Constant Tides

by Peter Crawley

  Her senses, like the sharp, irregular fragments of a glass smashed against a marble floor, have deserted her and in a daze, Lilla wanders amongst the debris of the Garibaldi, making past the church.

  “Where am I going? Where? Oh, yes, Enzo. Enzo’s house.” Lilla tries to remember where. “Oh, my love, your house.”

  She had been there twice, alone on both occasions. Her father had warned her that Signor Ruggeri would not take kindly to her and for once, or perhaps more honestly because Enzo too had warned her, she had for the first few weeks after meeting the handsome young man, taken her father’s advice. However, like a dolphin cannot resist the temptation to swim beneath the bow of a boat, her curiosity had got the better of her and one day she had summoned her courage and sought out the address.

  That first time, she had waited and watched, spying on his mother and his young sisters as they came and went; and she’d dreamt, fancifully if not frivolously, that one day perhaps she and Enzo would live in such a grand property and keep a cat, a domesticated, adoring cat unlike those scrawny, flea–ridden animals that had lounged on the pavement and eyed her suspiciously.

  The second time, Carmelo Ruggeri had returned unexpectedly and caught her. In words she had never heard, though whose meaning she completely understood, he’d shouted at her. She’d been upset and had thought to tell her father, but on her way home she’d recalled his warning and thought better of it.

  Once more, Lilla closes her eyes and tries to imagine her best route through the chaos and carnage. Enzo’s house lies on the far side of the Via Cardines, a narrow street which, he’d told her when recounting the history of the city as they sat one afternoon in the Gardens of the Villa Mazzini, was originally named the Via della Giudecca, after the Jews who populated it. So, for the sake of her own safety, she decides to keep to the wider, more open Piazza dei Catalani and then take the Via Primo Settembre into the Piazza del Duomo; that way, the only narrow street she will have to risk will be the one that leads up in the direction of the Chiesa di San Gregorio. And, if she can keep the helical bell tower of the church to her left and in front, then with a little luck she should come across the Via dei Templari somewhere on her right.

  Her head! Blood is streaming down her face. She reaches up to press against the wound, hoping to stem the flow. Her hair is caked in blood and dust, yet the liquid feels lighter than before. Her shoulders, too, are soaking. But not with blood.

  Lilla looks up and fat rain drops sting her eyes as if they are thorns hurled from the sky.

  An old man stands, staring at her, his mind closed to a horror he cannot comprehend. He raises his arms as if to petition her and is immediately, magically and shockingly buried beneath an enormous lump of falling masonry. One second, he was right there in front of her; the next he is gone, flattened, disappeared without trace.

  Lilla begins to run, blindly. The Primo Settembre is no longer broad, it is now a narrow valley winding between tall hills of broken brick, bordered by jets of flame and fountains of foul liquid. And as if the debris of nature’s wrath isn’t sufficient to delay her progress, her way is now blocked by a horde of onrushing terror–crazed lunatics, some half–dressed, some undressed and others wearing bizarre assortments of clothing: a man in a bodice, another with his head poking out of a torn bedsheet, a starkly naked woman clutching a hat with which she vainly tries to protect her head from the falling mortar.

  They are oblivious to Lilla’s presence; they simply run straight through her, bumping her this way and that in their panic to reach the marina.

  “Not that way!” a man shouts at her, “there is only death in the city. Make to the port. Find a ship. Get away. Save yourself.”

  When she doesn’t reply, he waves her away as though she must be deaf or stupid, or more likely mad.

  The Piazza del Duomo, too, is a sprawl of rubble. The fountain of Orion is unmolested by the tremors, yet beside it the great cathedral’s roof has fallen in and only the left wall and door remain intact.

  More people, their faces gaunt, their expressions hollow, are running towards the marina, clambering over the wreckage that is now strewn so haphazardly about the piazza. Those who are not running are only walking because they are either carrying or supporting a loved one who cannot stand. They seem uncaring of the sharp stones and jagged stumps of beams which shred their bare feet, and they scream and moan in panic. In the midst of the hysteria, two ear–splitting explosions to the north send vast fireballs high into the rainy sky. The gas lanterns flare brightly, then fail.

