Carlo Gadda - That Awful Mess on the via Merulana

And he had also obtained permission for gasoline, In-gravallo, playing his cards and then, all of a sudden, bang, ace of trumps, he screwed the whole lot of them: he filled it with gas enough to cruise to Benevento and back. Three armed policemen, two with muskets: but no Grabber, ordered off to the Pensione Burgess, nor Blondie either, ordered to Piazza Vittorio: but instead, all nice and thin with his mustache erect, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, who makes four: and he, Ingravallo five: and six, the showfurr, in twenty-seven French words were still allowed. {75}So I don't have to tell you what the car looked like. The Barcaccia from Piazza di Spagna out for a drive. It sped, as it could, with its tires swelling, soft as they were, and at the first stone they encountered, they already wanted to blow up: the clutch went crack at every street corner, at every dog that crossed their path. At Via Giovanni Lanza, under repair, it tangoed and rocked through the potholes for more than a hundred yards, spattered muck against the legs of the passers-by, even those on the sidewalk: parabolic slabs of liquid mud, opalescent against the pink lights of the morning which, nevertheless, was darkening: it plunged, re-emerged, and looked as if it had been repainted: a nice nut-colored bath, it had had. At Largo Brancaccio, as they were turning into Via Merulana towards Piazza San Giovanni, Ingravallo looked, grimly, to his left: he rolled down the window, Santa Maria Maggiore, with the three dark arches of the loggia over the narthex, seemed to follow, with the afflatus of charity of her plebs, a bier that had sprung from her own womb. Designed and constructed enunciation, artful, on the summit of what must have been, in the distant centuries, the "hill," the Viminal, the seventeenth-century architecture of the basilica, as if of a sumptuous dwelling of thought, had its roots in the shadow, in the darkness of the straight descending street and in the tangle of all its offshoots: a hint, the cuspidal campanile, beyond the tangle of branches and foliage that flanked it. But over the brick of that romanesque little tower, the sky was prepared for its decoration. Don Ciccio stuck out his head, tried to raise his eyes towards the clouds, for the day's forecast. All the clouds could be seen running: a flight of horses; they crossed the clear broad stripe, blue at moments, of the sky, between the two parallel rain pipes: they rushed off God knows where, prompt cohorts. The plane-trees and the boughs of Merulana were a forest, as the car turned, a tangle to the eyes, on the parallel descent of the lines which nourished the trams: still skeletal in March, with already a merely skin-deep languor, nonetheless, a kind of itch within the happy, street-lining clarity of their bark, made of scales and patches: dry leather, white calf, silver: the undergarment the color of a tender pea's skin, amid the bustle of the people, the coming and going of wagons and bicycles. And emerging then from the boughs, and already awakened at a hint of purple, the campanile "of the ninth century" seemed to warm in the sun's ray: to waken, at that tepidness, the dozing bronzes, which, at any moment, would then officiate. Trapped within its cage, the heavy bell of the scholars began to sway in its turn, slowly, slowly, with a trembling almost unnoticed at first, with a rumble still suspended in the heavens, like that of a metallic wing. The wave spread happily through one's thoughts, over the balconies, the closed windows of the houses vibrated with it, every most sleeping window. An old grandmother on a swing, who rhythmically took in air: and grated forth her soft whisper, a little watery at every new thrust, and one doesn't know from what guitar: to summon Lucianos and Maria Maddalenas to their classes, with their braids down. Where, in fact, a little later they ran, with a pack of dictionaries: and some were already out: and on foot, or on the tram, which meant they had a bit of money: alone, or in bunches, like so many little flights of sparrows, of little wrens: after drying their ears in haste, and perhaps even washing them a bit: yes, their ears: indispensable organ of all study. Dong, dong, dong, dong. The bell, the old woman on her swing, hurled out that bumblebee signal, from the pendulum, with all her heart, at every blow with full ass that she gave it, to be able to take the forward thrust. And gradually, it became more full-bodied every time, this admonition, emphasizing the air, magnifying the wave: until she, the grandmother, spun it out for you a bit en sourdine: to not stir too badly the little darlings, the Nanninas or the rumpled Romolettos: who from a nonentity of an alarm clock in angry trills would have got the scarlatina poor babies! A sweetness in her heart, to hear her, the old granny! That perorating cautiousness brought the evil closer by degrees, in a subdued modulation: no, not oil: the evil of reawakening to knowledge: to recognition and to reliving the truth of every day: which is that, immediately after the cold water, there is school waiting, and the teacher with his zeros in readiness. She, the grandmother of all, uncovered with her slow caress the little heads, the black curls of the boys, of the girls: she parted their eyelids, just barely, drawing from them, with the clean tip of the counterpane, the veil of the fugitive dreams. It took her a half hour to wax, very slowly, and another half hour to wane. She descended, little by little, into her calmed silence. Which was the silence of the offices and the tasks at their beginning, the chilblains on the penmanship. With that great portrait of Him hanging on the wall: a mug, who because he was born stupid, seems to want to take his revenge on all.

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A few curious faces, of two or three loafers with their hands in their pockets, and with three gaping mouths under the black questioning of their eyes, received and then surrounded, at Marino, the car "of the Roman police" when it honked twice, poh! poh! before the main gate of the fort. In the frame of a window, on high, behind a rusty grating, the face of a young man appeared, with two stars on his gray canvas collar, one here and one there. He vanished. A few minutes: and the gates opened. The willing and bumpy car, after some great pushing and reversing and turns forward, with several jolts and starts which one wouldn't have hoped for, even from her, finally drove through that arch of triumph, which it had devoured the countryside to gain. And it had been, the road to the fort, a narrow, climbing road, all compact cobbles, between spurred walls which retained the shadow patched with lichens, on the old peperino, of strange pools and cockades, blue-green, yellow. The cobbles slippery. A slab at the corner: Via Massimo d'Azeglio. Ingravallo got out of the car, imitated by his followers. The sentry said: "The sergeant is out on a search party; the corporal was sent to I Due Santi, on that crime business." Meanwhile another soldier appeared. Higher in rank, or older, after a not prompt and rather soft clicking of heels (these gentlemen were from the police) and a raising of the head which announced more explicitly and more elegantly that he had come to attention, he handed Ingravallo a bluish envelope which, on being torn open, produced a sheet of paper,

folded over twice. Santarella, therein, communicated that he had sent Pestalozzi to la Pacori, accompanied by a soldier, for further checking; he, with another man, was out to follow the tracks of the fugitive Enea, alias Iginio, which was how they called Retalli. He had some hopes of overtaking him, that is to say, of catching him and of handcuffing him, to bring him, handcuffed, to the barracks: not however, a certainty. Ingravallo, more than a little cross, took off his hat, to allow his head to get a bit of air, clenched his teeth: two hard knobs on the two jaws, halfway from the ears, gave him, under his black mop a kind of bulldog's muzzle, already illustrated on more than one occasion. The two carabinieri were not the least impressed. The carabinieri, in peace time, and nuns, at all times, know how to draw from their respective disciplines that durable steadiness which indemnifies them to the jolt of current events, if not even to the quakes of history, for which events or history, however, it may turn out, they give as much as any history merits: that is, not to damn. "Do you know whether Crocchiapani Assunta," Ingravallo asked, "about whom I sent a communication on the twentieth, has already been questioned at her home?" "No, sir."