That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [94]
"It was a dirt road: where there was a field . . . and a church, but without any priests in it, it has a long name with tondo in it."
A liar, who got all tangled up in her own lies. Fumi wondered whether she was crazy, or something like it. The tortuous, winding notions of a stupid peasant girl who's lying. After having snapped at her, the four of them, like four dogs at a doe, pulling her and pushing her this way and that in the torment of easy and nonetheless repeated objections, they succeeded in the end in wrenching from her lips the calming lie, the plausible lie: the one which, contradicting or resolving all the previous ones, seemed finally the truth. The "country road," it was discovered, must have been a street (in those days still countrified and solitary) on the Celian hill, amid silent umbrella pines, fields of artichokes and some stables, and crumbling walls and an arch or two, trod, at nightfall, by the wondrous steps of solitude, so dear to lovers: perhaps it was Via di San Paolo della Croce, or more probably Via Delia Navicella or Santo Stefano Rotondo. The arch was that of San Paolo, if not the archway of Villa Celimontana to the side of Santa Maria in Domnica. The "tondo" . . . "without any priests in it," wasn't, could not be, the Temple of Agrippa, where the bloodhounds had traveled in their thoughts, immediately rejecting is since it doesn't stand "in the country." It was instead Santo Stefano Rotondo, deconsecrated, in those years, to permit certain restoration work.
With all these logistics Doctor Fumi had rather lost sight of the gypsy, the bride of the Turin industrialist. The bloodhounds seemed to sink deeper into the mud.
"Tell us about these earrings."
"I didn't see them. But everybody knows about them: two long earrings, like a real lady's." And she repeated, in an obstinate singsong: "her fiance gave them to her, a businessman from Turin: he buys and sells cars: how can I make it any clearer than that?"
"Just skip the clear and the dark . . . clarity is our worry," Doctor Fumi scolded her, his eyes now sleepy in their wrath. Who was she? Yes, this witch, this gypsy. . . Where did she live? What was her address? "Her address. . ." Ines hesitated again. Well, she must have lived somewhere around Pavona: that's what la Mattonari had told her. And that's what everybody said, at I Due Santi. "That girl's lucky: Rome is where girls get ruined: and instead she even got herself a dowry, that's what. And now, whenever she gets the notion, she can marry herself a real gent."
The officials, Doctor Fumi, Ingravallo, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, the corporal exchanged glances. Grabber, perceptive young man that he was, read in those glances a thought: "This girl's trying to screw us. She thinks she's stealing candy from a baby."
Ingravallo seemed tired, upset, annoyed: then absorbed behind a chain of thoughts. Strange analogies, Grabber suspected, unknown to the others, were at work in that brain. There was no apparent connection, but who knows that one didn't exist, who knows but what Ingravallo would guess it, black and silent in his reflecting; there was no trail from the aproned delivery boy, to the thief in overalls, to the unknown murderer, to the big eyes of the gypsy.
"And what about the boy?"
"What boy?"
"Your boy friend, that guappo, that little crook: what do you want me to call him?" Doctor Fumi seemed to encourage her, to invite her to see reason, to speak. Then Ines took fright: she seemed tired, all of a sudden, in her filthy attraction: she seemed to withdraw in shame, to cloak her suffering: with sunken, hollow eyes, her white brow swathed in sadness under that blond hair, so hard, hardened with a bit of dried rain and crassament desiccated in the dust (that hair, all of them thought, from which a green celluloid comb would have extracted gold in the sun), with her lips a bit swollen and as if still chapped, by every gust of March wind.
"His name is Diomede, my boy friend. But