That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  "How should I know? Why should I recognize it?" she shrugged.

  "Your cousin Mattonari Lavinia states . . . that she was lent it by you."

  "No, no, she's a big liar. I don't have anything to do with it."

  "That she picked it out," he improvised, "from the others that you have."

  "That liar! The nerve! She probably got it from her boy friend. I've never had a ring like this in my life . .."

  "Like this! You mean, however, that you have others, or some others, different from this one. I want to see them. Show me where they are. And who is your boy friend?" but he neglected to linger on that quite ordinary image of the boy friend, completely gripped, now, by the idea that the fat girl was lying to him, that an almond or two, in some hole, she kept hidden. "And, while we're about it, why didn't you go to work this morning?" The girl, lips white, with the gesture of a robot, raised the pin with its double skin, and with eyes avoiding the corporal's glance, as if to say: "through the fault, or merit, of this here."

  "Yes, I see that you've got that flag in your hand: but . . . are you the signal-man? Is that what you're trying to make me believe?"

  "No, my uncle had to go down to Ciampino, to the office. He's the chief here. But when he has to go someplace, then I stay here for him."

  Chief, in her lexicon, meant signal-man.

  "Let me have a look at the other rings, if there are any: at your corals: all the jewelry you have: your Sunday earrings."

  "Jewelry? I don't have any corals, not even earrings. What do you think? Poor as we are, hungry all the year round?"

  "Your uncle is a government employee: you work as a seamstress, when you work. Let's not waste any time. Show me what you have. If the stuff is yours, nobody's going to touch it. And if it isn't, I have a search warrant. And if we start searching and then something funny turns up . . . Seek and ye shall find: and if you find, you have to report to the superiors. I hope I'm making myself clear. I don't know if you know the regulations . . ."

  "What regulations? I don't know what you mean . . ."

  "The re-gu-la-tions," he shouted, "the law! what the law says!"

  "Sorry, Corporal, I don't follow you."

  "There's a law, right? And a list of regulations, where it tells us what to do, how we're supposed to proceed. We . . . have to obey the regulations. So watch out. Don't force me to search the house," which was, really, no more than a cabin, "or the room where you keep the stuff . . . your things. It would be an aggravating circumstance for you: Article 788": (788 my ass: he invented it on the spot): "the article is clear as a bell." The girl peered at him, now that she was a little more self-confident in answering, her big tan eyes set in the pork fat of her eyelids, with the miserly hesitation of the peasant who demurs at opening her mouth, between fear and suspicion. The old woman had acted as if she had things to do in the garden: and had gone down there with a little hoe which was heard intermittently striking the ground. The dog, its snarling passed, still stared fiercely, with that zeal peculiar to the stupid.

  "If we have to do the searching," Pestalozzi added again, "it'll be worse for you. I told you. Seek and ye shall find. You understand me?" The squat girl, as if the corporal had pointed a pistol in her face, shook herself and turned, walked away like a somnambulist, went into the house—or cabin, as may be. The two men followed her. From that telephone booth-cum-kitchen which was the ground-floor room, they went up, on steps of gray peperino, to the floor above, into a smaller room, irregular, as required by the stair well. It was occupied by three beds, and ill-furnished for the rest. Pestalozzi and Cocullo, after the girl, could barely squeeze into it. A smell of clothing, if you call clothing the lipoids, the amino acids, the urea, the sweat, in short, in which the clothing of the poor is steeped: a window with a grille and mosquito net: no furniture, beyond the three beds, which seemed three pallets for dogs, and a minimal little cupboard with a scalene fragment on it, of a mirror long since broken forever. On the wall, over one of the little beds, with a little olive branch with shriveled leaves, in its dark frame, a two-lira oleograph, yellowed at the edges, which Pestalozzi recognized on the spot. It was the Madonna del Divino Amore, over the postern of Castel di Leva, who had appeared to the tormented man lost in the night, pursued by ferocious, barking dogs who were about to claw and tear him apart, but who at the sight of Her fell back: and the fence enclosed him.

