IX

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

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

After some negotiation the corporal consented, reluctantly: and he added a word or two suitable to the occasion: cards on the table. He engaged the buggy for the return trip: set the bicycle against the bank, which at that point, beyond the dip in the road, marked the rise of the grassy land again: he charged the driver to guard it. Having arrived with the trusty Farafilioro, at milestone 20, they were received by the furious barking of a lousy mutt whose eyes they could barely see, but whose spare, canine teeth they saw with fear, he was so fanged and hairy, half-spinone, half-Maremmano hound^{64} and half sonofabitch (this was Cocullo's ideogram), but fortunately, on a chain. An old woman appeared, contrary to all credible hypotheses, in that panorama of deconsecrated railway; she tried to calm him, to silence him, then came to the bar: which interrupted the road, to signify, if not quite the imminence, at least the expectation of an extraordinary phenomenon: that is, the black passage of the train, the puffing of steam above and below, marvelous fluid, which confers virtue and locomotory quality to freight, even in ascent, as well as to train 181, half-freight, half-passenger: which, in fact, already gasping, announced the slippery play of its crankings up up up pup pup pup from le Frattocchie, overwhelming the distant imploration of the cuckoo: and at signal kilometer 20, it would be equally victorious over the grade: a miracle of art, an unterminated four per cent incline, but all curves and countercurves, of the late nineteenth century. At the house, known to some as Casal Bruciato, it was awaited every day, once a day, with the algebraic certitude and the trepidation of spirit that, at the speculum of Arcetri or the Mount Palomar Observatory, every seventy-five years, attend the recurrence of Halley's comet. The old woman, decrepit though she was, must have understood at once that this unwanted olive drab-and-black visit . . . looked for all the world as if it were aiming at her house! so she sewed up, without parting them again, the two bloodless rims of her lips, the two curly hairs embellishing here and there the jawing of her chin, and left to them, to the Brothers Grim, the initiative of paying their respects, to the older and higher in rank of the two. In the meanwhile, without giving any outward sign nevertheless, she made an effort to swallow the event, this, of the three arrivals, which she most feared and abhorred in the torment of her viscera: by hastily recommending herself in prayer to Sant'Antonio di Padova loving miracle-worker for all of us, and also, however, in another plea to the good offices (automatic in her former days) of the plexus haemorroidalis medii. She arrived, in fact, at the deliberate constriction of the more celebrated rectal rings, extenuated though they were by advanced age: not entirely inoperative, though more and more crumbling with the years, were the so-called Houston valves, chiefly the super-valve of Kohlrausch, nor the semilunars of Morgagni. The desperate attempt to block the ampulla, whose constricted extreme ahi ahi ahi already the olive drab-black-silver trauma was affecting, in concomitance with the shrill whistle ahi ahi of the arriving engine, achieved nothing more than the release of a few drops, rather phobic, plonk, on the platform of Casal Bruciato: free on board, yes, F.O.B. Casal Bruciato, though some may say and, however, write C.I.F. (cost insurance free) and some P.L.O.P. The providential lack, under the crotch of the old woman, of that pair of tubular correctives of nakedness which our most exquisite reporters today habitually call "intimate garments," allowed the event to fall out on to the pavement, unobserved by the Grims. Filing forward, one after the other, by the pedestrian passage to one side of the bar, the carabinieri advanced in silence on the platform with heavy, nailed footsteps to the door of the house: as if they were unaware of the woman, believing her engaged in the exercise of public duties and by now dealing with the train. But they were deceived: they encountered there the potato-white face and the resolute bursting forth of a girl who had taken up, from a bench, a kind of rolling pin for preparing pasta in the home, but wrapped in a red and green cloth: and at that moment more green than red.

