Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [81]
THE FIRE ON PEOPLE STREET, begun by the earthquake, destroyed the entire contents of our Central Library, lost in that tragic blaze were many hundreds of precious books and manuscripts, many irreplaceable items of great civic importance. After the fire was out, after about a week, when the ruins had cooled sufficiently, Ambras Cetts—in his capacity as acting mayor—visited the wretched place. What he saw there resembled the ugly crumbs of some merciless war: there were single walls perversely still standing quite black now with sorrowful holes where windows once were, but nothing of the insides. Mostly there was just black, toxic space, not even metal had survived, it too had melted under the savage heat. The former position of the Central Library was only distinguishable because somehow its marble entrance steps, cracked and blackened, were still there, though now they lead nowhere. If you climbed those fifteen steps they would take you only to a drop of five metres or more. That was all that remained of the library—a great open space, populated only by the ashes and dark fragments of so much defeated knowledge.
Our city had become a gallery of extraordinary sights, it had been singled out as the backdrop to sensational photographs. A few days after the quake whole families, if they were still whole, would set out to peruse the devastation and to have themselves pictured for the sake of future generations in front of this amazingly twisted mass or that dramatically bent street.
The Opera House was perhaps the most popular. The people loved to be photographed standing outside it so that the full extent of the damage could be seen; or inside it just beneath the main rotunda, surrounded by twelve bent Corinthian columns. The earthquake had undressed the Opera House. Gaunt and cold, it stood a shell of a building, lacking bricks and marble.
After the earthquake some loquacious people didn’t talk for weeks, and, conversely, the taciturn suddenly found they could not be quiet. Amongst that latter group was Efrim Alt, the administrator of the Opera House. How he cried when the Opera House shook off its clothes, how he clambered up and down those buckled grand Baroque staircases in distress calculating the damage. He wanted the singers to come, to bring their music. Their music, he would swear to it, would be able to replace the dome, would sweep the carpets, would remove all the dust and debris on the seven hundred and eighty-two seats, would reunite the chandeliers and launch them back up to the ceiling. Perhaps just one aria would do all the work, but the singers never came. Efrim Alt found a kind of solace in the props store: an old-fashioned, wind-up gramophone. He placed the gramophone on the rubble-filled stage and let the sounds of scratched records of Turandot, Tristran and Isolde, Don Giovanni leak out into the empty, roofless vastness.
IT WAS FATHER HOPPIN who was the first to understand the healing power of plasticine. He had seen all those lonely souls wandering around piles of rubble or staring into empty plots. People did a lot of walking in those weeks after the earthquake, strange nocturnal perambulations into the city’s darkness and into their own. People set out on these walks from their new temporary places of habitation to visit their old homes,