• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1322 0

his haste, crunch crunch, in a flash everything had disappeared. That morning, needless to say, that Wednesday March 23rd, Feast of San Benedetto the farmer, according to the calendar, "and with such anguirsh for that poor soul on your mind," Signora Celli made the sign of the Cross, "ora et labora pro nobis," she margheritized. "Anguish," grunted Don Ciccio, highly offended, his mouth full of mush: "and the pro nobis you can skip." He choked, his face turned purple: any minute he would shoot it all from his nose, crusts and coffee. "Anguirsh, anguish," the donator trilled, "isn't it the same thing? You've had too much education, Doctor: you're like a school-teacher sometimes." And in the meanwhile she struck him twice on the back, practical woman, and like a sister, helas! lovingly assisting: she, who had become a specialist in rapping (on the hard wood of the door). The doctor wiped his mouth, stood up. He had already intrigued yesterday morning, and then at night before leaving his office, for the car: by telephone, on the switchboard, by direct visit to him who could grant it, and by talk: and again on the phone at eleven in the evening, Assistant Chief Pantanella was discussing it with Commendatore Amabile: he had whispered into his ear, poor man, a whole wind: with considerable hail of angry electrons: he had raised his voice as if he had been speaking to a Turk (Amabile was deaf). The automobile? Yes, sir, he had already made a requisition. Yes! He had asked for it!

And he had—incredibly—obtained it: from a colleague of his: the chief of the political section. Who, foreseeing a slack day, well, two or three fezzes left over from the day before, he had let him have the sedan of the "P" department, albeit reluctantly, and giving himself great airs of having done him a very special favor, a rare gesture of delicacy

"because it's for you, Don Ciccio, you realize . . . Ingra-vallo": as if to indicate that he would expect, one day, a favor in return. For another he wouldn't have done such a favor, no: "not by a long shot." An old hulk of a car, you'd be ashamed to go out in. Rattly and slow, two slabs of corrugated iron for fenders, hand-painted black, all wavy, with drops where the paint had dripped, which swayed and jolted as soon as the car moved, like two cabbage leaves hanging out of the cook's half-empty shopping bag: with one door that wouldn't open, and a handle that couldn't keep the other one shut: one window that wouldn't roll up, and a smashed headlight: so it was even one-eyed: the tires worn down like old shoes, and with so many buboes outside that it looked like an inguinal hernia. It had been, illis temporibus! the highly respected automobile of the Chief of Police of Rome. Fallen into the hands of the gang in the post-March days, and immediately defamed in proportion to the times, the events, and the learning of those young gentlemen whom it had driven around, it told of itself now, in unambiguous terms, its own record of service. Within, one sensed, one sniffed, they must have drunk and toasted, chewed salami, stained their lips with Olevano, "damn good, this red stuff from Rome, it goes down like oil" "sure, castor oil," smoked cheap cigarettes, sneezed, spat, vomited both Olevano and salami.

So that everyone, now, in that car, political or non-political, stuck his head in unwillingly and a cautious shoe after the head, the other shoe still on the ground, and a suspicious, examining eye, nostrils the same: as if, from such muck, vapors could steam forth, conjunctive to the odor, pallors of lemures of more than one three-months'-old dead infant, with the tail all coiled, and the little head of a donkey. Careful, frowning, uneasy. The idea that there had settled in the cloth (of the seats) some organic ejection of the more popularly known variety now obsessed every user: it made fearful the more cautious, and cautious even the bold and heedless, were there any. All of them hesitated a little (very little), scared, each, of his own basic decorum, that is to say the decorum of the seat, of the pants: those