That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (12 page)

"Our great secret, you see, is the secret we like to tell everybody: the constancy of the specifications for each different kind of oil. Now, for example, take our unbeatable Transformer Oil B, Grade 11-Extra. You can ask about it here in Rome: Engineer Casalis of the Anglo-Romana Company, or Engineer Bocciarelli of the Terni." He assisted himself with the fingers of his left hand, thumb, index, middle finger, unrolling them one after the other, to list the merits of Grade 11-Extra; he reached his little finger, and remained there: "Absolutely waterless: this is the most basic essential; yes, the
sine qua non:
freezing point . . . extremely low: viscosity . . . 2.4 Wayne, at the outside: acid value, negligible: dielectric strength, amazing: flash point ... the highest of all American industrial oils.

"Now, you tell me, what more can you ask from an oil for transformers? But then, as I said before, what really counts, more than anything else, is the
constancy of the specifications
in every grade: the characteristics that indicate the merit of a given oil . . . of our Transformer B, I mean. Always the same! Always! Identical, any time and any place: from one shipment to the next." He raised his voice. "Over a period of years! The world can come to an end, the phoenix can rise from its ashes, the Colosseum can catch fire ... but Standard's Transformer Oil B, 11-Extra, is what it is, and remains what it is. Our client can sleep the sleep of the just, believe me. We know what he needs. And a lot of our clients have finally caught on to this themselves. It's easy enough for them to be unfaithful to us. But then what? Here you have a transformer that's cost you a million, let's say, and you wake up one fine morning and realize that you've been pouring tomato sauce into it, instead of oil. And when your transformer has burnt out on you, the first storm that comes along, then what do you do? You can kiss any operating economy good-bye! And it's good-bye to amortizement in fifteen years, or ten years! ... Or in eight months, for that matter! . . . No, believe me, doctor, it isn't only the price that should determine the transaction, that's the bait ... the bald fact of the amount: four, nine, six the quintal. No. The price . . . well, you know. Take a watch for example: you can find one for fourteen-fifty in some little store in Via dei Greci; but a good watch sets you back two thousand lire at Catellani's. You try to buy yourself a Patek Philippe, a Longines, a Vacheron-Constantin ... for fourteen-fifty. Where are you going to find anybody who'll let one go for that? If you find me one, then that'll be the day I can make a present of my Transformer B 11-Extra at the price ... at the price of some of the other stuff they've got on the market!"

He sighed, "Ah, well, so it goes." Ingravallo was in a stupor. His eyelids had begun to drop forward like awnings over two shop windows: to fall down, halfway over the globe of each eye, in his poppy-seed attitude of state occasions: when the torpor of the office crowned him with a hebetude which was . . . almost divinatory. And instead, this divine occasion was being created by the stupidest source. A gusher! Oil! The people back in Apulia: oil is what they live on. But this other oil . . . he really didn't know how to get a grip on it.

"Make the client fall in love. That's the whole story. Hammer the truth into his head: the great nail of truth! That's all. Doctor Valdarena, when it comes to hammering, has shown plenty of talent. Then, when the day comes that they've fallen in love and have given our Transformer B a try, it's very hard, believe you me, for anybody else to seduce them away, to make them unfaithful to us! And all screwing aside, those who love us, follow us ... as the Great Man says . . . so . . . How about a cigarette?" "Thanks." "So, I mean, they pay. They pay up, without saying another word."

"They pay. They pay," grunted Don Ciccio, in the solitude of his own, interior forum.

      
IV

AFTER
twenty-two hours of general uneasiness Balducci arrived, on the 18th: unforeseen engagements, he stated. Meanwhile the police stations had been alerted: Milan, Bologna, Vicenza, Padua. It was, for Ingravallo and for Doctor Fumi, a real relief. If it had turned out that Balducci had skipped, the investigations would have had to be extended over half the peninsula, with a slow monsoon of telegrams.

