The sergeant pressed down with his foot, accelerating towards the fountain. From the right, where the plain was dense with dwellings and went down to the river, Rome appeared, lying as if on a map or a scale model: it smoked slightly, at Porta San Paolo: a clear proximity of infinite thoughts and palaces, which the north wind had cleansed, which the tepid succession of sirocco had, after a few hours, with its habitual knavishness, resolved in easy images and had gently washed. The cupola of mother-of-pearl: other domes, towers: dark clumps of pines. Here ashen: there all pink and white, confirmation veils: sugar in a haute pate, a morning painting by Scialoja. It looked like a huge clock flattened on to the ground, which the chain of the Claudian aqueduct bound . . . joined ... to the mysterious springs of the dream. There, stood the general H.Q. of the force: there, there, for many moons, his dreamed-of application lay waiting, waiting. Like pears, medlars, even an application's ripening is marked by that capacity for perfectable maceration which the capital of the ex-kingdom confers on all paper, is commensurate with an unrevolving time, but internal to the paper and its relative stamps, a period of incubation and of Roman softening. Bedecked, with silent dust, are all the red tapes, the dossiers of the files: with heavy cobwebs, all the great boxes of time: of the incubating time, Roma doma; Rome tames. Rome broods. On the haystack of her decrees. A day comes, at last, when the egg of the longed-for promulgation drops at last from her viscera, from the sewer of the decretal labyrinth: and the respective rescript, which licenses the gaunt petitioner to scramble that egg for the rest of his natural life, is whipped off to the addressee. In more cases than one, it arrives along with the Extreme Unction. It licenses the applicant, now sunk into coma—verba volant, scripta manent—to practice that sleeping art, that crippled trade that he had surreptitiously practiced until then, till the moment of the Holy Oil: and which from then on, de jure decreto, he will make an effort to practice, a little at a time, in hell with all the leisure granted him by eternity.
The sergeant sped downhill towards I Due Santi. It was a sultry day, the mugginess seemed to have drunk the swamps. But the wind of their speeding and an occasional rare drop, like a musket ball in the face, presaged the alacrity of their investigation, and the fecund interviews in the useful hours of the morning. Sounding the horn at a gander, which lingered to duck its ass in the road, he ripped a half-curse from his teeth: it was at that moment that there came to his mind, in a flash, haunted by his wakening at this early hour, the endless dream of the night before.
He had seen in his sleep, or had dreamed . . . what the hell had he managed to dream of? ... a strange being, a topass: a topase. He had dreamed of a topaz: what is, after all, a topaz? a faceted glass, a kind of yellow stop light, which grew, and was enlarged from one moment to the next until it promptly became a sunflower, a malign disk that escaped him, rolling forward, almost beneath the wheel of the bike, in mute magic. The Marchesa wanted it, the topaz; she was drunk, yelling and threatening, stamping her feet, her face estranged in a pallor as she uttered obscenities in Venetian, or in some Spanish dialect, more likely. She had raised hell with General Rebaudengo because his carabinieri weren't bright enough to overtake it on any road, or path, the awful topaz, that yellow glass. So at the railroad crossing of Casal Bruciato, the glass sunflower ... by the right flank, march! It had fled along the rails, changing its form into a yellow rat and snickering top-as-ass-ass: and the Rome-Naples express raced on and on, full speed after the sunset and almost already into the night, into the Circean darkness, diademed with flashes and spectral sparks on the pantograph, luminous stag saturated with electricity. Until, realizing that the mad rolling along the fleeting parallels was not enough to save him, the topaz-ass-rat had turned from the track and had sped into the countryside in the night towards the mouthless ponds of Campo Morto and the underbrush and the thickets of the Pometian shore: the women signal-keepers yelled, shouted that he was mad: they were to stop him, handcuff him: the locomotive chased him through the swamp, with two yellow eyes searching everything, cane brake and the darkness, to that point where place names become sparse, at the foot of the mountain of Contessa Circea, where Japanese lanterns and garlands