"I understand," murmured Fumi, his great head on the desk.
"Tuscans!" she resumed: and throwing her head back, with one hand she thrust back her hair, those blond locks on which drops of glue had rained: then she whispered, bored: "they're a bunch of stinkers, too, goddamn 'em." The imprecation was lost in a murmur, in the apocope of the pronoun, in an ever less benevolent stammering of the tongue, of the lips.
"Stinkers? What have they ever done to you?" Grabber pricked her again, with a tinkling laugh, as a novelist would say; but which, given his gullet, was instead the thunder of a trombone.
"Nothing. They didn't do nothing to me. I just happen to know they're stinkers, that's all."
"Take it easy, Pompeo, and don't bother her," Doctor Fumi said, contracting his nose: and to the girl: "You were saying i
"I was saying that, with women like that, he picks them up right off, without having to work too hard to make them catch on. T beg your pardong, could you direck me to Villa Porghesay?' When they're on Via Veneto, a foot away. Or even at the arches of Porta Pinciana! the pigs. 'It's not far away from here.' I'll say it isn't. All you have to do is cross the street. He lights her cigarette maybe. T can show you the way, if you want!' And they want, all right. With me, it's different, with these rags I have on . . . dying of the cold. With me, now, he doesn't even want to come: he says I'm stupid, that I look like a beggar. But with them! From Porta Pinciana, to the lake, to the Belvedere—it isn't a walk that makes your feet hurt, either. A little chat, as they go, turning to look at each other every now and then, looking her straight in the eye. Oh I know, I know how he does." "And what about you?"
"Me? They've screwed me, that's what they've done, so's I don't know which way to turn for a crust of bread: I'm just about ready to jump in the river. With them, they have a nice hot meal, a dinner—or supper, anyway."
"And the ready?"
"The ready?"
"The money, I mean: who puts out?" Pompeo interrupted again, rubbing his thumb against his index finger in the classic gesture.
"Shut up, Pompeo, you're getting on my nerves," Fumi admonished him. Then, to her: "These dinners, or let's say these suppers: who pays for them?"
"He pays, of course," the girl replied with hauteur and envy: "but she passes him the cash under the napkin: or when they go into Bottaro's" (envy of the disbursing rival) "while they're looking in the window ... at the list of the day's dishes. To see if there's chicken, or lamb. They've worked it all out along the way: and he's got a driver's license and everything, he took the exam, and all he has to do is collect the license in Via Panisperna, but he needs certain papers still, certain official stamps: and he knows all the restaurants in Rome by heart, but it wouldn't look good for him or for her either, to let them see that she's the one who's putting out the money. Rome isn't like Paris, he says. Because we've got the Pope here." They laughed. In her weariness, in her tears, erect, at the end, in the mucid light of the room, she had spoken, resplendent: her lashes, blond, turned aloft, radiated above the luminous gravity of her gaze: her tears had cleansed the irises, a dark brown, the two turquoise jewels they enclosed. Her face appeared stained and tired.
"And he made his aunt, too, if she is his aunt, give him a hundred lire. One time when he was in a hurry to go someplace, I forget where. And I have a feeling she never saw it again, that hundred note. Her husband's a scar-face; she says he used to be a baker, but he never comes home."
Zamira had had a fight with him: "Maybe because he talked me into coming away: and she was furious. You'll regret this, she said to me: the old witch! Listen to me! you'll be sorry, baby! With those dragon eyes of her's! He made me touch a coral horn{49}: and he touched it, too. Yes, he was the one who talked me into it. So they had a fight. Maybe that was the reason, or maybe—who knows—because there was no more money in it for them. She's an old witch, a lousy hick whore. Even in Africa, she went whoring. Fifteen years ago. And when it comes to money, she'd skin her own father alive. He took me away."
"And that's why they fought?" asked Fumi, not convinced. The girl didn't hear the question. "You can understand how he looked at it, too. A boy like him! For nothing . . . too little! He told her to find herself somebody else. He said he wasn't working just for the fun of it. You women, he says, don't have to do anything, just have a little patience. You just have to be still for a couple of minutes. A couple of sighs. And in the meanwhile . . . domino vobisco ... so long . . . till next time! But us men, he says! and he swells his chest: with us, it's a different thing, altogether!"
"Did you hear that?" said Doctor Fumi, deeply depressed, as one who hears or sees torpedoed or mocked, by unforeseen jest or torpedo, the most sainted, the most deeply rooted belief in the goodness of human nature. He turned his great eyes around sadly, as if to ask aid of the gentlemen co-inquisitors. His neck was stuffed into his shoulders: as if an apostle of ill humor had pressed a heel on his head. The cynical boldness of those remarks of the young man, reported by Ines, seemed to put a full stop to her tale.
