Song of the Sea Maid (20 page)

I wander back outside, thinking perhaps that it is not safe to stay indoors, as I am familiar enough with earthquakes to know there may well be more tremors later. I cross the street to a grassed area that was once surrounded by orange trees, many of which have been uprooted like snapped twigs. I sit on one and gaze out at the previously stupendous view of Lisbon and its snaking mighty river. The scene is one of utter desolation. This great European capital is now nothing but a ruined heap. Everywhere one looks there are no churches, no convents, few palaces or humbler houses still upright. I look across to the unharmed buildings and it is now I notice a new feature: a broad column of dark grey smoke rising from one of the river-facing palaces that survived. Now I spot another, and another. Now, the lick of red as flames consume the roofs. Spirals of smoke billow from spots all over the city. Lisbon is on fire. For a mad moment, I think the earth itself has opened up and will swallow us whole. But I surmise it must be the kitchen fires and candles catching at the furniture and rugs and tapestries and whatnot, all fanned by a strong wind coming from the east. The smoke stacks are expanding fast, greedily feeding on the chaos, ballooning into inky-blue monsters puffed with flashes of crimson and orange, the flames fuelling their hideous growth. I see people sprinting from the fires, away to the river and I reach out a hand towards them as if I were a deity and could pluck them from the constant stream of terror pouring down to the banks. Then, the earth begins to shake again.

It is another tremor, this one as bad as the first. I throw myself to the ground and cover my head with my hands, hopeless I know, but there is no other cover to be had. The houses nearby collapse further into choking dust and I run randomly from them, catching a glimpse of the hotel roof caving in under the swaying tree that had landed there before, now tossed like a leaf on the breeze. I run down the hill, away from the hotel, looking for open space, instinctively heading towards the river though I know it is miles from here. The air from below brings ashes and sparks to choke me further and I realise it is madness to head downhill, I must go back up where the air is cleaner. People are scrambling from houses that survived the first quake, now shaken to pieces by this new tragedy when they must have thought they had escaped God’s wrath. I trip over rocks and fall, hitting my forehead on the ground and almost fainting away. I touch my head and see blood mark my fingers. The sky is filling with dust tinged with an acrid heat emanating from the raging fires. The air is being eaten by flame. I know if I stay seated here I will share the same fate as those I walked by earlier, so I gather my last ounce of strength and force myself to stand up.

Choking and gasping, I turn and pelt back up the hill as fast as my fragile legs allow, and see a garden behind a ruined house with a family kneeling on the grass, holding each other and praying as the world judders. It is as if God shakes a fist at them in their simple devotion. As I approach, I see there is a priest with them, a purple-robed canon who stands up shakily and crosses himself. He shouts at me in Portuguese, ‘Who are you? Where do you come from?’ and I shout back, ‘England!’ as it is the only word I have in my mind. ‘England!’
I shout again – as if I could will myself back there and out of this catastrophe – and I look down at myself and realise what a shocking, bedraggled sight I must be: my torn dress, my battered legs with stockings shredded, my shoes gone – when did I lose those? – my hands painted with blood, my hair matted with ash and dust. I must look quite mangled. I stumble towards him and he shouts at me again, this time invoking the ire of God upon my head, the Englishwoman, the heretic. God has been provoked and we must call upon the Blessed Virgin to intervene. He holds up a cross and tells me to kiss it, kiss it! I back away. He follows me, gesturing to the sky and pointing at me, then the house in whose garden he has been praying succumbs to God’s fury and collapses behind him, a pile of stone falling atop him and he is gone. All at once the quake subsides and everything stands still once more.

