That Awful Mess on the via Merulana (37 page)

And he had also obtained permission for gasoline, In-gravallo, playing his cards and then, all of a sudden, bang, ace of trumps, he screwed the whole lot of them: he filled it with gas enough to cruise to Benevento and back. Three armed policemen, two with muskets: but no Grabber, ordered off to the Pensione Burgess, nor Blondie either, ordered to Piazza Vittorio: but instead, all nice and thin with his mustache erect, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, who makes four: and he, Ingravallo five: and six, the showfurr, in twenty-seven French words were still allowed.
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So I don't have to tell you what the car looked like. The Barcaccia from Piazza di Spagna out for a drive. It sped, as it could, with its tires swelling, soft as they were, and at the first stone they encountered, they already wanted to blow up: the clutch went crack at every street corner, at every dog that crossed their path. At Via Giovanni Lanza, under repair, it tangoed and rocked through the potholes for more than a hundred yards, spattered muck against the legs of the passers-by, even those on the sidewalk: parabolic slabs of liquid mud, opalescent against the pink lights of the morning which, nevertheless, was darkening: it plunged, re-emerged, and looked as if it had been repainted: a nice nut-colored bath, it had had. At Largo Brancaccio, as they were turning into Via Merulana towards Piazza San Giovanni, Ingravallo looked, grimly, to his left: he rolled down the window, Santa Maria Maggiore, with the three dark arches of the loggia over the narthex, seemed to follow, with the afflatus of charity of her plebs, a bier that had sprung from her own womb. Designed and constructed enunciation, artful, on the summit of what must have been, in the distant centuries, the "hill," the Viminal, the seventeenth-century architecture of the basilica, as if of a sumptuous dwelling of thought, had its roots in the shadow, in the darkness of the straight descending street and in the tangle of all its offshoots: a hint, the cuspidal campanile, beyond the tangle of branches and foliage that flanked it. But over the brick of that romanesque little tower, the sky was prepared for its decoration. Don Ciccio stuck out his head, tried to raise his eyes towards the clouds, for the day's forecast. All the clouds could be seen running: a flight of horses; they crossed the clear broad stripe, blue at moments, of the sky, between the two parallel rain pipes: they rushed off God knows where, prompt cohorts. The plane-trees and the boughs of Merulana were a forest, as the car turned, a tangle to the eyes, on the parallel descent of the lines which nourished the trams: still skeletal in March, with already a merely skin-deep languor, nonetheless, a kind of itch within the happy, street-lining clarity of their bark, made of scales and patches: dry leather, white calf, silver: the undergarment the color of a tender pea's skin, amid the bustle of the people, the coming and going of wagons and bicycles. And emerging then from the boughs, and already awakened at a hint of purple, the campanile "of the ninth century" seemed to warm in the sun's ray: to waken, at that tepidness, the dozing bronzes, which, at any moment, would then officiate. Trapped within its cage, the heavy bell of the scholars began to sway in its turn, slowly, slowly, with a trembling almost unnoticed at first, with a rumble still suspended in the heavens, like that of a metallic wing. The wave spread happily through one's thoughts, over the balconies, the closed windows of the houses vibrated with it, every most sleeping window. An old grandmother on a swing, who rhythmically took in air: and grated forth her soft whisper, a little watery at every new thrust, and one doesn't know from what guitar: to summon Lucianos and Maria Maddalenas to their classes, with their braids down. Where, in fact, a little later they ran, with a pack of dictionaries: and some were already out: and on foot, or on the tram, which meant they had a bit of money: alone, or in bunches, like so many little flights of sparrows, of little wrens: after drying their ears in haste, and perhaps even washing them a bit: yes, their ears: indispensable organ of all study. Dong, dong, dong, dong. The bell, the old woman on her swing, hurled out that bumblebee signal, from the pendulum, with all her heart, at every blow with full ass that she gave it, to be able to take the forward thrust. And gradually, it became more full-bodied every time, this admonition, emphasizing the air, magnifying the wave: until she, the grandmother, spun it out for you a bit
en sourdine:
to not stir too badly the little darlings, the Nanninas or the rumpled Romolettos: who from a nonentity of an alarm clock in angry trills would have got the scarlatina poor babies! A sweetness in her heart, to hear her, the old granny! That perorating cautiousness brought the evil closer by degrees, in a subdued modulation: no,
not oil:
the evil of reawakening to knowledge: to recognition and to reliving the truth of every day: which is that, immediately after the cold water, there is school waiting, and the teacher with his zeros in readiness. She, the grandmother of all, uncovered with her slow caress the little heads, the black curls of the boys, of the girls: she parted their eyelids, just barely, drawing from them, with the clean tip of the counterpane, the veil of the fugitive dreams. It took her a half hour to wax, very slowly, and another half hour to wane. She descended, little by little, into her calmed silence. Which was the silence of the offices and the tasks at their beginning, the chilblains on the penmanship. With that great portrait of Him hanging on the wall: a mug, who because he was born stupid, seems to want to take his revenge on all.

