That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [44]
Doctor Valdarena had been searched as soon as they brought him in; nothing had been found on him: nothing of a suspicious origin. But he had had plenty of time, between nine A.M. and twenty after ten, to go out and stash his loot in a safe place, and to come back (but, but the notion was a bit risky, to tell the truth) . . . after Cristoforo and Gina had gone off about their business, and before he had called for help, at ten-twenty . . . Well, yes, more than an hour had gone by, at the very least. The concierge Pettacchioni was busy up above, way up in the clouds. With her broom and bucket: and with her tongue, too, you could bet on that. At that hour, judging by Pompeo's report, she liked to drop over to B, where her mainstay was la Bolenfi, or Sbolenfi, still in her slippers. Ingravallo, with one hand, rooting a bit among the papers: "Elia Gabbi, widow Bolenfi," he recited, with firm assurance.
Higher still than the widow, on the top floor, there was General Barbezzo. Ingravallo, promptly, plucked him out, too, from all that paper, like an old black hen, cluckcluck-cluck, might snap up a fat worm: with a single peck, never missing, even in a mountain of manure. Again he recited: "General Grand'Ufficiale nobleman Ottorino Barbezzi-Gallo, retired: age? hah! from Casalpusterlengo. To hell with him."
So he was a nobleman, as well. From what Grabber had hummed in an ear, a very distinguished gent, a widower, with his beard divided in two, looking like some de luxe brush: but his gout (according to Sora Manuela) made him suffer the torments of hell. Why, the doctors had forbidden him to set his feet on the ground: celestified, perforce, into his own empyrean. A nice little collection to console himself: fourteen or fifteen of the finest bottles, kind that take your breath away, at one gulp. A perfect gentleman, though: he wore two carpet slippers, that looked like elephant's feet. A gent. Sora Manuela, in the odd moments of leisure granted her from her concierge-ship, used to perform for him certain domestic services. She did little odd jobs ... in the morning, too, while he was waiting for the maid to come; the maid came in late, at noon, but with the marketing already done. A man living by himself, and helpless like that! But she didn't want the tenants to know: and naturally, vice versa, all of them knew it. She claimed she had things of her own to do, up on the roof. The roof, as all know, is the realm of the washing to be hung out. Well, on certain windy mornings up there, she seemed ready to fly away herself, like a plane from the launching deck of an aircraft carrier. With those four bombs she had attached to her, one pair fore and one aft.
"I'm up here. I'm hanging out the wash!" she yelled to the building's sleepers. She sang like a girl of eighteen. The kids, at times, called her from down below: from the fabled well of the courtyard. "Hey, Sora Manue, somebody wants you! Come on down!" When they didn't go to school. Her husband was kept very busy, at the Fontanelli Milk Company. She came down, ker-plonk, ker-plonk, her cheeks flushed: that wind! all hundred and twenty-nine steps. With her breath smelling of anise. A breeze in itself! She descended, in a word, from heaven. A heaven of anisette. "Don Ciccio!" and Ingravallo turned the page. According to the more reliable, among the many and melodiously whispered rumors of number two hundred and nineteen, so promptly picked up by Grabber, it seemed . . . yes, in short, that she and Barbezzi-Gallo, from time to time, after a good swig of the old Barbezzi's gall, well it was only natural, they felt the need to exchange