That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (27 page)

Thus, in this delirium, they had sought safety in flight, in the ponds of the swamp, in the shadows of the canes, in the night, the silvery thicket of ilexes and pines on the shore, in the free wash of the beach, lorded over by a seething swell: others, poetesses and sea-creatures diving from the lunar rocks of the circeum, had plunged into the foam of the breakers. But the Contessa Circea, drunken, threw her head back, tossing her soaked hair (as yellow balloons laughed and swayed in Chinese) in the torpid benignity of the night: soaked in a shampoo of White Label: the cleft of her mouth, like an earthenware piggy-bank, arched, open and vulgar, till it could touch her ears, splitting the face like a watermelon after the first incision, in two slippers, in two soles of clogs: and from her rolling eyes, where you could see the white below the iris like that of a Teresa repossessed by the devil,
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down her face dripped ethylic tears, bluish gouts: opalescent pearls of a contraband Pernod. She invoked the flask of
ratafia,
called for the subventions of Papa, Pappy, the great Aleppo, the invisible Omnipresent, who was, on the contrary, the Omnivisible pig, hailed savior of Italy, omnipresent in his tickling, in every kind of tickling: impotent as he was to achieve anything whatsoever, and even less his verbose braggings. There dripped azure pearls, tears of aloe, of terebene and vodka: the head thrown back, the hair lost in the night, with the two fingers, thumb and index, each with a yellow topaz, raising her skirt, in front, revealing to one and all that she was wearing underwear. She was wearing it, the sainted woman: yes, yes, she was. The wild rape had taken that path, which was the path of duty, for him and for his scenting scariness, climbing up her thighs now like ivy, fat and trembling in his terror, making her laugh and laugh in silly cascades, raving at his tickling: there: they were made of cardboard and plaster, her underpants, that time. Because once, in life, they had put a plaster cast on the trap.

The sergeant sped on, with a dry crackling, in the direction of I Due Santi, with the private grabbing his waist, blinking his eyelids at the oncoming wind, bothered by the dust. Disappointment wakened him abruptly. The time in which we would say that dreams extend has, instead, the diaphragming rapidity of a Leica's click, is measured in lightning segments of time, by fractions of the fourth degree on the orbital time of the earth, commonly known as solar time, the time of Caesar and of Gregory. And lo, now, beyond the flotilla of clouds that was skirting the rocks of the east, the opal became rose, the rose thickened and was stratified in carmine: the lividness everywhere, to the north, of broken day: then, at last, from the ridge, the splendid eyelash: a dot of fire, in a peak of the ridge of the Ernici or the Simbruni the unbearable pupil: the straight, arrowing gaze of the handsome Apollo, the spotlight. The gray latitudes of Latium were clarified, made plastic, emerging, purple-clad, almost like crumbling milestones of time, fragments of towers without names.

