That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (33 page)

He was born illiterate, like all of us; but where there's a will there's a way: and by strength of will he had learned his letters: he could read the tape like it was nothing at all and he could tick away with his key. He mastered and shot from his belly the multiskinned banner, like a lordly esquire, at the Palio, the banner of the Torre, the Tartuca, or the Oca.
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Born timid, yes, vis-a-vis the black vulcanite cup, he gulped saliva, rather than pour into it the clamorous chatter of the day: he emitted cautious monosyllables: and few even of those. The grandmother was left alone to await him: alone, not counting the dog, the hens. She would have waited also, in the full assumption of official position and in the exclusive manipulation of the green club, good for signifying proceed, for that little train from Velletri at noon. The girl, one would now have thought her no less a deaf-mute than her grandmother, was led to the crossroads: where, awaiting the return of the carabinieri, the buggy was standing: and Lavinia, above, seated, huddled, throat and cheeks in her two hands, and her elbows set evenly on her knees, her chin extended, lips drawn, and her mouth in an attitude of contempt. Such a posture granted her, beneath her arms, sufficient room to lodge there and almost conceal, disdainful now and intolerant of glances, the tepid weight of her teats: though the arch of each armpit still allowed their profile to be seen, if one glanced there, perhaps without seeming to: as did Farafilio, in his palpitation, a little later, as soon as they came up to the buggy.

The proprietor of the horse was seated, beyond the ditch, on the rather high edge of the field in which the road, even today, is sunk, looking pensively at the ground: mouth open: his shoes in the dry culvert. He seemed to be speculating on human destiny and forebodings: he allowed his mind to graze in the limitless meadows of nothingness as utopists and lanternists are wont, having created the void there: that sweet Torricellian vacuum that the disturbed mists and the fogs of the equinoctial morning heighten, if anything, to an inderogatable condition of the life of the psyche. Curiosity had pricked him at once, on seeing Lavinia with the soldiers, then had been calmed and completely satisfied when, left alone with her and her horse (but the horse couldn't follow well the discourse of more than one voice), he had asked her about the case. Lavinia, bitter, had annihilated him in a few words, a process in which she excelled, and had huddled down in the position described. So, he, now, was mindless in peace, staring agape at some blades of grass: a thread of saliva was about to come from a corner of that unretentive meatus, filtering, from below the inert tongue, to drop on to the cobbles. His two shoes planted on the cobbles of the culvert, legs apart, his elbows on his knees, his whip extended from his ten basketed fingers, which held it slackly: and it seemed the staff of a flag from its socket on a balcony, or the tacit pole of the fisherman over the lake's silence: not did its handle rest on the ground, but instead of the ground, in a superfluous fold (immediately beneath his waistcoat of rawhide) which his trousers formed at jointing: so that it jutted from his lower crotch, like a faunesque stump gradually lengthened into a bending twig, in a thin and dropping splinter: like a patented contrivance, a private and personal organ, antenna or pole, disjunctive attribute of the radio-amateur-fisherman, or conductor. And all around the hanging twitching of the splinter (swaying with the wrist) a horsefly abandoned himself to his habitual goings and comings, which indicate a greed for footstuffs, perpetually awake or reawakening, and of the achieved spotting, that is, scenting, of the same. It buzzed nosily in a metallic vibration which reached top notes with certain swervings or counterswervings in figure 8's: drunk, almost, at having forced itself by the renewed fatality of a
sui generis
field of gravity: a field excogitated, for the new history, by the Buck of the young horseflies: where the ellipse of the Newtonian orbitation had been replaced by the lemniscate. He was one of those handsome green ones, with wings of metallic ash-green that recall burnished steel, devoted, as soon as he has it made, that is, when someone had made a turd, devoted to sumptuous pauses, and to ineffable epula-tions in the meadowed paths, in the unlofty corners of the territory:
du vieux terroir.
Wracked by precocious puberty in the muggy weather and by pubic nose in the equinox, in that cosmos of prescient odors (foretelling the spring fertilizing) he restored himself with the idea: of the tail of the whip. Who knows, the lout, what he thought it was?

