Carlo Gadda - That Awful Mess on the via Merulana

Musing in this way, he was finally aware of the road: they were almost at the Anzio crossing. He concluded then, leaving all his doubts open: it was his sergeant's exam, this; in the barracks the beans would spill forth. But the spirit, or the devil, of the "reconstruction of the events" hammered at his temples. Retalli. . here's why he had left the stolen property at the signal-man's house. It was a place. . which no one, perhaps not even Sergeant Santar-ella, would have been capable, of guessing: there was the ugly fiancee, there: ugly and sure. And the countryside all around, deserted. He must have decided to flee on the spot, after having caught some random word, in the discussions of the people, or read a headline in a paper they were reading. The jewelry… no, he couldn't leave it at his place. (A few hours after he had become "a fugitive from justice" they had searched his house.) They would have found it. It would have been the proof, imprisonment. To take it with him, if they should stop him, was no less dangerous than shutting it in a drawer. And so, there. To escape, to keep a safe distance, took money: and for the train, too! Camilla, perhaps, had some, could give it to him: she could cough up… a bit of the ready: and he would leave her, as a pledge, all those sapphires and topazes, of course, he would have given them to her.

But Camilla whimpered about being so poor? The corporal's mind became confused. Every hypothesis, every deduction, no matter how well-constructed, turned out to have a weak point, like a net that is unraveling. And the fish then. . good-bye! The fish of the impeccable "reconstruction." Retalli, in a far shadier level, must work like that blond boy of Ines', like the Ganymede Lanciani, who had been the blond — and invisible — god of the interrogation at Santo Stefano: and in this rather withered collection, the greed of the search was stilled. Ganymede was a more easily filed denomination, in the archive of his memory, than Diomede was.

The girls, in the buggy, seemed to be quarreling again: they went on, in fact, exchanging vituperation in low voices: with cheeks like she-devils, hysterical witches: but the upper hand seemed to be hers still, the more furious in the eyes, the more contemptuous of lip, the more beautiful. Dying of curiosity, the severe Pestalozzi listened, but did not hear: the creak of the springs, the rasping of the bike, an occasional exploded admission from the ass of the tugging horse, prevented him from enjoying that altercation, as excited to see as it was in fact, in reality: without counting the disturbing snaps of the whip, and the aaaah's of the simple-minded driver, who seemed every time to wake with a start, from his diver's lethargy, to emit his voice, quite uselessly: since the horse, poor beast, more than what it was doing, could not do, nor its kindly ass explode. No, he couldn't hear, the corporal.

"Because you have a bank book with a couple of lire in it," he heard all of a sudden, and put one foot on the ground, "that's the only reason, ugly as you are. That's why Igi lets on he's engaged to you. Go on. You're one of those girls that if she wants a boy, she has to buy him with money." And she spat, overshooting with her projectile, the helpless knees of the driver, who said aaah! but in vain, because his intervention was belated: and then because the horse had stopped and had already planted his legs apart for an unforeseen (to him, the master) need. The corporal's face relaxed; his spirit was consoled.

"Yes," Lavinia shouted, venemous, "you were fed up with giving him money, after all you had given him before, so he thought he'd leave that stuff with you. A guarantee. You bought it for two thousand lire — you told me so yourself!"

"Liar, witch, whore — if you want to be a stool-pigeon after all, you've got to tell the truth — because lousy spies like you are no good to anybody, not even to the people who pay you." "Ahoy, girls," Pestalozzi said, resenting the slight respect in which the cousins Mattonari seemed to hold him: "now what's got into you? You can fight it out at the barracks. The sergeant will be overjoyed to hear you both talking at once: he'll let you go on arguing till midnight and after, don't worry. Once you're in the coop, you can peck at each other all you want. But that's enough presently. Cut it out." Where he comes from they say "presently" rather than "now." They say it in Rome, too. So the argument of the two furies died down, faded, like thunder that becomes calm, fleeing, on the marvelous lips of Lavinia. The Farafilio, on foot, arrived overheated, his face flushed, except for the cheese-colored patches which whitened, as if for a belated confirmation, his jaws: just above the neck. He dragged after him, with some difficulty in the climb, that little balloon, so court-vetu, so uncovered to the caprices of the equinox, that it recalled the old story, of the regiment confirmed (not to say baptized) by fire.

