That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (17 page)

"It doesn't exist anymore, because I don't want it, even if it did belong to grandfather. They say it's bad luck. And, in fact, poor Uncle Peppe . . . you see? Cancer. And double, at that. Who would ever have imagined such a thing? He was so good, poor Uncle Peppe! Believe me, Doctor Ingravallo. I remember every single word: it made such an impression on me. I can't forget that face of hers. How she laughed, and how she cried! Those presents! A scene between cousins. But it could have been a love scene! No, no love, not on any terms!" he seemed to recover himself. "It was really laughable, too, poor Liliana! So you'll go tomorrow, no, today, she said. Promise me! Yes, yes, to Campo Marzio, to Ceccherelli. Remember. Just before you get to Piazza in Lucina, where there's that pizzeria. Yes, San Lorenzo in Lucina: now don't start playing dumb on me, you know perfectly well. It's on the right, though."

Ingravallo didn't want to believe it; he couldn't But he realized, little by little, that he was being drawn to believe what he would have believed unbelievable.

"Doctor Ingravallo, listen to me," Giuliano implored, "maybe she was crazy. I don't want to insult the dead, a poor dead woman. And after the way she died, too! But listen to me, please ... I... for her I was ... I realized ... I . . ."

"You . . . what?"

"I," Giuliano got a little mixed up, laughed nervously, laughing at himself: "I was, for her, like a champion of the race, this great old race of the Valdarenas. Seriously. If she could have, if she had been free . . . But her conscience, and then ... her religion. No, she wasn't depraved" (sic) "She wasn't like so many other women" (sic) "It was just because of that idea, that obsession of hers, for a baby. It really was, believe me, a mania, a fixed idea, anybody would have understood that: something that made her think queerly. It was stronger that she was, believe me, Doctor."

Valdarena's affirmations had the timbre and the incontestable warmth of the truth. "And how do you explain the disappearance of the iron coffer? and the two bank books?"

"How should I know?" the young man said: "how could I know who did it?" He looked at Ingravallo. "If I knew, that monster would already be in jail for sure, in my place. The coffer? I've never even seen it. The chain and the ring, along with the ten thousand lire—she gave them to me: she forced me to take them. The envelope—she was the one who insisted on hiding it here": he slapped his hip with his hand: "For that matter . . . Remo must know about it, too, I should think."

"No, he didn't know anything!" Ingravallo contradicted him harshly. "Cousins' secrets!" under that pitch on his head, he was livid: "And you," he incriminated him with a forefinger, "you knew that he didn't know." Giuliano flushed, shrugged. "Well, like I said before, she was the one who gave me the ten thousand. She stuffed the money here, in my jacket," and he touched his side again. "That envelope, the one they took from my desk": Don Ciccio frowned. "Then I ran off, I ran away. I went into the dining room and locked myself in, playing, click. No sooner was I in there when she knocked . . . Then I opened the door to her: she went to the sideboard ... to the buffet."

"Ah, in the dining room? Near the buffet? Right where you cut her throat?" Ingravallo's face by now was white, furious. His eyes were those of an enemy.

"Cut her throat? What I'm talking about was two months ago, Doctor, still in January, the twenty-fifth of January, like I said. About three weeks before . . . before you and I also met. You remember that Sunday, maybe a month ago, when you were at their house for dinner? well, about three weeks before that dinner. And besides, it's easy to check, my God. Why didn't I think of it before? Ask Ceccherelli, the jeweler in Campo Marzio. I went to get the damned jasper myself. He can testify to that. He had instructions from Liliana to give it to me, to me personally, the fob with the new stone with my initials on it, to replace that other one: she had told him to attach it to the chain for me himself, to her grandfather's chain," he pointed to it, on the desk, with his chin, "and she told him I'd bring it to him: me, in person. Liliana was so precise about everything; she had arranged it all: she had even showed him my picture. But Ceccherelli, when I went in, made me show him my identification, a license or something, he said: so I showed him my papers. He begged my pardon. But then I was bringing him the chain. What better identification could he want than that, after all. . .?

"So it was twenty days before the twentieth of February, even twenty-five days, all right. How is it that you didn't mention a word of it to anybody? To your grandmother. To your aunt? Why didn't you show it to the family? Wedding presents, according to what you've been saying. Family jewels. Grandfather's gold: which was to go to the grandchildren. Why hide it then? And how come Balducci, this morning, was so taken by surprise? A memento of your own . . . great-grandfather . . . you can surely show it to your grandmother: who is his daughter, if I'm not mistaken."

