That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (4 page)

"All right, I'll go," Ingravallo said, then muttered, "I'll go," and he took his hat down from the peg. The badly fitted peg came loose and fell to the floor, as it did every time, then rolled for a bit. He picked it up, stuck its withered root into the hole, and with the sleeve of his forearm, as if it were a brush, briefly smoothed his black hat, along the band. The two policemen went after him, as if by tacit command of the chief commissioner; they were Gaudenzio, known to the underworld as "Blondie," and Pompeo, alias "Grabber."

They took the PV bus
^{3}
and got off at the Viminal, then changed to the tram for San Giovanni. So in twenty minutes or so they were at number two hundred and nineteen.

The palace of gold, or of the sharks, if you prefer, was there: five floors plus mezzanine. Worm-eaten and gray. To judge by that grim dwelling and its cohort of windows, the sharks must have been a myriad: little sharks with yawning stomachs, that's for sure, but easily satisfied esthetically. Living underwater on appetites and phagic sensations in general, the grayness, the lofty opalescence of the day was light, for them: that little bit of light which was all they needed. As to the gold, well, yes, maybe it did have gold and silver. One of those big buildings constructed at the beginning of the century which fill you at first sight with a sense of boredom and canarified contrition: you know, the precise opposite of the color of Rome, of the sky and the gleaming sun of Rome. Ingravallo, you might say, knew it by heart: and in fact, a slight palpitation seized him, as with the two policemen he approached the familiar structure, in his official, investigative role.

                                  *** *** ***

In front of the big, louse-colored building: a crowd: circumfused by a protective net of bicycles. Women, shopping bags, and celery stalks: a shopkeeper or two from across the street, in his white apron: an "odd job" man, also in an apron, striped, his nose the shape and color of a wondrous pepper: concierges, maids, the little daughters of the concierges shouting "Peppiiino!" to boys with hoops, a batman saturated with oranges, trapped in his great net bag, and crowned by the ferns of two big fennels, and packages: two or three important officials, who in that hour ripe for the higher ranks seemed to have unfurled their sails: bound, each of them, for his personal Ministry: and a dozen or even fifteen idlers, headed in no direction at all. A letter carrier in a state of advanced pregnancy, more curious than all, with his brimming bag which smacked everyone in the ass: some muttered goddamnit, and then goddamn, goddamn, one after the other, as the bag struck them, in turn, on the behind. A gamin, with Tiberine seriousness, said: "This building here, inside it, there's more gold than there is garbage." All around, the stripe of the bicycle wheels, like a
sui generis
skin, seemed to render impenetrable that collective pulp.

Assisted and virtually preceded by his two men, Ingravallo cleared a path for himself. "The cops," somebody said. "Hey, kid, make way for old Grabber . . . Hi, Pompeo! Did you catch the thief? . . . Now here comes Blondie . . ." The door to the building was ajar, guarded by a corporal from the San Giovanni Station. The concierge had seen him pass and had called on him for help: shortly after the event and just before the arrival of the two men of the squad, that is to say Gaudenzio and Pompeo. She had known the corporal for ages, because of the reports she had to turn in on the tenants' moves. The deed had been done an hour before, a little after ten: an incredible hour! In the entrance hall and in the porter's lodge there was another little crowd, tenants of the building: the women's chatter. Ingravallo, followed by the concierge herself and by the other two, as well as by the comments of all, "the cops, the cops," climbed up to the third floor, stairway A, where the robbed woman lived. Below, the great chattering continued: the unleashed, fluted voices of the females, emulated by an occasional masculine trombone, which from time to time even drowned them out: like the cows' bent cervixes by the bull's great horns: the crowd's mind gathered the clover of the initial eyewitness accounts, of the "I swear I saw him's"; began to weave them into an epic. It was a robbery, or to be more precise, a case of breaking and entering,
manu armata.

It was a rather serious affair, to tell the truth. Signora Menegazzi, a moment after her fright, had fainted. Signora Liliana had "felt unwell" in her turn, as soon as she came out of the bath. Don Ciccio collected and transcribed then and there what he could skim from the explosive jet of this first account: he began with the concierge, granting Signora Menegazzi time to comb her hair and deck herself out a bit: in his honor, one would have said. He had paper and fountain pen, and omitted the
"Gesù, Gesù,
officer dear ..." and the other interjections-invocations with which the "signora" Manuela Pettacchioni did not fail to flavor her report: a dramatic tale. Her porter-husband, a doorman at the Fontanelli Milk Company, wouldn't be home until six.

