• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1325 0

from masculine to feminine and vice versa: with disturbing alternations of impasto: from the Duke of Mantua to Gilda, from Rodolfo to Mimi. For the rest, in the home of Sergeant Santarella, there were women: and women there would be. Malicious-minded men and, even more, women, said that despite the nine women, the eighteen dainty shoes with eighteen women's heels that clicked about in the hours of domestic loisir . . . among the . . . domestic walls, in the presence of the domestic lares, who were two fine plaster cats over the unlighted fireplace, delivered, poor Toms, of a male from Lucca, they said, oh yes, while the gramophone from Via Zanardelli ladled into his soul for the twenty-third consecutive time the tiny frozen hand, for him and the whole neighborhood, they said, yes they did say, that he had a weakness for some of the niece-apprentices of Zamira, the dyer of I Due Santi. Well, he liked a bit of skirt, Sergeant Santarella did, like all sergeants.

An expert in the art: only logical. At the right moment he knew how to close his eyes. Or open the both of them, on the other hand.

A marvelous mien: his face full, reddish-tanned in cheeks and nose, blue-black where his shaven beard virilized it.

The generous skin of the Italics, in their baked harvests, in July, in the thresher's sun: scorched, to use Carducci's word. A health like a country horse trader. Those stiff mustachios a la Wilhelm II. That heavy pistol on his left hip, weighing six pounds. He made hearts fill with joy at the very sight of him. The girls, on certain moonlight nights, dreamed of the sergeant. Certain seedy bums with all the poverty of the imminent Empire upon them, certain down-at-the-heel bicycle thieves, dopes who lounged around the streets and dives all day long, at night to labor, were overjoyed to allow him to handcuff them, to be "put inside" by him. When he arrived, goddamnit-to-hell, they could draw breath: their anxiety was over, their danger: it was an end to sweating and running, to fiddling around, jumping at the slightest sound, at the suspicion of a gate's distant squeak: breaking locks, your heart in your mouth: there now, all suffering was at an end: they were seized with joy again, in their hearts, poor boys! their faith in the morrow was restored. They were so pleased, just to see him, that they forget their sad obligation, damn the judge: the obligation to escape with their haul, and—what was worse—with their tools, too, and overloaded: after so much labor, to have to take to your heels, too! So it goes. They greeted him with a glance, with a little laugh of understanding, a laugh that means "between us . . .": they made him spontaneous gifts of whole bunches of picklocks, skeleton keys, whole assortments of jimmies. They asked him, respectfully, for his last match: to light, voluptuously, their last butt. Aaaaah! Ah! they said, exhaling, with voluptuousness in their throats, or expelling the smoke through the nose: "Ah well, all right, you know how it is," they said: and they held out their wrists: there was born in them a sudden longing for the chains on their wrists: as the weary, exhausted man wants only his bed. They held out two light-fingered paws: he could do what he pleased with them: dazzled by that darkened face, by those steady, black, piercing eyes: by those red stripes, on his trousers, those silver chevrons on his sleeve: by that white calfskin bandoleer like the banner of authority, inquiring, pursuing, handcuffing: by that V.E. in the silver grenade on his cap: by that paunch, by that ass. Yes, ass. Because he turned, he spun, raged, then again wheeled around, planted that pair of eyes on the face of one and of all, mustache erect, pointed, like two nails, and black: he acted, deliberated, telephoned, click, clickety, click, yelled into the receiver, asked for the reinforcement of the two privates from headquarters, imparted orders: which all obeyed, that's the beauty of it, and in a kind of algolagniac frenzy, of masochist voluptuousness: caught in the magic circle of the V.E., in the gravitational ellipse