  The cupboard, half-wardrobe and half-dresser, emerged from beyond the third bed, between the edge of the mattress not of sweet-smelling corn husks, but responsible—with the other two—for that so "human" sultriness, and the recently whitewashed wall. It looked as if it received, collectively, those futile items, those tangles of yarn, those odd buttons, those lozenge-shaped rags, of which the good women of the campagna and of every other part of the fatal peninsula are cautious collectors, fussy savers towards the improbable needs of a tomorrow where neither yarn nor string is, since there will be nothing to bundle up. Pestalozzi glanced at it, the humble item of furniture, but without special interest. "Well then?"

  "There," murmured the potato: more with a jerk of the head, since she had little chin, than with a movement of the lips, motioning below the bed, the second one. Moving around it, they discovered and, moments later, brought up a coffer: a little wooden box, bound with dark tin at the edges. The girl armed herself with a key, produced as if by magic, then crouched to reach the chest with both hands, from under the bed. Her face and the full part of her bust lay slightly over the tan blankets: she groped like a blind woman, and a knowing one, gazing straight ahead until she had mastered the removal of the parallelepiped, then as if guessing rags, at random with the divining gestures of a blind musician gifted at striking on the piano the right keys, to erogate from the keyboard the pathetic squadrons of his blindnesses. She took out the chest, opened it. "Go ahead and search, Corporal: there's nothing there." And then, since the corporal didn't move, displaying in his face how much the goatish hovel already disappointed him, and how much his nose was repelled by it, she raised the lid, scraped up a blouse or two, a shawl, some black stockings with white heels, a cardboard box, a man's shirt, the best one. "And the ring? Where is your ring?" Annoyed by the chief deduction of the corporal: "you mean to say you have another one": she opened the little bicarbonate box under his nose: raised from it, as from a nest of cotton batting, a poor little chain that seemed of gold, with a light cross which also seemed gold: a brooch with a fake coral, another metal pin with an enamel four-leaf clover.