"The daughter-in-law would be closer: Grandfather Valdarena, Grandfather Rutilio, was my father's grandfather; that is to say, if you follow me, the father of my grandfather": Don Ciccio looked at him furiously with the suspicion that Giuliano was pulling his leg: in his situation? "That's why I'm called Valdarena, too. My grandmother, grandmother Marietta, who brought me up, was the
daughter-in-law
of grandfather Rutilio."

"The daughter-in-law, I know, I know. Aha? Wait. The daughter-in-law? Your father's grandfather—is that what you said? Then the Signora Liliana was ... your aunt?"

"No. Poor Liliana was my second cousin. A generation behind. That's why, perhaps, I liked her so! That's why she was so stupendous!" Don Ciccio listened, glumly, bituminous: "she was the daughter of Uncle Felice: Uncle Felice Valdarena, who was my father's uncle, the brother of my father's father. Liliana and my father were first cousins."

"I see, I see. And so you hid everything? Very carefully?

You were afraid maybe you'd have to share the stuff? share the gold chain .. . with the poor? The way Amedeo II shared his Collar of the Annunziata?"
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"Vittorio Amedeo . . ."

"Vittorio, I know, I know. With your poor relations? With some third cousin once removed?"

"Some newly hatched ugly duckling of the younger generation," sneered the accused.

"Or were you afraid that Signor Balducci, the minute he got off the train . . . those presents, all that money . . . might be kind of a weight on his stomach?"

"No, no!" said the accused, with a pleading voice. "She was the one, poor thing. She! I really wasn't thinking of hiding them: but she said to me: mind you, Giuliano, this is between us, our little harmless secret, a secret between cousins . . . like in books! The secret of beauty: aren't we beautiful, the two of us? Of happiness, longed for and not fulfilled. Oh God, what am I saying! And she covered her face with her hands. You'll have happiness. And then the secret ... let me think a minute ... the secret of two good souls: who in a world a litttle better than this one . . . well, would have created other souls. In this world, though, the way it is (Doctor, if you could have seen her! At that moment!), we have to go our separate ways, like the leaves when the wind tears them from the tree. My goodness! she said, what nonsense is coming out of my mouth, today of all days. This is a fine way to wish you all happiness. And you have to have the baby, Giuliano! Forgive me, forgive me. She was crying; then she smiled through her tears; in fact, she started to laugh. Happy, handsome—you have to make him, she said. And blond, mind you. Like you were, when you were a little tyke, laughing all the time, and wanting to wee-wee without turning your back, right in front of everybody!" Don Ciccio felt called upon to rummage among his papers for a moment, on the desk.

"She laughed, and she said to me: what would Remo say, when he comes back! If he knew I was giving presents to a young man! Even if he is my cousin, my handsome cousin who's going to be married. She laughed: who's marrying another girl, poor little me! No, no, you mustn't even tell your grandmother, poor old soul, or your mother, when you go to Bologna: you mustn't tell anybody. Swear! And I swore . . ."

Don Ciccio was in a cold sweat. The whole story, theoretically, smelled like a fairy tale to him. But the young man's voice, his accents, those gestures, were the voice of truth. The world of the so-called verities, he philosophized, is merely a tissue of fairy tales: and bad dreams. So that only the mist of dreams and fairy tales can have the name of truth. And, on the poor leaves, it is a caressing ray of light.

With his toothless grin, with that latrine-like breath that distinguishes him, Common Sense was already mocking the story, wanting to laugh, swine-like, in Don Ciccio's face, spit the round
no
of the smart-ass at his mop of a police dog not yet named cavaliere. But Thought will not be prevented: he arrives first. You can't erase from the night the flash of an idea: of an idea, slightly dirty, then . . . You can't repress the ancient Fescennine, banish from the old earth fable, its perennial Atellan: when aloft, happy and wicked, swirls the laughter from peoples and from the soul: just as you cannot charm away the individual aroma from thyme or horsemint or origanum: the sacred odors of the earth, of the barren mountain, in the wind. Up, up, from the packed cities, from the races, from every street corner, from the railings of every bridge: from the brown shores, and from the silvered, twisted people of the olives, which climb the mountains. When, over the houses and all the rooftops of mankind, a bluish air trembles a little, over their brims. When the warm dung heap smokes, above the frost, resurgent hopes: the fabling hopes of the truth! When every ridge dissolves, in the smoking plowed furrows! When the sharp descent of the billhook consecrates the olive tree to its fruit, and strips away falsehood. To Ingravallo, there came in a flash, between his grief and his contempt, that it was much more natural and much simpler, something very logical, since it really meant so much to Liliana, this baby, that instead of giving him, this handsome crook here (who was before him) the gold chains of the dead . . . babies . . . from chains of gold, babies don't come, surely ... it was much quicker if she made him give her, instead, another little plaything, much more suited to the purpose. That story, really, smacked of lies. A lot of nonsense, all made up.

