That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (22 page)

Forward! And on we go!

Which eliminates, as one can see, any possibility of going into reverse.

Santarella, setting to a hypothetic melos that life-enhancing meter, went along humming it and savoring in spirit—as one might gnaw on a toothpick after dinner— in its fugitive pregnancy, along the rumbling and the rush of the succeeding miles: from the dusty trapeze of the road. Then, near Ciampino or La Palomba, he raised his eyes: up and up: white caravans of clouds, crossing the sky in mid-March, pursued by no royal representative: but they too, had somebody who saw to hooking them: and this was the silvered peaks of the antennae, like the teeth of a currycomb biting into cotton into the fleece of the fleeting, the snowy flock was ripped by a perpetual deformability, then was gathered in an unreachable alternation of presages, with the wind high, cold shreds of blue.

      
VII

"Ines Cionini ..."

"Yes, Chief?" Paolillo asked.

"To be kept at our disposal! . . ." Poor girl, she was to await the dawn on the flat board of the night tank, wrapped in a tan army blanket under the Sign of the Louse: in the company of other Nereids fished from the ocean by the patrol, wrapped in similar double vicuna, and similarly involved with the relations of the Same, and from time to time sighing or even eloquent in their sleep: and in the presence of a pan mute, uncovered, in a corner: known as the "Commendatore": an authoritative sort, in fact, the Lord Treasurer of excrements. It brought the spirit back to certain Roman abundance and looseness of living and acting, to a certain pre-forty-eight (or pre-forty-nineish)
^{40}
and quite Gregorian
^{41}
"loisir de sieger."

Poor girl: when, however, that order was given, well, Sor Paolillo came for her again at ten.

As to Pestalozzi, at a certain point he had asked Doctor Fumi leave to go, begging him for time to take a bit of refreshment, after the long and not perfect day's work: an idea Fumi also found excellent. Having plunged down from the most salubrious hills, the super-sergeant centaur had interpreted the desire of one and all. They agreed to meet at quarter-past nine, or half-past. Before going off again, logically, Pestalozzi wanted to agree on the sequel: the conclusion of what had already been accomplished. In a shuffling along the halls and stairs, the assembly broke up.

In the meanwhile, having gone to Palazzo Simonetti in Via Lanza, Ingravallo ripened what the Deuce on his throne in the Palazzo del Mappamondo would have called "the instructions to be imparted . . ." to the inferior levels of the hierarchy: that is to say, to the earthenware vessels, one below the next, which drank in gulping, the cascades of his truculent foolishness: each from the behind of the other. It was late. Drizzling. Everything was still topsyturvy in the night. Don Ciccio ladled into his mouth the lean broth, but not really so lean, emphasizing in a brothy trail the poverty of the proteins and the peptonic ingredients: then, fed up, he chewed and gulped down a few morsels for better or worse, without a word, his big head over the plate of that stew of rubber gristle, poor Don Ciccio! the amorous target of an occasional "But what's on your mind this evening, Doctor?" from his unequaled landlady, all anxieties, all concern: who wouldn't stop spinning around him, him and what he had been served. "A nice piece of cheese? Some of that Corticelli stracchino that you like so?" And, when he grimaced: "Just a little piece, Doctor. Try it: it's so good ... It can't hurt you . . ."

Under the glass spotlight rimmed with pleats and green-and-white ruffles like salad, his pate seemed more tenebrous, more curly than usual. No automobile! No help in moving away from his base. There were automobiles, bah! "but only for those bastards in political," that is to say, the political section. The excursion he had missed, that horrible Thursday: "the seventeenth of the month! The worst number there is," he sighed, "seventeen, lousiest of all! . . ." he grunted, through clenched teeth.

Now all the merit went to the carabinieri of Marino. "Those big-hats, those Punch-and-Judy cops." Pestalozzi dined with good appetite off the marble-topped table in Via del Gesù, at the Maccheronaro's, where Pompeo had taken him: Grabber, as he was called, who also acted as master of ceremonies, at Santo Stefano, when the occasion demanded.

Pompeo, for his part, didn't see what obstacle could oppose the introit of a reprise of that shoe-sized sandwich he had had at seven: with paving this time, of roast beef and mortadella, in alternate slices, gently laid in that sofa of bread, by the expert, pudgy fingers of the Maccheronaro himself: who tegumented the slices at last, after a checking, dismissing glance, with the precut and set-aside roof top or lid (the upper half of the roll): the lower lip sticking out, but by a bare millimeter: while his double chin compressed and, so to speak, flattened against the collar, if one could believe he had a collar, ended by hiding entirely his spring-like tie, a bow, with polka dots on a green ground.

