That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  When it came to women, especially, and exploiters of women, love, lovers, true marriages and false ones, cuckoldom and counter-cuckoldom, Pompeo was supreme, you might say. Certain smart-ass bigamists or polygamists, with all their troubles and poly-troubles, and with all the mess of the respective kids whom they sort of wanted sometimes and then maybe didn't want—well, in all that muck, he slipped in and out with the ease of a taxi driver. His necessary association with the underworld, his abbreviated investigation, obtained by his intuition of those "family status" questions, had brought him to such a pass that, on a moment's notice, he could give you all the "cohabitations," let's say, from Via Capo d'Africa to Via Frangipani, and as far as Piazza degli Zingari, at Via dei Capocci and Vicolo Ciancaleoni; and then down, past Piazza Montanara —not even worth mentioning—to Via di Monte Caprino, and Via Bucimazza and Via dei Fienili: the things that man knew! Or the neighborhood of Palazzo Pio, that other pesthole, and in all those alleyways behind Sant'Andrea della Valle, Piazza Grottapinta, Via di Ferro, and the Vicolo delle Grotte del Teatro: and maybe even Piazza Pollarola, even though the people there are classy, they still have some funny additions to the household, or a character or two around who isn't in the police's good graces. In those areas, in fact, he kept his trumps. There, he knew by heart all the couples, all their kith and kin, and all the ramifications that they sprung in the spring, whether the ramifications came in the shape of horns, or whether they appeared farther down on the body: the double couples, and the triple, the royal flushes, in all the possible combinations: birth, life, death, and distinguishing marks. He knew the dumps they rented, and when they moved out of one to go into another, the double rooms with kitchen privileges, the closets, the rooms let by the hour, the sofas and even the couches, with every flea that lives in them, individually.

  So for Pompeo the Valdarena tribe was child's play. Giuliano's mother had left Rome to live elsewhere. Having married a second time, a certain accountant named Carlo Ricco of the Moda Italiana, she lived with the latter in Turin. The information on the children was good: they went to school and studied. Her classy relatives—well, it seemed she had "been somewhat cast off by them"; and they had made no effort, from Turin: but on the other hand "she had become estranged from her mother-in-law," or rather her "in-laws," as they were called, en masse: leaving her son to his grandmother. When you came right down to it, everybody was really satisfied, after all the rows and tears: because when she doesn't have cash, the best job a widow can find is to dig herself up another man who'll marry her. Giuliano had maybe been a little depressed and jealous of his mother, for a while he seemed kind of grumpy with everybody: then, as he grew up and developed, little by little, he had come around and seen reason: his mother was young and beautiful. And the depression of a kid like him... He had soon found people who pulled him out of it.

  His grandmother spoiled him rotten: this grandmother who was Liliana's Aunt Marietta.

  Well, and then what? Things all started going wrong at once. Giuliano's mother, seven or eight months ago, was hospitalized in Bologna, stuck in a bed at San Michele in Bosco: an automobile accident, while she was on her way to Rome to visit the relatives—that's how much she disliked them, poor woman! They'd come by way of Milan. Both legs smashed: it was a miracle that she had saved her skin at all. There, traction and counter-traction, weights attached to one foot and to the other. And machinery of every shape and kind. For this reason, too, the signorino was a little dazed, and had been for some while: he was worried about his mother. And the womenfolk, all over him, sympathizing, poor boy! Going out of their way to see if they couldn't console him.

  Liliana Balducci, then, was very rich. Daughter of a profiteer. So then what?

  He, the young gentleman her cousin, his technique was that of the idler, the good-looker. Who has or can have his fill of women till they run out of his ears. But surely, too, inside, he must have had some fixed idea. A goal: surely he had one in his heart of hearts. Aha: he wanted her to be the one to want him. Now Ingravallo could see it clearly. Giuliano wanted to be desired. To give himself: but to condescend, to sell himself dearly. At the highest possible price. He tried to play it cool and handsome, like that, to act fancy-free. With all women. And even with her. Sure. He wanted to be fair to them all, her included.

  And then when she had gone crazy, too, the way certain poor creatures do lose their minds over certain animals in the right season (Ingravallo clenched his teeth), certain characters ripe for jail—then, the bastard! then, plonk, plonk, plonk, the rain of bank notes. Great big drops, too!

