That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (30 page)

"You, Signora, keep still with those fingers!" the Filiorum commanded her indignantly. His cheeks had become red, the red of tomato sauce, whitened to cheese color in the lower portion of his jaws. The objective clarity of ratiocination, in him, got the upper hand of the unreason of the powers of darkness: as if his elementary diploma had been countersigned by Filangieri himself with his own hand, Don Gaetano Filangieri, Prince of Arianello, Minister of the Realm.
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He wouldn't admit, couldn't tolerate that the "superstition" of past centuries should rise again in magic, in the art of fashioning hunchbacks for one's neighbor, carabiniere as in this case, by that fingering of the witch. There is a uterus in us, always, a reasonable one, which is disturbed by a wink, a hint, a kneading of fingertips with which, despite every new enlightening of the Realm and every diploma on outsized paper, the most enlightened certainties are poisoned.

"Let's go," repeated Corporal Pestalozzi, making up his mind. "I'll leave the machine here," and he turned, "watch out for it: put a chair in front of it, and don't let anybody touch it."

Signora Pacori smiled at him, a little automatic smile, though black in the center: a dry little smile, silly, the kind she was used to dispensing from the counter in gray moments, a habit of her art, of a saleswoman who knows how to look at smokers: she revealed, as usual, the hole: she could do nothing else. Her eyelids closed a moment, as if in foretasted voluptuousness: foretasted out of duty, out of professional obligation. Her little eyes signified, with a moment's flashing, the usual permission: to whom? to what? The malevolence meanwhile, on her forehead, had waxed and polished the two bumps, two strongholds still held by the devil.

"Where is Retalli?" the corporal was saying to the girl. "Corporal, I don't know," she said: her face distraught.

"And your cousin? Where is your cousin? Take me to her. Come on." He seemed seized, really, by the mania to catch somebody, not to go back, empty-handed, to the barracks. A ring—and what a ring!—he had. All right. But now a suspect was needed, an accomplice, male or female, if not the guilty party in person.

"But I . . ." the girl whimpered again, forgetting the umbrella where she had placed it.

"Come on, that's enough. Show me where she is": and he opened the door, inviting her, with the other hand, to make use of both the step and the exit. Lavinia went outside first.

"At the railroad crossing," Zamira then hissed into his ear. But the private also heard her. Still, under her malevolent forehead, the pernicious light of her gaze was not spent. "She's the niece of the signal-keeper: at the crossing. That's where she lives."

"Which crossing?"

"The road to Castel de Leva, to the bridge; then to the left, the crossing at Casal Bruciato": she seemed a deaf-mute, explaining herself with her fingers, with the aphonous movement of her lips. She didn't want Lavinia to hear her, from the road. Farafilio stumbled over the step: "Careful!" she said, maternally: and repeated: "On the road to Divino Amore. Almost to the bridge. Then to the left."

And with that little thrust, with that viaticum, she succeeded in getting off the two comrades, with their four great boots. They would have plenty of dust to swallow! Old Nick had heard the boiling of her prayers, had graciously listened to her reiterated invocations and her pleas.

"Take care of the machine!" the corporal shouted to her again, from outside: as her gaze sharpened in meanness: "at the bridge of Divino Amore!" she shouted, as if to strike again at the rear guard of the vanquished. What fireworks exploded in their wake, what ejaculations, while the glass door was still open behind the departing men, history, past-mistress of life, has not troubled to record.