The customers present, envious, were stunned. A full-scale torpedo boat, something exceptional. To see it from the outside . . . quite decorous: but ponderously stuffed, within. Er Maccheronaro raised his eyelids, deeply serious, his lip still extended by that fraction of an inch, fixing without a word his beloved client, in the moment and in the very gesture of handing him this trophy. "Is this it, or isn't it?" his gaze seemed to signify. Pompeo allowed himself to be fixed. He set his tooth where it deserved to be set. After a couple of cavalierish bites, his mouth resembled a grinder, an eccentric millstone. He couldn't manage an answer, if anybody asked him anything. He looked towards the person in question, his big eyes wide, with the air of having understood.

At ten-thirty they were all gathered in Doctor Fumi's office. Paolillo brought back Ines. Who was—and where was—the young man? And that girl friend of her girl friend? Why, what girl friend? The one . . . the one that she had talked about, Mattonari, Camilla: "the one, if I'm not mistaken," Doctor Fumi said, "the friend who worked with you at Zamira's," at I Due Santi.

Camilla Mattonari, Ines admitted, had spoken to her of a girl friend, who had been in service in Rome, but not an all-day job.

"Half-time, you mean."

"Well, I don't know if it was half: she worked for some people who had given her a dowry, and now, she had to get married."

"Married to who?"

"Married to a gentleman, a businessman in trade: the kind that live in Turin and make cars: who had given her two pearls. And on Candlemas Day, for that matter, she was wearing them in her ears, those pearls. Everybody saw them." And she had also met her one evening . . . what a pair of eyes!

"What eyes!": and Fumi was annoyed; he shrugged.

"Well, yes, her eyes . . ." Ines rebutted, "were . . . different. Different from the eyes like the rest of us have. Like she was a witch, or a gypsy. Two black stars, right out of hell. At the Ave Maria, when it was getting dark, she looked like a devil disguised as a woman. Those eyes were scary. It was like they had an idea, in them, of getting revenge on somebody."

"So you know her then."

"No, I only saw her once . . . after dark."

"Where?"

"Well ... it was on a road, in the country."

"In the country where? . . . Look here, girl, don't think you can fool me . . . You're trying to pull the wool over my eyes."

"It was a dirt road: where there was a field . . . and a church, but without any priests in it, it has a long name with
tondo
in it."

A liar, who got all tangled up in her own lies. Fumi wondered whether she was crazy, or something like it. The tortuous, winding notions of a stupid peasant girl who's lying. After having snapped at her, the four of them, like four dogs at a doe, pulling her and pushing her this way and that in the torment of easy and nonetheless repeated objections, they succeeded in the end in wrenching from her lips the calming lie, the plausible lie: the one which, contradicting or resolving all the previous ones, seemed finally the truth. The "country road," it was discovered, must have been a street (in those days still countrified and solitary) on the Celian hill, amid silent umbrella pines, fields of artichokes and some stables, and crumbling walls and an arch or two, trod, at nightfall, by the wondrous steps of solitude, so dear to lovers: perhaps it was Via di San Paolo della Croce, or more probably Via Delia Navicella or Santo Stefano Rotondo. The arch was that of San Paolo, if not the archway of Villa Celimontana to the side of Santa Maria in Domnica. The
"tondo"
.
.
. "without any priests in it," wasn't, could not be, the Temple of Agrippa, where the bloodhounds had traveled in their thoughts, immediately rejecting is since it doesn't stand "in the country." It was instead Santo Stefano Rotondo, deconsecrated, in those years, to permit certain restoration work.

With all these logistics Doctor Fumi had rather lost sight of the gypsy, the bride of the Turin industrialist. The bloodhounds seemed to sink deeper into the mud.

"Tell us about these earrings."

"I didn't see them. But everybody knows about them: two long earrings, like a real lady's." And she repeated, in an obstinate singsong: "her fiance gave them to her, a businessman from Turin: he buys and sells cars: how can I make it any clearer than that?"

"Just skip the clear and the dark . . . clarity is our worry," Doctor Fumi scolded her, his eyes now sleepy in their wrath. Who was she? Yes, this witch, this gypsy. . . Where did she live? What was her address? "Her address. . ." Ines hesitated again. Well, she must have lived somewhere around Pavona: that's what la Mattonari had told her. And that's what everybody said, at I Due Santi. "That girl's lucky: Rome is where girls get ruined: and instead she even got herself a dowry, that's what. And now, whenever she gets the notion, she can marry herself a real gent."

