That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (15 page)

At the reading of that text, or at hearing it read with such involvement, a text which, to tell the truth, was a little out of the ordinary, one would have believed that, at the moment she wrote her will, poor Liliana, prey to a kind of madness, or divinatory hallucination, already foresaw her end as imminent: if she hadn't positively been meditating suicide. The testament bore the date of January 12th, two months ago: her name-day, as her husband pointed out: a little after the Epiphany. It was "the unbosoming of an overexcited woman," someone opined tacitly. And the writing, too, to Balducci, Don Ciccio, Don Lorenzo, betrayed a certain jerkiness, a certain agitation: a graphologist would have earned the fee for his expertising. A strange ecstasy in this detachment from worldly things, and from their names and symbols: that voluptuousness of farewell which immediately distinguishes heroic minds as well as minds unwittingly suicidal: when one, not yet departed on the long journey, already finds himself with a foot at the water's edge, on the shores of darkness.

Ingravallo was thinking: he thought that even Christmas, that the Crib, the Epiphany . . . with their children, their gifts, their Three Kings . . . with that sunburst of golden rays under the Christ Child . . . straw in the manger, light of the divine source . . . could have concentrated, as in a mental storm-cloud, certain melancholy fixations of the signora: January 12th. The poor testatrix, at that moment, must not have had all her emotions under control. Damnit: and yet . . . and yet she had maintained the provisions: she had changed nothing afterwards, in February, in March, not a syllable. Therefore, indeed, she had trusted the will to Don Corpi, urging him to "hide it and forget it."

An enigmatic expression: already clear to Don Ciccio, however: to forget it for the duration of her life, as if she wished to see buried, as soon as possible, that guilty list of possessions: which, only in the final loss of herself, she was permitted to scatter: which at every new day led her back towards the obligations, the inane reasons of living, while her soul tended already towards a kind of expatriation (her dear soul!) from the useless land towards maternal silences. The city and its people would know the future. She, Liliana . . . Forgetful of markets and cries, with brief opal wings, in the sweet hour, when every farewell is necessary and every still-warm wall loses its color in the night, Hermes, appearing to her in his true being, would at last have looked towards the doors, with silent command: the doors through which one leaves, at last, as the populace continues talking, to go down, down, into a more pardonable vanity.
"Evasi, effugi: spes et fortuna valete: nil mihi vobis-cum est: ludificate alios":
at the Lateran museum, a sarcophagus: Liliana had remembered those words: she had asked him to translate them.

That giving, that donating, that sharing out among others! Ingravallo thought: operations, to his way of looking at things, so removed from the carnality and, in consequence, from the psyche of woman (a little woman, he thought of some, a little bourgeoise) which tends, on the contrary, to cash in: to elicit the gift: to accumulate: to save up for herself or for her children, black or white or chocolate brown: or at least to waste and to squander without giving to others, consuming like wastepaper hundred-lire banknotes in the cult of herself, of her own throat, her own nose, or lobes or lips, but never—and Don Ciccio became heated, in a kind of pre-established delirium—never, however, in honor of her rivals: and still less of rivals who were younger. That casting away, that dissipating like petals in the wind or like flowers in a floating stream, all the things that count most, that are most carefully locked up, sheets! contrary to the laws of the human heart which, if it gives, either gives in words or gives what is not its own; these ended by revealing to him, to Don Ciccio, the emotional state of the victim: the typical psychosis of the frustrated woman, the discontent, the woman humiliated in her soul: almost, indeed, a disassociation of a panic nature, a tendency to chaos: that is, a longing to begin all over again from the beginning: from the first Possible: "a return to the Indistinct." Since only the Indistinct, the Abyss, the Outer Darkness, can reopen a new spiritual ascent for the chain of determining causes: a renewed form, renewed fortune. For Liliana, it was true, the inhibitive powers of the Faith were still in force, and more the cohibitive ones: the formal proclamations of Doctrine: the symbol operated as light, as certitude. Radiated in the soul. Thus ruminated Ingravallo. The twelve
lemmata
had had the effect of channeling her psychoses towards the funnel of a holograph will, perfectly legal. The accounts of death were settled down to the last fraction of a cent. Beyond the confessor and the notary lay the limpid spaces of Mercy. Or, for others, the unknown liberty of not being, the eras of freedom.

