That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [152]
And he had also obtained permission for gasoline, In-gravallo, playing his cards and then, all of a sudden, bang, ace of trumps, he screwed the whole lot of them: he filled it with gas enough to cruise to Benevento and back. Three armed policemen, two with muskets: but no Grabber, ordered off to the Pensione Burgess, nor Blondie either, ordered to Piazza Vittorio: but instead, all nice and thin with his mustache erect, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, who makes four: and he, Ingravallo five: and six, the showfurr, in twenty-seven French words were still allowed.{75} So I don't have to tell you what the car looked like. The Barcaccia from Piazza di Spagna out for a drive. It sped, as it could, with its tires swelling, soft as they were, and at the first stone they encountered, they already wanted to blow up: the clutch went crack at every street corner, at every dog that crossed their path. At Via Giovanni Lanza, under repair, it tangoed and rocked through the potholes for more than a hundred yards, spattered muck against the legs of the passers-by, even those on the sidewalk: parabolic slabs of liquid mud, opalescent against the pink lights of the morning which, nevertheless, was darkening: it plunged, re-emerged, and looked as if it had been repainted: a nice nut-colored bath, it had had. At Largo Brancaccio, as they were turning into Via Merulana towards Piazza San Giovanni, Ingravallo looked, grimly, to his left: he rolled down the window, Santa Maria Maggiore, with the three dark arches of the loggia over the narthex, seemed to follow, with the afflatus of charity of her plebs, a bier that had sprung from her own womb. Designed and constructed enunciation, artful, on the summit of what must have been, in the distant centuries, the "hill," the Viminal, the seventeenth-century architecture of the basilica, as if of a sumptuous dwelling of thought, had its roots in the shadow, in the darkness of the straight descending street and in the tangle of all its offshoots: a hint, the cuspidal campanile, beyond the tangle of branches and foliage that flanked it. But over the brick of that romanesque little tower, the sky was prepared for its decoration. Don Ciccio stuck out his head, tried to raise his eyes towards the clouds, for the day's forecast. All the clouds could be seen running: a flight of horses; they crossed the clear broad stripe, blue at moments, of the sky, between the two parallel rain pipes: they rushed off God knows where, prompt cohorts. The plane-trees and the boughs of Merulana were a forest, as the car turned, a tangle to the eyes, on the parallel descent of the lines which nourished the trams: still skeletal in March, with already a merely skin-deep languor, nonetheless, a kind of itch within the happy, street-lining clarity of their bark, made of scales and patches: dry leather, white calf, silver: the undergarment the color of a tender pea's skin, amid the bustle of the people, the coming and going of wagons and bicycles. And emerging then from the boughs, and already awakened at a hint of purple, the campanile "of the ninth century" seemed to warm in the sun's ray: to waken, at that tepidness, the dozing bronzes, which, at any moment, would then officiate. Trapped within its cage, the heavy bell of the scholars began to sway in its turn, slowly, slowly, with a trembling almost unnoticed at first, with a rumble still suspended in the heavens, like that of a metallic wing. The wave spread happily through one's thoughts, over the balconies, the closed windows of the houses vibrated with it, every most sleeping window. An old grandmother on a swing, who rhythmically took in air: and grated forth her soft whisper, a little watery at every new thrust, and one