On December 28th, 1908, the Strait of Messina—the body of water that separates mainland Italy from the island of Sicily—was struck by the most powerful recorded earthquake to ever hit Europe. Shortly after the earthquake, a tsunami crashed down with waves that crushed the surrounding coasts of Northern Sicily and Southern Calabria. The combination of storms killed more than 80,000 of the region’s inhabitants and left a devastating wake of ruins in its stead. In the port cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria, survivors had to withstand the threat of hunger, injury, and violence in a time just before widespread electricity. Out of these ruins, a series of apocalyptic events occurred which created the conditions for a rapidly changing and perilous new order.
Nadia Terranova’s The Night Trembles, translated by Ann Goldstein, traces the intersecting stories of two young survivors of this disaster: a twenty-year-old young woman, Barbara, and an eleven-year-old boy, Nicola. When the earthquake struck at 5:20am local time, both Barbara and Nicola woke from their slumber to a brand new world. Amidst the rubble of their former homes in Messina and Reggio Calabria, they discovered that the earthquake had killed every member of their respective families. Each had been orphaned within an instant. For several harrowing days which burn into weeks, Barbara and Nicola manage to survive a series of harrowing encounters with disasters both natural and terrifyingly human. As they venture out from beneath the rubble of their destroyed homes, they must navigate a world thoroughly undone by the disaster.
The Night Trembles is cut open with a prelude from Barbara, eleven years after the disaster. She says of Nicola that “His story, mine, and the story of this place are bound together … Those stories can only be told together.” Throughout the rest of the novel, Nicola and Barabara’s stories unfold in dueling chapters from opposite sides of the Strait, intersecting only for one terrible moment before separating once more. After he was pulled from the rubble, Nicola boarded a Torpedo boat crossing the Strait in an attempt to escape a destroyed Reggio Calabria. Unbeknownst to him, the worst of the disaster was yet to come. When the boat arrived on the shores of Messina, a starving and thirsty Barbara jumped aboard to look for fresh drinking water and food. Nicola, who “looked around as if he had just arrived from the moon,” guided her to water barrels stored beneath the ship’s deck, but her luck ran out fast. The rest of Barbara and Nicola’s encounter is brief, but painfully slow; Barbara was held captive and assaulted by a sailor in front of Nicola, who watched, frozen in terror. This intense burst of violence, this loss of innocence, anchors the story and delivers a haunting impression that lasts for the rest of their lives.
Although the events of the story took place over one hundred years ago, Terranova’s prose has an undoubtedly contemporary tone. What is old in the story seems old not because of the year it is describing, but because it is taking place in the rear view of a child’s mind. Often, the framing of events does not follow an ordinary meter. Sometimes a chapter covers several years, and sometimes just a few minutes. Time bends and extends according to the polar emotions of fright and hope. Memory is like “the shadows of history, where the lights are always out.”
To structure this nebulous form of memory, Terranova organized the plot around a selection of major tarot cards, called the Arcana. Each chapter is given a tarot card from the Major Arcana for its title, accompanied by a brief description of the card and its significance, pulled from Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. The cards offer cryptic, prophetic symbols with which Terranova weaves the stories of Barbara and Nicola. Though the Arcana may seem like a language of distress and disorder, the cards also offer a note of divinity, a lesson for each way of the story.
Sometime before the earthquake, Nicola was taken to a woman called Maestra with his mother to have his tarot cards read. His is a story of a nightmarish, gothic childhood. In Reggio Calabria, he suffered under the control of his obsessive mother who feared that her son had been possessed by the devil. The Maestra is a French woman from Marseilles, “her voice a mixture of honey and cinnamon,” who “knew the Arcana … since she was a child.” When the Maestra pulled the Devil card for Nicola, his mother assumed that the card meant that Nicola had been possessed, and she used it as fuel for her abuse. Gripped by both a fear of and obsession with her son, she directed all her rage and all her fears onto his young body. At night, Nicola was forced to sleep in the cellar, bound with rope by his mother for fear that the devil might come and get him while his family sleeps. After the earthquake, the Maestra appeared to Nicola again, assisting the authorities by helping to “divine” where children—those who survived—have been buried. In fact, it was the Maestra who coordinated Nicola’s rescue after he was nearly passed over by authorities searching his building, trapped as the sole survivor of his family under the ruins of his former home.
Barbara’s story began in similar misfortune from the other side of the Strait. Fleeing an arranged marriage dictated by her father, Barbara arrived in Messina on the eve of the earthquake after leaving her home in the neighboring village of Scaletta Zanclea. At twenty years old, she, like Nicola, suffered from the burden of her family’s control. The arranged marriage to a much older man would have forced her to grow “gracefully like mold on a wall.” But, Barbara had other plans, so she opted to stay with her grandmother, a sort of cosmopolitan figure who took her to the opera and looked the other way when she sneaked into university lectures. On the night before the earthquake, Barbara and her grandmother went to the Opera to watch a performance of Aida. At the performance, Barbara bursts onto the Messina social scene, ripe with adolescent curiosity, rage, and independence threatening her family’s social stature. She returned home that evening and fell asleep thinking about her plans to meet the next day with an admirer that she met at the opera, but the meeting never came.
