That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  The Pirroficoni case had not yet afflicted the pages of the city papers: the Death's Head in his diplomat's ceremonial hat twisting already, on the other hand, the peacock's feather of the suspect, to be able to stick it where he stuck his feathers: peacock's or of spoiled chicken that stank.

  In any case it was wise, already in those days, to proceed with caution: Don Ciccio had a whiff of this, and Doctor Fumi as well, after public opinion—that is to say, the general racket—had taken possession of the event.

  "To exploit" the event—whatsoever event Jove Scoundrel, big-cheese in the cloud department, dropped in your lap, plop—to the magnification of one's own pseudo-ethical activity, in fact protuberantly theatrical and filthily staged, is the game of the institution or person who wishes to endow propaganda and fisheries with the weight of a moral activity. The displayed psyche of the political madman (a narcissist of pseudo-ethical content) grabs the alien crime, real or believed, and roars over it like a stupid, furious beast, in cold blood, over an ass's jawbone: behaving in such a way as to exhaust (to relax) in the inane matter of a punitive myth the dirty tension that compels him to action, action coute que coute. The alien crime is exploited to placate the snaky-maned Megaera, the mad multitude: which will not be placated with so little: it is offered, like a ram or stag to be torn to pieces, to the disheveled women who will rip it apart, light of foot, ubiquitous and mammary in the bacchanal which their own cries kindle, purpled with torment and blood. In this way, a pseudo-justice assumes a legal course, a pseudo-severity, or the pseudo-habilitation of the finger-pointings whose manifest countersigns seem to be both the arrogance of the ill-considered magistrate's investigation and the cynobalanic{15} excitement of the anticipated sentence. Reread the sad and atrocious tale in War and Peace, book three, part three, chapter twenty-five: and understand the summary execution of the helpless Verestchagin, thought a spy, not being one; Count Rostopchin, governor of Moscow, play-acting on the steps of his palace before the grim, waiting crowd, orders the dragoons to kill him with their sabers, there, in the crowd's presence: on the fine old principle, by God, "quit leur faut une victime." It was in the morning, ten o'clock. "At four in the afternoon Murat's army entered Moscow."

  Much more base and theatrical, chez nous, that Fierce-Face with his plume: nor can we grant him, as we can Rostopchin, the immediate attenuating circumstances of fear (of being lynched himself) and of anguish and rage and the pandemonium (total psychosis of the mob) and of the enemy approaching, after the brusque cannonades and the slaughter (at Borodino).

  The hapless Pirroficoni was almost killed by the blows of an Italian of the same stripe: because they wanted to wring from him, in any way, in the "interrogation chamber," the truthful admission that he had raped certain little girls. He was stunned and pleaded no, there wasn't a word of truth in it: but he was beaten to a faretheewell. O generous Manes of Beccaria!{16}

  The Urbs, in the very period of his fits of public decency and of police-enforced Federzonism,{17} was to know (1926— 27) several periodical stranglings of little girls: and on the meadows there lay traces of the remains and the torment, and the poor, slaughtered innocence: there, there extra muros, after the shrines of suburbicarian devotion, and the epigraphs of the ancient marbles and sacella. Consule Federsonio, Rosamaltonio enixa: Damnato Shittonio dictatore syphlitico{18}. Pirroficoni, the wretch! was master at that time of a mistress, rather plump not to say overripe, but somewhat difficult of access: fifth floor, a modern building: concierge in her lodge: husband, present and in working order ... in his carpet slippers: clusters of neighbors ad libitum, natural glossators superior even to Irnerius.{19} Whence, that is, because of these factual premises, a pathetic up-and-down of autographs of various import thanks to a gentle maiden (thirteen years old) who bore them with some circumspection and with equal palpitation of the heart to their destination. And conversations in sign language and various finger play from window to street: and vice versa. The expert and fingersome swain was arrested on the sidewalk, just when he was transmitting some of his signals with six or seven fingers (the hours of love) towards that window on the fifth floor (this, in the opinion of headquarters, was a "strategic feint"): and as he was entrusting a note for Madame, second stratagem, to her little messenger, a little maid, thrilled and frightened by her mission, her face all flushed. Pirroficoni had also given the child, as usual with him, a caress or two: this action, and his own blushing, were his perdition. On this splendid array of evidence the plumed Death's Head belched that "the Roman police in less than forty-eight hours etc. etc." And the cop, comforted by the lofty words of the Deuce, fell to with a will. The doubting intervention of some honest official saved Pirroficoni's bones, but not before they were sorely beaten.