  Lilla is barged roughly out of the way by a man she does not at first recognise.

  It is Don Carmelo. His chest is bare and bloody; his trousers torn; his eyes wild, as though he is running from the very devil himself.

  “Signor Ruggeri, it’s me, Lilla.”

  Enzo’s father hesitates at hearing his name.

  “Where is Signora Ruggeri?” she asks. “Where are the girls and Vittorio?”

  Carmelo foams at his mouth, his face a landslide of mud and tears.

  “Gone!” he shouts at her. “They are all gone, I tell you. Run. Run for your life.” He pushes and then tries to shove her from his path, yet Lilla stands her ground. She is not to be deterred. Her one thought is Enzo. He must be alive. He must be. If anyone deserves to be saved, it is her love.

  “And what of Enzo, Signor Ruggeri? Where is Enzo?”

  “That boy?” he sneers. “That fool. And you, you snivelling little harbour slut, this is all your fault. Get out of my way.”

  Lilla lowers her head and stares up at him. “Not until you tell me where Enzo is. Now, where is he?”

  “Where do you think he is?” Carmelo replies, spraying her with spittle. “He is at home in the cellar. You put him there. If you hadn’t interfered, he would be alive. Alive here with me. Now get out of my way.”

  Lilla stands back and is bowled over by a swarm of people. She is pushed and shoved and scratched and punched, yet her desire is stronger than that of the tide of humanity which flows before her and she gets back to her feet and watches as Carmelo Ruggeri staggers away.

  The Via Oratorio San Francesco narrows towards the top, taking a small right and then left turn before the entrance to the Templari.

  As Lilla reaches the bend, the ground begins to tremble again and the façades of buildings either side of her crack and slump down into the road. The rubble is slippery from the incessant rain and her legs are now ripped and bloody from her scrambling and slithering.

  A woman lurches from a house to her left as its balustrade detaches and falls to the ground with a startling crash. She shrieks, turns and rushes back into the house, which crumbles and caves in, burying her in her flight.

  No sooner than the ground has begun to tremble, it stills and Lilla carries on. Enzo’s street is now only a few metres away. She dips into a doorway to catch her breath before one final dash. Yet the carnage she has left behind is little more than a sideshow to that being staged in the Via dei Templari. Not one building is intact, the front of the terraced houses having been ripped clean away to reveal the skeletons of their construction, pictures hanging askew, clothes hanging on stands, shadows dancing eerily on every floor.

  At the foot of Enzo’s house lies a mountain of rubble, on top of which Enzo’s youngest sister lies peacefully asleep.

  Lilla climbs up and examines her. She leans her ear against Lucrezia’s small mouth, but can neither feel nor hear her breath. She pinches her arm hard and waits for a reaction. Lucrezia’s smile is that of an angel Lilla has seen painted on the ceiling of the Chiesa di Gesù e Maria del Buon Viaggio. Well, that is now who or what Lucrezia is, isn’t she? An angel on her way to a better place, on her way to any place so long as it is not the hell of this place. Lilla studies the lifeless form of Enzo’s sister: her dark curls, the down at her cheeks, her cherubic lips, her delicate hands, the small gold ring on her finger;
the gold ring her mother must have given her at her confirmation.

  “Lucrezia, go forth from this world,” she whispers, trying to concentrate, trying to remember the prayer. “In the name of the father who created you and… Oh please, Madonna, look after this young girl. Look after Enzo’s sister as if she was your own.”

  “Enzo?” Lilla shouts out his name. “Enzo?” And the louder she shouts, the greater her anxiety builds: and the greater her anxiety builds, the more her tears flow. She shouts again and again, until she can no longer hear if she is still shouting. “Enzo? Oh, Enzo, don’t leave me here. Take me with you. If you are dead, take me with you, I beg you. Don’t leave me here.”

  For how long she calls for him, Lilla isn’t aware. All she knows is that the rain continues to fall and the street is lit by yellowed flames.

