Carlo Gadda - That Awful Mess on the via Merulana

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hearts as they came out: at the sudden reappearance of the town, of the racing cloud-bank, in the sky. The devil, for the girl, had turned into a hen: the one that, in the garden, plays ignorant, and cautiously lifts its foot, then replaces it, to peck, to shit a bit here and there. One of the three hens, but which? And so, near home, between one stubble field and the next, the devil tempted with an egg per day (and it could never be known which, of the three, had laid it on that day) in the poverty and the solitude of the countryside without grange, tempted souls: then he reported them to the sergeant, to the informers of the Lord: pretending, he the devil, or she, hen, pretending all day to be merely intent on scratching, on hunting for grubs. Certain roaches, certain worms. And as soon as the train was heard puffing, he let himself be seized by that fear and hope of having it upon him, and on the girls, too: to keep from understanding which of the three, and who it was: being the devil. Devil, there was no doubt about it, and spy, imagined the girl holding out a horned hand towards the chickens: spy, spy: having insinuated himself, in disguise, into the home, that rural, railish home, there it is, there he is: he swaggered around like a chicken, with a chicken's manner: like a gent with yellow gloves on the Via Veneto, a glass in his eye, a white flower in his buttonhole: he de-loused a shoulder, with his beak, all proud of himself, then the other one: he shat along, like it was nothing, but he took advantage meanwhile of the convenience of being a chicken, looking to one side, just the way chickens do, making bold to peek into the kitchen, if the door was open. He even came inside, maybe. And nobody sent him away: the uncle was telegraphing to Ciampino or to Cecchina, tap taptap tap sitting at his machine. So he could spy around at his ease. He recorded with his mad pupil and retained in his retina: with that lateral eye that chickens have, like it was invented by Picasso, a bathroom porthole, a toilet void of understanding or any intention of spying to starboard or to port. And instead they're looking at you. Yes, he was the devil: worming his way into the kitchen, on the helpless tiles of the domestic poverty: or in ambush beyond the cane fence: little canes artfully stuck into the ground, with two opposing slants to make the figures of rhombs, ripped by the pouring rain and by the wind, half-broken and half-rotten, now, at the end of winter: a worn girdle, now: which does not isolate the domestic indigence, at kilometer 20. 25, from the open access of the country. The grandmother, amid the hens and the stubble, was like a humpbacked tree in the garden, a sorb already skeletal in death: set up as a scarecrow, one day, and then torn to black tatters by the north wind. She gave the earth a blow with her little hoe, then left off, tired, without straightening up. With four strides the corporal reached her. "I found what I was looking for," he said to her. "If you were the one who hid them, you'll have to give me an explanation. ." She raised her face, which seemed carved from brier: she looked at him without understanding, without even hearing.

"She's deaf," Camilla warned him. They telephoned to the uncle. They wanted to tell him: Camilla had been "called in" by Sergeant Santarella, so they said: she had to "report" to Marino, as a witness: the signal-house would be left unguarded. The old man expressed no opinions and still less raised protests, over the phone. He made no comment on what they let him know. He was already about to come back to Casal Bruciato. There wouldn't be any more trains going by, Camilla knew that anyway, until the mixed train for Ciampino-Termini at twelve fourteen.

The old man, in reality, at hearing an unknown voice, was seized with panic. At the telephone, the girl explained harshly, when it wasn't a question of service communications or calls, he was infallibly seized with a paralysis of the basioglottis, or as she put it, he was tongue-tied: like an engineer, little inclined to speechifying, who moves perfectly his abacuses and yet hasn't at his disposal the "sufficiently appropriate words" not to say sufficient Italian verbs to be able to petrarchize over news that is far from good. A typical aphasia coram telephono, reverence, spite, incapacity of expressing himself properly, and the suspicion or indeed the obsessive certainty that one can be overheard and naturally mocked by third parties, by unknown imbeciles, and finally, the loss of one's own personality and the pulpifying of the logos in a flushing stammer, flowed or stagnated, endemic, in Europe, and, therefore, in the Italian peninsula of those years of telephone avec la manivelle. In the campagna, in the country, you can imagine! Her uncle was a railroad man, ha! like the daddy of Lucherino. {68}And, rustic widower flabby though still fierce in the face, before he had his hut beside the tracks.

