Now, standing in the dark field, waiting for his friend to stop throwing up, Topo realized that tonight had already turned out more like “the good old days” than he had hoped for. The drinking, the singing, the reminiscing had been good—but by midnight the liquor in Topo’s stomach had turned sour, he had a headache, and he wanted to go home. That was about the time that Leo decided to join a card game in a back room. He was going to win enough money to “get the hell outta this piss hole.” At least, that’s what his garbled slurs sounded like to Topo. Later there was the pushing and the shouting at the card table after he’d lost all his money. Next came the punching and the falling down in the street when they were tossed out of the bar. Then there were the protests about being cheated, followed by the bumpy ride home filled with angry threats against every male child ever born in Grosseto. Leo finally reached his peak of self-pity with a demand that Topo stop the truck, and even before the truck came to a complete halt, Leo was out the door, staggering and vomiting his way into the darkness. That was twenty minutes ago.
“Leo?”
Silence.
Straining against the moonlight, all Topo could make out were mounds of shadowy boulders and cactus. He knew that one of those motionless lumps was Leo, but since the retching noises stopped he’d lost track of which one.
“Leo? Are you okay?”
Silence.
Leo struggled to his knees and was glad it was dark. He looked terrible, that was for sure. He remembered the jacket ripping in the fight and one of the knees tore when he fell on the greasy pavement. All his money was gone and his suit was ruined. With one hand he checked the top of his head—at least he still had his hat. He tried to climb up to his feet and failed.
Topo called again from the truck. Kneeling against the low boulder Leo let out a sound. It was supposed to be a word, perhaps a phrase—something to let Topo know that he was all right. Instead what came out was the cry of an animal in pain—something terrified and trapped. Leo moaned angrily to the sky; it was as close to a prayer as anything he had uttered in years. Why had he returned? Why had God trapped him in this place again? Why did God continue to humiliate him and mock him? It may have been a prayer of sorts, but he was surprised to discover that it was also a challenge because as he knelt clenching the boulder, he felt defiance growing in his heart and he tossed contempt upward toward the night sky. No words, no real thoughts, but abstractions of anger raced in his mind and he tossed this defiance into the teeth of God. He would not accept this fate—a lifetime of disrepute in Santo Fico. No matter what it took he would escape and this time he would not be tricked into returning. He dared God to stop him.
Struggling to his feet, he searched out the faint silhouette of the small truck back at the road.
“I’m okay. I’m coming.”
His words were still more slurred than he intended, but some dignity had returned. Brushing himself off and straightening his tie, he took less than a dozen tentative steps across the field before he tripped over a tall thin boulder that was standing oddly on its end and he fell into a small cactus. The stinging nettles gave him new incentive to quickly find his feet, accompanied by a hail of painful curses. In a matter of moments he was again staggering across the field toward the shadow of the little truck.
Leo didn’t bother to notice the tall, thin stone that had tripped him and he was certainly far too drunk to see the bright glint of metal that the moonlight revealed buried beneath it.
A
fter their long day sweltering in the kitchen and then the violent rendezvous in the garden with Solly Puce,
Marta and Carmen were both exhausted. They barely had enough energy to fight for a full hour before retreating to their bedrooms where each cried herself to sleep.
At about that same time, Father Elio finished his prayers and made his way back to his dark rooms. He got all the way to the bathroom before he was reminded that there were no light bulbs. He was so exhausted from his unusually active day, he didn’t mind ignoring a few of the usual ablutions. What was absolutely necessary was performed in the dark and he was asleep by eleven.
Down the road, in the cluttered rooms behind the Pasolini Fix-It Shop, it was almost 2:30 by the time Topo was finally able to climb out of his clothes and slip peacefully between his cool familiar sheets.
Topo loved his house and his shop. He had inherited the building, the business, and much of the debris that filled all the rooms from his father. He even inherited his talent for tinkering and his reluctance to throw anything away (or put anything away for that matter) from his father. Cans of discarded screws, countless bolts without nuts, twice as many nuts without bolts, washers, wires, tubes, and cords, boxes of parts, parts without boxes—anything that his hand or the hand of his father had ever touched, but didn’t use, remained in the shop; shoved, stacked, and crammed into every room, closet or cubbyhole available. To call the Pasolini family pack rats trivializes an art form.