  *** *** ***

  Then it was Balducci's turn to be questioned: the afternoon of that same day, March 18th, at Santo Stefano del Cacco: for several hours: by the Chief himself: the coroner also took part, pro forma, "the police were still taking the initiative in the investigations." Ingravallo, this time, didn't really feel up to questioning him. A friend, after all! He didn't even want to watch. And besides, it was clear, they would touch on difficult matters: the delicate questioning was bound to end in the hairsplitting of a particular kind of interrogation, or else it would break out in disgusting crudities, an interrogation of the crudest kind. The relations between . . . Balducci and his wife: moods, her frame of mind. There came to the surface again that incredible story of the nieces: the strange "mania" of the victim, wanting a daughter at any cost. She would have bought one, secondhand, at the Campo de' Fiori market, all else failing. As to the dough, Doctor Fumi was quick to convince himself that the married couple, him and her both, were in an enviable economic position. With that ballast down in the hold . . . there was no rough sea that could rock the boat, no inflation scare.

  The widower sketched out a list of their bonds, as best he could, from memory: his own as well as Liliana's: to facilitate the proof, he said, that when it came to him, they ought to consider him beyond all suspicion, even a momentary cloud. "Me? My own little Liliana? What? You're kidding?" His lips began to tremble, he burst into sobs which made his necktie jerk. When those tears were dried, he began summoning up his memory: with the aid of a little leather notebook, alligator skin it was: the kind real gents carry. He had brought it with him. Their holdings were noted down in it. Liliana kept a safe-deposit box at the bank, at branch number 11 of the Banca Commerciale, which had a safe-deposit service, a caveau of the most modern kind: at Piazza Vittorio, just opposite the market, under the arcades: right corner of Via Carlo Alberto. But then, there was another one at Corso Umberto, at the Banco di Santo Spirito. "Liliana's father, my poor old father-in-law, was a straight sort of man: a man with a real instinct: he didn't believe there was going to be any revolution, not this time, he said to me, and he said it was no good trusting corporations; first of all . . . because they're anonymous; you don't know their name or what they're up to, or where they are. Why, if one day it comes into their heads to say: this dope here, I think I'll screw him, then what can you do? You think you can track them down up there in Milan and say, hey, Signora Societa Anonima, I want my dough back. The hell you say. No, no. Five-year bonds! he used to say. They're safer than gold! he said, because gold is up today and down tomorrow: but bonds ... and a bit of consolidated, five per cent maybe, the sort of investment that lets you get your sleep at night. All stuff guaranteed by the government: the Italian government! It's like a granite building, the government, take it from me: there, nobody wants to screw you. What would they get out of it? And this new one, they say wants to do things seriously." Having quoted his father-in-law, at a sad smile from Doctor Fumi, Balducci reserved the right to produce detailed, exact lists. Himself. Liliana.

  He furnished "unexceptionable" commercial references and bank references, then various clarifications about his position as a sales representative, in the textiles line, for certain producers up north. The question of
cash, one might say, between him and his wife, simply didn't exist. "We never wanted for anything, not me, and not Liliana. Never any trouble, never a worry ... no lack of ready cash, never, a loan . . . not even from today to tomorrow. Notes?" In their family they didn't even know what the word meant.

  "Commercial bills, in my business: yes . . . you can't do business without them."

  How was it, with all their means, that they lived there, among those wormy shopkeepers, retired merchants, com-mendatores making fifteen hundred a month?