The female personality—Ingravallo grumbled mentally, as if preaching to himself—what did it all mean? . . . The female personality, typically gravity-centered on the ovaries, is distinguished from the male insofar as the very activity of the cortex, the old gray matter, of the female, is revealed in a comprehension, and in a revision, of the reasoning of the male element, if we can call it reasoning, or even in an echolalic re-edition of the words circulated by the man she has respected: by the professor, the commendatore, the gynecologist, the smart lawyer, or that slob over on the balcony of Palazzo Chigi. The woman's morality-personality turns for affective coagulations and condensations to the husband, or to whoever functions in his place, and from the lips of the idol takes the daily oracle of the understood admonition: for there isn't a man alive who doesn't feel he's Apollo in the Delphic sanctum. The eminently echolalic quality of her soul (The Council of Mainz, in 589, granted her a soul: by a majority of one vote) induces her to flutter gently around the axis of marriage: impressionable wax, she asks the seal of his imprint: for the husband, word and affection, ethos and pathos. Whence, that is to say, from the husband, the slow and heavy ripening, the painful descent of children. And when children are lacking, proclaimed Ingravallo, the fifty-eight-year-old husband declines, through no fault of his own, to the position of a good friend, a plaster idol, a pleasant ornament about the house, or chairman and general manager of the confederation of knickknacks, more image or dummy of husband; and man in general (in her unconscious perception) is degraded to puppet: an infertile animal, with a big, fake carnivalesque head. An implement that is of no use: a gimlet with its threads worn out.

It is then that the poor creature dissolves, like a flower or blossom, once vivid, now giving her petals to the wind. The sweet and weary spirit flies towards the Red Cross, in unconscious "abandoning the husband": and perhaps she abandons every man insofar as gamic element. Her personality, structurally envious of the male and only stilled by offspring, when offspring are missing, gives way to a kind of desperate jealousy and, at the same time, of forced sisterlike συμπατία
in the regards of her own sex.

It gives way, one might believe, to a form of sublimited homoerotism: that is to say, to metaphysical paternity. The woman forgotten by God—and Ingravallo now was raging with grief, with bitterness—caresses and kisses in her dreams the fertile womb of her sisters. She looks, among the flowers of the garden, at the children of others: and she weeps. She turns to the nuns and the orphanages, anything to have "her" child, to "have" a baby of her own. And in the meanwhile the years call to her, from their dark cave. Enlightened charity, from one year to the next, replaces the sweet philter of love.

                                  *** *** ***

Another circumstance emerged, meanwhile, from the painstaking (of course) search, ordered and carried out at the lodgings of Valdarena: who lived in Prati, in a handsome bedroom-studio in Via Nicotera: in a little villa: while, in his place and in the bed of his youth, at home, or rather at his grandmother's (Liliana's Aunt Marietta) there huddled and slept—the bedpan, but not the foot warmer, having been sent away-—that old bag of bones, Aunt Romilda: widow of the unforgettable Uncle Peppe. On the marble top of the dresser, in Via Nicotera, they "discovered" a picture of Liliana: inside, in the top drawer, a man's gold ring with a diamond: and a gold watch chain, very heavy, and quite long. "This is an anchor chain," Ingravallo said, showing it to Balducci, who recognized the two objects as fomerly belonging to his wife's "treasure." Without rancor, and without any particular amazement.

The chain, at one end, terminated in the characteristic spring snap (of gold link), and at the other, in a little gold pin, cylindrical, which could be stuck in a waistcoat buttonhole: one of the nine higher of the then regulatory twelve:
ad libitum.
(According to the choice of buttonhole the "personality is expressed.") And then, the hook for the pendant.

