Carlo Gadda - That Awful Mess on the via Merulana

The little door opened a crack. When it was completely open Ingravallo found himself facing… a face, a pair of eyes! gleaming in the penumbra: Tina Crocchiapani! "Her! Her!" he meditated, not without a composite beating of the heart: the stupendous maidservant of the Balduccis, with black gleams under her coal-black lashes, where the Alban light became tangled, broke, iridescent (the white tablecloth, the spinach) from the black hair gathered on her forehead, like the work of Sanzio, from the blue— dangling from lobes and on the cheeks — earrings: with that bosom! which Foscolo would have certified as a brimming bosom, in a troubadoric-mandrillian access, of the kind that have made him immortal in Brianza. At supper with the Balduccis, at Signora Liliana's! The field of the black and silent goddess, for her, who had been so cruelly separated from all things, from the lights and phenomena of the world! And she, she was the one, the one (the pathway of time became confused and lost) who had presented the filled and badly tilted oval of the plate, a whole leg, all the kidneyed syncretism of a dish of kid, or of lamb, in pieces as it was, had allowed to roll out, on the whiteness amid the silver and the crystal, of a goblet, or no, of a glass, the tuft of spinach: receiving, from Signora Liliana, that heartbroken reproof of a glance, and a name: "Assunta!" Tina, with her face, as in other times, severe, a little pale, but with an inflection of dismay in her eyes, looked at him nonetheless proudly, and he thought she recovered herself: two dark flashes, her pupils, again, bright in the shadow, in the odor of the closed entranceway to the house. "Doctor," she said, with an effort: and was about to add something else. But Di Pietrantonio alarmed her, even though she had already noted him from the window, after the policeman who seemed to be leading the whole row of overcoats. Tall, and wordless, police-like in his moustache, was he not the punishment feared? comminated by the law? But for what guilt, for what crime, she argued to herself, officially, could they punish her? For having solicited too many gifts, for having received them, from Signora Liliana?

"Officer Ingravallo, sir, what is it?"

"Who lives here, in your house?" Ingravallo asked her, harsh: harsh as he was required to be, at that moment, his "other" soul: to which Liliana seemed to address herself, calling to him desperately, from her sea of shadows: with her weary, whitened face, her eye dilated in terror, still, forever, on the atrocious flashes of the knife. "Let me in; I have to see who's here."

"There's my father, sir; who's sick; he's bad off, poor soul!" and she was slightly breathless, in disdain, very beautiful, pallid. "He's going to die on me any minute."

"And then, besides your father, who is there?"

"Nobody, Signor Incravalli: who could there be? You tell me, if you know. There's a woman, a neighbor, from Tor di Gheppio, who helps me take care of the sick man. . and maybe some other neighbor woman, you may have seen outside."

"Who is this one? What's her name?"

Tina thought a little. "She's Veronica. Migliarini. Hereabouts we call her la Veronica."

"Let me in anyway. Come on. Let's go. I have to search the house." And he examined her face, with the steady, cruel eye of one who wants to unmask deceit. "Search?":

Tina frowned: wrath whitened her eyes, her face, as if at an unforeseen outrage. "Yeah, search, that's what I said." And thrusting her aside, he came into the darkness toward the little wooden stairway. The girl followed him. Di Pietrantonio after her. It occurred to him, then and there, that Liliana's murderer, in addition to having received from Tina information which was useful to him "or rather indispensable: did I say useful?" could have also entrusted the jewels to her:. . "to his fiancee?" They went upstairs. The steps creaked. All around, outside, the house was observed: three policemen, not counting the little man who had guided them there. Those two black and furious eyes of Tina — Ingravallo felt them aimed at his nape; he felt them piercing his neck. He tried, he tried to sum up, rationally; to pull the threads, one might say, of the inert puppet of the Probable. "How was it that the girl didn't rush to Rome? Didn't she feel it was her duty?": this was a compulsory idea, now, in his atrociously wounded spirit: "to the funeral at least?. . Doesn't she have any heart or soul in her, after all the kindness she received?" It was the painful bookkeeping of the humble, the ingenuous, perhaps. The horrible news, perhaps, hadn't reached Tor di Gheppio until too late, and in that solitude… terror had paralyzed the poor girl. But no, a grown woman! And news flies, even in the jungle, in the wastelands of Africa. For a Christian heart the inspiration would have been another. Although, the father, dying. .

