Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [13]
“We’ve much work to do,” he said on the second morning after the tsunami, as he stood praying on the shore. “You have to come back.”
At night in his simple room on church grounds, he prayed for the people of Matera, but each morning he’d return to the beach.
It was on the third day after the tsunami that Father Charles says his prayers were answered. That morning, as he stood on the shore, he implored the statue to return.
“My goodness, you have to come today,” he said. “You can’t wait anymore.”
A few hours later a child came to the church and spoke with one of the deacons. He’d found something lying in bushes about a mile from the shrine. It was the statue, intact. Even the delicate gold crown on baby Jesus’s head had remained in place.
When Father Charles was summoned, he could barely contain himself, so sure was he that it was the work of God.
Nearly two weeks later, when I talk with him, we stand on the beach in the spot where he prayed each morning. His white cassock flutters in the breeze, and he clutches a black rosary in his hand. He is more convinced than ever that God has watched over Matera.
“Lives are lost, and we are still looking for so many people,” he says. “For the statue to come back, it’s a miracle. I think these people who’ve died have sacrificed for a better cause. Our country was divided politically and along ethnic lines, and now we don’t think about divisions. When I do the burials, when I visit the mortuaries, and I see all the bodies together, just the same, without any clothes, it shows whatever the faith, whatever the culture, the color, we are all human in the end.”
The statue of Our Lady of Matera was taken to the bishop’s office, where it will be stored until the church is repaired. The day the statue is returned, Father Charles and his parishioners intend to walk through the streets of Matera with it. A procession of survivors, showing Our Lady that their faith is still alive.
YOU ALWAYS HEAR stories about brothers who sense each other’s pain. Brothers so close that when one is in danger, the other knows it, feels it. This isn’t one of those stories. The night my brother died, I was hundreds of miles away, in Washington, sitting on a subway. At the moment it happened, I didn’t feel a thing.
I’d only seen him once since April, when he’d appeared at my crew race scared and disoriented. We’d talked on the phone, but never for very long. The day I saw him, I was interning in Washington, but had come to New York for a long weekend. By chance I ran into him on the street. It was the day before the Fourth of July.
“The last time I saw you, I was like an animal,” he said. I wasn’t sure what he meant, and I didn’t know what to say, but I took it as a good sign that he was joking about our last encounter. We went for a hamburger, and parted soon after. I can’t remember if we hugged or not. He said he’d see me later that weekend. He didn’t. I never saw him alive again.
ON JULY 22, 1988, my brother showed up at my mother’s apartment early in the morning, unexpectedly. It was a Friday, and once again he said that he wanted to move back in. He seemed out of sorts, nervous, and said he hadn’t slept the night before. Throughout the day, he took several naps in my old bedroom, on the second floor of the duplex. When she checked on him, my mother noticed he’d opened the sliding glass door to the balcony. It was a summer day, and the heat was overwhelming.
“Don’t you want me to turn on the air conditioner?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “It’s fine the way it is.”
They ate lunch together, and talked. My mother was concerned, but not overly so. She knew that something was wrong, but Carter wouldn’t say what. After lunch she let him sleep for a time, then checked on him to see if there was anything he wanted. At some point, as he lay on the sofa in the library, she read him a story by Michael Cunningham called “White Angel,” which had just been published