That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (20 page)

Fumi swung around in his chair, pressed the button, and asked for Piscitiello, he charged Paolillo to have Piscitiello hand the girl over to him, if she hadn't already been shipped off to Regina Coeli. Paolillo, after a short while, brought in a rather well-supplied girl, with two marvelous eyes in her face, very luminous, shiny; but she was incredibly dirty and disheveled, and her stockings! her cloth shoes, half in tatters, with one toe sticking out. A gust of the wild, not to say worse, breathed into the room; a smell: "Mmm! get a load of that!" all of them said to themselves, mentally.

After a certain amount of preamble concerning her vital statistics, Ines .. . Ines Cionini, questioned a while by Doctor Fumi and some by Don Ciccio, examined from head to foot by Corporal Pestalozzi, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, and Paolillo and, behind them, a little by Grabber, Ines understood at once what they wanted from her. They wanted to hear her voice. So she sang out, she spilled the beans. Without having to be coaxed. Had she perchance worked for la Pacori? Yes, that was where she worked, for Zamira. Zamira? Yes, that was her name. And . . . how? And . . . when? And . . . for how long? Ah, for over a year! And ... what did she do, at Zamira's? What sort of customers did she have? Oh, all kinds. Just about everybody came to her, men and women: because of her cards. And . . . also, what did she have in her cellar? Cellar? Well, the floor below? Oh, she kept a demijohn of oil! And pecorino cheese, too! Oh, sure, of course. Un huh. And how many girls did she have working for her? How old were they? From sixteen up? There were some that were only fifteen. And the carters? And the horses? Oh, the stables . .. sure!

And what other animals did she have around? And who took care of them? Aha! Is that so? And they played cards, too, did they? Oh, but only on Saturdays. Naturally, of course. That's obvious enough. Saturday evening. Just about everybody came. The wine was good. Yes, she had a license: yes, for alcoholic beverages. Et cetera et cetera. It came out that on Fridays and Tuesdays she was also visited by the force, the Royal Carabinieri. Pestalozzi would have liked and, above all,
should
have tried, to protest. He thought, on the other hand, that it was preferable for him to let a little fresh water run on, from such a generous faucet: and he contented himself, at critical moments, with a shrug and a shake of his head: "nonsense! all lies!" But they all believed it, nevertheless. The police dote on nonsense: in their rivalry with the carabinieri. Each of the two organizations would like to have a monopoly on such stories, on History indeed. But History is one alone! Well, they're capable of hacking it in two: a piece for each: in a process of de-twinning, of amoebic splitting: half for me, half for you. The singleness of History is derogated into a double historiography, it is devolved into psalm and antiphony, it is potted in two contradictory certainties: the police report, the carabiniere report. The one says yes: the other says no. The one says white: the other says black. Dogs and cats get along better.

Ines Cionini had had her fancy-man, she admitted, a good-looking boy: a real and proper lover. Who, they all thought, must have met her and perhaps even . . . why not? . . . treated her with some tenderness ... in a period far closer to her latest bath. She was very beautiful, to gaze upon, despite the squalor of the room, the moldy light on the brick floor: white of face and throat amid the pools and fringes of dirt: with swollen, red lips: like a baby sylph, precociously troubled with puberty: and rather undulant in her turning, in her leaning forward, pained by certain weights (a little in the manner of some saints, some nuns, believed to be Spanish) as if by an incontrovertible charge, a heavy burden, eternal: laid upon her by the ancient caprice of nature. Surfaces imitating the true, nucleal volume seemed to enfold her repeatedly, like circles surround the stone cast in the water, amplifying "in the minds of the witnesses," that is in male delirium that stupendous suggestion: from her there emanated, along with the above-mentioned aroma, the true and basic sense of the life of the viscera, of hunger: and of animal warmth. The idea proper to stables, to haystacks: and far from all lowly pragmatic sanctions. Her gem-eyes, a child's, enunciated to all those men, still without their supper, the name of a happiness that was yet possible; a joy, a hope, a truth superior to their papers, to the squalid walls, the dried flies on the ceiling, the portrait of the Shit. The syphilitic Swaggerer. Perhaps, poor creature, the adjective that so suited to the beshat Maltonian
^{33}
was to modify her as well? No, she didn't look ill: if not with hunger, with beauty, with puberty, with filth, with impudence, with abandon. And perhaps with sleep, with weariness. Her fancy-man had led her into theft, after having had his will of her: because the soft whisperings at nightfall had concluded with "shift for yourself." Her erstwhile employer and mentor had clarified her thinking, or had enabled her to clarify it for herself. Love, after besmirching her, had handed her over to the whim of hunger. All, now, hoped to find in her the longed-for spy of whom they had need. She understood this; she knew it: and for that matter, hell, who gave a damn? the evil that the blue days had poured over her was such that she had to give it back, to her protectors. So she sang. About her mistress-teacher. "Teacher of sewing? Mistress-seamstress?" Teacher of sewing and not of sewing. La Pacori: yes, Zamira. In parallel fashion Pestalozzi and Di Pietrantonio reported. Ingravallo shook his huge head also: three or four times.

