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."
"Well, then tell us his name."
"And I don't feel like I've done anything wrong, either": her eyes became damp: "Let me go, too."
"Diomede, eh . . ." and Doctor Fumi's gaze had the unswerving quality of a request to see identification papers, urgently.
"Well, they told me his name was Diomede .. . Lanciani, Diomede." And she burst into a sort of stifled, soft weeping.
"Don't you worry your head. We want to get hold of him because he has to tell us . . . something: something interesting. That's why we have to find him."
"Hurry up now. What sort of a mug does this Lanciani have?" Ingravallo insisted, hard. "Is he big? little? blond? does he have dark hair?"
Torn between distrust and pride, Ines dried her eyes with the back of her hand. "This Lanciani's an electrician," she said proudly: and took to sketching his likeness. Her voice, after pauses of fear and suspicion and admissions filled with belated caution, became animated to the point of a heedless gaiety, almost joy. She resented Ingravallo's choice of words. "If you want to know about this mug," she resumed, turning to Fumi as to the more benign of her two principal inquisitors, "there's more than one boy who'd be glad to have it, that mug; believe me, sir, chief, that you wouldn't mind having it yourself, a face like that." "Sure, sure." "A boy this tall": and she made the usual gesture, raising and extending horizontally her hand. She bent her head to one side, the better to glance at her palm, to evaluate, from below, the accuracy of that indication of height. "A handsome boy. Yes, he's handsome. So what? Is that against the law? He's smart, too. Yes, blond. It's not his fault if his Mamma made him a blond. Eh? Was she supposed to make him dark, when she felt like making him blond?" In her bag she even had his picture. Paolillo went straight off to the storeroom to dig out, from those rags, that miserable little purse: the identification card of the poor girl, which she had refused to the patrol when she was picked up, was already on Doctor Fumi's desk and under the light, open, crumpled. Paolillo returned, with the vagabond's purse and, in his other hand, the photograph of a young man painfully autographed crosswise with a scrawled signature: "Lumiai Dio . . ." he spelled out, as he walked, and he was about to hold it out. "Hand it over." Doctor Fumi tore it from his hand. "Lunci-a-ci Di-o . . . God only knows what he's written here. Diomede!" he exclaimed, victorious. A character! A face of the kind that the bimonthly "The Defense of the Race,"{42} fifteen years later, would have published as an example of splendid Aryanism: the Aryanism of the Latin and Sabellian peoples. As an exact copy, yes. He was blond, certainly: the photo asserted that: a virile face, a clump of hair. The mouth, a straight line. Above the life of the cheeks and the neck two steady, mocking eyes: which promised the best, to girls, to maidservants, and the worst to their dejarred savings. A bold sort, made to be surrounded and fought over, followed and overtaken, and then given presents more or less by all the girls, according to the possibilities of each. A type to represent Latium and its handsomeness at the Foro Italico.{43}
That photo, Ines explained, had cost her an incredible number of slaps: because he, one day, had wanted it back. Yes, he wanted it back at all costs. It was night, almost. He had turned mean, as she refused: he seemed out of his mind. He had yelled in her face, called her one thing and another, he even had the heart to slap her around: and, as if that weren't enough, threats. They were alone, between two walls, under a broken street light on the Clivo de' Publicii at Rocca Savella, where the knights are{44}: it was growing dark. But she had taken the slaps, not batting an eye. She had held fast. At least that memento of him! of all the love they had felt for each other! and she loved him still, for her part: even if now . . . they forced her to turn informer. "But there's nothing to inform!" she yelled. "So he gave me a couple of slaps, what of it? That's our business: you can't put him in jail for that."
"A couple of slaps!" and Doctor Fumi, shaking his head, looked at her. "Before, you told us another story: but it doesn't matter!" and he drew his head down between his shoulders. He was about to tell her again that she had nothing to fear: they only wanted to question him, not to arrest him, still less, to lock him up. "Well, anyway I'm sure you'll never make it: you won't find him, not him." She spoke with her head bowed, pensive. "And besides, if you do find him, I'll be glad. That'll be the end of things between him and . . . that American woman." She seemed to be excusing herself, a woman, to herself.
