That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [131]
been placed in there all anyhow, pressed in at random. He picked up with one hand a knitted bodice, a rabbit's skin, a pale blue undershirt with lysol-whitened zones. Two or three walnuts rolled out. Then, from the rags, there emerged, all decked with worn socks, a chamber pot. Filled with walnuts, and with more than one dent in its enameled convexity, one saw at once that it wasn't a piece of Capodimonte, nor even a Ginori. "Ah Gesù, my grandmother's walnuts!" la Mattonari cried, as if to bestow value, in an expression of possessive anguish, on this treasure: which the autumn had deposited in the capaciousness of the vessel, en passant: pilgrim who pays without farewell, before dawn, the debt of the hospitality benignly received. And she started, at the side of the standing corporal, to bend over and take up the recipient and to remove it, animated—so it seemed—by the best of intentions. She meant, with that gesture, to smooth the path for the Requisition, for the Aggravation, for the hard Cross, the Law. But the bloodhound's evil phlegm had already scented the Hiding Place. "Stop! You take it!" he ordered Cocullo. The girl stood up. The trusty Farafilio bent down. He introduced both hands into the cabinet: to seize, with the one, the brimming chamber pot by the handle, to press it respectfully from the opposite side with the palm of the other, as if caressing its kindliness, so rotund on the opposite and non-handled hemisphere. And he extracted it from the tabernacle (and it was heavy as it rarely had been) in the position proper to the user, or even to the owner, who prepares at night to employ it for its lower purpose. An eighth, a ninth walnut rolled out. Too scarce, then, for the almost boyish opulence of the brave soldier, the olive-drab tunic freed for public view his posterior rotundities, properly covered with cloth of the same color. Emphasized by the crouching position, they seemed to emulate and to surpass completely the smooth rotundities of the pot, as if a pump had swollen them, the kind on a tripod, that bicycle mechanics have. The incredible fullness was about to burst—so it appeared—the median rear seam of the trousers: which seemed, instead, only to loosen, in the taut zigzag of a line of reluctant thread, of a blue-green color, darker than the green of the cloth. The seam being pressed beyond its capacity, the breaking point was not reached. A sharp shot re-echoed in the room instead. No: it wasn't a revolver's bullet. Farafilio, poor boy, very probably blushed, with that patchy manner of blushing that he had, in his good, but severe face. Crouched as he was, his face against the commode and the pot in his arms, the purple did not spread. The humble duty had expressed itself: that was all: certain postures favor certain nomenclatures, as if eliciting the sound from the very sources of the same. The girl remained silent, amorphous. The corporal's brow became clouded: in the silence. Brimming, meanwhile, and heavy with every most dried gift of Vertumnus, the lousy pot was elevated to the honors of the top (of the commode), whence the gleaming fragment of mirror had been slightly removed. The maneuverer stood up, without turning around. "Dope! empty it on the bed!" the corporal said, harshly. The maneuverer obeyed. In his half-turn, the visible side of his face was shown papered with alternating zones, islands of flush and pallor: the flush a bishop color, the pallor the color of cheese. He also proved to possess, to an eminent degree, that property of the good, the generous, the honest: the faculty of blushing all the way down the neck. He set slowly, then quickly overturned the vessel where he had been told: with his hands then, all around, diligently confining. Of that treasure of nuts, the silliest, not yet unleashed, would have jumped down with multiple hops and cretinous festive rolls, going to earth, one here, one there, in God knows what corners under the beds: had it not, in fact, been for the hole, that is to say the imprint of the body in the bed itself. But they were screwed. All together, they