  He—to summarize—he had to go to Genoa. His transfer had already been decided: it was imminent even, a matter of days.

  The fine room in Via Nicotera 21, as confirmed by Signora Amalia Bazz .. . Buzzichelli, had really been given up, as of the end of the month. (That other nonsense, the pipeline that was to pump refined petroleum to Ferrania!){13} There wasn't time left, now, for him to perfect his process of enchantment. And so? A blunt request? Refusal on the part of Liliana? Lack of money on hand? Or a grab at the gold, the jewels? That horrible object ... for a handful of greasy paper? And the jewels?

  Doctor Valdarena had been searched as soon as they brought him in; nothing had been found on him: nothing of a suspicious origin. But he had had plenty of time, between nine A.M. and twenty after ten, to go out and stash his loot in a safe place, and to come back (but, but the notion was a bit risky, to tell the truth) . . . after Cristoforo and Gina had gone off about their business, and before he had called for help, at ten-twenty . . . Well, yes, more than an hour had gone by, at the very least. The concierge Pettacchioni was busy up above, way up in the clouds. With her broom and bucket: and with her tongue, too, you could bet on that. At that hour, judging by Pompeo's report, she liked to drop over to B, where her mainstay was la Bolenfi, or Sbolenfi, still in her slippers. Ingravallo, with one hand, rooting a bit among the papers: "Elia Gabbi, widow Bolenfi," he recited, with firm assurance.

  Higher still than the widow, on the top floor, there was General Barbezzo. Ingravallo, promptly, plucked him out, too, from all that paper, like an old black hen, cluckcluck-cluck, might snap up a fat worm: with a single peck, never missing, even in a mountain of manure. Again he recited: "General Grand'Ufficiale nobleman Ottorino Barbezzi-Gallo, retired: age? hah! from Casalpusterlengo. To hell with him."

  So he was a nobleman, as well. From what Grabber had hummed in an ear, a very distinguished gent, a widower, with his beard divided in two, looking like some de luxe brush: but his gout (according to Sora Manuela) made him suffer the torments of hell. Why, the doctors had forbidden him to set his feet on the ground: celestified, perforce, into his own empyrean. A nice little collection to console himself: fourteen or fifteen of the finest bottles, kind that take your breath away, at one gulp. A perfect gentleman, though: he wore two carpet slippers, that looked like elephant's feet. A gent. Sora Manuela, in the odd moments of leisure granted her from her concierge-ship, used to perform for him certain domestic services. She did little odd jobs ... in the morning, too, while he was waiting for the maid to come; the maid came in late, at noon, but with the marketing already done. A man living by himself, and helpless like that! But she didn't want the tenants to know: and naturally, vice versa, all of them knew it. She claimed she had things of her own to do, up on the roof. The roof, as all know, is the realm of the washing to be hung out. Well, on certain windy mornings up there, she seemed ready to fly away herself, like a plane from the launching deck of an aircraft carrier. With those four bombs she had attached to her, one pair fore and one aft.

  "I'm up here. I'm hanging out the wash!" she yelled to the building's sleepers. She sang like a girl of eighteen. The kids, at times, called her from down below: from the fabled well of the courtyard. "Hey, Sora Manue, somebody wants you! Come on down!" When they didn't go to school. Her husband was kept very busy, at the Fontanelli Milk Company. She came down, ker-plonk, ker-plonk, her cheeks flushed: that wind! all hundred an
d twenty-nine steps. With her breath smelling of anise. A breeze in itself! She descended, in a word, from heaven. A heaven of anisette. "Don Ciccio!" and Ingravallo turned the page. According to the more reliable, among the many and melodiously whispered rumors of number two hundred and nineteen, so promptly picked up by Grabber, it seemed . . . yes, in short, that she and Barbezzi-Gallo, from time to time, after a good swig of the old Barbezzi's gall, well it was only natural, they felt the need to exchange congratulations, glass in hand. The classics from his collection. Authentic Meletti anisette, a hundred and twenty lire the bottle, containing three-quarters of a liter. And for this reason, Napoleon himself with the whole Army of Italy, could go past the lodge, if the kids were off at school, as they were on that awful Thursday, and nobody would be seen.