La Zamira, yes: known to all, between Marino and Ariccia, by the lack of her eight teeth in front (her teeth began with the canines: Ines pointed to her own, as paradigms, opening and twisting with one finger her lovely lips), four above and four below: whereby the mouth, viscid and salivary, red as if burning with fever, opened badly, like a hole, to speak: worse, it stretched at the corners into a dark and lascivious smile, not handsome, and, no doubt involuntarily, coarse. Despite the face, there were murmurs, that rictus, that vacuum held for some of the Royal force and for some non-royalty a perverse allure. Sometimes on certain afternoons, her eyes were flashing, yet soft, swollen underneath, like two serous blisters, filled with a dazed and slightly baby-faced malice: she was a bit drunk: you could see it: you could smell it on her breath: then her wrinkles smoothed out as if by a breath of Favonius. At other times she seemed more herself: her, Zamira: the light must have struck then on something hard, like the flame of a witch's curse on the face. The harsh roughness and tempestuous dishevelment of her hair, and the parallel, profound wrinkles all over her face, which was brown and dark, wooden, and the greedy ambages of her gaze in those moments delineated better her aspect: like an ancient sorceress, priestess of abominable spells and roots, the stewed roots, in which the soul of a Lucan, of an Ovid is entangled.

Her official activity was that of a mender and re-weaver, trouser-maker, dyeress, and in some cases, notions-merchant empirical in curing sciatica through secret herbs, seer, clairvoyante, card-reader, licensed to sell wines and liquors at I Due Santi, and Oriental Wizardess with a diploma in the first degree: in her workshop-tavern where the carters of the Appia stopped for a half-liter of wine, precisely at I Due Santi. She was consulted in the exorcism line, for casting or removing spells, exorcizing the evil eye from infants in their bonnets, simple-minded babies, and preventive spells in general; gifted also in the branch of washing heads to drive away lice, and when some girl's monthly was overdue, whether through nerves or other troubles, of which there are many, as all know. An immunologist of great experience and rare knowledge, after the liberation of Italy from the menace of the bolshevik hydra thanks to the Great Balcony of the Holy Sepulchre (October 28, 1922) the cracking of the malocchio sive evil eye, whose infinite case-history was at her fingertips, more and more constituted the chief subject of the appeals to her art. But not all. She was also skilled,
sic et simpliciter,
another gift of nature, as authoress of propitiatory or even repellent potions, according to the requirements of the case, and of almost all the love philters and powders for both signs, that is positive and negative. She could make pedigreed dogs have a miscarriage, when impregnated by some mongrel stray. She knew how to inculcate, at a reasonable fee, a certain
quantum
—that is to say the necessary amount—of kinetic energy to the dubious, to the insecure: comfort them in the
pragma,
corroborate them in the act itself. With ten lire one purchased, through her medicine, the faculty of willing. With another ten, that of being able. She un-kierkegaarded little crooks of the province, channeling them "to work" in the city, known as the Urbs, after having purged their souls of any remaining perplexity, or of their last scruples. She set the bold on their path, showing them that the poor creatures of the weaker sex asked for nothing better, in those years, than to lean on someone, to attach themselves to something, that would be able to share with them a mindless emotion, the sweet pain of living: she catechized them in the Protection of the Homeless Girl, in competition with the better-known organization of the same name. And her catechumens looked upon her as a mistress, though dubbing her, from one drink to the next, filthy, when they thought she couldn't hear them, of course, and bag and witch: such is the foolhardiness of our time, and their personal coarseness: and even perhaps titling her the old sow, her, Zamira Pacori! and old procuress, hah! a seamstress of her position! and Oriental wizardess with a diploma of the first degree! Some gratitude. And they even had the nerve to say that the Due Santi, the two saints of the locality . . . were ... a pair of "if you follow my meaning," accompanying this assertion with an immodest manucaption— prolation of the pair in question, wrapped though they were in the crotch: immodest, oh yes, but not infrequent then, in popular usage. Slander. Foulmouths. Hick scum, that go out at night to steal chickens.

