That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (36 page)

"A little shed in the midst of the broccoli, and we grow artichokes too." Ascanio slept there with them. They kept him out of charity, in exchange for a little help there at the market. His father . . . ha, his father; his brother had been out of a job for two months. "We haven't heard anything from him!" Ascanio, they were trying to help him, poor boy, "the best we can." And she let him go with them, nice and quiet, upon assurance that they would bring him back to her, later. Equally anxious, on their part, to avoid scenes, not only for the customers but for themselves, the two dark-haired angels had moved away from the stand, were waiting farther on: the boy, white in the face after all his shouting, came around the stand, and his new cousin up to his side. This was Blondie's great art: with his head bowed shouldering his way through the crowd, he stumbled, as if by chance, over the character,
his
character: "Well, look who's here! What are you up to around these parts?"
(sotto voce)
: "Tickling the ass of the working girls, or the men's wallets? If there's a button off their back pocket, then you've got it made: am I right?" Then, peremptory: "Let's go. The chief wants you: he's got something he wants to say to you." He took him by the arm, looking at the ground, as if he had a serious proposal to make to him.

They came out of the confusion towards Via Mamiani or Via Ricasoli: there was a passageway among the stands of the fish-mongers and the chicken-vendors, where they sell the squid and the cuttlefish and all kinds of eels and meals from the sea, not to mention mussels. The character, and Blondie himself, looked at those mushy polyps of a pale, silvery mother-of-pearl (so delicately burnished in their inner veins), sniffed, though involuntarily, the odor of seaweeds from all the cool dampness, that sense of sky and chloro-bromo-iodic freedom, of bright morning on the docks, that promise of fried silver in the plate against the hunger that already could be called profound. Coils of boiled tripe, one upon the other, like rolled-up rugs, gentle anatomies of skinned kid, red-white, the pointed tail, but ending in its tuft, to signify—beyond contradiction—its nobility: "I'll give it all to you for four lire," the vendor was saying, holding it up in midair: all, that is a half: and the white clumps of romaine, or curly salad greens, live chickens with the eyes peering from a single side, and who see, each one, a quarter of the world, live hens, still and huddled in their cages, black or Belgian or straw-ivory Paduans: yellow-green dried peppers, or red-green, which made your tongue sting just to look at them, and made saliva come into your mouth: and then walnuts, Sorrento walnuts, hazlenuts from Vignanello, and piles of chestnuts. Farewell, farewell, a long farewell. The women, the plump housewives: dark shawl, or grass-green, a safety pin, undone, ouch!, to prick the teat of the neighbor a moment:
cosi fan tutte.
Self-moving pudges, they ambulated with effort from one stand and from one umbrella to the next, from the celery to the dried figs; they turned, they rubbed their respective asses one against the other, groping to open a path, with brimming bags, they choked, gasped, fat carp in a pool trap where the water, little by little recedes, jammed, wrung, trapped for life with all their fat in the eddies of the great comestibles fair.

