That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  A waxen hand relaxed, fell back . . . when the knife was already in Liliana's breath, tearing, ripping her trachea; and the blood, when she inhaled, flowed down into her lungs: and her breath gurgled out, coughing, in that torture, and it looked like so many bubbles of red soap: and the carotid, the jugular, spurted like two pumps from a well, plop, plop, half a yard away. Her breath, her last, sideways, in bubbles, in that horrid purple of her life: and she felt the blood in her mouth, and she saw those eyes, no longer human, on the wound: there was still work to be done: another blow: the eyes! of the endless beast. The unsuspected ferocity of the world ... was revealed to her all of a sudden . . . brief years! But a spasm was depriving her of sensation, annihilating memory, life. A sweetish, tepid savor of night.

  The hands, stark white, with their delicate nails, periwinkle color now, revealed no cuts: she hadn't been able, hadn't dared grasp the cutter, arrest the slaughterer's determination. She had submitted to the slaughterer. The face and the nose seemed scratched, here and there, in the weariness and pallor of death, as if the hatred had surpassed death itself. The fingers were stripped of rings; the wedding ring had vanished. Nor did it occur to anyone, then, to impute its disappearance to the Fatherland.{10} The knife had done its job. Liliana! Liliana! To Don Ciccio it was as if the world's every aspect were darkened, all the world's gentility.

  The man from the criminological bureau said a razor was out of the question, because it makes a neater cut, more superficial, he opined, and in general, in such cases multiple cuts are required; since it has no sharp tip, and it can't be used with such violence. Violence? Yes, the wound was deep, all right, a horrible thing: it had hacked away half the neck, just about. In the dining room, no, no clue ... except for the blood. And, after looking around the other rooms: nothing. Only more blood: clear traces in the kitchen sink: diluted, until it looked like frog's blood: and many scarlet, or now black, drops on the floor, round and radiated, as blood characteristically behaves when you let it drip on the ground: like sections of asteroids. Those horrible drops indicated an obvious itinerary: from the abandoned encumbrance of the body, the still-tepid evidence of the deceased . . . Liliana! to the kitchen sink, to the chill, the ablutions: the chill which absolves us of all memory. Many drops in the dining room, there, of which five or perhaps more were contiguous to that other blood, to that mess, the stains and the largest pool, from which they tracked it all around with their shoes, those stupid louts. Many drops in the hall, a little smaller, and many in the kitchen: and some rubbed off, as if to erase them with the sole to keep them from being seen on the white, hexagonal tiles. The men had a go at the furniture: eleven drawers and cupboards, closets and sideboards they couldn't open. Giuliano, in the living room, was guarded by two policemen. Cristo-foro had brought some sandwiches and a couple of oranges. All these big men kept wandering and tramping around the house. It jangled the nerves. Don Ciccio sat down, brokenhearted, in the vestibule, waiting for the magistrate. Then he went back in there again: he looked, as if in farewell, at the poor creature over whom the photographers were arguing in whispers, taking care not to stain themselves or their traps, their bulbs, screens, wires, tripods, their big box cameras. They had already discovered two light plugs behind two armchairs, and had already blown a fuse two or three times, one of the three fuses of the apartment. They decided to use magnesium. They fiddled around like two sinister angels, full of a desire not to attract attention, above that terrifying weariness: a cold, poor derelict, now, of the world's evil. They buzzed around like flies, maneuvering those wires, snapping the shutters, agreeing in a whisper on steps, trying to keep from setting the whole kit and kaboodle on fire—these were the first hum of eternity over her opaque senses, that body of a woman which no longer possessed modesty or memory. They operated on the "victim" with no regard for her suffering, and unable to spare her ignominy. The beauty, the clothing, the spent flesh of Liliana were there: the sweet body, still clothed from their gaze. In the obscenity of that involuntary pose—whose motives, beyond doubt, were the skirt lifted back for the outrage, the parted legs, and above them, and the swell and furrow of voluptuousness to inflame the weak (and those sunken eyes, horribly open on to the void, fixed on an inane object, the sideboard)—death seemed to Don Ciccio an extreme decompounding of possibles, an unfocusing of interdependent ideas, formerly harmonized in one person. Like the dissolving of a unity which cannot hold out any longer, the sudden collapse of relationships, of all ties with organizing reality.

