That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [104]
"What's this feeling of yours? Out with it," Pompeo said, in a kindly tone.
"I have a feeling that . . . that he made a thorough job of it. He's a wide-awake kind of boy. When something's broken, he finds the trouble right away. And then, in Rome, with his living expenses. It couldn't be any other way."
Fumi turned his eyes on Ingravallo; at the very moment that Ingravallo had raised his own, more clouded, to look at him. Then, to the girl:
"This countess then? Where is she? I mean," he clenched his lips, "where does she live?"
"Somewhere near the station, I think: past Piazza Vit-torio though. But I ... I don't know that part of town very well." She blushed faintly: her voice seemed to dissolve, to vacillate: to tremble towards weeping. "I . . . What is this? Now you want to make a spy out of me? I . . ."
"Talk, talk, talk, eh girlie? Make up your mind. In or out. You take your pick . . ." menaced Ingravallo, anything but amiable: and he stood up, black.
"It's a long wide street," she said, hesitating between shame and remorse, "a straight one . . . that goes all the way to San Giovanni."
"I get it," Doctor Fumi said, "I get the whole thing." He glanced again at his colleague, who looked back at him.
Diomede was in need of money: when he had it, he spent it: and he procured more: he spent that, too: coffee, cigarettes, neckties, ball games, movies, trams: he even played the lottery.
"He even wanted to drink an aperitiff: Carpano, it's called" (she explained, mistaking the accent). "At Pic-carozzi, in the Gallery. Before he went to eat." But she said this with pride, as she might have said: "and a shirt of real silk, yes, sir!"
"And where does he go to eat?" asked Fumi.
"It depends. If he's by himself, he makes do with a sandwich maybe. He might even drink straight from the fountain: a gulp of Aqua Marcia in Via della Scrofa or at the little fountain in Piazza Borghese. But if he's with some of those young ladies, with fancy customers . .."
"So he wasn't all yours, then," Pompeo pricked her, with a grin. And touching her shoulder: "Come on, baby, you got to get it off your chest, console yourself!" she moved away, spitefully, as if disgusted by that contact. "Yes, yes," she wept, "I do want to console myself."
She dried herself with her hand, sobbed, changed her mind: "Well, what do you think? He's not the only fish in the sea." And she started, at a new sob, to look for a handkerchief: to dry her face, her nose: until, as usual, she rubbed it on her sleeve. Poor creature! The elbow revealed the hole, and the sleeve the darns and the tatters. The poor wrist, the arm, the shoulders jerked in desperate sobs. But she raised her head: and with her wet face she looked at them again. "When he finds a woman that'll come across, I mean one of those women . . . who don't make any fuss about it, because that's what they're out looking for, then he makes her go to a fancy place: to Bottaro in Passeggiata di Ripetta: or to the Quattro Cantoni to L'Aliciaro, behind San Carlo: or maybe in Via della Vite, if he catches on . . . that she's from out of town, that she's maybe a foreigner, something special: and he has a sharp eye for them. Even to the Buco in Sant' Ignazio, sometimes, where they're Tuscans, he told me: from Tuscany. And there, you have to drink their wine, and it costs more because it's famous and fancy and all."
"I understand," murmured Fumi, his great head on the desk.
"Tuscans!" she resumed: and throwing her head back, with one hand she thrust back her hair, those blond locks on which drops of glue had rained: then she whispered, bored: "they're a bunch of stinkers, too, goddamn 'em." The imprecation was lost in a murmur, in the apocope of the pronoun, in an ever less benevolent stammering of the tongue, of the lips.
"Stinkers? What have they ever done to you?" Grabber pricked her again, with a tinkling