Fugitives and Victims
At Caltanissetta they told me that the trains were bringing fugitives from Messina all day and all night. The fugitives were mostly naked and all very dirty, some with rugs, some with cloaks, some with rags. A woman got out of the train clothed, like Monna Vanna, in nothing but a cloak which a soldier had given her. They asked her:
“What do you want done for you?”
She opened her cloak and showed that she wanted everything.
Another woman came with her daughter whose leg was broken and they were both naked. The doctor said to the mother:
“And what do you want?”
“Help for my daughter.”
To another destitute woman: “And you?”
“Shoes for my baby.”
Michele, a young man, was known to be in Reggio where he was employed in the Municipio. His father went from Caltanissetta to look for him and returned after four days, during which he had searched for his son and suffered mental anguish and physical discomfort. His friends went to the station to meet him. He talked politics to them and asked their opinion about the rotation of crops.
“And Michele?” they inquired.
“Oh! Michele,” here he began to laugh: “Michele; yes, he is buried under the ruins of a house three storeys high.”
They could get nothing more out of him except laughter and that Michele was lying under a house three storeys high. A few months later, Michele’s body was found, with no traces of decay, brought to Caltanissetta and buried. Then his friends wrote elegies in verse about him and handed them round for approval.
Plenty of people went mad besides Michele’s father. The streets of Messina were full of mad people. They told me of one who lost his wife. Within a fortnight he married a widow whose husband had been destroyed. This happy couple spent their honeymoon in digging out the bodies of their previous spouses and having them suitably buried.
When I say they married, a widow may not legally marry for ten months after the death of her husband, but this couple married on credit, as they call it. There were many fugitives who found a temporary asylum in a prison in Catania and who similarly married on credit, intending to return later and contribute to the population of the new Messina.
There was a family living on the top floor of a house close to the railway station near the port in Reggio. They were not hurt, but they could not get down because the earthquake had destroyed the stairs. The man made a rope of sheets, with the help of which he carried his wife down, then he went up and fetched his children one after another, three or four children. He went up again to fetch his money and while in his room the house fell with him, killing and burying him in the ruins. But he had saved his wife and children.
They told me of a victim, pinned down in a cellar, unable to rise; a chicken, whose coop had been broken, escaped and passed near; the victim caught the chicken, killed it, plucked it and ate it raw. They told me of others, not pinned down but imprisoned in rooms, who ate what they found in cupboards—oil, biscuits, salame, uncooked maccaroni. These victims were saved and lived to recount their sufferings. But there were others, pinned down and imprisoned, whose bodies were not extricated till they had lain for weeks and months beside their emptied cupboards, no longer on the watch for escaping chickens. I was in Catania about a year and a half after the earthquake and saw the funeral of one whose body had recently been found; it was not the last.