The photograph of Diomede passed from hand to hand. Ingravallo also gave it a sidelong peep, as if reluctantly, though in reality with a certain secret annoyance: he passed it to Fumi, carelessly: a gesture meant to signify boredom and fatigue, and the desire to go and get some sleep, since it was high time: "one of a thousand like him." Finally after a few more ahas and a few more ahems, after a "But I've already seen it," it was knocked down to Pompeo, author of this last exclamation, who sheltered it in his wallet of simulated alligator, and the wallet he placed over his heart, agreeing in a loud and ringing voice: "Well, we'll do our best." The chief, meanwhile, had motioned to him: "Here," with the little rake of his four fingers of the right hand: and Pompeo had therefore approached: bent, now, he gave ear to the whispers of the seated official, and had already nodded his head repeatedly, looking far into the distance, that is to say, against the papered or opaque panes of the window: which the night's gaze, outside, observed, fearing, venerating. That ear listened, with its habitual zeal: and the doctor dropped those whispers into it, like so many drops of a rare henbane: and the movement of the lips was accompanied by a lively digitation, like a closed tulip, index and thumb in disjunctive oscillation.
At seeing the photo of her beloved take shelter against Grabber's heart, Ines, poor kid, blanched. Over her little nose her saddened eyebrows thickened in a frown that seemed wrath but wasn't: tears glistened, suddenly gleaming, under the very long and golden lashes (through whose comb, once upon a time, to her childish gaze, the glowing Alban light, the light of morning had been broken and radiated). They ran down her cheeks, leaving there, or so it seemed, two white streams, down to her mouth: the trail of humiliation, of alarm. She had nothing with which to blow her nose, nor to dry those tears: she raised her hand as if to stanch with the gesture alone what might have bubbled up from the wretched solitude of her face, to perfect the cruelty of those moments, the chill and derision of the hour which is their sum. She felt as if she were naked, helpless, before those who have the power to pry into the nakedness of shame and, if they don't mock it, they pass judgment on it: naked, helpless: as are all sons and daughters without shelter and without support, in the bestial arena of the earth. The stove was damp. The big room was cold: you could see your breath in it: the light bulbs of the Investigation Squad were governmental. She felt upon herself, shuddering at it, the men's gaze, and the rips, the tears, the wretched bunting, the sordid poverty of her dress: a tramp's jersey. To God, she could surely not address herself, not in these clothes. When he had called her by name, the name of her baptism, three times: Ines! Ines! Ines! at the beginning of her life in the underbrush, three times! like the three Persons of the Holy Trinity . . . the oaks writhed in foreboding under the gusts of the mistral: they opened the path of the underbrush to her, behind the deliberate tread of the boy. When the Lord had called her back, with his gaze of golden rays in the evening, from the round window of Croce domini, she, to the Lord—who had the heart to answer Him? "I'm going with my love," she had answered that gaze, that voice. So as for the Lord, now, He had to be left out of it.
She bowed her head, which, falling over her face, her dry or gluey hair put in the shadow, threatened to hide altogether. Her shoulders seemed to grow thinner, more skeletal almost, in the jerks of a silent sobbing. She dried her face, and nose: with her sleeve. She raised her arm: she wanted to hide her weeping, shelter her fear, her shame. A gap, at the beginning of her sleeve, and another in the undershirt below it, revealed the whiteness of her shoulder. She had nothing to conceal herself, but those torn and discolored remains of a poor girl's dress.
