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By Root 1366 0

legs a little, around eleven, rather than tangle up his soul and his ears with the confused and groping reports of some subordinate. Gaudenzio and Pompeo were occupied elsewhere. "Those who want to go, go; those who don't want to, send . . ." The number and the series of the ticket, the hole on the date, the 13th, and the tear at the stop, Torraccio, had happily allowed him to establish the day, hour, car where the ticket was sold; he had also been able to interrogate the conductor who had sold it, summoned to the manager's office with the driver, the morning of Ingravallo's second visit. At Due Santi, Torraccio, Le Frattocchie, last Sunday, in the early afternoon, a number of people had got on: a crowd. It was impossible for the two men to remember everybody: some of them, yes, and they indicated the more easily recognized customers: not without some bickering between driver and conductor, confusing Sunday with the day before or the day after. The conductor, Merlani Alfredo, denied having seen a young man in an overall, blue or gray. "With a cap pulled over his eyes?" No. "With a scarf around his neck? A scarf?" Yes . . . that he had ... "A kind of scarf or a big muffler of green wool? . . ." Yes, yes. "Green like dark grass." He warmed to the question. He had been struck by the fact, as he gave him the ticket, that the scarf was all wrapped around half his face, his customer's: "he had his chin inside," as if it were God knows how cold, the 13th of March, at Torraccio. No, he didn't have a cap. Bareheaded, yes, but with his head bent over, not looking you in the face: a great clump of hair, all rumpled up, and nothing else. He didn't know who he might be. No, maybe he wouldn't even recognize him again. That was all he could say.

It was eleven now. Officer Ingravallo was about to get on the tram, at the corner of Via d'Azeglio. The few cars at the disposal of the police were wandering over the seven hills, or busy in the forums and squares, or on the Pincio or the Gianicolo, idly, or perhaps to amuse those gentlemen of the era of the hejira, the big shots with the fezzes: or they stole a nap at the Collegio Romano, like so many hacks, but always ready to take the brass for a ride: you never know. There were great visits in those very days from the plenipotentiaries of Iraq and chiefs of the General Staff of Venezuela, a coming and going of people plastered with medals: poured out in shoals at Naples, down the gangways of every hoarse-voiced ocean liner.

These were the first explosions, the first tremors in Palazzo Venezia, after a year and a half of novitiate, of the Death's Head in frock coat or in morning clothes: the grim looks were already there, the vomiting stream of words: the period of the black derbies and the dove-colored spats was, you might say, about to come to an end: with those short little toad-arms, and those ten fat fingers that hung at his sides like two clumps of bananas, like a black minstrel's gloves. The glorious national destiny hadn't yet had room to show itself, as it would later, in all its splendor. Margherita,{6} the nymph Egeria now reduced to playing Dido Abandoned, was still launching the Novecento, the neuf-cent, modern art, the nightmare of the Milanese of the time. She attended the vernissages, the launchings, the oils, the watercolors, the sketches, insofar as a gentle Margherita can attend. He had tried on the feluca, five felucas. They fit him to a T. The glinting eyes of the hereditary syphilitic (also syphilitic in his own right), the illiterate day-laborer's jaws, the rachitic acromegalic face already filled the pages of Italia Illustrata: already, once they were confirmed, all the Maria Barbisas of Italy were beginning to fall in love with him, already they began to invulvulate him, Italy's Magdas, Milenas, Filomenas, as soon as they stepped down from the altar: in white veils, crowned with orange blossoms, photographed coming out of the narthex, dreaming of the orgies and the educatory exploits of the swinging cudgel. The ladies, at Maiano or at Cernobbio, were already choking