That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (24 page)

"And the photograph of the boy photographed here": he slapped one hand on his head, with pathetic emphasis: the good-looker, the picture of... of Diomede Luci-ani..."

"Lanci-ani," corrected Ingravallo.

"All right, all right, Ingravallo! Lanci-ani, Lanchy Annie." Then, turned to the others present, over the circle of whom he moved his eyes, and with the pacified tone of one who is speechifying
de moribus, de temporibus:
"Those girls land at the Immacolatella, a hundred and fifty at a time, at the Beverello pier! From the Conte Verde!" he stated: and drew his brows back half across his forehead, index and thumb joined authoritatively to form a circle: "the largest ocean liner of the Italian Counts Line!" They come flying out in droves, in fact, from the belly of the Count, like so many hens from a cage: which, after a long trip across the world, is finally set on shore, opened: coming down the gangway in groups, with bags, some with eyeglasses, they scatter over the Beverello: amid trunks, hotel agents and men from Cook's, with words written in gold embroidery on their caps, and porters, and people waiting open-mouthed, and vendors of ices or coral horns, offering services and addresses, and inventors of needs which are not needed, meddlers, curious bystanders of every kind, women.

"But . . ." and Doctor Fumi waved the hole of his two fingers, extending his little finger, "hens that lay golden eggs! when they lay them. Their father, the mother, back in Chicago, think the girls are coming to look at the pictures in the museums, to study how the Madonna is dressed up, how pretty she is: how handsome San Gennaro is, too": and he was shaking his head, at the certainty of those fathers and mothers: "The Beato Angelico Chapel! The Raphael rooms! The frescoes of Pinturicchio!"
^{45}
He sighed. "Those little things have other rooms on their minds," he murmured. "The Assumption of the Virgin!" he exclaimed: "by Titian, Tiziano Vecellio!" and the last name, in that dirty room of police headquarters, lent an added propriety to the first name: as if this Titian were a fellow with all his documents in order, a person whom suspicion couldn't even graze. "The portrait of the Madonna—the spit and image—-with those seven wax angels over her head! . . ."

When he was assistant chief at the Frari station in Venice, the five scarlet Cherubim of one of the six Enthroned Madonnas of Giovan Bellino (Galleria dell'Accademia) had become impressed on his memory, his genteel however bureaucratized memory, like the seven seals of the Apocalypse, in a lead-colored sky. And he had thrown in the Assumption: which has a dance of
putti
all around the Virgin's head, vice versa, some with doves' wings, others without: one, wingless, with a tambourine: singing ho-sannas.

"That's what their parents think, back in Boston, in Brooklyn." He tapped his index finger against his forehead, hammering. His eyes assumed a knowing look, the sly face, reproducing the slyness of those relatives. "They think these girls travel around Italy in herds, a hundred at a time, like little kids in a boarding school. A hundred at the museum, a hundred at the opera, a hundred at the aquarium, you know, where they keep the fish, under water; a hundred at the Baths of Caracalla, a hundred at San Callisto following that monk with the candle, which then goes out. Those girls—Ingravallo—not in a pig's eye." He turned to his inferiors. "Those girls, as soon as they get off the boat, Ingravallo, you follow me . . . bzzz bzz": he fluttered, with his hands, casting them here and there like thunderbolts, with the eyes of the Thunderer.

"One slips away here, another there, you understand me?" and his eyes, luminous in their sadness, gathered assent on all sides. "Each on her own, and God for all! Taormina, Cernobbio, Positano, Baveno," he was becoming stubborn: "Capri, Fiesole, Santa Margherita, Venezia," his tone hardened, with stern emphasis in its crescendo, a vertical wrinkle in the middle of his brow: "Cortina d'Ampiezzo!"

"D'Ampezzo," grumbled Ingravallo.

"D'Ampezzo, d'Ampezzo: all right, Ingravallo, you're our philosophy professor." He frowned: "Cortina, Positano! And—see you later!" he waved his hand in the air, a farewell to somebody who wasn't there: "See you here, six months from now"; the index plunged. "Here, here on the dock, Beverello. In exactly six months." He was silent. He sighed, knowingly. "Raphael my foot!" he exclaimed, in a new jerk, in a return of his contempt: which contempt rolled and died away beneath his preceding statements, like thunder after a storm in flight. "Rooms!" and he became agitated. "Pinturicchio! The room they're after is another kind, Pompeo, and you have to hunt for that room, if it takes all night!" Stilled at last, to himself: "And the Pinturicchio they want... is another man, too . . ."

