That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [45]
The vigorous new forces, then effecting in Italian society that profound renewal, were inspired by the ancient severity or at least by the severe faces of the Lictors, but the renewal also was flavored by their endowment of little clubs (staves tightly bound to the handle of the ax, not only emblematic). Now without wasting their strength in philosophizing (primum vivere), they devoted themselves to paving with the most verbose of good intentions the road to hell. Gassi-fied into funereal menace, made Word (and Wind), they conspired with great impetus, in that whirlwind of air and dust they stirred up, to kiss the ass even of the clouds, destroying all separation of powers and also the living being generally known as the Fatherland: the distinction of the "three powers," which the great and modest sociologist of the slightly askew wig, observing the best institutions of the Romans and the wisest and more recent of English history, had isolated with such lucidity. Italy's new resurrection followed a not very clothed (as far as the human species was concerned) renaissance, with the pictorial or poetical forms which the world had hailed as indecent and, at the same time, masterful. And this rebirth clung, with an air of bringing it to the best possible conclusion, to a risorgimento a little too generous in squeezing pathos from the locks of its troubadours, shaggy or bearded, or generously mustachioed, or glorious in their muttonchops or sideburns, all in any case needing—to our taste—the radical attentions of a Figaro with drastic scissors. The effect that this above-mentioned resurrection extracted from its entrails, ruttingly eager at last to dispose of all the dispositions made disposable by political power, was the effect that is found every time: I mean every time that absolute power is assumed, conglomerating the three controls—discerned by Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu with such clear thinking, in book eleven, chapter six, of his little treatise of roughly eight hundred pages on the esprit des lois—conglomerating them, all three, in a single and triply impenetrable and unremovable mafia. In such an event "le meme corps de magistrature a, comme executeur des lois, toute la puissance quil s'est donnee come legislateur. Il peut ravager l'Etat" (did you get that? ravager l'Etat!) "par ses volontes generales et, comme il a encore la puissance de juger, il peut detruire chaque citoyen par ses volontes particulieres": particulieres to it, that is, to the above-mentioned corps. In our case, in the new ravage brought about by a too-fiery remembrance of the ancient cudgels (which, if anything, did their cudgeling in accordance with the law, and not in accordance with mob rule), the telephone was found ready and willing to lend, to the triply powerful mafia, the expert services of a liaison officer, controlled by the zeal and the hypersensitive ears of an official spy. Bureaucratic "urging" could assume that tone and, more, that harshly injunctive, or even imperious character fitting only to the "homines consulares," to the "homines praetorii" of the neo-Empire that was being cooked up. The man who, through his strength, is sure to be right, never for a moment suspects he could be wrong by law. The man who recognizes himself as a genius, a beacon to all peoples, never suspects that he might be a candle to be snuffed out, or a quadruped ass. When one considers a depository, or a commissioner, of the renewed truth, one would never dare think him likely to pee new stupidities with each new day: into the mouth of those who are listening to him, agape. Ah well. The little cascade of official telephone calls, like every cascade with any self-respect, was and is unreversible,