by D. L. Smith
Struggling to his feet, he searched out the faint silhouette of the small truck back at the road.
“I’m okay. I’m coming.”
His words were still more slurred than he intended, but some dignity had returned. Brushing himself off and straightening his tie, he took less than a dozen tentative steps across the field before he tripped over a tall thin boulder that was standing oddly on its end and he fell into a small cactus. The stinging nettles gave him new incentive to quickly find his feet, accompanied by a hail of painful curses. In a matter of moments he was again staggering across the field toward the shadow of the little truck.
Leo didn’t bother to notice the tall, thin stone that had tripped him and he was certainly far too drunk to see the bright glint of metal that the moonlight revealed buried beneath it.
NINE
After their long day sweltering in the kitchen and then the violent rendezvous in the garden with Solly Puce,
Marta and Carmen were both exhausted. They barely had enough energy to fight for a full hour before retreating to their bedrooms where each cried herself to sleep.
At about that same time, Father Elio finished his prayers and made his way back to his dark rooms. He got all the way to the bathroom before he was reminded that there were no light bulbs. He was so exhausted from his unusually active day, he didn’t mind ignoring a few of the usual ablutions. What was absolutely necessary was performed in the dark and he was asleep by eleven.
Down the road, in the cluttered rooms behind the Pasolini Fix-It Shop, it was almost 2:30 by the time Topo was finally able to climb out of his clothes and slip peacefully between his cool familiar sheets.
Topo loved his house and his shop. He had inherited the building, the business, and much of the debris that filled all the rooms from his father. He even inherited his talent for tinkering and his reluctance to throw anything away (or put anything away for that matter) from his father. Cans of discarded screws, countless bolts without nuts, twice as many nuts without bolts, washers, wires, tubes, and cords, boxes of parts, parts without boxes—anything that his hand or the hand of his father had ever touched, but didn’t use, remained in the shop; shoved, stacked, and crammed into every room, closet or cubbyhole available. To call the Pasolini family pack rats trivializes an art form.
The whole lot of it had been passed down from his father—that is, all except the “Pasolini Classics of World Cinema.” That was Topo’s doing. He began collecting old films as a teenager when a movie theater in Castiglione went out of business. When he was older he discovered a distributor in Livorno who would sell him discarded or damaged prints. Now, after almost twenty-five years of collecting, he had over sixty films. The large tin spools were all categorized and filled special shelves that covered the walls of his bedroom. Some years earlier he’d acquired a broken projector and repaired it himself. Often, on Saturday nights, when the weather was fine, Topo would set up his projector in the town square and show his films on the side of the church. He didn’t make any announcements. He had no schedule—he just set up when the spirit moved him. But when word went out that Guido Pasolini was stringing extension cords across the piazza, you could be sure that as the sun went down the square was going to be filled with blankets and chairs.
Topo could hear Leo already snoring in the front room. The thought of any further trek to Leo’s stone hut had been too daunting for either of them and Leo quickly accepted Topo’s mumbled offer to spend the night. He sprawled across his friend’s couch and the discrepancy in length between Leo’s lanky frame and the short sofa was no deterrent. In a matter of minutes, first Leo, then Topo drifted off and, at long last, everyone in Santo Fico was finally asleep.
When the earth began to rumble, sunrise was still over two hours away. It began when the ocean floor buckled slightly some fifty kilometers out at sea and it rolled quickly north past the small island of Montecristo, heading for the coast just south of Santo Fico. As earthquakes go, it wasn’t much. The next day newspapers in the region would mention the event, noting some minor damage to a few older buildings in Grosseto, Follonica, and Massa. News accounts would assure the readers that, “Fortunately, the moderate tremor missed major cities and caused relatively no damage.”
But while the citizens of Grossetto to the south and Siena to the north barely rolled over in their collective sleep, to certain small and forgotten villages it was serious business.
It was 3:47 when the gray dog stirred. Of course, Nonno had no way of knowing it was 3:47 because, as he repeatedly reminded people, he lost his watch when he made the water go away. He knew it was early since through the room’s only window he could see that it was still dark outside. The scratching at the door at such an hour troubled the old man because the dog always slept through the night and it was a little upsetting to suddenly have his mangy companion whining as if the earth itself was about to swallow him.
Then Nonno heard what he knew the dog must have heard and he too became frightened. A low rumbling came rolling around him, as if some ancient monster was beginning to stir and grumble deep within the sea, just beyond his door. Then, it was as if the ground took up the complaint and the earth beneath his bed moaned painfully. As the groaning became louder, everything began to quiver and tremble. Small objects skittered across tables and shelves. The terrified dog howled loudly and the old man scrambled off his cot. He staggered toward the door, but the floor and furniture rolled around him and Nonno became so muddled in the dark that he found himself grasping at bare plaster where he was sure a door handle should have been. He barely had time to realize how topsy-turvy everything was before the roof and much of the walls of the dilapidated building collapsed on him. The old dog yelped once and then the howling stopped.
