That Awful Mess On The Via Merulana

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  *** *** ***

  A few curious faces, of two or three loafers with their hands in their pockets, and with three gaping mouths under the black questioning of their eyes, received and then surrounded, at Marino, the car "of the Roman police" when it honked twice, poh! poh! before the main gate of the fort. In the frame of a window, on high, behind a rusty grating, the face of a young man appeared, with two stars on his gray canvas collar, one here and one there. He vanished. A few minutes: and the gates opened. The willing and bumpy car, after some great pushing and reversing and turns forward, with several jolts and starts which one wouldn't have hoped for, even from her, finally drove through that arch of triumph, which it had devoured the countryside to gain. And it had been, the road to the fort, a narrow, climbing road, all compact cobbles, between spurred walls which retained the shadow patched with lichens, on the old peperino, of strange pools and cockades, blue-green, yellow. The cobbles slippery. A slab at the corner: Via Massimo d'Azeglio. Ingravallo got out of the car, imitated by his followers. The sentry said: "The sergeant is out on a search party; the corporal was sent to I Due Santi, on that crime business." Meanwhile another soldier appeared. Higher in rank, or older, after a not prompt and rather soft clicking of heels (these gentlemen were from the police) and a raising of the head which announced more explicitly and more elegantly that he had come to attention, he handed Ingravallo a bluish envelope which, on being torn open, produced a sheet of paper,

  folded over twice. Santarella, therein, communicated that he had sent Pestalozzi to la Pacori, accompanied by a soldier, for further checking; he, with another man, was out to follow the tracks of the fugitive Enea, alias Iginio, which was how they called Retalli. He had some hopes of overtaking him, that is to say, of catching him and of handcuffing him, to bring him, handcuffed, to the barracks: not however, a certainty. Ingravallo, more than a little cross, took off his hat, to allow his head to get a bit of air, clenched his teeth: two hard knobs on the two jaws, halfway from the ears, gave him, under his black mop a kind of bulldog's muzzle, already illustrated on more than one occasion. The two carabinieri were not the least impressed. The carabinieri, in peace time, and nuns, at all times, know how to draw from their respective disciplines that durable steadiness which indemnifies them to the jolt of current events, if not even to the quakes of history, for which events or history, however, it may turn out, they give as much as any history merits: that is, not to damn. "Do you know whether Crocchiapani Assunta," Ingravallo asked, "about whom I sent a communication on the twentieth, has already been questioned at her home?" "No, sir."

  "And why not? Do you know where she is? I mean, do you know the locality?"

  "Tor di Gheppio, the sergeant said."

  "How long does it take to get there?"

  "With a car, sir, about forty minutes . . . even less . . ."

  "Well, we'll start there then. Let's go."

