'No, arteriosclerosis. I can't complain, since she's docile enough. The only thing is I can never go out, because even though I double lock the door, she's often managed to open it and then she wanders off and has no idea where she is or how to get back home, poor thing. It was easier when my husband was alive, though of course she wasn't nearly so bad seven years ago as she is now.'
Seven years. Seven years trapped in this house, keeping up appearances in spite of a life that must be almost totally devoid of even the smallest pleasures. Some women were saints.
As if she could read his thoughts, Signora Santoli went on: 'Fortunately, I'm very fond of music and I've treated myself to a stereo set, not a very good one but it's adequate.' Her eyes strayed across to where an obviously new stereo set was set up in one corner, the only modern note in what was a rather gloomy, old-fashioned room. 'I enjoy watching television, too, and my mother-in-law goes to bed early. Her health is otherwise very good, you know, one must be thankful for that. And I have a neighbour who comes in for an hour on Saturday mornings so that I can do a little shopping for myself instead of having everything sent in. It makes a nice change.'
'Though I imagine,' the Marshal said, 'that your neighbour is on holiday now.'
'She is, but August will soon be over, won't it?'
'Yes,' said the Marshal with feeling, 'it will, thank goodness.'
He sipped the water. It was cool, so it must have been in the fridge, but it was tap water and unpleasant. He was pretty sure that there wasn't much money to spare in the household and that buying the stereo set had been a very big event in this woman's life. No doubt she'd agonized over the decision for months beforehand before taking the plunge. Seven years . . . With a start he remembered the Prosecutor's words about the way he let people involve him in their 'little problems'. But the Prosecutor never saw these people except in his office where their 'little problems' were not in evidence. Out of pure defiance he sat there and let Signora Santoli carry on talking.
'Although my husband was Italian,' she was saying, 'I'm Swiss, myself. We met when I was working as a children's governess here. Unfortunately, we had no children ourselves, which was a great disappointment to both of us, especially to me as I'd been used to having children around me because of my job. Well, we must take the rough with the smooth, don't you think so? And if I'm not too old when my mother-in-law goes, I intend to register myself as a child-minder. Few people can afford nannies and governesses, these days, but so many young mothers are obliged to carry on working that I'm sure I can make myself useful.'
'I'm sure you can.'
'Would you like me to get you another glass of water.'
'No. No, thank you.'
'Then perhaps you should tell me what you'd like to know about Anna. I shouldn't be wasting your time talking about myself.'
'I want to know anything at all you can tell me. You see, I know nothing about her life before she went into San Salvi except that she had a husband and child.'
'Ah, little Elena. What a lovely little girl she was, and so full of life. Many's the hour she spent up here with me—it was through little Elena that I came to know Anna and her husband. Before that, although we'd been neighbours for so long, it never went further than a few polite words if we met downstairs. They lived on the ground floor behind the husband's workshop. He made leather bags and belts and so on, and I think he did quite well. I only went in their house twice, but though it was small and on the ground floor, she'd made it very pretty and put a few plants out in the tiny courtyard behind so that they could sit outside on hot nights.'
'But weren't they rather cramped, living behind the workshop with a child? If he was doing well. . .'
'In fact, they'd started building. One of those cooperative building schemes. Very sensible of them, really, to stick it out here until they could afford something of their own.'
'I see there's no longer a shop on the ground floor.'
'No, indeed. It was completely restructured and now it's an elegant little flat which I'm sure costs the earth. It's always rented by foreigners. Things have changed so much in this Quarter since the flood. When I first came here, Florence was the sleepiest little city I'd ever seen. Now it's all tourism and fast food. The old ways are gone and everyone wants to make too much money too quickly. There's still some fine craftsmanship here but it's a luxury now.'
'That's true.'
'Anna's husband was one of the old-style craftsmen. Poor man, he was barely forty when he died. I didn't know him well but I think he was a very hardworking, respectable sort of man. It was little Elena I was fond of. She must have been about six months old when Anna came knocking at my door one evening. She was in a panic because the baby was sick, and as the doctor had already been and left some medicine, saying it was nothing serious, she hadn't the courage to call him again. Although we didn't know each other well she'd heard I'd looked after children so she came to ask jny advice. Couples with their first child easily get into a panic like that, with the result that the baby gets hysterical. When I got down there she'd been screaming for hours and they were beside themselves, especially Anna, who, as I found out on knowing her better, got hysterical when the slightest thing went wrong. I only discovered the reason much later. Anyway, needless to say, the baby soon settled when she felt the presence of somebody calm, and after that Anna would come to me whenever she needed help. It wasn't long before I started having little Elena up here when Anna was helping her husband in the shop. It was a great pleasure for me to have her and I missed her terribly when she died. It's strange to think she'd have been a young woman by now.'
'Was she killed along with her father?'
'They died within minutes of each other. He was trying to save her, you see. You didn't even know about that?'
'Nothing at all. I wasn't here all those years ago. I'm not from Florence.'