The girls, no sooner were they dished up on to the Beverello from the tenebrous belly of the Count, felt at once, in their hearts, and since they were girls one couldn't say they were wholly wrong, they understood, they sensed suddenly that in the land of the fine arts, and of the fine artisans, they would prefer a live painter to a Pinturicchio deceased. Ingravallo, too, had read Norman Douglas as well as Lawrence: and had distilled Calabria, Sardinia (growling) as from a phial of super-effective elixir. He remembered that one of the two great erotologists, but he didn't recall which one, had become transformed into a geodesist, and had considered the wisdom of drawing up a map of the male contour line, extending it to all the surface of the earth. He had then triangulated, in his geodesy, also the Circean territory, extracting from it the documented certitude that Circe had not chosen badly the site wherein to exercise her art, which was the art of putting young men to sleep. This territory of the most profitable drowsiness, that is to say, of the highest level of male potential was, according to Norman Douglas or according to Lawrence, a spheric triangle, or rather, a geodetic one. And the vertices, the extreme geodetic strongholds of the unmatchable triangle, he, Norman Douglas, or he, Lawrence, saw as emerging from the three cities of Reggio (Calabria), Sassari, and Civitavecchia, to the great vexation of the citizens of Palermo. "He could have moved a little farther north, this sonovanologist," Ingravallo thought, silently, clenching his teeth in anger: "and a little more to the east," his unconscious prompted him, "to the top of the Matese mountains."
^{46}
He shrugged: "It's his business!" And, teeth still clenched, he drew the conclusion: a conclusion probably unjust: which, in any case, is of no interest to the present report.

                                  *** *** ***

The girl's broken but explicit admissions continued trickling out until eleven, or thereabouts. The annoyance, or the wrath, at some points, in her spirit seemed to overcome her love, the ardent remembrance of the flesh. Diomede, at the beginning, had come to see her at Zamira's, every day. Far from her eyes, and from the greedy exercise of his own, the enflamed young man, it seemed, could not stay for more than a few hours. Or else he accompanied her, burning, trembling, at times, for a good stretch of road, or a dirt track which turned into the fields, solitary, hesitating in his walk, between two thickets, with every hesitation, both of his person and his heart: and of his senses. They took the path that followed the oak thicket, in the direction of Tor Ser Paolo, or the little road of the Fountain of Health, towards Casa del Butiro. Ines, now, seemed to be thinking. Her lips parted, as if in the intention of uttering a new word: "Zamira, she liked him a lot, in her way. She sort of confided in him." She whispered to him, in fact, certain long tales, under his nose, looking him in the face, staring hard, devouring him with her eyes, her too, oh yes, why not? with a cackling voice, whispering, like in the confessional. A psspsspss like she was saying a prayer to him, or giving him good advice: good only for him, since he had special need, for the health of his soul. She wouldn't stop that psspsspss . . . : sometimes, for greater security, after looking all around, and maybe even standing up on her tiptoes, she would put her mouth to the boy's ear: the exquisite secrets were not for the nose, but for the secret privacy of the tympanum. "Like she was saying a prayer, one of those long ones, that gives you a stomach ache. Worse than the double Rosary of Christmas Eve . . ." As if to give him secret instructions, hah, concerning undertakings, or deeds, or obligations, or opportunities, or troubles, or dealings, or expedients ... of considerable moment. Zamira spoke to him then, to Diomede, with a rolling of the eyes and a galloping of the tongue like a foreign minister new to his frock coat, but already smart,
^{47}
when he feeds new words to the beloved ambassador in a low voice, in a selective "aside": and keeps vigil, at the same time, and maintains at the proper distance and in the proper awe the others: who seem to be mocking him by their gaze alone, with their calm foxy confidence, consummate in their art: the thin beak saturated with subtle initiatives: the tail with provident experience, and the back with unforgettable lashings. In the toothless mouth, the hole, black: from which, between one word and the next, she sucked back in the already erogated saliva, with a kind of slightly damp sibi-lance where her r's wallowed backwards, like one who, cast up by the wave, is pulled back by the undertow. A hesitation of tiny, sweet bubbles, on the lips, accompanied this salvage: which, with a sudden sweep, shortly thereafter, the pointed and scarlet tip of the tongue was assigned to conclude. Yes, a sparkle of the eyes, in her face, when she so much as spoke to him, to the boy, to Diomede: yes, within the two serous blisters beneath her eyes, two black dots, her eyes, two pinheads. You'd have said that Old Nick had finally revealed to her where the treasure was to be found, buried, the long lost pile of gold doubloons: or the elixir of requited love for lovers. A livid smile distorted her mouth, to one side, diaphragming the hole: over the skin of half her face a yellowish cast—something fearsome— like certain unhealthy fires, of Beelzebub's mint.