  The noncom sent for some character, who was supposed

  to be familiar with that zone: a thin little man, dressed in black as Ingravallo was. They welcomed him aboard. To get the car out of the courtyard, ass frontwards, along a narrow curve and uphill, to thread it into the d'Azeglio toboggan in a forward gear, took a number of pushes in the direction opposite to that previously described. Ingravallo, blackly, continued to clench his jaws: his teeth creaked. He was mentally cursing the tires, the springs, the Fascists. If he had a flat, wouldn't he look a fool? with this new man in the car. The whole legion would laugh for thirty years. The automobile of the Rome Police: with a hernia-ed tire that goes plof, at the climax, and it's only luck if the car hasn't driven off a bridge. But the car went: it would go. It sped against the wind, with rare seeds of rain on the windows: with unforeseen jolts at certain recesses, certain bumps not yet reported by the Touring Club. Olive trees, and their fronds of ashen silver, were still not much shaken: beaded by the night's rain, or dried at the first sun, they spoke of the clear continuity of the year already adolescent, already tormented into Aries, smelling a bit of manure in the vineyards, in the brown earth of the hummocks, the slopes. A cloud passed over the grain or the fields, barely grassy: and an immediate fear gripped them, as if they were to be spent again, in winter: to that shadow, swift and yet feared, they seemed to adapt themselves helplessly, to freeze, despairing. But the wing of the sirocco, quite to the contrary, tawny and tepid, in the pale humidity of the day: more than a calf's breath in the stable. The weather, muggy, gave the augury of grain, of the battle of grain{76} and of corn and of the rearings of the Jack-ass it cared little. A late-March frost, Ingravallo thought, could upset, God unwilling, the presage: the eighty million quintals were to come down to thirty-eight. The Autarch Jawbone, for his forty-four million . . . subjects, yes, fine subjects too, had to load on grain in Toronto, where there were French become English in Canada, beg maccheroni from the redskins. And Ingravallo clenched and creaked, from rage and satisfaction joined together. They went down to Torraccio, where the sirocco, dying, became warmer: or so it seemed. They turned on to the Appia at I Due Santi, having to travel over it, retracing their steps, for a good half-mile, towards Rome, that is, to the turn-off for Falcognana. After a short stretch of this road, they encountered the Anzio road, and turned off again. The wind dropped. With the Guzzi motorbike of Sergeant Santarella and the motorized Pestalozzi, the carabiniere had suggested that a meeting was not improbable, or even almost certain: but they didn't meet at all. An ass, on the other hand, loaded with wood, and with the respective peasant on his back, one hand clutching the tail: or a little flock of about fifteen sheep, the shepherd with his green umbrella, shut: no, no dog, they cost too much. A buggy: "the vet from Albano," the little man informed. He drove calmly, ruddy, a cigar butt spent in his lips, with threadbare gloves. After a little more than a mile and a half on the Anzio road, they had to take a right: "this way, this way, towards Santa Fumia," their guest said. Over the Santa Fumia bridge towards Tor di Gheppio and then towards Casal Bruciato. The muddy little road went downhill, then hardened: the tracks dilated into puddles, brimming, against the light, with livid water, molten blue-silver lead, where the wing of a dab-chick was seen, black, or of a scattered jay. It seemed that, a little later, they had to become lost in the lands, in the mire. They crossed instead the tracks (of the Velletri line) at a level, similar to the one a mile to the north, near the Divino Amore bridge. Blades of grass, between the two tracks, rose here and there from the breach, between one tie and the next (of oak), as if the line were of no further use, after having been used, for one year, by Pius the Ninth. Strands of smoke lay still in midair, motionless, clotted there by magic: remains of a barely dissolved apparition: white, like cotton batting, or of an unreal white, like steam. The smoked outline of the little train was diminishing at that moment towards a distant arch: it accredited in itself, in its vanishing, the perspective flight of the two converging rails: and it resembled the Prince of Darkness, and the cabin of the last car, the rail, when it is freed from the enchantress and disappears with a hiss through its portals, under the black vaulted arch, into the mountain; and in the silence of the countryside and in the mute stupefaction of all things, at a goat's hoof-print that has remained to seal the mire and a wisp of sulphur in the air. "Tor di Gheppio's over there," the willing little man said, pointing, "towards the palace farm. Crocchiapani lives there, in one of those houses you can see, the little bunch on the left." Emerging then from the undulations of that clay bare of trees, which the fallow land made green in patches, a tower's pointed tip stood out against the sky, like a shard, an ancient tooth of an ancient jaw of the world. The houses of the living, mute in the distance of the cultivated land, stood before it: but a little more in this direction. They drove down.

  "Pavona? The station?" Ingravallo asked.

  "The town of Pavona is there," the guest pointed again: "down there, see? That's the station. If you cross the fields it's maybe twenty-five minutes: if you walk fast. But we'd get all wet."

  "And the Rome-Nap
les line?"