Meanwhile there approached, really, the puff-puff at full tilt: its headlights aglow even in this daytime hour against the darkness of each new tunnel: the only train of the morning, in that direction. It was coming up from Ciampino, all black, with the self-importance of a nasty fireman, sending up into the heavens cannonades of brown smoke from its spout and then, all of a sudden, white steam, certain comical foof-foofs which seemed so many shots inspiring one to say, "but what's come over you? What have they done to you?" and below, from a pair of cylindrical bags, one here, one there, as if it had a mustache on the ground floor. Whirled and somersaulted, gleaming and greasy, the connecting rod and, like a maddened knife grinder's, the crank, with an odor of burnt oil, in the tragic ascent of the grade constructed by Engineer Negroni. It was like a man who plants himself in front of you, wants to call you a bastard to your face, and unable to run because of gout, he spurts out his anger at you from his nose, and at the same time, from his feet. Beyond the house then, on the gray path flanking the flight of the gravel, two or three highly frightened and yet— more insolito—unhurried hens prepared to follow the track in accelerated fluttering: to cross it then, in flight, at the most opportune moment, with the cowcatcher upon them, and above the cowcatcher, the headlights, with that suicide premediation that distinguishes their species. The Maremmano hound or spinone hurled himself forward: one could believe he wanted to choke or self-guillotine himself with his collar, a slender ring of iron where his hair stood up, in wrath: and, the chain taut, he began to yelp and bark again in reiterated, frenetic explosions: as if he declaimed impetuous verses of Foscolo without understanding their sense, nor even their nonsense, to a public overcome with sleepiness; meaning to reawaken tbem all and to summon them to repentance and vigilance, nor to forgive sleepiness to the least of them. The demoniac idiot, in doing this, became lost between his sparse, distorted incisors and the ferocity of his canines and omitted from his lips, in whitish ribbons at each new jerk of his head, a pulpy drool like bechamel: in the arsis of such dewy rage, raising bloodshot bestial eyes to heaven, as if to invoke the approval of the supernal Beasts, the gods of his race, and to propitiate their chief divinity, and to encourage their consent to new and more foolish hendecasyllables. That which, cretin that he was, he considered his inderogatable duty amid the shoes and the puttees of the carabinieri. Those bilious petards of his rancor were lacerating his accursed gullet, of which— at moments—to the soldiers' hesitation, he exposed the cavernous flush, like the gaping jaws of hell: and seeing the fowl running before the streaming black monster, his vehemence was redoubled to the point of paroxysm and seemed, at a certain point, resolved to follow and even to compete with the hysterical biddies: but solidity of chain and charity of cord, or indeed string, restrained him, though not without effort. For which the hothead went on bobbing, without idea and with no gain for himself or for others, at every explosion from his throat: cerberus on leave upon earth and on the hills, where he had planted himself to work, guzzling their unmerited light, the gentle air of their open sky: coeli jucundum lumen et auras. The puff-puff was just about ready to pass. The wind which rose from the swamps seemed tired, its wing drooped in the daylight: but a whirr, again, of a wren, from a bush up to the rusty rainspout, or the broken flight, higher, and the conjugal cries, in reply, of two nestless jays. The girl with the potato face brushed the two characters aside, as if they were cards with a low face-value, and in a gesture of intolerance like a maiden rudely accosted, twisting her head in a grimace, she advanced with her instrument, to the platform: where, having grasped the implement with a steady hand and in a posture of attention, she planted it against her belly, at precisely forty-five degrees. That rolling pin with green skin now blossomed from her person, and it was, from its rough trunk, a sprout of exceptional vigor, and to hell with who might or might not see it: it was a standard not hers. The engine driver's blackened face was already thrust from his cab, to note the color of that bud. A stage Moor, an Othello with a black skier's cap. The puff-puff was the mixed train: the only one that came by in the morning: pieced together with three freight cars, of various age and structure, and two passenger cars: where the faces, the mops, and the shining eyes and mouths of the more impudent and the happier, or of some dope with more prestige than usual, gleamed at or hung from the windows, snickering. Or they leaned out, some of them, with half their chest and arms, in the gallant farewell of a waving hand. They mouthed with shining, lascivious mouths fugitive madrigals to the girl: their words were indistinct, but certainly filth: they were a swarm of soldiers discharged at that time, in that era, but even in another era, the same would have occurred. "He has his stick straight!" Cocullo was able to reconstruct, after a moment, in the rattling of the train that was already passing, and he clenched his teeth, paling with contempt and reddening higher up, between cheeks and chin. And they would have added another refrain for the carabinieri: if the train, which seemed utterly out of breath, hadn't gone so slowly. It was heard now creaking in the brake block and grating in its undergreased threadings, in descent: the Negroni grade, number 71, was followed, after the straight stretch of the station, by the counterslope of grade number 73, still Negroni's work: which had the fame of offering itself like a moorish odalisque filled with participating consents to the untangled enthusiasm of the mechanism whereby the puff-puff, freed from suffering and now silent in whistle and piston, would abandon itself, freewheeling, to the Mussoline glory of a first-rate derailing with consequent disabling of its own features and others', if it had not provided for the contrary, in fact, with its brakes. The air had become somnolent and seemed to stagnate over the ground. The little train was disappearing, made smaller, towards tall caravans of clouds: among the reminiscent shadows, fragments, crumbling walls, of a history not its own. The plumes of smoke which it had left behind after the bridge (of Divine Love) and before reaching the station, at the altitude, barely, of a swallow's flight, had been dispersed a bit from their track and hung now, white and useless, on the damp green of the unploughed fields. The hens, as they did every day, had survived the drama: for years, now, the ex-pupils of Melpomene had arranged in an algolagniac, theatrified ritual, in a scene "for Nordic tourists" the most foreseeable and preventative breaches of their first and youthful error of clucking and squawking for a mere nothing in an hebephrenic crescendo: and they had adapted themselves, instead, in a carefully chosen poetics, to silence and to the vagotonic pallors of the mystes. Their orphic initiation, little by little, had become perfected to mastery: it had reached the climax of a pictorial wisdom, forgetting the acoustic bravuras of puberty. A half-extinguished or dozing and nevertheless always available and recovered voluptuousness reawakened them every day, with the toiling up of the train and with the whistle, to the familiar fiction: to the artificial excitement of the victim whom no one threatens, to the precipitous fluttering and dash along the track and the breach, to the attempt at flight (will Delagrange fly?),^{65} to the simulated suicide with the headlights upon them and the concomitant dispensing of a couple of bonbons, puff-puff passing. Though feigned was the orgiastic movement, the little gift could not be feigned: thus, as in the theater, feigned passions release kisses that are not pretense and the cuckolds of the stage seem to be, a majority of times, cuckolds in fact. Every day, every morning. Then, no sooner had the locomotory entity completed its apparition, released its huffs, then, having unwound the reel of their obligatory fright, they went on scratching about as if nothing had happened: and as if they were uprooting a weed, with a plunge and a prompt recovery of the head, the neck, pecking from the earth the rare worms.

The brief caravan of the tympanic importuning, rail-roadward, having passed, and almost extinguished the mad animality in calamitous growls and snarls, teeth clenched in rage: I'll show you, I will, Pestalozzi also forgot the old woman: behind or within whose empty and badly hung skirt, tatters with appendices of threads, he had seemed to hear some devilment grumbling, or some toad gargling. There was no evil spell, as at the sorceress's shop, but perhaps jactura: preterintentional. Yes. And he interpellated the girl directly. "Are you Mattonari Camilla?" He recognized her as a seamstress of I Due Santi, but hadn't known her name: the least elect, the least "friendly." He drew from his pocket, twice folded over, and slowly unfolded with official decorum, the sheet: in legalitarian justification of his question: the list of topazes already displayed in the shop. "Yes," she said. She was a medium-sized dumpy girl with pale gray skin that looked like greasy paper: a flat, rather potato-like face, little eyes, tan, drowned in the redundance of suet. "Do you recognize this?" and he put the ring under her nose.

"How should I know? Why should I recognize it?" she shrugged.

"Your cousin Mattonari Lavinia states . . . that she was lent it by you."

"No, no, she's a big liar. I don't have anything to do with it."

"That she picked it out," he improvised, "from the others that you have."

"That liar! The nerve! She probably got it from her boy friend. I've never had a ring like this in my life . .."

"Like this! You mean, however, that you have others, or some others, different from this one. I want to see them. Show me where they are. And who is your boy friend?" but he neglected to linger on that quite ordinary image of the boy friend, completely gripped, now, by the idea that the fat girl was lying to him, that an almond or two, in some hole, she kept hidden. "And, while we're about it, why didn't you go to work this morning?" The girl, lips white, with the gesture of a robot, raised the pin with its double skin, and with eyes avoiding the corporal's glance, as if to say: "through the fault, or merit, of this here."

"Yes, I see that you've got that flag in your hand: but . . . are you the signal-man? Is that what you're trying to make me believe?"

"No, my uncle had to go down to Ciampino, to the office. He's the chief here. But when he has to go someplace, then I stay here for him."

Chief, in her lexicon, meant signal-man.

"Let me have a look at the other rings, if there are any: at your corals: all the jewelry you have: your Sunday earrings."

"Jewelry? I don't have any corals, not even earrings. What do you think? Poor as we are, hungry all the year round?"