swayed above the terraces on the shore, in the evening breeze from the sea. Nereids, there, freshly emergent from the waves and immediately denuded of their garments of seaweed and foam, amid the bustle of waiters in white jackets and of damp siphons and fistulas, were wont to make merry the enchanting night of Villa Porca. The Contessa, amid languid dirges, asked for a phial for sleep, for oblivion: for the vain arabesques, the bewilderments of dreams. Of the dream of not being. At Villa Porcina, under festoons of yellow ten-watt pears and drunken balloons, sweetly obese in the breathing and dying of every melody, the sorceress of the (perpetually) open snuffbox elicited at her scent the imminent swine, those who, at that philter, and that perfume, were to turn into snouted pigs, after having become eared-asses at the school: of the machiavellian club's hard knocks. Already the female pupils writhed, stark white except for the thicket triangle, from every austere veto of fathers, they wriggled in silent offering: which, from slow, restrained moorish saraband gradually was exalted to the trochaic rhythm of an estampida, where the resolute beating of the foot bestowed a fierce arsis on the floor: while the prompt erection and the shaking both of neck and head gave their hair back to the abyss, signifying the untamed pride both of the cervix and of the spirit, reiterated by the ta-ta-ta-tum of the castanets. Then as the aggression of the naked (but not for that hebefied) males broke into the chorus, the estampida was exacerbated to a sicinnis, to a dance simultaneously exozcizational: a swarm of frightened and bosomy nymphs pretended to abhor a herd of satyrs, to shield themselves and take shelter both with their hands and in flight towards their rubescent and fumigant thyrsi, already half-dazed, to tell the truth, by their excessive officiating: with their noses. Falling at that point among their legs, like the black thunderbolt of every prompt and every black happening, the crazed topaz had suddenly frightened the beauties. Shards of an exploded heart had flown off in every direction, to every corner, stopping—at the very sight of that possessed sewer rat, their hippy and mammary ritual. And there were shouts and shrills not to be told as the mustachioed one darted here and there like an arrow's notch, black, sharpened meatball. Many of the priestesses, forgetting their nakedness, had made a gesture as if to draw skirts down to their knees, protecting a defenseless delicacy: but the skirts were only a dream. And so was their delicacy.
Thus, in this delirium, they had sought safety in flight, in the ponds of the swamp, in the shadows of the canes, in the night, the silvery thicket of ilexes and pines on the shore, in the free wash of the beach, lorded over by a seething swell: others, poetesses and sea-creatures diving from the lunar rocks of the circeum, had plunged into the foam of the breakers. But the Contessa Circea, drunken, threw her head back, tossing her soaked hair (as yellow balloons laughed and swayed in Chinese) in the torpid benignity of the night: soaked in a shampoo of White Label: the cleft of her mouth, like an earthenware piggy-bank, arched, open and vulgar, till it could touch her ears, splitting the face like a watermelon after the first incision, in two slippers, in two soles of clogs: and from her rolling eyes, where you could see the white below the iris like that of a Teresa repossessed by the devil,{52} down her face dripped ethylic tears, bluish gouts: opalescent pearls of a contraband Pernod. She invoked the flask of ratafia, called for the subventions of Papa, Pappy, the great Aleppo, the invisible Omnipresent, who was, on the contrary, the Omnivisible pig, hailed savior of Italy, omnipresent in his tickling, in every kind of tickling: impotent as he was to achieve anything whatsoever, and even less his verbose braggings. There dripped azure pearls, tears of aloe, of terebene and vodka: the head thrown back, the hair lost in the night, with the two fingers, thumb and index, each with a yellow topaz, raising her skirt, in front, revealing to one and all that she was wearing underwear. She was wearing it, the sainted woman: yes, yes, she was. The wild rape had taken that path, wh
ich was the path of duty, for him and for his scenting scariness, climbing up her thighs now like ivy, fat and trembling in his terror, making her laugh and laugh in silly cascades, raving at his tickling: there: they were made of cardboard and plaster, her underpants, that time. Because once, in life, they had put a plaster cast on the trap.
