Ten and a Half Seconds
An earthquake early-warning bell at a parish school once sent 140 children down the stairs for a shake that never came, and a boy broke his wrist. His mother wants the system off. The school's assistant counts what the warning is worth (at best ten and a half seconds, and none at all inside twenty-one kilometres), and the headmistress keeps the bell but changes what it means; under the desk, never the stairs.
The wrist had been broken on a Monday, on the fourth stair from the bottom, and by Thursday the whole parish had an opinion about whose fault it was.
Signora Nadia Di Giacomo had come to the school office at ten past eight with her son's cast in her hand, which is to say with her son, who was nine and would have liked to be somewhere else. Tommaso stood by the radiator and looked at the plaster on his left arm, where the other boys had drawn a goal and a goalkeeper and, for reasons nobody could explain, a camel. His mother stood by the desk. She did not sit, and Suor Chiara Dell'Orso, who was headmistress of the Scuola Santa Lucia and had been a nun for thirty-four years of which nineteen had been spent being shouted at by parents, did not ask her to.
"I want it switched off," said the signora. "The bell. The whole thing. I want it in writing that on the next Monday nothing in this building tells one hundred and forty children to run."
"It told them to leave the building," said Suor Chiara. "That is not the same. But sit, please, Signora, and let me put Campanaro on the speaker, because I think you will want the numbers, and I would sooner you had them from him than from me. He does not get tired and he does not take offence."
"I don't want a machine's numbers."
"Then you will hear him be wrong, and you can tell me," said the nun, and touched the desk.
The school's assistant had been put in the building four years before, when the regional government paid for a bell and a box and a wire to the network of seismometers that ran down the spine of the Apennines. The box listened to the network. When the network thought an earthquake had begun somewhere, the box worked out how hard the ground would shake at the school, and if the answer was high enough it rang the bell in the corridor, a flat electric note, three beats and a pause, and a voice said what to do. The children had called the voice Campanaro, the bell-keeper, because it lived in a bell and because the old sacristan at the parish church, who rang the real ones, was called Campanaro by everyone, though his name was Ottavio.
"Good morning, Signora," said the voice from the desk. It sounded like a man of no particular age who had slept well. "I am sorry about Tommaso's arm. May I tell you what I know about Monday and what I do not?"
The signora said nothing, which Campanaro, who was not a fool, took for yes.
"At 10:14 and 21 seconds on Monday the third of February the network recorded an earthquake forty-one kilometres from the school. Within four seconds the first stations had guessed its size at magnitude 5.6. I worked out that the shaking here would be about intensity six, which is plaster cracking and things falling off shelves, and that was over my threshold, and I rang the bell. The instruction I gave was the instruction the school had given me in the autumn: evacuate. Leave the building by the stairs and gather in the yard.
"The guess was wrong. The earthquake was a magnitude 4.2. At this school it was intensity three, which is what a lorry going past on the road feels like. I was wrong by one and four-tenths of a magnitude unit in the first four seconds, which is more than the network usually is, but not more than it is allowed to be. I did not know it was wrong until nine seconds after I rang, when the stations nearer the epicentre had heard more. By then the corridors were full."
"It took them thirty-one seconds to reach the yard," said Suor Chiara. "I timed it from the log. A hundred and forty children and eleven adults, down two flights, with the youngest at the back, and the big ones in front, who are the ones who run."
"And Tommaso was at the bottom of the second flight with seventeen children behind him," said Campanaro. "I have the camera. I will not play it for you, Signora, unless you ask. He was not pushed in any way I could call a fault. He was a boy on a stair in a crowd, and the crowd moved, and I rang the bell that put him there."
The signora looked at the speaker for the first time. Tommaso, by the radiator, looked at the camel.
"You see," she said, to the nun. "It says so itself."
"It does," said Suor Chiara. "That is why I keep it. Go on, Campanaro. Tell her the rest of it, the part she will not like."
The rest of it was a table, and Campanaro read it out the way the old sacristan read the banns, slowly, with the numbers given their full weight.