"Your uncle is a government employee: you work as a seamstress, when you work. Let's not waste any time. Show me what you have. If the stuff is yours, nobody's going to touch it. And if it isn't, I have a search warrant. And if we start searching and then something funny turns up . . . Seek and ye shall find: and if you find, you have to report to the superiors. I hope I'm making myself clear. I don't know if you know the regulations . . ."

"What regulations? I don't know what you mean . . ."

"The re-gu-la-tions," he shouted, "the law! what the law says!"

"Sorry, Corporal, I don't follow you."

"There's a law, right? And a list of regulations, where it tells us what to do, how we're supposed to proceed. We . . . have to obey the regulations. So watch out. Don't force me to search the house," which was, really, no more than a cabin, "or the room where you keep the stuff . . . your things. It would be an aggravating circumstance for you: Article 788": (788 my ass: he invented it on the spot): "the article is clear as a bell." The girl peered at him, now that she was a little more self-confident in answering, her big tan eyes set in the pork fat of her eyelids, with the miserly hesitation of the peasant who demurs at opening her mouth, between fear and suspicion. The old woman had acted as if she had things to do in the garden: and had gone down there with a little hoe which was heard intermittently striking the ground. The dog, its snarling passed, still stared fiercely, with that zeal peculiar to the stupid.

"If we have to do the searching," Pestalozzi added again, "it'll be worse for you. I told you. Seek and ye shall find. You understand me?" The squat girl, as if the corporal had pointed a pistol in her face, shook herself and turned, walked away like a somnambulist, went into the house—or cabin, as may be. The two men followed her. From that telephone booth-cum-kitchen which was the ground-floor room, they went up, on steps of gray peperino, to the floor above, into a smaller room, irregular, as required by the stair well. It was occupied by three beds, and ill-furnished for the rest. Pestalozzi and Cocullo, after the girl, could barely squeeze into it. A smell of clothing, if you call clothing the lipoids, the amino acids, the urea, the sweat, in short, in which the clothing of the poor is steeped: a window with a grille and mosquito net: no furniture, beyond the three beds, which seemed three pallets for dogs, and a minimal little cupboard with a scalene fragment on it, of a mirror long since broken forever. On the wall, over one of the little beds, with a little olive branch with shriveled leaves, in its dark frame, a two-lira oleograph, yellowed at the edges, which Pestalozzi recognized on the spot. It was the Madonna del Divino Amore, over the postern of Castel di Leva, who had appeared to the tormented man lost in the night, pursued by ferocious, barking dogs who were about to claw and tear him apart, but who at the sight of Her fell back: and the fence enclosed him.

The cupboard, half-wardrobe and half-dresser, emerged from beyond the third bed, between the edge of the mattress not of sweet-smelling corn husks, but responsible—with the other two—for that so "human" sultriness, and the recently whitewashed wall. It looked as if it received, collectively, those futile items, those tangles of yarn, those odd buttons, those lozenge-shaped rags, of which the good women of the campagna and of every other part of the fatal peninsula are cautious collectors, fussy savers towards the improbable needs of a tomorrow where neither yarn nor string is, since there will be nothing to bundle up. Pestalozzi glanced at it, the humble item of furniture, but without special interest. "Well then?"

"There," murmured the potato: more with a jerk of the head, since she had little chin, than with a movement of the lips, motioning below the bed, the second one. Moving around it, they discovered and, moments later, brought up a coffer: a little wooden box, bound with dark tin at the edges. The girl armed herself with a key, produced as if by magic, then crouched to reach the chest with both hands, from under the bed. Her face and the full part of her bust lay slightly over the tan blankets: she groped like a blind woman, and a knowing one, gazing straight ahead until she had mastered the removal of the parallelepiped, then as if guessing rags, at random with the divining gestures of a blind musician gifted at striking on the piano the right keys, to erogate from the keyboard the pathetic squadrons of his blindnesses. She took out the chest, opened it. "Go ahead and search, Corporal: there's nothing there." And then, since the corporal didn't move, displaying in his face how much the goatish hovel already disappointed him, and how much his nose was repelled by it, she raised the lid, scraped up a blouse or two, a shawl, some black stockings with white heels, a cardboard box, a man's shirt, the best one. "And the ring? Where is your ring?" Annoyed by the chief deduction of the corporal: "you mean to say you have another one": she opened the little bicarbonate box under his nose: raised from it, as from a nest of cotton batting, a poor little chain that seemed of gold, with a light cross which also seemed gold: a brooch with a fake coral, another metal pin with an enamel four-leaf clover.