They were about to dismiss her, and Paolillo was already moving, an uncoercible yawn having engaged his jaws, which for over an hour had been longing for another occupation: when, tears dried, she threw out another few words, as a supplement to what had already been said: with a calm, ringing voice, like the reprise of an aria which she had previously paid out towards the bliss of the listeners: "He has a little brother, too, named Ascanio: he must have hung around the same building, where that countess from Venice lives. A cute little kid: smart as anything! always scared, though, like he was afraid he wouldn't get away with something. He looks up at you, and then shuts his eyes: he reminds me of a cat when it wants to tell you it's sleepy, when instead it's done something dirtier than usual, and knows it, but doesn't want you to know. A quick kid, like his brother: but a different kind: something between an altar boy and a delivery boy from that baker's there."
"And this would be the younger brother, the little one, Ascanio Lanciani," Fumi said, pensive, inviting, forcing his whole tongue into the cia of Lanciani, exceptionally. But the cats were all out of the bag, now.
"Yes, Ascanio," she spilled on, nevertheless, "Ascanio."
Ingravallo had a start, which he contained, a growl of his soul: like a dozing mastiff in his professional suspicion, which rewakens, at night, the muffled and cautious footstep of the Probable, the Improbable. "A kid who worked in a shop, at a grocer's . . . Moving here and there, like his brother. Then I think he traveled around, from town to town, with a peddler. I saw him just last Sunday, the thirteenth of the month, he was with his granny, selling roast pork . . ."
"Where?"
"At Piazza Vittorio, and he even slipped me a sandwich: from under his apron: he knows how to do tricks: with those eyes of his, scared stiff, for fear his granny would see him: with that mop of hair he has. He said to me: don't tell anybody you saw me here. I wonder why. Always mysterious, that kid. A sandwich with a slice of pork. Big enough to last two days. But without letting the old woman see him. That old witch would have slapped him good, if she'd seen. She'd already given me a dirty look, when she saw I was talking to the kid, whispering . . ."
"What time was it?"
"It must have been around eleven. I was so hungry I couldn't see straight. The big bell, at Santa Maria Maggiore, kept ringing and ringing ... to bring us the grace from San Giuseppe, they say, who's so good: because Saturday was his feast, but I was already in here. In fact, he made me run into Ascanio, who gave me that sandwich. That bell, when I hear it, it sounds like my granny on the swings: up and down, down and up, drrring drrring, every time you give her behind a push, she lets out a word or two from even from there: brrr brr frrrfrrr ... I was so hungry! I told him right out that I was hungry, that I was a good customer: while he went on yelling 'Get you roast pork here! Nice roast pork (that nobody wanted, not at that price) golden brown.' He understood me: he had already caught on, the moment he saw me. That was the last good food I ate: something to stick
to my ribs, before I ended up in here. I was lucky!"
Chance (non datur casus, non datur salus) well, on the other hand, it seemed to be chance itself that night which succored the puzzled, straightened out the investigations, changing the turn of the wind: chance, luck, the net, a little unraveled, a little frayed, of the patrol, more than any artful wisdom or hairsplitting dialectic. Ingravallo had them call in Deviti (he was there, this time) and charged him, the next morning, to look for the kid, Ascanio Lanciani. The features of the boy . .. could be furnished him at once by Ines, a proper little portrait. And she also had to explain the location of the stand, and the grandmother, who sold roast pork: yes, at Piazza Vittorio, yes: where they had their counter. Pestalozzi was furnished with a copy of the list, typewritten, of turquoises and topazes, in which all the o's (opals, topazes, onyx) figured as so many little holes or dots in the onionskin paper, round just like an o: ulcers of a precision and of an operative deliberateness not adequately comforted by the budgets. Some were topazes, properly called, others were topazos: the jewels of the broken-and-entered and detopazed Menecazzi, who returned, this time, to the definitive possession and full enjoyment, by right and by might, of her own z's: her Venetian g, for the rest, joyfully commuted into a central-Italian c. So it happened, in the documents of the implacable administration by which we have the honor and pleasure to be ministered with the papers and rubber stamps necessary to life, that the recovery of a Carlo Emilio from a precedent Paolo Maria, preceded in turn the name of the great dead of Cannae, is offset by a Gadola: which, meanwhile, is permitted to glow in civic execration in place of a Gadda.{50} The sheet of the Menecazzi list was supplemented (Ingravallo, handing Lance-Corporal Pestalozzi the second sheet, took a look at it) by another list, more grimly horrid and splendid : of those other jewels, kept in a little iron coffer, in the first dresser drawer, by Signora Liliana.
