Carlo Gadda - That Awful Mess on the via Merulana

It is then that the poor creature dissolves, like a flower or blossom, once vivid, now giving her petals to the wind. The sweet and weary spirit flies towards the Red Cross, in unconscious "abandoning the husband": and perhaps she abandons every man insofar as gamic element. Her personality, structurally envious of the male and only stilled by offspring, when offspring are missing, gives way to a kind of desperate jealousy and, at the same time, of forced sisterlike συμπατία in the regards of her own sex.

It gives way, one might believe, to a form of sublimited homoerotism: that is to say, to metaphysical paternity. The woman forgotten by God — and Ingravallo now was raging with grief, with bitterness — caresses and kisses in her dreams the fertile womb of her sisters. She looks, among the flowers of the garden, at the children of others: and she weeps. She turns to the nuns and the orphanages, anything to have "her" child, to "have" a baby of her own. And in the meanwhile the years call to her, from their dark cave. Enlightened charity, from one year to the next, replaces the sweet philter of love.

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Another circumstance emerged, meanwhile, from the painstaking (of course) search, ordered and carried out at the lodgings of Valdarena: who lived in Prati, in a handsome bedroom-studio in Via Nicotera: in a little villa: while, in his place and in the bed of his youth, at home, or rather at his grandmother's (Liliana's Aunt Marietta) there huddled and slept — the bedpan, but not the foot warmer, having been sent away-that old bag of bones, Aunt Romilda: widow of the unforgettable Uncle Peppe. On the marble top of the dresser, in Via Nicotera, they "discovered" a picture of Liliana: inside, in the top drawer, a man's gold ring with a diamond: and a gold watch chain, very heavy, and quite long. "This is an anchor chain," Ingravallo said, showing it to Balducci, who recognized the two objects as fomerly belonging to his wife's "treasure." Without rancor, and without any particular amazement.

The chain, at one end, terminated in the characteristic spring snap (of gold link), and at the other, in a little gold pin, cylindrical, which could be stuck in a waistcoat buttonhole: one of the nine higher of the then regulatory twelve: ad libitum. (According to the choice of buttonhole the "personality is expressed.") And then, the hook for the pendant.

Balducci noted at once that the big, swaying fob had changed stone. It was a kind of reliquary, oval: a minuscule gold-bound peace held by a golden stirrup, so that it could swing and even revolve completely under that arc, since it was pricked on either side by two little invisible pins: gold, yes: it was all gold, solid gold, 18-karat gold, handsome, red-gold, yellow-gold, on the knobby hands, on the dry bellies of their grandfathers, who today are mere worn, disgusting parchment filled with poverty and plague, or empty chatter in the wind. Lousy wind of hardship, with soap costing three hundred lire the pound. In the frame there was set a beautiful jasper, with the tegument of a little plate of gold, on the back, when you turned it in your fingers. Also elliptical in shape, it was, naturally. A blood-jasper: a dark-green stone, its color gleaming like a swamp leaf, was made for certain noble cuts, or corners, or keystones in arches, for secret throne rooms in palaces in the architecture of Melozzo or of Mantegna, or in the marble squares of Andrea del Castagno in his murals: with delicate veins of a cinnabar vermilion like stripes of coral: almost like clotted blood, within the green flesh of the dream. In what was called Gothic lettering, and intertwined and interlaced in the glyptic work the two initials: G.V. On the other face, smooth, precise, the little plate of clear gold.

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.