The sergeant sped on, with a dry crackling, in the direction of I Due Santi, with the private grabbing his waist, blinking his eyelids at the oncoming wind, bothered by the dust. Disappointment wakened him abruptly. The time in which we would say that dreams extend has, instead, the diaphragming rapidity of a Leica's click, is measured in lightning segments of time, by fractions of the fourth degree on the orbital time of the earth, commonly known as solar time, the time of Caesar and of Gregory. And lo, now, beyond the flotilla of clouds that was skirting the rocks of the east, the opal became rose, the rose thickened and was stratified in carmine: the lividness everywhere, to the north, of broken day: then, at last, from the ridge, the splendid eyelash: a dot of fire, in a peak of the ridge of the Ernici or the Simbruni the unbearable pupil: the straight, arrowing gaze of the handsome Apollo, the spotlight. The gray latitudes of Latium were clarified, made plastic, emerging, purple-clad, almost like crumbling milestones of time, fragments of towers without names.
*** *** ***
When the bam-bam-bam died out at I Due Santi, in a brief skid of the wheels, which the brakes quickly hindered, then blocked, the private found himself on the ground standing, as if he had fallen there: a mountain bear: stretching, from right to left, the lower edge of the olive-drab tunic, which was revealed to be an extremely short garment, over the rotund opulences of his anthropological type. To the right of the Appia, for those who went on in the direction of Albano, the door of opaque or colored panes to a little store, whose threshold of gray and worn peperino, on the outside, was at the level of the still damp asphalt. Opposite the door, to the left of the road that ascended straight and calm, between the mouths of the two connecting roads, one of which had brought them here from the barracks and the town, the low wall of a garden or a vineyard or something of the sort: above which there protruded, somewhat disheveled in the muggy dripping of the morning, the tops of some dried reeds. The wall was broken by a tall shrine, with two eaves and curlicues of pale stucco on the front. Two tumblers, and in them some primulas and periwinkles, consecrated to devotional use, flowered and colored the stone of that kind of window's sill: from which the Divinity, a bit stunned in the head, leaned out as if from a pulvinar over the bustle of the Appia. Framed by the jambs and the slightly cockeyed arch, the old painting, its color quite faded and chalky, demanded all one's attention: the Fara Filiorum Petri{53} gazed at it, though stupefied by sleep and dazed by the novelty of this excursion. Two figures, surely saints—he argued from the data: that is, dressed in clothes that weren't the pants-and-jacket of ordinary men, and their pates behaloed: of which the one, without beard, smaller, was dark and bald: the other, hard and boney, with a white blob on his chin, like a spoonful of lime, and thick hair halfway down his forehead, white, or once white, inside the halo's yellow circle. Those two little short cloaks, bunched like a bandoleer on the left shoulder of the two partners, did not cover the calves and still further, below the calves, the repainted malleoli: and that had allowed the first painter, their "creator," to bring on to the scene four unsuspected feet. The two right ones, enormous, had come to him in a flash: and they were generously tentacled in toes, stretched forward in their stride, to puncture the foreground, the ideal plane (vertical and transparent), to which every visual occasion is referred. With particular expressive vigor, in a remarkable adaptation to the mastery of the centuries, the big toes were depicted. In each of the two extended digits, the cross strap of otherwise unperceived footwear segregated and singled out the knuckled-toe in that august pre-eminence which is his, which belongs to the big toe, and to that toe alone, separating it out from the flock of the toes of lower rank, less suitable for the day of glory, but still, in the osteologues' atlases and in the masterpieces of Italian painting, toes. The two haughty digits, enhanced by genius, were projected, hurled forward: they traveled on their own: they almost, paired off as they were, stuck in your eye: indeed, into both your eyes: they were sublimated to the central pathetic motif of the fresco, or alfresco, seeing as how it was plenty fresh. A bolt from heaven, a light of excruciated