That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [81]
stove, put into his mouth and hastily chewed the last remains of roast-beef sandwich, which to a great extent he had already managed to lacerate outside, in the corridor. Er Maccheronaro, in Via del Gesù, just a stone's-throw away, never overlooked a chance to demonstrate his friendliness: and he had paved it inside, with three such slices of prime beef that, on first seeing them, he had taken them for three terra cotta roof tiles on a roof in Sampierdarena: nestling one against the other, all three supported by that big beam of double roll, the size of a carpet slipper, Madonna! the kind you can't even remember nowadays, now that the Empire has put its oar in. The panacea of panaceas for his empty stomach, lacking its soup, but already dewy in the gastric juices of an anticipated gratitude and no less predisposed peristalsis. The customers at the counter, seeing that miracle, had been bug-eyed: natural enough: who can say what they were thinking; "Hey, Pompeo, what are you doing over there in that stove? . . . Come here," Doctor Fumi ordered, "you've got to hear this, too." He began and continued in a loud voice, with musical vigor, reading the report of carabinieri headquarters, Marino. When he had terminated, he began to titillate Pestalozzi with questions and, alternately, Di Pietrantonio, with the aid of his great shining eyes, which in the not-bright light of the room, a little each time, he turned, on every face: he mitigated with parallel statements, more and more vivid, more and more narrated (like neighboring little streams) the carabinieresque, buttoned-up discipline of the former and the smart, police alertness of the latter. That discipline is well evidenced, generally, and is operative in a tacit, a hard and cautious resistance in the face of the rival organization of the police.{32} The fact is that, at Doctor Fumi's gently inviting glances, so black, so limpid and melancholy in his pallid countenance—even at night, and in the weak candle-power of Madam Mazda—even at night, and barely descended from the motorcycle, at the marvelous timbre of that voice, the most buttoned-up of carabinieri couldn't resist. Pestalozzi, moreover, having still to catch Retalli, whose scarf alone had remained in his hand, was, in turn, interested in eliciting as much as possible from the five experts of the Collegio Romano: in pumping out the best from Santo Stefano del Cacco's urban cistern: data, various illations, motives for suspicion, well-founded hypotheses, doubts, counsel, the latest news: the final dotting of i's and crossing of z's the final disjunctions of the great deductive wisdom. And then the bloodhound's amour-propre, his pride in taking part in the investigation of the great crime which was on every tongue, from Frascati to Velletri, whose numbers all Italy was playing in the lottery, in all the best and luckiest cities: the Royal Lottery, as it was then, nowadays Lottery of the Republic. So that a kind of police-carabinieri osmosis began and continued to be celebrated in that room number 4, and at that late hour, through the ass's skin membrane of reciprocal distrust, professional jealousy and esprit de corps: a two-way flow of information, a game of do ut des, with amiable phrases, or even lapses into gossip.
Di Pietrantonio was personally acquainted with Sergeant Santarella: not to mention Ingravallo, who was even a distant cousin via various old women, aunts, a chain of godmothers: the chain of relations, repeated in time along the chain of mountains, the harsh Apennine, had traveled up the bitter spine of the boot, up, up, from Vinchiaturo to Ovindoli. And, besides Santarella was the shining eponym of discipline: and of Latial duty. Di Pietrantonio, for his part, knew la Pacori, and Grabber knew her, too: because they had stopped for a drink, in September, at her counter: Zamira! of whose name and whose actions, open or veiled, not to say secret or splendid, legend had become first discoverer or trouvere, then divulgator and trumpeter: from Marino to Albano, from Castel Gandolfo to Ariccia.
Meanwhile Retalli