Life in the Post-Collapse Zone

Early in Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, we see construction foreman Geremio di Alba warning his boss about shoddy safety standards and building materials. Sure enough, the building collapses, and Geremio and his crew of workmen are trapped in gruesome deaths. Geremio’s is particularly so: his genitals convulse due to “the cold steel rod on which they were impaled,”1 and he attempts to gnaw his way to air through wood and hardening concrete until “his teeth snap[…] off to the gums in the uneven conflict.”2

Ah, nothing like a little literature to let you know how bad things could be. “You call that a collapse? The place was abandoned, for Chrissakes! Now, I’ll tell you about a collapse….”

I am, however, truly thankful that the collapse of the house next door was merely alarming, as opposed to tragic, and that we don’t have a little Paul di Alba running around the neighborhood telling people of his bereft and poverty-stricken family's plight: “Look…the newspaper here…see…papa’s job—la jobe-a collapsed; the building—fell…ca—caduta…!”3

The yellow tape is gone. It didn’t bother me all that much; on a certain level, I had a glimmering memory of those pseudo-halcyon evenings when my friends and I would escape from our high-school dormitories and seek out abandoned buildings as sanctuaries in which we could do…uh...our homework…um, never mind.

Anyway, all that’s left now are some bricks, an empty space where the wall next to our patio used to be, a broken and sloppily reassembled gate, and dust, lots of dust.

I would really like to have an intact fence again. I was developing into something of a fussy gardener. I need privacy for that. Plus, the workers told my roommate that they were putting rat poison out to handle any vermin fleeing the destruction. Hearing something like that just makes you want to put up walls.


(1) Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete. New York, Penguin: 1993. Originally published 1937. Page 16.
(2) Page 17.
(3) Page 24.