That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [48]
"Make the client fall in love. That's the whole story. Hammer the truth into his head: the great nail of truth! That's all. Doctor Valdarena, when it comes to hammering, has shown plenty of talent. Then, when the day comes that they've fallen in love and have given our Transformer B a try, it's very hard, believe you me, for anybody else to seduce them away, to make them unfaithful to us! And all screwing aside, those who love us, follow us ... as the Great Man says . . . so . . . How about a cigarette?" "Thanks." "So, I mean, they pay. They pay up, without saying another word."
"They pay. They pay," grunted Don Ciccio, in the solitude of his own, interior forum.
IV
AFTER twenty-two hours of general uneasiness Balducci arrived, on the 18th: unforeseen engagements, he stated. Meanwhile the police stations had been alerted: Milan, Bologna, Vicenza, Padua. It was, for Ingravallo and for Doctor Fumi, a real relief. If it had turned out that Balducci had skipped, the investigations would have had to be extended over half the peninsula, with a slow monsoon of telegrams.
And the mess, already fairly tangled up, would have become utterly snarled. But Balducci, miraculously unaware, got off the train at eight, the collar of his overcoat turned up, his face anything but ruddy at that moment and a bit smudged to boot: with his necktie loosened, and with a look as if he had slept, in discomfort and over interminable jolting, profoundly. He and the train had kept faith with the telegram, which for the rest had been vague. But the only through train coming into Rome Station at eight was the one from Sarzana: which at its final creak and the successive blocking of the breaks was on the dot, as clocks under the roof of the platform and beside the gate waited open-mouthed, observing the new orders from above, gloriously imparted from the Ass on high. The terrible news was broken to him with all due consideration and with all the most opportune toning down, right there by the train, as other travelers, at the windows, were still fighting over the porters, with shouts imperious or imploring, and the porters assumed the tone of their finest hour: Swiss and Milanese in arrival: good, sound luggage; it was broken to him by his wife's relatives who had come there on Ingravallo's invitation, some dressed in black, some merely in dark gray: Aunt Marietta at their head, with a black prayer shawl around her shoulders, like a mandrill's ruff, a necklace of little black beads around her neck, a hat like a teacher in a teacher's college, a face like an attorney general. Then, behind her, Zia Elviruccia, with her son, Oreste, the big boy with the big yellow teeth who looked so much like Uncle Peppino, who was, you might say, the spit and image of Uncle Peppino. A funeral face on him, too. There was also the sergeant, in uniform: Di Pietrantonio. When, little by little, they made him understand, Uncle Remo, what had happened, he, poor man, first of all, set his overnight case on the ground: the others, the heavy ones, had already been taken off by the porter. The news didn't seem to shock him so very much. Maybe it was sleepiness, fatigue after those nights in the train. Maybe he was kind of out of his head and didn't even hear what they were saying to him.
In the meanwhile the corpse had been removed and taken to the City Morgue, where they had proceeded to an external examination of the body. Nothing. When it was dressed and laid out, the throat was bandaged, with white gauze, like a Carmelite lying in death: the head was covered with a sort of Red Cross nurse's bonnet, without the red cross, however. Seeing