The two cousins had glimpsed each other from afar. The trio, the new hope of Regina Coeli and her two great angels a little behind and almost at her sides, proceeded as a group. When they had approached the buggy, the proprietor stood up, and briskly raised his whip high as if a fine mullet had taken the bait: Camilla faded to a greeny-white: "It was you," she said softly to Lavinia, as she came within knifing distance of her, with the Brothers Grim at her ribs: the driver cracked his whip in the air, to reawaken the horse, and prepared to climb in after Camilla, in whom a hysterical malice from moment to moment was deflating the resultant inflation,
empâtée,
of the various volumes of the face, that abscessed consistency which with puberty, the two oily balloons of the cheeks, had assumed in her, to become all one with the cushions of her cheekbones. Her eyes, carved into the potatoish oval, had begun to react, gleaming in a white ground, to make themselves seen. Rage was giving her a gaze, lending her a face: "Me?" said Lavinia, "have you gone crazy?" Hatred, contempt, and also fear in that voice, in those words, which corporal Pestalozzi made an effort to intercept, then, in vain, to interpret. A slight breathiness, in her speech, a shy caesura. Her breast palpitated, most desirable, like a magnetic blade between the two poles: but this was not the magnetism of Maxwell, and the blade was instead of milk-colored skin, trepid and dear. "Me?" and she shrugged, "they're taking me in, too. We're going to have a little trip to Marino, to be witnesses." She raised her neck, haughty. "I have to tell you how it happened, when he, the corporal here, thought I was engaged, with the ring on my finger." The explosions of the whip reannounced, almost gaily, the advisability of being silent, of leaving. A little further on, at the high edge of the field, two little open-mouthed girls were looking on, with long underpants and shoes, without laces, that had belonged to their big brother. A strong man, a peasant, was trying to light and to draw, twisting his neck like a plebeian painted by Inganni,
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half of a half-cigar. "Get in," the corporal said to Camilla, "and stop talking: and don't try to work something out between the two of you, because it won't do you any good anyway. We already know the whole thing, how it went: and who gave them to you." The pocket of his tunic could be seen swollen, over his hip, on the right, as if to create a symmetry with the holster, as if to counterweight the encumbrance. "Go on, get in!" he repeated. Camilla obeyed. The owner got in after her, on the other side. The springs, perceiving his capacity, creaked again, and this time with their habitual zeal: then they were silent, quite flattened, crushed. The corporal, bicycle in hand, prepared to follow the buggy: which turned to the right, after a suitable turning of the wagon brake, like the pommel of a coffee grinder, after a last crack of the whip, a geeee from the master, a straightening of ears and a pawing of hooves on the part of the quadruped, a slap of the tail between the buttocks, after which it did not fail to start off. At a walk, that is, the walk of an old jade, going uphill, with three people. The road, in fact, rose: the bicycle, as soon as Pestalozzi pressed the miracle foreward, began again to chew, to gnaw on its torrone. The faithful Farafilio was to chew the road on foot. To enter that basket, with their full endowments, the two girls had to pack themselves in with some effort, so that they leaned, one against the other, at the shoulders and their respective thighs, like two fat quail, twinned on the stick, in the pan, to make a single generous portion: the driver supporting them on the one side, Camilla—as a counter-thrust—on the other, had clutched the lateral iron bar of the seat, fearing to fall out onto the road: that iron which was an available anchorage, the only one.

"Yes, it was you, you lousy spy," she said in a low voice, in a wrath greener still than her face. "You're good at flirting, I know. For a moment it suited him to see you every now and then, that pimp of yours."

"My fiance, you mean," and Lavinia raised her head, resolutely, with the sudden dart of the snake, looking straight ahead, as if to avoid even the sight of her traveling companion of whom she yet perceived the hateful warmth, the odor. She twisted her lips, slightly, continuing to despise.

"No, no, fiance my foot: he's not going to marry you, that's one sure thing."

"You want to take him away from me with money, you're so greedy, nasty snake, you. To get a taste of a man, you have to buy him, like the schoolmistress. But you won't get him away from me. You're too ugly, with that face like a potato of yours. And you're too tight: with that two cents you've saved up—you want to get him away from me?"

"They'll
take him away from you, don't worry."

"You can leave them out of it. And yourself, too. I made him swear. I had a fight with him. 'With her? You think I'm crazy?' Go on, you potato, you. Go hoe the field, you ugly witch." The owner of the buggy kept his mouth shut: from time to time, to assume a casual attitude, he carefully cracked the whip in the air like a postillion in a cloak on the box, humbly clad in his flea-colored jacket as he was, inciting the horse with a a-ah! After each crack, on the contrary, he seemed intimidated: like the feeble-minded or certain children who fall silent when their parents quarrel because they can't understand it all, except for a frightful aversion, a hatred whose motive is hidden. He didn't know much about women. Woman is a great mystery, he used to say, on Sundays, at Le Frattocchie, at the Marinese's, sitting astride the bench, or in the summer under the arbor, with his elbow and with the half-liter of wine on the table. You have to study women carefully before you start anything, he would asseverate at I Due Santi, his glass half-drained, before the bar of the striped white marble: because Woman is a mystery. And Zamira pitied him, from aloft, with all the blackness of her mouth, half-disgusted, half-compassionate, drying her hands on her apron, which she sometimes wore, though dirty. And once she even answered him: "It's a mystery you can understand right away, if you just have a little imagination." He didn't understand them much, he said. And perhaps he didn't understand anything very much. With these, with one of them at least, but which he couldn't recall, he must have played when she was a kid. But he hadn't understood anything even then. He stood there, crestfallen, waiting to be fed. Now, when he came upon one on the road, sometimes, but never on his own initiative, he agreed to give her a lift.

