That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (2 page)

In other words, the problem is not "who done it." From the first pages of the novel, we are told that what determines a crime is the "field of forces" that emanates from the victim's situation as it relates to the situations of others in the complicated web of events: "that system of forces and probabilities which surround every human creature, and which is customarily called destiny."

Rome, March 6, 1984

Translated from the Italian
by
William Weaver

       TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

T
HERE
is hardly anything about Carlo Emilio Gadda that is not contradictory. Stately and courtly, he lives in a lower-middle-class apartment house in Rome, where the yelling of children, the clatter of dishes, and the laundry hanging on the balconies contrast violently with the cloistral austerity, the shy solitude of the writer's quarters. And this solitude, the timid elegance of his speech and manner are, in turn, a surprise to one who has read his most famous book,
Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana,
a teeming canvas of Roman life, many of whose characters speak the city's expressive, but not always elegant dialect. The contrasts are, to a supreme degree, present in the book itself, a pastiche—as its title implies—of languages and dialects that has been compared to the work of Joyce.

Via Merulana, the locale of much of the story, is also an unlikely setting for a great novel. It is the least romantic street in Rome: a long, straight thoroughfare with square, solid, ugly buildings, constructed for the square, solid bourgeoisie of half a century ago, already a bit down-at-the-heels in 1927, the year in which the novel's events take place, and still more down-at-the-heels today. A street no tourist ever sees, except to pass along it hastily en route to some monument of the neighborhood like Santa Maria Maggiore or the church of the Santi Quattro Incoronati, both mentioned often and tellingly in
Il
pasticciaccio
(as the novel is familiarly called).

Gadda himself, the poet and chronicler of Rome, is not a Roman; and this most Roman of novels was written, some years after the events it describes, in Florence, where the author lived between 1940 and 1950. Born in Milan in 1893, Gadda has lived not only in Rome and Florence, but for long periods in Argentina, France, Germany, and Belgium. Officially he was—until the years in Florence—an engineer, but this profession was also a part of the disguise behind which the writer and thinker operated.

A soldier in the First World War (and a prisoner in Germany), Gadda had already begun filling notebooks with his round, precise hand. These notebooks, in part, appeared in his first published volume,
La Madonna dei filosofi
(1931), and, more completely, in his
Giornali di guerra e di prigionia
in 1955. His first articles had appeared in the distinguished Florentine literary magazine
Solaria
in 1926, and in
Solaria's
successor, the review
Letteratura,
he published installments of his two novels,
Il
pasticciaccio
(1946) and
La cognizione del dolore
(1938-41).

Gadda's first published volumes were collections of short stories which came out in small—almost clandestine— editions. Some of the books were published, wholly or partly, at the author's expense. But despite this secret manner of revealing his works, Gadda soon attracted the attention of the Italian critics and of a small but devoted band of readers. And, in time, those critics and readers included editors of two of Italy's leading publishing firms, Garzanti and Einaudi, who, after the Second World War, began to bring out Gadda's
opera omnia
in a more accessible manner, attracting new readers and renewed critical attention. And it was the influence of the Italian critics and publishers which brought about Gadda's being awarded the Prix International de Litterature at Corfu in 1963 for
La cognizione del dolore.

This prize came as something of a shock to the Italian literary world—where Gadda, though considered the country's most significant prose master, was still more or less a coterie possession—and as a complete surprise to critics and readers in other countries, where Gadda's name was known, at most, to a few specialists of Italian literature. A piece of Gadda's journalism (journalism, always, of a very unorthodox nature) had been translated into English for a special number of
The Texas Quarterly,
but otherwise his work had been totally ignored. A story of his then appeared, in English, in the review
Art and Literature
in Paris, and an article on his work was translated for a recent Italian number of
The London Magazine.
The present translation of
Il
pasticciaccio
follows translations into French, German, and Dutch.

La cognizione del dolore
is an unfinished work, and so, in a sense, is
II pasticciaccio.
Gadda's short stories—which now number several volumes—are frequently not stories at all, but fragments of other, unfinished longer works. Unfinished, but not incomplete. Even the briefest of Gadda's fragments has its own curious wholeness; and if the "murder story" aspect of
Il pasticciaccio
remains unresolved, one feels—at the end of this long, apparently ambling work— that it is better
not
to know who is responsible for the death of Signora Liliana. The reader feels that he has probed deeply enough already into the evil and horror of the world and that yet another, worse revelation of it would be more than the reader, the author, and the protagonist Ingravallo could bear. Though students of Gadda's work might not agree, one also suspects that his novels were born to be fragments, like certain imaginary ruins in Venetian painting, perfect parts of impossible wholes.

