Carlo Gadda - That Awful Mess on the via Merulana

Which contributed, with the March draft from the badly closed window, that is badly closable, to clearing up his head completely, even though the draft was a gust of sirocco. He slipped off the nightshirt, still all tepid both with bed and sleep, and hung it on a hook: whence he saw it hang, empty, immaculate, the nocturnal skin of himself. Dawn was breaking. From Marsyas, after having so badly sung in his sleep, he seemed to have stepped out, an Apollo. An Apollo no longer twenty, a tiny bit hairy. He scratched his great head again, approached the basin, and giving free rein to its lymphs, he soaped his nose and face, neck and ears. He shook his mop under the high faucet of the basin, with those puffs and those nasal trumpetings, like a seal coming to the surface after its underwater twirls, which were, every morning, from the "occupied" bathroom, the unfailing sign of his bountiful ablutions. A sweet excitement from the other part of the door that the latch barred, a delicate trepidation used, in those moments, to overcome his genteel hostess, Signora Margherita: Margherita Anto-nini, nee Celli, widow of the late Commendatore Antonini: no, no, no, not the keeper of a rooming house, ah!: a very distinguished lady, sister-in-law of his Excellency Barlani, president Pier Calumero Barlani: president, no. . yes. . she couldn't remember of what: it had been several years since he, too, passed on, poor man: a pulmonary emphysema with suppuration, septicemia: he was, you might say, the support of the whole family. She annulled the eternity of waiting in tiled hallways with the relative odor (cat pee and kerosene) with silent transferences, winged with improbability and with miracle, which seemed to be celebrated in a field of gravity now disused, and even unfunctioning, as if of a demagnetized magnet. She passed thus as far as the kitchen and the pots on flowing little steps, which her long bathrobe of pink flannel withdrew one after the other, from the perception of third parties; and there remained in the hall, like a belated trail, the very idea of continuity in the infinitesimal sense of the term.

Which fluidity and lightness as of a ghost shivering in cotton, though devoted to the mourned manes of the deceased, "my poor Gaspare," was applied (in truth) to not disturb in any way the strophic successions of the ablutional rite, and freeing, at the same time, of the nasal passages, to which Don Ciccio was wont to abandon himself. In a revitalized heart-beating, in her role of hostess (no, not landlady), oh no, with unperceived blushings as of a girl ready for confirmation, she devoted herself through all the house to the first cares of the day: which bore fruit, barely risen as she was from her bed, first of all in a canonical cup of coffee and milk, already prepared the preceding evening: the celebrated double coffee of Sora Margherita: a true folly, deprecated by all, and first by all the landladies in the building, oh yes, they were rooming-house keepers! Yes. "Poor man," she used to say, "could I send him on an empty stomach to Santo Stefano?" She couldn't bring herself to add "del Cacco," in the fear, perhaps, of becoming derailed from the Cacco. {74}Devoutly offered on a pewter tray, the coffee in a pot either of copper or tin (it wasn't clear), the milk in a pitcher lacking its handle, the sugar in an unemployed jar of peptone, a little, greasy cylinder, at the foot of the low-slung pot, little plates with toasted crusts and curls of butter, the frowning doctor, never you mind, threw himself on it every morning like a buffalo: with the excuse of his haste, crunch crunch, in a flash everything had disappeared. That morning, needless to say, that Wednesday March 23rd, Feast of San Benedetto the farmer, according to the calendar, "and with such anguirsh for that poor soul on your mind," Signora Celli made the sign of the Cross, "ora et labora pro nobis," she margheritized. "Anguish," grunted Don Ciccio, highly offended, his mouth full of mush: "and the pro nobis you can skip." He choked, his face turned purple: any minute he would shoot it all from his nose, crusts and coffee. "Anguirsh, anguish," the donator trilled, "isn't it the same thing? You've had too much education, Doctor: you're like a school-teacher sometimes." And in the meanwhile she struck him twice on the back, practical woman, and like a sister, helas! lovingly assisting: she, who had become a specialist in rapping (on the hard wood of the door). The doctor wiped his mouth, stood up. He had already intrigued yesterday morning, and then at night before leaving his office, for the car: by telephone, on the switchboard, by direct visit to him who could grant it, and by talk: and again on the phone at eleven in the evening, Assistant Chief Pantanella was discussing it with Commendatore Amabile: he had whispered into his ear, poor man, a whole wind: with considerable hail of angry electrons: he had raised his voice as if he had been speaking to a Turk (Amabile was deaf). The automobile? Yes, sir, he had already made a requisition. Yes! He had asked for it!

And he had — incredibly — obtained it: from a colleague of his: the chief of the political section. Who, foreseeing a slack day, well, two or three fezzes left over from the day before, he had let him have the sedan of the "P" department, albeit reluctantly, and giving himself great airs of having done him a very special favor, a rare gesture of delicacy

"because it's for you, Don Ciccio, you realize. . Ingra-vallo": as if to indicate that he would expect, one day, a favor in return. For another he wouldn't have done such a favor, no: "not by a long shot." An old hulk of a car, you'd be ashamed to go out in. Rattly and slow, two slabs of corrugated iron for fenders, hand-painted black, all wavy, with drops where the paint had dripped, which swayed and jolted as soon as the car moved, like two cabbage leaves hanging out of the cook's half-empty shopping bag: with one door that wouldn't open, and a handle that couldn't keep the other one shut: one window that wouldn't roll up, and a smashed headlight: so it was even one-eyed: the tires worn down like old shoes, and with so many buboes outside that it looked like an inguinal hernia. It had been, illis temporibus! the highly respected automobile of the Chief of Police of Rome. Fallen into the hands of the gang in the post-March days, and immediately defamed in proportion to the times, the events, and the learning of those young gentlemen whom it had driven around, it told of itself now, in unambiguous terms, its own record of service. Within, one sensed, one sniffed, they must have drunk and toasted, chewed salami, stained their lips with Olevano, "damn good, this red stuff from Rome, it goes down like oil" "sure, castor oil," smoked cheap cigarettes, sneezed, spat, vomited both Olevano and salami.

So that everyone, now, in that car, political or non-political, stuck his head in unwillingly and a cautious shoe after the head, the other shoe still on the ground, and a suspicious, examining eye, nostrils the same: as if, from such muck, vapors could steam forth, conjunctive to the odor, pallors of lemures of more than one three-months'-old dead infant, with the tail all coiled, and the little head of a donkey. Careful, frowning, uneasy. The idea that there had settled in the cloth (of the seats) some organic ejection of the more popularly known variety now obsessed every user: it made fearful the more cautious, and cautious even the bold and heedless, were there any. All of them hesitated a little (very little), scared, each, of his own basic decorum, that is to say the decorum of the seat, of the pants: those so dignified trousers, paid for in installments, month by month, in sums withheld from salaries, with the respective tightening of the belts of the same. Once stuck to the bottom, well, it's obvious enough, every least-deserved stain, in maculating the splendor like the most reputable spots of Father Secchi, stained the luminous rotundities of the photosphere.