That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (32 page)

Pestalozzi, no, he wasn't a Minister of Finance of Italy: and neither was la Menegazzi. Both of them had a certain sense of value and nonvalue: she, if for nothing else, to be able to satisfy the whim of forgetting in the bathroom all about value (the topaz) inasmuch as she wouldn't have got any pleasure, in any part of her dithyrambic and trembling body, in forgetting in the bathroom nonvalue: a bottle-bottom. Jewels they were, those resplendent rubies, that was obvious, incubated and born in the originative millennia of the world. The expert could check and guarantee this, despite the cuts, the faceting, the polishing of art. Gems crystallized naturally from fused sesquioxide, following the principles of the system: and not a crystallized pretense in a light, a glory of falsehood, from a basin of excrement. As the impetus, the grief of a soul freezes in a cry, coagulates in notation, following the formal processes of thought: in a frozen cry! which is its own, and not the bawl of another, or of the market place of bawlings and of souls. The corporal scattered them with his fingers, with the gesture of a cook sorting rice before throwing it into the pot, scattered the stones, the jewels, the gold ornaments, the fabulous caramels, shining gems of the Maharajah in the depression of the miserable blanket. Of those appearances, wisps of gold or luminous grains on the dark color of the drapery, a dotted line stood out, like a string (seen, however, from above, and from afar, from a mountain or a plane) of electric globes in the curve of the Riviera: such as the illumination of Botafogo beads, in the bananiferous nights, all around the base of the Pao de Azucar. Those jewels, at that moment, seemed to burst and play over the bed from the mingled amassment of diverse thieving coups. But Pestalozzi, with a certain applied hesitation at first, then with smug certainty, thought that he could gradually recognize, in that scattered splendor, the debatable and ultradesired pearl necklace, two or three bangles, an amethyst, the garnet cross, the ball of lapil-laruli (so it was written), the corals, the jewelry, possessors of the names and the descriptions which figured, colleagues and brethren of the topass, in the first and following lines of the first and second sheets of the Martinazzi list, or rather, to be more precise, the Mantegazzi. Owners of the names and the titles, in general use, in some cases a tiny bit difficult: ring "of" ruby with two pearls, brooch with small black pearl and two emeralds, pendant "of" sapphire, as one might say of pastry, "surrounded" with brilliants, carcanet typed as carcanot, then corrected to carcano, of garnets in old (sic) style, string of (the o a hole, of course) white pearls (quite fake) et cetera, small ring et cetera, large brooch with onyx stone et cetera. A good reading exam for the aspiring carabinieri's course, thought Pestalozzi.

Time, meanwhile, was pressing: that very morning, before noon, he had to return to Marino with the topaz in his pocket and with everything else he had managed to recover, in his wanderings so intensely fruitful of gems, gold, false pearls, girls pretty or ugly but all equally lying. Of the recovered, the found or not found, he had to render an account to the sergeant, list in hand: the names were strange and difficult, with something magic about them, mysterial, Indian: with all those holes, like so many punched railroad tickets, in the place of every
o.
The second list, incomplete because a sheet was missing, but no less pocked than the first, seemed to him, on the other hand, a pain in the ass, a lousy pain that didn't concern him at all, a job deferred to another, since officer Ingravallo, that big head who instead of brilliantine used tar, had said "expressly" that he wanted to deal with it himself. So that was Don Ciccio's business. Typed on a red ribbon, as if the ribbon had been dipped in blood, the list of the "Balducci stolen property" seemed to him materialized from a nightmare: sheeted and reported in pages from a secret horror which was not, on that mad equinox morning so filled with prognostications, no, was not the carabinieri's responsibility. No, the solitary country outside, dampened by the squalls of rain, barely eyed by the sun awake from time to time, no, it didn't want the horror re-created: which clothes, after the sudden flashes of the knife, all condonation denied life by the beast, the immobility of the funereal relic. Before the eyes of the concierge and the police (even before the ascertainments of the law) or of the terrified cousin who had come in without knowing, so he said, then among the carpet slippers of all, men and women, a whitened simulacrum for the wax museums of death: and that putrid ichor, down from the rent throat, the days following, in an odor of morgue. What he had recovered were jewels and gold "from the door opposite," the jewelry of the blond countess, in any case: and in the successive flashes of a dreamed (not seen) image, the corporal sighed. And fantasticating already that he would appear before her in his sergeant's stripes, in the guise of recoverer-savior, he tried at the same time to untangle himself from all the serpents of doubt: ". . . but perhaps some of the others, too, from the iron coffer of the murdered woman." He didn't waste time checking. By now he was in a hurry. Over any possible gems of Signora Balducci, with that half-recovered list there, the ambiguity of hypothesis hung still: the recognition and division of the individual items were to be carried out in the barracks, up at Marino, or perhaps in Rome at Santo Stefano del Cacco, while the jewels of Countess Mantegazza, which were individualized in the relative list, claimed each one, with prompt evidence, its stolen identity. And then, to tell the truth, his reason began to compute the remaining probabilities : in an hour and a half two lucky coups like this, a topaz on a finger and a chamber pot full of topazes, were even too much from the miserly cornucopia of Luck. A third stroke was not acceptable to the precogitative statistics of the mind, eager but still hesitant, dubious. The girl and Cocullo were waiting, immobile, as if drained of any capability of following: the corporal shook off his hesitation.

