died there. How very quiet it was, Chris says, this death, in the midst of chaos. And I look at him, this kind and cultivated man, recounting a journey through a strange yet deeply familiar city, and see an aspect to him I’d never noticed before. Strength. Calm. They are indeed admirable qualities.

  It is like seeing the structure of a building, the wooden arches that are revealed when the walls of a church are
stripped away, the brick walls that lie beneath pseudo-classical shop frontages. Ah, you think, walking about a damaged city. So that’s what it’s made of! You see the nobility of people, the psychic structure that has been there all along, unremarked.

  There’s a teacher who, like dozens of her colleagues, sat with children in the playground, keeping them calm and singing songs while they waited for their parents to arrive on foot, sometimes after hours of walking across the city, while her own family waited somewhere for her to return.

  There’s the theatre nurse who, like her colleagues, carried on operating as the broken and injured flooded in and the power sources surged and faltered and who knew what lay outside the closed world of that windowless room.

  There’s the young woman who knelt beneath a table over her little son, hoping only that someone good would find him and take care of him should she be killed.

  There’s the woman who lay with her dog over her neighbour, keeping him safe.

  There’s the young man who sat with a workmate and held his broken ribs in place so he could breathe.

  Such quiet stories, and there are hundreds of them, are not told with any desire to impress but simply as an aside, mentioned almost casually during a longer conversation. And they completely alter your perception of humanity. We are not after all, it seems, horrible predatory creatures, interested only in perpetuating our own genetic code, indifferent to the suffering of others, but, in extremis, capable of extraordinary courage.

  There are others, of course, who fly apart. They fail to protect or act altruistically, but attend to their own survival or panic or run about, as someone said of one of the men fully trained and charged with overseeing the emergency response in February, ‘like a headless chook’. Training is no defence. You cannot tell until that instant of peak acceleration exactly what kind of person you will be. You cannot necessarily choose to be calm.

  YOU CAN, HOWEVER, CHOOSE HOW you will respond in the aftermath of disaster.

  Seneca is writing about the adrenaline-charged moment of catastrophe. An earthquake is indeed spectacular. It arouses a range of extraordinary responses. But what follows an earthquake is equally demanding. Those long-drawn-out months of readjustment arouse other emotions and over these we have complete control.

  Take, for example, the loss of things.

  In this city, a lot of things have been lost: large things, like buildings and homes and routines and schools. And small things.

  Another stoic philosopher, Epictetus, had advice for those who lose things. ‘With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific cup, remind yourself that it is only cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed.’

  A lot of people lost cups in the quakes, not to mention bowls and plates and glasses. They shuffled to the edges of shelves and leapt off, smashing to the floor. People mention such losses, if they bother mentioning them at all, as trivial. ‘It’s just stuff,’ they say. Some say it has been good to free themselves of clutter, opening the way to what is new. They feel as if they have been released from the tyranny of things, of the need to maintain, keep, store, preserve.

  But for others, the loss of the cup is not quite so simple. That cup might have been the perfect cup, the one that sat just so in the hand, not too heavy, not too flimsy, the one with that Goldilocks quality of being ‘just right’. That’s why that fairy story remains in circulation: because like all the long-lasting stories it tells a fundamental truth about us, that we recognise and value the thing that suits us perfectly. I have a friend who likes one cup because every morning he drinks precisely one and one half shots of coffee and that cup holds the correct amount.

  Or perhaps we love a cup because it delivers a little jolt of pleasure for its shape, the curve of its handle. We leave it out on a shelf, rather than in a cupboard, for just that reason: the pleasure it gives when we enter a room and see it there. Surrounded by cups of indifferent quality, whole warehouses full of mugs and cups, whole container loads of cups and mugs, avalanches of them rattling off the assembly lines and crossing the world in their millions, billions, we choose that cup.

  I have a cup the colour of fresh spring leaf that my daughter gave me one year for Christmas. It was made by a woman in Dunedin to be deliberately a little wonky, as if a sheet of clay has been furled into a tube, but it is perfectly balanced. I love it for its wonkiness and its leaf green and the way tea looks in its white interior. Our lives are made up of tiny instants of such ordinary perfection, and when such objects are destroyed, there is loss. We keep the broken pieces in a box in a cupboard. They cannot be mended, but we hang onto them, at least for a while.