"You're a lousy whore and a spy," Camilla resumed, anxious that the fight shouldn't end. She was enraged by the love of which she had been defrauded, even more than by the treasure that had been confiscated from her: what she already was calling "the jewelry for my wedding," the pledge of love, in any case, there, had ended up in the hands of the carabinieri, "damn the person who ever invented the stuff," she cursed, clenching her teeth.

"A lousy spy, that's what you are, bitch. Stinking bitch." The man in the tight jacket fired his whip aloft, said "aah!" to cover this altercation with his voice.

"They can hear you," he warned, without turning, in an attempted whisper that came out grainy with catarrh: and at that he became more timid than ever. He kept his eyes on the road, beyond the tips of the horse's ears which served him as sights, though double ones: because he felt, suddenly, the corporal's burning: eyes and ears alike.

The horse, at every new crack, did its best to seem to be engaging in a trot, which remained brisk for a few paces, then slowed down. The girls were silent. Lavinia, finally, was weeping: her beauty, her arrogance: crushed: so expert in the pride of loving: indeed, in being sought after for love. The young man who had given her the ring, that stone all light which seemed to be sublimated from the buttercup—where was he? where was her boy friend, at this hour? A knapsack over his shoulder, a knife in his pocket: a flash, a clump of light hair in the wind, like a handful of straw that suffers no comb: after having betrayed her and despised her,
her,
poor thing (and her tears, almost, were sweet), to go down to the station at Casal Bruciato and put gold all over that shit.

"That shit who's warming my thigh now."

Oh, Iginio. The carabinieri had caught hold of him by the scarf, but he, quick as a wink, had already slipped from their hands. That lousy pistol of his, he never dreamed of shooting it, but just kept it to defend himself: and now, as if the rest weren't enough, he had hidden it, buried it. Thank God. But now it's not buried any more. Some gun! Good enough to scare the countess. The cap? Ha! He had it in the pocket of that sack thing he was wearing. The law, no, they couldn't put him in jail three years because of a green scarf and a cap, and an old pistol, all rusty and useless. The knife . . .
Madonna Santa!
he had been wrong to use it, on a married lady ... in her house, if it was true that he was the one who did it. And a chill sweat, a shudder of revulsion and anguish now gripped her again at the thought: it was horrible. And she dried her cheeks, her eyes with a filthy rag. The fat sergeant from Marino—and she wiped her little nose—how had he figured it out? How had he guessed everything?

Because of the scarf, all right: but that scarf can't speak. And the ring with the yellow stone, how had he learned that it had been Igi who gave it to her? All of a sudden? And that she and Igi had exchanged their promises three days before, after almost a year that they had been going together, so that the ring ... he had been the one to stick it on her finger, forcing it on her? "The ring's mine, isn't it? And you're my girl, aren't you" he had said, and had kissed her with a fury! ... it was enough to scare you, almost. But the corporal, though, how had he managed to guess? Ah! Could he of been hiding behind a tree, behind a bush, right there, when they had said yes to each other? Or had somebody else seen them and told him about it? Had Igi gone around telling about it, the way men brag? (and her heart leapt with pride). Well, it wasn't too good for him to talk, either. And besides he wasn't the kind who likes to do much talking. You couldn't get much more than an um or an uh out of that mouth of his, that mean-face. Well who? Some girl from Zamira's? There were three of them now, sewing there: she herself went almost every day: Camilla and Clelia, maybe every other day. Camilla hadn't opened her mouth, for sure, with her dirty conscience at having taken the goods, all that gold and those stones: sooner than talk she'd do better to jump in front of the train. Clelia? Clelia liked those big carabinieri: to her they seemed like so many handsome devils, she could dance with them all and say yes to one every month, that was obvious: even a blind man could see it. But to turn informer to the soldiers and tell on a girl friend, a fellow worker! "Or maybe it's another lousy lie of that corporal's," and she glanced at Pestalozzi who was struggling upon his musical bike, "that lousy northerner, who wants to make sergeant no matter what? No: it would never pop into Clelia's head to inform on anybody. She walked her legs off to get a bowl of soup at night, and a cot, all the way to Santa Rita in Vitacolo: she was too far away, and in a place that was too open. It was already dark when she got home. And besides what? She'd be risking something herself. If Igi—just supposing—if Igi happened to find out, that she had talked! He wasn't above breaking her bones for her." And she recalled in a kind of somnolence barely illuminated by flashes, in a leap of her blood, in the hammering of the blood in her ears, she remembered that the sergeant's bike, the fat sergeant's, they heard it spluttering a little all along every road and path, raging at the closed crossing, annoyed, as far as Torraccio, Ponte, as far as Santa Palomba, where the radio poles are, and sometimes yes, even as far as Santa Rita in Vitacolo.