"Gesùmmaria!
First he rang Signora Liliana's bell. . ." "Who did?" "Why, the murderer ..." "What murderer are you talking about, since there's nobody killed ...?" Signora Liliana (Ingravallo shuddered), alone in the house, hadn't gone to the door. "She was in the bathroom . . . yes . . . she was taking a bath." Don Ciccio, involuntarily, passed a hand over his eyes, as if to shield them from a sudden, too-dazzling brightness. The maid, Assunta, had left a few days earlier for her home: her father was sick, as maids' fathers often are, "especially the way things are nowadays." Gina was at school all day, at the Sacred Heart, at the sisters'; where she had lunch and sometimes even a snack. So, "you see," nobody answered, "it's obvious, of course" then that the criminal rang at Signora Menegazzi's door; yes, right there, on the same landing, just opposite the Balduccis': the door facing, there. Oh! Don Ciccio knew that landing well, and that other door!

La Menegazzi, her hair arranged, came on stage again, with a faint cough. A great lilac scarf around her neck which, at the front, seemed scrawny and withered: a languid tone in all her traumatized person. A rather unexpected negligee, a mixture of Japanese and Madrileno, a cross between a mantilla and a kimono. A bluish mustache on her rather faded face, her skin pale, like a floured gecko, her lips made of two hearts, joined, enamelled in a strawberry red of the most provocative shade, gave her the appearance and the momentary formal prestige of an ex-madam or ex-habituee of some brothel, now a little come down in the world: if, on the other hand, that neo-virginal, stern touch, and the devotion-solicitude typical of the
virgo intacta
hadn't placed her, beyond precautionary suspicion, in the romantic roster of the nubile, as well as of the respectable. She was, in fact, a widow. The mantilla-bathrobe overlapped the foulard, or rather foulards, not one but two, also powdered and vaguely modulated in their hues, so that the first merged into the second, and the second into the delicate petals— or perhaps butterflies—of that somewhat Castilian kimono. She superimposed her report on that of the concierge, straightening out, correcting. She spoke up, a tremor in her voice, her poor voice, a hope in her eyes. Not perhaps the hope of seeing her gold objects again, but the certainty . . . of the protection of the law, so validly personified by Ingravallo. On hearing the bell, Signora Menegazzi had let out her usual "Who is it?": she now repeated the tone, worried and whining, which she adopted every time the doorbell trilled. Then she had opened. The murderer was a tall young man in a cap, a mechanic's gray overall, or at least so it seemed to her, his face dark, with a greenish-brown woolen scarf. A handsome boy, yes, a good-looking sort. But somehow he immediately made you feel afraid. "What was the cap like?" Don Ciccio asked, writing the while. "It was . . . why, to tell you the truth, officer, I don't quite ... I can't quite remember what it was like. I wouldn't know what to tell you." "And you?" he said to the concierge: "When he ran off, ran right past your eyes? Didn't you see? Can't you tell me what it looked like, this cap? . . ."

"Why, officer dear, ... I was that upset! How could I think about caps, at a time like that? You see . . . Now tell me yourself, frankly: when they start firing all these bullets, do you think a lady notices a cap? . . ."

"Was he alone?" "Oh, yes, alone, alone," the two women said, in unison. "Oh, officer," la Menegazzi implored, "you must help us, you who can help us. For pity's sake.
Maria Vergine!
A widow! Alone in the house!
Maria Vergine!
What a nasty world we live in! These aren't men, they're devils! Ugly devils that come back from hell . . ."

