Catastrophe: And Other Stories Read online

  There followed the most terrifying crash, as if hundreds of Liberators had released their bombs simultaneously. The ground shook, and a great cloud of yellowish dust immediately rose to hide the immense tomb.

  The next thing I remember is that I was on my way home, in a desperate attempt to escape from that wretched place; the news had spread with astonishing rapidity, and the gathering crowds stared at me in horror, perhaps because my clothes were thick with dust. But most memorable of all were the horrified, the pitying glances of my brother-in-law and his children. In silence they stared at me as one might stare at a condemned man (or was this all my imagination?).

  When I reached home and when it became known what I had seen, no one was surprised at my state; nor did it seem unnatural that I should shut myself in my room for several days, refusing to talk to anyone or even to read the papers (I did catch sight of one, against my will, which my brother-in-law was holding when he came to see how I was; on the front page there was a huge photograph showing an endless stream of black trucks).

  Had I been the cause of that massacre? Had the snapping of that iron spike, by some monstrous pileup of cause and effect, actually precipitated the collapse of that hulk of a fortress? Or perhaps the original builders themselves, with diabolical cunning, had organized a secret play of balance so that one needed only to remove that one insignificant spike in order to send the whole structure hurtling to the ground? But my brother-in-law, his children, Scavezzi—had they noticed what I’d done? And if they hadn’t, why from then on did Giuseppe seem to try to avoid meeting me? Or was it myself who, for fear I’d give myself away, unconsciously tried to avoid him?

  And, conversely, isn’t it rather worrying that Scavezzi is so insistent on seeing so much of me? He’s not very well off financially, but since that day he must have ordered a dozen suits from me. When he comes for a fitting he always has his unctuous little smile and he never takes his eyes off me. Furthermore he is maddeningly pedantic about the whole thing: a crease here, an ill-fitting shoulder there; or the buttons on the sleeves, the width of the lapels, there’s always some alteration. He has six or seven fittings for each suit. And every so often he says, “Do you remember that day?”

  “What day?” I ask.

  “That day at the Baliverna, of course.” He seems to wink, slyly.

  “How could I ever forget?” I reply.

  He shakes his head: “Ah, quite . . . how could you?”

  Naturally I give him exceptional discounts, indeed I am resigned to making a loss on the whole business. But he pretends not to notice. “Oh, yes,” he says, “you’re not cheap by any means, but I admit it’s worth it.” Honestly, is he a complete idiot or does he enjoy this mean variety of blackmail?

  Yes, he certainly could have seen me break that fatal iron spike. Perhaps he knows it all, he could report me, unleash the hatred of the whole town upon me. But he’s treacherous and says nothing. He comes and orders a new suit, stares at me, enjoys coming up on me when I least expect it. He is the cat and I the mouse, and I suppose finally he’ll pounce. He’s waiting for the inquiry, preparing his dramatic denunciation. At the crucial moment he’ll rise to his feet: “I alone know who caused the collapse of the Baliverna,” he’ll shout, “I saw it with my own eyes.”

  Today he came to order a flannel suit, more honey-tongued than ever. “Well, this is almost it!”

  “What do you mean, it?”

  “The inquiry, of course. The whole town’s talking about it. You seem to live in another world!”

  “Do you mean the Baliverna?”

  “Precisely, the Baliverna . . . I wonder whether they’ll find who was really responsible?”

  He bade me an elaborately ceremonious goodbye and away he went. I went with him to the door and waited till he had gone down one flight of stairs before closing it. Silence; but I am terrified.

  Catastrophe

  THE TRAIN HAD GONE ONLY A FEW MILES (AND IT WAS a long journey, we were to arrive at our distant destination after a nonstop run of ten hours) when I looked out of a window at a railroad crossing and saw a young woman. It was sheer chance, I could have looked at a hundred other things but my eyes happened to light on her, though neither her face nor her figure were particularly attractive; in fact there was nothing extraordinary about her at all, I can’t imagine why I looked at her. She was obviously leaning on the gates to gaze at our train, which was a very fast one, the northern express and the symbol, for the inhabitants of those uncivilized parts, of immense riches; the easy life, magnificent leather cases, of adventurers, celebrities, film stars; a wonderful daily spectacle, and absolutely free to boot.

