Carlo Gadda - That Awful Mess on the via Merulana

The two cousins had glimpsed each other from afar. The trio, the new hope of Regina Coeli and her two great angels a little behind and almost at her sides, proceeded as a group. When they had approached the buggy, the proprietor stood up, and briskly raised his whip high as if a fine mullet had taken the bait: Camilla faded to a greeny-white: "It was you," she said softly to Lavinia, as she came within knifing distance of her, with the Brothers Grim at her ribs: the driver cracked his whip in the air, to reawaken the horse, and prepared to climb in after Camilla, in whom a hysterical malice from moment to moment was deflating the resultant inflation, empâtée, of the various volumes of the face, that abscessed consistency which with puberty, the two oily balloons of the cheeks, had assumed in her, to become all one with the cushions of her cheekbones. Her eyes, carved into the potatoish oval, had begun to react, gleaming in a white ground, to make themselves seen. Rage was giving her a gaze, lending her a face: "Me?" said Lavinia, "have you gone crazy?" Hatred, contempt, and also fear in that voice, in those words, which corporal Pestalozzi made an effort to intercept, then, in vain, to interpret. A slight breathiness, in her speech, a shy caesura. Her breast palpitated, most desirable, like a magnetic blade between the two poles: but this was not the magnetism of Maxwell, and the blade was instead of milk-colored skin, trepid and dear. "Me?" and she shrugged, "they're taking me in, too. We're going to have a little trip to Marino, to be witnesses." She raised her neck, haughty. "I have to tell you how it happened, when he, the corporal here, thought I was engaged, with the ring on my finger." The explosions of the whip reannounced, almost gaily, the advisability of being silent, of leaving. A little further on, at the high edge of the field, two little open-mouthed girls were looking on, with long underpants and shoes, without laces, that had belonged to their big brother. A strong man, a peasant, was trying to light and to draw, twisting his neck like a plebeian painted by Inganni, {70}half of a half-cigar. "Get in," the corporal said to Camilla, "and stop talking: and don't try to work something out between the two of you, because it won't do you any good anyway. We already know the whole thing, how it went: and who gave them to you." The pocket of his tunic could be seen swollen, over his hip, on the right, as if to create a symmetry with the holster, as if to counterweight the encumbrance. "Go on, get in!" he repeated. Camilla obeyed. The owner got in after her, on the other side. The springs, perceiving his capacity, creaked again, and this time with their habitual zeal: then they were silent, quite flattened, crushed. The corporal, bicycle in hand, prepared to follow the buggy: which turned to the right, after a suitable turning of the wagon brake, like the pommel of a coffee grinder, after a last crack of the whip, a geeee from the master, a straightening of ears and a pawing of hooves on the part of the quadruped, a slap of the tail between the buttocks, after which it did not fail to start off. At a walk, that is, the walk of an old jade, going uphill, with three people. The road, in fact, rose: the bicycle, as soon as Pestalozzi pressed the miracle foreward, began again to chew, to gnaw on its torrone. The faithful Farafilio was to chew the road on foot. To enter that basket, with their full endowments, the two girls had to pack themselves in with some effort, so that they leaned, one against the other, at the shoulders and their respective thighs, like two fat quail, twinned on the stick, in the pan, to make a single generous portion: the driver supporting them on the one side, Camilla — as a counter-thrust — on the other, had clutched the lateral iron bar of the seat, fearing to fall out onto the road: that iron which was an available anchorage, the only one.

"Yes, it was you, you lousy spy," she said in a low voice, in a wrath greener still than her face. "You're good at flirting, I know. For a moment it suited him to see you every now and then, that pimp of yours."

"My fiance, you mean," and Lavinia raised her head, resolutely, with the sudden dart of the snake, looking straight ahead, as if to avoid even the sight of her traveling companion of whom she yet perceived the hateful warmth, the odor. She twisted her lips, slightly, continuing to despise.

"No, no, fiance my foot: he's not going to marry you, that's one sure thing."

"You want to take him away from me with money, you're so greedy, nasty snake, you. To get a taste of a man, you have to buy him, like the schoolmistress. But you won't get him away from me. You're too ugly, with that face like a potato of yours. And you're too tight: with that two cents you've saved up — you want to get him away from me?"

"They'll take him away from you, don't worry."

"You can leave them out of it. And yourself, too. I made him swear. I had a fight with him. 'With her? You think I'm crazy?' Go on, you potato, you. Go hoe the field, you ugly witch." The owner of the buggy kept his mouth shut: from time to time, to assume a casual attitude, he carefully cracked the whip in the air like a postillion in a cloak on the box, humbly clad in his flea-colored jacket as he was, inciting the horse with a a-ah! After each crack, on the contrary, he seemed intimidated: like the feeble-minded or certain children who fall silent when their parents quarrel because they can't understand it all, except for a frightful aversion, a hatred whose motive is hidden. He didn't know much about women. Woman is a great mystery, he used to say, on Sundays, at Le Frattocchie, at the Marinese's, sitting astride the bench, or in the summer under the arbor, with his elbow and with the half-liter of wine on the table. You have to study women carefully before you start anything, he would asseverate at I Due Santi, his glass half-drained, before the bar of the striped white marble: because Woman is a mystery. And Zamira pitied him, from aloft, with all the blackness of her mouth, half-disgusted, half-compassionate, drying her hands on her apron, which she sometimes wore, though dirty. And once she even answered him: "It's a mystery you can understand right away, if you just have a little imagination." He didn't understand them much, he said. And perhaps he didn't understand anything very much. With these, with one of them at least, but which he couldn't recall, he must have played when she was a kid. But he hadn't understood anything even then. He stood there, crestfallen, waiting to be fed. Now, when he came upon one on the road, sometimes, but never on his own initiative, he agreed to give her a lift.

"You're a lousy whore and a spy," Camilla resumed, anxious that the fight shouldn't end. She was enraged by the love of which she had been defrauded, even more than by the treasure that had been confiscated from her: what she already was calling "the jewelry for my wedding," the pledge of love, in any case, there, had ended up in the hands of the carabinieri, "damn the person who ever invented the stuff," she cursed, clenching her teeth.

"A lousy spy, that's what you are, bitch. Stinking bitch." The man in the tight jacket fired his whip aloft, said "aah!" to cover this altercation with his voice.

"They can hear you," he warned, without turning, in an attempted whisper that came out grainy with catarrh: and at that he became more timid than ever. He kept his eyes on the road, beyond the tips of the horse's ears which served him as sights, though double ones: because he felt, suddenly, the corporal's burning: eyes and ears alike.

The horse, at every new crack, did its best to seem to be engaging in a trot, which remained brisk for a few paces, then slowed down. The girls were silent. Lavinia, finally, was weeping: her beauty, her arrogance: crushed: so expert in the pride of loving: indeed, in being sought after for love. The young man who had given her the ring, that stone all light which seemed to be sublimated from the buttercup — where was he? where was her boy friend, at this hour? A knapsack over his shoulder, a knife in his pocket: a flash, a clump of light hair in the wind, like a handful of straw that suffers no comb: after having betrayed her and despised her, her, poor thing (and her tears, almost, were sweet), to go down to the station at Casal Bruciato and put gold all over that shit.