  “How can it be?” she asks Lucrezia as though they are sitting beneath the old fig tree in the Villa Mazzini on a sunny afternoon. “How can it be that the flames still burn and yet the rain still falls?”

  And as Lilla tires, she grows cold and silent. Silent but for the screams of the multitudes and a curious, harrowing, whispering wind, the like of which she remembers from a storm upon the Strait. “Has God not punished us enough?”

  Lilla rests her weary head on Lucrezia’s stomach. “Oh, Enzo. The sea,” she mutters. “The sea is coming to claim us.”

  Chapter 8

  “Wake up now. You can’t sleep there all day. Wake up, young lady.”

  Lilla sits up, blinks and rubs her eyes: it is daylight, still raining hard and she is cold, very cold. The man speaks in English accented Italian, much the same as the man she’d met down in the harbour. She turns and notices the still form on whose stomach her head has been resting.

  “Whoa,” the man reaches out to steady her. “Mustn’t worry, my dear. Nothing more you can do for her, now. Best see what we can do for you, eh?”

  “No, I’m fine. We must… Oh, poor Lucrezia.”

  “Never mind poor Lucrezia, you’re in a pretty dreadful state yourself. Best see if we can’t get you to one of the medical stations.” The man is thickset, with bushy eyebrows and a square chin. He wears the kind of cap a ship’s officer would wear. “Let’s see if you can stand up for me, eh? Slowly now.”

  “What about Lucrezia? We can’t leave her here. Not like this, she’ll freeze to death.”

  “Now then,” he replies, placing his large, warm hands on her arms, “plenty of other people in need of help; we’ll get to your friend Lucrezia in good time. Up you get.”

  Lilla tries to stand, but finds her legs have no energy and she sinks back down, covers her eyes with her hands and begins to cry.

  “Right then, I’ll have to carry you. Your legs are in a bit of a state. We need to get them dressed or they’ll turn bad.” He picks her up and lays her gently over his shoulder.

  Lilla glances between Lucrezia’s pale form and the mountain of rubble as the man picks his way carefully to the bottom. Once there, a handful of other men are waiting.

  “Now then, Smith,” the man says, this time in English, “you take her.”

  “Yes, Mister Read, I’ve got her. Blessed rain,” he mutters, “slippery as an eel, she is. As if a bloody earthquake isn’t enough.”

  Lilla comes to and begins to struggle.

  “Just you hold on there, young lady,” Read says, trying to calm her.

  “But Enzo… he’s in there.”

  “I dare say he is,” he replies, his tone soft, sympathetic. “And if he is, I’m afraid that’s where he’ll be staying for the moment. We can’t go digging around in there. What with these aftershocks, the rest of the building might come down any minute. As I said, we’ve got to get you down to the medical station: you’ve been out here most of the day and you’re as weak as a new–born lamb. If we leave you here any longer, you’ll likely as not die of cold.”

  “But, the flames. What about the flames? He’ll burn.”

  “There, there, young lady. I’m sure your Enzo will turn up. Got to believe that. No point in getting upset now, is there?”

  For Lilla, the next minutes pass in a blur of bouncing and swaying as the two men pass her back and forth while they navigate their way around and over mounds of rubble. Joists have shaken out of their pockets, bringing whole floors crashing down one upon the other, trapping the residents beneath piles of bricks, stones, tiles, beams, laths and mortar. At one house, a woman screams for help and then quiets; at another a corpse is hanging upside down, pinned at the waist by a long section of cornice which leans like a bolster against the wall. Surrounded by chairs, a piano stands upright in the middle of the street and a bedstead, square on all four of its iron feet, is littered with books and papers. And as if these visions aren’t sufficiently bizarre, towards the bottom of the street a fishing skiff perches against a fallen statue.

  On noticing the skiff, Lilla grows agitated. “My parents? What about my parents? I must go to them.”

  “All right, my dear. Just you settle down,” soothes Read.

  Lilla’s energy, though, cannot match her curiosity and concern for her parents, and she sags back onto her guardian’s shoulder, asking dreamily, “Where are you taking me?”

