as her educational restriction operated, the first evidence then the gradual exacerbation of a delirium of solitude: "rare in a woman," Doctor Fumi interjected softly: "and in a Roman woman even more . . .": "yes, we like our company, we Romans," Balducci agreed: and that need, quite to the contrary, to rest in spirit against the physical image of another, on the visible geneticizing of people, and of the poor: that mania ... for giving double sheets to the maids, giving them a dowry at all costs, urging to marriage those who wanted nothing more: that notion of wanting to cry, then, and to blow her nose, that gripped her for whole days, poor Liliana, when they really did up and marry: as if, when it was done, she felt envious. An envy that gnawed at her liver: as if they had done it to spite her, marrying, and to say then: "Look at me: after four months, a kid on the way! Our little boy weighs eight pounds, he gains two pounds a month." On certain mornings all it took was for some woman friend to say: "Have you seen Clementina? What a stomach she has." and Liliana's eyes would be red. "Once she almost made a scene with me, her husband, over a girl from Soriano al Cimino: a peasant who came to Rome on the bus from Viterbo, to bring me a slice of wedding cake. I don't even want to see her, that shameless thing! she yelled. The bride, poor kid, came in with her husband, and with a belly on her like a balloon on the feast of San Giovanni, when they send up fireworks. They said: we brought you some wedding cake. Of course, they were kind of embarrassed. So I said to them, laughing: it looks like the air is plenty healthy, up there on the Cimino: she blushed and looked down at her stomach, like the Virgin when the Angel explains the business to her in the Annunciation: then she got her nerve up, though, and answered: well, Signor Balducci, that's how it goes. We're young. We kind of hurried things . . . When the baby comes, nobody will remember any more, whether there was a priest or not to bless us. But don't worry, now we've been blessed, all three of us." The years! like a rose wasting, the petals falling one after another . . . into nothingness.
It was at this point, with a face the color of ashes, that Ingravallo asked to be excused: for reasons of duty. Information and reports from subalterns: words and written paper: orders to give: the telephone. Doctor Fumi followed him with one eye, as he went towards the door, head bowed, shoulders bent, in an attitude that seemed weary and pensive: he saw him take a pack of Macedonias from his pocket, a cigarette from the pack, the last, plunged into God knows what griefs: the door shut again.
To Don Ciccio, it was as if he had known it, that whole story, for a long time. The impressions and memories that Liliana's cousin and her husband were drawing out, in a kind of tormented salvage operation, from her days now so horribly dissolved, confirmed what he had already sensed on his own, though in a vague, uncertain way.
Also that idea of wanting to die, if a baby didn't come to her: hadn't he "imagined as much," Don Ciccio, or didn't he already believe it a little? Through his acquaintance with Signora Liliana: a little of it had come to the surface with the admissions of the cousin, and now, from the talk of her husband, made loquacious by the tragedy, and by feeling himself the center of attention and of the general compassion (a hunter he was! he felt he had come back with a fine hare, gun on his shoulder, boots muddy, and hounds exhausted), wanting to unburden himself, after the blow: and disputing, freely, on the delicacy of the feminine soul and, in general, on woman's great sensitivity: which among those poor creatures! is something widespread. The word "widespread" he had read in Milan, in the Secolo, in an article by Maroccus ... the Secolo's doctor: smart as a whip!
This posthumous medical chart of Liliana was then filled in by the pity of her woman friends and those whom she had benefited: orphan girls who wept, nuns from the Sacred Heart who didn't weep because they were