That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (29 page)

All these aerodynamics, naturally, and the consequent release of chocolate, or mocha, as may be, were exploited by Zamira to avoid answering: while some surly little feathers, snowy and delicate as those of a baby duckling, lingered above, in midair, softly swaying, till they seemed the dissolving rings of smoke from a cigarette. In this new wonder Pestalozzi's imperative faded away. She got up quickly from the chair with all her bluish behind, and started kicking her slipper and waving her skirt after the sulky beast, since she had no apron, and screeching at it: "Get out! Out! dirty, filthy thing! The idea! Of anything so nasty! To the sergeant here! Filthy animal!"

So that the filthy thing in question, still trilling a thousand clucketyclucks, and spewing them, all together, towards the ceiling in a great cackling resume, doubly anchored though she was by string and yarn, took flight up to the top of the sideboard: where, pissed off, and resuming her full dignity, she deposited, on the pewter tray, another neat little turd, but smaller than the first: plink! With which she seemed to have evacuated to the full extent of her possibilities. Fear (of the carabinieri) brings out the worst in all of us.

And there, at the glass door, the brass handle began also to show signs of restlessness. The door opened. A young girl, from the March outside, burst into the large room like a gust of wind. A dark shawl around her neck: umbrella in hand, already closed before her entry. A wave of handsome chestnut hair from the forehead back, almost in a cascade over the shawl: March had invaded it, with lunatic arabesques. At the sight of the olive drab, as soon as she had come down the step, she stopped, lips parted, dumfounded. The two soldiers and Zamira, all three, sensed an unexpected emotion which had flamed up from her uterus through the lymphatic glands and the vaginal tracts into the fullness of her boobs: in a faint gasping, but certainly a vivid palpitation. Her face paled, or so it seemed: it was, at this point, the slightly hysterical white of a desirable girl. She remained with her lips parted, then said: "Good morning, Corporal": and hurled a larboard glance at the other one, whom she had already discerned on coming in and descending the step, but whom she saw for the first time, cornered in his corner as if in a modest penumbra: over whom prevailed, in any case, the chevroned dazzle, that is to say the hierarchical precedence of Pestalozzi. After the glance at the other simpleton, she made as if to look around for a place to set her umbrella: but the lynx-like gaze (lynx was the word he used to describe himself) of the above-named sergeant . . . no, the lynx-like gaze did not miss a movement of her left hand (which held in the ring and little finger that scarecrow of an umbrella), to the charge or benefit of the other hand: a kind of scratching or massage inflicted or practiced with the thumb, from below, and externally with the index and middle finger, on the long, central fingers of the right hand: as if to warm them up, foreseeing the work to come. In the apparent casualness of the gesture there was an insistent, a premeditated quality: it was the gesture, not casual, of one who wishes to remove a ring, with some effort, and who proposes, at the same time, to conceal the not-easy operation from others present. The corporal glared at the girl, approached her by two paces, bang, bang, gently but firmly took her right hand by the fingertips: an invitation to the dance which admitted no refusal. He seemed to be pressing and squeezing them, one by one, those fingers, one after the other, as if to feel if there was a pimple, or a callus, as he went on looking into her eyes, fixed and perplexed, with the manner of a magician on the stage in a demonstration of hypnotism. Finally he turned it over, that hand, and stood there looking into its palm, to read her fate, one would have said. A handsome yellow stone, a topaz?, glowed like the headlight of a train, a hundred facets, on the inner part of the finger, the ring finger, after her surreptitious half-twist. It gave forth, from itself, the bumptious and slightly silly gaiety, at moments, of colored glass, under the sudden appearance and alternate fading, among the March clouds, of the sun, also seized with a uterine languor: for in that first month, when he has barely caught a whiff of the rain in the skies, he too is seized with the vapors and palpitations: like that Apollo that he is.

"You . . . who are you?" Pestalozzi, radiant, asked her, recognizing in his own desire the stimulating identity of the face, the eyes, the genteel figure of the girl, though not yet her name, in the filing cabinet of his mind. "Are you Clelia? Clelia Farcioni? or Camilla Mattonari?"

"Why, Corporal, what's all this about? Yes, my name's Mattonari, all right: but I'm not Camilla. My name is . . ." she hesitated, "Mattonari Lavinia."

"Then where is Camilla? And who is she? Your sister?"

"Sister?" she pursed her lips in disgust, "I don't have any sisters," disdaining the hypothesis of such a kinship.

"But you know her. She works here: you said her name, Camilla's. So you're friends." And in the meanwhile he was still holding her hand. She had set down, at last, the umbrella: she frowned: "Did I say that? Camilla? I just repeated the name you said, corporal." Pestalozzi thought he had caught a use of the article, in Tuscan or Lombard fashion,
^{62}
which hadn't been spoken at all.