Le bon vieux grenadier

qui revenait des Flandres..

était si court-vetu

qu'on lui voyait son tendre. .

The horse, in the meanwhile, had finally regained his composure; and a definitive aaah brought him back to his job of tugging, before the good soldier came to learn the cause of the stop: which, from the distance, might have seemed a wait, ordered of the driver through the kindliness of his superior, and thus an act of clemency and total pardon granted him, Farafilio, in person. But, having glanced at the little hippuric lake, and sniffed the sweetish and still tepid steam that emanated from it, he displayed in the rubescent skin of his neck and the ad hoc zones of the face his reproof, his contempt. That little equine stop had been demanded by rude nature, but a blow of the whip might even have obviated it: there were two women present!

IN the same hours of the morning of that same day, Wednesday, March 23rd, when the search for Enea Retalli alias Iginio had proved vain at Torraccio, where he lived when he lived there, Sergeant Santarella cavaliere Fabrizio was riding on his motorcycle over the provincial highway from Marino to Albano, so stupendously shaded, or flanked by trees, in the gardens and the parks which cover the slope. March finds a part of them bare or tattered, the elms, the plane-trees, the oaks: others have green fronds by the Feast of San Biagio or San Lucio: the Italian pines, the ilexes, the serene and almost domestic friendliness, in the villas, of the laurel, where, in other sites, the academician is crowned and, in some cases, the poet. From more than one indication, or clue, there was reason to believe, or at least not to reject the idea that the young man had headed (approximately) towards Pavona and Palazzo, moving down along sideroads and paths, when the roads proper seemed, in their way, unsafe. He also had a soldier on the rear seat, the good sergeant did, and armed, not to say embarrassed, with a musket. Having turned into a no-more-than-vaguely-indicative tune the seven syllables of the Touring's anthemer, his thoughts pursued the fugitive, who, with some advantage over him, had used the romantic "go!" proceeding by now at great strides beyond the confines of the "condition of unrecoverability." That phrase, that incitement, the sergeant-devil went singing to himself, between nose and mouth, yoking its bold (and equally imagined) rhythm to the explosions of his motor. Of the two soldiers stationed at the fort he had asked for reinforcements, by hand-cranked telephone, and knowing them to be equipped with a machine, that is to say a bicycle, he had ordered them to Pavona.

Quite different, on the other hand, and of a different life, crowded with a different and more densely settled people and populace, inscribed with other toponymies, ennobled with other names, amid the august ruins and the Umbertine grayness of the six-story houses, and the hindered and therefore bell-ringing rolling of the tram, was the working atmosphere of Blondie: his field of work and of leisure, of after-work and work-after, where he carried out his dandling and absent-minded (to hear him) technique, loafing, peering at random, sniffing, at a whim, a caprice, and the lucky wisdom of the urban idler who allows himself to be guided by the silence of every hypothesis and of every disjunction, like the sleep-walker on the rainpipe; he, instead, in the full agitation and the constant bumping into one another of people, as they go their way: after the bars, the shoe shops, the stores of soap and washing soda, along the fences of gardens with oblique palms beyond, yellow, whipped in the winter, tormented under arid skies, in changeable weather, by the very certain tridua of the north wind. The fountains, the basilica of Santa Maria della Neve, and the arches and the fornixes in the surviving walls, the cubes of peperino and of sandstone: recalling Tullius and Gallienus and of Saint Liberius Pope, among the invitations of the chestnut vendors, black-fingered over their braziers, their face serious, smoked, all wrinkled towards commerce, and the non-invitation of the waiting taxi-driver, huddled in his glass confessional: the charioteer of whom it might also be said that he is waiting (a call, an order) if his genteel snoring had not by now cut him adrift, far far from every less aware expectancy.