That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  All these novelties instead of the ash-blue opal that Balducci had seen there other times: a stone with two faces, recto and verso, and also very good-looking, he explained to Ingravallo, but ... A sublunar stone, an elegiac stone, with soft, suffused milkiness as in a Nordic sky (nuits de Saint Petersbourg) or perhaps of silica paste, set and frozen slowly in the cold light, in the twilight dawn of the 60th parallel. On one side was carved the monogram R.V., Rutilio Valdarena: the other side was smooth. The name of the grandfather, the archetype of all the Valdarenas: who, as a kid, had been blond: a reddish blond, they used to say. When the grandfather died, the chain (with the fob) had gone to Uncle Peppe, on whose waistcoat of black velvet with yellow dots it had hung for a few months, on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. Her grandfather had meant it to go to Liliana, of course: to little Liliana: from her Grandad Rutilio: who, however, had temporarily left it to Uncle Peppe, in a kind of equitable trusteeship. And, when it came to Uncle Peppe the opal fob with the benign and beneficent warmth of all fobs and charms and coral horns, but with the sinister cancer-promoting aptitudes which ab aeterno had dwelt in the noble and melancholy frigidity of that gem. Seven and a half months after the grandfather's death, the uncle had not been able to evade his obligation, so nicely opaline, to transfer to Liliana the ownership of the gold chain, in accordance with the paternal will: with that toy attached to it. Because it was then, Balducci declared grimly, that the uncle had become unforgettable.

  "Poor, dear Uncle Peppe!" the survivors wept. Balducci could see his features again in the remembering mirror of his heart, as husband of the niece. Allocated there, in his big chair, amid a souffle of cushions, surrounded by his relations who hung from his lips; two fine, gray walrus-mustachios, and two large, yellow horse-teeth orchestrated his sad smile, the good yellowing smile of the "gentleman of the old school," former, distinguished client of the Baths of Chianciano. While in that posture so abandoned to the opinions of Doctor Beccari, and with that slightly Mongoloid tinge in his mustache and his cheeks, he celebrated within his immediate family the great virtues of the same and all the Valdarena clan in general, the bluish fob of the Lord's day used to rest on his black waistcoat on an axis with his liver and duodenum. Titillated by the thin, waxy fingers of the trustee, the gem covered both organs, duodenum as well as liver: alternating from one to the other a bit, perhaps: like a girl who is keeping at bay two swains at the same time. It was, to be precise, of cancer of the liver, supplemented by a similar affliction of the duodenum, that the bearer of the opal found himself forced to succumb.

  O powerful emanation of the doubly ill-starred bioxide! to the damnation of the abdominal tract, by God! and half the tripes of Peppe! Witness-bearing presence of an invisible light, it was the son, that reverse talisman, of the un-imitated elegy; a standard-bearer of the distant September dawn, page to the milky-blue reticence of the Polar semester. Worthy, in its nobility, to have bejeweled the finger of a count of the palace, who had fallen asleep at Roncesvalles, with seven windows in his heart: or of a viscount, suddenly gone pale in the September prisons. Bearer of a double curse, Ingravallo conjectured, given its double face. The double evil eye must come from the bioxide. The combined duodenum-liver cancer is one of those double numbers that the cancer lottery rarely comes out with, from the modern cancerological cabala: whether in Europe or abroad.

  Everybody, then and there, took fright; they began to touch wood, some here, some there. "And as for Liliana, well, Doctor, it seems to me .. ." and this time, again, poor Balducci let out a sob, his voice shook. He wept. At Santo Stefano del Cacco he was summoned daily, you might say.

  In the little writing desk near the balcony, in Via Nicotera, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, assisted by Private First-Class Paolillo, found ten thousand lire: ten one-thousand notes, brand new. The members of the family, aghast at the death of Liliana, then at the young man's arbitrary arrest, as they called it, were unable to indicate the source of the money. At the Standard Oil they denied having given him anything beyond his usual salary at the end of February. Ten thousand lire! It was unlikely that Giuliano, even in a year, could have saved that much from his earnings: as a recent graduate and starting employee, a young representative, a good-looking young man. With the expenses of his marriage in sight, which is tantamount to saying, in part expended.

