Carlo Gadda - That Awful Mess on the via Merulana

With all these logistics Doctor Fumi had rather lost sight of the gypsy, the bride of the Turin industrialist. The bloodhounds seemed to sink deeper into the mud.

"Tell us about these earrings."

"I didn't see them. But everybody knows about them: two long earrings, like a real lady's." And she repeated, in an obstinate singsong: "her fiance gave them to her, a businessman from Turin: he buys and sells cars: how can I make it any clearer than that?"

"Just skip the clear and the dark. . clarity is our worry," Doctor Fumi scolded her, his eyes now sleepy in their wrath. Who was she? Yes, this witch, this gypsy. . Where did she live? What was her address? "Her address. ." Ines hesitated again. Well, she must have lived somewhere around Pavona: that's what la Mattonari had told her. And that's what everybody said, at I Due Santi. "That girl's lucky: Rome is where girls get ruined: and instead she even got herself a dowry, that's what. And now, whenever she gets the notion, she can marry herself a real gent."

The officials, Doctor Fumi, Ingravallo, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, the corporal exchanged glances. Grabber, perceptive young man that he was, read in those glances a thought: "This girl's trying to screw us. She thinks she's stealing candy from a baby."

Ingravallo seemed tired, upset, annoyed: then absorbed behind a chain of thoughts. Strange analogies, Grabber suspected, unknown to the others, were at work in that brain. There was no apparent connection, but who knows that one didn't exist, who knows but what Ingravallo would guess it, black and silent in his reflecting; there was no trail from the aproned delivery boy, to the thief in overalls, to the unknown murderer, to the big eyes of the gypsy.

"And what about the boy?"

"What boy?"

"Your boy friend, that guappo, that little crook: what do you want me to call him?" Doctor Fumi seemed to encourage her, to invite her to see reason, to speak. Then Ines took fright: she seemed tired, all of a sudden, in her filthy attraction: she seemed to withdraw in shame, to cloak her suffering: with sunken, hollow eyes, her white brow swathed in sadness under that blond hair, so hard, hardened with a bit of dried rain and crassament desiccated in the dust (that hair, all of them thought, from which a green celluloid comb would have extracted gold in the sun), with her lips a bit swollen and as if still chapped, by every gust of March wind.

"His name is Diomede, my boy friend. But I don't know where he lives. He's always moving around."

"Moving around how?" He moved around in the two best senses of the word: often changing his room or rather lair or cot: and strolling idly about Rome from morning to evening: looking for you never know what. The last time, she had run into him at the Tunnel of Via Nazionale. He lived here for a while, then there. But he wouldn't tell her where he was staying. On a couch at some relative's: in a room rented from a seamstress. In the empty bed of an uncle who had died, a couple of weeks ago. . that is, the uncle of a friend of his, who had lost his uncle. And when he couldn't manage any more, couldn't pay up, then he had to get a change of air, you see?

"Obviously," Doctor Fumi concurred in a low voice. And he wandered around the city with no particular place to go, or else with slow and perhaps meditated itineraries: he shifted softly from one neighborhood to another: Monti at ten, Trastevere at four, at Piazza Colonna or Piazza Esedra with the lights and the red-green reclame of the evening, the night. The residential districts? Yes.

"He also used to work Via Veneto, Via Ludovisi every now and then, where it's a little darker, because of the women."

The girl blushed, raised her head, and her voice became spiteful, irked. "He went out walking, walking: he had to have his shoes resoled every month: he walked, and disappeared, and you never knew where he had gone."

Either to cultivate his beauties, or to escape his beauties: certain beauties, at least so it seemed to Ingravallo, looking for him, eager to find him, to catch him, with long, examining looks beyond the flow of the cars, from one sidewalk to the other, or along the sidewalk crowded with tables and chairs, with ladies and gentlemen drinking or in the process of sucking, in cautious, disinterested sips, the pallid fistulas.

"They'd go to the end of the earth to hunt for him," she stated: her eyes steady, calm.

"He too! He, too!" Ingravallo's feelings ached. "In the roster of the fortunate and the happy, even he!" His face became grim. "He, too, persecuted by women!"

