That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [71]
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Sunday the 20th, in the morning, further information from Balducci to the two officials: then to Doctor Fumi alone, when Don Ciccio, shortly after noon, was led to "concern himself with another matter" and preferred "to go out for a moment." In all truth, there was no lack of other matters on his desk. Indeed, the desk overflowed onto the shelves, and the shelves to the files: and there were people coming up and going down, and more waiting outside: some smoking, some throwing away the butt, some hawking and spitting against the wall. All heavy and smoky, the genteel clime of Santo Stefano del Cacco, in a syncretic odor, a little like a barracks or the second balcony of the Cinema Jovinelli: between armpits and feet, and other effluvia and aromas more or less of March, which it was sheer delight to sniff. Of "other matters" there was enough to wallow in, to swim in: and people in the waiting room! Madonna! more than at the foot of the great Tower of Babel. They were hints (and better than hints) of "an intimate nature," the ones proferred by Balducci: in part spontaneously, slipping into them, one would say, the hunter-traveler abandoning himself to that kind of logor-rhea to which certain suffering souls succumb, repenting a little perhaps of their past behavior, as soon as the phase of softening sets in, as the bruise follows the blow: posttraumatic cicatrization: when they feel that forgiveness is theirs, from Christ and man: and a part, instead, drawn from him with the gentlest oral string, through a civil dialectic, through a passionate peroration, a vivid flashing of the eyes, an extracting maieutics and that charitable poppy-heroin, the voice and the gestures of Parthenope and Vesuvius: the action both bland, and the same time, persuasive, ahah! of an amiable type of forceps. And out came the tooth. Liliana, by now, had got it into her head that, with her husband ... she wouldn't ever have any babies: she considered him a good husband, of course, "from every point of view": but when it came to a baby in view, no, not a sign. In ten years of marriage, almost, well! not even the hope: and she had married at twenty-one. The doctors had spoken frankly: it was he or she. Or both. She? To prove it wasn't her fault she would have had to try with another. This is what Professor D'Andrea told her, too. So, from those continuous disappointments, from those ten years, more or less, where her grief had put down such deep roots, her humiliation, despair, tears, from those useless years of her beauty dated also those sighs, those "ah me's," those long looks at every woman, at those who were full, ah! . . . (When hearts heave a sigh, then sorrow is nigh, as the saying goes.) ... at children, at plump maidservants, all leafy with celery and spinach, in their shopping bags, as they came from Piazza Vittorio in the morning: or with their asses in the air, bending over to blow a kid's nose, or to touch him, to see if he's wet through: for those are the moments when you see her at her best, the maidservant, all health, all thighs, from behind: now that it's the fashion to wear such short underpants—if they wear any at all. She looked at the girls, she returned, for a flash, with a note of profound melancholy, the bold glances of young men: a caress, or a benevolent license, mentally bestowed on the future bestowers of life: on whatever seemed to her to contain the certainty, the germinal verity, the kernel of secret growth. Hers was the limpid assent of a fraternal spirit: to those who outlined the pattern of life. But the years were rushing past, one after the other, from their dark stables, into nothingness. From those years,