  A salary, good as it was, and some percentage on the deals that he handled might allow him, in Rome, to eat, clothe and wash himself, and pay for the fine room and bath at Signora Amalia's: manicures and cigarettes extra: extra his grandmother's fettucine. His women, given his charm, the quality that made Don Ciccio so jealous, apparently didn't cost him very much. "He had many invitations," according to his relatives: and also from his landlady, not herself the owner of the little villa. "Yes, he brought ladies to his room. No, not the lady in the picture. Some ladies of the aristocracy . . ." (so she trilled). Ingravallo drew a breath "mentally" with great circumspection. The room's entry was private. In announcing this prerogative of the room, she, the landlady, assumed a serious, haughty voice, like a building contractor, when he says, "a fine view, three baths."

  "Oh, he had invitations everywhere. Because everybody was devoted to him." "Every woman" grunted Don Ciccio, within himself, gazing again into those deep, big eyes of Signora Amalia, circled by two blue crescent moons which were pendants to the two golden crescents she wore in her ears: which, at the first turn of her head, seemed about to go "ding-dong." Like an odalisque of the Sultan.

  Ingravallo subjected Valdarena, who had already been heard once that day, to yet another questioning. Night had fallen, it was happast seven. He had lighted, as reinforcement, a "special" bulb, which hung down to his desk. He showed him all of a sudden, without forewarning, the corpora delicti: that is to say, the chain, the diamond ring, the ten one-thousand lire notes, not to mention among these exhibits the photograph of Liliana, which, for good measure, he had left in. Valdarena, seeing that money and those objects on the desk, along with Liliana's picture, suddenly blushed: Don Ciccio had removed a newspaper which was concealing them. The young man sat down: then slowly he stood up: he wiped the sweat from his forehead: he regained his composure: he looked his preyer in the eye. There was a sudden movement of his neck, of his whole head, with a sweep of his hair: as if he had resolved to cast himself into the worst of it. He entered instead the bold, almost eloquent phase, of his own stubbornness and his own apology; he was silent for half a minute, then, "Officer," he shouted, with the haughtiness of one who insists on the legitimacy of a deed, of another person's sentiments which, nevertheless, concerns him: "there's no point in my keeping silent any more, out of fear of what people might say or out of respect for a dead person, a poor murdered woman: or out of shame for myself. Liliana, my poor cousin, yes, she was very fond of me. That's all there is to it. She wasn't in love with me, maybe . . . No. I mean . . . not in the way another woman, in her place, would have loved me. Oh! Liliana! But if her conscience" (sic) "had permitted her, the religion in which she was born and raised . . . well, I'm sure that she would have fallen in love with me, that she would have loved me madly." Ingravallo turned pale. "Like all the other women."

  "Yeah, like all the others."

  Valdarena didn't seem to notice this. "The great dream of her life was . . . was to join herself to a man," he looked at the glowering Don Ciccio, "to a man, or maybe even to a snake, who could give her the child she had dreamed of: 'her' child, the baby . . . she had waited and waited for, in vain, in tears. She wept and prayed. When she began to realize that time was passing and nobody could stop it, then . . . poor Liliana! In her emotional state she wouldn't recognize her own incapacity: no, she didn't admit it. And yet, without saying it outright, without putting it into words, she used to imagine, to dream that with another man, perhaps . . . Believe me, Doctor, there's a kind of physical pride, a vanity of the person, of the viscera. We men, of course, some more, some less, by nature, we're all a pack of ... preening turkey-cocks. We like to str
oll up and down the Corso.

  "But women have their pride, too: a physical one, like I say. You probably know this better than me." Ingravallo was biting back his fury, black as a thunderstorm. "She .. . Liliana . . . when I talked with her sometimes, all alone, the way cousins do . . . you know, I could see . . . she lived on that dream of hers, you might say: that with another man . . . Another man! A tall order! with all that religion of hers! So ... in that fantasy, she ... in her guts . . . she thought ... it seemed to her that . . . the other, that other man, could have been me . . ."

  "Ah," said Don Ciccio, "my warmest congratulations!" A horrible grimace, his face like tar.