The corporal took the chain with two fingers, spread the others to hold it out, and let the cross dangle: then the green-enamel pin, as you pick from the hawthorn hedge a butterfly resting with its wings closed, to restore it to its flight. "You mean to say you have another one." She had told him no. Now she didn't consider it licit to contradict herself, or in any way to recede from that negative stand. The oily, motionless, stubbornly statuary quality of her physiognomic attributes helped her meanwhile to leave her tongue in repose. Pallor, suet, and potatoship, those two buttons were stuck in it as if into a mound of dough, two round cheeks which looked as if they'd been hit by a good pair of slaps, all her best features, in other words, allowed her to stand there silent and mindless without a word: simulating only an apprehension which, perhaps, disturbed her but slightly. The corporal had eyed the cupboard. He was about to say to her: "turn over the mattresses! let me see under the mattresses! And instead he navigated about the beds and came, after his not-easy periplus, to take his stand between the last bed and the wall, in an attitude as if he were going to interrogate the bedside table. He pulled at its door, noticed that it was provided with a lock, an incredible thing for a night-table: it was a sui generis commode. He asked for its key. The Signorina Mattonari looked under a mattress, found it: she opened the cupboard with a greasy sadness in her face, like a loyal citizen harassed by abuse of authority. Rags again, woman's stuff, a waistcoat, a pair of worn pants spilled down onto the floor, for the disappointed knowledge of the noncom: they had been placed in there all anyhow, pressed in at random. He picked up with one hand a knitted bodice, a rabbit's skin, a pale blue undershirt with lysol-whitened zones. Two or three walnuts rolled out. Then, from the rags, there emerged, all decked with worn socks, a chamber pot. Filled with walnuts, and with more than one dent in its enameled convexity, one saw at once that it wasn't a piece of Capodimonte, nor even a Ginori. "Ah Gesù, my grandmother's walnuts!" la Mattonari cried, as if to bestow value, in an expression of possessive anguish, on this treasure: which the autumn had deposited in the capaciousness of the vessel, en passant: pilgrim who pays without farewell, before dawn, the debt of the hospitality benignly received. And she started, at the side of the standing corporal, to bend over and take up the recipient and to remove it, animated—so it seemed—by the best of intentions. She meant, with that gesture, to smooth the path for the Requisition, for the Aggravation, for the hard Cross, the Law. But the bloodhound's evil phlegm had already scented the Hiding Place. "Stop! You take it!" he ordered Cocullo. The girl stood up. The trusty Farafilio bent down. He introduced both hands into the cabinet: to seize, with the one, the brimming chamber pot by the handle, to press it respectfully from the opposite side with the palm of the other, as if caressing its kindliness, so rotund on the opposite and non-handled hemisphere. And he extracted it from the tabernacle (and it was heavy as it rarely had been) in the position proper to the user, or even to the owner, who prepares at night to employ it for its lower purpose. An eighth, a ninth walnut rolled out. Too scarce, then, for the almost boyish opulence of the brave soldier, the olive-drab tunic freed for public view his posterior rotundities, properly covered with cloth of the same color. Emphasized by the crouching position, they seemed to emulate and to surpass completely the smooth rotundities of the pot, as if a pump had swollen them, the kind on a tripod, that bicycle mechanics have. The incredible fullness was about to burst—so it appeared—the median rear seam of the trousers: which seemed, instead, only to loosen, in the taut zigzag of a line of reluctant thread, of a blue-green color, darker than the green of the cloth. The seam being pressed beyond its capacity, the breaking point was not reached. A sharp shot re-echoed in the room instead. No: it wasn't a revolver's bullet. Farafilio, poor boy, very probably blushed, with that patchy manner of blushing that he had, in his good, but severe face. Crouched as he was, his face against the commode and the pot in his arms, the purple did not spread. The humble duty had expressed itself: that was all: certain postures favor certain nomenclatures, as if eliciting the sound from the very sources of the same. The girl remained silent, amorphous. The corporal's brow became clouded: in the silence. Brimming, meanwhile, and heavy with every most dried gift of Vertumnus, the lousy pot was elevated to the honors of the top (of the commode), whence the gleaming fragment of mirror had been slightly removed. The maneuverer stood up, without turning around. "Dope! empty it on the bed!" the corporal said, harshly. The maneuverer obeyed. In his half-turn, the visible side of his face was shown papered with alternating zones, islands of flush and pallor: the flush a bishop color, the pallor the color of cheese. He also proved to possess, to an eminent degree, that property of the good, the generous, the honest: the faculty of blushing all the way down the neck. He set slowly, then quickly overturned the vessel where he had been told: with his hands then, all around, diligently confining. Of that treasure of nuts, the silliest, not yet unleashed, would have jumped down with multiple hops and cretinous festive rolls, going to earth, one here, one there, in God knows what corners under the beds: had it not, in fact, been for the hole, that is to say the imprint of the body in the bed itself. But they were screwed. All together, they fell into it, as into a casserole, making a neat pile. On the peak of which there was a little paper packet. Of blue wrapping paper, as if from the grocer's. Sugar, probably: a secret store of granny's. Moving from the other side of the bed, with impatient fingering, the corporal unwrapped it himself, that little packet. There appeared, then, a tiny sack of rough canvas: not swollen, and yet heavy and variously nutted at the bottom, in which there was merchandise: hazelnuts perhaps? or a little collection of buttons? or a rosary? choked, towards the mouth, by the tight turns of some string, then knots and double knots. Pestalozzi felt it. His face became illuminated: by the dawn of "this is it." The punishment that he had mentally comminated to his pupil evaporated from his thoughts. Half a lip curled, upwards, in a grimace of contempt: as if to render more explicit the features of irony: of his irony. The tangle of the many knots was untangled by persistent use of nails: the tightness of the twists of string loosened to clear the path: from the undone sack, overturned, in turn, with every precaution, but on the grandmother's bed, the middle one, there land-slided down, as if comforting one another in this unexpected exit and fall, little green balls, medals, brooches and carnelians, gold bangles, chains, crosses, filagree necklaces, tangled one in the other, and rings and corals: rings distinguished by rare stones, or shining with a single gem, or with two of different colors, before the open mouth of Cocullo, to the pounding of the corporal's heart: who could already feel the new chevrons climbing up his sleeve, to replace those now there. Sergeant's chevrons, this time. The objects froze, like little frightened animals, ladybirds who fold their wings, not to be seen, in the wretched lap of poverty; and instead, they were seen: they were seen as so many unmasked lies, recognized by the jeweler with the hooked nose, on the counter, after theft and recovery: of every most curious color and every form: a little cross of some semiprecious dark-green stone, which the fingertips of the future sergeant could not stop savoring, turning over and over: a handsome, shining little green-black cylinder, for interpreting horoscopes by the shitty priests for Egypt more than Pythagoras drew ravings from the apothegm of the pentagon, standing towards the west to blather, to gaze at the tops of their baked pyramids: mysteriosophic candy, concealed in the ancient womb of the earth, seized from the earth's womb, one day geometrized to magic. A poor little egg between pale-blue and milk-white like a little gland of a dead pigeon, to be thrown in the refuse: and two earrings, with two big drops a sky-blue, isosceles triangles, rounded at the tops, dangling and weighted, with a marvelous felicity-facility, for the lobes of a boobified laughing girl dressed in blue: who in one of their almost transparent striations laughed enriched, as if by wisps of gold enclosed there, to freeze. And a heavy ring, a gold-bound cylinder which had circled the thumb of Ahenobar-bus or the big toe of Heliogabalus, with a big caramel orange-green, then a moment later, lemon-color: pierced by all the rays, slightly, of the equinoctial morning as the tender flesh of the martyr by his hundred and ninety arrows: perfused by pale-green lights, like the sea at dawn, to the brightness of flint: which made the two men dream at once, spellbound, of a mint syrup with soda in Piazza Garibaldi at noon. And a little ring of golden thread, with a red pomegranate seed that a chicken might peck: and a final bangle, a tiny bauble, like a little ball of methylene bluing to get the yellow out of the wash, held by a little gold cap and by a pimple: and through this, attachable, by a golden link-chain, to another and equally essential organ of adornment, whether to the swelling beauty of a breast, or even the male fold of a lapel or the paunched and gold-watched authority of the protector of this breast, administrator, moderator and, in the last analysis, husband, "and damn fool!" thought Pestalozzi, his teeth clenched. A garnet cross, dark red moments of domestic shade. Rings, brooches: unbelieved marvel. And the ruby and the emerald shone and lay in the trench of the little mouse-skin bed, fellow tenants of the moment with the verecond ambages of the pearl, on the worn and almost ragged tegument of that old woman's couch: amid the precious gleam and the twists or polygons of the gold objects that kindled the minds, after the pupils and the retinas. Pins and earrings were tangled in the little chains, or mixed up with one another, like twin cherries amid the twinned stems of their sisterly couples: the pendants, in the immediate cataract, had taken the rings with them. Ruby and emerald took on a name and a body on the gray poverty of the cloth, or of the tatter, in the closed mute splendor innate in certain beings and signifying their rarity, their natural and intrinsic dignity: that mineralogical virtue which through false fanfares and winks is trumpeted so often, in trumpeting carnivals, by so many bits of bottle-bottoms, as, in said derrieres, the quality is totally lacking. The corundum, pleochroic crystals, revealed itself as such on the rat-gray of the ambience, come from Ceylon or from Burma, or from Siam, noble in its structural accepting—splendid green or splendid red, or night-blue, also—of the crystallographic suggestion of God: memory, every gem, and individual opus within the remote memory and within the labors of God: true sesquioxide A2O3 truly spaced in the ditrigonal scalenohedral modes of its class, premediated by God: despite the value-work of the Gadfly.^{66} Gadfly di Revello who was to last in his chair for an hour, chief economist of the Turkey and cock-minister of his screwed nonfinances: which, at a wink from the Big Cheese himself would have revealed to the Italians the new heaven of the flaskable values, substituting in the zodiacal band of credit and monetary circulation, for the gold standard which then went to Hell to be liquified, the scorpion of humbug which we'll never be rid of again. And the Italiener from that fiasco-flask, drank greedily in big gulps.

