That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [29]
The character, as la Menegazzi had described him, must have been a little crook from out of the city, a hick. Only that on Wednesday at nine, Doctor Fumi, glancing a little reluctantly and with a belated yawn over the list (of the lovely ladies pinched the preceding evening), let his eye pause on the information regarding a woman picked up on the Celian Hill, and identified as a . . . seamstress, no fixed address, from . . . from Torraccio. It was the list of the women picked up, after dark, by the various patrols of the "vice squad," which was also sent to him, by routine, for his information. The name of the place, Torraccio, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye, immediately caused him to reflect. He had the woman's card brought him. And the card repeated: Cionini Ines, aged 20, from Torraccio, unmarried: at the "without fixed address" there was a little "x" which meant, yes, really without one: "profession" seamstress (trous.), unemployed domestic: "identification papers" a horizontal stroke of the pen, which meant: no. She had insulted the arresting policemen with the epithet "lousy." "Patrol: Celian-Santo Stefano, San Giovanni Station."
"What's this 'trous.' here?"
"Trousers, Chief. She must sew men's trousers, piecework."
The policemen had caught her in the act. And the act could be classified as begging, four lire (the hard lire of those old days, however) which she had sought and obtained from a passer-by: with whom she had conferred then, standing, for a minute and a half, under cover of the darkness and of Santo Stefano Rotondo, from whom she had detached herself for a moment, at the approach of the fuzz: but the charitable gentleman had vanished just in time (from his point of view).
Doctor Fumi shook his head: a final yawn: he handed the card back to the policeman, the list was returned to its proper pile on the desk. Slim results, to tell the truth. Two or three random arrests, "in the usual places": which were, on this occasion, a dim cafe, a fifth-class brothel in Via Frangipane, and a park bench at Santa Croce. Three characters wearing caps: when your number's up, it's up. The third, in addition to the cap, also had ringworm.
II
THAT morning—Thursday at last!—Ingravallo could permit himself a little jaunt to Marino. He had taken Gaudenzio along with him: then, however, he changed his mind and, at the Viminale, dismissed him, urging him to tend to some other minor matters.
It was a marvelous day: one of those Roman days so splendid that even a Grade Eight government employee— about to hump his way into Grade Seven, however—well, even such a one feels something funny grab at his heart, something pretty much like happiness. He really seemed to be inhaling ambrosia through the old nose, drinking it down into the lungs: a golden sun on the travertine or on the peperino of every church's facade, on the top of every column, where flies were already buzzing around. And for himself, he had planned a whole program. At Marino, there's something better than ambrosia. There's the cellar of Sor Pippo, with a wicked white wine, a four-year-old rascal, in certain bottles that five years earlier could have electrified Prime Minister Facta{5} and his government if the Facta factorum had been in a position to suspect its existence. Its effect was like coffee's, on Don Ciccio's Molisan nerves: and it offered him, moreover, all the verve, with all the nuances, of a first-class wine: the modulated controls— lingual, palatal, pharyngeal, esophageal, of a dionysiac introduction. With a couple or three of those glasses down his gullet, who knows . . . ?
In the two preceding days, on top of everything else— Via Merulana isn't the only street in this world—he had twice gone to the main office of the Tranvie dei Castelli: he liked to stretch his