That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [3]
But greater suspicion is focused on a nephew of the murdered woman, who must explain his possession of a gold pendant containing a valuable stone that belonged to the victim. This investigation soon shows every sign of being a false lead. The inquiries about the robbery, on the other hand, seem to garner more promising information, as they move from the capital to the Alban Hills (and thus become the responsibility no longer of the urban police but of the carabinieri) in search of a gigolo-electrician, Diomede Lanciani, who had visited the eager widow. In this rural setting we rediscover the traces of various girls on whom Signora Liliana lavished her motherly attentions. And it is here that the carabinieri find, hidden in a chamber pot, the jewels stolen from the widow.
The description of the jewels is not simply an outburst of virtuosic writing; it adds to the rich depiction of circumstances—beyond the linguistic, phonetic, psychological, physiological, historical, mythical, gastronomic, and others—yet another level, a mineral, plu-tonic level of hidden treasures, bringing geological history and the forces of inanimate matter to bear on the sordid story of a crime. And it is around the possession of these precious stones that the knots of the characters' psychology or psychopathology are tightented: the violent envy of the poor, along with what Gadda calls the "typical psychosis of the frustrated woman" that led Liliana to bestow gifts on her protegees.
We might have been brought closer to the solution of the mystery by the first version of the novel, published in installments in a literary review in Florence in 1946, but the author suppressed a crucial fourth chapter when the novel was prepared for publication in 1957, precisely because he did not want to show his own hand too clearly. In this chapter, Ingravallo questions Liliana's husband about his affair with Virginia, one of his wife's "adoptive daughters." The sapphic atmosphere enveloping Signora Liliana and her gynaeceum is underlined, and the girl's character reveals lesbian tendencies, as well as amorality, cupidity, and social ambition (she had obviously become the man's lover to blackmail him later); there is evidence of a fit of blind, violent hatred as she utters obscure threats and slices into a roast with a kitchen knife.
Is Virginia the murderess then? Any doubt this raises is resolved by the posthumous discovery and publication of a film treatment that Gadda seems to have written at about the same time as the first draft of the novel. Here, the plot is developed and clarified in every detail, and we learn that the jewel thief is not Diomede Lan-ciani but Enea Retalli, who, rather than allow himself to be arrested, fires on the carabinieri and is killed. This treatment was ignored when Pietro Germi made a film from the novel in 1959 without Gadda's collaboration, and it was never considered by producers or directors. Their indifference is not surprising: Gadda had a rather ingenuous notion of writing for film and relied heavily on dissolves to reveal characters' thoughts and further the action. It makes interesting reading as a sketch for the novel, but it creates no real tension either as action or as psychology.
In other words, the problem is not "who done it." From the first pages of the novel, we are told that what determines a crime is the "field of forces" that emanates from the victim's situation as it relates to the situations of others in the complicated web of events: "that system of forces and probabilities which surround every human creature, and which is customarily called destiny."
Rome, March 6, 1984
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD
THERE is hardly anything about Carlo Emilio Gadda that is not contradictory. Stately and courtly, he lives in a lower-middle-class apartment house in Rome, where the yelling