The Marshal and the Madwoman (18 page)

'Then there was a terrible blast—it was the boiler in the cellar next door going up and it shattered that window there, where we were hanging out, cutting us all badly. I remember falling back on the floor. When we looked out again little Elena had gone. Anna was still screaming and I don't know if she had even realized the child was gone as her face was pressed against the wall beside the window. We saw her husband throw himself into the water, shouting for Elena. He disappeared immediately but then we saw him come up further down the street near a table which had become lodged between the wall and a lamp-post. We saw his arm reach out and try to cling to it. It might have saved his life, but then the floodwater brought an overturned bus rolling along the street, filling it completely. When it had passed, the lamp-post, the table and Signor Chiari were all gone.

'It was only then that we brought our eyes back to the window below. Anna had gone, too. It seemed certain that the bus had dashed her from the windowledge as it passed, but we went on calling to her for some time on the faint chance that she might have got back into the house. After a time we gave up, because if she had gone back in, the water was now up to their ceiling and not far from our own windowsills. We had to begin thinking about ourselves.

'We dressed our cuts as best we could and went up to the top floor, taking as much food as we could carry along with a few valuables and important papers. More than anything, we were terrified of the explosions. There's a terrace garden on top of the building and everyone collected up there. It was a shocking sight. Plumes of black smoke were going up everywhere as well as great sprays of water as the sewers went on exploding. It was still raining, of course, and we stayed up there huddled under umbrellas and wrapped in blankets, thinking it was safer than inside in case our cellar, too, went up. Hour after hour we sat there, shivering, waiting for help that didn't come. We saw other people on roofs like us, or staring out of top-floor windows, stunned. I suppose we must have been soaked and frozen, sitting out there in November like that, but I can't remember feeling it. It's difficult to explain now, but it was as if everything was somehow suspended. We barely even spoke among ourselves. We just waited. Waited for help. Waited for somebody to tell us something, to explain. Then the car horns started sounding, hundreds of them, like a great wail of sorrow and anger going up all over the city. For a while it cheered us because it gave the impression that there were people out there, cars, action, and we thought then it was only this Quarter that was flooded and that all this noise meant help was on its way. But the noise went on and on, not intermittent but continuous, and we began to realize there was something odd about so many people leaning on their horns like that. We had no way of guessing that the whole city was going under and that the hundreds of cars whose horns were wailing were driverless, tumbling along in the water that had activated their electrical circuits . . .

'We went in at some point, to eat something and try to get dry. Our hunger must have got the better of our fear. There was no gas or electricity or water and the phones had stopped working. We went back on the roof and waited. Late in the afternoon we heard helicopters, though we couldn't see them, and we started hoping again. The helicopters never came near us. Afterwards we found out how badly they'd been needed out in the country areas where people were trapped on the roofs of low farmhouses that were soon submerged. That was where most people drowned. We were much luckier in the city because of the buildings being so high.

'Once the current slowed down we saw thick black oil floating on the yellow water and our fear of fire got worse. If the building had set on fire what could we have done? Then it started to go dark. Can you imagine what it's like when darkness falls on a city and not a single light goes on? It wasn't just frightening it was eerie, desolate. A darkness that civilized people aren't accustomed to. It was then, as we stood watching and waiting and hoping for something, anything, to happen that we realized how bad things must be. Not a single light, Marshal. And in the darkness dogs were howling. It had stopped raining and the stars were brighter than you ever see them over a city because there were no lights. Not knowing what else to do, we went to bed. Nobody slept. We were all in the top flat, most of us having arranged ourselves as best we could with rugs and chairs.

'The water went down in the night leaving a foul-smelling mud behind it, and when it was light enough to see we came down here to see if there was much damage. My first thought was Anna, wondering if she was down below buried in all that filth.'

'And was she?'