  "Well, the idea of having to move ... laziness. My father-in-law had bought the apartment, and had even lived there with Liliana before she was married. I met her there": and once again the poor man couldn't keep back his tears. His heavy voice shook: "we got married there! Me and Lilianuc-cia!" Doctor Fumi felt tears rising in his throat, too: like a level of water, rising in a well. Liliana's father, it was. He had a sharp eye, for a deal! "You know how it is, doctor ..." They had already known each other for a few years: business affairs. And then ... She, only child, her mother dead: a beauty! Ah, those were the days!

  They had become engaged, they had been married in that house. Then, once they were husband and wife . . . They were in love, they were company for each other. Their tastes were modest. They kept to themselves. "I didn't feel like working to work for the other fellow, that was it. One of these days we all have to die, and we had no kids. Like life was trying to spite us! And then ... the armistice after the war! And besides, by then we were all settled down, we were used to the place. There's central heating, even if it doesn't heat all that well, but still! It was good enough for us. There was a modern bath ... A few broken dishes, a few odd chairs. But who doesn't have them? Liliana didn't like having people around her too much. With that obsession of hers, to adopt a girl.. . and that poor little animal, Lulu, who didn't want to move for anything! Her, too! What's happened to her now, poor animal? A bad sign!"

  The war! All their worries about getting out of the draft! All the documents! A job! And yet, he had made it. Well, not exactly exempted, but more or less. A leather belt, a big revolver: "I was scary to look at": he shook his head.

  "So I stayed in Via Merulana . . . Seventeen, after two years of being engaged, I said to myself, it looks to me like they're not going to stop this so soon. So to hell with it. If we're going to do it, let's go ahead. You probably remember what the apartment situation was then: with all those refugees! There was plenty of room at my father-in-law's: you couldn't find a thing anywhere else. So I moved in . . . with my father-in-law. There was nothing else to do. That house —it was like it was ours, I mean mine and Liliana's."

  "It was your ... er .. . nest, I understand."

  "You understand: being able to loaf around in your shirtsleeves whenever you felt like it." You long for a little peace and quiet, after work, after the trains, to do as you please: and not have to get involved with all your neighbors' messes.

  And that melancholy of Liliana's. That kind of obsession. And then, with the Santi Quattro practically next door. "Why, Liliana, she'd never have let me take her away from Santi Quattro!"

  So everything had sort of conspired to keep them where they were, in that awful building at number two hundred and nineteen. Now he regretted it . . . Anybody else, in their position, would have looked for something better. Now he understood: too late! A nice little place in Prati,{20} a little villa overlooking the Tiber ... He sighed.

  "And ... the rest of it?"

  "The rest . . . Ah, well, a man's only human. When you travel all the time ... A little something extra here and there, of course . . ." Doctor Fumi was looking at him. But in that direction ... a moment of hesitation: a certain increase, however slight, in the natural ruddiness of the face.

  *** *** ***

  Giuliano Valdarena had undergone three bouts of questioning in a single day, not counting the first one on Thursday, at the scene of the crime, in the presence, so to speak, of the victim's witnessing body. Three officials were following the course of things, three "bloodhounds"; including Don Ciccio, the most hounding of all. Then Fumi and Corporal Di Pietrantonio, or Sergeant, as may be. Precious hours and days: ideas, conjectures, hypotheses: which never came to anything. Valdarena and Balducci, cousin and husband, were brought face to face: the morning of the 19th, which was a Saturday: Balducci had gone to stay at the Hotel d'Azeglio. Grave, serious, the husband; more upset and anguished, Valdarena, more nervous. They looked at each other squarely, spoke to each other: they seemed to be meeting after years of separation, brought closer together in grief: each seeking in the other's face the horrible motive of the evil, not however attributing it to each other. Ingravallo and Doctor Fumi never took their eyes off the pair. No sign of animosity. Giuliano, restless at times: as if at recurrent gusts of fear. Their statements showed up no contradiction. They added little, virtually nothing, to what had already been recorded.

  When Doctor Fumi was on the point of dismissing them, the visit of "a priest" was announced. "Who is it?" Don Lorenzo Corpi asked to be heard, because of an urgent communication he had to make, "regarding the painful case in Via Merulana." He had spoken to the corporal on duty. Fumi, with a gesture, sent the two from the room: Valdarena under guard. He asked Balducci to remain in the station.