The officials, Doctor Fumi, Ingravallo, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, the corporal exchanged glances. Grabber, perceptive young man that he was, read in those glances a thought: "This girl's trying to screw us. She thinks she's stealing candy from a baby."

Ingravallo seemed tired, upset, annoyed: then absorbed behind a chain of thoughts. Strange analogies, Grabber suspected, unknown to the others, were at work in that brain. There was no apparent connection, but who knows that one didn't exist, who knows but what Ingravallo would guess it, black and silent in his reflecting; there was no trail from the aproned delivery boy, to the thief in overalls, to the unknown murderer, to the big eyes of the gypsy.

"And what about the boy?"

"What boy?"

"Your boy friend, that
guappo,
that little crook: what do you want me to call him?" Doctor Fumi seemed to encourage her, to invite her to see reason, to speak. Then Ines took fright: she seemed tired, all of a sudden, in her filthy attraction: she seemed to withdraw in shame, to cloak her suffering: with sunken, hollow eyes, her white brow swathed in sadness under that blond hair, so hard, hardened with a bit of dried rain and crassament desiccated in the dust (that hair, all of them thought, from which a green celluloid comb would have extracted gold in the sun), with her lips a bit swollen and as if still chapped, by every gust of March wind.

"His name is Diomede, my boy friend. But I don't know where he lives. He's always moving around."

"Moving around how?" He moved around in the two best senses of the word: often changing his room or rather lair or cot: and strolling idly about Rome from morning to evening: looking for you never know what. The last time, she had run into him at the Tunnel of Via Nazionale. He lived here for a while, then there. But he wouldn't tell her where he was staying. On a couch at some relative's: in a room rented from a seamstress. In the empty bed of an uncle who had died, a couple of weeks ago . . . that is, the uncle of a friend of his, who had lost his uncle. And when he couldn't manage any more, couldn't pay up, then he had to get a change of air, you see?

"Obviously," Doctor Fumi concurred in a low voice. And he wandered around the city with no particular place to go, or else with slow and perhaps meditated itineraries: he shifted softly from one neighborhood to another: Monti at ten, Trastevere at four, at Piazza Colonna or Piazza Esedra with the lights and the red-green
reclame
of the evening, the night. The residential districts? Yes.

"He also used to work Via Veneto, Via Ludovisi every now and then, where it's a little darker, because of the women."

The girl blushed, raised her head, and her voice became spiteful, irked. "He went out walking, walking: he had to have his shoes resoled every month: he walked, and disappeared, and you never knew where he had gone."

Either to cultivate his beauties, or to escape his beauties: certain beauties, at least so it seemed to Ingravallo, looking for him, eager to find him, to catch him, with long, examining looks beyond the flow of the cars, from one sidewalk to the other, or along the sidewalk crowded with tables and chairs, with ladies and gentlemen drinking or in the process of sucking, in cautious, disinterested sips, the pallid fistulas.

"They'd go to the end of the earth to hunt for him," she stated: her eyes steady, calm.

"He too! He, too!" Ingravallo's feelings ached. "In the roster of the fortunate and the happy, even he!" His face became grim. "He, too, persecuted by women!"

"So he kind of wanders around, you know what I mean . . ." and, after some hesitation and with a certain amount of emotion in her tone: "so all those women looking for him won't find him at home, so he doesn't have to trip over some girl every step he takes."

With one hand she threw back the evil mop: she was silent.

"I understand," Doctor Fumi resumed. "Now, tell me: what's he like, what kind of a face does he have, this Diomede? By the way, is Diomede his first name or his last name?"

"His last name?" Ines lowered her eyes: she blushed, to gain time, to fabricate her seventy-third lie.

"His last name," Ingravallo followed up. "Yes, we may need him."

"To learn a few things from him, too," Doctor Fumi added.

"Well, he didn't want to tell me his last name."

"But he finally did tell you, though," Ingravallo insisted. "Out with his last name."

"Listen to me, girlie. The bunch of us, here . . . it's best for you ... we need his help."

"But officer, sir, how can you need a boy like him? He's never done any harm to anybody."

"He has to you! . . . Seeing as how the vice squad has run you in."

"Well, I mean, that's between me and him: the police haven't got anything to do with that: it's our business."

"Aha, so the police have nothing to do with it, eh? Honey, you're not talking sense. We're the ones who know what the police have to do or not."

"He hasn't done anything."