That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [118]
"Well, let's see . . . it must have been last month, the one before this. Now that I think of it, we're just at the new moon." Obstinate, she harped on this theme: "How can I remember the monthlies of all the girls? I think that's asking too much . . ."
"Too much? Moons? Now look here, Zamira Pacori! Have you lost your mind? Who do you think you're talking to?"
"But last month . . ."
"Last month my ass! Watch what you're saying. Last month! I'm asking you if they were absent on Tuesday the fifteenth, or Friday: one of the two." (He didn't dare bring his Saturday into play.) "This is what I'm asking you. And this is all I want you to answer, because you know very well."
At that point, as if summoned from the darkness, from the slightly opened door of the little stairway which led into the store (of which the young boys daydreamed, others mythicized, and more than one, because of the palm-reading, knew from experience), there peered in, then hopped onto the chill tile floor, here and there, with certain cluck-clucks of hers, among two piles of sweaters, a surly and half-featherless hen, lacking one eye, with her right leg bound by a string, all knots and splices, which wouldn't stop coming out, coming up: such, as from the ocean, the endless line of the sounding where the windlass of the poop summons it back aboard and yet a fringe of beard decks it out, from time to time: a mucid, green seaweed from the depths. After having hazarded, this way and that, more than one lifting of the foot, with the air, each time, of knowing quite well where she meant to go, but of being hindered by the contradictory prohibitions of fate, the pattering one-eyed fowl then changed her mind completely. She unstuck her wings from her body (and she seemed to expose the ribs for a more generous intake of air), while a badly restrained anger already gurgled in the gullet: a catarrhous commination. Her windpipe envenomed, she began a cadenza in falsetto: she pecked wildly at the top of that mountain of rags, whence she sprayed the phenomena of the universe with the supreme cockledoodledoo, as if she had laid an egg up there. But she fluttered down without any waste of time, landing on the tiles with renewed paroxysms of high notes, a glide of the most successful sort, a record: still dragging the string after her. Parallel to the string and its chain of knots and gnarls, a thread of gray wool had caught on one leg: and the thread this time seemed to be unwoven from a rhubarb-colored scarf, beneath the dyed rags. Once on the ground, and after yet another cluck-cluck expressing either a wrath beyond cure or restored peace and friendship, she planted herself on steady legs before the shoes of the horrified corporal, turning to him the highly unbersagliere-like plume{61} of her tail: she lifted the root of the same, revealed the Pope's nose in all its beauty: diaphragmed to the minimum, the full extent of the aperture, the pink rose-window of her sphincter, and, plop, promptly took a shit: not out of contempt, no, probably indeed to honor, following hennish etiquette, the brave noncom, and with all the nonchalance in the world: a green chocolate drop twisted a la Borromini like the lumps of colloid sulphur in the Abule water: and on the very tip-top a little spit of calcium, also in the colloidal state, a very white cream, the pallor of pasteurized milk, which was already on the market in those days.
All these aerodynamics, naturally, and the consequent release of chocolate, or mocha, as may be, were exploited by Zamira to avoid