int ‘o rione
NoonFebruary 10, 2023 – 11:48
The buildings around seemed to bend, like in a surrealist painting
Of Fortunato Cerlino
Images of the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria scrolled on television. The Tg presenter launches the next service. More rubble, other crumbled cities. However, this is Ukraine, the rubble that covers the corpses is not caused by the irrationality of nature, but by the human one. The mind begins to wander, confuse, to superimpose memories and emotions. Reality returns to being fragile, uncertain, like that Sunday 23 November 1980 at 19.34 and 53 seconds.
I was doing homework for the next day. I was sitting at the ceramic table in the small kitchen on the ground floor of the five-story building where we lived. My mother was cooking. My grandmother, a large, obese woman who moved slowly, had gotten up to go to the salon. A room of a few square meters that also served as a bedroom for her, for me, and for my three brothers. At the time we were still four children, the fifth would arrive three years later.
Mum! Nonetheless, when you move, tremm all at home!.
But my grandmother understood that it wasn’t because of her size that the house was shaking.
Annamar! ‘the earthquake! ‘The earthquake!.
I remember almost all of the 90 seconds that followed, a fold of time that lives in my consciousness like an expanded bubble, a crystal ball where instead of snow falls concrete dust.
We didn’t know what the earthquake was. We had heard about it, we had seen some scenes on television of catastrophes that had occurred in other countries. Faraway places, too far away to be true. My brothers, summoned by my grandmother’s and mother’s screams, rushed into the corridor. Eyes wide open, pupils dilated. What’s happened?. Those frightened faces asked, but there was no time for an answer. We started running. We found ourselves in a torrent of tumultuous bodies scrambling down the alley to safety. There was the low wall at the end of the street. The light from the street lamp hanging from the two wooden poles leaning against each other bounced like crazy, but that was the point to reach. There we would not have been surrounded by the buildings that threatened us on both sides. While I was running I glanced behind me. My mother was a few steps away, the youngest of us in her arms. My father helped her. My grandmother followed them. On either side of me, in the crowd, were the other brothers. The light from the streetlight was approaching slowly, too slowly.
Currite! Currite! If they fall ‘and buildings!. someone yelled.
The buildings around seemed to bend, like in a surrealist painting. I remember that creeping, sneaky noise, which I could distinguish very well despite the screams. The sound of the stones crumbling, sliding one over the other. The more we ran the more it seemed we would never get to the lamppost.
Stu vico nu mastrillo!. Someone said when we reached safety. It was the first time I’d heard that word. Later they explained to me that I hammer a trap, made of metal or wood, and it’s used to catch the bitches, the rats.
It took hours, days, weeks, months before the world became possible again. No building in my alley fell, the damage to Pianura was modest, but the cracks that opened in the walls of many houses extended to the depths of our souls. The dream plane was confused with the real one, the frame of the day that keeps out the night, for many of us, became ephemeral. A fragile, permeable membrane that turned dreams to stone and walls to mist. Even today the dismay of those 90 seconds lives in the way I perceive reality. The certainties of faiths, ideologies, philosophies have never been unshakeable for me ever since. Plasterboard mental buildings, precarious sets, furnished costumes. The border that separates the possible from the impossible has never had customs again. That event, if on the one hand it forced me into fear, on the other it made me a citizen of a limbo of wonder and terror. It generated in me, and in many others, the need to question life as it had appeared to us up until a few minutes before the quake. Then begins a dissolution of flesh and matter which over time has made me more open to compromise with the Spirit, more frailly human. That camp of those evicted from life that was born under the lamppost at the end of the alley stood in a middle ground, a truce. The people who had hated each other up until a moment before cried together, hugging each other, giving each other comfort and support. Then a question arose in me to which I have not yet found an answer, and which re-emerges as I look at the rubble of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, and that of the Russian bombings in the Ukraine. How much longer do we have to wait for the day when we no longer need catastrophes or wars to remind us that we are only human, mysteriously human?
February 10, 2023 | 11:48
© Time.News