Read Online That Awful Mess on the via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Carlo Emilio Gadda
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that really fills the bill. He knows all of us; we're good customers. Rare roast beef; that's Peppino's speciality." Signora Manuela, once she had completed, on Don Ciccio's desk, that horrible and interminable tangle that was her respected signature, Manuela Pettacchioni crossed the dim antechamber and decided to take her leave also of the bundled-up dignitary. She gave him a jovial greeting, loud and woman-of-the-people as ever: "Ta-ta for now, Commendatore . . ." And everyone stared at him. "Stiff upper lip, eh? There's nothing to it... and it's over before you know it." And she went out to catch the PV-1, all in a rush, wiggling her ass like a quail and clicking in perilous equilibrium on the heels of her good shoes which were like trampolenes, like an old sow on her trotters. "With all the mess he's in today, he won't feel much like eating artichokes ... He won't even eat a crust, poor Signor Filippo . . . Santo Stefano del Cacco, of all places to end up. That's a place to keep away from!"
The Commendatore couldn't calm down. That tick-tock of the awful clock in the room, from one tick to the next, had hollowed the sockets of his eyes: he looked as if he had been dug up from his grave. He was questioned, in the early afternoon, by Ingravallo himself, who alternated blandishments and courtesy with rather heavier phases, falling victim, at times, to that "office torpor" which so usefully weighted his eyelids. Moments of vivacity and irony: bursts of what seemed sudden impatience: boredom, as if the red tape were stifling him: harsh parentheses. Deviti—Gaudenzio, that is—who was unobtrusively present throughout the interview at a little table in the corner, his head on the day's sheaf of documents, later told how, at the first bars of this duet, the harassed, intimidated Angeloni promptly and completely lost his bearings. It's a thing that happens to respectable people, to serious gentlemen, or to those who obstinately make a show of being such, in certain situations which are not adapted to them. An incredible anguish seemed to have overwhelmed the Commendatore. It ended with him blowing his nose, red-eyed: he trumpeted like a widow. He insisted he knew nothing, thought nothing, could imagine nothing, concerning that shop assistant. He insisted painfully, against all normal usage, on that term "shop assistant." The more Ingravallo fell back on a folk-loristic tone, between the Tiber and his native Biferno, the more he taunted by saying "grocer's kid" or "delivery boy," the more the other man withdrew like a snail into the pompous shell of high-flown terminology: which, however, was competely out of place, in that atmosphere of generic police distrust, like jellied eels and artichokes in oil. Via Venti Settembre, with its ministries, its clerks, its doormen, must in that implacable hour have seemed to him a paradise more teetering than ever: a distant Olympus, ruled over by a Quirites Commendatore, indeed Grand 'Ufficiale, but alas, hardly likely to succor him. What? Farewell, the magic papers of the sweet bureaucratic inanity? Farewell, the comforting warmth of the Central Administration? The "considerable" increments in the graph of fishing . . . for sardines? The duty exemptions on pickling? The stormy, yet beloved grumbling of the Excise Office, the holy reverberation of the Superior Court? Farewell? Alone, seated on a bench in the station house, with upon him all the hairsplitting of the homicide squad (so he thought) which made his eyes brim. His poor face, the face of a poor man who wants people not to look at him, but with that schnozz in the middle which constantly prompted opinions, unexpressed, from every interlocutor, his face seemed, to Ingravallo, a mute and desperate protest against the inhumanity, the cruelty of all organized investigation.
At times in the past, yes, they had sent some ham to his house. Who? Who, indeed. A difficult question. No, he couldn't put a name to him. He didn't even remember,
The Commendatore couldn't calm down. That tick-tock of the awful clock in the room, from one tick to the next, had hollowed the sockets of his eyes: he looked as if he had been dug up from his grave. He was questioned, in the early afternoon, by Ingravallo himself, who alternated blandishments and courtesy with rather heavier phases, falling victim, at times, to that "office torpor" which so usefully weighted his eyelids. Moments of vivacity and irony: bursts of what seemed sudden impatience: boredom, as if the red tape were stifling him: harsh parentheses. Deviti—Gaudenzio, that is—who was unobtrusively present throughout the interview at a little table in the corner, his head on the day's sheaf of documents, later told how, at the first bars of this duet, the harassed, intimidated Angeloni promptly and completely lost his bearings. It's a thing that happens to respectable people, to serious gentlemen, or to those who obstinately make a show of being such, in certain situations which are not adapted to them. An incredible anguish seemed to have overwhelmed the Commendatore. It ended with him blowing his nose, red-eyed: he trumpeted like a widow. He insisted he knew nothing, thought nothing, could imagine nothing, concerning that shop assistant. He insisted painfully, against all normal usage, on that term "shop assistant." The more Ingravallo fell back on a folk-loristic tone, between the Tiber and his native Biferno, the more he taunted by saying "grocer's kid" or "delivery boy," the more the other man withdrew like a snail into the pompous shell of high-flown terminology: which, however, was competely out of place, in that atmosphere of generic police distrust, like jellied eels and artichokes in oil. Via Venti Settembre, with its ministries, its clerks, its doormen, must in that implacable hour have seemed to him a paradise more teetering than ever: a distant Olympus, ruled over by a Quirites Commendatore, indeed Grand 'Ufficiale, but alas, hardly likely to succor him. What? Farewell, the magic papers of the sweet bureaucratic inanity? Farewell, the comforting warmth of the Central Administration? The "considerable" increments in the graph of fishing . . . for sardines? The duty exemptions on pickling? The stormy, yet beloved grumbling of the Excise Office, the holy reverberation of the Superior Court? Farewell? Alone, seated on a bench in the station house, with upon him all the hairsplitting of the homicide squad (so he thought) which made his eyes brim. His poor face, the face of a poor man who wants people not to look at him, but with that schnozz in the middle which constantly prompted opinions, unexpressed, from every interlocutor, his face seemed, to Ingravallo, a mute and desperate protest against the inhumanity, the cruelty of all organized investigation.
At times in the past, yes, they had sent some ham to his house. Who? Who, indeed. A difficult question. No, he couldn't put a name to him. He didn't even remember,
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