  "There," and he turned: "it's two, maybe even three miles: you just keep going straight, with the car. On our way back, then, if you have to go to Pavona, after Tor di Gheppio, then we could do down to Casal Bruciato, and take the Ardeatina there. If we go off in that direction, towards Ardea, right away, hardly more than a mile, we get to Santa Palomba—where those antennas are over there (he pointed them out), you can see them everywhere, even from Marino. There, if you want, you cross the road to Solforata and Pratica di Mare: so, for Palazzo, we can come straight up to Pavona. The whole thing, from Casal Bruciato, is maybe four and a half, five miles, maybe not even. With the car, maybe fifteen minutes." "All right," said Ingravallo, in whom all this toponymy had produced more clenching of the jaws: "now we'll go to Tor di Gheppio." They set off, they went: to the spot where the little man said, after spurts of water and various jolts, they got out. They left the car with the driver, who also got out and went off to one side for a moment, on his own. They started walking along the path which proceeded straight and not excessively muddily towards the three houses. They proceeded in so-called Indian file, one after the other, Private First-Class Runzato first of all, then Di Pietrantonio, then Don Ciccio with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat: and they looked like a school of grave-diggers, all so black in the clear, open day, as if they were going to pick up the deceased: and with some reluctance, too. "La Crocchiapani, that stupid girl, has already heard us coming," thought Ingravallo, "and she's peeking at us, for sure." In fact, as they were later to ascertain, she was observing them from the window, behind the almost-closed shutters, where the sound of the car had led her to station herself. When Ingravallo raised his face and Runzato whistled, then shouted: "Police! Let us in! Open the door!" the house, the first and the smallest, had a policeman at every corner. Kids, chickens, two women, two mongrel dogs with tails curled up like a bishop's crook, revealing all their beauty: couldn't stop looking, barking. Gleaming, black eyes, stunned in the wonder of the faces, and the almost tattered poverty of the clothes. "Who's here?" Di Pietrantonio prudently asked: "How many people? Are there any menfolk?" "There's a girl, with her father," said the nearer of the peasant women, who had come closer, as if to save their children, or a hen more in danger. This house, of Tina Crocchiapani's, was a little square, slightly separated from the flock: a little, closed door with the number 3, on the ground floor. Before the threshold some slabs of stone, rather hollowed by footsteps, and shoes, and nails. No voice, within. Opaque, somnolent years, after the pink of the inaugural wash, had given the walls a faded squalor, and, on the side toward the north wind a dark rust, shadows: which was the corner to which these gentlemen had come first. At the eaves there was no pipe nor any wooden apparatus, known as gableboard: so that the roof tiles, along the edge, seemed to Don Ciccio, stumps, or depicted in cross-section, they made a sort of wavy pleating along the margin of the roof, a rustic ornate. A few blades of grass from the earth deposited here and there on the tiles, under the wind's auspices. An occasional drop fell, radiating, once detached from the tiles that had become black with the years; and dropped heavily, as if it were of mercury, to wound again, to penetrate, all around, the dampened compactness of the earth. A window was opened, then shut: the maddened hens cluck-clucked. Too yielding the roof's slopes, or too shapeless, they seemed to descend in waves, they had been softened by the rains and then baked again and as if swollen in the heat: they charged their masons with lack of skill in their art: or else, in the garret the tree trunk which served as a beam was twisted. One would think that, under the earthy insistence of that covering, all the rotten apparatus, one fine day, would give way and fall and crash in a ruin: or the whole roof fly away, rather, at a gust of strong wind, like a rag, no sooner than the squall hit it. The wooden shutters, at the windows, one closing, one slamming: without paint of any kind and already putrid or splintered in the weather, in the steady evaporation of the years. Instead of glass, greased paper, on a frame, or a rusty piece of corrugated iron.