"You might say, she was in love with him, with Diomede, that ugly old hag." Fumi looked Ines in the face again, dropping his jaw, his tongue hanging, as if he were in a spell. "And he used to listen to her secrets, then. And sometimes she even took him down to the cellar with her, so she could talk to him more in private, like. I bet she had something important to tell him all right, the shameless thing! at her age! The girls . . . kept telling me I was a dope. I used to get nervous! But if you don't have the tin, you can't eat. No, I couldn't make ends meet, not at home, with that no-good dad of mine. Even the jailhouse won't keep him. So I had to swallow it, like it or not." Zamira and Diomede disappeared down the little stairway, one after the other. As to the motives of all that mysterious parleying, "nobody knows. I don't know."

"Come on, out with it. What's all the fuss about?" Ingravallo said, hard. "Stop that sobbing!" The girl under questioning, poor creature, admitted, then denied, then doubted, then supposed that the subject must have been— and she felt there was great probability of her hitting the nail on the head—a string of suggestions, or of advice "about how to make us girls fall for him, without him falling for any of us." A code, an etiquette of canny love: an initiation to controlled, bookkept gallantry, if not even to profitable gallantry. And if this were so, it meant profitable for both, "for him and for her": her, Zamira. Pestalozzi, at times, smiled, shrugged slightly, as if to say: "I realized all this long ago: only natural: of course."

The officials, in view of the hour, decided to understand that Diomede, the fancy-man, must act—was he charged by Zamira to do so?—as a clay pigeon, or like the decoy owl on a stick, for the beauties. The beauties, the poor Venuses of the countryside: those robust, solid girls, whose every cheap garment is to dream, in the dryness and in the unplacated light of the day, amid the brambles and the stubble, in the August sun. "Every cheap dress," Fumi thought: "grace granted by the mystery." And it was, he thought, the gilded, the vaporous mystery of the city. Clothes, ornaments, smells—from a bottle ... A golden lamina, giving off such light in the night, like a symbol, like a pass to an Orphic rite: to enter there where it is celebrated, at last, the rite of living. An emotion unknown which can be known without initiation, but foretold and dreamed of (with perfumes of garlic on the breath) by the heart, at evening. A mute "thou livest! Thou shalt live!" after rapid forkfuls of fodder: from the kindled clouds of the evening, from the warm horizon's promise.

"The wicked mystery of this world," thought Ingravallo, instead. He already hated, in his heart, that character, blond though he was: and the familiar clenching of teeth, the clamping of jaws, accompanied the appearance and the not-immediate disappearance of the image. It was, in his skull of diorite, an abominable image. A filthy, a wretched thing, that braggart, that gigolo! "Ah," he brooded, "Diomede then must have acted as the persuader, the initiator: for the sacred rites of the abracadabra: the beater: the pointer, pointing out the quails and the partridge, on the hill: a young terrier, flushing the hens from the bog." At least that was how everyone there understood it, in the great room where you could see their breath under the pears of light, drawn into a circle around the palpitation of a partridge, between the big cops and their attendants: Doctor Fumi, Ingravallo, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, Pompeo, and Paolillo, known also as Paolino ... Pestalozzi, "the cyclist." Ines did not speak out explicitly, but it seemed to them that they could nevertheless infer from her highly appreciated tale of the descent into the cave (of the enterprising blond with the more-than-Cumaean
^{48}
sibyl), from the many though hesitant and repentant "I don't know's, I couldn't say's," it seemed to them that they could actually write in the report that Diomede Lanciani had bestowed his violent comfort (this, the girl allowed them to deduce always, was the nature of comfort, from him), also on the mature hostess-seamstress and and dyeress, cleaner of garments both military and civilian.