VIII
THE sun still hadn't the slightest intention of appearing on the horizon when Corporal Pestalozzi had already left (on his motorcycle) the barracks of the are-are-see-see{51} at Marino to hurl himself on the tavern-workshop where he wasn't for one moment expected, at least not in his capacity as functioning corporal. The girls, and before them, the sorceress herself had sniffed in the air, yes, a certain, indefinable interest, then perceived a certain circumscribed buzzing of carabinieri (like the ugly horseflies when, of a sudden, a new miracle is scented, in the country), of the sergeant and the corporal, in particular, all around the sweet fragrance of the knitting shop, and finally to the very door of the tavern and even inside, at the counter: an attraction which wasn't the usual, for from the 17th to the 18th, from Thursday to Friday, in the space of twenty-four hours, it had become objectified in a scarf of green wool: yes: probably, if not surely, pinched: whence the urgency, for the beneficiary of the change of ownership, to take it to Zamira to be dyed. The new and, perhaps, even a bit intensified buzzing of the huge men in olive drab or black-and-red wasn't ascribable to private urges, that is to say to the exuberance of the eternal lymph from within the straits of discipline. No, no! The alert and ever closer circling of the workshop, or better of the little hovel that housed the same, had become, in the last couple of days, a royal, carabinierial buzz, obviously to be imputed to a determined case in point of the pinching variety: in short, a police-style buzzing. So that they, the girls, were? Silent! Lips sealed. And knitting, cutting, plying their needle: zum zum zum at the sewing machine. The two bechevroned men, sergeant and corporal, one after the other, and almost in mutual rivalry, had tossed out with effective nonchalance, as if it were a matter of mere passing curiosity, a couple of unforeseen questions, then foreseen and expected, concerning the scarf: and what was it like, and what color was it, was it made of cloth, or knitted, by hand or machine-made? An old lady had lost it, according to what they said ... as she got off a tram. Zamira blew little bubbles of saliva from her hole and beaded her lips, at the corners: it was her way of palpitating, of participating. She had, one might say an invitation in her eyelids, the most melting, the most edulcorating invitation of mi-careme. But that other girl, that quasi-bride, the one who to the paternal heart of the sergeant was the opened, purplish rose in the bouquet of the white and still-closed buds, had shot into his eyes "her" eyes. A rapid, luminous adept's glance: and that arrow shot, so dewy with intelligence, had been more than sufficient for the sergeant. To concert with immediate parapathia an encounter, vespertine and casual, oh very casual indeed, halfway along the little road to Santa Margherita in Abitacolo: at an hour when no living soul was to be seen. Then and there the scarf was brought back to him (ideally): so green: and in the welling-up of whispers also there came to the surface the buggy, March, the horizontal rain and the new moon and all the strong March winds, and the offering of hot wine, poor horse! in a watering bucket: and, what was more important, the Ciurlani Dyers in Marino. And finally the first name, last name, alias, fixed abode of the denominated male or "boyfriend": with some further information, some hints about his appearance, his character, type, manners, figure, shoelaces. His overall, for that matter, not to mention the cap, were missing from the portrait: a precise question of the sergeant remained unanswered. In the workshop-tavern at I Due Santi, all the girls, every time, and Zamira also, on the other hand, had become lost in a dreamy innocence, had remained silent, or had answered in questions, with their eyes, their questioners: or else they had shrugged and had contracted their lips in a moue of ignorance.
Towards Monday, then, that rather rascally zeal of the carabinieri had become completely stilled. A private or two, true enough, had dropped in, descending from his bike; to order an orangeade. The swaying of the handle of the door with glass panes (colored ones) had given the swaying forewarning of a customer: and he had appeared: a carabiniere passing by. The orangeade having been ingested, when its respective gas, as usual, had erupted back again in the kind of nasal crypto-belch which follows a beverage of that kind, then the soldier had unbuttoned his tunic, had opened it slightly, for greater comfort and the drawing of breath: and had drawn out a kind of hamburger swollen with papers more than a generous salami sandwich: a rotten wallet: an organ indispensable, to the sweating, to the wretched, to effect the laborious payment of a "soft" drink. His fingering his buttonholes, restoring to a freer splendor the noble buttons of his uniform, had granted the girls—not to say to the mistress-seamtress—occasion to eye, in a furtive glimpse, but surely a connoisseur's glance, the vivid outlines of his chest, to appreciate the mood of the quenched man: peace, vigor, relaxation, inhibition, pride, and, to record it, this mood, on the positive side of the ledger of humanity's general heritage: excluded, in practice, any dutiful assignment any "causal motive" or rationale of service.