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A few curious faces, of two or three loafers with their hands in their pockets, and with three gaping mouths under the black questioning of their eyes, received and then surrounded, at Marino, the car "of the Roman police" when it honked twice, poh! poh! before the main gate of the fort. In the frame of a window, on high, behind a rusty grating, the face of a young man appeared, with two stars on his gray canvas collar, one here and one there. He vanished. A few minutes: and the gates opened. The willing and bumpy car, after some great pushing and reversing and turns forward, with several jolts and starts which one wouldn't have hoped for, even from her, finally drove through that arch of triumph, which it had devoured the countryside to gain. And it had been, the road to the fort, a narrow, climbing road, all compact cobbles, between spurred walls which retained the shadow patched with lichens, on the old peperino, of strange pools and cockades, blue-green, yellow. The cobbles slippery. A slab at the corner: Via Massimo d'Azeglio. Ingravallo got out of the car, imitated by his followers. The sentry said: "The sergeant is out on a search party; the corporal was sent to I Due Santi, on that crime business." Meanwhile another soldier appeared. Higher in rank, or older, after a not prompt and rather soft clicking of heels (these gentlemen were from the police) and a raising of the head which announced more explicitly and more elegantly that he had come to attention, he handed Ingravallo a bluish envelope which, on being torn open, produced a sheet of paper,

folded over twice. Santarella, therein, communicated that he had sent Pestalozzi to la Pacori, accompanied by a soldier, for further checking; he, with another man, was out to follow the tracks of the fugitive Enea, alias Iginio, which was how they called Retalli. He had some hopes of overtaking him, that is to say, of catching him and of handcuffing him, to bring him, handcuffed, to the barracks: not however, a certainty. Ingravallo, more than a little cross, took off his hat, to allow his head to get a bit of air, clenched his teeth: two hard knobs on the two jaws, halfway from the ears, gave him, under his black mop a kind of bulldog's muzzle, already illustrated on more than one occasion. The two carabinieri were not the least impressed. The carabinieri, in peace time, and nuns, at all times, know how to draw from their respective disciplines that durable steadiness which indemnifies them to the jolt of current events, if not even to the quakes of history, for which events or history, however, it may turn out, they give as much as any history merits: that is, not to damn. "Do you know whether Crocchiapani Assunta," Ingravallo asked, "about whom I sent a communication on the twentieth, has already been questioned at her home?" "No, sir."

"And why not? Do you know where she is? I mean, do you know the locality?"

"Tor di Gheppio, the sergeant said."

"How long does it take to get there?"

"With a car, sir, about forty minutes . . . even less . . ."

"Well, we'll start there then. Let's go."