I stare at the ruin where the priest is buried and the family appear from the garden. They are shrieking at me. I cannot understand their words but their faces are masked with hatred. In my shocked state, I watch them as I used to study insects in Mr Woods’s garden, curious yet detached far above them. Over their shoulders, I glimpse the river. It is wildly heaving, as if a sea monster is about to breach the surface. Then I see the wave. It is a wall of water, as tall as a cliff, heading directly for the Burgio, the small island in the middle of the entrance to the Tagus. The vast wave swamps the island completely, then proceeds down the Tagus and tosses the vessels up and whirls them like sycamore seeds. It swiftly approaches the shore, boats carried atop it, on their sides or upturned. The quayside in every direction heaves rows deep in people and the river itself is swarming at the edges with others who have jumped in to escape the fires. Involuntarily I lift my hand and point, as the wave engulfs the quay and all the souls standing on it. Thousands of Lisboetas disappear in an instant. I cry out, ‘No, no,’ and shake my head, that what I am seeing cannot be, it cannot be. I cannot stop shaking my head. As the water floods into the streets, I see people tossed in its flow along with weighty pieces of timber, casks, barrels, household goods and other detritus from the wharves. The boats lifted and pitched by the wave smash into the ruins of buildings and I watch as sailors and passengers are hurled into the water, while a few leap out and grab on to objects to prevent their destruction, yet are swept away by further waves. The shore is flooded twice more, accompanied by the clamour of those souls not yet drowned as they flee uphill to escape the wave’s assault and its deadly cargo of fast-flowing rubbish. Then the flotsam is sucked back out as the water recedes – roaring, tinkling, creaking, squealing and crashing – and the river becomes a bubbling mass of entangled ships’ masts and beams and twisted knots of sails, shattered roofs and tree trunks and wrecks of huts and houses, swirling ribbons of wheels and doors and window-frames and countless reams of many-coloured litter; and bobbing and spinning among the rubbish, scores and scores of floating corpses. In the space of just over one hour, the beautiful city of Lisbon has become a ruined, burning, floating graveyard. Every element has colluded in its utter annihilation.

When I have seen my fill of it all, I turn away, somehow disgusted by my complicity as observer of the horror. I trudge back to the hotel. One end of it has collapsed, but the lobby is intact, as are many of the rooms. There is no one inside. I collect my bag, cross the yard at the back to find the kitchen and fill the bag with bread, fruit and cheese from the cupboards. There is a well in the yard outside and I bring up a bucket of water to wash my face and try to get some of the dust out of my hair. The water runs red and then black with the blood and the muck. I fill my water bottle, drink it down, then fill it again before going back inside to search through the rooms for women’s clothes I can change into. I find a suitably sensible dress and stockings to fit my frame. I find hairpins and a cap and tie back my damp hair. I locate a pair of shoes, too big for me, but they will do. All the while I am aware that I am stealing, but in the aftermath of this disaster it is as if there are no rules or laws or culture any more; the world has come to an end and started anew. The owners of this food, these clothes, these pins are most likely dead. If not, I believe they would not begrudge me a little help, as I hope I would not them if our positions were reversed.

I find a downstairs room that does not appear to have a current resident, hide my bag under the bed, lie down and I am asleep before I know it. I am found hours later in darkness by Mrs Dewar, the owner of the establishment. Her face is smudged with black from the ubiquitous smoke and her hair somewhat dishevelled, yet other than that she appears unhurt and quite bright.

‘Why, Miss Price. I am astonished to see you here! Are you well?’

I clasp both her hands in mine. ‘I am so glad to see you, Mrs Dewar!’ To see a living person, and a known face, a friendly face, is unutterably moving to me, and my voice catches in my throat and whimpers a little.

‘Oh, my dear. There, there now. Don’t fret. Oh, your head, it has been wounded! Oh, my dear!’

‘I must tell you that I borrowed some food from the kitchen and this dress from another room,’ I confess. ‘I will pay for all of it, I assure you.’

‘Oh, don’t fuss yourself on that account, my dear. Let me fetch something for that head of yours. Besides, we have just this minute come back from the city where we went to find our family and friends after the first quake and already there is terrible lawlessness on the streets down there, enough to make your hair curl. There is looting and raping and, oh, dreadful things. You stay here with us, miss. Safer up here on the hill. The troublemakers are too idle to walk all the way up here. Oh, Miss Price. The sights I have seen today, the people suffering. And the city is utterly racked. How will we manage? What will our livelihood be? Even though Mr Dewar says the tourists will come to see the ruins, like they do in Pompeii and Herculaneum. They will flock to see it, he says. But food, and firewood and supplies. Who will supply us, Miss Price? I fear for our future, I really do. Now, I said I wouldn’t do this. I must steel myself. No, my dear. I am not the one with an injured head. Let me help
you
. Stay there. I won’t be a moment.’

