Castellinaria, and Other Sicilian Diversions

by Henry Festing Jones

RAILWAY PORTERS

Some years ago the station porter who attended to my luggage at Messina gave me his name and address, saying that if I would send him a post-card next time I came, he would meet me and look after me. Since then I have passed through Messina once, and sometimes twice, a year and he has always met me. I wrote to him from London after the earthquake inquiring whether he was alive or dead, but he did not receive my card till nearly eight months later, after it had been returned to me and I had sent it to him again. I had in the meantime heard, in an indirect way, that he was one of the station porters who had survived. In the August following the earthquake I sent him a card to say I was coming by steamer from Naples, and he was in a little boat in the port to meet me.

There was a difference in his manner and a new look in his eyes. When he had been talking some time, I mentioned

it, and he admitted that he felt different since the earthquake. His house fell and he lay buried in the ruins with nothing to eat or drink and seriously wounded. A friend came looking for him and after three days he was extricated, restored to life and properly taken care of. But his wife and child were killed and his home destroyed. He has been born again naked into the world, no wonder there is a strange look in his eyes. We were joined by his cousin, another porter, who was seven days in the ruins, starved into unconsciousness. When the soldiers rescued him they thought he was dead, but they took him where the doctors gradually brought him back to life. He did not mind the dying after it had once set in, everything gave way to the indolent pleasure of irresponsible drifting, but the restoration was a difficult and exhausting business. He will be thought to be dead again some day, and will be allowed to continue his sleep in peace without any troublesome awakening.

I looked in the eyes of the men who were hanging about among the temporary wooden sheds in the piazza in front of the station, and saw in many of them the expression that was in my porter’s eyes, the expression that betrays those who are the figli del terremoto, those who have been born again with the earthquake for their second mother, and I remembered that the same expression was in the eyes of Turiddu’s professor in Naples. I had supposed it to be normal with the professor, but it was the first time I had seen him; now I understood that it was not there before. They have not all this look. Turiddu has not got it, nor has my porter’s cousin. The professor is sixty-two, Turiddu is only twelve and was able to sleep. My porter is about forty-two, his cousin is not yet thirty. Again, the professor had the responsibility of his party; Turiddu had none. My porter has lost his wife and child; his cousin is unmarried.

These two porters told me a great deal that I had read in the papers in England; to hear it from them on the spot

made it more real, and especially to see their gestures describing how the earthquake took the houses and worried them as a terrier worries a rat. Few houses were not wrecked. I pointed to one which I knew to be the Palazzo dei Carabinieri at a corner of a street leading out of the station piazza, but my porter replied:

“You are looking at a corner of it and can only see two walls. The other walls and the floors have fallen. If the shutters were open you would see the sky where the rooms ought to be.”

At the other corner of the street used to stand the Albergo di Francia, where I stayed once when all the other hotels were full because the wind was so strong that the ferry-boat could not get out of the harbour to take the travellers across the straits. The albergo was lying in a heap on the ground; in its fall it had crushed and killed and buried the young landlord, Michele;—“God rest his soul in heaven, so merry!”

I uttered some banality about their having passed through a terrible time. They accepted my remark as a final summing up and said it was better not to talk about it. It was evidently a relief to them to talk of something else.

Before Messina can be rebuilt on its old site, the ruins must be cleared away and the disputes about the boundaries must be settled, and this will take time. Meanwhile the people are living in the wooden bungalows of a New Messina which is growing up outside the old town. I spent two days there in the spring of 1910 and again in 1911. The Viale San Martino is the principal street. There are hotels, bookshops, sweet-shops, tobacconists, jewellers, butchers, restaurants with tables ready spread, and the lottery offices are open. Most of the huts have no upper storey and some are no bigger than half a dozen sentry boxes knocked into one. It is very dusty. The boys are crying papers up and down the street, there are barbers’ saloni and shops with silver-topped canes. The earthquake

seems to be forgotten in the intensity of the bubbling life. As I passed the Municipio in a side street, I saw a wedding party going in. One evening I went to the theatre and saw Feudalismo with Giovanni Grasso, a homonymous cousin of the great Giovanni, in the principal part and Turiddu’s mother, Signora Balistrieri, as one of the women.

The first time I was in Messina after the earthquake all this was only beginning and many of the people were living in railway waggons in the sidings, of which few now remain. It was strange to see rows of railway carriages with curtains to the windows and some with steps up to the door and a little terrace outside with creepers growing over it. The cabins and the waggons are supposed to be safe, because they would not crush their tenants in another earthquake. But they do not seriously fear another earthquake; Messina has been so thoroughly destroyed that it must now be the turn of some other town.

I replied: “Yes, the Veil of S. Agata preserved Catania this time, but it may desert her next time as the Letter of the Madonna deserted you last winter. By the by, what has become of that miraculous Letter? Was it destroyed or did anyone save it?”