And then, no . . . there wasn't a word of truth in it. Her husband, Balducci, was after all a husband: a great hulking husband. If the baby hadn't come out, so much the worse for him, that ugly bastard. It was no fault of men. He clenched his teeth, livid, collected his papers into the red folder. He had the prisoner taken back to his cell.

      
V

BUT the statements of Ceccherelli, of his "boy in the shop," one Gallone, a handsome old fellow, thin as a rail, with eyeglasses, and of an apprentice, a certain Amaldi, or Amaldini, were entirely in Giuliano's favor. Ceccherelli, backed up by the other two, confirmed in every detail the orders he had received more than two months before from the poor signora, the various stages in the preparation of the fob: "It's for a relation of mine who's getting married, so do your very best." The signora had shown him a gold signet ring, heavy, yellow-gold, with a blood-jasper, very handsome with the carved initials G.V. in what you might call Gothic lettering: "I want the stone for the chain to match this one." She had left him the ring. He had taken an impression in wax: first of the monogram, then of the whole stone, which projected from its setting. Liliana Balducci had then come back to the shop two more times, she had selected the stone from five he had shown her, after he had laid in a special stock from Digerini and Coccini, the wholesalers; he had dealt with them for years, so they hadn't raised any objection to giving him the stones on loan. It was also fully confirmed, from the same source, that the opal—very handsome stone, but with that curse on it like all opals—was to be taken over by Ceccherelli, who had in fact, taken it over, adjusting the price accordingly, despite that
R
.
V
., which was faintly engraved on it, "because, as far as I'm concerned, if you'll pardon the expression, I don't give a good goddamn about all these old superstitions. Why, you'd think you were in the Middle Ages, indeed you would. Now, in all conscience, I'm interested in doing business, in as straightforward a way as possible. In the forty years I've had my shop, believe me, Doctor, there has never been a word, not a shadow of a doubt, even for so much as a pin. And besides, just to be on the safe side, I stuck it right in a special drawer I keep for such things, as soon as I took it out of its setting, with pincers, not even touching it with my fingers, so to speak. As for the pincers, I stepped next door to the barber's and disinfected them with alcohol: and as for the gem in question then, I locked it away in that drawer, the last one on the way to the bathroom. You know the one, Alfredo; and so do you, Peppino: it's so packed with coral horns that if that opal decided to put the evil eye on the shop . . . on
my
shop? Poor opal. It's like a capon in there, in the midst of so many roosters! . . . with a sharp beak too, I can tell you."

As for the ring, he had given it back to the signora after a couple of days, "if I remember rightly, it was when she came back to the shop to look at the jaspers." He was to give the fob to Giuliano in person, who was to come by and collect it, bringing the chain with him: "yes, that one": he recognized it perfectly. "That chain," Liliana had said, "You know? Signor Ceccherelli, you know it well. Remember? The one you estimated at two thousand lire? . . . That's the one I gave away. And grandfather's ring, too, with the diamond, you remember? You estimated it at nine thousand five hundred?" Ingravallo also showed him the ring. "This is the one, no question about it: a diamond of twelve and a half carats, to say the very least. A marvelous fire." He took it, turned it around, looked at it: he held it up against the light: "Time and again grandfather used to say to me: remember, Liliana, this must stay in the family! You know to whom I mean!" The words of her grandfather, a sacred formula almost, for her: that was clear: well, she had repeated it twice, there in the shop: "isn't that so?": in the presence of Gallone, and in the presence of Giuseppe Amaldi: both of whom nodded their confirmation. To Amaldi Liliana herself chose to explain every detail: what the two intertwined letters he had to engrave were to be like, and how she wanted the stone set: jutting out slightly from the oval setting: Ceccherelli, with his little fingernail followed the firm binding of the green stone, mounted as a seal, that is to say, projecting a bit from the setting: and with a little band of gold on the back, to conceal the rough side, and to enclose it.