March the 23rd, in the carabinieri's barracks, at Marino. Having risen in the night, come down at daybreak, a private was waiting in the courtyard. Pestalozzi appeared, a dark person, from the shadows, from beneath the archway: he walked to his machine: his bandoleer stood out, white, to underline the dispatch of his actions in an elegant apparatus of authority. A few words to the subaltern, a brief inspection of the beast, splashed with mud up to its muzzle. Once he in the saddle, with one foot on the ground, the left, he gave the kick to the motor: with his right. The sentry had opened the doors, as if for the exit of a great coach, of some Roman Apostolic Prince and Duke of Marino. Pestalozzi seemed lost in thought. Wednesday the 23rd, he thought. In fact. He raised his eyes to the tower, which a spout of almost-yellow light, from a screened bulb, tinged at its top, in a stripe, a little below the surviving roughness of the cordon at the pinnacle. Six twenty-five by the clock in the tower: the same as his own, exactly. To accompany him he had summoned this private, who was already weighing down the rear part of the seat with his behind and was about to draw his feet into the boat, too, clasping his superior by the waist, with both hands, and awaiting the motor's first explosion. Pestalozzi with his right foot, pressed down: he reiterated the starter. The cylinder began at last to g
urgle, the whole machine to tremble, to beat its wings. The sentry saluted, at attention: the threshold was passed. The turn did not occasion falls. But they weighed, the two of them, on the tires. The cobbles were slippery, a steep slope: a little skin of mire, in some places, made it even more dangerous. The mare with the two riders on her withers rolled down, under restraint, grumbling, it bore to the right, then to the left towards the gate of the town, between black peperino walls and shadows, beneath little square windows, armed with rusty iron bars to incarcerate the darkness. An occasional civic lamp swayed its greeting to the fleeting men, in that dark and stony poverty of the village: a bracket coming from the lichened walls, which sloped back, like the curtains of a fort: electric flower of the willing budgets, ultimate sob from the bowels of the vice-mayor for the ante-lucan solitude of a street from which the north wind precipitates, whistling, at night: or the sirocco slows there and dies, three nights later. They descended to the gate of the town.
Once past the arch, the road started spreading out towards the Appian: it went among olive groves barely silvered by the dawn and the prone skeletons of vines in the vineyards. Then it was thrown back, like a stole, over the damp shoulders of the hill. At the first curve the view also turned back.
Pestalozzi raised his head for a moment, cut the motor, put on the brake, stopped their course, with a certain caution: he paused for a couple of minutes, to cast the morning's horoscope.
It was dawn, even later. The peaks of the Algido, the Carseolani and the Velini unexpectedly present, gray. Sor-atte, sudden magic, like a fortress of lead, of ash. Beyond the passes of Sabina, through small openings, portholes that interrupted the line of the mountain's crest, the sky's revival manifested itself in the distance by thin stripes of purple and more remote and fiery dots and splendors of sulphur yellow, of vermilion: strange lacquers: a noble glow, as if from a crucible of the depths. The north wind of the day before had died away, and here, to alternate the auguries, the hot slavering on skin and face, the gratuitous and now subsiding breath of a sirocco's lashing. Further on, from behind Tivoli and Carsoli, flotillas of horizontal clouds, all curled with cirrus, with false ribbons of saffron, hurled themselves, one after the other, into battle, filed joyously towards their shredding: whither? where? who knows? but surely where their admiral ordered them, to get it in the neck, as ours orders us, all their little sails within the range of the winds. Labile, changing galleys, tacked at a high, unreal height, in that kind of overturned dream which is our perception, after waking at dawn, tacked along the ashen cliffs of the mountains of the Equi, the whitened nakedness of the Velino, the forewall of the Marsica. Their journey resumed, the driver obeyed the road, the machine addressed the curves, bending with the two men. The opposite half of the weather there, above the shore of Fiumicino and Ladispoli, was a brown-colored flock, shading into certain leaden bruises: gravied sheep pressed, compact, meshed in the ass by their dog, the wind, the one that turns the sky rainy. A roll of thunder, rummm, son-of-a-gun! had the nerve to raise its voice, too: on March the 23rd!
That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana Page 23