That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [56]
After some slightly embarrassed or, at least, very cautious preamble, as the softer glances of Doctor Fumi led him on to speak, he said that: he had been out of Rome, visiting certain friends at Roccafringoli, at the very top of the mountains, at Monte Manno almost, which you reach from Palestrina on donkey-back, and having come back from there a mere twenty hours ago, "as soon as I heard of the terrible event," he had hastened to bring here the holograph will, entrusted to him by the "late lamented" Signora Balducci with her own hands, whom he had also "gone to visit" the evening before at the morgue, "may she rest in peace."
"At first," he stated, still deeply upset and horrified by the "thing," he had had reason to fear . . . that the document had been stolen from him. He had hunted for it all over the place, turning out all his papers, from all the drawers in his study: but he hadn't been able to dig it up. At night, all of sudden, it had come to him: he had deposited it with other envelopes and with certain . .. certain personal mementoes, in the Banco di Santo Spirito. In fact, this morning he had gone there, the moment they opened, just after he said the six o'clock Mass. His heart had been pounding, at times.
From that black calfskin case he took out and handed to Doctor Fumi—who received it with his very white hand —a white, fairly large, square envelope, with five seals of scarlet sealing wax. The envelope and the seals seemed to be in perfect order: "Holograph Will of Liliana Balducci."
The three officials, or rather Doctor Fumi and Ingravallo, decided to open it forthwith: and to read the "last wishes of the poor lady": dictating a report in the presence of Don Corpi and of four witnesses, in addition to Balducci, who had been called in again. Last wishes, which still must date back to a couple of months ago: last, since they had remained unchanged.
First of all, and by telephone, they consulted the royal notary Doctor Gaetano De Marini in Via Milano: 292.784: who, according to Don Lorenzo, "must know about this matter." After some calling and recalling, finally he answered. He was deaf. A Neapolitan secretary assisted him at the receiver. Both of them were dumfounded. Balducci knew De Marini, to whose services both he and Liliana's father had on many occasions had recourse: but he "felt that he could rule out the notion" that, for her personal will, Liliana had gone to that old cockroach, likable and sly, but horribly deaf in the fortress of his competence.
To act as witnesses, two clerks and two policemen were called in. The ceremony was quickly carried out: it was noon, or almost: another morning had drifted by, without their resolving anything.
The will, as Doctor Fumi went on reading it aloud, in vivid accents, with Neapolitan resonances from the four corners of the ceiling, gradually revealed an unforeseeable turn: as if it had been drawn up in a state of particular emotion by a person whose pen was running away with him, a person perhaps not in full control of his faculties. From that soft, warm, suave reading, effectively conducted in the most harmonious Parthenopean tones, the listeners present realized, with mounting interest and with mounting wonder, that the poor Signora Balducci was leaving her husband heir to the lesser part of her substance, with some gold objects and jewels: the strictly legal share, so to speak: almost half. A conspicuous portion, on the other hand, fell to "my beloved Luigia Zanchetti also known as Gina, daughter of the late Pompilio Zanchetti and Irene Zanchetti nee Spinaci,