That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [115]
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La Zamira, for it was truly she, so disheveled and ungirt, pushing a broom, preceded by a conspicuous cluster of domestic fluffs and straws and indefinable rubbish, received the two men with the salivary lubricity of her professional smile and the peasant falsity of her gaze. The resultant grimace, made livid by the window and the uncertain whiteness of the weather, then kindled by a sudden dart of the sun was meant to disguise as extremely welcome this most unwelcome visit.
"Come in, come in." Was she expecting it, this visit? Or did she guess its reason, if not its immediate purpose, then and there? The hard corporal wanted to bring his motorcycle inside, too well known to be left out in the road. When he had persuaded it to descend the step with both wheels, like an uneasy horse, he set it, with some difficulty, near the knitting machine. He looked at the femme fatale, at the sorceress. She hadn't yet combed her hair. Her bangs were a tangle: a gray clump of stubble and roots. Beneath the bumps of the forehead and the rain pipe of the two orbital arches, the pointed flashing of the irises, black, or almost: authentic fear, suspicion, reticence, derision, deception. Flanked by the four surviving canines, the barrel vault, obscene: her lips, at the corners, drooled revolting little bubbles, amid the irradiation of a thousand wrinkles, not yet smoothed or dispelled by cream. It seemed, that vault, the evil door whence like a snake, the head had to come blackened forth, followed then by the whole neck of an unforeseen stratagem, a cavil of the whoring peasant woman. The two dopes perceived, in alarm, the spell that misted towards them with her breath, like that of a gecko or a dragon whose experience in duel is not known. Pestalozzi had—and wanted—to make an effort in self-control: with one hand he seemed to dry his eyes, that is to say his eyelids, under the vizor, to clear his soul and his sensory faculties, which were commanded to pursue the investigation. "Goddamn whore!" he argued mentally. With this ejaculation he felt himself sergeant once again: "The below-named Farcioni Clelia, from Pozzofondo, and Mattonari Camilla, resident at Pavona, work here. Where are they?" The Fara-filiorum, meanwhile, was scratching his behind with sweet leisure: or lifting from it, perhaps, the too-sheathing underpants. With both hands, and with two parallel and symmetrical gestures, he proceeded to press his tunic along his hips. It was still like a too-short undershirt: he was ashamed: that insufficience was embittering his whole day.
"Come right in, Corporal. They'll be along any minute. Who wants them?" Zamira counter-asked, insinuating, insolent. The handle of that filthy old broom, all burs, was now clasped in her two hands as if she leaned on it, in repose, and to listen. Pestalozzi, now master of his soul, gave the vile woman a thunderous look: "lousy old whore" was its meaning, mute, his lips closed, straight, "you can see for yourself who." She seemed to dissolve into attentions, pushing aside as best she could the filth to the flank of the sideboard, and allocating the broom there too, as if to guard what it had collected. "I'll go call them, if you'll mind the store for me: I can trust you!" she smiled, turning: after