"Who gave these to you? Who brought them here? He didn't give you these as a present! Not you!"

"I don't know. This is the first time I've seen them. I don't know who put them there, in that place."

"Tell me who gave them to you. You know. Or who gave them to your grandmother . . . your uncle. The cabinet was locked. You put a lock on it. And you found the key right away."

"The lock's always been there. We keep stuff in there."

"Some stuff! Tell me who brought it here. You know. We already know: we've known who did it for a long time. In Rome, too, the police officer knows. Talk. You'd better confess, tell the truth; we don't have much time. If you won't make up your mind to talk here, then you'll talk to the sergeant, in Marino."

The girl remained silent, pensive, her eyes in the void: the potato of her face, the two tan marbles of her irises, the colorless lips betrayed no inclination to utter a word: like a rustic sibyl, or like a jurisprudent citizen, from whom a previous oblation had not elicited response. She was silent, in the silence, outside, of the country, of all the solitary countryside: the personification of an irreparable refusal. A stone hysteric, to whom the uttered falsehood has become truth and so will remain even under red-hot irons.

"Come to the barracks then. There they'll get it out of you, you'll see. Want to bet on it? The sergeant'll make you spill it."

The jewels were re-sacked, a nice handful: and plucked one by one the evasive ones, the centrifugal, peripheral ones. The corporal did it with his own hands, then with his fingers, paying careful attention not to abandon to the blanket a single grain of the "stolen property." His lips slightly parted for the task, and breathing heavily through veils of catarrh, the Farafilio, like a chilled lamb observing a laparotomy, held the bladder of strong canvas: introducing into it, to guarantee exhaustive reception, two gynecologists' thumbs. They tore up the comforters as if to unmake the beds, covers, sheets: not white, and even less smelling of corn, as the poet Pascoli would put it. She had collected the walnuts with the pot, like bailing water from the bottom of the boat, or as if emptying the trough. They also looked under the beds, made her overturn the mattresses ("Come on, Signorina, the air's good for them"), empty completely the cupboard of pants and worn socks, and the top, moving them. They groped at the mattresses, pulling them to a sitting position on the springs and, the first, over the two benches on which it was normally extended: with the little finger they broached the meatuses, with the big, or middle, finger, the rips. The Croesus chamber pot, from one bed to the other, was like a new mother, so thin and diminished, after having been so full. On the wall the green-reds of the Miracle, last year's little sprig with the dry and curling leaves, some silver-gray, others gray or greeny-brown or even havana color, as if the charisma that filled them had evaporated with the changing year. And below, at last, on the platform the light of a desolate knowledge, or at least, of glimmering. The evil, to the two dressed in gray clothes,
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seemed to exist: to ripen days and events: since always; silent force or presence in a pandemonism of the country or of the earth, beneath skies or clouds which could do nothing but look down, or flee. It had evidenced itself in that sensation of alarm, of loosening of every just bond, which gripped their

