That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [20]
Pompeo and Gaudenzio were made to move the dresser. Dust. A yellow straw from a broom. A bluish ticket, slightly crumpled, from a tram. He bent over, picked it up, and unfolded it very carefully, his moonface bent over this nullity: it seemed worn, almost. Tramways of the Castelli, the suburban lines. Punched on the date of the preceding day. Punched apparently (it was torn) at the station of . . . of . . . "Tor . . . Tor . . . Goddamnit! The stop before . . . Due Santi." "It must be Torraccio," Gaudenzio then said, stretching his neck behind Don Ciccio's shoulder. "Is it yours?" Don Ciccio asked the terrified Menegazzi. "No, sir, it's not mine." No, she had had no visitors, the day before. The maid, Cencia, a slightly hunchbacked little old woman, came only part time, at two in the afternoon: to her great disappointment: (her, that is, la Menegazzi's). And therefore she herself straightened up her bedroom, since . . . her poor nerves, ah! doctor! It was already in order, in fact, when, suddenly breaking the silence "that terrible bell" had unexpectedly made itself heard. And besides, in her bedroom, Maria Vergine! how could they possibly think—? In that sanctum of memories, no, no, she never received anyone, never, absolutely no one.
Don Ciccio could believe this easily, but she had a tone and a "Maria Vergine," as if admitting that she could be suspected of the opposite. No, the maid wasn't from Marino, wasn't from any of the Castelli Romani . . . She lived, since time immemorial, in one of the most mangy hovels in Via de' Querceti, halfway along the street, under the behind of the Santi Quattro, with a sister, a twin, a little smaller than she, just a tiny tiny bit. For the rest, he must believe her, they were very pious women. Cencia had a weakness for sugar, true enough, and coffee, too, very sweet. But touch anything . . . no, no, she would never touch a thing without asking. She suffered from chilblains, on her feet and hands, oh yes; there were times when she couldn't wash the dishes, because they burned her so, her hands; she suffered very much, yes, that she did. But not this winter, no, bad as it had been, no sir; the winter before. Very, very pious; kept her rosary in her hand all day long: with a special devotion to San Giuseppe. Don Corpi, too, could furnish information, Don Lorenzo—you don't know him? . . . Ah, a sainted man, that he was: from Santi Quattro Incoronati; yes, because Cencia went to confession to him: at times she did some cleaning for him, lending a hand to Rosa, the titular handmaiden of the rectory.
Ingravallo had listened to all this with his mouth open. "Well? What about this ticket then? This ticket? Who can have left it here? Tell me. The murderer? . . ." La Menegazzi seemed to repel the diligence and the pertinacity of the questioning, unwilling to assume the burden of reflecting: all timid, all dewy with belated hope, in the dream and in the charism of the, alas, barely grazed, not experienced torturings. A polychromatic giddiness wafted from her lilac-colored foulards, her azure mustache, the kimono which was a warbling of little birds (they weren't petals after all, but strange winged creatures somewhere between birds and butterflies), from her hair which was yellowish with a tendency towards a disheveled Titian, from the violet ribbon that gathered it into a kind of bouquet of glory: above the vagotonic sagging of the epigastrium and of the faded face, and the sighs of the alas, avoided, brutalization of her body but not avoided robberization of her gold. She didn't want to reflect, she didn't want to remember: or rather she would have preferred to remember what had carefully not taken place. Her fear, her "disaster" had unhinged her brain, that modicum of her person that could be called brain. She was forty-nine years old, though she looked fifty. The misfortune had come