Oh! the clean thread of time, of the Alban time and her own, unwound from the distaff of her divining like truth from an oracle. Murky or serene, but all summoned to her foresight, the days and the events seemed to orbit around her, to rise and vanish in her. To her, then, from that so fearful expectation of the multitude it was only right to prick the long study of the believers, derive from every consultation her little lire, from every delay of the miracle an increment for the faith, from every most secret vapor the aurora borealis of an improbable summoned back to probability. Why yes, indeed, who would ever have thought that? Despite the gratitude and the scared respect by which she was generally surrounded—collective hope and religiosity, Orphic sense of mystery and of the transcendence in the great heart of the people—despite her diplomas and degrees, Oriental and Occidental, and after infinite seances, after all those abracadabras with the skull on her table, and the respected needlework of more than ten years, her girls around her, poor babies, mending or knitting or sewing on rows of buttons, why yes, that's right, who would ever have thought it? Don't do good if you are not prepared to receive evil. Even Zamira. The base skepticism of the carabinieri persisted in surrounding her with the usual, unseemly suspicion through which they . . . many times, succeed in ruining the lives of seers, embittering the souls of card-readers: and even of the most respectable seamstresses. And that is: they thought, indeed they were sure, that she was an ex-whore (and no one could shake them from this opinion), widow, from year to year, of about fifteen former reserve captains in retirement: whose traces, little by little, from one autumn to the next, had become evanescent, from Marino and Ariccia. Having given herself, as the years passed and her incisors with them, to an ever more sly and bold madamship, with its epicenter, in fact, at I Due Santi, in a kind of cellar under the workshop-tavern: cellar or half-basement room that had light, perhaps even sunshine, from the garden. The garden—a few turnip greens, also disheveled: an occasional cabbage, its leaves stripped off by the sirocco, made wormy by Pieridae: with a dour hen, flapping there from time to time, checked by a string that was all gnarls, to lay eggs out of season—was at a level lower than the normal altitude of the road, the Via Appia. The cellar, or half-basement room, was equipped with a urinal: and, more, with a cot: which however creaked at a mere nothing, the bastard, and had the tegument of a "counterpane" of faded green: damasked by undecipherable maculations which, in their authentic obscurity, had a baroque tendency: a full, pompous baroque of the first jet of imagination, though it was washed and dried in the garden, the coverlet: and it seemed to deny even hypo-thetically any belated, neoclassical restraint. Attached to the wall, to one side of the little bed, you could see a really sweet oleo: a nice bunch of naked girls, at their medical exam, and a doctor with a little black goatee, looking at them one by one, but dressed like an ancient Roman, without eyeglasses, and with sandals instead. He had stuck his thumb in the hole of a little board, and with the other fingers of the same hand was grabbing a bunch of brushes, to paint with iodine who knows what part of their skin, if he found some pimple on any of them. It opened, this little drawing room or examination room, through a door provided with latch and chain, into the sanctum or oracular receptacle, properly speaking. There bloomed the prophecies and the responses (after working hours) of the seamstreess-sibyl: when all the girls were upstairs, on the other hand, at that hour of sewing and clickety-clack, well, at that time, the magical apparatus was visited by some large rats, using all the caution due the situation. Rats half as long as your arm came tiptoeing in, sniffing, those sons of bitches! with mustaches on them! ready to scent a ghost's sheet two palms away in the dark, and the smell of cheese, at a mile, all the way from the house of the garbage man, who kept their whole family at full board. But they had to be content with a bare smell of that manna, unable to reach it in any other way than with their olfactory sense: they whiffed the Idea, an invisible Presence. The presence of good mountain pecorino, a whole cheese of the days before the Empire landed on us: yes, right on the neck. A trestle in the darkness. A cast-iron stove, A country fireplace: a kettle over it, hanging from a chain: and a fine pot, in one corner, in the midst of such rags! a kind of copper pot which, in a few years' time, would fall prey to the Immortal Fatherland, War-Bearing, shoulder to shoulder with the Twotone
Bruder,
at a mere sign from the Deuce, the adored Doo-chay: thief of saucepans and pots of all peoples: with the excuse of making war on England.