Il pasticciaccio
occupies in contemporary Italian literature the position that
Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past,
and
The Man without Qualities
occupy in the literatures of their respective countries; but as these three works do not resemble one another, so Gadda's novel resembles none of them. Joyce and Gadda have this much in common: a fascination with language, and a revolutionary attitude towards the use of language in fiction. From the time of Manzoni on, the "problem of language" has been a central theme in all Italian discussion of the art of writing; the literary language that Manzoni fixed and made national was, for some authors, both a guide and a strait jacket. And, even in the last century, Verga and other novelists were working towards bringing the language of daily life into fictional descriptions of daily life. The dialect theater helped create the dialect novel.

But
Il pasticciaccio
is not a dialect novel. Gadda uses the language of his characters to help portray them: his detective, Ingravallo, speaks a mixture of Roman and Molisano; the Countess Menegazzi lapses frequently into her native Venetian. The author himself, when writing from his own point of view, uses all of these, but also uses Neapolitan, Milanese, and occasional French, Latin, Greek, and Spanish expressions. At the same time he expoits all the levels of Italian, spoken and written: the contorted officialese of the bureaucracy, the high-flown euphemisms of the press, the colorful and imaginative spiel of the vendors in Rome's popular market in Piazza Vittorio. And at the same time, Gadda's vast erudition, in such disparate and recondite fields as philosophy, physics, psychology, and engineering, is frequently evident—all of this fused into a single, difficult, rich, yet flowing style.

Grim as its story sometimes is, and bitter and bleak as the author's attitude towards the world may be,
Il
pasticciaccio
is basically a satirical work. And the targets of Gadda's satire are scattered: at times his lighthearted whimsy touches some friend's foible or attacks the pretensions of some innocent public figure (like the poor President of the Italian Touring Club who campaigned for more road signs); at other times, with Swiftian
saeva indignatio,
Gadda lashes out at the Fascists, their followers and their dupes, the destroyers and despoilers of life.

Another Gaddian contradiction: his ferocity is counterbalanced by his timidity, and often his attacks are so thoroughly veiled as to be incomprehensible to all but the author himself (even his victim remains unaware). This quality gives, at times, a curious allusiveness to his prose and lifts what would be a personal vendetta to a larger, more universal level.

The reader will note that Gadda does not hesitate to accept as his own the verbal difficulties or spoonerisms of his humbler characters. The Romans are notoriously bad at getting names right (as any foreigner whose name contains a "w" will well know), so that detective Ingravallo may also be called Incravallo, Ingravalli, or Incravalli, and the hapless Countess Menegazzi's name is mispronounced so often that it becomes hard to remember how it really should be spelled. There is confusion even in place names, and one locality, mentioned often in the latter part of the book, is called, indifferently, Torraccio and Torracchio.

The Romans are also fond of giving people titles. An accountant named Rossi is never called Signor Rossi, but always Ragioniere (accountant) Rossi. Thus any official, however minor, is known as Doctor, whether or not he has a university degree. And Ingravallo, being a southerner, is known not only as Doctor Ingravallo but also as Don Ciccio.

When it originally appeared in
Letteratura,
this novel was enriched by many long and discursive footnotes which Gadda removed when
Il
pasticciaccio
came out in book form. For the benefit of non-Italian readers, the translator has added a certain number of footnotes of his own to this English version.
Il pasticciaccio
takes place under the stifling years of Fascism, so that there are many references, direct and indirect, to the personages, the ukases, the slogans and customs of the regime, references which even to the Italian reader (especially if he is under thirty) are obscure.

A word on the special problems of this translation. The question of rendering dialect in another language is a particularly tormented one. Several years ago an American poet made a brave, but disastrous attempt to re-create the Roman-dialect sonnets of the great Gioacchino Belli in Brooklynese. The result was ingenious, but wholly lacking in the wit and elegance of the original. To translate Gadda's Roman or Venetian into the language of Mississippi or the Aran Islands would be as absurd as translating the language of Faulkner's Snopses into Sicilian or Welsh. So the English-speaking reader is therefore asked to imagine the speech of Gadda's characters, translated here into straightforward spoken English, as taking place in dialect, or in a mixture of dialects. Other aspects of Gadda's language were easier to transpose, but in a few cases, where untranslatable puns underlie a passage, the translator has inserted an explanatory footnote.