In the three years since the box had been installed it had rung the bell eleven times. Six of those, the shaking at the school had really been intensity four or more: people had felt it, a cup had walked along a table, a hanging lamp had swung. Five times the school had felt nothing, or next to nothing. Five false alarms in eleven was not a good record. It was also, the box said, what the network's own papers predicted for a threshold set where the school's board had set it, which was low on purpose, because the board had asked it to ring early rather than late.
"And in those three years," said Campanaro, "there was no earthquake at this school with intensity five or more that I failed to ring for. One of the six real ones was a five. I rang eight seconds before the S waves arrived. Nothing fell. A map in the geography room came off its nail."
"So it works," said the signora. "Five times in eleven it works."
"Six times in eleven it was right to ring, and the bell is not the problem on any of the eleven. I want to be exact about that, because you are asking me to give you a sentence and I do not think the sentence is the one you are after. The problem on Monday is not that I rang. It is what I said. If I had said under your desks on Monday, then a hundred and forty children would have spent eleven seconds with their heads below the tabletop and then been told it was a lorry. They would have laughed. Tommaso would have a left arm that does not say Juventus on it in three kinds of ink."
"It says Inter," said Tommaso, to the radiator.
"Forgive me," said Campanaro.
"The camel is a goalkeeper's friend," said the boy, with dignity, and his mother, who had not smiled that morning and did not intend to start, pressed her lips together very hard.
"Here is what the bell can and cannot buy you," said the voice, "and I would like to put it as a sum, because a sum does not care how anyone feels. An earthquake starts at a point. It sends out two waves. The first, the P wave, goes at about six kilometres a second and is small; you feel it as a tap, a thump on the floor. The second, the S wave, goes at about three and a half and does the damage. They leave together and they arrive apart, and the gap between them grows with distance: at the school's distance from the fault that matters most, fifty-eight kilometres, the P wave arrives at 9.7 seconds and the S wave at 16.6.
"The network's seismometers are about twenty-five kilometres apart. The nearest to an earthquake feels the P wave in a second or two, and the system needs a few seconds of it from two or three stations before it will say anything, and then there is the time to carry the message here. If everything goes as it has gone in the good cases, I ring about six seconds after the earthquake begins. If the S wave reaches the school at 16.6, I have ten and a half seconds. Not ten, not twelve. Ten and a half, and the half is not a courtesy.
"And if the earthquake is nearer, the sum gets worse. At forty-one kilometres the S wave is here at 11.7 seconds. I have five and a half. At twenty-one kilometres the S wave arrives at six seconds, which is when I ring. At twenty-one kilometres and nearer, the bell rings as the floor goes, and it is no use to anyone. That is the blind zone. It is a circle, twenty-one kilometres across its radius, around every earthquake there is, and it is not a fault in the programming. It is the speed of rock."
Nobody said anything. Down the corridor a class was reciting the twelve times table in the rhythm of a litany.
"What is in twenty-one kilometres of the fault they are all afraid of?" said the signora, quietly. She was from Sulmona, a family of Sulmona, and she knew the answer.
"Colle San Basso," said Suor Chiara. "Where my sister Agnese teaches. There is a school there, too, with sixty children, and the bell there is a church bell, and the first they will hear of any earthquake is the earthquake."
She said it to the signora as a fact and not as an argument, and the signora, who had come to win, found she had nothing to put against it.
They talked for an hour. It was not, Suor Chiara said afterwards, a negotiation; it was more like two women who had not met before working out what each of them was afraid of. The signora was afraid of a stair, and a crowd, and a machine that could turn a hundred and forty children into a crowd with one note. The nun was afraid of a morning when the note did not come and the children were still at their desks and the ceiling was not what it had been in 1953, when the school was built. They agreed, in the end, on a short list.
The bell would stay. The rule would not. From the next Monday the three beats of the bell would mean one thing, and one thing only: under the desk. Not the stairs, not the yard, not the door. A child who was in a classroom stayed in it and went under the tabletop and held a leg of the desk, and a child in the corridor went into the nearest room, and a child in the toilets stood against the inner wall away from the window. The children would be told it was a game of ten seconds and would play it twice a week for a month.