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When the bam-bam-bam died out at I Due Santi, in a brief skid of the wheels, which the brakes quickly hindered, then blocked, the private found himself on the ground standing, as if he had fallen there: a mountain bear: stretching, from right to left, the lower edge of the olive-drab tunic, which was revealed to be an extremely short garment, over the rotund opulences of his anthropological type. To the right of the Appia, for those who went on in the direction of Albano, the door of opaque or colored panes to a little store, whose threshold of gray and worn peperino, on the outside, was at the level of the still damp asphalt. Opposite the door, to the left of the road that ascended straight and calm, between the mouths of the two connecting roads, one of which had brought them here from the barracks and the town, the low wall of a garden or a vineyard or something of the sort: above which there protruded, somewhat disheveled in the muggy dripping of the morning, the tops of some dried reeds. The wall was broken by a tall shrine, with two eaves and curlicues of pale stucco on the front. Two tumblers, and in them some primulas and periwinkles, consecrated to devotional use, flowered and colored the stone of that kind of window's sill: from which the Divinity, a bit stunned in the head, leaned out as if from a pulvinar over the bustle of the Appia. Framed by the jambs and the slightly cockeyed arch, the old painting, its color quite faded and chalky, demanded all one's attention: the Fara Filiorum Petri
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gazed at it, though stupefied by sleep and dazed by the novelty of this excursion. Two figures, surely saints—he argued from the data: that is, dressed in clothes that weren't the pants-and-jacket of ordinary men, and their pates behaloed: of which the one, without beard, smaller, was dark and bald: the other, hard and boney, with a white blob on his chin, like a spoonful of lime, and thick hair halfway down his forehead, white, or once white, inside the halo's yellow circle. Those two little short cloaks, bunched like a bandoleer on the left shoulder of the two partners, did not cover the calves and still further, below the calves, the repainted malleoli: and that had allowed the first painter, their "creator," to bring on to the scene four unsuspected feet. The two right ones, enormous, had come to him in a flash: and they were generously tentacled in toes, stretched forward in their stride, to puncture the foreground, the ideal plane (vertical and transparent), to which every visual occasion is referred. With particular expressive vigor, in a remarkable adaptation to the mastery of the centuries, the big toes were depicted. In each of the two extended digits, the cross strap of otherwise unperceived footwear segregated and singled out the knuckled-toe in that august pre-eminence which is his, which belongs to the big toe, and to that toe alone, separating it out from the flock of the toes of lower rank, less suitable for the day of glory, but still, in the osteologues' atlases and in the masterpieces of Italian painting, toes. The two haughty digits, enhanced by genius, were projected, hurled forward: they traveled on their own: they almost, paired off as they were, stuck in your eye: indeed, into both your eyes: they were sublimated to the central pathetic motif of the fresco, or alfresco, seeing as how it was plenty fresh. A bolt from heaven, a light of excruciated hours blanched them; however, when you came right down to it, the light seemed to rise from underground, since it struck them from below. The distant bray of a donkey, as the wind rose again, with the tinkle of bells. The glorious history of our painting, in a part of its glory pays tribute to the big toe. Light and toes
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are prime ingredients, ineffable, in every painting that aspires to live, that wants to have its say, to narrate, persuade, educate: to subjugate our senses, win hearts from the Malign One: insist for eight hundred years on the favorite images. Not even the saints, then, so laden with so many gifts of the Lord— not even they could avoid the indispensable gift of feet: and still less these two, who walked the Appian Way together to Babylon,
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towards decollation or upside-down crucifixion. They had, indeed, in their feet, the physical instrument of their itinerant apostolate: they trod on the feet of Ahenobarbus. Who, however, remained less than persuaded. No, the saints must not lack their full complement of toes: as soldiers must receive their full issue of tins: and even less when an Italian painter of the sixteenth or seventeenth century or, of the eighteenth, or worse, kneels before them and prepares to depict them, from below, with the soul of a pedicurist. Light, in Italy, is the mother of toes: and if one is an Italian painter, it's nothing to joke about, as Manneroni didn't joke at I Due Santi, neither with the light nor with the toes. The metatarsus of Saint Joseph has been peduncled with an inimitable big toe in the Palatine
tondo
by Michelangelo (the Holy Family): which huge digit, for a minimal portion, to tell the truth, has its pictorial tegument from the little toe of the Bride: a livid and almost surreal, or perhaps eschatological light, proposes the Toe-Idea, loftily incarnating—or in ossifying—it, in the foreground of the contingent: and salvages it promptly for the metaphysical bruises of eternity. The same metartarsus protuberates, the foot's thumb, rival of the Michelangelan-Palatine (to signify the miracle, or rather the audicle, of male chastity) in the Urbino master's Sposalizio, today at the Brera. The divarication of the solitary, bony toe from the remaining herd of other toes is rendered prominent by the perspectively charming joints of the cleansed pavement, where there is no husk or skin, neither orange's nor chestnut's, nor has any leaf or paper settled there, nor has man urinated there, nor dog. And the master toe, though disjoined from the others, at its root is spurred and gnarled: and then it converges inwards, as if forced by gout or by the habitual constriction of a shoe momentarily removed, or I'd say
domum relapsa
as if too fetid for the hour of the wedding. And it responds, made august by its divarication, it responds to the tall, erect ecstacy of the slender stalk or staff which, overnight, miraculously flowered with three lilies, instead of the customary white carnation: and it picks up, from the rather rare juncture of carpenterial innocence with carpenterial poverty, the testimonial value of an artisan connotation: more than a toe of more than a barefoot carpenter, in that fashion.

