(10)
And everywhere, half buried by rubble, inside the parked cars, on the streets, there were corpses, a huge amount of corpses, all their concrete faces had a strange sneer and they had yellow-rose hair.
They hadn’t been beaten by either stones or beams of lights, some even resting in clean spaces and lying whole, without any visible blood or wounds, simply fallen as if struck by lightning. Others, however, hung from open soils or everything had been removed but one limb, or at the end, between the debris that imprisoned them. She knew almost all of them; they were neighbours, friends, people she was accustomed to seeing every day.
Also there had to be her parents.
(11)
And then she ran again, puffing under a shred of her blouse that she had wrapped in her face like a muzzle, because of the dust that made her cough. She moved towards the main square, where the belfry’s higher part, practically untouched, erected straight over the church’s ruins that closed the entrance to the back alleys, which were sufficiently narrow to make her climb piles of furniture walls and corpses, and to make her descend by embankments with its surface rolling away down her feet.
She was orienting herself in a city’s geography now unknown, she crossed a slope on the ground floor of a building that collapsed and nearly hung her. She jumped a high wall, her shorts got caught and tore in half, fastened only by the waistband and then she continued by a short and deserted street which had been flooded running towards the bend in the road where her house was.
(12)
And the house was no longer there. The two floors of the building had fallen over the low ceilings, which must now also have been demolished behind the door, the wall slightly inflated with pressure, closing the tomb where her father lay, her mother, her sister who would have married next month..
She raised her hands, flattened against the solid wood, letting them slide slowly along with her, her whole body sagging on her disadvantaged legs until the laps touch the ground that was full of studs. All of her, indifferent to the physical pain, curled up and muttering:
– Mother! Mother….