s ago the station porter who attended to my luggage at Messina
gave me his name and address, saying that if I would send him a post-card
next time I came, he would meet me and look after me. Since then I have
passed through Messina once, and sometimes twice, a year and he has
always met me. I wrote to him from London after the earthquake inquiring
whether he was alive or dead, but he did not receive my card till nearly
eight months later, after it had been returned to me and I had sent it to
him again. I had in the meantime heard, in an indirect way, that he was
one of the station porters who had survived. In the August following the
earthquake I sent him a card to say I was coming by steamer from Naples,
and he was in a little boat in the port to meet me.

There was a difference in his manner and a new look in his eyes. When he
had been talking some time, I mentioned it, and he admitted that he felt
different since the earthquake. His house fell and he lay buried in the
ruins with nothing to eat or drink and seriously wounded. A friend came
looking for him and after three days he was extricated, restored to life
and properly taken care of. But his wife and child were killed and his
home destroyed. He has been born again naked into the world, no wonder
there is a strange look in his eyes. We were joined by his cousin,
another porter, who was seven days in the ruins, starved into
unconsciousness. When the soldiers rescued him they thought he was dead,
but they took him where the doctors gradually brought him back to life.
He did not mind the dying after it had once set in, everything gave way
to the indolent pleasure of irresponsible drifting, but the restoration
was a difficult and exhausting business. He will be thought to be dead
again some day, and will be allowed to continue his sleep in peace
without any troublesome awakening.

I looked in the eyes of the men who were hanging about among the
temporary wooden sheds in the piazza in front of the station, and saw in
many of them the expression that was in my porter's eyes, the expression
that betrays those who are the figli del terremoto, those who have been
born again with the earthquake for their second mother, and I remembered
that the same expression was in the eyes of Turiddu's professor in
Naples. I had supposed it to be normal with the professor, but it was
the first time I had seen him; now I understood that it was not there
before. They have not