Balducci noted at once that the big, swaying fob had changed stone. It was a kind of reliquary, oval: a minuscule gold-bound peace held by a golden stirrup, so that it could swing and even revolve completely under that arc, since it was pricked on either side by two little invisible pins: gold, yes: it was all gold, solid gold, 18-karat gold, handsome, red-gold, yellow-gold, on the knobby hands, on the dry bellies of their grandfathers, who today are mere worn, disgusting parchment filled with poverty and plague, or empty chatter in the wind. Lousy wind of hardship, with soap costing three hundred lire the pound. In the frame there was set a beautiful jasper, with the tegument of a little plate of gold, on the back, when you turned it in your fingers. Also elliptical in shape, it was, naturally. A blood-jasper: a dark-green stone, its color gleaming like a swamp leaf, was made for certain noble cuts, or corners, or keystones in arches, for secret throne rooms in palaces in the architecture of Melozzo or of Mantegna, or in the marble squares of Andrea del Castagno in his murals: with delicate veins of a cinnabar vermilion like stripes of coral: almost like clotted blood, within the green flesh of the dream. In what was called Gothic lettering, and intertwined and interlaced in the glyptic work the two initials: G.V
.
On the other face, smooth, precise, the little plate of clear gold.

All these novelties instead of the ash-blue opal that Balducci had seen there other times: a stone with two faces, recto and verso, and also very good-looking, he explained to Ingravallo, but ... A sublunar stone, an elegiac stone, with soft, suffused milkiness as in a Nordic sky
(nuits de Saint Petersbourg)
or perhaps of silica paste, set and frozen slowly in the cold light, in the twilight dawn of the 60th parallel. On one side was carved the monogram R.V., Rutilio Valdarena: the other side was smooth. The name of the grandfather, the archetype of all the Valdarenas: who, as a kid, had been blond: a reddish blond, they used to say. When the grandfather died, the chain (with the fob) had gone to Uncle Peppe, on whose waistcoat of black velvet with yellow dots it had hung for a few months, on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation. Her grandfather had meant it to go to Liliana, of course: to little Liliana: from her Grandad Rutilio: who, however, had temporarily left it to Uncle Peppe, in a kind of equitable trusteeship. And, when it came to Uncle Peppe the opal fob with the benign and beneficent warmth of all fobs and charms and coral horns, but with the sinister cancer-promoting aptitudes which
ab aeterno
had dwelt in the noble and melancholy frigidity of that gem. Seven and a half months after the grandfather's death, the uncle had not been able to evade his obligation, so nicely opaline, to transfer to Liliana the ownership of the gold chain, in accordance with the paternal will: with that toy attached to it. Because it was then, Balducci declared grimly, that the uncle had become unforgettable.

"Poor, dear Uncle Peppe!" the survivors wept. Balducci could see his features again in the remembering mirror of his heart, as husband of the niece. Allocated there, in his big chair, amid a souffle of cushions, surrounded by his relations who hung from his lips; two fine, gray walrus-mustachios, and two large, yellow horse-teeth orchestrated his sad smile, the good yellowing smile of the "gentleman of the old school," former, distinguished client of the Baths of Chianciano. While in that posture so abandoned to the opinions of Doctor Beccari, and with that slightly Mongoloid tinge in his mustache and his cheeks, he celebrated within his immediate family the great virtues of the same and all the Valdarena clan in general, the bluish fob of the Lord's day used to rest on his black waistcoat on an axis with his liver and duodenum. Titillated by the thin, waxy fingers of the trustee, the gem covered both organs, duodenum as well as liver: alternating from one to the other a bit, perhaps: like a girl who is keeping at bay two swains at the same time. It was, to be precise, of cancer of the liver, supplemented by a similar affliction of the duodenum, that the bearer of the opal found himself forced to succumb.

O powerful emanation of the doubly ill-starred bioxide! to the damnation of the abdominal tract, by God! and half the tripes of Peppe! Witness-bearing presence of an invisible light, it was the son, that reverse talisman, of the un-imitated elegy; a standard-bearer of the distant September dawn, page to the milky-blue reticence of the Polar semester. Worthy, in its nobility, to have bejeweled the finger of a count of the palace, who had fallen asleep at Roncesvalles, with seven windows in his heart: or of a viscount, suddenly gone pale in the September prisons. Bearer of a double curse, Ingravallo conjectured, given its double face. The double evil eye must come from the bioxide. The combined duodenum-liver cancer is one of those double numbers that the cancer lottery rarely comes out with, from the modern cancerological cabala: whether in Europe or abroad.