As I await her return, I can hear Mr Dewar and an assortment of English-speaking guests traipsing in from outside, sharing stories of damage, destruction and death. Mrs Dewar dresses my head and makes it sting, fusses over me somewhat and asks if I would like to stay on in this room, for which I thank her. I accompany her to the kitchen, keen to be useful. There are no servants here. I help make tea for everyone and prepare food. The men are outside burying the dead. Mrs Dewar tells me several guests were leaving the hotel this morning for a day trip when the quake started. Those were the crushed coaches I saw outside. She says all the hotel ser-vants rushed away to find their relatives and they have not seen them since. Somehow she must get word to the families of the deceased guests, but no ships are permitted to leave the Tagus – to prevent deserters or looters leaving with their bounty – so what will happen to the postal service? As we work, it is comforting to listen to her babble on, yet periodically I find tears running down my cheeks, though I feel no emotion. I see the same happens with Mrs Dewar and at times we glance at each other and shake our heads in disbelief.

Say I, ‘I was in London for the earthquake in 1750. It was nothing like this. Nothing. And what a fuss they made then.’

‘This was like something from the pages of the Old Testament,’ says Mrs Dewar. ‘It will always be remembered.’

That first evening I spend with the Dewars and the few other surviving guests before the fire in the sitting room. It is cold at night here in Lisbon and I think of all those out there shivering under the empty skies, homeless, half-dressed, injured, hungry and thirsty. But I hug myself and stay put, as I have no more strength for strangers this night and have come to know that self-preservation is the strongest force extant. I tell my stories of what I have seen and the other guests tell theirs. One had been buried under rubble for hours until he found a way out, almost choked to death by powdered lime he can still taste in his mouth. An Irish guest had been in his office in the Baixa, ran outside at the first tremor and lost his brother in the mêlée; he has not found him yet, though he scoured the ruins until the fires came. I hear that thousands are homeless and all the canvas and wood has been burned up in the fires so nobody can make any shelters. Some noblemen have been opening up their mansion gardens to the destitute and handing out refreshments, cloaks and blankets and the royal family are camping in makeshift tents in the grounds of the palace. A Scottish lady had seen a few half-hearted soldiers appear in the street and tell some looters to clear off in the name of the King but were met with mockery and missiles, whereupon they retreated and nothing of the law has been seen since. Another guest had been over two hundred yards from the river-front yet had found himself up to the waist in water when the great wave came and was only saved by grasping hold of a flagpole.

We speak of how there seemed no pattern to rescue or death, that some had been killed by water or saved by it, or safe in basements where others had been crushed by them – no rules to learn from if there were ever a next time. Mr Dewar tells of the scenes in the main piazzas, like the grand square the Rossio, where thousands had rushed after the first quake to create a scene of mania resembling the final judgement day, numberless souls dying and wailing, and the survivors in their religious fervour were seen to smite their breasts and beat their faces until their cheeks were swollen and bruised hideously. The churches had been full as it is All Saints’ Day and thus thousands of worshippers were killed as church towers and steeples fell down by the dozen and crushed them; even so there seemed to be priests everywhere shouting at people to repent of their sins and performing absolution for hundreds of crazed followers, ranging around with groups of dazed zealots forcibly baptising those who are not Catholics, harassing the dying – and I remembered the canon who came at me with his cross and thought I had dreamed it, but I think it must have been real. He is dead now, buried under that house. His God did not save him.

Everyone starts at the sound of an explosion coming from the city. We rush outside to hear two more, and Mr Dewar conjectures it must be fire reaching the gunpowder stores on the waterfront. We all stand on the grass and watch the fires burning in zigzags across the scene and listen to the punctuated cries of women and children. I fear I will not sleep tonight. I fear nightmares. The flames light the sky and turn it almost daytime, cinders float on the air and fall down like drizzle, and the tremors continue, more gentle now, but constant, three or four an hour all this evening. I expect it to continue well into the night, as if the earth shudders at its rage and somewhat regrets it. Nobody speaks more – there is nothing left to say – and, one by one, we slink off to bed, though my prophecy is proven and I lie awake until dawn.