That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [57]
Balducci didn't draw a breath: he made a face, as if he had been the guilty one. Or perhaps, more likely, it was the thought of all that good stuff (and how!) heading for Zagarolo. Until the ward reached her majority, the swag was to be assigned, to be administered, to some caretakers or executors, as it were, one of whom was Balducci himself, "my husband Remo Eleuterio Balducci, father in spirit, if not by blood, of the abandoned Luiggia." The mother of Luigia, according to the will, "was condemned by an incurable illness" (tuberculosis, probably complicated by priapomania): from time to time she went on a drunk in Tivoli with her lover a butcher: and it took plenty of pull to keep the carabinieri from sending her forcibly back to Zagarolo: given her "inability to support herself with her own means" and given the circumstances, too: a public scandal. The butcher, it was never quite clear how, managed to hush things up every time: almost certainly with the argument of the "prime fillet" (top quality): which is to say that, to the poor sick woman, his roast beef was much more salubrious than the all-too-thin air of Zagarolo, with the consequent unsatisfied appetite. At other times he beat her like a rug: she coughed and spat blood, poor thing, if not raspberry gelatin: "What did I do, after all?" She had gathered spring violets at Villa d'Este or some March daisies in Villa Gregoriana, just before you get to the waterfall. A future subject of the Mustached-Beast, armed with his Zeiss, exploring with that perfect binocular the whole slope of Venus Slut, inch by inch, from one blade of grass to the next, Teuton fashion, all of a sudden, happens to see under the blazing sun a kind of spider, inhaling-exhaling: a strange clump in the shadow of a great laurel bush, the most Gregorian, according to his Baedeker, of all the bushes of Tivoli: a kind of back, in a kind of digger's jacket: with four legs and four feet, however; two of them upside down. And that back, so full of Macht, seemed gripped by an irrepressible agitation of an alternating nature, metronomic in its cadence. The binoculared seal then thought it his duty to report this to the management—"Verwaltung, Verwaltung! . . . Wo ist denn die Verwaltung? druben links? Ach so! . . ."—which he long sought, in the sweat of his brow, and finally found: and where there wasn't a soul, because they were all home eating or enjoying a little after-dinner nap. Padre Domenico, the following Sunday, thundered at nine A.M. from the pulpit of San Francesco: what a pair of lungs! He had it in for certain shameless women, generally speaking, and he guaranteed them hell, the very bottom: a lodging adapted to them—he triptyched here and there with his head, his fist raised, as if one moment he were addressing Marta, then Maddalena, then Pietro, then Paolo. But everyone understood from his opening roar where he was going to end up: with those eyes bulging and that rage that looked as if he wanted to bite somebody, which then, however, calmed down, slowly, and went straight to strike the devil, where he got it all off his chest: and the devil, without a word, down, crouching, at the fear Padre Domenico inspired: then he climbed up gently towards "the beauties of nature so plentifully lavished by God's Providence on this, your Tibur" as well as the "miracles of art and our national generosity so wisely given to this ancient land by the provident hand of the Roman Pontiff Gregory Sixteenth, after the great telluric cataclysm of 1826 and the fearsome flooding of our own Aniene": when it came to the flooded Aniene he could share the local pride, being a native of Filettino, only a short distance from the river's source and 1,062 meters above sea level. "Today, alas contaminated," both miracles and beauties, "by the pestilential and stinking breath of Utter Darkness: which is always lying in wait: wherever he realizes