La Menegazzi, like all women alone in the house, spent her hours in a state of anguish or, rather, of suspicious and tormented expectancy. For some time her constant fear of the doorbell's ring had become intellectualized into a complex of images and obsessions: masked men, seen in close-up, with felt-soled shoes: sudden, and equally silent, intrusions into the hall; a hammer brought down hard on her head, or her throat clutched by hands or strangled with a length of string brought for the purpose, preceded perhaps by horrible torture: a notion—or a word—this last, which filled her with unspeakable emotion. Mixed anxieties and fantasies: to the accompaniment, perhaps, of a sudden palpitation of the heart, the sudden creak, in the darkness, of some cupboard, its wood more seasoned than the others: fantasies, in any case, greedily anticipating the event. Which, after so much insistence, couldn't fail, in the end, to arrive. The long wait for house-breaking and aggression, Ingravallo thought, had created a compulsion not so much for her, her actions and thoughts, a victim already marked down, but a compulsion for destiny, for destiny's "field of forces." The prefiguration of disasters must have evolved into a historic predisposition: it had acted: not only on the psyche of the woman to be robbed-strangled-tortured, but also on the "field" of atmosphere, on the field of the external psychic tensions. Because Ingravallo, like certain of our philosophers, attributed a soul, indeed a lousy bastard of a soul, to that system of forces and probabilities which surrounds every human creature, and which is customarily called destiny. To put it simply, her great fear had brought bad luck to her, to Signora Menegazzi. Her dominating thought, at every trill, used to coagulate in that "Who is it?", a bleat or bray habitual in every female recluse whose
lares
are too weak to protect her. In her it was a moaning antiphony to the ring itself, to the doorbell's most domestic requests.

It turned out that the young man, as soon as Signora Teresina resolved to take off the chain and open up, had said he was sent by the management of the building to check the radiators, which he was to inspect one by one. In fact, some days before, there had been an argument over the radiators because, at centrally heated winter's official end, they were more tepid (towards the cold) than the tenants' desire to spend money.

The flame of all heating equipment, in Rome, was extinguished on the Ides of March, at times it was the Nones instead, or indeed, even the Kalends. During double winters with prolonged epilogues, as was the winter of Twenty-seven, the flame was fed for the whole month, then it was allowed to waste away in a prolonged languor not without discussion and diatribe among the opinionated tenants, vociferous in proportion to the event: among pros and cons, the penniless and the wealthy, the stingy careful ones and the carefree, urinators in hope and glory. As to the rooms on the upper floors of two hundred and nineteen, they could be numbered, beyond any doubt, among the most Romanly sunny of all Rome: for which reason, since in that early spring it was snowy-raining, the inhabitants quaked with cold.

The mechanic had with him neither bag nor sack: the implements of his position for the moment were not required. It was merely an inspection. The Signora Teresina added—but this Don Ciccio did not write down—that she was sure that young man . . . yes, the murderer, the mechanic . . . she was sure, and could have sworn it in court, was sure that the boy had hypnotized her (Don Ciccio stood there and listened, his mouth agape, with a sleepy manner) because at a certain point, while they were still in the vestibule, he had stared at her. "Stared!" she repeated, almost declaiming, enthusiastic at the stern fixity of that gaze: "his eyes were merciless, steady and hard," from beneath his cap, "like a snake's." And she had, then, felt her strength fail her. She told how, indeed, at that moment, whatever the young man had asked or commanded, at that point she would have done it, would have unquestionably obeyed him: "like a robot" (her very words).

"Maria Vergine!
Hypnotized! That's what I was . . ." Don Ciccio, in his thoughts, couldn't help editorializing: "These women!"

And so it happened that he, the mechanic, was able to go all over the apartment. In the bedroom, glimpsing some gold objects on the dresser, on its marble top, he had scooped them up with one movement of his hand, opened with his other hand beneath it, like a bucket, the large pocket at his disposal, over his hip, in the overall.

"What are you up to?" la Menegazzi had screeched at him, not totally helpless despite her hypnotic condition. He, turning, had aimed a pistol at her face: "Shut up, you old witch, or I'll fry you to a crisp." Having taken the measure of her terror, he opened the drawer, the top one, where the key is . . . And he had guessed right. There was all her gold, her jewels: in a little leather coffer. There was the money. "How much?" Ingravallo asked. "I couldn't be absolutely sure. Four thousand six hundred, I think." The money in a man's wallet, dry and old: a memento of her poor husband. (Her eyes became damp.) And that boy, without a moment's hesitation, had already wrapped the coffer in a kind of dirty handkerchief, or maybe it was a rag, yes, it was, with a fever in his fingers: the wallet he had simply slipped into his pocket, so quickly!
Maria Verginel
"In the pocket here . . ." and the signora slapped her hip with her hand.