In addition to the jewelers, who were heard in the morning, it must be said that the Valdarena family and its ramifications, that is to say Giuliano's grandmother, Balducci himself, and the two aunts from Via dei Banchi Vecchi, and Uncle Carlo, Aunt Elvira, and more or less all the kinfolk had been groping around for three days, some in this direction, some in that, seeking the road to salvation, the way to get Giuliano out, out of the mess in which he found himself, poor boy, through no fault or sin of his own. Easier said than done. But after the three clarifying statements of the three jewelers, which were one good thing, there came immediately the even better statement of the head cashier of the bank, the man from the Banco di Santo Spirito. From the master file of her account (the savings account) it turned out that she, Liliana, had withdrawn the ten thousand lire, right on the 23rd of January, two days before making the present, which she had given him on the 25th, at her house, when he had gone to visit the Balduccis and had found her alone. The head cashier, Public Accountant Del Bo, knew Liliana: he had done as she requested, that time: he happened to be at the window, number 8, full of paternal smiles. A few minutes before noon. Yes, yes, he remembered perfectly: at the moment when he was snapping out those ten notes on the glass counter—ten filthy, freckled old blankets, they were, the mangy kind, that have come from the accordionlike wallet of some sheep-trader from Passo Fortuna or from the wine-damp counter of a tavern in the Castelli— she had said to him, with that soft voice of hers and those deep, deep eyes: "Please, Signor Cavalli, see if you can't give me fresh, clean bills, if you have them: you know how I like new ones . . . ," she had called him Cavalli rather than Del Bo. "Like this?" he had said to her, taking away the dirty ones he had in his hand; and he showed her a fresh pack, in the air, against the light, holding it by one corner, letting it dangle from two fingers. "Nice and shiny, look! . . . They just arrived yesterday from the Bank of Italy: the mint has just spat them out. They have a nice odor: sniff. The day before yesterday morning they were still at Piazza Verdi.
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What? Afraid of germs? You're right ... a handsome lady like yourself."

"No, Signor Cavalli . . . the fact is that I have to make someone a present," Liliana had said. "A wedding present?" "Yes." "Ten thousand-lire notes make a nice present, especially for a young couple."
"It's a cousin, who's like a brother to me. You've no idea . . . I was like his mother, when he was a baby."
Those were her very words: he remembered perfectly; he could swear it on the Bible. "Best wishes to the happy couple: and to you too, Signora." They had shaken hands.