"So he kind of wanders around, you know what I mean. ." and, after some hesitation and with a certain amount of emotion in her tone: "so all those women looking for him won't find him at home, so he doesn't have to trip over some girl every step he takes."

With one hand she threw back the evil mop: she was silent.

"I understand," Doctor Fumi resumed. "Now, tell me: what's he like, what kind of a face does he have, this Diomede? By the way, is Diomede his first name or his last name?"

"His last name?" Ines lowered her eyes: she blushed, to gain time, to fabricate her seventy-third lie.

"His last name," Ingravallo followed up. "Yes, we may need him."

"To learn a few things from him, too," Doctor Fumi added.

"Well, he didn't want to tell me his last name."

"But he finally did tell you, though," Ingravallo insisted. "Out with his last name."

"Listen to me, girlie. The bunch of us, here. . it's best for you… we need his help."

"But officer, sir, how can you need a boy like him? He's never done any harm to anybody."

"He has to you!. . Seeing as how the vice squad has run you in."

"Well, I mean, that's between me and him: the police haven't got anything to do with that: it's our business."

"Aha, so the police have nothing to do with it, eh? Honey, you're not talking sense. We're the ones who know what the police have to do or not."

"He hasn't done anything."

"Well, then tell us his name."

"And I don't feel like I've done anything wrong, either": her eyes became damp: "Let me go, too."

"Diomede, eh. ." and Doctor Fumi's gaze had the unswerving quality of a request to see identification papers, urgently.

"Well, they told me his name was Diomede.. Lanciani, Diomede." And she burst into a sort of stifled, soft weeping.

"Don't you worry your head. We want to get hold of him because he has to tell us. . something: something interesting. That's why we have to find him."

"Hurry up now. What sort of a mug does this Lanciani have?" Ingravallo insisted, hard. "Is he big? little? blond? does he have dark hair?"

Torn between distrust and pride, Ines dried her eyes with the back of her hand. "This Lanciani's an electrician," she said proudly: and took to sketching his likeness. Her voice, after pauses of fear and suspicion and admissions filled with belated caution, became animated to the point of a heedless gaiety, almost joy. She resented Ingravallo's choice of words. "If you want to know about this mug," she resumed, turning to Fumi as to the more benign of her two principal inquisitors, "there's more than one boy who'd be glad to have it, that mug; believe me, sir, chief, that you wouldn't mind having it yourself, a face like that." "Sure, sure." "A boy this tall": and she made the usual gesture, raising and extending horizontally her hand. She bent her head to one side, the better to glance at her palm, to evaluate, from below, the accuracy of that indication of height. "A handsome boy. Yes, he's handsome. So what? Is that against the law? He's smart, too. Yes, blond. It's not his fault if his Mamma made him a blond. Eh? Was she supposed to make him dark, when she felt like making him blond?" In her bag she even had his picture. Paolillo went straight off to the storeroom to dig out, from those rags, that miserable little purse: the identification card of the poor girl, which she had refused to the patrol when she was picked up, was already on Doctor Fumi's desk and under the light, open, crumpled. Paolillo returned, with the vagabond's purse and, in his other hand, the photograph of a young man painfully autographed crosswise with a scrawled signature: "Lumiai Dio. ." he spelled out, as he walked, and he was about to hold it out. "Hand it over." Doctor Fumi tore it from his hand. "Lunci-a-ci Di-o. . God only knows what he's written here. Diomede!" he exclaimed, victorious. A character! A face of the kind that the bimonthly "The Defense of the Race," {42}fifteen years later, would have published as an example of splendid Aryanism: the Aryanism of the Latin and Sabellian peoples. As an exact copy, yes. He was blond, certainly: the photo asserted that: a virile face, a clump of hair. The mouth, a straight line. Above the life of the cheeks and the neck two steady, mocking eyes: which promised the best, to girls, to maidservants, and the worst to their dejarred savings. A bold sort, made to be surrounded and fought over, followed and overtaken, and then given presents more or less by all the girls, according to the possibilities of each. A type to represent Latium and its handsomeness at the Foro Italico. {43}