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

weak to protect her. In her it was a moaning antiphony to the ring itself, to the doorbell's most domestic requests.
    It turned out that the young man, as soon as Signora Teresina resolved to take off the chain and open up, had said he was sent by the management of the building to check the radiators, which he was to inspect one by one. In fact, some days before, there had been an argument over the radiators because, at centrally heated winter's official end, they were more tepid (towards the cold) than the tenants' desire to spend money.
    The flame of all heating equipment, in Rome, was extinguished on the Ides of March, at times it was the Nones instead, or indeed, even the Kalends. During double winters with prolonged epilogues, as was the winter of Twenty-seven, the flame was fed for the whole month, then it was allowed to waste away in a prolonged languor not without discussion and diatribe among the opinionated tenants, vociferous in proportion to the event: among pros and cons, the penniless and the wealthy, the stingy careful ones and the carefree, urinators in hope and glory. As to the rooms on the upper floors of two hundred and nineteen, they could be numbered, beyond any doubt, among the most Romanly sunny of all Rome: for which reason, since in that early spring it was snowy-raining, the inhabitants quaked with cold.
    The mechanic had with him neither bag nor sack: the implements of his position for the moment were not required. It was merely an inspection. The Signora Teresina added—but this Don Ciccio did not write down—that she was sure that young man . . . yes, the murderer, the mechanic . . . she was sure, and could have sworn it in court, was sure that the boy had hypnotized her (Don Ciccio stood there and listened, his mouth agape, with a sleepy manner) because at a certain point, while they were still in the vestibule, he had stared at her. "Stared!" she repeated, almost declaiming, enthusiastic at the stern fixity of that gaze: "his eyes were merciless, steady and hard," from beneath his cap, "like a snake's." And she had, then, felt her strength fail her. She told how, indeed, at that moment, whatever the young man had asked or commanded, at that point she would have done it, would have unquestionably obeyed him: "like a robot" (her very words).
    "Maria Vergine! Hypnotized! That's what I was . . ." Don Ciccio, in his thoughts, couldn't help editorializing: "These women!"
    And so it happened that he, the mechanic, was able to go all over the apartment. In the bedroom, glimpsing some gold objects on the dresser, on its marble top, he had scooped them up with one movement of his hand, opened with his other hand beneath it, like a bucket, the large pocket at his disposal, over his hip, in the overall.
    "What are you up to?" la Menegazzi had screeched at him, not totally helpless despite her hypnotic condition. He, turning, had aimed a pistol at her face: "Shut up, you old witch, or I'll fry you to a crisp." Having taken the measure of her terror, he opened the drawer, the top one, where the key is . . . And he had guessed right. There was all her gold, her jewels: in a little leather coffer. There was the money. "How much?" Ingravallo asked. "I couldn't be absolutely sure. Four thousand six hundred, I think." The money in a man's wallet, dry and old: a memento of her poor husband. (Her eyes became damp.) And that boy, without a moment's hesitation, had already wrapped the coffer in a kind of dirty handkerchief, or maybe it was a rag, yes, it was, with a fever in his fingers: the wallet he had simply slipped into his pocket, so quickly! Maria Verginel "In the pocket here . . ." and the signora slapped her hip with her hand.
    "Devils. I don't know how they do it. The devils! Devils."
    "Aw shut up," the young man had said to her in a grim, menacing voice, keeping his eye on her, his face almost touching hers. They looked like a tiger's, now, those eyes: the evil soul had seized its prey: he would have