They did not know and muttered something about “stupidagini,” and perhaps there will be no need to trouble oneself with any such thoughts when one is living the life after death. Later on, in another part of the island, I asked a dignitary of the Church, who had not been through the earthquake, what had become of the Madonna’s Letter and he assured me that it had been preserved. I had pretty well made up my mind that this would be his answer before putting the question; but if the earthquake had destroyed Girgenti and I had asked him about the letter from the Devil, which is said to be preserved in the cathedral there, I should have expected him to tell me that that letter had not survived the shock.

GIUSEPPE PLATANIA

In Catania I saw my friend Lieutenant Giuseppe Platania, who was quartered in Messina during the winter of 1908-9. He was away for Christmas and returned about midnight on the 27th December and went to bed at two in the morning on the 28th. He was awakened by the falling of a picture, which hit him. He guessed the reason, covered his head with the pillows and lay still, waiting. He had to wait fifty-seven seconds—at least many people told me the earthquake lasted fifty-seven seconds, but the recording instruments were broken, so it is not certain how long it lasted. When the room left off rocking, Giuseppe put out his hand for the match-box, but the table was no longer by his bedside. He heard cries for help, and a man who was sleeping in the next room came with a light, then he saw that the floor of his room had fallen, but not under his bed, which was in a corner. He and the man with the light managed to get to the window and let themselves down into a side street, but they saw no way out because the exit was closed by the fallen houses. Their window was on the first floor and they climbed back into the house, helped another man who was there, got themselves some clothes and returned into the side street. Here they felt no better off and were afraid of the houses falling on them, but Giuseppe’s soldier servant, Giulio Giuli, a contadino of Nocera, appeared among them. He had come to look for his master and crept through the ruins into the side street. He told them that Messina was destroyed, which they would not believe; everyone seems to have supposed at first that the earthquake had only damaged his own house. Giulio showed them the way out, and so they got into the town and realised the extent of the disaster. If Giulio had not come, Giuseppe and his friends would probably have been destroyed by more houses falling into their narrow street before they could have found a way out.

Giuseppe had changed his bedroom about ten days

previously. The house he used to live in was completely destroyed, he showed me a photograph of its ruins. His mother and his brother Giovanni, in Catania, heard of the disaster, but could get no particulars because communication was broken. Giovanni went to Messina to inquire for his brother, not knowing where his new room was, but he knew the number of his regiment. He stopped a soldier in the street who was wearing the number in his cap and who told him where to find Giuseppe. In the meantime Giulio had walked about fifteen miles to Alì, whence he took the train to Catania, told the mother her son was safe, and returned to Messina to help in the work of rescuing victims.

Giuseppe directed his soldiers in the rescue work and afterwards received a medal “Per speciali benemerenze.” While at work they saw a hand among the ruins and began to dig round it, all the time in fear lest the disturbing of the rubbish might make matters worse for the victim and for themselves. The hand belonged to a woman whose head had been protected by being under a wooden staircase. She showed no sign of life and it was already four days since the disaster. They wetted her lips with marsala and poured some into her mouth and thus restored her. Giuseppe told me that nothing made more impression on him than seeing this woman’s breast begin to heave as life returned.

The soldiers had to shoot the horses and dogs for eating the corpses, and the thieves for pilfering. The horses had escaped from their stables, which were broken by the earthquake, and the dogs had come in from the country. And besides the pilfering they told me of other things the doing of which had better be ignored by those who seriously cultivate the belief that civilisation and education have already so transformed human nature that all restraints may be safely removed, things which, nevertheless, were done by human beings in Messina while the houses were tottering during the closing days of 1908 and the opening weeks of 1909. I inquired whether the townspeople were themselves

guilty of these horrors and they said: No. The bad things were done by people who came into the city from the country, like the dogs, and across the straits from Calabria to take advantage of the catastrophe. As my friend Peppino Fazio in Catania put it:

“The earthquake was very judiciously managed; it killed only the wicked townspeople; it did not touch the good ones, they all escaped.”

Giuseppe’s brother, Giovanni Platania, is a scientific man and a professor; he went often from Catania to Messina during the early part of 1909 to study the behaviour of the sea during the earthquake—the maremoto. He has embodied the results of his researches in an opuscolo on the subject Il Maremoto dello Stretto di Messina del 28 Dicembre 1908 (Modena. Società Tipografica Modenese, 1909). It took him twelve hours to return to Catania from one of his first visits; the journey in ordinary times is performed by the express in two hours and a half. There was no charge for the tickets because it was the policy of the authorities to empty the town; in this way malefactors who escaped from the prison got easily away. In the train was a woman who talked, saying that no one could blame her for travelling to Catania free, especially as she had not deserved to be put in prison—she had been put there for nothing. There was also a man who did not exactly say he was a thief, but he informed his fellow-travellers that the bundle he had with him had been confided to his care by the padrone of his house. There was no reason why he should have told them this, no one had asked him about his bundle, and Giovanni drew his own conclusions.