  But as the train passed her she didn’t even look in our direction (and yet she might have been waiting there for as much as an hour) but turned her head to listen to a man who had come rushing up the lane and was shouting something which we, of course, couldn’t hear: he seemed to be warning the woman of some imminent danger. This all took place in a matter of seconds; the scene was whisked away and I promptly began to wonder what bad news the man could have brought to that girl who had come to watch us. The rhythmic rocking of the carriage had brought me to the verge of sleep when by chance—coincidence pure and simple—I noticed a peasant standing on a low wall and shouting out across the fields, his hands cupped over his mouth. This time too it was a matter of seconds (the train was going very fast), but I did manage to glimpse half a dozen people running across fields of grass, corn, alfalfa, uncaring as to whether they trampled on it, so it must have been something very important. They emerged from all directions, from a house, a hole in the hedge, from behind a row of vines and so on, all making for the wall where the young man stood shouting. They were running, galvanized into frenzied activity by some unexpected foreboding which had shattered the peace of their lives. But, I repeat, it was a matter of seconds, there was no time for further observation.

  How odd, I thought, that within the space of a couple of miles I should have seen two cases of people receiving unexpected news, for that was what I took it to be. Mildly intrigued, I scrutinized the countryside, roads, farms and villages with a vague feeling of unease.

  Perhaps it was just my particular state of mind, but the more I examined the passersby, peasants, carters and so on, the more I felt that they were all strangely excited. It wasn’t my imagination: how could one explain such bustle in the courtyards, the frightened women, the carts and cattle? It was the same everywhere. The speed at which we were traveling made it impossible to be sure, but I would have sworn that all the activity had one single cause. Some local festival? Were the men getting ready to go to market? But the train was traveling at some speed and the countryside was seething with activity everywhere, judging by the confusion. Suddenly I saw the connection between the young woman at the railroad crossing, the young man on the wall and the frenzied movements of the peasants: something had happened and we on the train knew nothing of it.

  I looked at my fellow travelers in the compartment and outside in the corridor. They had noticed nothing. They were quite calm, indeed an elderly woman opposite me was on the verge of sleep. Or did they have an inkling of what was going on? Yes, they too were clearly worried and didn’t dare to speak out. More than once I glanced up quickly enough to catch them looking out of the window. The woman who appeared half-asleep was one of the chief offenders, glancing out through half-closed lids and then examining me to see if I had noticed.

  Naples. Trains usually stop here. Not our express. The old houses streaked past us, we could see lighted windows in the dark courtyards and in the rooms—it was a matter of seconds—there seemed to be men and women bending over parcels, closing suitcases. Or was it all my imagination?

  They were getting ready to leave. For where? So it wasn’t good news that was electrifying towns and villages. A threat, a danger, scent of disaster. Then I reflected: if it was something really serious, they would have stopped the train; but everything was normal—signals, clear track—for all the worl
d as if it were an inaugural run.

  A young man beside me stood up, pretending to stretch his legs. In fact he wanted to see what was going on and leaned across me to be nearer the window. Outside was the countryside, the sun and the white lanes; and on the main roads were crowds of trucks, groups of people on foot, long convoys, slow-moving processions like those to shrines on saints’ days. The farther north the train went, the larger the crowds became; and they were all going in the same direction, fleeing the danger toward which we were hurtling at such speed: war, revolution, plague, fire, the unknown. We would not know the cause for another five hours, when we would reach our destination, and perhaps by that time it would be too late.

  No one spoke. No one wanted to be the first to give in. Like myself, the others were uncertain as to whether the alarm was real or whether it was just a crazy idea, a hallucination, one of those absurd thoughts that tend to force themselves upon the tired traveler. The woman opposite me gave a sigh, pretending to wake up, and glancing up automatically as one does on waking, fixed her apparently casual gaze on the chain of the communication cord. Then we all looked at the thing too, with a single thought. But no one spoke, or had the courage to break the silence, or even dared to ask the others whether they had noticed anything disturbing going on outside.

