That Awful Mess on the via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda Read Free Book Online

of the virgo intacta hadn't placed her, beyond precautionary suspicion, in the romantic roster of the nubile, as well as of the respectable. She was, in fact, a widow. The mantilla-bathrobe overlapped the foulard, or rather foulards, not one but two, also powdered and vaguely modulated in their hues, so that the first merged into the second, and the second into the delicate petals— or perhaps butterflies—of that somewhat Castilian kimono. She superimposed her report on that of the concierge, straightening out, correcting. She spoke up, a tremor in her voice, her poor voice, a hope in her eyes. Not perhaps the hope of seeing her gold objects again, but the certainty . . . of the protection of the law, so validly personified by Ingravallo. On hearing the bell, Signora Menegazzi had let out her usual "Who is it?": she now repeated the tone, worried and whining, which she adopted every time the doorbell trilled. Then she had opened. The murderer was a tall young man in a cap, a mechanic's gray overall, or at least so it seemed to her, his face dark, with a greenish-brown woolen scarf. A handsome boy, yes, a good-looking sort. But somehow he immediately made you feel afraid. "What was the cap like?" Don Ciccio asked, writing the while. "It was . . . why, to tell you the truth, officer, I don't quite ... I can't quite remember what it was like. I wouldn't know what to tell you." "And you?" he said to the concierge: "When he ran off, ran right past your eyes? Didn't you see? Can't you tell me what it looked like, this cap? . . ."
    "Why, officer dear, ... I was that upset! How could I think about caps, at a time like that? You see . . . Now tell me yourself, frankly: when they start firing all these bullets, do you think a lady notices a cap? . . ."
    "Was he alone?" "Oh, yes, alone, alone," the two women said, in unison. "Oh, officer," la Menegazzi implored, "you must help us, you who can help us. For pity's sake. Maria Vergine! A widow! Alone in the house! Maria Vergine! What a nasty world we live in! These aren't men, they're devils! Ugly devils that come back from hell . . ."
    La Menegazzi, like all women alone in the house, spent her hours in a state of anguish or, rather, of suspicious and tormented expectancy. For some time her constant fear of the doorbell's ring had become intellectualized into a complex of images and obsessions: masked men, seen in close-up, with felt-soled shoes: sudden, and equally silent, intrusions into the hall; a hammer brought down hard on her head, or her throat clutched by hands or strangled with a length of string brought for the purpose, preceded perhaps by horrible torture: a notion—or a word—this last, which filled her with unspeakable emotion. Mixed anxieties and fantasies: to the accompaniment, perhaps, of a sudden palpitation of the heart, the sudden creak, in the darkness, of some cupboard, its wood more seasoned than the others: fantasies, in any case, greedily anticipating the event. Which, after so much insistence, couldn't fail, in the end, to arrive. The long wait for house-breaking and aggression, Ingravallo thought, had created a compulsion not so much for her, her actions and thoughts, a victim already marked down, but a compulsion for destiny, for destiny's "field of forces." The prefiguration of disasters must have evolved into a historic predisposition: it had acted: not only on the psyche of the woman to be robbed-strangled-tortured, but also on the "field" of atmosphere, on the field of the external psychic tensions. Because Ingravallo, like certain of our philosophers, attributed a soul, indeed a lousy bastard of a soul, to that system of forces and probabilities which surrounds every human creature, and which is customarily called destiny. To put it simply, her great fear had brought bad luck to her, to Signora Menegazzi. Her dominating thought, at every trill, used to coagulate in that "Who is it?", a bleat or bray habitual in every female recluse whose lares are too