The noncom sent for some character, who was supposed

to be familiar with that zone: a thin little man, dressed in black as Ingravallo was. They welcomed him aboard. To get the car out of the courtyard, ass frontwards, along a narrow curve and uphill, to thread it into the d'Azeglio toboggan in a forward gear, took a number of pushes in the direction opposite to that previously described. Ingravallo, blackly, continued to clench his jaws: his teeth creaked. He was mentally cursing the tires, the springs, the Fascists. If he had a flat, wouldn't he look a fool? with this new man in the car. The whole legion would laugh for thirty years. The automobile of the Rome Police: with a hernia-ed tire that goes plof, at the climax, and it's only luck if the car hasn't driven off a bridge. But the car went: it would go. It sped against the wind, with rare seeds of rain on the windows: with unforeseen jolts at certain recesses, certain bumps not yet reported by the Touring Club. Olive trees, and their fronds of ashen silver, were still not much shaken: beaded by the night's rain, or dried at the first sun, they spoke of the clear continuity of the year already adolescent, already tormented into Aries, smelling a bit of manure in the vineyards, in the brown earth of the hummocks, the slopes. A cloud passed over the grain or the fields, barely grassy: and an immediate fear gripped them, as if they were to be spent again, in winter: to that shadow, swift and yet feared, they seemed to adapt themselves helplessly, to freeze, despairing. But the wing of the sirocco, quite to the contrary, tawny and tepid, in the pale humidity of the day: more than a calf's breath in the stable. The weather, muggy, gave the augury of grain, of the battle of grain
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and of corn and of the rearings of the Jack-ass it cared little. A late-March frost, Ingravallo thought, could upset, God unwilling, the presage: the eighty million quintals were to come down to thirty-eight. The Autarch Jawbone, for his forty-four million . . . subjects, yes, fine subjects too, had to load on grain in Toronto, where there were French become English in Canada, beg maccheroni from the redskins. And Ingravallo clenched and creaked, from rage and satisfaction joined together. They went down to Torraccio, where the sirocco, dying, became warmer: or so it seemed. They turned on to the Appia at I Due Santi, having to travel over it, retracing their steps, for a good half-mile, towards Rome, that is, to the turn-off for Falcognana. After a short stretch of this road, they encountered the Anzio road, and turned off again. The wind dropped. With the Guzzi motorbike of Sergeant Santarella and the motorized Pestalozzi, the carabiniere had suggested that a meeting was not improbable, or even almost certain: but they didn't meet at all. An ass, on the other hand, loaded with wood, and with the respective peasant on his back, one hand clutching the tail: or a little flock of about fifteen sheep, the shepherd with his green umbrella, shut: no, no dog, they cost too much. A buggy: "the vet from Albano," the little man informed. He drove calmly, ruddy, a cigar butt spent in his lips, with threadbare gloves. After a little more than a mile and a half on the Anzio road, they had to take a right: "this way, this way, towards Santa Fumia," their guest said. Over the Santa Fumia bridge towards Tor di Gheppio and then towards Casal Bruciato. The muddy little road went downhill, then hardened: the tracks dilated into puddles, brimming, against the light, with livid water, molten blue-silver lead, where the wing of a dab-chick was seen, black, or of a scattered jay. It seemed that, a little later, they had to become lost in the lands, in the mire. They crossed instead the tracks (of the Velletri line) at a level, similar to the one a mile to the north, near the Divino Amore bridge. Blades of grass, between the two tracks, rose here and there from the breach, between one tie and the next (of oak), as if the line were of no further use, after having been used, for one year, by Pius the Ninth. Strands of smoke lay still in midair, motionless, clotted there by magic: remains of a barely dissolved apparition: white, like cotton batting, or of an unreal white, like steam. The smoked outline of the little train was diminishing at that moment towards a distant arch: it accredited in itself, in its vanishing, the perspective flight of the two converging rails: and it resembled the Prince of Darkness, and the cabin of the last car, the rail, when it is freed from the enchantress and disappears with a hiss through its portals, under the black vaulted arch, into the mountain; and in the silence of the countryside and in the mute stupefaction of all things, at a goat's hoof-print that has remained to seal the mire and a wisp of sulphur in the air. "Tor di Gheppio's over there," the willing little man said, pointing, "towards the palace farm. Crocchiapani lives there, in one of those houses you can see, the little bunch on the left." Emerging then from the undulations of that clay bare of trees, which the fallow land made green in patches, a tower's pointed tip stood out against the sky, like a shard, an ancient tooth of an ancient jaw of the world. The houses of the living, mute in the distance of the cultivated land, stood before it: but a little more in this direction. They drove down.

