That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [68]
"The daughter-in-law, I know, I know. Aha? Wait. The daughter-in-law? Your father's grandfather—is that what you said? Then the Signora Liliana was ... your aunt?"
"No. Poor Liliana was my second cousin. A generation behind. That's why, perhaps, I liked her so! That's why she was so stupendous!" Don Ciccio listened, glumly, bituminous: "she was the daughter of Uncle Felice: Uncle Felice Valdarena, who was my father's uncle, the brother of my father's father. Liliana and my father were first cousins."
"I see, I see. And so you hid everything? Very carefully?
You were afraid maybe you'd have to share the stuff? share the gold chain .. . with the poor? The way Amedeo II shared his Collar of the Annunziata?"{22}
"Vittorio Amedeo . . ."
"Vittorio, I know, I know. With your poor relations? With some third cousin once removed?"
"Some newly hatched ugly duckling of the younger generation," sneered the accused.
"Or were you afraid that Signor Balducci, the minute he got off the train . . . those presents, all that money . . . might be kind of a weight on his stomach?"
"No, no!" said the accused, with a pleading voice. "She was the one, poor thing. She! I really wasn't thinking of hiding them: but she said to me: mind you, Giuliano, this is between us, our little harmless secret, a secret between cousins . . . like in books! The secret of beauty: aren't we beautiful, the two of us? Of happiness, longed for and not fulfilled. Oh God, what am I saying! And she covered her face with her hands. You'll have happiness. And then the secret ... let me think a minute ... the secret of two good souls: who in a world a litttle better than this one . . . well, would have created other souls. In this world, though, the way it is (Doctor, if you could have seen her! At that moment!), we have to go our separate ways, like the leaves when the wind tears them from the tree. My goodness! she said, what nonsense is coming out of my mouth, today of all days. This is a fine way to wish you all happiness. And you have to have the baby, Giuliano! Forgive me, forgive me. She was crying; then she smiled through her tears; in fact, she started to laugh. Happy, handsome—you have to make him, she said. And blond, mind you. Like you were, when you were a little tyke, laughing all the time, and wanting to wee-wee without turning your back, right in front of everybody!" Don Ciccio felt called upon to rummage among his papers for a moment, on the desk.
"She laughed, and she said to me: what would Remo say, when he comes back! If he knew I was giving presents to a young man! Even if he is my cousin, my handsome cousin who's going to be married. She laughed: who's marrying another girl, poor little me! No, no, you mustn't even tell your grandmother, poor old soul, or your mother, when you go to Bologna: you mustn't tell anybody. Swear! And I swore . . ."
Don Ciccio was in a cold sweat. The whole story, theoretically, smelled like a fairy tale to him. But the young man's voice, his accents, those gestures, were the voice of truth. The world of the so-called verities, he philosophized, is merely a tissue of fairy tales: and bad dreams. So that only the mist of dreams and fairy tales can have the name of truth. And, on the poor leaves, it is a caressing ray of light.
With his toothless grin, with that latrine-like breath that distinguishes him, Common Sense was already mocking the story, wanting to laugh, swine-like, in Don Ciccio's face, spit the round no of the smart-ass at his mop of a police dog not yet named cavaliere. But Thought will not be prevented: he arrives first. You can't erase from the night the flash of an idea: of an idea, slightly dirty, then . . . You can't repress the ancient Fescennine, banish from the old earth fable, its perennial Atellan: when aloft, happy and wicked, swirls the laughter from peoples and from the soul: just as you cannot charm away the individual aroma from thyme or horsemint