Pestalozzi, no, he wasn't a Minister of Finance of Italy: and neither was la Menegazzi. Both of them had a certain sense of value and nonvalue: she, if for nothing else, to be able to satisfy the whim of forgetting in the bathroom all about value (the topaz) inasmuch as she wouldn't have got any pleasure, in any part of her dithyrambic and trembling body, in forgetting in the bathroom nonvalue: a bottle-bottom. Jewels they were, those resplendent rubies, that was obvious, incubated and born in the originative millennia of the world. The expert could check and guarantee this, despite the cuts, the faceting, the polishing of art. Gems crystallized naturally from fused sesquioxide, following the principles of the system: and not a crystallized pretense in a light, a glory of falsehood, from a basin of excrement. As the impetus, the grief of a soul freezes in a cry, coagulates in notation, following the formal processes of thought: in a frozen cry! which is its own, and not the bawl of another, or of the market place of bawlings and of souls. The corporal scattered them with his fingers, with the gesture of a cook sorting rice before throwing it into the pot, scattered the stones, the jewels, the gold ornaments, the fabulous caramels, shining gems of the Maharajah in the depression of the miserable blanket. Of those appearances, wisps of gold or luminous grains on the dark color of the drapery, a dotted line stood out, like a string (seen, however, from above, and from afar, from a mountain or a plane) of electric globes in the curve of the Riviera: such as the illumination of Botafogo beads, in the bananiferous nights, all around the base of the Pao de Azucar. Those jewels, at that moment, seemed to burst and play over the bed from the mingled amassment of diverse thieving coups. But Pestalozzi, with a certain applied hesitation at first, then with smug certainty, thought that he could gradually recognize, in that scattered splendor, the debatable and ultradesired pearl necklace, two or three bangles, an amethyst, the garnet cross, the ball of lapil-laruli (so it was written), the corals, the jewelry, possessors of the names and the descriptions which figured, colleagues and brethren of the topass, in the first and following lines of the first and second sheets of the Martinazzi list, or rather, to be more precise, the Mantegazzi. Owners of the names and the titles, in general use, in some cases a tiny bit difficult: ring "of" ruby with two pearls, brooch with small black pearl and two emeralds, pendant "of" sapphire, as one might say of pastry, "surrounded" with brilliants, carcanet typed as carcanot, then corrected to carcano, of garnets in old (sic) style, string of (the o a hole, of course) white pearls (quite fake) et cetera, small ring et cetera, large brooch with onyx stone et cetera. A good reading exam for the aspiring carabinieri's course, thought Pestalozzi.

Time, meanwhile, was pressing: that very morning, before noon, he had to return to Marino with the topaz in his pocket and with everything else he had managed to recover, in his wanderings so intensely fruitful of gems, gold, false pearls, girls pretty or ugly but all equally lying. Of the recovered, the found or not found, he had to render an account to the sergeant, list in hand: the names were strange and difficult, with something magic about them, mysterial, Indian: with all those holes, like so many punched railroad tickets, in the place of every o. The second list, incomplete because a sheet was missing, but no less pocked than the first, seemed to him, on the other hand, a pain in the ass, a lousy pain that didn't concern him at all, a job deferred to another, since officer Ingravallo, that big head who instead of brilliantine used tar, had said "expressly" that he wanted to deal with it himself. So that was Don Ciccio's business. Typed on a red ribbon, as if the ribbon had been dipped in blood, the list of the "Balducci stolen property" seemed to him materialized from a nightmare: sheeted and reported in pages from a secret horror which was not, on that mad equinox morning so filled with prognostications, no, was not the carabinieri's responsibility. No, the solitary country outside, dampened by the squalls of rain, barely eyed by the sun awake from time to time, no, it didn't want the horror re-created: which clothes, after the sudden flashes of the knife, all condonation denied life by the beast, the immobility of the funereal relic. Before the eyes of the concierge and the police (even before the ascertainments of the law) or of the terrified cousin who had come in without knowing, so he said, then among the carpet slippers of all, men and women, a whitened simulacrum for the wax museums of death: and that putrid ichor, down from the rent throat, the days following, in an odor of morgue. What he had recovered were jewels and gold "from the door opposite," the jewelry of the blond countess, in any case: and in the successive flashes of a dreamed (not seen) image, the corporal sighed. And fantasticating already that he would appear before her in his sergeant's stripes, in the guise of recoverer-savior, he tried at the same time to untangle himself from all the serpents of doubt: ". . . but perhaps some of the others, too, from the iron coffer of the murdered woman." He didn't waste time checking. By now he was in a hurry. Over any possible gems of Signora Balducci, with that half-recovered list there, the ambiguity of hypothesis hung still: the recognition and division of the individual items were to be carried out in the barracks, up at Marino, or perhaps in Rome at Santo Stefano del Cacco, while the jewels of Countess Mantegazza, which were individualized in the relative list, claimed each one, with prompt evidence, its stolen identity. And then, to tell the truth, his reason began to compute the remaining probabilities : in an hour and a half two lucky coups like this, a topaz on a finger and a chamber pot full of topazes, were even too much from the miserly cornucopia of Luck. A third stroke was not acceptable to the precogitative statistics of the mind, eager but still hesitant, dubious. The girl and Cocullo were waiting, immobile, as if drained of any capability of following: the corporal shook off his hesitation.

