That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [58]
Having reached the incurable illness part, Doctor Fumi stumbled, coughed: as if there had been a crumb determined to sidetrack into the trachea. Warming to his reading, at a certain point, he had swallowed some saliva the wrong way. Then, on and on, until that fit of coughing seemed about to unhinge his lungs.
His face barely flushed, but his veins swollen on the forehead: the whole machinery distended by a deflagration of inner charges, which however did not succeed in shattering it. He recovered himself: the others had slapped him on the back. Little by little he started up again, with his voice, after all, cleared. Now he seemed, as you listened to him, a defense lawyer, plunging into the grim tones of the peroration, with apparent calm, but portending the worst: waiting to explode at the demoniac motion: "of the abandoned Luig-gia." A tidy sum, forty-eight thousand, to her cousin Doctor Giuliano Valdarena, son of Romolo Valdarena and Matilde nee Rabitti, born et cetera. Item: the diamond ring "left to me by my grandfather, Cavaliere Ufficiale Rutilio Valdarena, as a sacred legacy: and the gold watch chain with the semi-precious fob" (sic: nec aliter) "which belonged to the same." Item: "tortoise-shell snuffbox with gold trim" and finally, some onyx acorns or balls of lapis lazuli, also of agnactic origins: "so that he may remember me, like a sister, who from Heaven will pray constantly for him, and may follow the luminous example of his Valdarena grandparents and the unforgettable Uncle Peppe" (Uncle Peppe, in fact, forced donator to the Fascio of Via Nomentana, was still taking snuff from the tortoise as late as 1925, in Viale della Regina 326) "and may he always follow the paths of goodness, the only paths that can win us, in life and in death, the forgiveness and mercy of God." She hadn't forgotten the old ex-domestic Rosa Taddei, either, a paralytic in the hospice of San Camillo: nor Assunta Crocchiapaini (in reality Crocchiapani: it may have been an error of reading caused by the handwriting, or perhaps merely an oversight on the part of Doctor Fumi), the Alban maiden without any paralysis, crowned by her lofty silence and with dazzling eyes: "for whose flourishing young womanhood I desire and pray for, now and always, the supreme happiness of Christian offspring." She also left Assunta, among other things, six sheets, double-bed size, and eighteen pillowcases: and twelve towels, with fringe, specifying which ones. Various bequests followed, anything but negligible, for several women's charities and institutions: such as the bequest to the nuns of Saint Ursula, to some female acquaintances, to some friends, and to various little girls and babies, "today tender flowers of innocence, tomorrow, with the Lord's protection, blissful and holy mothers for our beloved Italy."
And at last a little purse of twenty thousand lire to the same, listening (without seeming to) Don Corpi, along with an ivory crucifix on an ebony cross, "that he may assist me with his good prayers through the pain of Purgatory to the hope of Heaven, as in this Vale of Tears he has supported me with his paternal counsel and with the doctrine of Holy Mother Church."
"Here's a woman whose like you don't find often!" cried Doctor Fumi, striking two knuckles of his right hand on those poor papers, where the gentle hand of the murdered woman had moved (he was holding them in the meanwhile with his left).
All were silent. Balducci, in spite of those donations, seemed the first to have tears in his eyes. In reality, without going that far, he was showing that he, too, was convinced. The warm, the deductive sonority of the voice, of the phrasing, had persuaded them all: some to accept, some to surrender: as if gathering the aghast souls under the mantle of God's will. A handsome, male Neapolitan voice, when it surfaces from the limpid depths of deduction, like the candid nakedness of a siren from the marine milkiness in the Gajola{21}