Upstairs at the Albergo di Santo Fico, Marta was awakened from a dreamless sleep by the sound of pictures dropping off the walls and crashing against the floor. The moon had set and the room was pitch black. The deep rumbling earth, the crashing pictures, her bed tossing back and forth—Marta became convinced someone was in her room attacking her and she sat up, her fists clenched and her arms swinging wildly to fend off an assault. But in an instant she came to herself and was out of bed and down the hall, shouting all the way.
“Carmen! Get out! Nina, hurry! Get up!”
In the darkness of the hall she heard Carmen scream, but could see nothing. She used the wall as a guide, hurried toward the sound, and ran straight into Carmen, who was bolting into the hall from her own room. Both of them tripped and fell over each other and became a tangle of limbs on a floor that rolled and pitched beneath them. Marta forced herself to her feet, pulled Carmen up, and started off in the direction of what she thought was Nina’s room. But her face smashed into the plaster wall and she saw dizzying lights behind her eyes as she sank back to her knees. Carmen screamed louder. Suddenly, there were steady hands on their shoulders and Nina’s voice commanded them over the groans of the wobbling villa.
“This way! Come with me!”
Nina led them down the trembling hall and all along the corridor while in adjacent rooms chairs and tables tap-danced madly across the hardwood floors. Marta and Carmen clung to Nina’s thin nightgown and listened only to her soothing voice as it guided them through the black terror.
Down the hill at his little fix-it shop, Topo slept peacefully, unaware that his family’s penchant for collecting was about to do him in. The earthquake hit the cluttered fix-it shop like a whirlwind hits a house of cards. In a matter of seconds shelves of containers, boxes of debris, years and generations of miscellaneous collecting showered down around him like a hailstorm of angry utensils. Discarded toasters, broken radios, obsolete thingamajigs and forsaken doohickeys all toppled from their precariously balanced pyramids and came crashing off their perches.
Topo scrabbled out of bed, groping for a light. His voice shrieked at a pitch usually heard only by dogs, “Earthquake! Save me God! Earthquake!”
Leo stirred on the dusty sofa in the living
room and discovered his room was raining small appliances as well, but his coma had been deeper. At Topo’s second panicked screech of “Earthquake!” Leo managed to wipe a line of drool off his cheek and sit up. He hadn’t slept nearly long enough to actually sober up—only long enough to develop a massive headache and a ferocious thirst. Blinking at the light streaming in from Topo’s bedroom he too became aware of objects crashing and collapsing around him. Topo was right. It was an earthquake.
“My God, Leo, help,” came the new frantic cry from the bedroom. Leo could see his friend whirling around the room like a dervish, vainly trying to hold his film canisters in place. But in spite of his frantic efforts, canister after canister hit the floor with a cymbal crash. Then each flat can flew open and the spools wheeled themselves across the room. It was like a grotesque dance, the way Topo leapt about grabbing at his collapsing film empire. A few of the spools rolled out of the bedroom and across the living room floor leaving a shiny snail-trail of black celluloid behind. Leo almost wanted to laugh, but his head felt like his brain was three sizes too large for his skull.
With a gasp, the real peril of the earthquake hit Leo like a shot of dry cell voltage. He sprang from the sofa and bolted for the door, catching a medium-sized television that was dropping from a shelf as he raced past. The catch was instinctual and purely in self-defense, but from the bedroom Topo saw his friend save one of his only working televisions and was sincerely grateful for the help, until he watched Leo toss the TV over his shoulder and dash out the front door. Then the electricity went off.
Father Elio had to manage on his own. It didn’t take much shaking and rumbling to rouse the old man; these days his sleep was fitful at best. At the first tremor he was sitting up on his cot. There was a door in his small room that led outside to the back of the church, but he ignored that way to safety and instead charged down the low corridor toward the kitchen. He heard things in the distance that made his heart ache.
Father Elio’s hands fumbled along the stone walls of the ancient tunnel, stumbling blindly forward as if the terrible sounds echoing from the cathedral were pulling him. In the darkness ahead of him he heard explosions of glass crashing against stone floor and he prayed that some of the beautiful stained glass windows would be spared. Then a violent rending that sounded to Elio like a scream of pain shook the building far beyond the shaking of the earthquake. It was followed by the thunderous roar of a collapsing building and a tremor so violent it knocked Father Elio off his feet. Something was terribly wrong in the sanctuary. Crawling forward on his hands and knees, he began to cough and fight for air as the dark corridor was engulfed in a wave of thick, choking dust.
Leo ran so quickly up the narrow street he was unaware of when the quake actually stopped. From the tall houses that lined the corridor like sheer canyon walls, he could hear frightened voices crying and wailing in the darkness, calling desperately to loved ones, but he saw no people.
He stumbled and tripped a great deal as he raced up the hill, but not just from the remains of the alcohol that was rapidly sweating out of his system. The dark street was littered with broken crockery, the remnants of window boxes filled with flowers, and terra-cotta roof tiles that were shaken loose and crashed to the street. As chunks of dislodged debris fell out of the blackness, their shattering concussions on the cobblestones sent him dodging to one side or the other, often crashing into the ghostly white walls that defined his gauntlet. It was a good thing no one called for help because he had no intention of stopping.