"Who gave these to you? Who brought them here? He didn't give you these as a present! Not you!"

"I don't know. This is the first time I've seen them. I don't know who put them there, in that place."

"Tell me who gave them to you. You know. Or who gave them to your grandmother . . . your uncle. The cabinet was locked. You put a lock on it. And you found the key right away."

"The lock's always been there. We keep stuff in there."

"Some stuff! Tell me who brought it here. You know. We already know: we've known who did it for a long time. In Rome, too, the police officer knows. Talk. You'd better confess, tell the truth; we don't have much time. If you won't make up your mind to talk here, then you'll talk to the sergeant, in Marino."

The girl remained silent, pensive, her eyes in the void: the potato of her face, the two tan marbles of her irises, the colorless lips betrayed no inclination to utter a word: like a rustic sibyl, or like a jurisprudent citizen, from whom a previous oblation had not elicited response. She was silent, in the silence, outside, of the country, of all the solitary countryside: the personification of an irreparable refusal. A stone hysteric, to whom the uttered falsehood has become truth and so will remain even under red-hot irons.

"Come to the barracks then. There they'll get it out of you, you'll see. Want to bet on it? The sergeant'll make you spill it."

The jewels were re-sacked, a nice handful: and plucked one by one the evasive ones, the centrifugal, peripheral ones. The corporal did it with his own hands, then with his fingers, paying careful attention not to abandon to the blanket a single grain of the "stolen property." His lips slightly parted for the task, and breathing heavily through veils of catarrh, the Farafilio, like a chilled lamb observing a laparotomy, held the bladder of strong canvas: introducing into it, to guarantee exhaustive reception, two gynecologists' thumbs. They tore up the comforters as if to unmake the beds, covers, sheets: not white, and even less smelling of corn, as the poet Pascoli would put it. She had collected the walnuts with the pot, like bailing water from the bottom of the boat, or as if emptying the trough. They also looked under the beds, made her overturn the mattresses ("Come on, Signorina, the air's good for them"), empty completely the cupboard of pants and worn socks, and the top, moving them. They groped at the mattresses, pulling them to a sitting position on the springs and, the first, over the two benches on which it was normally extended: with the little finger they broached the meatuses, with the big, or middle, finger, the rips. The Croesus chamber pot, from one bed to the other, was like a new mother, so thin and diminished, after having been so full. On the wall the green-reds of the Miracle, last year's little sprig with the dry and curling leaves, some silver-gray, others gray or greeny-brown or even havana color, as if the charisma that filled them had evaporated with the changing year. And below, at last, on the platform the light of a desolate knowledge, or at least, of glimmering. The evil, to the two dressed in gray clothes,^{67} seemed to exist: to ripen days and events: since always; silent force or presence in a pandemonism of the country or of the earth, beneath skies or clouds which could do nothing but look down, or flee. It had evidenced itself in that sensation of alarm, of loosening of every just bond, which gripped their

*

hearts as they came out: at the sudden reappearance of the town, of the racing cloud-bank, in the sky. The devil, for the girl, had turned into a hen: the one that, in the garden, plays ignorant, and cautiously lifts its foot, then replaces it, to peck, to shit a bit here and there. One of the three hens, but which? And so, near home, between one stubble field and the next, the devil tempted with an egg per day (and it could never be known which, of the three, had laid it on that day) in the poverty and the solitude of the countryside without grange, tempted souls: then he reported them to the sergeant, to the informers of the Lord: pretending, he the devil, or she, hen, pretending all day to be merely intent on scratching, on hunting for grubs. Certain roaches, certain worms. And as soon as the train was heard puffing, he let himself be seized by that fear and hope of having it upon him, and on the girls, too: to keep from understanding which of the three, and who it was: being the devil. Devil, there was no doubt about it, and spy, imagined the girl holding out a horned hand towards the chickens: spy, spy: having insinuated himself, in disguise, into the home, that rural, railish home, there it is, there he is: he swaggered around like a chicken, with a chicken's manner: like a gent with yellow gloves on the Via Veneto, a glass in his eye, a white flower in his buttonhole: he de-loused a shoulder, with his beak, all proud of himself, then the other one: he shat along, like it was nothing, but he took advantage meanwhile of the convenience of being a chicken, looking to one side, just the way chickens do, making bold to peek into the kitchen, if the door was open. He even came inside, maybe. And nobody sent him away: the uncle was telegraphing to Ciampino or to Cecchina, tap taptap tap sitting at his machine. So he could spy around at his ease. He recorded with his mad pupil and retained in his retina: with that lateral eye that chickens have, like it was invented by Picasso, a bathroom porthole, a toilet void of understanding or any intention of spying to starboard or to port. And instead they're looking at you. Yes, he was the devil: worming his way into the kitchen, on the helpless tiles of the domestic poverty: or in ambush beyond the cane fence: little canes artfully stuck into the ground, with two opposing slants to make the figures of rhombs, ripped by the pouring rain and by the wind, half-broken and half-rotten, now, at the end of winter: a worn girdle, now: which does not isolate the domestic indigence, at kilometer 20. 25, from the open access of the country. The grandmother, amid the hens and the stubble, was like a humpbacked tree in the garden, a sorb already skeletal in death: set up as a scarecrow, one day, and then torn to black tatters by the north wind. She gave the earth a blow with her little hoe, then left off, tired, without straightening up. With four strides the corporal reached her. "I found what I was looking for," he said to her. "If you were the one who hid them, you'll have to give me an explanation . . ." She raised her face, which seemed carved from brier: she looked at him without understanding, without even hearing.

"She's deaf," Camilla warned him. They telephoned to the uncle. They wanted to tell him: Camilla had been "called in" by Sergeant Santarella, so they said: she had to "report" to Marino, as a witness: the signal-house would be left unguarded. The old man expressed no opinions and still less raised protests, over the phone. He made no comment on what they let him know. He was already about to come back to Casal Bruciato. There wouldn't be any more trains going by, Camilla knew that anyway, until the mixed train for Ciampino-Termini at twelve fourteen.

