That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [148]
"You've got to come to headquarters for a minute; if you keep your mouth shut, nobody'll notice! These are two plainclothesmen, but if you'd rather, I'll take you in myself, without disturbing them to come along as escort. You're Lanciani, Ascanio Lanciani, if I'm not mistaken." So, to avoid any fuss, he had to abandon pork and knives, and leave everything to his aunt . . . his grandmother: she was there, hard, erect, with one eye, filled with uneasiness, on the crowd, which went by, ignoring it all. He had an order to take the boy to headquarters, Blondie notified her briefly, and he displayed his document a second time: "Lanciani Ascanio" he added. The grandmother, the owner of the business, a middle-aged peasant woman, her hair still black, much thinner, in her wooden and wrinkled face, than her trade should have warranted, seemed uncertain what attitude to adopt: consternated no, but cross: "this boy hasn't done anything wrong, not a thing," she said, "why do you want to take him away?" Requested by Blondie in a low voice, she uttered her own name and surname, address, and showed him her license for the stand. She added, though without any enthusiasm, that she was a young aunt of Ascanio's Mamma. Blondie wrote this data on a piece of paper with a stub of pencil, then pocketed it. They looked like three cousins conversing: nobody paid any attention to them. They were from Grottaferrata, the grandmother admitted, reluctantly: the neighborhood of Grottaferrata, a little settlement known as Torraccio, after le Frattochie: but they had come to Rome eight years ago, yes, near Porta Latina, in the midst of the vegetables, you might say, a country road where there was barely a sign with Via Popolonia written on it, "it's where the truck farmers live, in the sheds. We live there, before the railroad tracks: this way," she gestured, "you can go down through the reeds to the Caffarella swamp."
"A little shed in the midst of the broccoli, and we grow artichokes too." Ascanio slept there with them. They kept him out of charity, in exchange for a little help there at the market. His father . . . ha, his father; his brother had been out of a job for two months. "We haven't heard anything from him!" Ascanio, they were trying to help him, poor boy, "the best we can." And she let him go with them, nice and quiet, upon assurance that they would bring him back to her, later. Equally anxious, on their part, to avoid scenes, not only for the customers but for themselves, the two dark-haired angels had moved away from the stand, were waiting farther on: the boy, white in the face after all his shouting, came around the stand, and his new cousin up to his side. This was Blondie's great art: with his head bowed shouldering his way through the crowd, he stumbled, as if by chance, over the character, his character: "Well, look who's here! What are you up to around these parts?" (sotto voce): "Tickling the ass of the working girls, or the men's wallets? If there's a button off their back pocket, then you've got it made: am I right?" Then, peremptory: "Let's go. The chief wants you: he's got something he wants to say to you." He took him by the arm, looking at the ground, as if he had a serious proposal to make to him.
They came out of the confusion towards Via Mamiani or Via Ricasoli: there was a passageway among the stands of the fish-mongers and the chicken-vendors, where they sell the squid and the cuttlefish and all kinds of eels and meals from the sea, not to mention mussels. The character, and Blondie himself, looked at those mushy polyps of a pale, silvery mother-of-pearl (so delicately burnished in their inner veins), sniffed, though involuntarily, the odor of seaweeds from all the cool dampness, that sense of sky and chloro-bromo-iodic freedom, of bright morning on the docks, that promise of fried silver in the plate against the hunger that already could be called profound. Coils of boiled