"And no stairs," said the signora. "Ever. Not on a bell. Not on a warning."
"No stairs on a bell," said Suor Chiara. "When the shaking has stopped, a person will tell them what to do. A person, in the room. Not me from the office and not the box. Marco, or Giulia, or Suor Bernardetta. You will hear the bell, you will hear nothing about stairs, and when it is over there is a teacher in the room who says stay there until I say."
"I want to time it myself."
"Marco has a stopwatch," said the nun. "I will lend you his."
"And you," said the signora, and she addressed the desk, because that was where the voice was. "You will not tell me it is safe."
"I will not tell you it is safe," said Campanaro. "I do not know that it is. A warning of ten and a half seconds is a thing that costs nothing when it is wrong and helps a little when it is right, and I will say so for as long as anyone asks me. I cannot say the building will stand. The city survey of 2051 puts this school in the middle band, which is not the worst. I can say that eleven seconds under a desk is better than eleven seconds in a corridor. That is all I can honestly say. It is less than you want."
"It is more than I expected," said Nadia Di Giacomo, and took her son home.
On Friday there was a drill. It was the first with the new rule, and the signora came to the back of the first-year classroom with the stopwatch from the gym cupboard, a black one with a cracked glass that Marco Pellegrini had owned since he was a student and was fond of. Marco, who taught the fourth form and a good deal else, stood at the front with a face of great seriousness. He had been told that a woman who had been angry on Thursday would be watching him. He had, in consequence, put on a tie.
The bell sounded: three beats, a pause. Campanaro said, in the voice of the good morning, "Earthquake alert. Under the desks. Hold on. Ten seconds."
Twenty-six children, in a room built for twenty-four, went under twenty-six desks. A chair fell over. A girl named Viola lay down flat beside her desk, rather than under it, because she had been told to keep her head down and had formed a view about how far. The signora pressed the button when the bell sounded, and pressed it again when the last of the small feet disappeared and the room went still. The first-year class, the slowest in the school by a second and a half, took eight and four-tenths, because Viola had to be picked up and put somewhere more useful.
"Eight point four," said the signora, to the room, as if announcing the end of a race.
"It is not ten and a half," said Tommaso, from the corner, where his cast was the only part of him sticking out from under a table. He was supposed to be in the fourth form. He had come down to help. "It's two seconds less."
"Two seconds in hand," said Marco. "We call that margin."
"My father says margin is where a thing goes wrong."
"Your father is right," said Marco, "and I'd like those two seconds all the same."
They did it again on Monday, and twice in the next week, and on the fifteenth of March the whole school went under its desks in seven and a quarter seconds, the slowest class in eight, and a little girl in the second form was heard to say, with great contempt, that it was easier than Mass. Suor Chiara, who overheard it, decided not to have been in the corridor.
She telephoned her sister on the Sunday evening, after Vespers, when the line to Colle San Basso was least likely to be the line to a plumber.
"I know what you are going to say," said Agnese.
"You do not. I am going to say that I have not seen you since the feast of Saint Joseph, and that I have not asked you for anything in twenty years."
"That is not true. You asked me for my second-best veil in 2041."
"I am asking you now for a drill. A short one. Marco Pellegrini's. I will send it by email tonight. Under the desk, hold the leg, count to ten, say a Hail Mary in your head, don't go near the stairs. It costs you a morning. You have sixty children and a school that was built in 1948, and the bell I have is a gift that you have not got. The only warning you have is the one in your own hands, which is that the children know where to go before the floor moves."
There was a pause on the line in which the two sisters, who had been raised in the same kitchen, heard each other thinking.
"You think it will come," said Agnese.
"I think it is not for me to think," said Suor Chiara. "The box says the fault has been quiet for eighty years and is a hundred and ten kilometres long, and has a two-in-a-hundred chance in any year of doing something, and that is a number, and I am not able to turn it into a date. I think that if I have a hundred and forty and you have sixty, there are two hundred children between us, and I would sooner they were practised."
"Send it," said Agnese. "I will hold the leg of the desk myself."
The earthquake came on a Wednesday, on the twenty-eighth of May, at nineteen minutes to twelve, in the middle of a lesson on the river Pescara.