  “Down to the esplanade.”

  “Why? I need to go home.”

  “Get you patched up first, then you can go home.”

  “You’re not from Messina, are you, Mr Read? Where are you from?”

  “City of Cardiff, country of Wales. Long ways from here.”

  “What’s the name of your boat?”

  “Afonwen. Coal ship.”

  “Why are you here?” Lilla is delirious and intrigued in equal measure.

  “We are looking for Ali, Ali Hassan, one of our firemen. Came ashore last night.”

  She wonders whether their man Ali was the man she’d seen embracing the woman in the doorway near the Municipio. “Do you know Mr Gordon?”

  “No, miss.”

  “My father’s a fisherman,” Lilla mumbles as she surrenders and slumps down on his shoulder.

  “Is he now? Well, you be quiet now. I’m sure he’ll be along to find you soon.” He rubs her back, gently, as her mother used to when putting her to bed. “Smith?”

  “Yes, Second Mate Read?”

  “Passed out, she has.”

  Chapter 9

  Enzo, too, wakes up, although waking from sleep is a gentle process far removed from that of regaining one’s consciousness.

  He tries to open his eyes: he can’t, the sandman has sealed his eyelids with a deep crust of dirt and dust. He tries to think: he can’t, the devil’s blacksmith is busily engaged hammering his thoughts against an anvil. And when he tries to shift his torso, Enzo senses a stabbing, stinging pain somewhere down near his hips and realises that he cannot move the lower half of his body.

  “Mama,” he says. Then, more loudly, “Mama? Mama, I am here, down in the cellar, please come and help me.”

  He waits, listening.

  Nothing. A groaning, creaking, crackling noise… nothing more.

  His arms are weighed down and he struggles to lift them, finding both to his dismay and relief that they are only covered in what feels like a shale of brick fragments, wood splinters and mortar.

  “Why am I covered like this?” he asks no one in particular. “Have I banged my head so hard that I have knocked the plaster from the walls?” His disorientation is multiplied when he realises he isn’t sure whether he is sitting upright or hanging upside down. His nose is bloody; that, he remembers, was caused when his father banged his head against the door. Yet now, he can taste some thin, almost metallic liquid. Blood! His mouth is full of it. He spits.

  “Mama, Vittorio, Angelica, Lucrezia? I am down here, in the cellar.”

  He doesn’t call for his father, for his father is the true reason he is imp
risoned so. And in thinking of his father, a scroll of unpleasantness is rolled out before him: the betrayal of the ship’s captain, the intervention of Ullo and Virgilio, the blow to the back of his head, being thrown at his father’s feet, his father’s intransigence, his insult, his violence and worst of all his disrespect towards Lilla.

  “Lilla. Oh, Lilla, where are you now?” Even the small effort of asking, tires him and he draws a deep breath to shout out in frustration.

  A fog of dust still hangs in the cellar: it lines his lungs and his airways, and provokes a fit of coughing and spluttering which, in turn, pains his bruised ribs.

  “Oh, Lilla.”

  The mere idea of her softens him; as though in thinking of her his mind has generated some anaesthetic fluid which soothes his aching head and shepherds his wits towards a placid delirium.

  That first time Enzo had noticed her; he recalls the moment so easily, the memory so vivid, so colourful, so real:

  A summer’s day, he is helping load a consignment of oranges into the hold of a steamship and as he walks back down the gangplank, he sees her standing there, the full moon of her eyes following his every move. He pokes his tongue at her. She giggles and runs away.

  The next day, and for what seemed like the whole summer, she appears and stands watching him, waiting for him to acknowledge her presence. The other stevedores soon catch on to the fact that she cannot take her eyes off him and rib him mercilessly.

  She seems so much younger; she has no breasts to speak of and looks perhaps scrawny; not underfed, not tall or short, just a young girl who has some growing up to do. Her hair is hidden under a white scarf which frames her face, drawing his attention to the warmth of her round eyes; those full moons that beguile Enzo in his every waking moment.