  By now the roads were swarming with vehicles and people, all heading southward. Trains coming from the other direction were packed. Bystanders seeing us flying north at such a speed stared in amazement. The stations were crammed. Now and then someone would gesticulate or shout phrases which reached us as mere vowels, like mountain echoes.

  The woman opposite began to stare at me. She twisted a handkerchief in her bejeweled hands and looked at me beseechingly: if only I’d speak, lift them out of that silence, voice the question they were all awaiting like a reprieve and that no one dared to be the first to ask.

  Another town. As the train slowed down to enter the station, two or three people stood up, unable to resist the hope that the driver might stop. But the train roared along the platforms like a whirlwind, amid nervous crowds piling, panting, into a departing train, with their chaotic piles of luggage. A small boy with a bundle of newspapers tried to chase after us, waving one with great black headlines on the front page. With a sudden movement the woman opposite me leaned out and managed to seize a sheet, but the wind blew it away. She was left holding a small piece of it. I noticed that her hands trembled as she unfolded it. It was triangular in shape. On it was printed the name of the paper and four letters only of the headline: -TION. Nothing more. On the back were various uninteresting news items.

  Without speaking the woman held up the scrap of paper so that everyone could see it. But they had all seen already and so pretended to take no notice. The more frightened they were, the more they suppressed it. We were rushing toward something ending in “-tion,” something that must indeed be terrible if the population of whole towns fled immediately on hearing about it. A new and powerful factor had broken up the life of the country, men and women thought of nothing but their own safety and were abandoning their houses, jobs, business, everything, while our train, our wretched train was proceeding with the regularity of clockwork, like the honest soldier making his way through the ranks of his defeated army to reach his trench where the enemy is already encamped. And our sense of decency, our pathetic self-respect denied us the courage to react. Trains, undeniably, are very like life.

  Two hours to go. In two hours we would know our common fate. Two hours, an hour and a half, an hour, it was already getting dark. In the distance we could see the lights of our longed-for city, and their unmoving brightness, sending a yellow glow into the sky, gave us a breath of courage. The engine whistled, the wheels pounded over a maze of points. The station, the black curve of the glass roof, the lights and hoardings were just as usual.

  But, crowning horror, as the train continued to move forward, I saw that the station was deserted, the platforms bare and empty, not a human being in sight. At last it stopped. We ran along the platforms toward the exit, looking for some sign of life. Right down in the far right-hand corner, in the half shadow, I thought I caught sight of a railwayman in a peaked cap vanishing through a door, as though terrified. What had happened? Was there no one in the whole town? Then suddenly a woman’s voice, piercing and violent as a gunshot, made us shudder. It was a shout for help, and it echoed under those glass arches with the empty resonance of places that have been deserted forever.

  The Epidemic

  ONE MORNING AT HALF-PAST EIGHT PRECISELY, COLONEL Ennio Molinas sat down at his desk at the head of a large room in Cip (Cipher Office). Like all other servicemen attached to the Ministry, he wore civilian clothes. Since he was the head of the department his desk stood on a small platform from which he could supervise the desks of his decoders: a sort of dais. The walls were lined with tall shelves filled with books and records: dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, directories, sets of newspapers and periodicals, the basis for all sorts of reference and research. The whole great office had been organized for the war, and functioned at a slacker pace nowadays; but the staff of the department was still complete. The men who worked there were the best in the country at the particular work concerned. They were known jokingly within the Ministry as the “twenty-four geniuses.”

  The Colonel smoothed his whiskers, opened the daily register, read the morning’s notes made by the secretary shortly beforehand and looked up to take the roll call. Eight of the twenty-four desks were empty. “Ahem,” he muttered to himself in his own particular way. One of the decoders in the front row caught his worried glance and smiled at him. The Colonel, who was always pleasant yet knew how to keep his distance, shook his head. The young man’s smile broadened: “If things go on like this, sir, the department will be empty in a couple of days.” Molinas nodded silent assent.