But the men, those men, blackmailed her with their gaze alone, afire, broken at intervals by signals and flashes, not pertinent to the case, of a repugnant greed. Those men, from her, wanted to hear, to know. Behind them was Justice: a machine! A torment, that's what Justice was. Hunger was better: and going on the street, and feeling the rain drizzling in your hair: better to go and sleep on a bench by the river, in Prati. They wanted to know. Well? What sort of dealings did this Diomede traffic in? She shut up. And they: come on, come on, talk, spill it. They weren't asking her to do any harm to anyone, after all: only to tell the truth, they begged her. Some truth! Putting people in jail for it. People . . . who have to shift for themselves: they have to live the best they can. Talk, spill. And be quick about it. No harm, after all. And, in the contrary case, bad papers for her. They needed him for the law, because a big crime had been committed, in all the papers it was. They showed her some of them. Rubbish. She waved the newsprint under her nose, slapping a hand on it as if to say: there you are. (She drew her head back.) For the law: "not to hurt you or anybody else," Grabber added calmly, persuasive, with a deep voice that came right straight from his heart. He was one of the Brothers of Happy Death, Grabber was, the ones who wear hoods over their heads and accompany the deceased : when it came to consoling widows there was nobody like him on the force. "Diomede," the girl said to herself, "is bound to be innocent. Giving a girl a slap or two, the coward, doesn't mean he cuts women up with a knife." She was reserved. She hesitated. "With these cops, a girl never knows." Maybe it was better to satisfy them, she thought. Better for Diomede, and better for herself, too. That would be an end of it, at least! They'd quit their nagging. Pompeo would take her back to the dormitory. She'd throw herself on the planks; hard as they were, she could still fall asleep there. Maybe even those four-legged relatives would fall asleep too, poor babies! She was dead tired: her head swam: worn out.
"What did Diomede do?" she started. "What were those women he had hanging around him? What sort of women were they?"
She, between humiliation and the fury of the great jealousy she suffered, her face still plunged into her elbow, her hair falling lankly even beyond the elbow, hiding her whole forehead . . . ended by saying, sure, he was capable of going even with old bags, as long as they . . .
"As they—?"
Well, of course, yes, no: she didn't want to insult herself, since she also went with him. It was ... it was for his own interest. Because he had been out of a job for two months: and he couldn't find work: another job, a little better, to keep going.
"So what does he do?" asked Doctor Fumi, mildly. "What would his job be, if he wasn't out of work?" The great eyes of the inquisitor widened, a little yellowish at the corners, they rested sadly on that tangle of hair, which streamed, like a fountain, from the girl's elbow. "Electrician!" she sobbed, without raising her head entirely, only extracting it slightly from that defense of arm and elbow, and allowing its voice to escape. Now, with softened tears, she was dampening the sleeve, where there reappeared a hole, at the point of the bone, and the rip of the blouse and jersey and the white of the skin, at the shoulder. "And now he has an English woman," she stated, resuming her sobs, in that bath, with bathed words: "an ugly American, he has, but what do I know about it? She isn't old, though, not this one, but with hair like straw!" She wiped her nose on her cuff. "She has money, that's what she has": and again she burst into sobs.
"And who is she? Do you know who she is? Where does she live? Can you tell us? Speak up. This American, this English woman . . ."
"What do you think? Who do you think I am? She's probably there, in one of those swell hotels, where rich people stay . . ."
"There? Where?"
"There, in the fancy part of town, Via Boncompagni, Via Veneto. How should I know? I know the name is Burger . . . Borges . . ."
"I know. The Pensione Bergess," said Pompeo, pronouncing the foreign name after his fashion.
"Pompeo," said Doctor Fumi, turning, "tonight I want to see the hotel lists."
Pompeo looked at his wrist watch. Ingravallo moved from his desk and began to pace slowly up and down the cold tile floor: his head bowed, sulky, he seemed to be meditating on all these complications, as was his wont.
"The Foreigners' Bureau, Pompeo, the file. Pensione Bergesse. And good hunting. Since we've got a clue here, go straight to the night clerk and see what he has to say. Reports! Doormen! Information! What are all those porters for in hotels, anyway?" He hesitated a moment. "And in pensioni, too, Pompeo. Ingravallo, you better have a look, too . . . into this mess with the American." Don Ciccio nodded his assent, with two-tenths of a millimeter of movement: of that great head.
"And tomorrow morning, Pompeo, you're going to take a little stroll along Via Veneto. You've got to meet this English girl by accident, you get me? And then—we understand each other, eh? . . ." Great eyes on Pompeo. "Follow her, trail her: and catch her with the boy!" index finger towards the abyss, "after the rendez-vous," triumphant tone: "you've got to bring her in with the boy, not before": a singing note. "After they've met! You understand me, Pompeo? Straw hair!" he frowned. "English, English," pensive, thoughtful, or rather . . . why not?" thoughtful, "Scotch, or American!" Brief silence: "after the rendezvous!"