      
IX

THE Divino Amore bridge! Easier said than done! a mile and a half, and even more: a good forty minutes' walking: and with the girl, and with the shoes she was wearing. An apparition of the sun, a disk, an ephemeral or faint sphere, with fleeting veils of vapor on its face, so that it looked like the yoke of an egg seen through the white: tepid, at times, or soft; then, in some sudden yawn of the day, between one cloud and the following, reawakened, restored and randy, astride that gallop of the sirocco: flight and journey, from the Pontus, of all the cloud bank, huddled, slapping its flank against the spikes of the Apennine. The road was only one, luckily, except for the first part, however: the highway, the Appia, then at a right angle, the local road, for Falcognana. Taking the opportunity of that angle, a path went off diagonally into the countryside: too muddy an itinerary still, through the fallow fields that were of a damp, new green, water-soaked: and, here and there, as if sugared by the frost. If she came up this way, Camilla Mattonari, so Lavinia said, they were sure to run into her, walking along the asphalt, or at least on the dry part, to be precise, of the road from Falcognana. A buggy, which overtook them after they had turned in that direction, allowed the corporal to make Lavinia climb in, and the private after her. When the happy couple had been seen aboard, he turned back towards the little tavern at the corner, to ask somebody for the loan of a bike: otherwise, he would go back up to Zamira's, to recover his steed. The Farafilio, serious and round of face as of bottom, didn't seem wholly displeased by his superior's inspiration, which spared him the walk, however hygienic it may have been, and granted him the tepid contiguity of the girl's thigh, though,
helasl, keine Rose ohne Dornen,
the thrill was shared with the driver on the other side, that is, the side of her other thigh. Despite the odor, promptly perceived and appreciated, of feminine vitality, and the disturbing co-seating in the vehicle, of such a "supple" and "nice" young lady, the stern soldier, be it said to his praise, was obdurate, yes, obdurate in being, or at least seeming, the most legally and militarily agnostic of carabinieri of the whole legion, in that wakening March of the Castelli. The descent was slow, among the new plantations of some vines (still barren) which broke the meadows. They reached a crossroads, with the horse, already in sight of the bridge known as the Divino Amore bridge, with which the above-praised local road passes over the Velletri line of the railway. Divine Amore proper, a little church of ancient date, here and there replastered, and two hovels leased to the sun by the Latium of the guardian Princes Torlonia, and Castel di Leva, which flanks and dominates them, and looks around through the empty eyes of the Torraccio tower, and girds or girded them with a wall, are about three miles from the bridge. There, at the crossroads, Pestalozzi was able to overtake, on a bicycle, the excursion companions he had sent on ahead, displaying on his outstretched arm his chevrons which seemed a patent, a driving license exceptionally granted him, for such an unfluent vehicle. The bike was a music box, with a creak-creak in its hubs. It was like a machine with broken teeth for eating torrone: but there was not much in the way of torrone around those parts! The driver went ah to the horse, to hold him back a little and, in the meanwhile, leaning to the right, he was wringing the brake handle, as more and more, on the rims, the two brake blocks slid until they creaked. The horse, going downhill, disputed as best he could, then finally having sustained with his scrawny rump the successive jerks of the harness, when they arrived, one after the other, on his two buttocks, like the slaps of the sea against the innocence of the beach; he aimed definitively at the solid part of the road, without raising again in a trot, now spent, his forelegs; he skidded a little on all fours: and stopped, turning his head only slightly at the tug of the reins, as if to say: "I'd like to see you pulling a buggy! you have to try to stop me
now,
just when we're going so well." Plunged forward the three heads of the travelers, the brimming jiggling teats, the desirable throat and the face and slightly hysterical pallor of Lavinia as if in an attack of vomiting: as happens to everything that is not properly packaged, crated and nailed into a system: and travels, however, on its own, as if forward at random. Pestalozzi got off the bicycle. From the Falcognana road, which crosses, with the Divinio Amore bridge, the half-trench of the railroad a few hundred yards further down, at that point the road for Casal Bruciato broke off: which descends, even today, with a broad curve, to cross the same train track on the same level. On the roof of the yellow signal-man's house there weighed, uncertain and broken in parts, a smoke, though they could not see if it had come from a chimney: it was dispelled, as if with effort, in March: to depict, in that rising search of its own nonbeing, the poverty that had generated it: or to dissolve in the rustic solitude that pang of daily need that those who feel it are wont to call hunger. The perennial, insisted name, the desperate diphthong of the horned owl had fallen silent in the night: had died with the dawn. From an unseen elm, now, perhaps from a Roman oak surviving the axe in the emptiness of the countryside, the intermittent appeal, the unreachable, imploring iambus of the cuckoo. In foretelling the new fronds to the earth it seemed to recall the eternal, lost seasons, to ache with spring.

Lavinia begged the corporal to leave her "outside," to wait. "Outside where?" There, or rather: "here. Otherwise they'll start thinking that I . . . that I turned my own cousin in."