The whole lot of it had been passed down from his father—that is, all except the “Pasolini Classics of World Cinema.” That was Topo’s doing. He began collecting old films as a teenager when a movie theater in Castiglione went out of business. When he was older he discovered a distributor in Livorno who would sell him discarded or damaged prints. Now, after almost twenty-five years of collecting, he had over sixty films. The large tin spools were all categorized and filled special shelves that covered the walls of his bedroom. Some years earlier he’d acquired a broken projector and repaired it himself. Often, on Saturday nights, when the weather was fine, Topo would set up his projector in the town square and show his films on the side of the church. He didn’t make any announcements. He had no schedule—he just set up when the spirit moved him. But when word went out that Guido Pasolini was stringing extension cords across the piazza, you could be sure that as the sun went down the square was going to be filled with blankets and chairs.
Topo could hear Leo already snoring in the front room. The thought of any further trek to Leo’s stone hut had been too daunting for either of them and Leo quickly accepted Topo’s mumbled offer to spend the night. He sprawled across his friend’s couch and the discrepancy in length between Leo’s lanky frame and the short sofa was no deterrent. In a matter of minutes, first Leo, then Topo drifted off and, at long last, everyone in Santo Fico was finally asleep.
When the earth began to rumble, sunrise was still over two hours away. It began when the ocean floor buckled slightly some fifty kilometers out at sea and it rolled quickly north past the small island of Montecristo, heading for the coast just south of Santo Fico. As earthquakes go, it wasn’t much. The next day newspapers in the region would mention the event, noting some minor damage to a few older buildings in Grosseto, Follonica, and Massa. News accounts would assure the readers that, “Fortunately, the moderate tremor missed major cities and caused relatively no damage.”
But while the citizens of Grossetto to the south and Siena to the north barely rolled over in their collective sleep, to certain small and forgotten villages it was serious business.
It was 3:47 when the gray dog stirred. Of course, Nonno had no way of knowing it was 3:47 because, as he repeatedly reminded people, he lost his watch when he made the water go away. He knew it was early since through the room’s only window he could see that it was still dark outside. The scratching at the door at such an hour troubled the old man because the dog always slept through the night and it was a little upsetting to suddenly have his mangy companion whining as if the earth itself was about to swallow him.
Then Nonno heard what he knew the dog must have heard and he too became frightened. A low rumbling came rolling around him, as if some ancient monster was beginning to stir and grumble deep within the sea, just beyond his door. Then, it was as if the ground took up the complaint and the earth beneath his bed moaned painfully. As the groaning became louder, everything began to quiver and tremble. Small objects skittered across tables and shelves. The terrified dog howled loudly and the old man scrambled off his cot. He staggered toward the door, but the floor and furniture rolled around him and Nonno became so muddled in the dark that he found himself grasping at bare plaster where he was sure a door handle should have been. He barely had time to realize how topsy-turvy everything was before the roof and much of the walls of the dilapidated building collapsed on him. The old dog yelped once and then the howling stopped.
Upstairs at the Albergo di Santo Fico, Marta was awakened from a dreamless sleep by the sound of pictures dropping off the walls and crashing against the floor. The moon had set and the room was pitch black. The deep rumbling earth, the crashing pictures, her bed tossing back and forth—Marta became convinced someone was in her room attacking her and she sat up, her fists clenched and her arms swinging wildly to fend off an assault. But in an instant she came to herself and was out of bed and down the hall, shouting all the way.
“Carmen! Get out! Nina, hurry! Get up!”
In the darkness of the hall she heard Carmen scream, but could see nothing. She used the wall as a guide, hurried toward the sound, and ran straight into Carmen, who was bolting into the hall from her own room. Both of them tripped and fell over each other and became a tangle of limbs on a floor that rolled and pitched beneath them. Marta forced herself to her feet, pulled Carmen up, and started off in the direction of what she thought was Nina’s room. But her face smashed into the plaster wall and she saw dizzying lights behind her eyes as she sank back to her knees. Carmen screamed louder. Suddenly, there were steady hands on their shoulders and Nina’s voice commanded them over the groans of the wobbling villa.
