That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [127]
and to summon them to repentance and vigilance, nor to forgive sleepiness to the least of them. The demoniac idiot, in doing this, became lost between his sparse, distorted incisors and the ferocity of his canines and omitted from his lips, in whitish ribbons at each new jerk of his head, a pulpy drool like bechamel: in the arsis of such dewy rage, raising bloodshot bestial eyes to heaven, as if to invoke the approval of the supernal Beasts, the gods of his race, and to propitiate their chief divinity, and to encourage their consent to new and more foolish hendecasyllables. That which, cretin that he was, he considered his inderogatable duty amid the shoes and the puttees of the carabinieri. Those bilious petards of his rancor were lacerating his accursed gullet, of which— at moments—to the soldiers' hesitation, he exposed the cavernous flush, like the gaping jaws of hell: and seeing the fowl running before the streaming black monster, his vehemence was redoubled to the point of paroxysm and seemed, at a certain point, resolved to follow and even to compete with the hysterical biddies: but solidity of chain and charity of cord, or indeed string, restrained him, though not without effort. For which the hothead went on bobbing, without idea and with no gain for himself or for others, at every explosion from his throat: cerberus on leave upon earth and on the hills, where he had planted himself to work, guzzling their unmerited light, the gentle air of their open sky: coeli jucundum lumen et auras. The puff-puff was just about ready to pass. The wind which rose from the swamps seemed tired, its wing drooped in the daylight: but a whirr, again, of a wren, from a bush up to the rusty rainspout, or the broken flight, higher, and the conjugal cries, in reply, of two nestless jays. The girl with the potato face brushed the two characters aside, as if they were cards with a low face-value, and in a gesture of intolerance like a maiden rudely accosted, twisting her head in a grimace, she advanced with her instrument, to the platform: where, having grasped the implement with a steady hand and in a posture of attention, she planted it against her belly, at precisely forty-five degrees. That rolling pin with green skin now blossomed from her person, and it was, from its rough trunk, a sprout of exceptional vigor, and to hell with who might or might not see it: it was a standard not hers. The engine driver's blackened face was already thrust from his cab, to note the color of that bud. A stage Moor, an Othello with a black skier's cap. The puff-puff was the mixed train: the only one that came by in the morning: pieced together with three freight cars, of various age and structure, and two passenger cars: where the faces, the mops, and the shining eyes and mouths of the more impudent and the happier, or of some dope with more prestige than usual, gleamed at or hung from the windows, snickering. Or they leaned out, some of them, with half their chest and arms, in the gallant farewell of a waving hand. They mouthed with shining, lascivious mouths fugitive madrigals to the girl: their words were indistinct, but certainly filth: they were a swarm of soldiers discharged at that time, in that era, but even in another era, the same would have occurred. "He has his stick straight!" Cocullo was able to reconstruct, after a moment, in the rattling of the train that was already passing, and he clenched his teeth, paling with contempt and reddening higher up, between cheeks and chin. And they would have added another refrain for the carabinieri: if the train, which seemed utterly out of breath, hadn't gone so slowly. It was heard now creaking in the brake block and grating in its undergreased threadings, in descent: the Negroni grade, number 71, was followed, after the straight stretch of the station, by the counterslope of grade number 73, still Negroni's work: which had the fame of offering itself like a moorish odalisque filled with participating consents to the untangled enthusiasm of the mechanism whereby the puff-puff, freed from suffering and