After surviving both the earthquake and the attack, grief and post-traumatic terror nearly consume Barbara. She wanders aimlessly around the ruins of her city before being saved by a widow named Jutta who recognizes Barbara’s plight and takes her to a convent where both are kept safe for several months. That is, until the Maestra visits the convent and pulls the High Priestess tarot card for Barbara, inadvertently revealing her pregnancy. Jutta and a few sympathetic nuns assist Barbara with the invention of a new name and widow status which protect her from the consequences of unmarried pregnancy. She has her baby in a refugee camp outside of Messina, where she continues to live with Jutta and a few other similarly displaced women and children for the remainder of the novel. When offered a teaching position for the children in the camp, Barbara emerges into a life wholly unimaginable to her former self.
As for Nicola, he says that “ever since I’d left the torpedo boat Morgana, god had lost the capital letter.” After sheltering at a church with other orphaned children for weeks after the disaster, he was adopted by a wealthy and kind childless couple in the city of Biella. Life with his new parents is a rather pleasant improvement from his former life, but Nicola, haunted by his experience of the earthquake and his encounter with Barbara on the boat, did not speak for nearly a year. Fortunately, the convalescence offered by the new family transformed him, and towards the end of the novel, he eventually regains his voice.
Terranova, like Barbara, was born in Messina. The Night Trembles is her second novel to be translated into English. Her translator, Ann Goldstein, is also the translator of several other eminent Italian writers, including Donatella Di Pietrantonio (A Sister’s Story, 2022 and A Girl Returned, 2019), Elsa Morante (Arturo’s Island, 2019), Alba de Céspedes (Forbidden Notebook, 2023), and, most notably, the entire body of work of Elena Ferrante. Among Goldstein’s translations, it is common to find a (often female) narrative voice who, through writing, claims agency over the story of her own life. Terranova’s Barbara is no exception. In Barabara’s voice, readers may hear an echo of Ferrante’s Lenú from My Brilliant Friend. Barbara, like Lenú, is a natural storyteller. Chapter by chapter, as Barbara recounts the formless and unimaginable terror of her past, she uses her writing to confront her ghosts head-on, to set her story straight. With the command of her voice, that vibrant and disorderly light, she calls forth the shadows that linger in the past and gives them names.
In the last chapter of the novel, Barbara, in her new position as a teacher, has discovered that in teaching and in writing, she can finally take command of a life of her own. “Life besieged me all at once,” she declares, “and the words were somewhere waiting.” The final scene jumps ahead nearly ten years, to 1919, in which Barbara and Nicola meet once more. Though each was reborn after the earthquake, neither could forget their encounter. The residual effects of the trauma still haunt Nicola, who decides to track down Barbara eleven years later. “You were my last night of childhood,” he says to her. It is a chilling message of closure that carries a weight of finality and of transcendence.
Children make for terribly peculiar witnesses to disaster. Rarely are their perspectives granted the accountability of adult accounts. And, of course, the fears which present to a boy of eleven and a girl of twenty are far different than those of an adult. But, the child’s eye is low to the ground and it often captures that which evades the purview of an adult’s gaze. This is where the Tarot cards come into focus. They anchor the unfathomable and give body to the weightless. The language of tarot, that is, of intuition, both responds to and transcends the material world. Catastrophe defies form; the surprise of disaster brings forth the definitive collapse of future, expectation, tradition, and structures good and bad. The Arcana speak to a fragmenting, a splitting, a multiplicity of options. In the face of the unknown, they offer a surge of fear and hope, a polyphony made up of “signs visible only to intuition.”
I found it interesting that, although Terranova chose to title the chapters with the Major Arcana, these chapters do not follow the traditional order of the Arcana. The first card in almost any tarot deck is The Fool and the last is most often The World. But The Night Trembles begins with The Hanged Man, a card which often signifies a new perspective. While this is still a more or less faithful rendering of the Arcana—to begin in a place of ignorance and to end in rebirth—it is even more apt for this novel to shuffle the expected structure. When learning to read tarot myself, I have found it helpful to remember that the cards do not divine the future. Instead of predictions, the Arcana offer a shuffling of the present, one possible translation of circumstance, among many other possibilities. Barbara, in her prelude, refers to hers and Nicola’s stories as “cards from the tarot deck that the wind has jumbled in the dark.” For Terranova, the Arcana are like the spark of electricity or the reflection of the moon across the water at night, they carry both memory and a lesson for the future. Throughout The Night Trembles, the characters are often cloaked in neglect and deceit, plagued by “terrible forebodings” real and imagined, as the ground shakes and boundaries of place and time dissolve. These terrible forebodings are the language of the Arcana, of intuition. When structures crumble and the light vanishes, one has only their intuition to guide them.
Elena Schafer
Elena Schafer is a writer who was born in Michigan and now lives in Chicago. She works as a Writing Advisor at the University of Chicago and is interested in Spanish-English and Italian-English translation.