“This way! Come with me!”
Nina led them down the trembling hall and all along the corridor while in adjacent rooms chairs and tables tap-danced madly across the hardwood floors. Marta and Carmen clung to Nina’s thin nightgown and listened only to her soothing voice as it guided them through the black terror.
Down the hill at his little fix-it shop, Topo slept peacefully, unaware that his family’s penchant for collecting was about to do him in. The earthquake hit the cluttered fix-it shop like a whirlwind hits a house of cards. In a matter of seconds shelves of containers, boxes of debris, years and generations of miscellaneous collecting showered down around him like a hailstorm of angry utensils. Discarded toasters, broken radios, obsolete thingamajigs and forsaken doohickeys all toppled from their precariously balanced pyramids and came crashing off their perches.
Topo scrabbled out of bed, groping for a light. His voice shrieked at a pitch usually heard only by dogs, “Earthquake! Save me God! Earthquake!”
Leo stirred on the dusty sofa in the living room and discovered his room was raining small appliances as well, but his coma had been deeper. At Topo’s second panicked screech of “Earthquake!” Leo managed to wipe a line of drool off his cheek and sit up. He hadn’t slept nearly long enough to actually sober up—only long enough to develop a massive headache and a ferocious thirst. Blinking at the light streaming in from Topo’s bedroom he too became aware of objects crashing and collapsing around him. Topo was right. It was an earthquake.
“My God, Leo, help,” came the new frantic cry from the bedroom. Leo could see his friend whirling around the room like a dervish, vainly trying to hold his film canisters in place. But in spite of his frantic efforts, canister after canister hit the floor with a cymbal crash. Then each flat can flew open and the spools wheeled themselves across the room. It was like a grotesque dance, the way Topo leapt about grabbing at his collapsing film empire. A few of the spools rolled out of the bedroom and across the living room floor leaving a shiny snail-trail of black celluloid behind. Leo almost wanted to laugh, but his head felt like his brain was three sizes too large for his skull.
With a gasp, the real peril of the earthquake hit Leo like a shot of dry cell voltage. He sprang from the sofa and bolted for the door, catching a medium-sized television that was dropping from a shelf as he raced past. The catch was instinctual and purely in self-defense, but from the bedroom Topo saw his friend save one of his only working televisions and was sincerely grateful for the help, until he watched Leo toss the TV over his shoulder and dash out the front door. Then the electricity went off.
Father Elio had to manage on his own. It didn’t take much shaking and rumbling to rouse the old man; these days his sleep was fitful at best. At the first tremor he was sitting up on his cot. There was a door in his small room that led outside to the back of the church, but he ignored that way to safety and instead charged down the low corridor toward the kitchen. He heard things in the distance that made his heart ache.
Father Elio’s hands fumbled along the stone walls of the ancient tunnel, stumbling blindly forward as if the terrible sounds echoing from the cathedral were pulling him. In the darkness ahead of him he heard explosions of glass crashing against stone floor and he prayed that some of the beautiful stained glass windows would be spared. Then a violent rending that sounded to Elio like a scream of pain shook the building far beyond the shaking of the earthquake. It was followed by the thunderous roar of a collapsing building and a tremor so violent it knocked Father Elio off his feet. Something was terribly wrong in the sanctuary. Crawling forward on his hands and knees, he began to cough and fight for air as the dark corridor was engulfed in a wave of thick, choking dust.
Leo ran so quickly up the narrow street he was unaware of when the quake actually stopped. From the tall houses that lined the corridor like sheer canyon walls, he could hear frightened voices crying and wailing in the darkness, calling desperately to loved ones, but he saw no people.
He stumbled and tripped a great deal as he raced up the hill, but not just from the remains of the alcohol that was rapidly sweating out of his system. The dark street was littered with broken crockery, the remnants of window boxes filled with flowers, and terra-cotta roof tiles that were shaken loose and crashed to the street. As chunks of dislodged debris fell out of the blackness, their shattering concussions on the cobblestones sent him dodging to one side or the other, often crashing into the ghostly white walls that defined his gauntlet. It was a good thing no one called for help because he had no intention of stopping.