  The corporal took the chain with two fingers, spread the others to hold it out, and let the cross dangle: then the green-enamel pin, as you pick from the hawthorn hedge a butterfly resting with its wings closed, to restore it to its flight. "You mean to say you have another one." She had told him no. Now she didn't consider it licit to contradict herself, or in any way to recede from that negative stand. The oily, motionless, stubbornly statuary quality of her physiognomic attributes helped her meanwhile to leave her tongue in repose. Pallor, suet, and potatoship, those two buttons were stuck in it as if into a mound of dough, two round cheeks which looked as if they'd been hit by a good pair of slaps, all her best features, in other words, allowed her to stand there silent and mindless without a word: simulating only an apprehension which, perhaps, disturbed her but slightly. The corporal had eyed the cupboard. He was about to say to her: "turn over the mattresses! let me see under the mattresses! And instead he navigated about the beds and came, after his not-easy periplus, to take his stand between the last bed and the wall, in an attitude as if he were going to interrogate the bedside table. He pulled at its door, noticed that it was provided with a lock, an incredible thing for a night-table: it was a sui generis commode. He asked for its key. The Signorina Mattonari looked under a mattress, found it: she opened the cupboard with a greasy sadness in her face, like a loyal citizen harassed by abuse of authority. Rags again, woman's stuff, a waistcoat, a pair of worn pants spilled down onto the floor, for the disappointed knowledge of the no
ncom: they had been placed in there all anyhow, pressed in at random. He picked up with one hand a knitted bodice, a rabbit's skin, a pale blue undershirt with lysol-whitened zones. Two or three walnuts rolled out. Then, from the rags, there emerged, all decked with worn socks, a chamber pot. Filled with walnuts, and with more than one dent in its enameled convexity, one saw at once that it wasn't a piece of Capodimonte, nor even a Ginori. "Ah Gesù, my grandmother's walnuts!" la Mattonari cried, as if to bestow value, in an expression of possessive anguish, on this treasure: which the autumn had deposited in the capaciousness of the vessel, en passant: pilgrim who pays without farewell, before dawn, the debt of the hospitality benignly received. And she started, at the side of the standing corporal, to bend over and take up the recipient and to remove it, animated—so it seemed—by the best of intentions. She meant, with that gesture, to smooth the path for the Requisition, for the Aggravation, for the hard Cross, the Law. But the bloodhound's evil phlegm had already scented the Hiding Place. "Stop! You take it!" he ordered Cocullo. The girl stood up. The trusty Farafilio bent down. He introduced both hands into the cabinet: to seize, with the one, the brimming chamber pot by the handle, to press it respectfully from the opposite side with the palm of the other, as if caressing its kindliness, so rotund on the opposite and non-handled hemisphere. And he extracted it from the tabernacle (and it was heavy as it rarely had been) in the position proper to the user, or even to the owner, who prepares at night to employ it for its lower purpose. An eighth, a ninth walnut rolled out. Too scarce, then, for the almost boyish opulence of the brave soldier, the olive-drab tunic freed for public view his posterior rotundities, properly covered with cloth of the same color. Emphasized by the crouching position, they seemed to emulate and to surpass completely the smooth rotundities of the pot, as if a pump had swollen them, the kind on a tripod, that bicycle mechanics have. The incredible fullness was about to burst—so it appeared—the median rear seam of the trousers: which seemed, instead, only to loosen, in the taut zigzag of a line of reluctant thread, of a blue-green color, darker than the green of the cloth. The seam being pressed beyond its capacity, the breaking point was not reached. A sharp shot re-echoed in the room instead. No: it wasn't a revolver's bullet. Farafilio, poor boy, very probably blushed, with that patchy manner of blushing that he had, in his good, but severe face. Crouched as he was, his face against the commode and the pot in his arms, the purple did not spread. The humble duty had expressed itself: that was all: certain postures favor certain nomenclatures, as if eliciting the sound from the very sources of the same. The girl remained silent, amorphous. The corporal's brow became clouded: in the silence. Brimming, meanwhile, and heavy with every most dried gift of Vertumnus, the lousy pot was elevated to the honors of the top (of the commode), whence the gleaming fragment of mirror had been slightly removed. The maneuverer stood up, without turning around. "Dope! empty it on the bed!" the corporal said, harshly. The maneuverer obeyed. In his half-turn, the visible side of his face was shown papered with alternating zones, islands of flush and pallor: the flush a bishop color, the pallor the color of cheese. He also proved to possess, to an eminent degree, that property of the good, the generous, the honest: the faculty of blushing all the way down the neck. He set slowly, then quickly overturned the vessel where he had been told: with his hands then, all around, diligently confining. Of that treasure of nuts, the silliest, not yet unleashed, would have jumped down with multiple hops and cretinous festive rolls, going to earth, one here, one there, in God knows what corners under the beds: had it not, in fact, been for the hole, that is to say the imprint of the body in the bed itself. But they were screwed. All together, they fell into it, as into a casserole, making a neat pile. On the peak of which there was a little paper packet. Of blue wrapping paper, as if from the grocer's. Sugar, probably: a secret store of granny's. Moving from the other