Rational nightmares, I keep having visions of what might have been. Of not finding one of my children, a sister, a brother, any of my students, my neighbour. The minutes after the 3.32 mainshock, we counted one another - all the inhabitants of the house were safe. I went up the street, seeing one of the neighbours "Are you well?" They were all well. Then the house still after, at the end of the street, a couple with their so blond, 5-year-old daughter, ok them too. The "men" then go the other way of the street, in the light of the stars and fullmoon, house after house, in this instinctive search of neighbours to find if help was necessary. At the entrance of the street, the tragedy. A heap of ruins, where a man and his daughter, both working at a gas station nearby, were living. The girl is taken out, alive, he will be extracted hours later, after a man arrives with his own excavator. On the list of victims, I see that Rocco had his birthday on 5 april 2009, the last birthday of his life.
The mystery of not knowing when the day comes is the deepest rooted certainty in the now fragmentary existences, with queues for having a doctor see your eyesight, to get the salad, the fruit, the shoes and the toothpaste, and every 2 or 3 days the via crucis of returning to the city, one abandoned village after another, one field of blue tents after the many others, meeting other friends and neighbours and asking about their dear ones first, then their whereabouts, then avoiding the future, no plans, no tomorrows, surviving today and getting stronger as in Langston Hughes poem, the wounded eagle must eat and grow strong, for the time when she feels she can fly again, and the world will see how beautiful she is.