  The sweet pallor of her face, so white in the opaline dreams of the evening, had given way through funereal modulations to a cyanosed tone, a faded periwinkle: as if hate and outrage had been too harsh, when encountered, for the tender flower of the being, of the soul. Shudders ran down his spine. He tried to reflect. He was sweating again.

  From his pocket, mechanically, he took the tram ticket: from the right pocket of his jacket, where he had placed it that morning, and where it still rested, after all the day's grief: with half a cigarette and with a few crumbs: the elongated greenish-blue ticket of the Tranvie dei Castelli, with the hole at the 13th, and another hole, or tear, at Torraccio. He turned it over, then turned it back again. He went into the vestibule, into the master bedroom. He flung himself down in a chair, worn out.

  He pondered, trying to put together the pieces of the evidence—disconnected as they were—to set in order the moments, the worn moments of the sequence, of the time that had been lacerated, dead. First of all: the two messes were to be connected, weren't they? The incredible burglary of that poor old parrot, la Menegazzi, that woman . . . that collection of spinach stains: and this horror, here. Same building, same floor. And yet . . . It seemed impossible. Three days apart?

  His reason . . . told him that the two crimes had nothing in common. The first, well, a "daring" burglary, performed by a criminal very well-informed, if not personally acquainted with the customs and ways of number two hundred and nineteen, stairway A. "Stairway A, stairway A," he grumbled to himself, swaying his head imperceptibly, curly and black: staring at a point on the floor, his hands clasped, his elbows on his knees: "a burglary, all right, homemade."

  With that unfindable grocer's boy as informer: hah, or as lookout. More likely lookout, since la Menegazzi, the old fool, hadn't the slightest idea: which means, when you come right down to it, still an accomplice. And with that flat toy trumpet, the Commendatore of the Economy, who had truffles delivered to him. "Commendatore Angeloni!" he sighed, with a certain emphasis. "He has a little weakness for artichokes. We'll have to look into that. And the country ham from Via Panisperna is another weakness. Down at the corner of Via dei Serpenti."

  And the ring at the Balducci door? A mistake, surely. Or an alternative? Or a precaution? Rewarded with silence? In any case—this much was clear—a thief. Armed robbery, breaking and entering . . .

  This other mess, for God's sake, was enough to drive you crazy! Who ever saw such a thing? Still, the robbery motive couldn't be overlooked here, either, not at all, not till Balducci got back. And then . . . then what? The drawers would tell their story. Yes, but . . . this was a different thing. The manner of the crime, that poor encumbrance in there, those eyes, the horrible wound: a motive, perhaps, a murkier one. That skirt . . . thrown back like that, as if by a gust of wind: a hot, greedy gust, blowing from Hell. Summoned by a rage, by such contempt, only the gates of Hell could have granted it passage. The murder "seemed, at this stage of the investigations, a crime of passion." Rape? Desire? Vengeance?

  His reason told him to study the two cases separately, to get the feel of them, each on its own. The double number doesn't come up so rarely on the Naples or Bari lottery, and also in Rome it's frequent enough, so even here in the merulanian street, in this stingy phalanstery of two hundred and nineteen stuffed with gold, another fine double combination could turn up. The unwanted double of a pair of crimes. Bang. Bang. Without any connection other than the topical, that is the external, cause: the great fame of the
sharks, and their evil gold. A fame omnipresent in the San Giovanni neighborhood, from Porta Maggiore to the Celian, to the ancient cloaca-swamp, the Suburra: where, however, the wine is icy, in summer. He looked at the ticket, again. He turned it over, twice. He scratched his nose lightly (extending his mouth like a tuber) with the thumbnail of his right hand, the back of the nail: a gesture habitual with him, and one of remarkable refinement.

  III

  THE next morning the newspapers reported the event more fully. It was Friday. The reporters and the telephone had been a nuisance all evening: both in Via Merulana and over at Santo Stefano. So, the next morning, the pack was in full cry: "Ghastly Crime in Via Merulana," shouted the newsboys, with their bundles knocking against people's knees: until quarter to twelve. In the local news, inside the paper, a bold headline over two columns: but then, sober and quite detached, the report itself: a terse little column, and ten lines in the continued column, "the investigation is being relentlessly pursued"; and a few other words, filler of purest New-Order style. The good old days were past.. . when for pinching a maid's bottom in Piazza Vittorio there was half a page of slobbering. The moralization of the Urbs and of all Italy, the concept of greater civil austerity, was then making its way. You might have said, in fact, that it was making great strides. Crimes and suggestive stories had abandoned forever the Ausonian land, like a bad dream dissolving. Robberies, stabbings, whorings, pimpings, burglary, cocaine, vitriol, arsenic bought for poisoning rats, abortions manu armata, feats of pimps and cardsharps, youngsters who make a woman pay for their drinks—why, what are you thinking of?—the Ausonian land didn't even remember the meaning of such things.

