That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [42]
The handsome Giuliano! Too upset, he had seemed, too nervous, and too depressed, at the same time. He was on the verge of breaking down. He couldn't manage to maintain the proper composure. "How can you be so calm?" Don Ciccio had asked him: it was a trap. Anything but calm. "They're open-handed; they don't count the change. Ah!"
Liliana Balducci was very rich, Liliana Balducci nee Valdarena. She had money of her own and, to some extent, she was mistress of it. An only child. And her father had had a gift for coining money. Even Doctor Fumi, in the vast din of this whole symphony, had picked out the theme, "the motive," the Leitmotif.
"Her old man knew his onions, all right. During the war, and during the post-war, too. He was a real, a no-bones-about-it shark. He had died, too, a couple of years ago, some time after the daughter got married. The apartment in Via Merulana was his property. Business deals, partnerships, investments here, there and everywhere. Owner of this, part-owner of that. Lending money on mortgages, mortgaging to buy up. He must have been a real son of a bitch." He accompanied this sermon with some twirls of his right hand. Liliana had referred vaguely to her father's fortune, on San Francesco's day, during that happy meal.
As for the Valdarena relatives, Doctor Fumi had taken care of them. First Pompeo went to call: a long tramp it was, and no results. Then the sergeant: nothing. Finally the relatives themselves came to see Fumi. So he had given them the full treatment; he had handled them, in his way, touching them first here, then there, with great gentleness, swaying his head as if he were reciting a poem: with those eyes, with that voice of his, Fumi, if he had wanted, could have been a five-star criminal lawyer! A real tear-jerker!
Giuliano's mother no longer lived in Rome: a handsome woman, they said. Pompeo had codified the registerial information that had emerged relative to the relatives. A native talent, refined by excellent practice in the art and by the necessity for saving time, for abbreviating the long chains of procedural syllogisms, eye, ear and nose, at the service of the old gray matter, assisted by an occasional roast-beef sandwich, had made him a master of delineating with a few strokes, a couple of hard and fruitful knocks, the most entangled family trees of the whole repertory. And with the most edifying details.
When it came to women, especially, and exploiters of women, love, lovers, true marriages and false ones, cuckoldom and counter-cuckoldom, Pompeo was supreme, you might say. Certain smart-ass bigamists or polygamists, with all their troubles and poly-troubles, and with all the mess of the respective kids whom they sort of wanted sometimes and then maybe didn't want—well, in all that muck, he slipped in and out with the ease of a taxi driver. His necessary association with the underworld, his abbreviated investigation, obtained by his intuition of those "family status" questions, had brought him to such a pass that, on a moment's notice, he could give you all the "cohabitations," let's say, from Via Capo d'Africa to Via Frangipani, and as far as Piazza degli Zingari, at Via dei Capocci and Vicolo Ciancaleoni; and then down, past Piazza Montanara —not even worth mentioning—to Via di Monte Caprino, and Via Bucimazza and Via dei Fienili: the things that man knew! Or the neighborhood of Palazzo Pio, that other pesthole, and in all those alleyways behind