"Pavona? The station?" Ingravallo asked.

"The town of Pavona is there," the guest pointed again: "down there, see? That's the station. If you cross the fields it's maybe twenty-five minutes: if you walk fast. But we'd get all wet."

"And the Rome-Naples line?"

"There," and he turned: "it's two, maybe even three miles: you just keep going straight, with the car. On our way back, then, if you have to go to Pavona, after Tor di Gheppio, then we could do down to Casal Bruciato, and take the Ardeatina there. If we go off in that direction, towards Ardea, right away, hardly more than a mile, we get to Santa Palomba—where those antennas are over there (he pointed them out), you can see them everywhere, even from Marino. There, if you want, you cross the road to Solforata and Pratica di Mare: so, for Palazzo, we can come straight up to Pavona. The whole thing, from Casal Bruciato, is maybe four and a half, five miles, maybe not even. With the car, maybe fifteen minutes." "All right," said Ingravallo, in whom all this toponymy had produced more clenching of the jaws: "now we'll go to Tor di Gheppio." They set off, they went: to the spot where the little man said, after spurts of water and various jolts, they got out. They left the car with the driver, who also got out and went off to one side for a moment, on his own. They started walking along the path which proceeded straight and not excessively muddily towards the three houses. They proceeded in so-called Indian file, one after the other, Private First-Class Runzato first of all, then Di Pietrantonio, then Don Ciccio with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat: and they looked like a school of grave-diggers, all so black in the clear, open day, as if they were going to pick up the deceased: and with some reluctance, too. "La Crocchiapani, that stupid girl, has already heard us coming," thought Ingravallo, "and she's peeking at us, for sure." In fact, as they were later to ascertain, she was observing them from the window, behind the almost-closed shutters, where the sound of the car had led her to station herself. When Ingravallo raised his face and Runzato whistled, then shouted: "Police! Let us in! Open the door!" the house, the first and the smallest, had a policeman at every corner. Kids, chickens, two women, two mongrel dogs with tails curled up like a bishop's crook, revealing all their beauty: couldn't stop looking, barking. Gleaming, black eyes, stunned in the wonder of the faces, and the almost tattered poverty of the clothes. "Who's here?" Di Pietrantonio prudently asked: "How many people? Are there any menfolk?" "There's a girl, with her father," said the nearer of the peasant women, who had come closer, as if to save their children, or a hen more in danger. This house, of Tina Crocchiapani's, was a little square, slightly separated from the flock: a little, closed door with the number 3, on the ground floor. Before the threshold some slabs of stone, rather hollowed by footsteps, and shoes, and nails. No voice, within. Opaque, somnolent years, after the pink of the inaugural wash, had given the walls a faded squalor, and, on the side toward the north wind a dark rust, shadows: which was the corner to which these gentlemen had come first. At the eaves there was no pipe nor any wooden apparatus, known as gableboard: so that the roof tiles, along the edge, seemed to Don Ciccio, stumps, or depicted in cross-section, they made a sort of wavy pleating along the margin of the roof, a rustic ornate. A few blades of grass from the earth deposited here and there on the tiles, under the wind's auspices. An occasional drop fell, radiating, once detached from the tiles that had become black with the years; and dropped heavily, as if it were of mercury, to wound again, to penetrate, all around, the dampened compactness of the earth. A window was opened, then shut: the maddened hens cluck-clucked. Too yielding the roof's slopes, or too shapeless, they seemed to descend in waves, they had been softened by the rains and then baked again and as if swollen in the heat: they charged their masons with lack of skill in their art: or else, in the garret the tree trunk which served as a beam was twisted. One would think that, under the earthy insistence of that covering, all the rotten apparatus, one fine day, would give way and fall and crash in a ruin: or the whole roof fly away, rather, at a gust of strong wind, like a rag, no sooner than the squall hit it. The wooden shutters, at the windows, one closing, one slamming: without paint of any kind and already putrid or splintered in the weather, in the steady evaporation of the years. Instead of glass, greased paper, on a frame, or a rusty piece of corrugated iron.