The present translation was made from the seventh Garzanti edition of the novel (October 1962), which contains a few variants on earlier editions, variants made by the author, of course. The translator wishes to express his thanks to the author, for help and encouragement, to his friend Ariodante Marianni, who explained a number of Roman terms and customs, and to the critic and Gadda scholar Giancarlo Roscioni, who read the translation in manuscript and generously furnished innumerable elucidations and suggestions. Of course, the translator himself assumes full responsibility for the final result and, especially, for the general approach to the daunting, but infinitely rewarding task.

WILLIAM
WEAVER

Rome, January 15, 1965

      
THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA

      
I

EVERYBODY
called him Don Ciccio by now. He was Officer Francesco Ingravallo, assigned to homicide; one of the youngest and, God knows why, most envied officials of the detective section: ubiquitous as the occasion required, omnipresent in all tenebrous matters. Of medium height, rather rotund as to physique, or perhaps a bit squat, with black hair, thick and curly, which sprang forth from his forehead at the halfway point, as if to shelter his two metaphysical knobs from the fine Italian sun, he had a somnolent look, a heavy, lumbering walk, a slightly dull manner, like a person fighting a laborious digestion; dressed as well as his slender government salary allowed him to dress, with one or two little stains of olive oil on his lapel, almost imperceptible however, like a souvenir of the hills of his Molise. A certain familiarity with the ways of the world, with our so-called "Latin" world, though he was young (thirty-five), must have been his: a certain knowledge of men: and also of women. His landlady venerated, not to say worshiped him: for and notwithstanding the unfamiliar complication of every telephone trill and every sudden telegram, and night calls, and hours with no peace, which formed the tangled texture of his time. "All hours! He works around the clock! Last night he came home at daybreak!" For her he was the "distinguished, single gentleman, government employee" she had long dreamed of, the gentleman preceded by a discreet "to let" in
Il
Messaggero,
evoked, extracted from the infinite assortment of single gentlemen by that lure of "spacious and sunny" and despite the stern, closing injunction: "no women allowed"; which, in the language of the
Messaggero's
advertisements can offer, as everyone knows, a double interpretation. And besides, he managed to persuade the police to overlook that ridiculous little matter . . . yes, that fine for letting rooms without a license . . . why, when they divided it up, that fine, between City Hall and the police ... "A lady like me! Widow of Commendatore Antonini! All Rome knew him, you might say; and everybody who knew him had only the highest regard for him. Now I don't say this because he was my husband, rest his soul. And they take me for a common landlady! Me? Rent out my rooms to just anybody? Merciful Heavens, I'd rather throw myself in the river."

In his wisdom and in his Molisan poverty, Officer Ingravallo, who seemed to live on silence and sleep under the black jungle of that mop, shiny as pitch and curly as astrakhan lamb, in his wisdom, he sometimes interrupted this silence and this sleep to enunciate some theoretical idea (a general idea, that is) on the affairs of men, and of women. At first sight, or rather, on first hearing, these seemed banalities. They weren't banalities. And so, those rapid declarations, which crackled on his lips like the sudden illumination of a sulphur match, were revived in the ears of people at a distance of hours, or of months, from their enunciation: as if after a mysterious period of incubation. "That's right!" the person in question admitted, "That's exactly what Ingravallo said to me." He sustained, among other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of
a
cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. He also used words like knot or tangle, or muddle, or
gnommero,
which in Roman dialect means skein. But the legal term, "the motive, the motives," escaped his lips by preference, though as if against his will. The opinion that we must "reform within ourselves the meaning of the category of cause," as handed down by the philosophers from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant, and replace cause with causes was for him a central, persistent opinion, almost a fixation, which melted from his fleshy, but rather white lips, where the stub of a spent cigarette seemed, dangling from one corner, to accompany the somnolence of his gaze and the quasi-grin, half-bitter, half-skeptical, in which through "old" habit he would fix the lower half of his face beneath that sleep of his forehead and eyelids and that pitchy black of his mop. This was how, exactly how he defined "his" crimes. "When they call me . . . Sure. If they call
me,
you can be sure that there's trouble: some mess, some
gliuommero
to untangle," he would say, garbling his Italian with the dialects of Naples and the Molise.