The wood of the steps continued to creak, more and more, under the rising weight of the three. Ingravallo, once at the top, pushed the door, with a certain charitable prudence.

He went in, followed by Tina and by Di Pietrantonio, into a large room. A stink, there, of dirty clothing or of not very washable or seldom-washed people in illness, or sweating in the labor that the countryside, unremittingly, at every change of weather, demands: or rather, even more, of feces poorly put away near the illness, so needful of shelter. Two long tapers painted in the vivid colors, blues, reds, gold, of a coloristic tradition unbroken in the years, hung on the wall from two nails at either side of the bed: the dry olive twig: an oleograph, the blue Madonna with a golden crown, in a black wood frame. Some rush-bottomed chairs. A plaster cat with a ribbon around its neck, scarlet, on the commode amid bottles, bowls. Near the Illness was seated an old woman, her striped skirt halfway down her tibias, with a pair of cloth shoes, no laces (and, within, her feet) which she had rested on the crossbar of the chair, open like slippers. In the bed, broad, under worn and greenish blankets, covered in part by one good one (and warm, and light, gift of Liliana, Ingravallo deduced) an outstretched little body, like a skinny cat in a sack set on the ground: a bony and cachetic face rested on the pillow, motionless, of a yellow-brown like something in an Egyptian museum; were it not, on the other hand, for the glassy whiteness of the beard, which indicated its belonging, not to an Egyptian catalogue, but to an era of human history painfully close and, for Ingravallo, in those days, downright contemporary. Everything was silent. You couldn't understand whether the man was alive or dead: if it was a man or woman, who in proceeding among the consolations of offspring and of the hoe in a swarm of mosquitoes towards the golden wedding, had sprouted that beard: a virile beard, as was wont to say, even of feminine beards, the Founder of the five-year-old Empire. The two tapers, here and there, seemed to be waiting to be stuck into suitable candlesticks, lighted by a match held in a charitable hand. Intolerant of this new mess of the dying parent and yet cautious and pitying, the imagination of Doctor Ingravallo kicked, bucked, galloped, heard and saw: he was seeing and already dismissing the coffin without drapery, of poplar planks, flowered with periwinkles and primula, surrounded by the absolving mutters or the prompt insurgence of some phrase chanted, or perhaps nasalized for better or worse amid the murmurings of the women and the good odor of the incense, issuing (core cuidado) from the parsimonious sway of the censer: to signify the great fear suffered and the repentance of the deceased, and the imploration and hope, all around, of the living and the surviving, once that coffin was closed and nailed and well-hammered: and in short, a kind of convinced serenity in every heart (better to go like this than to suffer for another month or more), in watching the planks, the flowers. . target of the reiterated spatterings of the asperges: between a shuffling of soles and a creaking of iron on the cobbles, if there were cobbles. But the reality was as yet different from the dream: those images of an almost raving impatience regarded the future, however near that future might be. Don Ciccio restrained the galloping of his delirium, tugged at the reins of his pawing rage. The patient, so thin, seemed ripe for the last rites: Eternity, infallible physician, was already, bent over him. Lovingly, she gazed upon him (and gulped some saliva down) with the succoring and greedy gaze of a Red Cross woman or a nurse who was slightly necrophilic: concerned with wiping his forehead in a light caress with the more delaying hand: and with the other, expert one, maneuvering under the covers and even under the body, between the sacroiliac and the bedpan, had finally found the right spot to stick into him the little point, the ebonite straw, for the service of perpetual immunization.