"Friends? I don't have any friends." The violence of this denial, a second time: no more than the corporal was expecting: "Well, if you don't have any friends, so much the better: you can speak out then: and no foolishness, because I don't have time to waste. Who's Camilla?" he continued to hold her hand, by the fingertips.

"She's . . . yes, a girl who . . . she's learning to be a seamstress, too . . . she works . . ."

"She works here?"

"Well yes," she admitted, hanging her head.

"She's her cousin: a distant cousin . . ." Zamira said calmly, in the tone with which the
Almanack de Gotha
asseverates, and all believe, that Charlotte Elisabeth of Coburg is the fourth cousin of Amalia of Mecklenburg.

"And where is she? Why isn't she here? Isn't she coming to work today?"

"How should I know?" the girl shrugged. "She'll be coming."

"You can see for yourself, Sergeant," Zamira insisted, haughtily. "We're out in the country. We work when there's something to do ... to make or to mend: when there's need, I mean. Every other day, more or less. But in the winter, with the weather like this," and she took advantage of a fading of the sun, through the panes, and nodded towards the outside, "with these storms, you can't tell from one day to the next . . . whether it's spring or whether it's still January, with this weather maybe we work one day out of five. You know better than me, Sergeant, since you must have studied all about the weather and the signs of the moon, the way I did, when I got my fortunetelling diploma," she recited in a sententious tone:

"Candlemas, Candlemas! Winter's end has come at last. But should rain fall or north wind blow Winter then has weeks to go.

and three weeks ago, if you remember, just like today, the weather was something terrible; the water came right down into the shop, and that lousy hen," she sought the hen with her eyes behind the machine, "even stopped laying. Today maybe we have nothing to do, and tomorrow there may be a whole heap of stuff."

"It looks to me like you have a fine heap of lies, enough to last a month," and he indicated with his chin the little mound of things, piled as if in two peaks, like the back of a camel. Still holding the young girl by the hand, he abandoned the clucking hen to her doubts and the double train of yarn and string and the relative knots.

"Now . . . tell me something: who gave you this?" he raised his hand of the palpitating Lavinia, now clasping her by the wrist, and looking at the topaz which, from the inner part of the hand, she had turned again on her finger.

"Who gave it to me?" she made an effort to blush, as if at a tender secret.

"Signorina, hurry up. Take off the ring. I have to confiscate it. And tell me who gave it to you. If you tell me, all right. And if you don't tell me . . ." and he took from his pocket the familiar plaything: presenting it to her.

Lavinia blanched: "Corporal . . ."

"Skip the corporal. Take that ring off right now, and hand it over, make it snappy, because if you don't know, I'll tell you: it's stolen goods. It's in the list of jewels and gold objects stolen from the countess in Via Merulana, from Countess Menegazzi: it's here, in the list of jewels." And, to motivate his demand which, in spite of everything, he knew smacked a bit of bullying, he replaced the handcuffs and removed, from another pocket, Ingravallo's paper. The procedural timidity of that which in the
Barber
is marked in F sharp, the "force," had not yet sunk then, in 1927, into the present Oceanic depths: but it already knew certain aspects of today's taste. Even the most harsh official, alone in the countryside in the midst of the populace, deferred to it, as they defer to it today. Having therefore extracted the list, squaring off the two sheets as if he were reading a warrant, Pestalozzi pretended also to look there ... for the legitimate authorization to proceed. "Mmm ..." he went down the first lines, muttering, and stumbled at once at what he was seeking: "gold ring with topaz!" and his was the voice of victory. He waved the letterheaded paper, put it under her eyes, the girl's. She, Lavinia, didn't even know how to read it.

"Police Headquarters, Rome!" he chanted in her face, in a tone of importance, and of ironic detachment towards the rival organization, which, just because they could type a couple of sheets of paper, gave themselves such airs: "Police Headquarters, Rome!" He took the ring held out to him by the girl, her face pale with spite, livid, with the air of submitting, helpless, she, poor country girl, to this abuse of power. Zamira, silent, looked on: and listened. "Aha! this is the very one!" Pestalozzi ventured, examining the ring with a connoisseur's eye, turning it over and looking at it closely, as a fence would have done in Via del Gobbo, tending to sequester it at once: meanwhile he clasped the two sheets of paper in the other hand, between little finger and palm: "this is the topaz I've been hunting for for two days: this is it!" as if his professional wisdom, operating in his cranium
ab aeterno,
had allowed him to recognize it instantly. In reality he was seeing it then for the first time, and he had been hunting for it for two hours, if, after all, it really was a topaz, and not a piece of bottle, perhaps: "Who gave it to you? Tell the truth. He did, Retalli. You don't have the money to buy it: a ring like this! Enea Retalli gave it to you: he already confessed it yesterday to the sergeant." (Retalli was still a fugitive from justice.) "He's your lover, we know that: and he gave you this topaz"; which was rather a naive remark. "Nobody's my lover: and Enea Retalli is out working somewhere: I don't know where; and it's not true that you caught him last night, or that he confessed anything."