After some negotiation the corporal consented, reluctantly: and he added a word or two suitable to the occasion: cards on the table. He engaged the buggy for the return trip: set the bicycle against the bank, which at that point, beyond the dip in the road, marked the rise of the grassy land again: he charged the driver to guard it. Having arrived with the trusty Farafilioro, at milestone 20, they were received by the furious barking of a lousy mutt whose eyes they could barely see, but whose spare, canine teeth they saw with fear, he was so fanged and hairy, half-spinone, half-Maremmano hound
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and half sonofabitch (this was Cocullo's ideogram), but fortunately, on a chain. An old woman appeared, contrary to all credible hypotheses, in that panorama of deconsecrated railway; she tried to calm him, to silence him, then came to the bar: which interrupted the road, to signify, if not quite the imminence, at least the expectation of an extraordinary phenomenon: that is, the black passage of the train, the puffing of steam above and below, marvelous fluid, which confers virtue and locomotory quality to freight, even in ascent, as well as to train 181, half-freight, half-passenger: which, in fact, already gasping, announced the slippery play of its crankings up up up pup pup pup from le Frattocchie, overwhelming the distant imploration of the cuckoo: and at signal kilometer 20, it would be equally victorious over the grade: a miracle of art, an unterminated four per cent incline, but all curves and countercurves, of the late nineteenth century. At the house, known to some as Casal Bruciato, it was awaited every day, once a day, with the algebraic certitude and the trepidation of spirit that, at the speculum of Arcetri or the Mount Palomar Observatory, every seventy-five years, attend the recurrence of Halley's comet. The old woman, decrepit though she was, must have understood at once that this unwanted olive drab-and-black visit . . . looked for all the world as if it were aiming at her house! so she sewed up, without parting them again, the two bloodless rims of her lips, the two curly hairs embellishing here and there the jawing of her chin, and left to them, to the Brothers Grim, the initiative of paying their respects, to the older and higher in rank of the two. In the meanwhile, without giving any outward sign nevertheless, she made an effort to swallow the event, this, of the three arrivals, which she most feared and abhorred in the torment of her viscera: by hastily recommending herself in prayer to Sant'Antonio di Padova loving miracle-worker for all of us, and also, however, in another plea to the good offices (automatic in her former days) of the
plexus haemorroidalis medii.
She arrived, in fact, at the deliberate constriction of the more celebrated rectal rings, extenuated though they were by advanced age: not entirely inoperative, though more and more crumbling with the years, were the so-called Houston valves, chiefly the super-valve of Kohlrausch, nor the semilunars of Morgagni. The desperate attempt to block the ampulla, whose constricted extreme ahi ahi ahi already the olive drab-black-silver trauma was affecting, in concomitance with the shrill whistle ahi ahi of the arriving engine, achieved nothing more than the release of a few drops, rather phobic, plonk, on the platform of Casal Bruciato: free on board, yes, F.O.B. Casal Bruciato, though some may say and, however, write C.I.F. (cost insurance free) and some P.L.O.P. The providential lack, under the crotch of the old woman, of that pair of tubular correctives of nakedness which our most exquisite reporters today habitually call "intimate garments," allowed the event to fall out on to the pavement, unobserved by the Grims. Filing forward, one after the other, by the pedestrian passage to one side of the bar, the carabinieri advanced in silence on the platform with heavy, nailed footsteps to the door of the house: as if they were unaware of the woman, believing her engaged in the exercise of public duties and by now dealing with the train. But they were deceived: they encountered there the potato-white face and the resolute bursting forth of a girl who had taken up, from a bench, a kind of rolling pin for preparing pasta in the home, but wrapped in a red and green cloth: and at that moment more green than red.