  At this point Sbrinzel, the absurdly lean and hungry-looking secretary of Department Int (Interception and Troop Movements), came in with the sheaf of messages to be decoded. Despite his modest position Sbrinzel commanded much respect. Some said that he was related to the Minister of Internal Affairs, but this may have been nonsense. Others flatly proclaimed him a spy. In short, he was feared. People spoke guardedly in his presence.

  The Colonel, seeing Sbrinzel enter, checked an instinctive movement to stand smartly to attention as though Sbrinzel were a superior. Instead, he smiled broadly.

  Sbrinzel went up onto the platform, put down the file and indicated the desks, a third of which were empty, with a wink. “Well, sir, something of a purge, eh?” For some reasons his jokes were always ambiguous.

  “Influenza, my dear Sbrinzel . . . this year it really is an epidemic . . . luckily it’s taking quite a harmless form so far, no complications . . . four days in bed and it’s all over . . .”

  “Eh, four days! And sometimes four years, eh!” leered Sbrinzel, launching into one of his hateful laughs, dry, harsh and completely lacking in inner gaiety.

  Molinas did not understand. “Four years? How could anyone’s influenza last four years?”

  “Eh”—Sbrinzel invariably began and ended his speeches with this unpleasantly nasal sound—“I quite agree that the present form is mild, but personally I would prefer the Spanish variety, with all its attendant risks. . . . This epidemic is unlikely to dispatch anyone to the next world, but it’s unpleasant all the same, eh!”

  “Well, naturally. Influenza is never exactly pleasant!”

  “Eh, it’s quite plain that you, sir, know nothing about it, eh.”

  “About what? What should I know?”

  Sbrinzel shook his head. “For the head of Cip, if you’ll excuse my saying so, sir, this is a bit much. I, for instance, understood without any assistance.”

  “Understood what?” asked the Colonel, now faintly disquieted.

  “Eh, eh—I could confide in you, I suppose, you’re a responsible man, reserved; you’d hardly occupy this position if you weren’t”—he paused at length
to savor the Colonel’s anxiety, then went on mysteriously, in a lower tone—“But, sir, have you not noticed . . . have you not noticed that this influenza does not choose its victims at random, eh?”

  “I simply don’t understand, my dear Sbrinzel, I really don’t . . .”

  “Eh, then I shall have to spell it out word for word. These bacilli, or viruses, or whatever the hell they’re called . . . well, they have a special flair, they pick people out as if they could read into their very hearts . . . and there’s no way of deceiving them, eh!”

  Molinas looked at him in perplexity. “Look, my dear Sbrinzel, you may feel like joking . . . but as long as you continue to speak in riddles, how do you expect me to understand? Perhaps I am a little slow today . . . I woke up with a headache . . . I hope I . . .”

  “Eh, not you, sir, not you! You couldn’t have influenza! You’re the very personification of discipline, eh!”

  “How does discipline come into it?”

  “Eh, I must admit that you’re not at your best this morning, sir . . .” He lowered his voice still further: “The fact is this, sir, to put it crudely: if you get influenza, it means you’re against the government!”

  “Against the government?”

  “Eh, I found it hard to believe too . . . but finally I was convinced. Believe me, not even we have any idea of the brilliance of the Chief who leads us. . . . A magnificent idea for taking the country’s pulse . . . State influenza! Don’t you think it’s wonderful? Influenza which attacks only pessimists, skeptics, opponents, enemies of the country lurking all over the place . . . while the devoted citizens, the patriots, the conscientious workers are untouched!”

  Here the Colonel managed to voice his objection: “But my dear Sbrinzel, how could such a thing happen? You mean that all those absent today are against the government?”

  “Eh, just think carefully if you don’t believe it, take the cases one by one . . . you’ll see how perfectly it all fits . . . whose desk is that one, for instance?”