Adrenaline carried Leo quite a ways up the hill, but by the time he reached the top his heart was pounding like an angry drum, his lungs burned, and he felt as if he might have thrown up had he not so effectively taken care of that earlier. But the quaking and rumbling had stopped; all that could be heard now were the whines and yowls of distant dogs and the intermittent wails of terrified people. These indistinct cries came from places beyond the edge of darkness and seemed far away and otherworldly.
Leo staggered his way around to the front of the hotel, trying to ignore his trembling legs, churning stomach, and the desire for cold beer and a cigarette. The moon was long down, but the sky was clear and the stars were close and bright, allowing almost enough light to make out ghostly shapes and phantom shadows in the darkness. When he had rounded the corner coming up the hill, he’d looked over the low wall and into the back garden of the hotel hoping to find three figures huddled by the chinaberry bush at the back gate, but everything was one great shifting shadow and he heard no sound. He moved across the empty piazza at the front of the hotel and still couldn’t be sure of what was real and what wasn’t. At least the hotel was standing, but the harder he strained to see, the less sure he was of what he saw. Where were they? Why weren’t they outside? Why couldn’t he hear them? If the roof had collapsed, then from the outside everything might appear normal, but Marta and the girls could be in their beds, buried under piles of beams and plaster and tile.
At the far end of the building—the side that overlooked the bay—there was a wide staircase that led directly to the family’s living quarters. As a boy Leo had raced up and down those stairs a thousand times and that was his route of choice now. He pushed through the gate and was fumbling his way across the verandah when he saw three ghostly apparitions clinging together like spirits floating slowly down the staircase. Nina led the way, her sure hands following the rails; Marta and Carmen still clung to her and gripped handfuls of each other’s thin nightgowns.
“Marta . . . !”
Marta hated that she recognized his voice, but hated even more that she was glad to hear it.
“What do you want?”
“Are you all right?”
“Have you come to rescue me again? Last time you came by here in the middle of the night to do that, you were too late and I broke your nose. Go away or I’ll break it again.”
Leo expected no less, but for Carmen and Nina their mother’s cryptic remarks certainly raised questions. Both girls wanted to know more about failed rescues and broken noses, but Nina had a more urgent concern and she spoke directly to Leo.
“Have you seen Uncle Elio? I heard a big noise from the church. Can you see him?”
She may have spoken to Leo, but it was Marta who won the fearful, stumbling race across the suddenly treacherous piazza. Narrow white flashlight beams and broad golden glowing lanterns were appearing down the side streets of the village. Voices were calling out of the darkness; neighbors calling to neighbors in fear, or for help, or just to hear another voice.
Leo caught up with Marta at the church doors, which, of course, were open. It would never occur to Father Elio to lock any church door. When Leo pulled one of the great doors back he and Marta were greeted by a rolling wave of dust that poured out like a thick fog, spilling down the steps.
“Uncle Elio!” Marta screamed through the open door in spite of the choking dust. “Uncle Elio . . . !” But the church was silent.
Marta threw herself into the black cloud of dust, but in just a few meters she was tripping and falling over unsteady mounds of broken plaster, jagged tiles, and splintered beams. She called for Father Elio, but her only reply was an occasional explosion of falling debris. Great chunks of plaster and tiles dropped from thirty meters over her head, bursting like bombs and refilling the dark air with more dust. Someone called her name, but the fine dry dirt filled her lungs and eyes and she lost all sense of direction. Scrambling across a mountain of shifting debris in what should have been the center aisle, Marta tripped over a plaster slab and landed hard against something jagged. She felt a searing pain in her hip and tried to call out, but she couldn’t catch her breath. Time and direction blurred and her mind was filled with the image of her uncle buried beneath the wreckage of his church. She crawled forward, but again Marta heard her name being called from the bottom of a black well. She tried to answer, but all that came out was more choking and gagging. Something closed around her leg and pulled at her. She fought hard as she wa
s dragged painfully back across the broken mounds of rubble; sinking deeper into a confused darkness, kicking with all her might at whatever gripped her leg. Suddenly everything seemed to give way. She was tossed and jostled in the air like a sack of potatoes and reluctantly she gave herself over to the spinning, tumbling fall. Wherever she was going, she would land eventually and deal with it then—and the blanket of dust swept over her and covered her mind.
Marta awoke on the steps of the church to stars shining out of the black sky. Carmen and Nina knelt beside her. Someone was coughing and gasping for air and she thought it was herself, but after a moment realized it was Leo. It was Leo who’d entered the crumbling cathedral, found her, fought her, and carried her out to safety—and she was stung by the thought that he finally got his rescue after all. She tried to speak, but her voice was thick with dust. She swallowed hard and tried again.
“Where’s Uncle Elio?”
A thin voice called out of the darkness at the far corner of the building, “Here . . . I’m here.”
The old priest was out of breath and covered with dirt, but he was alive and climbing the steps toward them. The three women collapsed on the exhausted old man, clinging to him as their tears smeared the dirt from their faces with the dirt on his.