  The vigorous new forces, then effecting in Italian society that profound renewal, were inspired by the ancient severity or at least by the severe faces of the Lictors, but the renewal also was flavored by their endowment of little clubs (staves tightly bound to the handle of the ax, not only emblematic). Now without wasting their strength in philosophizing (primum vivere), they devoted themselves to paving with the most verbose of good intentions the road to hell. Gassi-fied into funereal menace, made Word (and Wind), they conspired with great impetus, in that whirlwind of air and dust they stirred up, to kiss the ass even of the clouds, destroying all separation of powers and also the living being generally known as the Fatherland: the distinction of the "three powers," which the great and modest sociologist of the slightly askew wig, observing the best institutions of the Romans and the wisest and more recent of English history, had isolated with such lucidity. Italy's new resurrection followed a not very clothed (as far as the human species was concerned) renaissance, with the pictorial or poetical forms which the world had hailed as indecent and, at the same time, masterful. And this rebirth clung, with an air of bringing it to the best possible conclusion, to a risorgimento a little too generous in squeezing pathos from the locks of its troubadours, shaggy or bearded, or generously mustachioed, or glorious in their muttonchops or sideburns, all in any case needing—to our taste—the radical attentions of a Figaro with drastic scissors. The effect that this above-mentioned resurrection extracted from its entrails, ruttingly eager at last to dispose of all the dispositions made disposable by political power, was the effect that is found every time: I mean every time that absolute power is assumed, conglomerating the three controls—discerned by Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu with such clear thinking, in book eleven, chapter six, of his little treatise of roughly eight hundred pages on the esprit des lois—conglomerating them, all three, in a single and triply impenetrable and unremovable mafia. In such an event "le meme corps de magistrature a, comme executeur des lois, toute la puissance quil s'est donnee come legislateur. Il peut ravager l'Etat" (did you get that? ravager l'Etat!) "par ses volontes generales et, comme il a encore la puissance de juger, il peut detruire chaque citoyen par ses volontes particulieres": particulieres to it, that is, to the above-mentioned corps. In our case, in the new ravage brought about by a too-fiery remembrance of the ancient cudgels (which, if anything, did their cudgeling in accordance with the law, and not in accordance with mob rule), the telephone was found ready and willing to lend, to the triply powerful mafia, the expert services of a liaison officer, controlled by the zeal and the hypersensitive ears of an official spy. Bureaucratic "urging" could assume that tone and, more, that harshly injunctive, or even imperious character fitting only to the "homines consulares," to the "homines praetorii" of the neo-Empire that was being cooked up. The man who, through his strength, is sure to be right, never for a moment suspects he could be wrong by law. The man who recognizes himself as a genius, a beacon to all peoples, never suspects that he might be a candle to be snuffed out, or a quadruped ass. When one considers a depository, or a commissioner, of the renewed truth, one would never dare think him likely to pee new stupidities with each new day: into the mouth of those who are listening to him, agape. Ah well. The little cascade of official telephone calls, like every cascade with any self-respect, was and is unreversible, within a determined field of forces, the field of gravity, or the field of obsequiousness and pass-the-buckdom. And there was no need even to summon up two louts with two clumps of hair on their noses, and two huge shiny leather belts adorned with pistols and dirks, to make the ass-sitting subaltern aware, from the other end of the wire, on the spot, of what he had best answer, or how he should best proceed: "Prepared . . . always prepared to obey." Click. And so it happened after the crime, the first, at Via Merulana two hundred and nineteen, as soon as the second, the horrible murder, followed it. "The unjustified delay in the investigations, which" now must "assume a brisker pace," adapting themselves from one moment to the next to the impatient stampings of the pausarius, hammering at the prow, rather than the poop, and in compensation with all four hoofs. The economical Commendatore and, in his free time truffle-fancier, eighty-six hours after that nine P.M. of the Monday evening, was invited to show up again at Santo Stefano. After ninety-two, more dead than alive, he was sent back to blowing his nose in Regina Coeli: in the vast and least expectable of his handkerchiefs.

