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.