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hearts as they came out: at the sudden reappearance of the town, of the racing cloud-bank, in the sky. The devil, for the girl, had turned into a hen: the one that, in the garden, plays ignorant, and cautiously lifts its foot, then replaces it, to peck, to shit a bit here and there. One of the three hens, but which? And so, near home, between one stubble field and the next, the devil tempted with an egg per day (and it could never be known which, of the three, had laid it on that day) in the poverty and the solitude of the countryside without grange, tempted souls: then he reported them to the sergeant, to the informers of the Lord: pretending, he the devil, or she, hen, pretending all day to be merely intent on scratching, on hunting for grubs. Certain roaches, certain worms. And as soon as the train was heard puffing, he let himself be seized by that fear and hope of having it upon him, and on the girls, too: to keep from understanding which of the three, and
who
it was: being the devil. Devil, there was no doubt about it, and spy, imagined the girl holding out a horned hand towards the chickens: spy, spy: having insinuated himself, in disguise, into the home, that rural, railish home, there it is, there he is: he swaggered around like a chicken, with a chicken's manner: like a gent with yellow gloves on the Via Veneto, a glass in his eye, a white flower in his buttonhole: he de-loused a shoulder, with his beak, all proud of himself, then the other one: he shat along, like it was nothing, but he took advantage meanwhile of the convenience of being a chicken, looking to one side, just the way chickens do, making bold to peek into the kitchen, if the door was open. He even came inside, maybe. And nobody sent him away: the uncle was telegraphing to Ciampino or to Cecchina, tap taptap tap sitting at his machine. So he could spy around at his ease. He recorded with his mad pupil and retained in his retina: with that lateral eye that chickens have, like it was invented by Picasso, a bathroom porthole, a toilet void of understanding or any intention of spying to starboard or to port. And instead they're looking at you. Yes, he was the devil: worming his way into the kitchen, on the helpless tiles of the domestic poverty: or in ambush beyond the cane fence: little canes artfully stuck into the ground, with two opposing slants to make the figures of rhombs, ripped by the pouring rain and by the wind, half-broken and half-rotten, now, at the end of winter: a worn girdle, now: which does not isolate the domestic indigence, at kilometer 20. 25, from the open access of the country. The grandmother, amid the hens and the stubble, was like a humpbacked tree in the garden, a sorb already skeletal in death: set up as a scarecrow, one day, and then torn to black tatters by the north wind. She gave the earth a blow with her little hoe, then left off, tired, without straightening up. With four strides the corporal reached her. "I found what I was looking for," he said to her. "If you were the one who hid them, you'll have to give me an explanation . . ." She raised her face, which seemed carved from brier: she looked at him without understanding, without even hearing.

"She's deaf," Camilla warned him. They telephoned to the uncle. They wanted to tell him: Camilla had been "called in" by Sergeant Santarella, so they said: she had to "report" to Marino, as a witness: the signal-house would be left unguarded. The old man expressed no opinions and still less raised protests, over the phone. He made no comment on what they let him know. He was already about to come back to Casal Bruciato. There wouldn't be any more trains going by, Camilla knew that anyway, until the mixed train for Ciampino-Termini at twelve fourteen.

The old man, in reality, at hearing an unknown voice, was seized with panic. At the telephone, the girl explained harshly, when it wasn't a question of service communications or calls, he was infallibly seized with a paralysis of the basioglottis, or as she put it, he was tongue-tied: like an engineer, little inclined to speechifying, who moves perfectly his abacuses and yet hasn't at his disposal the "sufficiently appropriate words" not to say sufficient Italian verbs to be able to petrarchize over news that is far from good. A typical
aphasia coram telephono,
reverence, spite, incapacity of expressing himself properly, and the suspicion or indeed the obsessive certainty that one can be overheard and naturally mocked by third parties, by unknown imbeciles, and finally, the loss of one's own personality and the pulpifying of the logos in a flushing stammer, flowed or stagnated, endemic, in Europe, and, therefore, in the Italian peninsula of those years of
telephone avec la manivelle.
In the campagna, in the country, you can imagine! Her uncle was a railroad man, ha! like the daddy of Lucherino.
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And, rustic widower flabby though still fierce in the face, before he had his hut beside the tracks.