                                  *** *** ***

Don Ciccio, in the meanwhile, had not been wasting time, either. Having got home at half-past midnight. "Monday March twenty-one, San Benedetto da Norcia," enunciated the calendar from its nail (year's end offering from the baker opposite) with the leaf of two days earlier which Sora Margherita had forgotten to rip off. A big drop of molten metal, the half-hour, from the clock of Santa Maria delle Neve. He went to bed, fell asleep, snored heavily, postponing all further deduction to the morning. When the angry trill broke loose, all of a sudden, in the silence of the sleeping house, bursting unexpected from that old turnip of an alarm clock self-moving on the marble (of the table) to announce the new headaches of the day, there, two knocks, discreet, from the landlady at the door, authenticated the furious admonition of the imbecile: despite the great longing that he had, in his head, to turn over and go on sleeping, they—clock and landlady's summons— dragged him to his feet at six. He slipped, hard-assed, and used to fall from the side of the bed, ker-plonk, like a peasant, on his heels. Stocky, and of sturdy legs, which appeared hairy from the knees down, from the straw-yellow nightshirt with little red parallel lines which bedecked him at night, he used also to repent
ipso facto,
even before he had appreciated it with his waking mind, that thud: which resounded on the plank floor, despite the wormy little rug, and announced his activist rising to the neurasthenic engineer on the floor below, by waking him with a start. Not even the north wind of the night, as he came home, nor, once in bed, the speedy breeze of dreams had been able to rumple the lambskin mop: black, pitchy, curly and compact: which re-resplendent in the new light, whatever Pestalozzi may have thought, did not require brilliantine. The knotty legs, the portion visible, emitted, indeed, arrowed perpendicular to the skin their hair, equally black, saturated with electricity: like lines of force of a Newtonian or Coulombian field. His eyes still closed, or almost, he slipped on his old slippers: which seemed to wait for him like two little animals crouched on the parquet: waiting for his feet to each his own. He stretched, looking like a
guappo
recovering consciousness, chain-yawned eight or nine times, until he had dislocated, or almost, his nevertheless mighty mandibles. He concluded each time with a o-am! which seemed definitive and yet wasn't, inasmuch as he began again, immediately afterwards. Tears dropped from his left eye, then his right, slowly slowly, squeezed one after the other by the consecutive yawns, like the two halves of a lemon successively used by the oyster vendor. He gave his head a brief scratching, a review with three nails of the occiput-jungle, zin zin zin, looking like a monkey: and with the automatic motions of a sleepwalker he headed for "the bath." Arriving there, and closing the door with its latch, he could finally unburden himself in the most radical and expeditious of ways of that annoying sensation of
trop-plein
which marks every morning, and every bladder however elastic and youthful, on the prompt awakening of the owner.

Which contributed, with the March draft from the badly closed window, that is badly closable, to clearing up his head completely, even though the draft was a gust of sirocco. He slipped off the nightshirt, still all tepid both with bed and sleep, and hung it on a hook: whence he saw it hang, empty, immaculate, the nocturnal skin of himself. Dawn was breaking. From Marsyas, after having so badly sung in his sleep, he seemed to have stepped out, an Apollo. An Apollo no longer twenty, a tiny bit hairy. He scratched his great head again, approached the basin, and giving free rein to its lymphs, he soaped his nose and face, neck and ears. He shook his mop under the high faucet of the basin, with those puffs and those nasal trumpetings, like a seal coming to the surface after its underwater twirls, which were, every morning, from the "occupied" bathroom, the unfailing sign of his bountiful ablutions. A sweet excitement from the other part of the door that the latch barred, a delicate trepidation used, in those moments, to overcome his genteel hostess, Signora Margherita: Margherita Anto-nini, nee Celli, widow of the late Commendatore Antonini: no, no, no, not the keeper of a rooming house, ah!: a very distinguished lady, sister-in-law of his Excellency Barlani, president Pier Calumero Barlani: president, no . . . yes . . . she couldn't remember of what: it had been several years since he, too, passed on, poor man: a pulmonary emphysema with suppuration, septicemia: he was, you might say, the support of the whole family. She annulled the eternity of waiting in tiled hallways with the relative odor (cat pee and kerosene) with silent transferences, winged with improbability and with miracle, which seemed to be celebrated in a field of gravity now disused, and even unfunctioning, as if of a demagnetized magnet. She passed thus as far as the kitchen and the pots on flowing little steps, which her long bathrobe of pink flannel withdrew one after the other, from the perception of third parties; and there remained in the hall, like a belated trail, the very idea of continuity in the infinitesimal sense of the term.