"I understand, chief, but . . ."
"Straw hair!" eyebrows and lashes turned inexorably up towards the stars: a tone that admitted no appeal: palm extended, repelling, resisting any objection, licit or illicit: fingers splayed like a monstrance.
"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.
Yes, bestowed his comfort: despite Venus the Snooty and all the swarm of her powdered Cupids. "That old, toothless ex-cow!" thought Pestalozzi, in his sylloge, rather northern in accent, to tell the truth. It was evident by now: the blond had given repeated proof of his wisdom and valor, to the old woman: even though when it came to the obviousness, the enticements and the itineraries, Pestalozzi opined, modifying, forever known and traveled through the ages, this wisdom had proved superfluous, and the valor more necessary than ever. A valor heedless to all repulses by adverse circumstances. He had granted her the best, or the worst, of his own spirit of initiative. Yes, it was clear, now, the spirit of initiative ... he had boldly insufflated it, into the sorceress: perhaps, in fact certainly, after suitable remuneration. "Because he didn't have any cash before," Ines blurted, "and then he had some."
Corporal Pestalozzi seemed indeed to remember, without difficulty, the tacit existence of Diomede: whom he had met at the wine counter of I Due Santi. He frowned. It seemed to him, at a certain moment, that he would recognize him. What? Can it be? Yes. But that very day? The silent and unexpected appearance of the youth from the stairs: a young man of singular attractiveness, to be sure, blond as an archangel, but without sword: returning from the incursion into the Abyss. The Abyss, that time, must have received the blow. A blow that deserved praise. He had in his face, a steady and pale face with slightly prominent cheekbones, he had in his clear and steadily blue gaze that sort of insolent, almost hysterical volition with which a painter, in the Marches, had studied (and taken pleasure) in perfecting the natural physiognomic notes of the winged celestial creatures: when he charged them with slightly awkward missions. Such volition, if it had to be described in words, would be graphicized in the well-known terms: "Everything has to go the right way, which before it is 'right' is my way, seeing as how I'm an archangel. And if anybody thinks different about it, I'll settle his hash right away: with this cudgel here."
Then and there, however, he hadn't seemed too convinced, exceptional creature though he was, finding himself face to face with a carabiniere corporal: a figure that didn't suit his taste, so red and black: and which upsets everybody a little, under certain circumstances. But sly, he saw at once that the corporal had downed an orangeade: well, that was all right then.
Having come to Rome to work as an electrician, Ines reported, he had found work in a shop at sixty lire per week:
"but then they fired him." Whereupon, afterwards, he worked here and there: on his own: "he went to people's houses to fix wires when they were worn out, or to wire a room, in a new apartment: or maybe some old bag's place," she insinuated, and became annoyed. "Or to change the fuses or make the bells work, when they broke down and wouldn't ring anymore, because some ladies, and their husbands, too, are afraid to touch electric fuses. Mamma mia! Afraid of getting a shock. And then, if you stop and think about it, who would ever have the nerve to climb up to the top of a ladder, till you touch the ceiling with your head? Except some poor kid who does it to earn his living? standing on that ladder for hours and hours too? Putting all those wires together, that's what I say . . . well, if we women do it, you can see everything ... I mean, garters and all the rest": she turned two magnificent eyes, two gems. "No, nobody wants to do that kind of job." She seemed to hesitate for a moment. "Well, maybe the Milanese, everybody knows what they're like: they get a kick out of that stuff: they're all engineers." She was repeating, or so it seemed, in these words, an affirmation of the young man.
Ingravallo scratched himself lightly, tick, tick, with the back of his thumb, on the black Angus mop. "So he worked at odd jobs then. Can you tell us where?"
"I don't know where; he never told me. He went to work for people, in their houses. Sometimes he went to work even for a countess, he said: she spoke Venetian"; she assumed her spiteful little mask, adorable. "And I have a feeling that with her, he ... or maybe I'm wrong": and she broke off.
"What's this feeling of yours? Out with it," Pompeo said, in a kindly tone.
