Howling death: my daughter was safe, the house was gone: 7 April 2009

L'AQUILA - I was asleep. Like many, I had shrugged at the other of so many shakes since December, shortly before 11 pm, after swearing, as an Inter fan, for the two scores of Milan in the final moments of the soccer match. "Lella - I said to my wife- what a shake! Is little Camilla asleep? She didn't wake up, thank goodness: she is so stressed with all these tremors. Well, then let us go to bed too: if we have to die, we'll die in our sleep ...". Death came as a whistle. A deaf, murdering howling. While all around the bedroom everything swayed and jumped, jumped and swayed. "Camillaaaaa!" I shouted with all the breath in my throat while I was flying barefoot on thorns of rubble to get to the bedroom of my little girl. I have the time to think that if there is no answer it is better to die. Now! My wife, I do not know how, reached her before me: she braces Camilla over what was left of the floor at the foot of the main walls, while around, in more places, we see the floor below and the apartment next door.

A few days ago, in the strongest quake before this (magnitude 4 Richter), I did panic and my daughter, after reading the newspaper, had reproached me: 'Dad, grown-ups must set an example for the youngest ... " . This time I did not scream. I clutched the hands of Camilla and Lella and we tried to reach the door: we are on a ground floor, we can do it. All around the damn howling again and again. An acrid smell, possibly methane, pain in the nostrils. Here is the door: "Beware of broken bottles and glasses from the cabinet bar ..." I say to Camilla. "Dad, but wasn't the cabinet in the other room?". Here's the door. "Are you alive? All right?" Granny Fausta is asking - she lives on the floor below us, (the five-storey building is stuck in the rock with a further basement of cellars), she - eighty-year-old gazelle, climbed with her nails and teeth up the shaking stairs. 'Yes, grandmother - I shout - but the door does not open, it's blocked. Go ask for help, please, Grandma! Go outside, call someone " "Angelo, there's nobody here. I will try with this brick ..."

Grandmother's blows are nothing for the solid wood door. Camilla cries desperately. My wife is gone (I learn only later that she came back to the bedroom to take some clothes and above all the keys of the small seaside house in Francavilla). I do not shout but I am desperate inside. I know that Grandma Fausta will never be able to break open that cursed door. I must find an alternative route: if death comes back, we'll die as mice in a trap. I go round the corner, towards the exit that opens onto the garden. I try to open it. And it is at that moment that cascade of debris comes down. I am under the debris, stunned, with blood dripping on my eyes down to the mouth. I get free. I rise and go back. This time I am shouting, "Nonna call for help. And help does come. It will take about thirty hammering blows to break the door open. It opens, opens, opens! We are safe! We, we are safe!

Around my block there is only stench of death, the palace beside us has collapsed to the ground floor making all garage doors burst out. Two nearby buildings have collapsed. We hear screams. Laments. Hallucinated rants. Somebody is digging with naked hands, and crying, and screaming. "Help us!" And again the whistle. Several times. In the square, with woolen gloves on our feet, most in pajamas (mine, now has become red), the children in the few cars that were spared and that we moved to safe locations. At the window of the nearby building, a voice in English asks "Help!" It's the Romanian maid of an elderly lady. Her son will come later to rescue her, I do not know how since there is no entrance door any more. We embrace "our" students from other places trying to call their parents in the hometowns. Mobile phones do not work. What shall we do? We wait for daylight. We open a passage, with our nails, through the ancient collapsed city walls where the father of a girl student - who just came from Teramo God only knows how - was able to enter. A railing becomes an emergency ladder.

Death everywhere. At least two apartment buildings collapsed, all the buildings are damaged, in one of two huge holes that opened between the lanes, two cars lay one on top of the other. People are wandering in a state of hallucination. "Careful there: everything is collapsing." Through via XX Settembre, we reach the Villa Comunale. Hopefully there will be an ambulance there. No ambulance. Only a van of the Protezione Civile with some water and not even one gauze, "Go to hospital!" Yea, but how? I do not care about my head, bandaged Vietcong-style (in the hospital of Pescara I will later be cared after with ten suturation stitches but the CAT scan will be negative). Even the small fountain at the Villa is out of order. "What shall we do?. "Let's go to Francavilla, and have yourself attended at the hospital in Pescara" my wife says. "Even there we'll have to break in through the door." 'No: I got the keys", fore-sighted woman. "And the car? And the money? Petrol? Driving license? Mobile phone? We do not have anything now. " "Some friend will help me ... We'll start from scratch at Francavilla."