XI
Zacchiele lost his life in the great flood of October, 1857. The dairy farm where he lived, in the neighbourhood of the Cappuccini Convent, beyond the Porta-Giulia, was inundated by the flood. The waters covered the entire country, from the hill of Orlando to the hill of Castellammare; and, since it had flown over vast deposits of clay, it looked bloody as in the ancient fable. The tops of the trees emerged here and there from this blood, so miry and extensive. At intervals passed enormous trunks of trees with all of their roots, furniture, unrecognisable materials, groups of beasts not yet dead who bellowed and disappeared and then reappeared and were lost sight of in the distance. The droves of oxen, especially, presented a wonderful sight; their great white bodies pursued one another, their heads reared desperately from out the water, furious interlacings of horns occurred in their rushes of terror. As the sea was to the east, the waves at the mouth of the river overflowed into it. The salt lake of Palata and its estuaries also joined with the river. The fort became a lost island. Inland the roads were submerged, and in the house of Donna Cristina the water-line reached almost half way up the stairs. The tumult increased continuously, while the bells sounded clamorously. The prisoners, within their prisons, howled.
Anna, believing in some supreme chastisement from the Most High, took recourse in prayers for salvation. The second day, as she mounted to the top of the pigeon-house, she saw nothing but water, water everywhere under the clouds, and later observed, terrified, horses galloping madly on the ridge of San Vitale. She descended, dulled, with her mind in a turmoil, and the persistency of the noise and the mists of the air blurred in her every sense of place and time.
When the flood began to subside, the country people entered the city by means of scows. Men, women and children carried in their faces and eyes a grievous stupefaction. All narrated sad stories. And a ploughman of the Cappuccini came to the Basile house to announce that Don Zacchiele had been washed out to sea. The ploughman spoke simply in telling of the death. He said that in the vicinity of the Cappuccini certain women had bound their nursing children to the top of an enormous tree to rescue them from the waters and that the whirlpools had uprooted the tree, dragging down the five little creatures. Don Zacchiele was upon a roof with other Christians in a compact group, and as the roof was about to be submerged the corpses of animals and broken branches beat against these desperate ones. When at length the tree with the babies passed over them, the impact was so terrible that after its passage there was no longer a trace of roof or Christians.
Anna listened without weeping, and in her mind, shaken by the account of that death, by that tree with its five infants, and those men all crouched upon the roof while the corpses of beasts beat against it, sprang up a kind of superstitious wonder like the excitement she had felt in hearing certain stories of the Old Testament. She mounted slowly to her room, and tried to compose herself. The sun shone upon her window, and the turtle slept in a corner, covered with his shield, while the chattering of swallows came from the tiles. All of these natural things, this customary tranquillity of her daily life, little by little comforted her. From the depths of that momentary calm at length her grief arose clearly, and she bent her head upon her breast in deep depression.
Her heart was stung with remorse for having preserved against Zacchiele that strange, silent rancour for so long a time; recollections one after another came to mind, and the virtues of her lost lover shone more brightly than ever in her memory. As the scourgings of her grief increased, she got up, went to her bed, and there stretched herself out upon her face. Her weeping mingled with the chattering of the birds.
Afterwards, when her tears were dried, the peace of resignation began to descend upon her soul, and she came to feel that everything of this earth was frail and that we ought to bend ourselves to the will of God. The unction of this simple act of consecration spread in her heart a fulness of sweetness. She felt herself freed from all inquietude, and found repose in her humble but firm faith. From now on in her law there was but this one clause: The sovereign will of God, always just, always adorable, established in all things praised and exalted through all eternity.