"I have a feeling that . . . that he made a thorough job of it. He's a wide-awake kind of boy. When something's broken, he finds the trouble right away. And then, in Rome, with his living expenses. It couldn't be any other way."
Fumi turned his eyes on Ingravallo; at the very moment that Ingravallo had raised his own, more clouded, to look at him. Then, to the girl:
"This countess then? Where is she? I mean," he clenched his lips, "where does she live?"
"Somewhere near the station, I think: past Piazza Vit-torio though. But I ... I don't know that part of town very well." She blushed faintly: her voice seemed to dissolve, to vacillate: to tremble towards weeping. "I . . . What is this? Now you want to make a spy out of me? I . . ."
"Talk, talk, talk, eh girlie? Make up your mind. In or out. You take your pick . . ." menaced Ingravallo, anything but amiable: and he stood up, black.
"It's a long wide street," she said, hesitating between shame and remorse, "a straight one . . . that goes all the way to San Giovanni."
"I get it," Doctor Fumi said, "I get the whole thing." He glanced again at his colleague, who looked back at him.
Diomede was in need of money: when he had it, he spent it: and he procured more: he spent that, too: coffee, cigarettes, neckties, ball games, movies, trams: he even played the lottery.
"He even wanted to drink an aperitiff: Carpano, it's called" (she explained, mistaking the accent). "At Pic-carozzi, in the Gallery. Before he went to eat." But she said this with pride, as she might have said: "and a shirt of real silk, yes, sir!"
"And where does he go to eat?" asked Fumi.
"It depends. If he's by himself, he makes do with a sandwich maybe. He might even drink straight from the fountain: a gulp of Aqua Marcia in Via della Scrofa or at the little fountain in Piazza Borghese. But if he's with some of those young ladies, with fancy customers . .."
"So he wasn't all yours, then," Pompeo pricked her, with a grin. And touching her shoulder: "Come on, baby, you got to get it off your chest, console yourself!" she moved away, spitefully, as if disgusted by that contact. "Yes, yes," she wept, "I do want to console myself."
She dried herself with her hand, sobbed, changed her mind: "Well, what do you think? He's not the only fish in the sea." And she started, at a new sob, to look for a handkerchief: to dry her face, her nose: until, as usual, she rubbed it on her sleeve. Poor creature! The elbow revealed the hole, and the sleeve the darns and the tatters. The poor wrist, the arm, the shoulders jerked in desperate sobs. But she raised her head: and with her wet face she looked at them again. "When he finds a woman that'll come across, I mean one of those women . . . who don't make any fuss about it, because that's what they're out looking for, then he makes her go to a fancy place: to Bottaro in Passeggiata di Ripetta: or to the Quattro Cantoni to L'Aliciaro, behind San Carlo: or maybe in Via della Vite, if he catches on . . . that she's from out of town, that she's maybe a foreigner, something special: and he has a sharp eye for them. Even to the Buco in Sant' Ignazio, sometimes, where they're Tuscans, he told me: from Tuscany. And there, you have to drink their wine, and it costs more because it's famous and fancy and all."
"I understand," murmured Fumi, his great head on the desk.
"Tuscans!" she resumed: and throwing her head back, with one hand she thrust back her hair, those blond locks on which drops of glue had rained: then she whispered, bored: "they're a bunch of stinkers, too, goddamn 'em." The imprecation was lost in a murmur, in the apocope of the pronoun, in an ever less benevolent stammering of the tongue, of the lips.
"Stinkers? What have they ever done to you?" Grabber pricked her again, with a tinkling laugh, as a novelist would say; but which, given his gullet, was instead the thunder of a trombone.
"Nothing. They didn't do nothing to me. I just happen to know they're stinkers, that's all."