'Yes, but we didn't find her, not then. My husband went down right away—not that we had any idea of finding her alive, he only hoped to recover her body if it hadn't been washed away. In any case, he wasn't able to get in since the outgoing water had left shelving and other furniture blocking the broken window and the door was swollen and wouldn't budge. From the street he could see the black oily tidemark showing the level which the water had risen to. It was higher than the Chiaris' workshop ceiling. There was a tank out there in the road and some soldiers called to my husband to come and help them. Injured people were being brought out of the building where the explosion had been and the soldiers were starting to shore it up in front. No one had been killed—luckily there was nobody living on the ground floor there because it had caved in completely. My husband was out there working with the soldiers most of the day. The rest of us in here tried to clear some of the mud out with buckets. It was a hopeless task but we went on with it, not knowing what else to do. All along the street people were doing the same, all with the same dazed expression. Nobody spoke much and nobody let out one word of complaint. When my husband came back, late in the afternoon, he brought some men with him. They weren't experts or anything, just the people from a bar on the corner of the square who'd been out distributing mineral water. I must say people were wonderful—it wasn't at all easy to get about the streets, you know. Haifa million tons of mud, the papers said, a ton for each person, and all of it contaminated with petrol and sewage and the dead bodies of animals . . .

'Anna was down there alive. At first it appeared to be a miracle. We'd seen how high the water was. But after they'd taken her away, we found the place . . . Like many of these high, old buildings there were false ceilings, you know the sort, made of straw and plaster. She'd climbed on top of a high old-fashioned wardrobe, which fortunately stayed upright because the water had rammed the bed up against it, and when the water reached her even there she'd clawed a hole ... It was only just big enough to let her head through, and there she'd stood with the water right up to her mouth. Had it risen another inch or so she would have drowned standing there. She must have known that, as she stood there waiting while we stood waiting on the roof. And if it was so terrible for us when darkness fell and no one came, just think of Anna. Just think of her . . .'

'But in the morning, didn't she climb down? Didn't she call for help? She must have heard people moving about, your husband trying to get in.'

'She climbed down but she didn't call for help. I mentioned that we were all too dazed to speak that first morning. My most vivid memory of that day is of the other women who, like me, were uselessly shovelling at all that mud. Every so often one of them would pause to examine a piece of furniture buried out there in the street in case it should be hers. If it wasn't, they just carried on shovelling without a word passing their lips or even an expression crossing their faces. No, Anna didn't call for help. For all I know she never spoke again. It was only by chance that they found her when they did.

'I didn't understand at first why my husband insisted on checking whether her body was in there before he did anything else when there must have been so many people still alive who urgently needed help. Most of us were in such a state of shock that apart from the immediate danger of fire we didn't think of other dangers, like infection. But he realized right away that the greatest danger in those first few days was of an outbreak of typhoid. No one knew for sure how many people were missing and every so often they uncovered a body when they were shifting debris, but there were so many animals drowned, dogs and cats in the city and herds of cattle washed in from the country, not to mention all the meat and fish in the basement of the central market. They were still clearing that days later, men with gas masks. It must have been the most terrible job because anyone who had to walk anywhere near it had to cover their faces and some of them couldn't help retching. So it was because of typhoid that my husband insisted, and thank God he did or she might have been in there for a week until the pumps arrived to shift the mud.

'There was so much stuff blocking the window that they decided to break the door down with an axe. I was here in our flat then, trying to cover the broken window before it went dark. It was raining again. I heard the noise of them breaking down the door but I didn't know what they were doing until my husband came up for me.

'"Can you come down a minute? It's Anna. I've called an
ambulance but I'd rather you came down
..."

'"You surely don't mean she's alive?"

'"She's alive, but. . . Come down with me, will you?"

'When we got there, the men who had helped him were still standing looking, not knowing what to do. Anna was there in her little kitchen which had had to serve them as dining- and sitting-room too. The place was more than knee-deep in mud and the furniture was all overturned in it. When I got past the men and saw Anna she was bending over to fish something out of the mess. It was a piece of broken cup with the handle still attached. When she straightened up I saw that she was covered in mud herself, even her hair, and she was almost unrecognizable. She had a mud-soaked rag in her other hand and I saw her begin very slowly and carefully wiping the bit of cup with the air of somebody doing a perfectly normal bit of washing up. Then she set the piece on a shelf attached to the wall, balancing it very carefully so that it didn't fall off.