  "Don't laugh, Doctor," the suspect cried, pompously, his youthful pallor all gleaming in the "special" hundred-watt light. "No, don't laugh. Time and again Liliana talked to me about it! She told me always that she had loved Remo . . . sincerely; I mean, she was kind of a goose about it, I'd say, poor thing." Ingravallo, in his heart, couldn't help conceding this: "an only daughter! without a mother! with no experience . . ." She had loved him "from the first day she saw him," naturally. "She loved him still, she respected him, poor Lilianuccia!": the voice hesitated, then got going again: "For nothing in the world, religion aside, would she have thought of betraying him. But when she saw the years passing in that way, the best years of her life, without even the hope for . . . for the fruit of that love ... it was, for her, it was like a tormenting disappointment. She felt humiliated, the way they all feel when the baby doesn't come off: more than sadness, it's a kind of spite, to think that other women are triumphant, and they aren't. The most bitter of all of life's disappointments. So, for her, the world was nothing but weariness: nothing but tears. Tears that gave her no comfort. Weeping and weariness. A swamp. Enough to drive her mad."

  "Let's skip the weariness, Doctor Valdarena . . . What about the chain, and the diamond? Let's get down to facts. It looks to me like we're wasting time here. We can do without these flights . . . these flights of fancy": he made a gesture as if dismissing some winged creature, urging the falcon up into the blue. "Let's talk a little about this anchor chain": and, taking it by one end, he swung it under his nose, looking him steadily in the eyes, blackly, "about this little gadget," and he weighed it in his other hand, "this tiny little thing." He seemed, at most, curious, wanting to observe minutely: like an ape into whose hand someone has dropped a toy whistle. Curly and black, that pitchy head, bent thus over the fingers and the metal that makes every mouth water, seemed to emanate tenebrous preconceived notions; and the procedural brightness of the room, as soon as the notions appeared, apparently forced them to curl up in that way, to become permanent, like a shiny, carbon fleece, on the skull: "We have read the will of the Signora Liliana, rest her soul, poor woman, and she left these to you," and he set down the chain, picking up the ring from the table and beginning to weigh it in the palm of his hand, "because old grandfather Romilio, Signor Balducci says— was that his name? Romilio? Have I got it right? Ah, Rutilio? Grandfather Rutilio wanted it to go to his grandchildren, to his own flesh and blood ... all in the family, I understand, I understand, and therefore to you, their pride and joy. But how come we found the stuff in your room? And how did the opal turn into an onyx? a what? .. . Yes, I meant to say ... a jasper?"

  Giuliano raised his right hand, which appeared white, vivid, faintly traced with blue, the flexible veins of adolescence: he showed, on his ring finger, the magnificent jasper which prison hadn't taken from him: the one Ingravallo remembered seeing on his finger at the Balduccis', after dinner on the 20th of February, as they were taking their coffee. "She wanted it to match this," he answered, "she wanted me to get married, to have a kid. You're sure to have one, she said to me every time: and then she would cry. When I told her I was getting married (at first she wouldn't believe it), that I was going to live in Genoa, as soon as I showed her the snaps of Renata, well, no, I can't say she was jealous, not the way another woman would have been . . . No. Isn't she beautiful? she said, but kind of with her teeth clenched. A brunette, isn't she? A pretty girl: just right for you, since you're as blond as an angel. And she started crying. As soon as she was convinced about the wedding, that it wasn't just a story . . . Doctor, you won't believe it. . . sometimes I think I'm going crazy myself . . . she made me swear, right away, that I'd have a kid, as soon as I could: a little Valdarena. A Valdarenuccio, she said, through her tears. Now swear! A darling little innocent. She was out of her mind, our poor Liliana. She would adopt that first one: because Renata and I, she said, would promptly make another, and a third, a fourth: and those would be for us. But she had a right to the first one, she said. Providence would give us, Renata and me, all the babies we wanted. Because that's how the good Lord is, she said: everything to one person, and nothing to another." And it is in this guise, indeed, that He displays His mysterious perfection. "You're young, she said, you're healthy . . . (like a bull, Doctor, I can tell you) like all the Valdarenas. The minute you're married, you'll make a baby: I can almost see him, almost hear him ... If you don't have one on the way already. She laughed, and went on crying, too. And you've got to swear that you'll give him to me. I was to let her adopt it, in other words: like it was her child.