  Relics of an age dissolved into the void, with its frivolities, and its cliches, and its condoms, and its Masonic screwing around. The knife, in those years—the dear old knife beloved of every cowardly killer and every smalltime gangster, the criminals and the traitors, the weapon of the tortuous alleyways, the pissed-on back streets—seemed truly to have vanished from the scene, never to return: except on the paunches of the new, funereal heroes, where it was now displayed, gloriously drawn out, a nickel-plated, or even silver-plated, spare genital. Now the new vigor was in power, of Lantern Jaw, the bowler-hatted Death's Head, the Emir with black fez, and with plume, and the new chastity of Baroness Malacianca-Fasulli, the new law of the rods tied in a fascio. Who would ever believe there were thieves, now, in Rome? With that humorless turkey cock in Palazzo Chigi? With Federzoni, who wanted to clap in jail all the neckers from the Lungotevere? Or everybody who did some kissing in the movies? All the randy dogs of the Lungara? With a Milanese Pope, and a Holy Year just two years before? And with the fresh brides and grooms? With the fresh chickens crowing all over Rome?{11}

  Long files of black-dressed women, having rented the ritual black veil in Borgo Pio, in Piazza Rusticucci, or Borgo Vecchio, trooped under the colonnade, swooned at Porta Angelica, and then through the gates of Sant'Anna, to go and receive the apostolic benediction from Pope Ratti, a Milanese of good background, from Saronno, a tough sort, the kind who get buildings built. As they waited to be formed into lines and led, after forty flights of steps, into the throne room, into the presence of the great Pope and mountain climber. All this to give you the idea that the Capital now incarnated, absolutely beyond any doubt, the city of the seven candelabra of the seven virtues: the city that had been invoked, through long millennia, by all Rome's poets, inquisitors, moralists and utopists, Cola not excepted (though hanged). Fat, he was.{12} In the streets of Rome not a whore was to be seen, at least not the kind with licenses. With the sweet thought of the Holy Year, Federzoni had confiscated the whole lot of them. The Marchesa Licker was off at Capri, or in Cortina, or had gone to Japan for a little trip.

  *** *** ***

  "Sonovabitch . . ." grumbled Don Ciccio, clenching his teeth: they were the teeth of a bulldog, and a cuisine in which garlic was prominent kept them a gleaming white. His smartest men were being taken from him, one by one, sent to swell the ranks of that other squad, the political. And meanwhile he sat there snorting through papers.

  Now it was time to think of Mister Good-Looking, seriously, too. Good-looking. Yes, he was that, all right. And hard up for cash.

  He seemed to remember a sentence of Balducci's, another evening at the Cantinone in Albano; it had issued forth with benign indulgence from that great ruddy face, while he was talking about a female cousin. "Women, of course, when they're in love . . ." He had pulled out his cigarette case. "... don't bother about petty details; they're generous-minded then." He had lighted Ingravallo's cigarette, then his own. "They're open-handed, not counting the change." Then and there Ingravallo hadn't paid much attention: a typically noble, after-dinner opinion. With him, Ingravallo, Doctor Francesco, to tell the truth, no woman had ever been open-handed, except perhaps, yes the poor signora herself: generous with her kindness, her goodness, a charming ... inspiration. In her honor, once (he blushed) he had ventured to write ... a sonnet. But he couldn't make all the rhymes come out right. The verses, however, even Professor Cammaruta had found perfect. "They're open-handed, oh yes, open-handed." Now, he felt he should convalidate that rather generic insinuation: perhaps, sure, women. "Don Ciccio! What if she had a private fund?" His thoughts were pursuing some anger, some vindictive bitterness. "Do they give money, along with all the rest?" No, no. He wanted to dispel this hypothesis. There were too many indications, no, Liliana Balducci ... no, no, she wasn't in love with her cousin. In love? What're you talking about? Yes, to be sure, she had looked at him, openly pleased, that time, smiling at him, but. . . considering him a fine specimen of the family stock, the way you might smile at a brother. A young man, now he could understand, a young man who was a credit to them all; descended from the same grandfather, or rather, for him, great-grandfather. She, poor Liliana, was a cousin of his father. She had lost father and mother. Her husband was all she had left in the world. Hah! And Giuliano ... a fine chip, struck smartly, from the same old block. Perhaps . . . yes, of course, they had played together as children, as cousins. The genealogy (Don Ciccio consulted a scrap of paper) had been compiled by Pompeo. "Her aunt, Aunt Marietta, wife of Uncle Cesare, was the grandmother of Giuliano. They grew up together, you might say. So with Giuliano, she always spoke like a sister. An older sister."