                                  *** *** ***

Sunday the 20th, in the morning, further information from Balducci to the two officials: then to Doctor Fumi alone, when Don Ciccio, shortly after noon, was led to "concern himself with another matter" and preferred "to go out for a moment." In all truth, there was no lack of other matters on his desk. Indeed, the desk overflowed onto the shelves, and the shelves to the files: and there were people coming up and going down, and more waiting outside: some smoking, some throwing away the butt, some hawking and spitting against the wall. All heavy and smoky, the genteel clime of Santo Stefano del Cacco, in a syncretic odor, a little like a barracks or the second balcony of the Cinema Jovinelli: between armpits and feet, and other effluvia and aromas more or less of March, which it was sheer delight to sniff. Of "other matters" there was enough to wallow in, to swim in: and people in the waiting room! Madonna! more than at the foot of the great Tower of Babel. They were hints (and better than hints) of "an intimate nature," the ones proferred by Balducci: in part spontaneously, slipping into them, one would say, the hunter-traveler abandoning himself to that kind of logor-rhea to which certain suffering souls succumb, repenting a little perhaps of their past behavior, as soon as the phase of softening sets in, as the bruise follows the blow: posttraumatic cicatrization: when they feel that forgiveness is theirs, from Christ and man: and a part, instead, drawn from him with the gentlest oral string, through a civil dialectic, through a passionate peroration, a vivid flashing of the eyes, an extracting maieutics and that charitable poppy-heroin, the voice and the gestures of Parthenope and Vesuvius: the action both bland, and the same time, persuasive, ahah! of an amiable type of forceps. And out came the tooth. Liliana, by now, had got it into her head that, with her husband ... she wouldn't ever have any babies: she considered him a good husband, of course, "from every point of view": but when it came to a baby in view, no, not a sign. In ten years of marriage, almost, well! not even the hope: and she had married at twenty-one. The doctors had spoken frankly: it was he or she. Or both. She? To prove it wasn't her fault she would have had to try with another. This is what Professor D'Andrea told her, too. So, from those continuous disappointments, from those ten years, more or less, where her grief had put down such deep roots, her humiliation, despair, tears, from those useless years of her beauty dated also those sighs, those "ah me's," those long looks at every woman, at those who were full, ah! . . . (When hearts heave a sigh, then sorrow is nigh, as the saying goes.) ... at children, at plump maidservants, all leafy with celery and spinach, in their shopping bags, as they came from Piazza Vittorio in the morning: or with their asses in the air, bending over to blow a kid's nose, or to touch him, to see if he's wet through: for those are the moments when you see her at her best, the maidservant, all health, all thighs, from behind: now that it's the fashion to wear such short underpants—if they wear any at all. She looked at the girls, she returned, for a flash, with a note of profound melancholy, the bold glances of young men: a caress, or a benevolent license, mentally bestowed on the future bestowers of life: on whatever seemed to her to contain the certainty, the germinal verity, the kernel of secret growth. Hers was the limpid assent of a fraternal spirit: to those who outlined the pattern of life. But the years were rushing past, one after the other, from their dark stables, into nothingness. From those years, as her educational restriction operated, the first evidence then the gradual exacerbation of a delirium of solitude: "rare in a woman," Doctor Fumi interjected softly: "and in a Roman woman even more . . .": "yes, we like our company, we Romans," Balducci agreed: and that need, quite to the contrary, to rest in spirit against the physical image of another, on the visible geneticizing of people, and of the poor: that mania ... for giving double sheets to the maids, giving them a dowry at all costs, urging to marriage those who
wanted nothing more: that notion of wanting to cry, then, and to blow her nose, that gripped her for whole days, poor Liliana, when they really did up and marry: as if, when it was done, she felt envious. An envy that gnawed at her liver: as if they had done it to spite her, marrying, and to say then: "Look at me: after four months, a kid on the way! Our little boy weighs eight pounds, he gains two pounds a month." On certain mornings all it took was for some woman friend to say: "Have you seen Clementina? What a stomach she has." and Liliana's eyes would be red. "Once she almost made a scene with me, her husband, over a girl from Soriano al Cimino: a peasant who came to Rome on the bus from Viterbo, to bring me a slice of wedding cake. I don't even want to see her, that shameless thing! she yelled. The bride, poor kid, came in with her husband, and with a belly on her like a balloon on the feast of San Giovanni, when they send up fireworks. They said: we brought you some wedding cake. Of course, they were kind of embarrassed. So I said to them, laughing: it looks like the air is plenty healthy, up there on the Cimino: she blushed and looked down at her stomach, like the Virgin when the Angel explains the business to her in the Annunciation: then she got her nerve up, though, and answered: well, Signor Balducci, that's how it goes. We're young. We kind of hurried things . . . When the baby comes, nobody will remember any more, whether there was a priest or not to bless us. But don't worry, now we've been blessed, all three of us." The years! like a rose wasting, the petals falling one after another . . . into nothingness.

It was at this point, with a face the color of ashes, that Ingravallo asked to be excused: for reasons of duty. Information and reports from subalterns: words and written paper: orders to give: the telephone. Doctor Fumi followed him with one eye, as he went towards the door, head bowed, shoulders bent, in an attitude that seemed weary and pensive: he saw him take a pack of Macedonias from his pocket, a cigarette from the pack, the last, plunged into God knows what griefs: the door shut again.

To Don Ciccio, it was as if he had known it, that whole story, for a long time. The impressions and memories that Liliana's cousin and her husband were drawing out, in a kind of tormented salvage operation, from her days now so horribly dissolved, confirmed what he had already sensed on his own, though in a vague, uncertain way.

Also that idea of wanting to die, if a baby didn't come to her: hadn't he "imagined as much," Don Ciccio, or didn't he already believe it a little? Through his acquaintance with Signora Liliana: a little of it had come to the surface with the admissions of the cousin, and now, from the talk of her husband, made loquacious by the tragedy, and by feeling himself the center of attention and of the general compassion (a hunter he was! he felt he had come back with a fine hare, gun on his shoulder, boots muddy, and hounds exhausted), wanting to unburden himself, after the blow: and disputing, freely, on the delicacy of the feminine soul and, in general, on woman's great sensitivity: which among those poor creatures! is something widespread. The word "widespread" he had read in Milan, in the
Secolo,
in an article by Maroccus ... the
Secolo's
doctor: smart as a whip!