  *** *** ***

  The poor Signora Balducci, according to the tenants' unanimous affirmations, seemed to have received no one in that house, the two last hours of her life! No one. Except her killer.

  They hadn't heard any shouts, or noises, or thuds: not even la Menegazzi, who had been combing her hair, not even the two Bottafavis, husband and wife. Inquiries at the Roman office of Standard Oil, "conducted personally by Doctor Ingravallo," confirmed the fact of the transfer, to Genoa, decided upon some time ago, of Doctor Giuliano Valdarena. It had been settled that he would leave on Monday, March 21st, oh, give or take a day either way. As far as they were concerned, they had nothing but praise for the young man. A quick-witted employee, a good talker when he wanted to be, distinguished appearance: and basically, oh yes, a willing worker. He didn't have to be asked twice to take a taxi and chase after some client, some engineer, one of those who are always running around, constantly in motion, up and down the country, in trains. Some mornings, early, or some sultry afternoons, perhaps . . . Well, he was young. A little laziness, at times, on some sirocco days: the office atmosphere. But with the clients, for the most part, he hit it off just fine.

  "It doesn't take much," Don Ciccio grunted to himself, "Where are they going to buy their oil, anyway? From the egg-man?"

  He hit it off, yes. The competition, especially when it comes to oil for transformers, that's where the real money is, tended to knock down the prices, though within the limits established by the cartel, to exploit the profit margin . . . of the ten lire per quintal. He, well, he knew his way around: he had a kind of charm, his good manners, the appearance of a man who uses his head, who knows how to wait.

  "You see, Doctor . . . er . . . Ingravallo, you won't believe it, perhaps, but a client is sort of like a woman. You think I'm joking, maybe . . . You have to know how to handle them. The patience it takes, sometimes! You have to wait, to know how to wait: stay there, under the stone bench, with your eyes looking sleepy, but ready to spring, like a tomcat in heat. And then there are times instead when you have to be cagey . . to make sure you get there before the next fellow, the competition, I mean. Believe me, sir, you have to keep working on them till they fall for you, at least a little bit, at least for half a day: l'éspace d'un matin. Even when they drag along old Auntie to chaperone, the big holding company who pretends to sit in a corner and knit, but is keeping a weather eye on the ledgers: and maybe has a weakness, her weakness. She has her likes and her dislikes, too, just like some old women, some mothers-in-law . . . like times when you want to make the daughter fall for you, but you have to win the mother over first. That's how it is. There are the Platonic ones, mind you, and the romantic ones: the ones who dream in the moonlight, those who make a fuss over ten lire, those who hope and swallow everything, and those
who like to drag it out. They make us hop, all right. Well, that's the way they like it: like a bunch of she-cats in February. Nothing you can do about it. It takes patience! Then there are the other ones, the brisk ones, who come straight to the point. I tell you, Doctor, you have to know how to handle them. Each in his own way. But, believe me, if we're going to work the way we should, first they have to fall in love! I don't mean with us exactly, we're just middlemen, although ... not even a pretty doll would throw us away . . . what the hell ... no, not us but . . . you might say, with Standard in general. They have to fall in love with Standard Oil, learn to trust Standard blindly, take what we give them! Because, we know what to give them, better than they do, the kind of bottle each one needs: this kind, and not that. Why, a world-wide organization like ours! I should hope so! Tens of thousands of gallons per year, in Europe alone, of the finest kinds of oil, that tells you something about Standard Oil, eh? Not something to kid about.

  "Our great secret, you see, is the secret we like to tell everybody: the constancy of the specifications for each different kind of oil. Now, for example, take our unbeatable Transformer Oil B, Grade 11-Extra. You can ask about it here in Rome: Engineer Casalis of the Anglo-Romana Company, or Engineer Bocciarelli of the Terni." He assisted himself with the fingers of his left hand, thumb, index, middle finger, unrolling them one after the other, to list the merits of Grade 11-Extra; he reached his little finger, and remained there: "Absolutely waterless: this is the most basic essential; yes, the sine qua non: freezing point . . . extremely low: viscosity . . . 2.4 Wayne, at the outside: acid value, negligible: dielectric strength, amazing: flash point ... the highest of all American industrial oils.