Campanaro had said, in the weeks between, a number of things, none of which anybody had asked him. He had said, after the second drill, that the school's old wire had a fault in it and that the network's message had taken eleven hundred milliseconds instead of three hundred, and that it had been mended. He had said that the network had added two stations in the valley since the autumn, which pulled the time of the first alert earlier by about half a second on a good day, and that he would not promise that for the day it mattered. He had said that if the bell rang in the early morning the teachers should expect it to ring again within a quarter of an hour, because aftershocks of the same sequence were usual, and that this was a thing he knew from the catalogues and not from any particular feeling about it.
Suor Chiara was in the office, with a sheet of the school's accounts and a cup of the coffee she was supposed to have given up for Lent and had given up for Lent, and the cup was in her hand for another reason: it was Wednesday. The bell began.
Three beats, a pause. Three beats, a pause.
"Earthquake alert," said Campanaro. "Under the desks. Hold on. Ten seconds." And then, in a lower voice, to her alone, because the office was a different line: "Magnitude five point four at this moment, Suor Chiara. Distance fifty-eight kilometres. The S wave in ten and a half seconds. I have nothing to add."
She did the thing she had told a hundred and forty children to do. She put the cup on the desk and went under the desk, and took hold of the leg. It was the first time she had been under it. The inside of the drawer was full of dust, and there was a pencil under there, and a rubber, and a toffee wrapper from 2049.
She said the Hail Mary. She had got as far as the Lord is with thee when the P wave came, a small flat knock from underneath, as if someone down in the cellar had struck the floor once with a mallet. Then there was a silence of perhaps four seconds, which she would remember for the rest of her life as the longest part. Then the floor began to move, not sideways at first but up and down, and then sideways, a long slow rolling like a boat in a swell, and the building made a noise she had never heard it make. It was the noise of a great many things, none of them designed to move, moving. Books fell somewhere. Plaster came down in the corridor in a sheet, with a sound like paper tearing, and somewhere a window broke, and nobody screamed.
That was what she was proudest of, afterwards, when she let herself be proud. Down the corridor there were twenty-two rooms of children, and out of the whole building, in twenty seconds of shaking, she could hear only one child crying, and a teacher's voice above her, counting aloud the way he had been told: one, two, three, hold on, four, five, hold on, which was Marco, in the fourth form, in a tie, with Tommaso Di Giacomo under the desk beside him, because he had been told he could.
The shaking stopped.
"It has stopped," said Campanaro in the office. "Stay where you are, Suor Chiara. There will be aftershocks. I am telling every room the same thing: stay under until your teacher says. Do not use the stairs. The network reports magnitude five point nine."
She stayed where she was. It was, she thought, the most difficult thing the box had ever asked of her.
Nobody was hurt. A girl in the third form had cut her hand on glass from the corridor window; the school nurse, who was Suor Bernardetta and had been waiting for thirty years for something to happen, was almost disappointed. The plaster in the stairwell came down, and a crack opened above the door of the first-year room that a man would be able to put two fingers in. The survey, when it came, would say that the school could be used again after propping and a month. The power failed at 11:42 and did not come back.
The first-year children came out of their room at the teacher's word, in a line, along the inside wall, and went down the stairs, which had not been touched, slowly and in the order Marco had written on the wall in felt pen, with one hand on the rail and the other in the next child's. It took them fifty-four seconds. Nobody ran.
Campanaro told her the rest in the yard, on a tablet that had the battery to say it, while a hundred and forty children stood in their classes on the tarmac in the sun and the teachers counted them for the third time.
"The network has a count," said the voice. "It is not final. There were forty-one stations that triggered. The earthquake was at 11:41 and 20 seconds, at a depth of nine kilometres, on the fault we had expected. Colle San Basso is at seventeen kilometres from the epicentre. It is inside the blind zone, Suor Chiara. The alert reached the town's phones at 11:41 and 26, and the S wave arrived there at 11:41 and 25. I have no warning to report for it. I am sorry. I have told you that was how it would be and I did not want to be right."
She looked at the tablet for some time.
"What do you have?" she said.
