Carlo Gadda - That Awful Mess on the via Merulana

One day, then, stripping her bed, the maid had found a candle: a Mira-Lanza candle, those stubby ones they made then: which she must have taken from the new package in the kitchen; they were kept on hand in the cupboard, for when the lights fail, sometimes. She — with her ready tongue — said she wanted to light it to the Madonna: because she had a special intention: but she didn't have matches: she had fallen asleep with the candle in her bed. Doctor Ghianda examined the girl, made her drink citron water, which has a calming effect for certain nervous fantasies, plus a few drops, three times a day, of the anti-hysteric water of Santa Maria Novella of Bologna, which the monks make there with a filter, a specialty of theirs. (This was, afterwards, confirmed: in the Merulanian tones of Sora Pettacchioni.) In any case, to avoid misunderstandings, the Professor was called back, was asked by Liliana for advice. He frowned for a moment, looking at her with a hint of a smile, his mannerism of a severe but kindly father, his usual way with kids. He was a very distinguished pediatrician. With three fingers he toyed with his gold fob, over his waistcoat. After a moment of suspense, he relaxed his forehead, drew a deep breath, and counseled "it seems the best thing, to me," that the child be sent back to her respective parents: who, however, didn't exist, neither the one nor the other. Whereupon, after a little while, when a reasonable pretext had been hit upon, she was restored to her "uncle and aunt," comforted, in the anticipation of receiving her back, with a nice bank order, of a sea-green color, the kind that have such a psycho-tonic effect on our beloved Comit. {28}"The Banca Commerciale Italiana. . will pay… on the line, for this handsome little sea-green gent here, the sum of lire. ." And the more they are, the better it is.

Don Corpi stretched his legs, holding his hat with his forearms, like a shield over his belly, clasping the big fingers of his two hands, which sank into his lap. The second ward, already twenty or twenty-one years old, was Ines, and she, after a little while, had gone off to be married: a wedding that was all in order. She had married a fine young man from Rieti, son of property owners, a law student in his eighth year of college: the full course lasted ten. One fine day, just when Liliana's tendernesses were condensing over her head, she had suddenly come out with the information that "she wanted to follow her vocation." And she followed it: with excellent results. From the daughterly, and urban, adventure, she had extracted a bit of a dowry, had collected a hope chest: two big suitcases full of lace-edged linen. Affected, as she was, by a classic form of wifely foresightedness, not, however, of the grasping form of her predecessor, she had been able to captivate wholly the stepmotherly heart, so maternal, or so gently sister-like (Liliana was eight or nine years older than she) and had acted with stubborn assiduousness in infallible determination, minute by minute, and in the systematized premeditation of her every gesture or smile or word or whim or glance or kiss: those which distinguish the tacit will of the woman, when she has "character": a past mistress, on occasion, in prompting the thought without even giving its outline verbally: with hints, lateral tries and counter-tries, mute waiting: setting off a process of induction, like the stator of a generator: with the same technique whereby she is wont to surround and protect (and direct towards the Right) the first stumbling steps of a little one: channeling it, however, where she wants, which is where he can wee-wee in the most seemly way, and with utter relaxation.

Ines! The urban adventure! From Galilei's {29}matutinal clarities, when the Lateran office and mystery, the green gaiety of the churchyard receive within the city's walls the hick with his devout Sign of the Cross, the ass hitched up for a moment, gee! from the golden pomp, at vespers, or ruby-colored, and from the full cavate of Maderno, from whose archway the indelible hymn in praise of Mary Mother has burst into the centuries never to return; from the PV and the BM and from the ten holes in the disk of the telephone, and from the big box of the radio which she put out of commission four times, the cothurnate fore-thinker had taken home a certain brisk, cavalier manner in darning socks, that is to say, taking the hole in wide circles, with needle and thread: and then, after that rapid circumnavigation, she pulled it all together and snapped off the thread at once, with her teeth. A first-class darn! Not even Princess Clotilde herself could have done better. A swelling, a musket ball under your heel which warmed your heart, for the whole festive day. Like so many orogenic seams towards the peak of a cone-shaped mountain: from those cones that pierce the clouds, which are the socks of the Lord.

She had brought to her student-husband, in addition to serene days and nights happy in the communion of souls and tongues, she had brought him. . everything that a girl can bring in the practical and welcome line, for a student-husband: a great nonchalance in ironing pants, after having scorched six or seven pairs of Balducci's. That, we know, had been her discipline, her gradus ad Parnassum. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We learn by mistake. Trial and error.

The third, Virginia! Don Lorenzo lowered his eyes, looking at the ground, though he was a grown man; then he raised his eyes to heaven for half a second, as if to say: be still, my lips! He joined his pious hams in a brief swinging beneath his nose, before his beard: a to-and-fro in the plane of the azimuth, an Italic, decent gesture. "The less said the better!" he seemed to be pleading with Doctor Fumi. It had to be said. The two officers were waiting: Ingravallo, indeed, was on his feet, grim, nervously tapping one leg. The giant's ten huge fingers slumped in his lap, still tightly intertwined: comb and counter-comb: like an apostle of marble, the kind that stand on the balustrade over the big cornice of San Giovanni Laterano. Twenty-five pounds of finger bones, good for cracking nuts, in that black furrow of the cassock: where, in rapid succession, the black caravan of the priest's buttons descended: which had neither beginning nor end, like the catalogue of the centuries. The two shoes, at rest, shiny gravedigger color, but no more so than all the rest, priapated from beneath the garment, like two forbidden objects, camping by themselves near those of Doctor Fumi, under the rack of dossiers, among the four legs of the desk; and inside them, no doubt, two hunks of double feet like a stone Saint Christopher.

"Well, what about Virginia?" Little by little, her character emerged: her headstrong vitality, the impudent type. It turned out that the charmer had charmed two souls: in two unconnected directions. The neighbor women, indeed, said that she had put a spell on both: and some of them played the numbers on the lottery. Her provocative beauty, her health, like a coral devil inside that ivory skin, her eyes! one could really believe that she had hypnotized husband and wife: "those brash ways," that somewhat rustic air, which revealed, however, "a big, sincere heart" (Petac-chioni), or as was said, with a smile and a frown at the same time, with the professional tic of Doctor Ghianda, "a case of violent puberty." To this same Professor Ghianda, without being called upon to do so, Virginia had displayed her tongue, with a very rapid expulsion and an equally rapid return to its place, as if automatic, and with the tip pointed in a special way that was her trademark: sustaining then with the cold authority of her full face, though with a spark of malice in her eyes, his irritated, sulphurous gaze, filled with wrath and pitchy emanations. Hearing him called— she thought — piedatrician, or piediatrist, with great respect, by all the ladies of Stairway A, but even by some of B, she had believed that the distinguished man of science, whom she had seen for years going up and down the steps of the building in that mortician's overcoat to worm the kids, was, at the same time, the Monsignor's callus doctor, {30}Don Lorenzo's, that is: that this, in fact, was the basic profession of old frock-coat. An idea which, once it had entered her head, nobody had been able to drive out. The dimensions of Don Lorenzo's dogs made her certain she was in the right, believing that for such feet you'd need a piediatrist of that high rank. For the rest, my God! she had a pair of hips, two marble breasts: two teats so hard you'd need a scalpel: and with her way of shrugging all the time, so haughty, and that contempt on her lips, as if to say: shit to you! Yes, sir.