And the mess, already fairly tangled up, would have become utterly snarled. But Balducci, miraculously unaware, got off the train at eight, the collar of his overcoat turned up, his face anything but ruddy at that moment and a bit smudged to boot: with his necktie loosened, and with a look as if he had slept, in discomfort and over interminable jolting, profoundly. He and the train had kept faith with the telegram, which for the rest had been vague. But the only through train coming into Rome Station at eight was the one from Sarzana: which at its final creak and the successive blocking of the breaks was on the dot, as clocks under the roof of the platform and beside the gate waited open-mouthed, observing the new orders from above, gloriously imparted from the Ass on high. The terrible news was broken to him with all due consideration and with all the most opportune toning down, right there by the train, as other travelers, at the windows, were still fighting over the porters, with shouts imperious or imploring, and the porters assumed the tone of their finest hour: Swiss and Milanese in arrival: good, sound luggage; it was broken to him by his wife's relatives who had come there on Ingravallo's invitation, some dressed in black, some merely in dark gray: Aunt Marietta at their head, with a black prayer shawl around her shoulders, like a mandrill's ruff, a necklace of little black beads around her neck, a hat like a teacher in a teacher's college, a face like an attorney general. Then, behind her, Zia Elviruccia, with her son, Oreste, the big boy with the big yellow teeth who looked so much like Uncle Peppino, who was, you might say, the spit and image of Uncle Peppino. A funeral face on him, too. There was also the sergeant, in uniform: Di Pietrantonio. When, little by little, they made him understand, Uncle Remo, what had happened, he, poor man, first of all, set his overnight case on the ground: the others, the heavy ones, had already been taken off by the porter. The news didn't seem to shock him so very much. Maybe it was sleepiness, fatigue after those nights in the train. Maybe he was kind of out of his head and didn't even hear what they were saying to him.

In the meanwhile the corpse had been removed and taken to the City Morgue, where they had proceeded to an external examination of the body. Nothing. When it was dressed and laid out, the throat was bandaged, with white gauze, like a Carmelite lying in death: the head was covered with a sort of Red Cross nurse's bonnet, without the red cross, however. Seeing her like that, white, immaculate, they all immediately took off their hats. The women made the Sign of the Cross. The coroner's office had witnessed the examinations, in accordance with the law, in the person of Judge Cavaliere Mucellato. Also the Attorney General's representative, Commendatore Macchioro, had paid her, so to speak, a duty call. The man in Palazzo Chigi had to have the last word, too, louder than all the others: "That evil murderer should have already been shot, six hours ago."

But Balducci hadn't read the papers.

On the body there was nothing, beyond the work of the knife, and those scratches, those fingernail marks.

Once he was at the house, poor Signor Remo was obliged to open drawers, unlock a reluctant cupboard or two. They hadn't been able to find the keys to some: and there were other keys, discovered at random, whose destination was still unknown. He tried them, he tried them again, here, then there, in vain. Nobody had gone into his little study. The desk, with "Marengo Universal" locks, seemed free from any tampering. He opened it himself: everything was in order. And so was the metal filing cabinet, where he kept certain papers: it was a little dark green, fired-enamel case, very neat and clean and new, which stood beside the half-empty wooden bookcases, half-filled with thumbed cheap volumes, and together, the two pieces of furniture looked like the young accountant fresh from the barber with the filthy-rich, dripping-nosed old woman whom he manages and robs and who is in love with him. The entire, mute examination was observed by the two ladies, the aunts, by Oreste, and the police sergeant Di Pietrantonio, in reality a top-sergeant, a policeman—one Rodolico—as well as by Sora Manuela. A moment later Blondie happened along. Doctor Ingravallo trusted Pompeo and the Blond Terror from Terracina: the others were a bunch of meatheads, at times, when you tried to drum a little psychology into them! Those two had sharp noses: they could catch on to people from their faces, after once glance: and usually without letting on. What was important to him, to Ingravallo, was, above all, the face, the attitude,
the immediate psychic and physiognomical reactions,
as he said, of the spectators and the protagonists of the drama: of this bunch of bastards and sonsabitches that people the world, and their women, whores and tramps and sows.

Bottafavi's aid was invoked, after a few vain tugs from Rodolico, who succeeded only in popping one of his buttons, where it wasn't immediately clear. The weapons expert came downstairs with a square-handled carpenter's box slung over his arm, containing a whole repertory of screwdrivers, saws, chisels, hammers, pliers, and a monkey wrench into the bargain: not to mention a goodly supply of loose nails, both straight and bent. In the end a smith was summoned, a veritable Don Juan when it came to locks: he had a bunch of hooks with an extra little twist in the end, and all he had to do was tickle the lock with one or the other, and it knew at once that it couldn't hold out. With him, locks were like virtuous women who suddenly go crazy. Balducci verified at once the absence of the best, the money and the jewels which the signora kept in a little iron coffer in the second drawer of the dresser: the coffer had disappeared, complete with contents. Not even the key was found: it stayed, usually, in an old velvet purse, black with embroidered forget-me-nots, in the mirrored wardrobe, tied by a fine little blue ribbon to the elite of its genteel and tinkling sisterhood. "The purse was ... it used to be here. Let me have a look." He groped with his hand from below upwards in that perfumed heap of silk, of all those slips, those blouses, and those little embroidered handkerchiefs. Yes, yes. The purse, too, had disappeared. And also the two passbooks to savings accounts failed to answer Balducci's roll-call. "My God, they've gone too!" "What?" "The savings account passbooks, Liliana's." "What color were they?" "Color! One was in the Banco di Santo Spirito, and one in the Banca Commerciale." "In whose name ... hers?" "Yes, Liliana's." "Were they made out to the bearer?" "No, personal."