He was born illiterate, like all of us; but where there's a will there's a way: and by strength of will he had learned his letters: he could read the tape like it was nothing at all and he could tick away with his key. He mastered and shot from his belly the multiskinned banner, like a lordly esquire, at the Palio, the banner of the Torre, the Tartuca, or the Oca. {69}Born timid, yes, vis-a-vis the black vulcanite cup, he gulped saliva, rather than pour into it the clamorous chatter of the day: he emitted cautious monosyllables: and few even of those. The grandmother was left alone to await him: alone, not counting the dog, the hens. She would have waited also, in the full assumption of official position and in the exclusive manipulation of the green club, good for signifying proceed, for that little train from Velletri at noon. The girl, one would now have thought her no less a deaf-mute than her grandmother, was led to the crossroads: where, awaiting the return of the carabinieri, the buggy was standing: and Lavinia, above, seated, huddled, throat and cheeks in her two hands, and her elbows set evenly on her knees, her chin extended, lips drawn, and her mouth in an attitude of contempt. Such a posture granted her, beneath her arms, sufficient room to lodge there and almost conceal, disdainful now and intolerant of glances, the tepid weight of her teats: though the arch of each armpit still allowed their profile to be seen, if one glanced there, perhaps without seeming to: as did Farafilio, in his palpitation, a little later, as soon as they came up to the buggy.

The proprietor of the horse was seated, beyond the ditch, on the rather high edge of the field in which the road, even today, is sunk, looking pensively at the ground: mouth open: his shoes in the dry culvert. He seemed to be speculating on human destiny and forebodings: he allowed his mind to graze in the limitless meadows of nothingness as utopists and lanternists are wont, having created the void there: that sweet Torricellian vacuum that the disturbed mists and the fogs of the equinoctial morning heighten, if anything, to an inderogatable condition of the life of the psyche. Curiosity had pricked him at once, on seeing Lavinia with the soldiers, then had been calmed and completely satisfied when, left alone with her and her horse (but the horse couldn't follow well the discourse of more than one voice), he had asked her about the case. Lavinia, bitter, had annihilated him in a few words, a process in which she excelled, and had huddled down in the position described. So, he, now, was mindless in peace, staring agape at some blades of grass: a thread of saliva was about to come from a corner of that unretentive meatus, filtering, from below the inert tongue, to drop on to the cobbles. His two shoes planted on the cobbles of the culvert, legs apart, his elbows on his knees, his whip extended from his ten basketed fingers, which held it slackly: and it seemed the staff of a flag from its socket on a balcony, or the tacit pole of the fisherman over the lake's silence: not did its handle rest on the ground, but instead of the ground, in a superfluous fold (immediately beneath his waistcoat of rawhide) which his trousers formed at jointing: so that it jutted from his lower crotch, like a faunesque stump gradually lengthened into a bending twig, in a thin and dropping splinter: like a patented contrivance, a private and personal organ, antenna or pole, disjunctive attribute of the radio-amateur-fisherman, or conductor. And all around the hanging twitching of the splinter (swaying with the wrist) a horsefly abandoned himself to his habitual goings and comings, which indicate a greed for footstuffs, perpetually awake or reawakening, and of the achieved spotting, that is, scenting, of the same. It buzzed nosily in a metallic vibration which reached top notes with certain swervings or counterswervings in figure 8's: drunk, almost, at having forced itself by the renewed fatality of a sui generis field of gravity: a field excogitated, for the new history, by the Buck of the young horseflies: where the ellipse of the Newtonian orbitation had been replaced by the lemniscate. He was one of those handsome green ones, with wings of metallic ash-green that recall burnished steel, devoted, as soon as he has it made, that is, when someone had made a turd, devoted to sumptuous pauses, and to ineffable epula-tions in the meadowed paths, in the unlofty corners of the territory: du vieux terroir. Wracked by precocious puberty in the muggy weather and by pubic nose in the equinox, in that cosmos of prescient odors (foretelling the spring fertilizing) he restored himself with the idea: of the tail of the whip. Who knows, the lout, what he thought it was?