'"Anna.'

'She didn't answer me, and I soon realized that she was quite oblivious of our presence. She just went on picking up bits of debris, wiping them, and setting them on any surface that was still more or less horizontal. Her face was quite expressionless but I saw that her eyes were unnaturally bright as though she had fever.

'"Try and get her to speak,"
my husband whispered to me.

'I did go on trying but it was quite hopeless. I never heard her speak again.

'When the ambulance men arrived she was sweeping very slowly at the surface of the mud with an equally muddy sweeping brush. Despite our fears to the contrary, she went with them without protest, neither knowing nor caring why she was being taken away in a tank along with other injured people.'

'Did they take her to Santa Maria Nuova?'

'I think so. At least, that's where she was when I next saw her, but there was so much confusion in those first days that she might well have been taken somewhere else first. The hospitals were so overcrowded. That was the reason why I put off going there myself for some days, but then I decided I'd better because the worst of the cuts from that window there was looking rather bad. It ought to have been stitched and it was looking a bit septic. It's left me with quite a scar, as you can see.' She turned up her elbow to show him the broad white mark.

'I can't say for sure what day I finally went to the First Aid department at Santa Maria Nuova. It may have been the Sunday or the Monday but those first few days all run into each other in my memory, I'm afraid.'

'I understand. The day isn't important. Did you see Anna?'

It was strange to be calling her that, but they seemed to be talking about quite a separate person who hadn't yet become Clementina.

'I saw her, but only for a moment. Once my arm had been dressed—they said it was too late to stitch it—I made inquiries and was told that she was there on the women's medical ward. I went up there and spoke to the sister in charge but I only got a brief glimpse of Anna. I'd been right about the fever. She had pneumonia and was in an oxygen tent. Nevertheless, the sister said she thought she'd pull through.'

It only needed the mention of the hospital. Would they say that of Bruno? 'He'll pull through . . .' They might have operated by now . . .

Perhaps Signora Santoli had noticed his attention wandering and misunderstood.

'I'm afraid I'm not telling you the sort of thing you want to know but I'm just telling you what I remember as I remember it.'

'No, no. Please go on. These are exactly the things I want to know. I'm already beginning to understand a lot about Clementina's strangeness.'

'How funny you should call her that. I didn't even know she had another name.'

'I imagine that if she didn't speak for so long, the people in the asylum took to calling her that rather than Anna.'

'I suppose that's the explanation but it makes her sound like another person.'

'She was another person, in many ways, by then.'

'Well, it's no wonder, is it? She lost everything, husband, child, income, property, even the beginnings of the place they were building. All washed away. That was what I was thinking as I came away from the hospital that day, of what she would have to face when she came round from her illness.'

'She never did face it.'

'I don't wonder. After all, you have to have something, any one little thing to hang on to, to make you keep going. She had nothing at all. Not even her broken bits of belongings and ruined clothes that were all sucked away with the mud. That was what I was thinking as I walked back through what was left of the city that day. All around me people were trying to put their lives back together. It looked hopeless but they were trying. I remember all the shopkeepers trying to salvage clothes, pictures, furniture, from under all that mud and sewage and oil, working away by themselves without complaint. It was still difficult even to walk—I was looking for the place they'd told me to go to at the hospital, where a pharmacy had been set up outdoors and where I had to buy antibiotics and more bandages. I remember some soldiers heaving the carcase of a cow on to the back of a truck with ropes and a man tramping through the mud carrying a statue in his arms as though it were a dead person, and I was still thinking about Anna. What could she salvage? I decided then that when I got home I'd go into her flat and see if there wasn't some little thing left there that I could take to her—up to then we'd been too busy working in the cellar trying to free the boiler. I suppose I was hoping to retrieve some keepsake, something to take to her in the hospital. It was a foolish enough idea but I didn't know what else to do for her.'