'Ah. I'm afraid that even after all these years in Italy I'm not very good at distinguishing accents. I'd have thought that a tragedy like that would have been in the national papers, even so. Though it's true that so many terrible things happened, so many people burned—and that poor man whose body was hanging from the roof for twenty-four hours. It's not something you ever forget.'
For a moment, the Marshal had the impression that she must be talking about the war and that she was a bit confused. That was forty years ago, not twenty. But before his embarrassment at her confusion could make itself felt he remembered the words of the fishmonger who had sent him up here: 'A few more storms like yesterday's and we'll be baling out like in '66.'
The flood. . . But she'd talked of people being burned . . .
'Did they die in the flood, the husband and child?'
'Both of them, poor things. And the miracle was that Anna didn't die, too. In a way you could say that she did die, since she was never the same person afterwards. Living on the ground floor as they did . . . They were asleep, of course, when the banks burst, with it being so early in the morning. The water rose so quickly that by the time they awoke their doors wouldn't open. It was the strangest thing, I often think of it still, but that night I had a dream about water running down the stairs of this building, like the terraces of one of those big fountains. It wasn't a dream about the building being flooded, just this cascade of water on the stairs.'
'Perhaps you heard the rain in your sleep.'
'That could be. It had rained and rained for days. But it may have been because we'd seen a film called The Bible the evening before. We'd gone out that evening because the fourth was a holiday and, like everyone else, we'd planned on having a lie-in. Little did we know. At any rate, when I woke up it was as if I were still dreaming. I'm not sure what woke me, whether the explosions had already started or whether it was the roar of the floodwater and Anna's husband screaming for help from the window below. They'd tried at first to get out into their little courtyard because the flood had broken the door which wasn't very strong, but all that happened was that more water rushed in. Of course, if they'd ma
naged to get out of the building at that point they'd all three have been killed at once because the water was travelling at 60 kilometres an hour and hurling tree-trunks and cars and all sorts of debris along these narrow streets. Nobody could have survived in that.
'I don't know whether they realized it, but at any rate they were perched on the windowsill with the water rushing by them, screaming. We hadn't even a bit of rope in the house but my husband thought of tying some bed sheets together. He was shouting down to Signor Chiari to tie little Elena on to the end of the sheet. It looked terribly risky, of course, but what else could we do? The water roaring past was getting higher every second, they'd have been swept away. He couldn't make himself heard. It wasn't just the water but the explosions which had started by then, plus the fact that Anna was completely hysterical and making things more difficult by screaming continually. Every time there was an explosion we saw great columns of water going up. It was the sewers exploding and gas pipes and boilers, but just then it seemed like the end of the world, especially as it had broken into our sleep and we were too dazed to understand. Signor Chiari, whether he could hear us or not, began trying to tie the sheet round little Elena, under her arms. I suppose it sounds simple. It's the sort of thing you see on television all the time, isn't it? But in reality it was impossible. The current was tearing at their feet and he was clinging to the child with one arm and the shutter with the other. How could he hope to tie the sheet round her? Every time he grabbed at it he had to let go and clutch at the shutter again, and Anna just screamed and screamed instead of trying to help him. We felt so helpless up here watching him and I think we knew even then it was hopeless, though we didn't know what else to do except to go on dangling that useless sheet.
'Then there was a terrible blast—it was the boiler in the cellar next door going up and it shattered that window there, where we were hanging out, cutting us all badly. I remember falling back on the floor. When we looked out again little Elena had gone. Anna was still screaming and I don't know if she had even realized the child was gone as her face was pressed against the wall beside the window. We saw her husband throw himself into the water, shouting for Elena. He disappeared immediately but then we saw him come up further down the street near a table which had become lodged between the wall and a lamp-post. We saw his arm reach out and try to cling to it. It might have saved his life, but then the floodwater brought an overturned bus rolling along the street, filling it completely. When it had passed, the lamp-post, the table and Signor Chiari were all gone.
'It was only then that we brought our eyes back to the window below. Anna had gone, too. It seemed certain that the bus had dashed her from the windowledge as it passed, but we went on calling to her for some time on the faint chance that she might have got back into the house. After a time we gave up, because if she had gone back in, the water was now up to their ceiling and not far from our own windowsills. We had to begin thinking about ourselves.
'We dressed our cuts as best we could and went up to the top floor, taking as much food as we could carry along with a few valuables and important papers. More than anything, we were terrified of the explosions. There's a terrace garden on top of the building and everyone collected up there. It was a shocking sight. Plumes of black smoke were going up everywhere as well as great sprays of water as the sewers went on exploding. It was still raining, of course, and we stayed up there huddled under umbrellas and wrapped in blankets, thinking it was safer than inside in case our cellar, too, went up. Hour after hour we sat there, shivering, waiting for help that didn't come. We saw other people on roofs like us, or staring out of top-floor windows, stunned. I suppose we must have been soaked and frozen, sitting out there in November like that, but I can't remember feeling it. It's difficult to explain now, but it was as if everything was somehow suspended. We barely even spoke among ourselves. We just waited. Waited for help. Waited for somebody to tell us something, to explain. Then the car horns started sounding, hundreds of them, like a great wail of sorrow and anger going up all over the city. For a while it cheered us because it gave the impression that there were people out there, cars, action, and we thought then it was only this Quarter that was flooded and that all this noise meant help was on its way. But the noise went on and on, not intermittent but continuous, and we began to realize there was something odd about so many people leaning on their horns like that. We had no way of guessing that the whole city was going under and that the hundreds of cars whose horns were wailing were driverless, tumbling along in the water that had activated their electrical circuits . . .
