That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [120]
"You . . . who are you?" Pestalozzi, radiant, asked her, recognizing in his own desire the stimulating identity of the face, the eyes, the genteel figure of the girl, though not yet her name, in the filing cabinet of his mind. "Are you Clelia? Clelia Farcioni? or Camilla Mattonari?"
"Why, Corporal, what's all this about? Yes, my name's Mattonari, all right: but I'm not Camilla. My name is . . ." she hesitated, "Mattonari Lavinia."
"Then where is Camilla? And who is she? Your sister?"
"Sister?" she pursed her lips in disgust, "I don't have any sisters," disdaining the hypothesis of such a kinship.
"But you know her. She works here: you said her name, Camilla's. So you're friends." And in the meanwhile he was still holding her hand. She had set down, at last, the umbrella: she frowned: "Did I say that? Camilla? I just repeated the name you said, corporal." Pestalozzi thought he had caught a use of the article, in Tuscan or Lombard fashion,{62} which hadn't been spoken at all.
"Friends? I don't have any friends." The violence of this denial, a second time: no more than the corporal was expecting: "Well, if you don't have any friends, so much the better: you can speak out then: and no foolishness, because I don't have time to waste. Who's Camilla?" he continued to hold her hand, by the fingertips.
"She's . . . yes, a girl who . . . she's learning to be a seamstress, too . . . she works . . ."
"She works here?"
"Well yes," she admitted, hanging her head.
"She's her cousin: a distant cousin . . ." Zamira said calmly, in the tone with which the Almanack de Gotha asseverates, and all believe, that Charlotte Elisabeth of Coburg is the fourth cousin of Amalia of Mecklenburg.
"And where is she? Why isn't she here? Isn't she coming to work today?"
"How should I know?" the girl shrugged. "She'll be coming."
"You can see for yourself, Sergeant," Zamira insisted, haughtily. "We're out in the country. We work when there's something to do ... to make or to mend: when there's need, I mean. Every other day, more or less. But in the winter, with the weather like this," and she took advantage of a fading of the sun, through the panes, and nodded towards the outside, "with these storms, you can't tell from one day to the next . . . whether it's spring or whether it's still January, with this weather maybe we work one day out of five. You know better than me, Sergeant, since you must have studied all about the weather and the signs of the moon, the way I did, when I got my fortunetelling diploma," she recited in a sententious tone:
"Candlemas, Candlemas! Winter's end has come at last. But should rain fall or north wind blow Winter then has weeks to go.
and three weeks ago, if you remember, just like today, the weather was something terrible; the water came right down into the shop, and that lousy hen," she sought the hen with her eyes behind the machine, "even stopped laying. Today maybe we have nothing to do, and tomorrow there may be a whole heap of stuff."
"It looks to me like you have a fine heap of lies, enough to last a month," and he indicated with his chin the little mound of things, piled as if in two peaks, like the back of a camel. Still holding the young girl by the hand, he abandoned the clucking hen to her doubts and the double train of yarn and string and the relative knots.
"Now . . . tell me something: who gave you this?" he raised his hand of the palpitating Lavinia, now clasping her by the wrist, and looking at the topaz which, from the inner part of the hand, she had turned again on her finger.
"Who gave it to me?" she made an effort to blush, as if at a tender secret.
"Signorina, hurry up. Take off the ring. I have to confiscate it. And tell me who gave it to you. If you tell me, all right. And if you don't tell me . . ."