The diminution of the little hoard (with the personal passbooks, however, there was no real danger) seemed to crush Signor Remo: even more perhaps, judging from outside, from
the immediate psychic and physiognomical reactions,
than the horrible news which had been brought to him at the station. It was a completely gratuitous, false impression, you might say: but none of those present managed to dispel it, not the (top) sergeant, nor Orestino: and still less Aunt Marietta and Aunt Elviruccia, embittered and malicious as they contemplated that gross man sunk in tribulations: "yes, yes, go out on your hunting trips now, now that the rabbit has run off," that huge man who went up and down the house, pulling out all the drawers of the furniture and looking into them . . . just in case a pin had been stolen.

Made grim and greedy, the aunts were, just thinking about it, in the great fermenting that the latent avarice common to all the Valdarena relations had created in those hours of the incredible night with its troubled counsels, after the many-regioned voices of the police and the unquestionably Roman one of Sora Manuela in the telephonic shock of the preceding day: and now both of them, Aunt Marietta and Aunt Elviruccia, disappointed in the disappointment of a moment. Lilianuccia, eh? Not even a little souvenir left to her cousins? to her aunts? to her own Aunt Marietta, who had been a mother to her, you might say, since her real mother died? not even a little medal of the Madonna? with all that jewelry (You could have stocked a shop with it) that she kept under lock and key? Poor child, it had never occurred to her to make a will. When a person has to die like that, she can't think about it beforehand, she can't foresee such a thing. Madonna! it was enough to drive you crazy! What a world! What a world, indeed!

And besides they had Giuliano on their minds. That arrest, they felt, was an outrage: an offense against them, the splendid house of Valdarena, "a high-class family whose like you can't find in the whole of Rome"; a family of the most florid, the most solidly rooted: men, women, and kids. The thought of a girl like that, plunged into the devil's arms, with all her finest wedding presents, all her gold and jewels, leaving nothing to remember her by, not even a word of farewell! The idea, for the poor aunts!, was about to become a torment, heartache. Murdered that way. Rancor, horror, terror, a cry in the darkness! At the bursting out of a demoniacal tension which acts to lacerate in such a drastic way the folio certificates of one's civil status, demos or parish, and the long, the many-eyed precautions of living—on such occasions, the human kin, the
gentes,
tend to repeat, as a right, even if they don't achieve it in fact, the thing lent.
Commodatam repetunt rem.
They summon it back from the darkness, from the night. They want it back, they want once more the flower! with its broken stem, the quantum that has been lost from their life. Like filings on the magnet, the tiniest fibers of their viscera are polarized on the
tension of return.
They feel they must suck back the gamic unit that has been expelled, the biological unit, the person once alive, eternally alive, and sacra-mentally alienated into marriage with some Tom, Dick or Harry. They would like to control again the possibility, the nuptial valency offered to another, to the husband (in this case): to the brother-in-law or son-in-law given them by the demos. And the gamic unit whose possession they claim implies, at the same time, an economic quantum. She was a splendid girl, and there was a coffer of jewels: former and latter ripened by the years: by the slow, tacit years. She was a girl with a little box; and they, the Valdarenas, had entrusted her husband with the key: and the right to make use of it, clickety-click: the sacrosanct use. And Christ's coadjutor, at the church of the Santi Quattro, had blessed the pact. With a wealth of
asperges in nomine Domini:
without too much splashing, however. She, beneath her orange-blossom crown, within her veil, had bowed her head. So let him give back, back what was wrongly taken, this fool of a hunter, this traveler in textiles. How had he used her beauty? Or how wasted it? such gentle beauty? and the cash? the grand old cash, equally beautiful? Where had he stashed it away, the loot? Those gold pieces with the Gentleman King's ugly face on them? Those nicely round, bright yellow pieces of the days before this Puppet in Palazzo Chigi, yelling from his balcony like an old-clothes man. She had forty-four of them, Liliana had, forty-four gold marengos: which went clink-clank in a little bag of pink silk, a bag her grandmother had sent wedding sweets in.
^{14}
And they weighed more than a pair of kidneys at Christmas. "And now where have they gone to?" the kinfolk thought. "What does he know about them, our hunter friend here?"
Manet sub Jove frigido.
To what marriage indeed has he reserved his wife, his bride's carnal and dowrial validity? What has he made of that tender flesh, this apoplectic salesman? and with that nice nest egg? which was so much a part of it? Yes, the tidy bundle! left her by a stubborn rumination of time, of the economic virtues of the lending clan? Thus, as she had inherited that tepid flesh from the accumulated vehemence of generations, after many a hard morning. Liliana's relatives seemed to be saying: "Oh! gentle bride, stuffed with nice cash! treasure of the years! Unexpected accrediting of the equinox! Let him cough up, that is to say, spit back, this hick of a commercial traveler! Let him not dare accuse Giuliano, splendid offshoot of the old stock, only because he has to face comparison with him now." Their minds, the minds of those two old bags Aunt Marietta and Aunt Elvira, pursued their private whims: "Giuliano, flower of the Valdarena clan! Replete with fertile days! Bud of life!"