"Take it easy, Pompeo, and don't bother her," Doctor Fumi said, contracting his nose: and to the girl: "You were saying i
"I was saying that, with women like that, he picks them up right off, without having to work too hard to make them catch on. T beg your pardong, could you direck me to Villa Porghesay?' When they're on Via Veneto, a foot away. Or even at the arches of Porta Pinciana! the pigs. 'It's not far away from here.' I'll say it isn't. All you have to do is cross the street. He lights her cigarette maybe. T can show you the way, if you want!' And they want, all right. With me, it's different, with these rags I have on . . . dying of the cold. With me, now, he doesn't even want to come: he says I'm stupid, that I look like a beggar. But with them! From Porta Pinciana, to the lake, to the Belvedere—it isn't a walk that makes your feet hurt, either. A little chat, as they go, turning to look at each other every now and then, looking her straight in the eye. Oh I know, I know how he does." "And what about you?"
"Me? They've screwed me, that's what they've done, so's I don't know which way to turn for a crust of bread: I'm just about ready to jump in the river. With them, they have a nice hot meal, a dinner—or supper, anyway."
"And the ready?"
"The ready?"
"The money, I mean: who puts out?" Pompeo interrupted again, rubbing his thumb against his index finger in the classic gesture.
"Shut up, Pompeo, you're getting on my nerves," Fumi admonished him. Then, to her: "These dinners, or let's say these suppers: who pays for them?"
"He pays, of course," the girl replied with hauteur and envy: "but she passes him the cash under the napkin: or when they go into Bottaro's" (envy of the disbursing rival) "while they're looking in the window ... at the list of the day's dishes. To see if there's chicken, or lamb. They've worked it all out along the way: and he's got a driver's license and everything, he took the exam, and all he has to do is collect the license in Via Panisperna, but he needs certain papers still, certain official stamps: and he knows all the restaurants in Rome by heart, but it wouldn't look good for him or for her either, to let them see that she's the one who's putting out the money. Rome isn't like Paris, he says. Because we've got the Pope here." They laughed. In her weariness, in her tears, erect, at the end, in the mucid light of the room, she had spoken, resplendent: her lashes, blond, turned aloft, radiated above the luminous gravity of her gaze: her tears had cleansed the irises, a dark brown, the two turquoise jewels they enclosed. Her face appeared stained and tired.
"And he made his aunt, too, if she is his aunt, give him a hundred lire. One time when he was in a hurry to go someplace, I forget where. And I have a feeling she never saw it again, that hundred note. Her husband's a scar-face; she says he used to be a baker, but he never comes home."
Zamira had had a fight with him: "Maybe because he talked me into coming away: and she was furious. You'll regret this, she said to me: the old witch! Listen to me! you'll be sorry, baby! With those dragon eyes of her's! He made me touch a coral horn{49}: and he touched it, too. Yes, he was the one who talked me into it. So they had a fight. Maybe that was the reason, or maybe—who knows—because there was no more money in it for them. She's an old witch, a lousy hick whore. Even in Africa, she went whoring. Fifteen years ago. And when it comes to money, she'd skin her own father alive. He took me away."
"And that's why they fought?" asked Fumi, not convinced. The girl didn't hear the question. "You can understand how he looked at it, too. A boy like him! For nothing . . . too little! He told her to find herself somebody else. He said he wasn't working just for the fun of it. You women, he says, don't have to do anything, just have a little patience. You just have to be still for a couple of minutes. A couple of sighs. And in the meanwhile . . . domino vobisco ... so long . . . till next time! But us men, he says! and he swells his chest: with us, it's a different thing, altogether!"
"Did you hear that?" said Doctor Fumi, deeply depressed, as one who hears or sees torpedoed or mocked, by unforeseen jest or torpedo, the most sainted, the most deeply rooted belief in the goodness of human nature. He turned his great eyes around sadly, as if to ask aid of the gentlemen co-inquisitors. His neck was stuffed into his shoulders: as if an apostle of ill humor had pressed a heel on his head. The cynical boldness of those remarks of the young man, reported by Ines, seemed to put a full stop to her tale.
They were about to dismiss her, and Paolillo was already moving, an uncoercible yawn having engaged his jaws, which for over an hour had been longing for another occupation: when, tears dried, she threw out another few words, as a supplement to what had already been said: with a calm, ringing voice, like the reprise of an aria which she had previously paid out towards the bliss of the listeners: "He has a little brother, too, named Ascanio: he must have hung around the same building, where that countess from Venice lives. A cute little kid: smart as anything! always scared, though, like he was afraid he wouldn't get away with something. He looks up at you, and then shuts his eyes: he reminds me of a cat when it wants to tell you it's sleepy, when instead it's done something dirtier than usual, and knows it, but doesn't want you to know. A quick kid, like his brother: but a different kind: something between an altar boy and a delivery boy from that baker's there."