Which fluidity and lightness as of a ghost shivering in cotton, though devoted to the mourned manes of the deceased, "my poor Gaspare," was applied (in truth) to not disturb in any way the strophic successions of the ablutional rite, and freeing, at the same time, of the nasal passages, to which Don Ciccio was wont to abandon himself. In a revitalized heart-beating, in her role of hostess (no,
not
landlady), oh no, with unperceived blushings as of a girl ready for confirmation, she devoted herself through all the house to the first cares of the day: which bore fruit, barely risen as she was from her bed, first of all in a canonical cup of coffee and milk, already prepared the preceding evening: the celebrated double coffee of Sora Margherita: a true folly, deprecated by all, and first by all the landladies in the building, oh yes,
they
were rooming-house keepers! Yes. "Poor man," she used to say, "could I send him on an empty stomach to Santo Stefano?" She couldn't bring herself to add "del Cacco," in the fear, perhaps, of becoming derailed from the Cacco.
^{74}
Devoutly offered on a pewter tray, the coffee in a pot either of copper or tin (it wasn't clear), the milk in a pitcher lacking its handle, the sugar in an unemployed jar of peptone, a little, greasy cylinder, at the foot of the low-slung pot, little plates with toasted crusts and curls of butter, the frowning doctor, never you mind, threw himself on it every morning like a buffalo: with the excuse of his haste, crunch crunch, in a flash everything had disappeared. That morning, needless to say, that Wednesday March 23rd, Feast of San Benedetto the farmer, according to the calendar, "and with such anguirsh for that poor soul on your mind," Signora Celli made the sign of the Cross,
"ora et labora pro nobis,"
she margheritized. "Anguish," grunted Don Ciccio, highly offended, his mouth full of mush: "and the
pro nobis
you can skip." He choked, his face turned purple: any minute he would shoot it all from his nose, crusts and coffee. "Anguirsh, anguish," the donator trilled, "isn't it the same thing? You've had too much education, Doctor: you're like a school-teacher sometimes." And in the meanwhile she struck him twice on the back, practical woman, and like a sister,
helas!
lovingly assisting: she, who had become a specialist in rapping (on the hard wood of the door). The doctor wiped his mouth, stood up. He had already intrigued yesterday morning, and then at night before leaving his office, for the car: by telephone, on the switchboard, by direct visit to him who could grant it, and by talk: and again on the phone at eleven in the evening, Assistant Chief Pantanella was discussing it with Commendatore Amabile: he had whispered into his ear, poor man, a whole wind: with considerable hail of angry electrons: he had raised his voice as if he had been speaking to a Turk (Amabile was deaf). The automobile? Yes, sir, he had already made a requisition. Yes! He had asked for it!

And he had—incredibly—obtained it: from a colleague of his: the chief of the political section. Who, foreseeing a slack day, well, two or three fezzes left over from the day before, he had let him have the sedan of the "P" department, albeit reluctantly, and giving himself great airs of having done him a very special favor, a rare gesture of delicacy

"because it's for you, Don Ciccio, you realize . . . Ingra-vallo": as if to indicate that he would expect, one day, a favor in return. For another he wouldn't have done such a favor, no: "not by a long shot." An old hulk of a car, you'd be ashamed to go out in. Rattly and slow, two slabs of corrugated iron for fenders, hand-painted black, all wavy, with drops where the paint had dripped, which swayed and jolted as soon as the car moved, like two cabbage leaves hanging out of the cook's half-empty shopping bag: with one door that wouldn't open, and a handle that couldn't keep the other one shut: one window that wouldn't roll up, and a smashed headlight: so it was even one-eyed: the tires worn down like old shoes, and with so many buboes outside that it looked like an inguinal hernia. It had been,
illis temporibus!
the highly respected automobile of the Chief of Police of Rome. Fallen into the hands of the gang in the post-March days, and immediately defamed in proportion to the times, the events, and the learning of those young gentlemen whom it had driven around, it told of itself now, in unambiguous terms, its own record of service. Within, one sensed, one sniffed, they must have drunk and toasted, chewed salami, stained their lips with Olevano, "damn good, this red stuff from Rome, it goes down like oil" "sure, castor oil," smoked cheap cigarettes, sneezed, spat, vomited both Olevano and salami.

So that everyone, now, in that car, political or non-political, stuck his head in unwillingly and a cautious shoe after the head, the other shoe still on the ground, and a suspicious, examining eye, nostrils the same: as if, from such muck, vapors could steam forth, conjunctive to the odor, pallors of lemures of more than one three-months'-old dead infant, with the tail all coiled, and the little head of a donkey. Careful, frowning, uneasy. The idea that there had settled in the cloth (of the seats) some organic ejection of the more popularly known variety now obsessed every user: it made fearful the more cautious, and cautious even the bold and heedless, were there any. All of them hesitated a little (very little), scared, each, of his own basic decorum, that is to say the decorum of the seat, of the pants: those so dignified trousers, paid for in installments, month by month, in sums withheld from salaries, with the respective tightening of the belts of the same. Once stuck to the bottom, well, it's obvious enough, every least-deserved stain, in maculating the splendor like the most reputable spots of Father Secchi, stained the luminous rotundities of the photosphere.