"So much the worse for you then. Come on. Let's go," and he motioned to Farafiliopetri: and grabbed her by the arm.

"Corporal, you've got to believe me," the girl protested, freeing herself, "a girl friend of mine gave it to me; she's promised to buy it off a woman; she lent it to me for a couple of days, because today . . . today's my birthday. She gave it to me just for two days."

"Ah, and how old are you?"

"Well ... I'm nineteen."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I was nineteen last night."

"So you were born at night then. And who lent you the ring, for your birthday? Speak up."

"Corporal, how could I know . . . that it belonged to the contessa that they murdered in Rome, or whose it was? The peddlers that go along the road on horseback, from town to town, you know? You think they know who owns or who made the stuff they sell?"

"That's enough fibs!" and he squeezed her arm, which he had taken again and was holding.

"Ouch!" she said: "You're bullying me."

"Who gave it to you? Come on. You can tell it to sergeant. He'll make you spill it, all right." He drew her towards the door. Fara also started to move, in compliance, he uprooted himself from where he was, left his corner. The hen had settled down, God knows where.

"I got it, Corporal, from a girl... A girl who works here gave it to me. We've been talking for ages about corals to wear around the neck, or earrings ... And I was always saying that I didn't have anything to put on for my birthday."

"Then say who she is. You know her," Zamira prompted, pale.

"It's Camilla," she answered Zamira.

"Ah! Camilla Mattonari then? All this fuss to give us the name of Mattonari Camilla, your cousin, whose lover is a thief, or even a murderer, maybe. Come on: take me to her."

"What about the motorcycle?" Zamira stammered; to her the very thought of that machine in the shop without its master annoyed her unspeakably. She had got up from the chair. She wrung her hands before her belly, a little ball that made her look three months pregnant, considerably stained below her belt, where there were certain rivulets of dishwater or coffee; she had no apron. Her lips pursed, forgetting now every invitation and all her winks, with the foresighted and deducing gaze of one who guesses from a single movement the motives and intentions of the mover, with intent and glistening eyes, she followed the motions of the two men in their somewhat embarrassed footsteps between sideboard and bike, machine and table, counter and chair, between the heap of sweaters and the door: the door to the road. The light in her eyes changed, became evil, malevolent and almost sinister, at times. She seemed to see oscillating, like the oscillation of a charge, a tension in the spirit, as if it meant to break the sequence of acts and inacceptable deeds, the procedural validity of that carabi-nieresque miracle. Which she saw, at a given point, in its true light: in its certain meaning, compelling recognition: a gray and scarlet devilment of the Prince of Demons: he of the sergeant's stripes: he, in any case, whom she had been able to recognize on many occasions as the sworn enemy of I Due Santi: who took shelter in the fortress, at night, in Marino, when the mountain wind howled, to meditate before the bluish circle of the lampwick his malefactions for the day, ubiquitious then in the great hours of the sun like the view of the falcon, who peers and sees over all the land, in farmyard and meadow, on mountain or plain. A red-and-black, chevroned malefaction, filled like the September night with a thousand sophists' persistences, which from day to day press ever closer around the person of one who, perhaps, works honestly, who tries to get along as best he (or she) can, with the first expedient that comes to mind, to fight off the many tribulations of life. A duty though vain and maleficent, suited to justify, as well as to determine, one's corpulence, one's rubicund health, one's pension: an arbitrary and therefore illicit intervention into the private operations of magic, or of simple palm-reading, such as to spoil the outcome of everything: disputable then, on good grounds, with augural looks on the order of her own, zamirian gaze, as well as by a summons for help to the great king with the straight horns, Astaroth: the very one that she, Zamira, had to call. So that she busied herself now, with her fingers, making on the sack of her paunch like the pharmacist on his marble counter, certain movements, certain twirls, certain jokes not comprehended by common ratiocination, as if she were shelling invisible peas or crumbling or snapping some invisible pill in the direction of the unaware Pestalozzi who had his back to her, still unsure what was to be done. Her lips began, little by little, to bubble up again, to twitch, and her cheeks to vibrate, to boil
motu proprio
in a grim contempt, which was being sharpened into the fideistic peroration of certain witch doctor-priests of Tanganyika or African Kafirs or snub-nosed, kinky Niam-niams, their heads all curly, dusted with coal, gold rings hanging from their noses, their behinds like terraces, when they implore or imprecate from or to their animal gods in their monosyllabic-agglutinate language and in homologous and rather nasal chanting: "Nyam, nyam chep, chep, i-ti, i-ti, give that lousy missionary a humpback and get him off our balls." Mennonite missionary, of course. And meanwhile they give him a drink, their spit whipped up with coconut milk in a coconut shell, a sign of subtropical honor, or Tanganyika reverence.