Meanwhile there approached, really, the puff-puff at full tilt: its headlights aglow even in this daytime hour against the darkness of each new tunnel: the only train of the morning, in that direction. It was coming up from Ciampino, all black, with the self-importance of a nasty fireman, sending up into the heavens cannonades of brown smoke from its spout and then, all of a sudden, white steam, certain comical foof-foofs which seemed so many shots inspiring one to say, "but what's come over you? What have they done to you?" and below, from a pair of cylindrical bags, one here, one there, as if it had a mustache on the ground floor. Whirled and somersaulted, gleaming and greasy, the connecting rod and, like a maddened knife grinder's, the crank, with an odor of burnt oil, in the tragic ascent of the grade constructed by Engineer Negroni. It was like a man who plants himself in front of you, wants to call you a bastard to your face, and unable to run because of gout, he spurts out his anger at you from his nose, and at the same time, from his feet. Beyond the house then, on the gray path flanking the flight of the gravel, two or three highly frightened and yet—
more insolito
—unhurried hens prepared to follow the track in accelerated fluttering: to cross it then, in flight, at the most opportune moment, with the cowcatcher upon them, and above the cowcatcher, the headlights, with that suicide premediation that distinguishes their species. The Maremmano hound or spinone hurled himself forward: one could believe he wanted to choke or self-guillotine himself with his collar, a slender ring of iron where his hair stood up, in wrath: and, the chain taut, he began to yelp and bark again in reiterated, frenetic explosions: as if he declaimed impetuous verses of Foscolo without understanding their sense, nor even their nonsense, to a public overcome with sleepiness; meaning to reawaken tbem all and to summon them to repentance and vigilance, nor to forgive sleepiness to the least of them. The demoniac idiot, in doing this, became lost between his sparse, distorted incisors and the ferocity of his canines and omitted from his lips, in whitish ribbons at each new jerk of his head, a pulpy drool like bechamel: in the arsis of such dewy rage, raising bloodshot bestial eyes to heaven, as if to invoke the approval of the supernal Beasts, the gods of his race, and to propitiate their chief divinity, and to encourage their consent to new and more foolish hendecasyllables. That which, cretin that he was, he considered his inderogatable duty amid the shoes and the puttees of the carabinieri. Those bilious petards of his rancor were lacerating his accursed gullet, of which— at moments—to the soldiers' hesitation, he exposed the cavernous flush, like the gaping jaws of hell: and seeing the fowl running before the streaming black monster, his vehemence was redoubled to the point of paroxysm and seemed, at a certain point, resolved to follow and even to compete with the hysterical biddies: but solidity of chain and charity of cord, or indeed string, restrained him, though not without effort. For which the hothead went on bobbing, without idea and with no gain for himself or for others, at every explosion from his throat: cerberus on leave upon earth and on the hills, where he had planted himself to work, guzzling their unmerited light, the gentle air of their open sky:
coeli jucundum lumen et auras.
The puff-puff was just about ready to pass. The wind which rose from the swamps seemed tired, its wing drooped in the daylight: but a whirr, again, of a wren, from a bush up to the rusty rainspout, or the broken flight, higher, and the conjugal cries, in reply, of two nestless jays. The girl with the potato face brushed the two characters aside, as if they were cards with a low face-value, and in a gesture of intolerance like a maiden rudely accosted, twisting her head in a grimace, she advanced with her instrument, to the platform: where, having grasped the implement with a steady hand and in a posture of attention, she planted it against her belly, at precisely forty-five degrees. That rolling pin with green skin now blossomed from her person, and it was, from its rough trunk, a sprout of exceptional vigor, and to hell with who might or might not see it: it was a standard not hers. The engine driver's blackened face was already thrust from his cab, to note the color of that bud. A stage Moor, an Othello with a black skier's cap. The puff-puff was the mixed train: the only one that came by in the morning: pieced together with three freight cars, of various age and structure, and two passenger cars: where the faces, the mops, and the shining eyes and mouths of the more impudent and the happier, or of some dope with more prestige than usual, gleamed at or hung from the windows, snickering. Or they leaned out, some of them, with half their chest and arms, in the gallant farewell of a waving hand. They mouthed with shining, lascivious mouths fugitive madrigals to the girl: their words were indistinct, but certainly filth: they were a swarm of soldiers discharged at that time, in that era, but even in another era, the same would have occurred. "He has his stick straight!" Cocullo was able to reconstruct, after a moment, in the rattling of the train that was already passing, and he clenched his teeth, paling with contempt and reddening higher up, between cheeks and chin. And they would have added another refrain for the carabinieri: if the train, which seemed utterly out of breath, hadn't gone so slowly. It was heard now creaking in the brake block and grating in its undergreased threadings, in descent: the Negroni grade, number 71, was followed, after the straight stretch of the station, by the counterslope of grade number 73, still Negroni's work: which had the fame of offering itself like a moorish odalisque filled with participating consents to the untangled enthusiasm of the mechanism whereby the puff-puff, freed from suffering and now silent in whistle and piston, would abandon itself, freewheeling, to the Mussoline glory of a first-rate derailing with consequent disabling of its own features and others', if it had not provided for the contrary, in fact, with its brakes. The air had become somnolent and seemed to stagnate over the ground. The little train was disappearing, made smaller, towards tall caravans of clouds: among the reminiscent shadows, fragments, crumbling walls, of a history not its own. The plumes of smoke which it had left behind after the bridge (of Divine Love) and before reaching the station, at the altitude, barely, of a swallow's flight, had been dispersed a bit from their track and hung now, white and useless, on the damp green of the unploughed fields. The hens, as they did every day, had survived the drama: for years, now, the ex-pupils of Melpomene had arranged in an algolagniac, theatrified ritual, in a scene "for Nordic tourists" the most foreseeable and preventative breaches of their first and youthful error of clucking and squawking for a mere nothing in an hebephrenic crescendo: and they had adapted themselves, instead, in a carefully chosen poetics, to silence and to the vagotonic pallors of the mystes. Their orphic initiation, little by little, had become perfected to mastery: it had reached the climax of a pictorial wisdom, forgetting the acoustic bravuras of puberty. A half-extinguished or dozing and nevertheless always available and recovered voluptuousness reawakened them every day, with the toiling up of the train and with the whistle, to the familiar fiction: to the artificial excitement of the victim whom no one threatens, to the precipitous fluttering and dash along the track and the breach, to the attempt at flight (will Delagrange fly?),
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to the simulated suicide with the headlights upon them and the concomitant dispensing of a couple of bonbons, puff-puff passing. Though feigned was the orgiastic movement, the little gift could not be feigned: thus, as in the theater, feigned passions release kisses that are not pretense and the cuckolds of the stage seem to be, a majority of times, cuckolds in fact. Every day, every morning. Then, no sooner had the locomotory entity completed its apparition, released its huffs, then, having unwound the reel of their obligatory fright, they went on scratching about as if nothing had happened: and as if they were uprooting a weed, with a plunge and a prompt recovery of the head, the neck, pecking from the earth the rare worms.