  Don Corpi was brought in. He removed his hat slowly, a prelate's gesture.

  He was a handsome priest, tall and stocky, with rare strands of white amid his raven hair, and with a pair of owl's eyes very close to his nose: which, metaphorically, between such eyes, could be compared only to a beak. Decorously sheathed in his cassock, he bore in his left hand, along with the new hat, a black leather briefcase, the kind priests carry sometimes, when they have to visit their lawyer and let him know who has the right on his side. Black shoes, very shiny, long and sturdy, good for walking on the Aven-tine, as well as the Celian, with double soles. A man of remarkable appearance: and of exceptional robustness, judging from his walk and his movements, from the handclasp that he gave Doctor Fumi, and from the fullness of his cassock, above, and down to the waist, and from the flapping it made below, where it belled out in a skirt of strong cloth that looked like the Banner of Judgment.

  After some slightly embarrassed or, at least, very cautious preamble, as the softer glances of Doctor Fumi led him on to speak, he said that: he had been out of Rome, visiting certain friends at Roccafringoli, at the very top of the mountains, at Monte Manno almost, which you reach from Palestrina on donkey-back, and having come back from there a mere twenty hours ago, "as soon as I heard of the terrible event," he had hastened to bring here the holograph will, entrusted to him by the "late lamented" Signora Balducci with her own hands, whom he had also "gone to visit" the evening before at the morgue, "may she rest in peace."

  "At first," he stated, still deeply upset and horrified by the "thing," he had had reason to fear . . . that the document had been stolen from him. He had hunted for it all over the place, turning out all his papers, from all the drawers in his study: but he hadn't been able to dig it up. At night, all of sudden, it had come to him: he had deposited it with other envelopes and with certain . .. certain personal mementoes, in the Banco di Santo Spirito. In fact, this morning he had gone there, the moment they opened, just after he said the six o'clock Mass. His heart had been pounding, at times.

  From that black calfskin case he took out and handed to Doctor Fumi—who received it with his very white hand —a white, fairly large, square envelope, with five seals of scarlet sealing wax. The envelope and the seals seemed to be in perfect order: "Holograph Will of Liliana Balducci."

  The three officials, or rather Doctor Fumi and Ingravallo, decided to open it forthwith: and to read the "last wishes of the poor lady": dictating a report in the presence of Don Corpi and of four witnesses, in addition to Balducci, who had been called in again. Last wishes, which still must date back to a couple of months ago: last, since they had remained unchanged.

  First of all, and by telephone, they consul
ted the royal notary Doctor Gaetano De Marini in Via Milano: 292.784: who, according to Don Lorenzo, "must know about this matter." After some calling and recalling, finally he answered. He was deaf. A Neapolitan secretary assisted him at the receiver. Both of them were dumfounded. Balducci knew De Marini, to whose services both he and Liliana's father had on many occasions had recourse: but he "felt that he could rule out the notion" that, for her personal will, Liliana had gone to that old cockroach, likable and sly, but horribly deaf in the fortress of his competence.

  To act as witnesses, two clerks and two policemen were called in. The ceremony was quickly carried out: it was noon, or almost: another morning had drifted by, without their resolving anything.

  The will, as Doctor Fumi went on reading it aloud, in vivid accents, with Neapolitan resonances from the four corners of the ceiling, gradually revealed an unforeseeable turn: as if it had been drawn up in a state of particular emotion by a person whose pen was running away with him, a person perhaps not in full control of his faculties. From that soft, warm, suave reading, effectively conducted in the most harmonious Parthenopean tones, the listeners present realized, with mounting interest and with mounting wonder, that the poor Signora Balducci was leaving her husband heir to the lesser part of her substance, with some gold objects and jewels: the strictly legal share, so to speak: almost half. A conspicuous portion, on the other hand, fell to "my beloved Luigia Zanchetti also known as Gina, daughter of the late Pompilio Zanchetti and Irene Zanchetti nee Spinaci, born at Zagarolo on the fifteenth of April, nineteen hundred and fourteen." To her, poor child: "since the inscrutable will of God has not seen fit to grant me the joy of motherhood."