hours blanched them; however, when you came right down to it, the light seemed to rise from underground, since it struck them from below. The distant bray of a donkey, as the wind rose again, with the tinkle of bells. The glorious history of our painting, in a part of its glory pays tribute to the big toe. Light and toes{54} are prime ingredients, ineffable, in every painting that aspires to live, that wants to have its say, to narrate, persuade, educate: to subjugate our senses, win hearts from the Malign One: insist for eight hundred years on the favorite images. Not even the saints, then, so laden with so many gifts of the Lord— not even they could avoid the indispensable gift of feet: and still less these two, who walked the Appian Way together to Babylon,{55} towards decollation or upside-down crucifixion. They had, indeed, in their feet, the physical instrument of their itinerant apostolate: they trod on the feet of Ahenobarbus. Who, however, remained less than persuaded. No, the saints must not lack their full complement of toes: as soldiers must receive their full issue of tins: and even less when an Italian painter of the sixteenth or seventeenth century or, of the eighteenth, or worse, kneels before them and prepares to depict them, from below, with the soul of a pedicurist. Light, in Italy, is the mother of toes: and if one is an Italian painter, it's nothing to joke about, as Manneroni didn't joke at I Due Santi, neither with the light nor with the toes. The metatarsus of Saint Joseph has been peduncled with an inimitable big toe in the Palatine tondo by Michelangelo (the Holy Family): which huge digit, for a minimal portion, to tell the truth, has its pictorial tegument from the little toe of the Bride: a livid and almost surreal, or perhaps eschatological light, proposes the Toe-Idea, loftily incarnating—or in ossifying—it, in the foreground of the contingent: and salvages it promptly for the metaphysical bruises of eternity. The same metartarsus protuberates, the foot's thumb, rival of the Michelangelan-Palatine (to signify the miracle, or rather the audicle, of male chastity) in the Urbino master's Sposalizio, today at the Brera. The divarication of the solitary, bony toe from the remaining herd of other toes is rendered prominent by the perspectively charming joints of the cleansed pavement, where there is no husk or skin, neither orange's nor chestnut's, nor has any leaf or paper settled there, nor has man urinated there, nor dog. And the master toe, though disjoined from the others, at its root is spurred and gnarled: and then it converges inwards, as if forced by gout or by the habitual constriction of a shoe momentarily removed, or I'd say domum relapsa as if too fetid for the hour of the wedding. And it responds, made august by its divarication, it responds to the tall, erect ecstacy of the slender stalk or staff which, overnight, miraculously flowered with three lilies, instead of the customary white carnation: and it picks up, from the rather rare juncture of carpenterial innocence with carpenterial poverty, the testimonial value of an artisan connotation: more than a toe of more than a barefoot carpenter, in that fashion.
As to the iconography of the two saints, and of the holy apostles in general, ah, didn't Manneroni dedicate to them the unspent energies of a velvet-bearded forty years of his own life? assisted on his scaffoldings not only by his believer's fervor, but by the tragic qualities of his genius and an iron constitution: by an athlete's physique, a prophet's appetite: and by a handful of cash, from time to time, given him, however, reluctantly, by the commissioner of those miracles. In the shrine of I Due Santi, adorned and curlicued with cheese-pale stuccos, he was finally enabled to collect and employ all of his talents: the talents which had been swelling his brush, in twenty years of initiation and pictorial apprenticeship, and of obstinate discipline through twenty more years of bearded mastery. Ejaculated impetuously and with
free hand on the mortar, still fresh —that is alfresco—the two big toes, the Pietrine and the Pauline, display all the vigor and the urgency of their creation . . . inderogatable, of the enunciation ... by coerced squeezing, as if splattered there by some source or spring . . . "ch'alta vena preme."{56} The "creator" couldn't bear another moment's delay, before creating. "Fiat lux!" And there were toes. Plip, plop.
That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana Page 24