  So, Epictetus, it is not always so easy to dispense with cups, to say that we like only cups in general. And when you go on to counsel calm in the face of other deeper losses, I lose faith in you entirely.

  If you kiss your child or your wife, say that

  you only kiss things which are human, and

  then you will not be disturbed if either of

  them dies.

  Epictetus has had a revival over the past twenty years, picked up by men of a tough military disposition. He makes an appearance, for example, in James Stockdale’s Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behaviour, an account of his seven years of imprisonment in North Vietnam. The philosopher is also echoed for popular consumption when Russell Crowe slips into the short leather skirt and goes forth to meet his death with dignity before the Roman crowd. Such masculine restraint can be noble but it can also shade rapidly into a psychopathic indifference that decides there are plenty of other wives and children to kiss.

  When things are broken, large or small, they leave a wound. We can choose indifference, or we can choose remembrance or regret. I remember years ago talking to a Polish woman who, as a child, had watched as her mother farewelled their home. The trains were waiting, the ones with little chimneys on each wagon that had a special name I’ve forgotten now, but which her parents knew meant Siberia. A couple of foreign ministers — Von Ribbentrop on the German side, Molotov on the Russian — had drawn a line on a map. An empty space would be created between their two nations, a buffer zone: those living west of the line would move to Germany, those to the east, to Russia. The trains waited, the soldiers were impatient, the family’s suitcases had been hastily packed.

  But as they were chivvied from their door by men just doing their job, her mother turned. She knelt and kissed the step. It was a customary thing, a peasant’s gesture of farewell. Then the trains moved on, life moved on, the mother died in Russia, the father and brothers disappeared, until only the child was left, along with a little boy who might have been her brother, or maybe not. They were found wandering together along a road near Isfahan. A truck driver rescued them. He gave them each a boiled egg. Then the New Zealand government offered asylum. They came to Pahiatua. And here she was, in her cosy flat in Palmerston North, photos of her own children on the mantelpiece, remembering her mother and how she had knelt to kiss the step of a building that remained, even then, thousands of kilometres away and many years in the past, a beloved home.

  Not all houses are created equal. Not all cities are spaces and opportunity, and when they are broken, we can choose, as they have in L’Aquila, to retain.

  Or we can choose, as we have in Christchurch, to start again from the scratchings of bulldozers in that silty soil.

  ON MY LAST AFTERNOON in L’Aquila, Francesco drives me a little way out of the city to lunch. We will go, he says, to Assunta’s. As if we are going to the house of a friend, which is in a way true. He has known Assunta for years. She is a strong and formidable woman and, judging from the laughter around her, a very funny one. And all this goodwill is tucked away behind a farmyard, at the end of a narrow winding lane. There are no si
gns at all. You have to know how to get there. When we step from the car the air is fresh and cool and filled with the rushing of water. A mountain torrent splashes downhill, past rough wooden shelters with tables and benches. It forms a pool where trout flicker and gleam. They’re the menu. Trout with pasta or whole trout, a good Abruzzo wine, and when the dishes are ready, they are placed on a table by the kitchen door where only the men are permitted to collect them. The women are to sit and be waited on. That’s Assunta’s rule, and it’s her restaurant, so there. The food is delicious. We sit in this pleasant convivial place and I think that this is possibly the best restaurant I’ve ever been to. And partly that’s because of where it is, here in an eternal countryside, at the edges of disruption.

  I love it as I love the café at Tai Tapu that stayed open right through the quake and the thousands of aftershocks, being ordinary with its lattes and bread rolls when nothing else was ordinary. Or Venuti, with its neon sign gleaming at the point where Colombo Street slammed into the cordons and the deep dead dark of the central city. Or Smash Palace improvising a bar from plastic sheeting and scaffolding on the corner of Victoria Street. And all those places that reasserted the primal pleasures of being with friends and talking and eating and drinking.

  We eat and drink and talk, finding common ground in our shaky territories. And next morning, I leave. The holiday weekend is over and work has begun again. Builders are busy on the roof of the building next to the Hotel 99 Cannelle. There is the sound of drills and hammers and men’s voices — and not a hard hat in sight, incidentally, nor a high-vis vest. I walk back along the road skirting the city wall to catch the 9.45 a.m. train to Rome and the long flight home. Above me, the cranes have swung back into action and the sun is shining on the wide valley, as L’Aquila, yet again, puts itself back together, hoping that this time, it will all last a couple of hundred years, maybe more.