  The little door opened a crack. When it was completely open Ingravallo found himself facing ... a face, a pair of eyes! gleaming in the penumbra: Tina Crocchiapani! "Her! Her!" he meditated, not without a composite beating of the heart: the stupendous maidservant of the Balduccis, with black gleams under her coal-black lashes, where the Alban light became tangled, broke, iridescent (the white tablecloth, the spinach) from the black hair gathered on her forehead, like the work of Sanzio, from the blue— dangling from lobes and on the cheeks—earrings: with that bosom! which Foscolo would have certified as a brimming bosom, in a troubadoric-mandrillian access, of the kind that have made him immortal in Brianza. At supper with the Balduccis, at Signora Liliana's! The field of the black and silent goddess, for her, who had been so cruelly separated from all things, from the lights and phenomena of the world! And she, she was the one, the one (the pathway of time became confused and lost) who had presented the filled and badly tilted oval of the plate, a whole leg, all the kidneyed syncretism of a dish of kid, or of lamb, in pieces as it was, had allowed to roll out, on the whiteness amid the silver and the crystal, of a goblet, or no, of a glass, the tuft of spinach: receiving, from Signora Liliana, that heartbroken reproof of a glance, and a name: "Assunta!" Tina, with her face, as in other times, severe, a little pale, but with an inflection of dismay in her eyes, looked at him nonetheless proudly, and he thought she recovered herself: two dark flashes, her pupils, again, bright in the shadow, in the odor of the closed entranceway to the house. "Doctor," she said, with an effort: and was about to add something else. But Di Pietrantonio alarmed her, even though she had already noted him from the window, after the policeman who seemed to be leading the whole row of overcoats. Tall, and wordless, police-like in his moustache, was he not the punishment feared? comminated by the law? But for what guilt, for what crime, she argued to herself, officially, could they punish her? For having solicited too many gifts, for having received them, from Signora Liliana?

  "Officer Ingravallo, sir, what is it?"

  "Who lives here, in your house?" Ingravallo asked her, harsh: harsh as he was required to be, at that moment, his "other" soul: to which Liliana seemed to address herself, calling to him desperately, from her sea of shadows: with her weary, whitened face, her eye dilated in terror, still, forever, on the atrocious flashes of the knife. "Let me in; I have to see who's here."

  "There's my father, sir; who's sick; he's bad off, poor soul!" and she was slightly breathless, in disdain, very beautiful, pallid. "He's going to die on me any minute."

  "And then, besides your father, who is there?"

  "Nobody, Signor Incravalli: who could there be? You tell me, if you know. There's a woman, a neighbor, from Tor di Gheppio, who helps me take care of the sick man . . . and maybe some other neighbor woman, you may have seen outside."

  "Who is this one? What's her name?"

  Tina thought a little. "She's Veronica. Migliarini. Hereabouts we call her la Veronica."

  "Let me in anyway. Come on. Let's go. I have to search the house." And he examined her face, with the steady, cruel eye of one who wants to unmask deceit. "Search?":

  Tina frowned: wrath whitened her eyes, her face, as if at an unforeseen outrage. "Yeah, search, that's what I said." And thrusting her aside, he came into the darkness toward the little wooden stairway. The girl followed him. Di Pietrantonio after her. It occurred to him, then and there, that Liliana's murderer, in addition to having received from Tina information which was useful to him "or rather indispensable: did I say useful?" could have also entrusted the jewels to her: . . . "to his fiancee?" They went upstairs. The steps creaked. All around, outside, the house was observed: three policemen, not counting the little man who had guided them there. Those two black and furious eyes of Tina—Ingravallo felt them aimed at his nape; he felt them piercing his neck. He tried, he tried to sum up, rationally; to pull the threads, one might say, of the inert puppet of the Probable. "How was it that the girl didn't rush to Rome? Didn't she f
eel it was her duty?": this was a compulsory idea, now, in his atrociously wounded spirit: "to the funeral at least? . . . Doesn't she have any heart or soul in her, after all the kindness she received?" It was the painful bookkeeping of the humble, the ingenuous, perhaps. The horrible news, perhaps, hadn't reached Tor di Gheppio until too late, and in that solitude ... terror had paralyzed the poor girl. But no, a grown woman! And news flies, even in the jungle, in the wastelands of Africa. For a Christian heart the inspiration would have been another. Although, the father, dying . . .