There exists a dramatic region of every rancor, from the spleen and from the gall bladder inside the gnawing liver, to the very penumbras behind the household furniture where the
lares
officiate: the gods that see and remain silent, breathing in the dead odor of naphthalene in cupboards. But at the first appearance of the blade, they had trembled, unable to cry out: and in the room's opaque volumes, now, they were shocked and weeping, with the nerves of martyrs. Well, it was there, between the legs of the corporal and the locksmiths, when Manuela's globes had been shoved aside, that all those envenomed phantoms wandered. Erect and hard, the aunts awaited justice: Oreste didn't know himself how to behave.

Valdarena, at the Collegio Romano, had been subjected to repeated questioning: the alibis he had produced (office, clerks in the office) were watertight up until nine twenty, but not after that. He said he had been out, downtown. Out where? With whom? Clients? Women? Tobacconist? Two or three times he blushed, as if at a lie. He had even trotted out his barber, but then had immediately retracted this affirmation: no, he had had his hair cut the day before. Actually none of the tenants had seen him, at that earlier hour. Only at ten thirty-five, when he had called for help. The Felicetti kid: brought before him, face to face, denied having seen him on the stairs: the one who went to say good morning to the Bottafavis, who had met the cheese-bearers: "n . . o . . ." she said, with great tugging at her lips, so that she could hardly blurt out: "he ... wasn't... there..." After which she went mute: and pressed by new and repeated questions, then by exhortation of every kind, she
hung her head, in tears. She almost said yes, but she couldn't quite make up her mind: she wouldn't open her mouth. Finally, as big drops ran down her cheeks, it seemed to everybody that she wanted to shake her head: no. Her Mamma, kneeling beside her, face to face, patted her on the head, from which statements issue; she whispered in one ear, kissing her: "Tell the nice man, dear, tell the truth. Tell me, yes, now didn't you see this gentleman here, on the steps? See how blond he is? Like an angel, isn't he? Tell us, sweetheart, Mamma's baby doll! No, don't cry, your Mamma's right here with you, your Mamma who loves you to pieces. Here," two kisses smacked on the kid's cheeks, "you mustn't be scared of the officer. Doctor Ingravallo isn't the bad kind of doctor, those mean ones, who hurt my poor baby and make her stick out her tongue and say ah. He's a doctor in a black suit, too, but he's a good one!" and she squeezed the little stomach under the dress, as if to ascertain whether it were dry or damp: in certain cases, testimony is not necessarily unaccompanied by suitable outpourings of another nature. "Tell me, tell Mamma, there's my sweetie. Tell us, and Doctor Ingravallo will give you a nice dolly, the kind that shut their eyes, with a pink apron with little blue flowers on it." Then the kid hung her head still lower and said: "Yes." Giuliano paled. "And what was the gentleman doing? What did he say to you?" She burst out weeping, yelling desperately amid her tears: "I—want —to—go home! Home!" after which her Mamma blew her nose for her: and that was that, nothing more to be got out of her. Mamma, "Oh, I tell you!" insisted that she was an extraordinarily bright child, for her age: "you know how it is ... with kiddies, you have to know how to handle them." To Ingravallo, on the other hand, she seemed an idiot, in every respect a daughter worthy of her mother.