That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [114]
As to the iconography of the two saints, and of the holy apostles in general, ah, didn't Manneroni dedicate to them the unspent energies of a velvet-bearded forty years of his own life? assisted on his scaffoldings not only by his believer's fervor, but by the tragic qualities of his genius and an iron constitution: by an athlete's physique, a prophet's appetite: and by a handful of cash, from time to time, given him, however, reluctantly, by the commissioner of those miracles. In the shrine of I Due Santi, adorned and curlicued with cheese-pale stuccos, he was finally enabled to collect and employ all of his talents: the talents which had been swelling his brush, in twenty years of initiation and pictorial apprenticeship, and of obstinate discipline through twenty more years of bearded mastery. Ejaculated impetuously and with free hand on the mortar, still fresh —that is alfresco—the two big toes, the Pietrine and the Pauline, display all the vigor and the urgency of their creation . . . inderogatable, of the enunciation ... by coerced squeezing, as if splattered there by some source or spring . . . "ch'alta vena preme."{56} The "creator" couldn't bear another moment's delay, before creating. "Fiat lux!" And there were toes. Plip, plop.
Also of the painter Zeuxis, for that matter, it is rumored that he made a mountain, of lovely foam, at the mouth of a horse, splattering we don't know what sponge on his muzzle, at a whim, but catching it a little too low. And it worked out well. While Pestalozzi had taken to fiddling with his machine, bent over and absorbed, the short-tunicked young man, having crossed the road, moved under the shrine as if for a prayer or a vow: hinting, with his thumb alone, at the Sign of the Cross, he looked up, open-mouthed, and noticed that, with one hand, they held the edge of their garments, the two walkers, inasmuch as, if they didn't, their clothes would have been muddied along the way. It was muddy, in fact, towards the mire of the plain, even the road or row that they still had to travel: that same one, perhaps, that the Farafiliopetri now saw descending towards Le Frattocchie. A light must have spread from above, at one time, but the years, the decades or the centuries, had equated it to the squalor of the general wash: overcome by the light from underground. The bald saint, a little gnome with black hair at his temples, looked like somebody who knew a thing or two: able to read and write as smart as a lawyer, maybe even better: but he seemed to be slowing his pace, now, not even reluctantly, to allow his colleague to go ahead. A kind of right of primogeniture haloed the cervix of the latter, kindled and sharpened his pupils, it circumflowed, like rough beard, the mug that was greedily thrust forward to discern, a fisherman peering at his line: his nose was hardened to the task: granted the title of a Princedom which made his gray hair seem of stone, woolly as it was, to the forehead minimized of the harder. Beneath the figures of the two men, in the two waving scrolls one upon the other in exergue, the tubby Farafiliopetri managed to read, in silent parting and closing of the lips, barely forming the words without uttering them: "Crescite vero in gratia etinco___co ... coccione Domini Preti Sec Ep."{57}
The sergeant, in the meanwhile, had taken it into his head —despite all prearranged plans—to medicate his machine on the spot, bent over her greasy viscera. He persisted in titillating obstinately it wasn't clear what hot nipple or what teat, withdrawing his fingers immediately, every time, with a "damn" or a "Jesus Christ!" in a