As to the iconography of the two saints, and of the holy apostles in general, ah, didn't Manneroni dedicate to them the unspent energies of a velvet-bearded forty years of his own life? assisted on his scaffoldings not only by his believer's fervor, but by the tragic qualities of his genius and an iron constitution: by an athlete's physique, a prophet's appetite: and by a handful of cash, from time to time, given him, however, reluctantly, by the commissioner of those miracles. In the shrine of I Due Santi, adorned and curlicued with cheese-pale stuccos, he was finally enabled to collect and employ all of his talents: the talents which had been swelling his brush, in twenty years of initiation and pictorial apprenticeship, and of obstinate discipline through twenty more years of bearded mastery. Ejaculated impetuously and with free hand on the mortar, still fresh —that is alfresco—the two big toes, the Pietrine and the Pauline, display all the vigor and the urgency of their creation . . . inderogatable, of the enunciation ... by coerced squeezing, as if splattered there by some source or spring
. . . "ch'alta vena preme."
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The "creator" couldn't bear another moment's delay, before creating.
"Fiat lux!"
And there were toes. Plip, plop.

Also of the painter Zeuxis, for that matter, it is rumored that he made a mountain, of lovely foam, at the mouth of a horse, splattering we don't know what sponge on his muzzle, at a whim, but catching it a little too low. And it worked out well. While Pestalozzi had taken to fiddling with his machine, bent over and absorbed, the short-tunicked young man, having crossed the road, moved under the shrine as if for a prayer or a vow: hinting, with his thumb alone, at the Sign of the Cross, he looked up, open-mouthed, and noticed that, with one hand, they held the edge of their garments, the two walkers, inasmuch as, if they didn't, their clothes would have been muddied along the way. It was muddy, in fact, towards the mire of the plain, even the road or row that they still had to travel: that same one, perhaps, that the Farafiliopetri now saw descending towards Le Frattocchie. A light must have spread from above, at one time, but the years, the decades or the centuries, had equated it to the squalor of the general wash: overcome by the light from underground. The bald saint, a little gnome with black hair at his temples, looked like somebody who knew a thing or two: able to read and write as smart as a lawyer, maybe even better: but he seemed to be slowing his pace, now, not even reluctantly, to allow his colleague to go ahead. A kind of right of primogeniture haloed the cervix of the latter, kindled and sharpened his pupils, it circumflowed, like rough beard, the mug that was greedily thrust forward to discern, a fisherman peering at his line: his nose was hardened to the task: granted the title of a Princedom which made his gray hair seem of stone, woolly as it was, to the forehead minimized of the harder. Beneath the figures of the two men, in the two waving scrolls one upon the other in exergue, the tubby Farafiliopetri managed to read, in silent parting and closing of the lips, barely forming the words without uttering them:
"Crescite vero in gratia etinco___co ... coccione Domini Preti Sec Ep."
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The sergeant, in the meanwhile, had taken it into his head —despite all prearranged plans—to medicate his machine on the spot, bent over her greasy viscera. He persisted in titillating obstinately it wasn't clear what hot nipple or what teat, withdrawing his fingers immediately, every time, with a "damn" or a "Jesus Christ!" in a whisper, and snapping them each time in the air, as if to shake off the burning.
"Saepe,"
the Farafilio read on,
"proposui venire ad vos et pro-hi-bitus"
(still mentally)
"sum usque adhuc. Paul ad Rom."
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Whereupon he was certain that he had truly deserved his diploma: from grade school. He had received it the year before, as a Baptist received Baptism after his twentieth year, and immediately added it to the already presented and certified papers: hair, brown: eyes, gray: noso, straight: height: 1.74 meters: chest: 91, circumference of the behind . . . not required. And now, at last, after the diuturnal assistance of the goddess of learning (and penmanship), spreading even to within the range of Pallas the Speller, now, behind, the "certificate of studies": diploma, yessir, yes, elementary.

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