The apparent motive, the principal motive was, of course, single. But the crime was the effect of a whole list of motives which had blown on it in a whirlwind (like the sixteen winds in the list of winds when they twist together in a tornado, in a cyclonic depression) and had ended by pressing into the vortex of the crime the enfeebled "reason of the world." Like wringing the neck of a chicken. And then he used to say, but this a bit wearily, "you're sure to find skirts where you don't want to find them." A belated Italian revision of the trite
"cherchez la femme."
And then he seemed to repent, as if he had slandered the ladies, and wanted to change his mind. But that would have got him into difficulties. So he would remain silent and pensive, afraid he had said too much. What he meant was that a certain affective motive, a certain amount or, as you might say today, a quantum of affection, of "eros," was also involved even in "matters of interest," in crimes which were apparently far removed from the tempests of love. Some colleagues, a tiny bit envious of his intuitions, a few priests, more acquainted with the many evils of our time, some subalterns, clerks, and his superiors too, insisted he read strange books: from which he drew all those words that mean nothing, or almost nothing, but which serve better than others to dazzle the naive, the ignorant. His terminology was for doctors in looneybins. But practical action takes something else! Notions and philosophizing are to be left to scribblers: the practical experience of the police stations and the homicide squad is quite another thing: it takes plenty of patience, and charity, and a strong stomach; and when the whole shooting match of the Italians isn't tottering, a sense of responsibility, prompt decision, civil moderation; yes, yes, and a firm hand. On him, on Don Ciccio, these objections, just as they were, had no effect; he continued to sleep on his feet, philosophize on an empty stomach, and pretend to smoke his half-cigarette which had, always, gone out.

For the 20th of February, Sunday, Feast of Sant'Eleu-terio, the Balduccis had invited him to dinner: "At half-past one, if that's convenient for you." It was, the signora said, "Remo's birthday"; and in fact, at the City Registry, Remo had been inscribed as "Remo Eleuterio," and baptized as such at the Church of San Martino ai Monti, so as to mark the day of his birth. "Two names that have a nasty ring to certain ears nowadays,"
^{1}
thought Don Ciccio, "both the first and the second." But for a guy like Balducci, who didn't give a damn about anything, they were a downright waste. The invitation, like the last time, had been issued by telephone two days ahead, a call "from outside" at the Collegio Romano Station, or rather, to give the street address, Santo Stefano del Cacco. First, in a melodious voice, the signora herself had spoken to him: "This is Liliana Balducci"; and then the old goat took over, Balducci, following up. Don Ciccio, after having kept the Sabbath with a visit to the barber's, took the signora a bottle of fresh oil from home. The Sunday dinner was happy, in the light of a marvelous afternoon, with confetti still littering the pavements, and an occasional carnival mask, a toy trumpet, an azure Cinderella or little devil in black velvet. The men talked about hunting: of expeditions and dogs: of guns: then about the comedian Petrolini: then about the various names they give the mullet all along the Tyrrhenian coast, from Ventimiglia to Cape Lilibeo: then the scandal of the day, Countess Pappalodoli, who had run off with a violinist; a Pole, naturally. Only seventeen. The story went on and on.

When he came in, Lulu, the little Pekinese bitch, a ball of fluff, had barked, and angrily, too; well, when she stopped growling, she had sniffed his shoes at length. The vitality of those little monsters is incredible. You feel like petting them, then stamping them. They were four at table: he, Don Ciccio, the husband and wife, and the niece. The niece, however, wasn't the same one as last time, that is to say on the Feast of San Francesco, this one was much younger, barely emerging from childhood. The other niece —the one on San Francesco's day—was only a niece after a manner of speaking: she looked like a peasant bride, her head crowned with black braids; strong and broad, she'd fill up a whole bed by herself: those eyes! and what a front! what a behind! Something to make you dream at night. This new one was a little girl with a pigtail hanging down her back, and she went to the sisters' school.

Don Ciccio, despite his somnolence, had a quick memory, infallible even: a pragmatic memory, he used to say. The maid, too, was a new face, though she vaguely resembled the first niece. They called her Tina. While she was serving, a wad of drained spinach deviated from the oval plate onto the candid whiteness of the immaculate tablecloth. "Assunta!" the signora cried. Assuntina looked at her. In that moment, both maid and mistress seemed extremely beautiful to Don Ciccio; the maid, harsher, had a severe, self-confident expression, a pair of steady, luminous eyes, two gems, a nose that made a straight line with the forehead: a Roman "virgin" of the age of Clelia; and the mistress, such a cordial manner, such a lofty tone, so nobly passionate, so melancholy! Her skin was enchanting. Looking at her guest, those deep eyes with a light of ancient nobility seemed to see, beyond the poor person of the "officer," all the poor dignity of a life! And she was rich, very rich, they said: her husband was well-off, traveled thirteen months the year, always tied up with those people up there in Vicenza. But she was even richer in her own right. To begin with, only real gents could afford to live in that huge building at number two hundred and nineteen: a few super high-class families, but above all people who were new to business, those who a few years ago had been called profiteers or "sharks."

