That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [146]
not only to supper, but more especially to the midday dinner which is their imminent care: the hour of the mozzarellas, the cheeses, the vermi-fugue onions, and the cardoon greens, patiently hibernating beneath the snows, the spices, the first salad, baby lamb. Of people selling roast pork there was a tribe at the stands in the square that morning. Starting with the Feast of San Giuseppe is its season, you might say. With thyme and the bows of rosemary, not to mention garlic, and the side dish or stuffing of potatoes with crushed parsley. But Blondie, his head hanging, allowed himself to be led among the cries and the red oranges by his loose-limbed optimism, whistling softly, or merely pursuing his lips, suddenly silent, casting an eye here or there, as if by chance. Or else he stood still, inconspicuous, his Homburg halfway down his forehead, hands in his pockets, his chilled back under a light-colored and rather lightweight coat, open, and with its two sides drooping in the back till it looked like the tail of a full-dress coat. It was a phony, between-season topcoat, which inclined towards the hairy, and to the soft, and proved worn in many places: it helped create the image of a drowsy wastrel, looking for a butt to smoke. Wrapped in the vortex of invitations and incitements to buy and in all the conclamations of that cheesy festival, he moved slowly in front of the lambish stands, passed carrots and chestnuts and adjacent mounds of bluish-white fennel, mustached, rotund heralds of Aries: then in short the whole herbarian republic, where in the contest of prices and offers the new celery already led the field: and the smell of the burnt chestnuts, at the end, seemed, from the few remaining braziers, the very odor of winter in flight. On many stands yellowed, now without time and without season, the pyramids of oranges, walnuts, in baskets the black Provence plums, polished with tar, plums from California: at the very sight of which water rose in the back of his mouth. Overwhelmed by the voices and the cries, by the shrill com-minations of all the lady vendors together, he reached at last the ancient, eternal realm of Tullus and of Ancus{73} where, stretched on carving boards, prone or, more rarely, supine, or dozing on one flank at times, the suckling pigs with golden skin displayed their viscera of rosemary and thyme, or a knot here and there, green-black, within the pale and tender skin, a leaf of bitter mint, set there as if to lard, with a grain of pepper which the cry praised in the hubbub: "a new little gland lent them in the kitchen, to other markets and to other fairs unknown." It wasn't hard for him there, given the stern wind of optimism which was driving him amid the whirl of women burdened with brimming shopping nets or bags, fringed with broccoli, it wasn't hard for him to recognize, from Ines' description, even at several paces' distance, the character, the trumpeting little kid that he wanted. He looked like a smart one, behind the stand, with a pair of eyes on him! the contrary, at that moment, of the fear and timidity that Ines had exalted, and with a thick mop of hair, supergreased, all to one side: he was standing with his grandmother. At the peak, falling a bit over his forehead, the strands of his hair had become curled like fresh salad after the capricious retouching of his comb, or like the roll of a choppy sea's wave, when it bubbles up for a moment before tangling and receding, and finally abandons the sand. A white apron bundled him up slightly and while he yelled he was sharpening the knives, one long and one short, and at the same time looking at him, Blondie, but without any sign of seeing him: that big, dark blond head, with that Homburg like a dental specialist's which came down over his mug, who had taken his stand at proper distance, hands in his pockets: he was probably somebody who wanted to eat some pork, but if he didn't have any dough, poor bastard, he could die of hunger on the spot. "Get your roast pork here! Pork straight from Ariccia with a whole tree of rosemary in its belly!