That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [28]
Don Ciccio, the next morning, was in a terrible humor. It was raining and windy: a harsh, angry northeasterly wind that spun everything crooked, beginning with the priests' cassocks, and the soaked dogs. Umbrellas were powerless. So were the rainspouts of the buildings. From what Pompeo reported to him, it seemed clear that the jewels of Countess Menegazzi were proverbial in the whole neighborhood. Epicized, desired, summoned up at every moment by the envy and the imagination of the women, the kids. They had been fabulizing about them for years. Brides used to say, "Oh, I'd like to have this," and "I'd love to have that," and they touched their throats, or their breasts, or the lobes of their ears as if to toy with a jewel in their fingers, to caress the little seed of a pearl, and they added: "like Signora Menicacci,"[sic] "like the Countess Menecacci." Because she was a genuine countess, she was.
On their stupendous lips that Venetian name swam against the etymological current, that is against the linguistic erosion that had been at work for years. The anaphonesis pierced the undertow with the perforating vigor of an eel, or of certain anadromous fish which can cover miles upstream, up, up, until they drink in again their natal lymph, at the mountain sources of the Yukon, or the Adda, or the Andean Rio Negro. From the latest transliterations of the parish ledgers they returned to the faint guttural of the origins, from Menegaccio to Menego, to Menico, to Domenico, Diminicus, and the "possessive which was of all." Certain maidens little instructed in the deciphering of parish registers stumbled over the name with their Sabellian or Tiberine awkwardness, after two or three heaves, they paused at Menecacci,{4} the kids yelled it, as they rolled about in their games, and the two policemen of the squad, in the presence of Doctor Fumi, had frequent opportunity of pronouncing it, even they, with the most admirable nonchalance.
That name and those jewels, real or imagined, that pile of gold of the "countess" on the third floor of number two hundred and nineteen (stairway A don't forget, because B is a different thing entirely) all along Via Merulana and Via Labicana as far as Sant'Antonio di Padova and San Clemente and the Santi Quattro, had become an epos, now ennobled, which flashed and gleamed, like the flames from greasy paper. For ages. Months, or years. On one occasion, the misplacement of a ring with a topaz or towpats (somebody, out of spite, pronounced it top-ass), which la Menegazzi, or more properly, Menecacci had forgotten in the toilet, solely because she was vain as a goose and equally brainless: she left it, the ring, at Cobianchi's public baths at San Lorenzo in Lucina—you know the place, there around the corner from Palazzo Ruspoli, but sort of underground—and then miraculously she found it again, on the little glass shelf under the mirror of the basin, having previously lighted a candle to Sant'Antonio, having gone over to the church at San Silvestro for that very purpose, and only after lighting it, had she gone back to hunt: on that occasion, and on that same day, when the news became known, various women at numbers 217 and 221 had played the lottery, the Naples series, which specialized in miraculous matters, as everybody knows. In fact, a double combination came out, the very numbers, but at Bari. This can give you an idea of the reputation the countess' treasure enjoyed. "Fama volat," sighed Doctor Fumi, his hand on a stack of red dossiers, "fama volat." It must have flown, on rapid wings, to the ears of that no-good thieving bum.
Of course, the police's first care, especially Officer Ingravallo's, to whom the papers were not ungenerous with the adjective "alert," had been to try to identify and possibly lay hands on the murderer, that is to say "the young man in a gray overall, wearing a cap, and a greenish-brown scarf." The most trusted informers in the light-fingered branch, suitably encouraged, had each made his ritual little trip: they had drained a glass here and there, had then expressed an opinion,