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By Root 1326 0

sure she was already in Paradise by now, they could take their oath on it: and Aunt Marietta and Aunt Elvira, in weeds, and a pair of other aunts from Banchi Vecchi, also rather black: and diverse acquaintances, numbering among them the Countess Teresa (la Menegazzi) and Donna Manuela Pettacchioni, as well as some other neighboring ladies from two hundred and nineteen: the two antagonistic trios: Elodia, Elia Bolenfi, Giulietta Frisoni (Stairway B) on the one hand, and on the other la Cammarota, Signora Bottafavi and Alda Pernetti (Stairway A), who also had a brother that counted for an extra six. All of them women with widespread sensitivity then: though of the kind that Liliana . . . kept at a distance. A widespread and delicate ovaricity, that's the word, permeated the whole stalk of their soul: like ancient essences, in the ground and the meadows of the Marsica, in the stalk of a flower: pressed at length until they explode in the sweet perfume of the corolla: but their corolla, these women's, was the nose, which they could blow as much as they pleased. Women all, both in their memories and their hope, and in the hard, obstinate pallor of their reticence and the purple of their non-confiteor: which Doctor Fumi elicited in those days into a mindful analysis, with the tact and the diplomacy which distinguished him throughout his hard-working career (and which have made him today, deserved reward! subprefect of Nucanaro, adnuente Gaspero{24}: or rather, no, better still! of Firlocca, a delightful little place, where he has ample opportunity to display all his fine qualities) and with that warm voice ... the voice that indicated his presence immediately, even before the sound of the bell (room number 4), to the ears of every corporal and every thief, the moment he set foot inside the office.

The funeral, against the expectations, or more precisely, the pale hopes of the police, didn't carry the investigation a step forward; it only increased the gossip. The newspapers wouldn't let up, the thousand, pitying glosses crackled like flames through a field of stubble in October, without arriving at an idea. The cortege left the morgue at the General Hospital at eight A.M., Monday, March 21st: a rather chilly day, considering it was the official beginning of spring, neither foul nor fair, the sky cloudy. The obsequies were respectful and quite private, not to say hastened, in compliance with the desire of the authorities, who in the end were getting annoyed with all that mess. A few priests in the lead, and a bunch of little girls and some nuns, but with "a large affluence of people," as the papers put it, and especially of women, who formed a line that never ended, they took the shortest route along Viale Regina Margherita, which had been extended in that direction about a year before, and at eight-thirty or eight-forty they reached San Lorenzo, Verano, stirring up a bit of dust, since the street there hadn't yet been asphalted, though barrels of tar were already on the site. The authorities were annoyed at the thought that in Rome, in broad daylight, and in the same building, two crimes like that had taken place, the second more terrible than the first. And then, and then: the arrest of Valdarena, seeing how things were going, wouldn't hold water: and the taking into custody of Commendatore Angeloni . . . that hadn't added up to anything either, since the Commendatore, poor man, had nothing to do with it. In justification of the work of the police and of the higher authorities in the ethic state, it must be said, on the other hand, that the very day before, Sunday the 20th, there had disembarked at Naples' Bever-ello pier, at eleven or half-past, the Maharajah of Sherpur, coming from the banks of the Brahmaputra on a visit to the Artificer of the Fatherland's new destiny, and possibly the grave of the two procreators and the birthplace of the same, which is a two-bit hovel, however. With him he had six or seven slobs with chocolate faces, in white silk pants where their legs were lost, despits the fact that the men, too, in