He said, You can stay here if you wish, contessa.
I’d like that, Signor Temper. Guest room, of course.
And before she fell asleep, she said someone needed to stay awake just in case. Ulysses promised he’d stand guard all night.
At midnight, he left the door on the latch and went down the stairs. Torchlight showed the water was lowering, and he knew they’d got off lightly. Ten feet in the Duomo square.
In his bedroom he opened the shutters. The rain had stopped. He lay down and fell asleep immediately.
7 a.m. brought a flaming sunrise. The beautiful sound of the swoosh of car tyres. He got up and looked out at the devastation. A Madonna stood muddied in the middle of the square. Her broken hand pointed to the sky.
One by one, on the morning of 5 November, people emerged from doorways dazed by the horror that awaited them. The water had gone, but had left behind the unimaginable: a thick layer of black stinking mud that coated everything. A slick composition of heating oil, soil and sewage, a wafty waft that marked buildings at the highest point of the river’s reach, an inconsistent line that would rise and fall throughout the city streets. Metal shutters on shops and restaurants had either buckled or been ripped away, and the interiors destroyed. Two cars had overturned near the fountain and at the doors of the basilica, Cressy’s Moto Guzzi Falcone was lying on its side. The stone benches, holders of memory, had become holders of muck. Flagstones had been torn up, windows smashed, and out into the mire had been sucked the intimate and the everyday. Shoes from the cobbler were strewn about the black landscape, giving the impression that scattered corpses lay not far beneath. This was not life that would ever return to normal.
Anything that could not be salvaged from ground-floor homes or shops or cafés began to appear in the square: a pram, an accordion, cushions, a toy car, tins of food, chairs, clothing, radios, a television set, suitcases, paintings, letters. It broke your heart, but you had to do it, you had to place it on the pile with all the rest. Even if it was a jukebox.
Michele was trying unsuccessfully to manoeuvre the machine out of the bar. He looked up at Ulysses’ approach. Che disastro, he said. Ulysses grabbed a corner and helped shift the machine into the square. Inside the bar, the watermark stood at just over a metre. Bottles of alcohol on the higher shelves, the public telephone, and the ancient coffee machine that had travelled up from the south, were the only things untouched by the mud.
Ulysses picked up chairs and carried them out and placed them on the pile. Giulia hovered by the kitchen. I will do this only once, Ulisse, she said, tears falling. He followed her down into the kitchen where the tidemark rose. Everything covered by shit, the smell noxious and potent.
Where do we start? she cried. Tell me where? No water even to clean the— and Ulysses wanted to hold her but Michele moved past and said something harsh about her tears. Ulisse, he said. Help me. We take it all out. Icebox first.
Massimo found Ulysses in the square. The two men held one another till a hundred silent words had passed between them.
How’s it your side? said Ulysses.
So bad. And Massimo recounted what he’d seen and heard:
Embankments had been washed away. The Biblioteca Nazionale was still completely cut off by water and inundated. Santa Croce no one can get inside. Street after street of overturned cars, and dead cattle. The Baptistery doors have been ripped from their frames – the mayor and a film crew are over there now – and panels from the Gates of Paradise are missing.
Madonna Mia, whispered Giulia and went back inside the bar.
No one knows how many are dead, he said.
The men looked up at a helicopter.
You hear they released all the prisoners from the Murate? said Michele. And now the looting starts!
Ulysses went across to help Giulia carry out a table.
You been to your workshop, Ulisse?
Not yet.
Michele turned. You do this but you haven’t been there? Take him now, Signor Buontalenti.
The pavements were slippery with stinking mud – the fango – and each step was slow and perilous. People were out in the streets, starting the clear-up. Worse than the war, they said. Faces hardened, the swish of brooms, the scrape of wooden rakes, an impossible task without detergents and water, but we have to do something, they say. The cheese seller, fishmonger, butcher, all gone. The contents festering in the road. Haberdashery shop, toy shop, bike shop, gone gone gone.
When they got to Piazza dei Sapiti, the narrow streets had funnelled the water with such velocity that the small square had taken the full force. The door to Ulysses’ workshop was ajar and inside, the walls were blackened. Globes, once the prize of the upper shelves had been sucked into the eddy, old map books that he’d collected since arriving in the city, Des’s moulds, tools, his father’s plates— Outside, a woman wailing, I’ve lost everything. I’ve lost everything.