The old man, in reality, at hearing an unknown voice, was seized with panic. At the telephone, the girl explained harshly, when it wasn't a question of service communications or calls, he was infallibly seized with a paralysis of the basioglottis, or as she put it, he was tongue-tied: like an engineer, little inclined to speechifying, who moves perfectly his abacuses and yet hasn't at his disposal the "sufficiently appropriate words" not to say sufficient Italian verbs to be able to petrarchize over news that is far from good. A typical aphasia coram telephono, reverence, spite, incapacity of expressing himself properly, and the suspicion or indeed the obsessive certainty that one can be overheard and naturally mocked by third parties, by unknown imbeciles, and finally, the loss of one's own personality and the pulpifying of the logos in a flushing stammer, flowed or stagnated, endemic, in Europe, and, therefore, in the Italian peninsula of those years of telephone avec la manivelle. In the campagna, in the country, you can imagine! Her uncle was a railroad man, ha! like the daddy of Lucherino.^{68} And, rustic widower flabby though still fierce in the face, before he had his hut beside the tracks.

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.^{69} 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,^{70} 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.

But what did that mean? It was his job, running around on his motorcycle day and night, to go and visit his poor, to see how they were getting along ... his chickens: that's why he wore those double chevrons of silver. "That's all he can think about, tearing around the day and night with his bike, you might say: and when he's done, he goes to bed: he plays the radio: and he has seven women who listen to it, besides himself."

Spies were not lacking, certainly, closed in the torpor of her mind and senses, from which Santa Rita had already evaporated. The sergeant, from confidences gathered the day before, had, according to her, succeeded in extracting (now she dreamt) how one Retalli Enea alias Iginio had become engaged to the beautiful Lavinia from whom with his infinite promises and a face that made you scared, he had obtained some advances. "Advances?" "Yes, some paper," answered the spy, without a face but with every certainty of the feminine sex, since she wore a shawl and skirt, "and especially . . . don't make me come out and say these things, Sergeant, you know what I mean better than I do." The ring—it had been he, Retalli Enea, who had given it to this beautiful Lavinia in a strange moment, as if he were going away: clasping her to him, kissing her furiously on the mouth, on the eyes. Or perhaps, that faceless apparition went on to say, and exhaling a word not human, to be rid of a trinket that was too risky to carry on his person, in those circumstances, and with the intention of collecting again one day, when he could move more freely. "But where were you when you saw them?"

"I saw them," answered the phantom of the lonely road, "I saw them from that pink house where you come up from Torraccio, where I go and do some odd jobs every now and then." "But if you were inside the house, and they . . . they were about their business outside, on a path. No, it doesn't work out right." "Sergeant, I saw them from the window." "From what window?" "From the window of the toilet": and Lavinia's mind was lost: real images become deformed, filtered through a tired, yet clairvoyant drowsiness. "You should go and look. It's a toilet, where you can see everything: motorcycles, the men working by themselves on the vines, and the carts, and the donkeys . . ." "And what were you doing in there?" "Sergeant!" He took her hand. "You swear?" "I can swear to that, all right, don't you worry!" she said then, and it wasn't clear with what lips she spoke, this fearsome mannequin: over which a shawl had been thrown, on which a skirt was hung. A girl, she was: and for a face, an oval, like the wooden egg for mending socks. The topaz had appeared two days earlier on Lavinia's ring finger (of the right hand) amid the amazement of all the girls. "My God! what's that on your finger?" to whose questions, to whose exhortations, "come on, tell us!" she had smoothed her eyebrows, "wouldn't you like to know?" and had shrugged her shoulders, piqued, then blushing as if content with this praise, this expression, all too clearly, of envy. "Don't show it around too much, Lavinia," Zamira had warned her, "with all these horseflies, we have buzzing around here, these days, buying smokes."

Pestalozzi had stored away, that morning, not only his immediate superior's commands, but also this hypothesis: the engagement ring! and, naturally, the double list of the Rome authorities, as he called them in moments of detachment. His superior was careful not to say "I have been told that. . .": he had limited himself to the formulation of hypotheses, few and limpid: one more reasonable than the next. He found himself now, as he chewed along the road, forced to integrate one of these hypotheses, that topazesque engagement, in the light of the new as well as unforeseen results. The topaz, in the possession of Mattonari Lavinia, all right then, "supposing that Retalli gave it to her." But why and how had all the rest gone, instead, to the potato, to Mattonari Camilla? A pledge of some kind? Not so much a pledge of love, perhaps, as, for example, for some small loan of money, of which Retalli Enea was always in need? "Other than the job of being unemployed—he's no good at finding other kind of work," he thought, brutally, like that sociologist he believed himself to be, like that carabiniere he was. "And besides, he must have been in a hurry to get away!" the sergeant had postulated this, too. He must have got off the morning before: he had certainly gone into the country. Or had he, instead, headed for Rome, along the roads? How did the sergeant know that Retalli had flown the coop that day? They had spoken in the evening, in the barracks, when he, Pestalozzi, had come back from Rome, almost at midnight. Ha! He knew a thing or two, the sergeant did; he had pawns everywhere. A sixth sense! A nose! If only he, Pestalozzi, in time, could succeed in having a scent like that! "Let's see now," he brooded, to himself, his eyes on the ground, forgetting the two quail, "let's take a good look. It's time to pass the exam, Guerrino: use your head, Guerrino. If you work things out right and carefully, this is the time that some silver'll drop on your sleeve. You'll be transferred, that's for sure: to Gerace . . . Marina's likely too. It's a little further from Orta than Marino (Latium) is: but they say, they swear, that the air is healthy there, too. And they have figs . . . and prickly pears. Ah well, moving around Italy, is our life. Let's see. Let's use the old head." And he plodded along. The sight of that countryside, so desolate in March, which with the return of the sirocco and of the wandering rains, from the shore, now, reached a cleansed clarity at the Castelli, at the houses of humankind, suddenly fascinated him as if it had appeared magically: the cubes and dihedrons of the houses crowned it at the peak, the cenobia, the towers. A moor for the mirages of solitude, a moment. But on high, ahead of him, the populated villages, the tram: along the consular road. Behind, he knew, the clay hills drained towards the dune the lashing rains: there, fear: the closed horizons of the little valleys, their weary marshes, the reddish mire where the canebrake thickens, a cold green color, a chill without shelter. Here and there, unforeseen, on the withers of the hill, an old tower, to scrutinize and recognize one who for months hadn't passed that way, but today, yes: with a roof of a single slope, like a cap over the eyes, walls baked by the relentless summer, faded by the brothy gusts from the southwest. Dried again by solitude. The signal-man's house, where shortly before he had so copiously harvested, the corporal thought on his bicycle, could have offered to Retalli Enea alias Iginio refuge and shelter, if only for a moment, on the first lap of a flight that was anything but impossible. Along the main highways, like the Appia or the Anzio road, there was police surveillance: motorcycles: patrols, perhaps, from other carabinieri stations: and then the coming and going of the red-painted wagons which came down, in those days, with the barrels of new wine loaded in a mountain-like pile (for those who saw them from the side). And gardeners, early in the morning, and men carrying fresh ricotta on their donkeys with their gay bells: and trucks, from time to time, all spattered with mud and the night's rain, with their gross drivers in the cab like helmsmen, behind the pane, in their black oilskin jackets, their grappa-red faces, in their fox collars: those could clearly see anybody on the run, even if they don't look like they're watching. All of these, by now, had read the papers, with the two crimes in them. Resting, on the other hand, only a moment at the signal-man's, Iginio could then reach Casal Bruciato, cross—or not cross—the Ardeatina, slip off unseen under the sandstone ramparts which create the invisible security of Ardea, and create also, for the goatish lupercal god, a cave and a home: or, a divergent hypothesis, he could reach in any case the Rome-Naples train, at Santa Palomba Station: like a day-laborer looking for work, wait for the train, the poorest of trains, a diretto, the poorer of the only two that stop there. Or else . . . Pestalozzi suspected at last, doubling the horns of the dilemma, if he was out of breath or lacked money for the train, he could take to the country towards Solforata and the great thickets of the prince,^{71} in the direction of Pratica di Mare. From there, come out on the shore: and, in easy stages, begging bread from the fishermen's huts, reach Ostia ... or escape to Anzio. And then who could ever find him? Right. But couldn't he have taken the train to Rome? And money, at the ticket window? Who could have given him the money? . . . Lavinia? . . . What about Camilla, why not her? It was more likely that the ugly one had given him the money."