"And this would be the younger brother, the little one, Ascanio Lanciani," Fumi said, pensive, inviting, forcing his whole tongue into the cia of Lanciani, exceptionally. But the cats were all out of the bag, now.
"Yes, Ascanio," she spilled on, nevertheless, "Ascanio."
Ingravallo had a start, which he contained, a growl of his soul: like a dozing mastiff in his professional suspicion, which rewakens, at night, the muffled and cautious footstep of the Probable, the Improbable. "A kid who worked in a shop, at a grocer's . . . Moving here and there, like his brother. Then I think he traveled around, from town to town, with a peddler. I saw him just last Sunday, the thirteenth of the month, he was with his granny, selling roast pork . . ."
"Where?"
"At Piazza Vittorio, and he even slipped me a sandwich: from under his apron: he knows how to do tricks: with those eyes of his, scared stiff, for fear his granny would see him: with that mop of hair he has. He said to me: don't tell anybody you saw me here. I wonder why. Always mysterious, that kid. A sandwich with a slice of pork. Big enough to last two days. But without letting the old woman see him. That old witch would have slapped him good, if she'd seen. She'd already given me a dirty look, when she saw I was talking to the kid, whispering . . ."
"What time was it?"
"It must have been around eleven. I was so hungry I couldn't see straight. The big bell, at Santa Maria Maggiore, kept ringing and ringing ... to bring us the grace from San Giuseppe, they say, who's so good: because Saturday was his feast, but I was already in here. In fact, he made me run into Ascanio, who gave me that sandwich. That bell, when I hear it, it sounds like my granny on the swings: up and down, down and up, drrring drrring, every time you give her behind a push, she lets out a word or two from even from there: brrr brr frrrfrrr ... I was so hungry! I told him right out that I was hungry, that I was a good customer: while he went on yelling 'Get you roast pork here! Nice roast pork (that nobody wanted, not at that price) golden brown.' He understood me: he had already caught on, the moment he saw me. That was the last good food I ate: something to stick to my ribs, before I ended up in here. I was lucky!"
Chance (non datur casus, non datur salus) well, on the other hand, it seemed to be chance itself that night which succored the puzzled, straightened out the investigations, changing the turn of the wind: chance, luck, the net, a little unraveled, a little frayed, of the patrol, more than any artful wisdom or hairsplitting dialectic. Ingravallo had them call in Deviti (he was there, this time) and charged him, the next morning, to look for the kid, Ascanio Lanciani. The features of the boy . .. could be furnished him at once by Ines, a proper little portrait. And she also had to explain the location of the stand, and the grandmother, who sold roast pork: yes, at Piazza Vittorio, yes: where they had their counter. Pestalozzi was furnished with a copy of the list, typewritten, of turquoises and topazes, in which all the o's (opals, topazes, onyx) figured as so many little holes or dots in the onionskin paper, round just like an o: ulcers of a precision and of an operative deliberateness not adequately comforted by the budgets. Some were topazes, properly called, others were topazos: the jewels of the broken-and-entered and detopazed Menecazzi, who returned, this time, to the definitive possession and full enjoyment, by right and by might, of her own z's: her Venetian g, for the rest, joyfully commuted into a central-Italian c. So it happened, in the documents of the implacable administration by which we have the honor and pleasure to be ministered with the papers and rubber stamps necessary to life, that the recovery of a Carlo Emilio from a precedent Paolo Maria, preceded in turn the name of the great dead of Cannae, is offset by a Gadola: which, meanwhile, is permitted to glow in civic execration in place of a Gadda.{50} The sheet of the Menecazzi list was supplemented (Ingravallo, handing Lance-Corporal Pestalozzi the second sheet, took a look at it) by another list, more grimly horrid and splendid : of those other jewels, kept in a little iron coffer, in the first dresser drawer, by Signora Liliana.