'We went in at some point, to eat something and try to get dry. Our hunger must have got the better of our fear. There was no gas or electricity or water and the phones had stopped working. We went back on the roof and waited. Late in the afternoon we heard helicopters, though we couldn't see them, and we started hoping again. The helicopters never came near us. Afterwards we found out how badly they'd been needed out in the country areas where people were trapped on the roofs of low farmhouses that were soon submerged. That was where most people drowned. We were much luckier in the city because of the buildings being so high.
'Once the current slowed down we saw thick black oil floating on the yellow water and our fear of fire got worse. If the building had set on fire what could we have done? Then it started to go dark. Can you imagine what it's like when darkness falls on a city and not a single light goes on? It wasn't just frightening it was eerie, desolate. A darkness that civilized people aren't accustomed to. It was then, as we stood watching and waiting and hoping for something, anything, to happen that we realized how bad things must be. Not a single light, Marshal. And in the darkness dogs were howling. It had stopped raining and the stars were brighter than you ever see them over a city because there were no lights. Not knowing what else to do, we went to bed. Nobody slept. We were all in the top flat, most of us having arranged ourselves as best we could with rugs and chairs.
'The water went down in the night leaving a foul-smelling mud behind it, and when it was light enough to see we came down here to see if there was much damage. My first thought was Anna, wondering if she was down below buried in all that filth.'
'And was she?'
'Yes, but we didn't find her, not then. My husband went down right away—not that we had any idea of finding her alive, he only hoped to recover her body if it hadn't been washed away. In any case, he wasn't able to get in since the outgoing water had left shelving and other furniture blocking the broken window and the door was swollen and wouldn't budge. From the street he could see the black oily tidemark showing the level which the water had risen to. It was higher than the Chiaris' workshop ceiling. There was a tank out there in the road and some soldiers called to my husband to come and help them. Injured people were being brought out of the building where the explosion had been and the soldiers were starting to shore it up in front. No one had been killed—luckily there was nobody living on the ground floor there because it had caved in completely. My husband was out there working with the soldiers most of the day. The rest of us in here tried to clear some of the mud out with buckets. It was a hopeless task but we went on with it, not knowing what else to do. All along the street people were doing the same, all with the same dazed expression. Nobody spoke much and nobody let out one word of complaint. When my husband came back, late in the afternoon, he brought some men with him. They weren't experts or anything, just the people from a bar on the corner of the square who'd been out distributing mineral water. I must say people were wonderful—it wasn't at all easy to get about the streets, you know. Haifa million tons of mud, the papers said, a ton for each person, and all of it contaminated with petrol and sewage and the dead bodies of animals . . .
'Anna was down there alive. At first it appeared to be a miracle. We'd seen how high the water was. But after they'd taken her away, we found the place . . . Like many of these high, old buildings there were false ceilings, you know the sort, made of straw and plaster.
She'd climbed on top of a high old-fashioned wardrobe, which fortunately stayed upright because the water had rammed the bed up against it, and when the water reached her even there she'd clawed a hole ... It was only just big enough to let her head through, and there she'd stood with the water right up to her mouth. Had it risen another inch or so she would have drowned standing there. She must have known that, as she stood there waiting while we stood waiting on the roof. And if it was so terrible for us when darkness fell and no one came, just think of Anna. Just think of her . . .'
'But in the morning, didn't she climb down? Didn't she call for help? She must have heard people moving about, your husband trying to get in.'
'She climbed down but she didn't call for help. I mentioned that we were all too dazed to speak that first morning. My most vivid memory of that day is of the other women who, like me, were uselessly shovelling at all that mud. Every so often one of them would pause to examine a piece of furniture buried out there in the street in case it should be hers. If it wasn't, they just carried on shovelling without a word passing their lips or even an expression crossing their faces. No, Anna didn't call for help. For all I know she never spoke again. It was only by chance that they found her when they did.
'I didn't understand at first why my husband insisted on checking whether her body was in there before he did anything else when there must have been so many people still alive who urgently needed help. Most of us were in such a state of shock that apart from the immediate danger of fire we didn't think of other dangers, like infection. But he realized right away that the greatest danger in those first few days was of an outbreak of typhoid. No one knew for sure how many people were missing and every so often they uncovered a body when they were shifting debris, but there were so many animals drowned, dogs and cats in the city and herds of cattle washed in from the country, not to mention all the meat and fish in the basement of the central market. They were still clearing that days later, men with gas masks. It must have been the most terrible job because anyone who had to walk anywhere near it had to cover their faces and some of them couldn't help retching. So it was because of typhoid that my husband insisted, and thank God he did or she might have been in there for a week until the pumps arrived to shift the mud.
The Marshal and the Madwoman Page 17