Musing in this way, he was finally aware of the road: they were almost at the Anzio crossing. He concluded then, leaving all his doubts open: it was his sergeant's exam, this; in the barracks the beans would spill forth. But the spirit, or the devil, of the "reconstruction of the events" hammered at his temples. Retalli . . . here's why he had left the stolen property at the signal-man's house. It was a place . . . which no one, perhaps not even Sergeant Santar-ella, would have been capable, of guessing: there was the ugly fiancee, there: ugly and sure. And the countryside all around, deserted. He must have decided to flee on the spot, after having caught some random word, in the discussions of the people, or read a headline in a paper they were reading. The jewelry ... no, he couldn't leave it at his place. (A few hours after he had become "a fugitive from justice" they had searched his house.) They would have found it. It would have been the proof, imprisonment. To take it with him, if they should stop him, was no less dangerous than shutting it in a drawer. And so, there. To escape, to keep a safe distance, took money: and for the train, too! Camilla, perhaps, had some, could give it to him: she could cough up ... a bit of the ready: and he would leave her, as a pledge, all those sapphires and topazes, of course, he would have given them to her.

But Camilla whimpered about being so poor? The corporal's mind became confused. Every hypothesis, every deduction, no matter how well-constructed, turned out to have a weak point, like a net that is unraveling. And the fish then . . . good-bye! The fish of the impeccable "reconstruction." Retalli, in a far shadier level, must work like that blond boy of Ines', like the Ganymede Lanciani, who had been the blond—and invisible—god of the interrogation at Santo Stefano: and in this rather withered collection, the greed of the search was stilled. Ganymede was a more easily filed denomination, in the archive of his memory, than Diomede was.

The girls, in the buggy, seemed to be quarreling again: they went on, in fact, exchanging vituperation in low voices: with cheeks like she-devils, hysterical witches: but the upper hand seemed to be hers still, the more furious in the eyes, the more contemptuous of lip, the more beautiful. Dying of curiosity, the severe Pestalozzi listened, but did not hear: the creak of the springs, the rasping of the bike, an occasional exploded admission from the ass of the tugging horse, prevented him from enjoying that altercation, as excited to see as it was in fact, in reality: without counting the disturbing snaps of the whip, and the aaaah's of the simple-minded driver, who seemed every time to wake with a start, from his diver's lethargy, to emit his voice, quite uselessly: since the horse, poor beast, more than what it was doing, could not do, nor its kindly ass explode. No, he couldn't hear, the corporal.

"Because you have a bank book with a couple of lire in it," he heard all of a sudden, and put one foot on the ground, "that's the only reason, ugly as you are. That's why Igi lets on he's engaged to you. Go on. You're one of those girls that if she wants a boy, she has to buy him with money." And she spat, overshooting with her projectile, the helpless knees of the driver, who said aaah! but in vain, because his intervention was belated: and then because the horse had stopped and had already planted his legs apart for an unforeseen (to him, the master) need. The corporal's face relaxed; his spirit was consoled.

"Yes," Lavinia shouted, venemous, "you were fed up with giving him money, after all you had given him before, so he thought he'd leave that stuff with you. A guarantee. You bought it for two thousand lire—you told me so yourself!"

"Liar, witch, whore—if you want to be a stool-pigeon after all, you've got to tell the truth—because lousy spies like you are no good to anybody, not even to the people who pay you." "Ahoy, girls," Pestalozzi said, resenting the slight respect in which the cousins Mattonari seemed to hold him: "now what's got into you? You can fight it out at the barracks. The sergeant will be overjoyed to hear you both talking at once: he'll let you go on arguing till midnight and after, don't worry. Once you're in the coop, you can peck at each other all you want. But that's enough presently. Cut it out." Where he comes from they say "presently" rather than "now." They say it in Rome, too. So the argument of the two furies died down, faded, like thunder that becomes calm, fleeing, on the marvelous lips of Lavinia. The Farafilio, on foot, arrived overheated, his face flushed, except for the cheese-colored patches which whitened, as if for a belated confirmation, his jaws: just above the neck. He dragged after him, with some difficulty in the climb, that little balloon, so court-vetu, so uncovered to the caprices of the equinox, that it recalled the old story, of the regiment confirmed (not to say baptized) by fire.

Le bon vieux grenadier

qui revenait des Flandres . ..

était si court-vetu

qu'on lui voyait son tendre . . .

The horse, in the meanwhile, had finally regained his composure; and a definitive aaah brought him back to his job of tugging, before the good soldier came to learn the cause of the stop: which, from the distance, might have seemed a wait, ordered of the driver through the kindliness of his superior, and thus an act of clemency and total pardon granted him, Farafilio, in person. But, having glanced at the little hippuric lake, and sniffed the sweetish and still tepid steam that emanated from it, he displayed in the rubescent skin of his neck and the ad hoc zones of the face his reproof, his contempt. That little equine stop had been demanded by rude nature, but a blow of the whip might even have obviated it: there were two women present!