And in the neighborhood the building itself was called by the poor people the palace of gold. Because it was as if the whole place right up to the roof were crammed with that precious metal. Inside, then, there were two staircases, A and B, with six floors and twelve tenants each, two per floor. But the triumph of it all was the third floor of stairway A, where on the one side lived the Balduccis, real class, and opposite the Balduccis there was a great lady, a Countess, also with a pile of money, a widow with a hard name to pronounce, Signora Menecacci,
many cash,
you might say, wherever you touched her there was a cache of gold, pearls, diamonds, all the most valuable stuff there is. And thousand-lire notes like butterflies: because money isn't safe in banks, you never know, and when you least expect it, they can catch on fire. So she had a dresser with a false bottom.

This, more or less, was the myth. The ears of Officer Ingravallo, which, under his crisp, black mop, rejoiced in a spring-like vitality, had seized it like that, in the air, like the ravings of ravens, or of Merulanian
merli,
after every whirring, from bough to bough of the spring. It was on every mouth, for that matter, and in every brain, one of those notions that become, thanks to a collective imagina-ion, compulsory, fixed ideas.

During the dinner Balducci had assumed, towards Gina, a paternal manner: "Ginetta, please, another drop of wine..." "Gina, fill the guest's glass . .." "Gina, an ashtray ..." like a good Papa; and she would answer promptly, "Yes, Uncle Remo." Signora Liliana then looked at her, content, almost with tenderness: as if she saw a flower, still closed, a little chilled by the dawn, now opening and shining before her eyes in the wonder of the daylight. The daylight was the male, baritonal voice of Balducci, the voice of the "father," and she, wife and bride of Papa, was therefore the Mamma. With great solicitude and a certain anxiety she followed the pretty hand of her still slightly hesitant ward in the act of pouring: glug, glug, golden Frascati, judging by the sound: the crystal decanter was heavy; the frail little arm seemed almost unable to hold it. Officer Ingravallo ate and drank soberly, as usual: but with a good appetite and a healthy thirst.

He didn't think, he didn't believe it opportune to think of asking anything, either about the new niece or the new maid. He tried to repress the admiration that Assunta aroused in him: a little like the strange fascination of the dazzling niece of the previous visit: a fascination, an authority wholly Latin and Sabellian, which made her well-suited to the ancient names, of ancient Latin warrior virgins or of not-reluctant wives once stolen by force at the Luper-cal, with the suggestion of hills and vineyards and harsh palaces, and with rites and the Pope in his coach, with the fine torches of Sant'Agnese in Agone and Santa Maria Portae Paradisi on Candlemas Day, and the blessing of the candles: a sense of the air of serene and distant days in Frascati or the valley of the Tiber, taken from the girls drawn by Pinelli among Piranesi's ruins, when the epheme-rides were heeded and the Church's calendars, and, in their vivid purple, all its high Princes. Like stupendous lobsters. The Princes of Holy Roman Apostolic Church. And in the center those eyes of Assunta's, that pride: as if she were denigrated by serving them at table. In the center ... of the whole . . . Ptolemaic system; yes, Ptolemaic. In the center, meaning no offense, that terrific behind.

He had to repress, repress. Assisted in this harsh necessity by the noble melancholy of Signora Liliana: whose gaze seemed to dismiss mysteriously every improper phantom, establishing for their souls a harmonious discipline, like music, that is: a texture of imagined architectures over the ambiguous derogations of the senses.

He, Ingravallo, was very polite, he was even a kindly uncle, with little Gina; from her throat, still rather long beneath her braid, came that little voice composed of yes and no, like the few, lamenting notes of a clarinet. He ignored, he chose to ignore, Assunta, after the maccheroni, as is only right in a guest who, also, has good manners. Signora Liliana, from time to time, might have been thought to sigh. Ingravallo noted that two or three times, in a whisper, she had said Hm. When hearts heave a sigh, then sorrow is nigh, as the saying goes. A strange sadness seemed to fill her face in the moments when she wasn't speaking or wasn't looking at the others at the table. Was she in the grip of some idea, some worry? concealed behind the curtain of her smiles, her polite attentions? and her talk, not studied or contrived, but yet always very courteous, as she adorned her guest with it? At those sighs, that way of passing a dish, those glances that sometimes wandered sadly off and seemed to breach a space or a time, unreal, only sensed by her, Ingravallo seemed little by little to take notice, to divine respective indications not so much of a basic disposition but of a present state of the spirit, a growing disheartenment. And then, a casual word or two, from Balducci himself: that hearty husband, all business deals and hares, now chatting so noisily, thanks to generous Frascatian inspiration.