• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1458 0

hour! In the entrance hall and in the porter's lodge there was another little crowd, tenants of the building: the women's chatter. Ingravallo, followed by the concierge herself and by the other two, as well as by the comments of all, "the cops, the cops," climbed up to the third floor, stairway A, where the robbed woman lived. Below, the great chattering continued: the unleashed, fluted voices of the females, emulated by an occasional masculine trombone, which from time to time even drowned them out: like the cows' bent cervixes by the bull's great horns: the crowd's mind gathered the clover of the initial eyewitness accounts, of the "I swear I saw him's"; began to weave them into an epic. It was a robbery, or to be more precise, a case of breaking and entering, manu armata.

It was a rather serious affair, to tell the truth. Signora Menegazzi, a moment after her fright, had fainted. Signora Liliana had "felt unwell" in her turn, as soon as she came out of the bath. Don Ciccio collected and transcribed then and there what he could skim from the explosive jet of this first account: he began with the concierge, granting Signora Menegazzi time to comb her hair and deck herself out a bit: in his honor, one would have said. He had paper and fountain pen, and omitted the "Gesù, Gesù, officer dear ..." and the other interjections-invocations with which the "signora" Manuela Pettacchioni did not fail to flavor her report: a dramatic tale. Her porter-husband, a doorman at the Fontanelli Milk Company, wouldn't be home until six.

"Gesùmmaria! First he rang Signora Liliana's bell. . ." "Who did?" "Why, the murderer ..." "What murderer are you talking about, since there's nobody killed ...?" Signora Liliana (Ingravallo shuddered), alone in the house, hadn't gone to the door. "She was in the bathroom . . . yes . . . she was taking a bath." Don Ciccio, involuntarily, passed a hand over his eyes, as if to shield them from a sudden, too-dazzling brightness. The maid, Assunta, had left a few days earlier for her home: her father was sick, as maids' fathers often are, "especially the way things are nowadays." Gina was at school all day, at the Sacred Heart, at the sisters'; where she had lunch and sometimes even a snack. So, "you see," nobody answered, "it's obvious, of course" then that the criminal rang at Signora Menegazzi's door; yes, right there, on the same landing, just opposite the Balduccis': the door facing, there. Oh! Don Ciccio knew that landing well, and that other door!

La Menegazzi, her hair arranged, came on stage again, with a faint cough. A great lilac scarf around her neck which, at the front, seemed scrawny and withered: a languid tone in all her traumatized person. A rather unexpected negligee, a mixture of Japanese and Madrileno, a cross between a mantilla and a kimono. A bluish mustache on her rather faded face, her skin pale, like a floured gecko, her lips made of two hearts, joined, enamelled in a strawberry red of the most provocative shade, gave her the appearance and the momentary formal prestige of an ex-madam or ex-habituee of some brothel, now a little come down in the world: if, on the other hand, that neo-virginal, stern touch, and the devotion-solicitude typical of the virgo intacta hadn't placed her, beyond precautionary suspicion, in the romantic roster of the nubile, as well as of the respectable. She was, in fact, a widow. The mantilla-bathrobe overlapped the foulard, or rather foulards, not one but two, also powdered and vaguely modulated in their hues, so that the first merged into the second, and the second into the delicate petals— or perhaps butterflies—of that somewhat Castilian kimono. She superimposed her report on that of the concierge, straightening out, correcting. She spoke up, a tremor in her voice, her poor voice, a hope in her eyes. Not perhaps the hope of seeing her gold objects again, but the certainty . . . of the protection of the law, so validly personified by Ingravallo. On hearing the bell, Signora Menegazzi had let out her usual "Who is it?": she now repeated the tone, worried