That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [63]
A salary, good as it was, and some percentage on the deals that he handled might allow him, in Rome, to eat, clothe and wash himself, and pay for the fine room and bath at Signora Amalia's: manicures and cigarettes extra: extra his grandmother's fettucine. His women, given his charm, the quality that made Don Ciccio so jealous, apparently didn't cost him very much. "He had many invitations," according to his relatives: and also from his landlady, not herself the owner of the little villa. "Yes, he brought ladies to his room. No, not the lady in the picture. Some ladies of the aristocracy . . ." (so she trilled). Ingravallo drew a breath "mentally" with great circumspection. The room's entry was private. In announcing this prerogative of the room, she, the landlady, assumed a serious, haughty voice, like a building contractor, when he says, "a fine view, three baths."
"Oh, he had invitations everywhere. Because everybody was devoted to him." "Every woman" grunted Don Ciccio, within himself, gazing again into those deep, big eyes of Signora Amalia, circled by two blue crescent moons which were pendants to the two golden crescents she wore in her ears: which, at the first turn of her head, seemed about to go "ding-dong." Like an odalisque of the Sultan.
Ingravallo subjected Valdarena, who had already been heard once that day, to yet another questioning. Night had fallen, it was happast seven. He had lighted, as reinforcement, a "special" bulb, which hung down to his desk. He showed him all of a sudden, without forewarning, the corpora delicti: that is to say, the chain, the diamond ring, the ten one-thousand lire notes, not to mention among these exhibits the photograph of Liliana, which, for good measure, he had left in. Valdarena, seeing that money and those objects on the desk, along with Liliana's picture, suddenly blushed: Don Ciccio had removed a newspaper which was concealing them. The young man sat down: then slowly he stood up: he wiped the sweat from his forehead: he regained his composure: he looked his preyer in the eye. There was a sudden movement of his neck, of his whole head, with a sweep of his hair: as if he had resolved to cast himself into the worst of it. He entered instead the bold, almost eloquent phase, of his own stubbornness and his own apology; he was silent for half a minute, then, "Officer," he shouted, with the haughtiness of one who insists on the legitimacy of a deed, of another person's sentiments which, nevertheless, concerns him: "there's no point in my keeping silent any more, out of fear of what people might say or out of respect for a dead person, a poor murdered woman: or out of shame for myself. Liliana, my poor cousin, yes, she was very fond of me. That's all there is to it. She wasn't in love with me, maybe . . . No. I mean . . . not in the way another woman, in her place, would have loved me. Oh! Liliana! But if her conscience" (sic) "had permitted her, the religion in which she was born and raised . . . well, I'm sure that she would have fallen in love with me, that she would have loved me madly." Ingravallo turned pale. "Like all the other women."
"Yeah, like all the others."
Valdarena didn't seem to notice this. "The great dream of her life was . . . was to join herself to a man," he looked at the glowering Don Ciccio, "to a man, or maybe even to a snake, who could give her the child she had dreamed of: 'her' child, the baby . . . she had waited and waited for, in vain, in tears. She wept and prayed. When she began to realize that time was passing and nobody could stop it, then . . . poor Liliana! In her emotional state she wouldn't recognize her own incapacity: no, she didn't admit it. And yet, without saying it outright, without putting it into words, she used to imagine, to dream that with another man, perhaps . . . Believe me, Doctor, there's a kind of physical pride, a vanity of the person, of the viscera. We