  "How come she was a Valdarena, too, before she got married?"

  "How? It's because her father and Giuliano's grandfather, Uncle Cesare, were brothers."

  "Well, why drag this Marietta on me then? If they're related, it's through the men of the family, the two fathers . . ."

  "Right!"

  "Right, my ass! You've got to get this Aunt Marietta off my back now."

  "She's the one that brought the signora up, when her mother died."

  Ingravallo remembered, in fact, that Balducci had told him this: Liliana, when still a child, had lost her mother. Complications following childbirth, her second. And the baby, too! And so, and so . . . Then, that evening . . . that evening she had spoken to her cousin with that admiring indulgence, that touch of envy women always betray when they look at handsome young men ... too sought-after by their rivals. And that was all there was to it. "Ah! these women!"

  It was one o'clock. He collected statements and reports, stacked the dossiers. In despair, he got up and went out.

  "And yet," he was thinking, "Valdarena, the cousin . . . he was the one who gave the alarm. Is this a sign ... an unmistakable sign ... of innocence? Or at least, of an easy conscience. Conscience! But what about the cuff of his shirt? No, the whole thing wouldn't come clear. The story of that caress sounded made-up to him. Caress a dead woman! Or else . . . There are murky moments in the slow drip-drip of the hours: the hours of puberty. Evil crops up unexpectedly in sudden, horrible shards from beneath the tegument, from beneath the skin of gossip: a fine accountant's diploma, then a university degree. From beneath the covering of decent appearances, like a stone, it breaks the ground, and you can't even see it: like
the dark hardness of the mountain, in a green field.

  The handsome Giuliano! Too upset, he had seemed, too nervous, and too depressed, at the same time. He was on the verge of breaking down. He couldn't manage to maintain the proper composure. "How can you be so calm?" Don Ciccio had asked him: it was a trap. Anything but calm. "They're open-handed; they don't count the change. Ah!"

  Liliana Balducci was very rich, Liliana Balducci nee Valdarena. She had money of her own and, to some extent, she was mistress of it. An only child. And her father had had a gift for coining money. Even Doctor Fumi, in the vast din of this whole symphony, had picked out the theme, "the motive," the Leitmotif.

  "Her old man knew his onions, all right. During the war, and during the post-war, too. He was a real, a no-bones-about-it shark. He had died, too, a couple of years ago, some time after the daughter got married. The apartment in Via Merulana was his property. Business deals, partnerships, investments here, there and everywhere. Owner of this, part-owner of that. Lending money on mortgages, mortgaging to buy up. He must have been a real son of a bitch." He accompanied this sermon with some twirls of his right hand. Liliana had referred vaguely to her father's fortune, on San Francesco's day, during that happy meal.

  As for the Valdarena relatives, Doctor Fumi had taken care of them. First Pompeo went to call: a long tramp it was, and no results. Then the sergeant: nothing. Finally the relatives themselves came to see Fumi. So he had given them the full treatment; he had handled them, in his way, touching them first here, then there, with great gentleness, swaying his head as if he were reciting a poem: with those eyes, with that voice of his, Fumi, if he had wanted, could have been a five-star criminal lawyer! A real tear-jerker!

  Giuliano's mother no longer lived in Rome: a handsome woman, they said. Pompeo had codified the registerial information that had emerged relative to the relatives. A native talent, refined by excellent practice in the art and by the necessity for saving time, for abbreviating the long chains of procedural syllogisms, eye, ear and nose, at the service of the old gray matter, assisted by an occasional roast-beef sandwich, had made him a master of delineating with a few strokes, a couple of hard and fruitful knocks, the most entangled family trees of the whole repertory. And with the most edifying details.