"The regional emergency room has begun to take calls from the town," said the voice. "That is all I know, and it is not mine to say what the calls say. I can tell you that the emergency number has been busy for four minutes, and that the lines from the hospital at Sulmona are open. I am not able to tell you that your sister is well. I do not know."
"No," said Suor Chiara. "You would not."
It took forty minutes to reach the Mother House's landline, and a further twenty before Agnese's voice came on it, rough with plaster. Colle San Basso was badly hurt. The bell tower of the old church had come down into the lane. Eleven houses were gone or going, and four people were under one of them, and the ambulances from Sulmona had been told to wait at the bridge. The school had stood. It had cracked across the front and lost its roof tiles, and the doors had jammed. The sixty children had been at their desks, and when the floor began to move they had gone under them, to the number of fifty-eight in the first six seconds, and the two who were slow had been on the way to the toilets and had been grabbed by Agnese, who had a bruise on her forearm in the shape of a boy of seven.
"We counted," said Agnese. "Under the desk. I said the Hail Mary. I don't know how I got to the end of it. A tile fell on the desk next to mine, one that would have been Carlo's. He was under mine. It was nothing to do with prayers, you know. It was a drill."
"I know," said Suor Chiara. "I know it was a drill."
"It was a drill and a Hail Mary," said her sister, and began to cry, which she had not done since 1996. "Is that all right? Can I say that? I'd like to say that."
"You can say that," said Suor Chiara. "I'll say it with you."
By evening the school was an assembly point for the families of the valley, whose own houses had cracks in them and whose own mothers would not sleep indoors. Nadia Di Giacomo came at six with a flask of coffee, a blanket and Tommaso, whose cast had a new line drawn on it, a long jagged one, in red marker, that was the earthquake, and next to it a very small man under a very large desk.
"I timed it," she said. She said it to the nun, without any greeting. She still had the cracked stopwatch in her coat pocket, and she took it out and showed her the number on the face. "Tommaso says it was seven and a half seconds, for his room. He was under before the first knock."
"Seven and a half," said Suor Chiara. "It's a good number."
"It is a number," said the signora. She sat down on the step, which she had not done in the office, and looked at the stopwatch. "I was angry with you for a month. I still am. Do you know what I would like? I would like to have been right about the stairs, and wrong about the bell. And that is not a thing that anyone can arrange, is it?"
"No," said the nun. "I don't think it is."
They sat on the step. In the yard the children had been given blankets and a ration of biscuits, and the teachers had started a kind of game with a ball that could be played sitting down. Someone had brought a gas ring from the canteen, and Marco, who had taken his tie off at last, was boiling water for the coffee, with an air of enormous competence.
At the other end of the yard the clock in the tower of the parish church had stopped at 11:41. It had a broken hand. Ottavio, the sacristan, an old man with a red face and a thick grey cardigan, stood under it and looked up with the expression of a man who has been betrayed by his oldest friend.
At six minutes to seven he came across the yard and found Suor Chiara.
"The bell is sound," he said. "I have been up. The frame has a crack but the bell is sound. The electric ringer will not go; there is no power. But I can ring it by the rope, if the Mother Superior says so. It is only that I am not able to, with my arm."
"Which arm?"
"The right. The shoulder." He lifted it an inch, and put it down. "I did it carrying the Madonna in January. I would have said nothing."
"Ottavio," said Suor Chiara.
She went into the church, and up the narrow stair, which was the one thing in San Pelino that nobody had thought to put a rule about, and took hold of the rope. It was greasy with seventy years of hands. She had rung it twice in her life, both times at a funeral, both times badly. She did it now by the book: three strokes, a pause, three strokes, a pause, three strokes, and then nine. The Angelus, which should have been rung at six in the evening and had been missed.
Below her in the yard, the children turned their faces up. In Colle San Basso, seventeen kilometres to the south, where there was no tower left to ring, the wind must have carried it, because Agnese said afterwards that she had heard a bell at about seven, over the digging, a flat dull note like a pan, and had known whose it was.
She counted the strokes aloud as she rang. She did not hurry. There was nobody she needed to warn.