side of the bed, with impatient fingering, the corporal unwrapped it himself, that little packet. There appeared, then, a tiny sack of rough canvas: not swollen, and yet heavy and variously nutted at the bottom, in which there was merchandise: hazelnuts perhaps? or a little collection of buttons? or a rosary? choked, towards the mouth, by the tight turns of some string, then knots and double knots. Pestalozzi felt it. His face became illuminated: by the dawn of "this is it." The punishment that he had mentally comminated to his pupil evaporated from his thoughts. Half a lip curled, upwards, in a grimace of contempt: as if to render more explicit the features of irony: of his irony. The tangle of the many knots was untangled by persistent use of nails: the tightness of the twists of string loosened to clear the path: from the undone sack, overturned, in turn, with every precaution, but on the grandmother's bed, the middle one, there land-slided down, as if comforting one another in this unexpected exit and fall, little green balls, medals, brooches and carnelians, gold bangles, chains, crosses, filagree necklaces, tangled one in the other, and rings and corals: rings distinguished by rare stones, or shining with a single gem, or with two of different colors, before the open mouth of Cocullo, to the pounding of the corporal's heart: who could already feel the new chevrons climbing up his sleeve, to replace those now there. Sergeant's chevrons, this time. The objects froze, like little frightened animals, ladybirds who fold their wings, not to be seen, in the wretched lap of poverty; and instead, they were seen: they were seen as so many unmasked lies, recognized by the jeweler with the hooked nose, on the counter, after theft and recovery: of every most curious color and every form: a little cross of some semiprecious dark-green stone, which the fingertips of the future sergeant could not stop savoring, turning over and over: a handsome, shining little green-black cylinder, for interpreting horoscopes by the shitty priests for Egypt more than Pythagoras drew ravings from the apothegm of the pentagon, standing towards the west to blather, to gaze at the tops of their baked pyramids: mysteriosophic candy, concealed in the ancient womb of the earth, seized from the earth's womb, one day geometrized to magic. A poor little egg between pale-blue and milk-white like a little gland of a dead pigeon, to be thrown in the refuse: and two earrings, with two big drops a sky-blue, isosceles triangles, rounded at the tops, dangling and weighted, with a marvelous felicity-facility, for the lobes of a boobified laughing girl dressed in blue: who in one of their almost transparent striations laughed enriched, as if by wisps of gold enclosed there, to freeze. And a heavy ring, a gold-bound cylinder which had circled the thumb of Ahenobar-bus or the big toe of Heliogabalus, with a big caramel orange-green, then a moment later, lemon-color: pierced by all the rays, slightly, of the equinoctial morning as the tender flesh of the martyr by his hundred and ninety arrows: perfused by pale-green lights, like the sea at dawn, to the brightness of flint: which made the two men dream at once, spellbound, of a mint syrup with soda in Piazza Garibaldi at noon. And a little ring of golden thread, with a red pomegranate seed that a chicken might peck: and a final bangle, a tiny bauble, like a little ball of methylene bluing to get the yellow out of the wash, held by a little gold cap and by a pimple: and through this, attachable, by a golden link-chain, to another and equally essential organ of adornment, whether to the swelling beauty of a breast, or even the male fold of a lapel or the paunched and gold-watched authority of the protector of this breast, administrator, moderator and, in the last analysis, husband, "and damn fool!" thought Pestalozzi, his teeth clenched. A garnet cross, dark red moments of domestic shade. Rings, brooches: unbelieved marvel. And the ruby and the emerald shone and lay in the trench of the little mouse-skin bed, fellow tenants of the moment with the verecond ambages of the pearl, on the worn and almost ragged tegument of that old woman's couch: amid the precious gleam and the twists or polygons of the gold objects that kindled the minds, after the pupils and the retinas. Pins and earrings were tangled in the little chains, or mixed up with one another, like twin cherries amid the twinned stems of their sisterly couples: the pendants, in the immediate cataract, had taken the rings with them. Ruby and emerald took on a name and a body on the gray poverty of the cloth, o
r of the tatter, in the closed mute splendor innate in certain beings and signifying their rarity, their natural and intrinsic dignity: that mineralogical virtue which through false fanfares and winks is trumpeted so often, in trumpeting carnivals, by so many bits of bottle-bottoms, as, in said derrieres, the quality is totally lacking. The corundum, pleochroic crystals, revealed itself as such on the rat-gray of the ambience, come from Ceylon or from Burma, or from Siam, noble in its structural accepting—splendid green or splendid red, or night-blue, also—of the crystallographic suggestion of God: memory, every gem, and individual opus within the remote memory and within the labors of God: true sesquioxide A2O3 truly spaced in the ditrigonal scalenohedral modes of its class, premediated by God: despite the value-work of the Gadfly.{66} Gadfly di Revello who was to last in his chair for an hour, chief economist of the Turkey and cock-minister of his screwed nonfinances: which, at a wink from the Big Cheese himself would have revealed to the Italians the new heaven of the flaskable values, substituting in the zodiacal band of credit and monetary circulation, for the gold standard which then went to Hell to be liquified, the scorpion of humbug which we'll never be rid of again. And the Italiener from that fiasco-flask, drank greedily in big gulps.