  "What'll you give me, if I give you my baby? I said to her once. Christmas was already past, and New Year's ... it was after the Epiphany. Why, it was past the middle of January. I was only joking. She bowed her head. Like she was thinking . . . tired, sad: like a poor thing who didn't have anything to trade me: as if she had to ask for charity. Love? No, no, I didn't want that: I didn't mean love—I said, joking. She went pale, and flung herself down in a chair, like she was desperate." Ingravallo paled, too. "She looked at me with those eyes of hers, imploring. They were clouded with tears. She took my fingers, my right hand. She looked at my mother's ring, this one here: and she began to slip it off my finger. You've got to leave this with me for a few days, she said. Why? Because I say so. Because I want to match something, the present I'm going to give you. So I left it with her. And the next time I went to see her—Remo was off on a trip, he was in Padua, and without knowing it, I went to the house to see her—the next time ... as soon as she saw me, she gave me my ring back, then, without saying anything, she made like a sign to me ... a smile, the way you smile at a kid. Here, she said, and she looked at me: here! She took my hand, and slipped that ring on my finger, her grandfather's ring; this other one, my mother's, I wear on my middle finger, as you can see. Here, Giuliano, now take care of it, it's grandfather's ring. My grandfather. Your great-grandfather: what a good and handsome and strong man he was! He was a real man, like you! like you!" (That like you, like you, made the bulldog grit his teeth.) "And this is grandfather's watch chain . . . And she showed me that, too (it's this one that they took from me in Via Nicotera) and she turned her eyes to the portrait, you know? the oval one, in the gold frame with the ivy leaves, you know?" "Ivy leaves?"

  "Yes, bright green, in the living room: the big portrait of her grandfather, Rutilio: you can see the chain on his stomach. This very one." He touched it, extending his hand to the desk, sadly. "With the fob . . ." He shook his head. "Then she said to me. Lilianuccia . . . poor Liliana said to me: you told me you have to go to Genoa. Before you get married, you have to fix up your house: on the shore at Albaro, is it? You can't kid with those Genoese, you know. I know that. Look! So I looked. No, I said, no, Liliana, no, what are you doing? . . . Don't make such a fuss, she said, a big man like you. I know a man's needs, what a man needs when he's getting married. Take this, for now, take it. Take it, I tell you. Please, do me this favor, don't make me work so hard. You know I don't have much imagination along this line. Take it! I moved away, I didn't want to, I started to run off, I put a chair between us . . . Here! She grabbed me by the arm, and stuck an envelope into my pocket: that one . . ." and he indicated it, with his chain, on the desk, next to the banknotes: "the ten thousand lire . . . it'll soon be two months ago: the twenty-fifth of January, I remember. Then
she wanted to give me the chain, too. At all costs. I couldn't stop her, believe me." Ingravallo had grave doubts about the whole story. "We were in the living room." Then, pensively: "But there wasn't anything attached to the chain, I mean, that big bugger of a fob, that bad-luck piece. Tomorrow you must go to Ceccherelli, he's my jeweler. You have to leave it with him, just a couple of minutes, so he can attach the stone to it, you know . . . You know what? Of course, come now, you know that it had that stone attached to it: I've showed it to you dozens of times! But I've had it changed, she said. I had the opal changed for a jasper. It's to match this one, the one in your ring. That's why the week before she wanted me to leave it with her. She took my hand, and looked. She said: it looks so nice! they both look so well on you! the gold, too! it looks absolutely pure. They made such handsome gold things in the old days, before the war. But this was given me by Mamma, I said, a memento ... after a while, when she had married a second time, the engineer, you know. Well, I didn't know, she said, with a kind of grumpy expression. I had a jasper put in. A bloodstone, green, dark as a pimpernel, with two coral veins . . . red! they look like two veins of the heart, one for you and one for me. I picked it out myself, she said, in Campo Marzio. He's probably finished engraving it by now: he was going to mount it this morning: with your initials, like the one you have on your finger. Because I didn't want to see that opal in the family any more. Touch wood! And she touched the top of the table there. She made me touch it, too. She laughed. She was so beautiful!" Ingravallo took this, grimly. "I don't want it in the family any more, that opal. It looks like it's bringing bad luck to all of us. No, enough; I don't want it. By now Ceccher-elli's finished his work. The opal—no, it doesn't exist anymore! (And we both had to touch wood again.)