That Awful Mess on the via Merulana Read Online Free PDF

patient in all things: prudent and patient. Don Lorenzo Corpi was a good soul whom one could trust completely. And "prudence" was one of the four cardinal virtues.
    All this Ingravallo had partially sensed and partially filled out with some hints of Balducci's, or with these gentle "moments" of her sadness: and the name of Don Corpi, Don Lorenzo, Don Lorenzo Corpi often shone, too, in Signora Liliana's conversation. To hell with Don Lorenzo! One would have said that in every big man she venerated ... an honorary father, a potential father, even in Don Lorenzo, yes, despite his black cassock, despite the sacramental incompatibility, of the two sacraments which were ... divergent.
    Even in Don Lorenzo. Who must have been something of a tower of strength, that mule. One of those men, to judge from certain remarks of hers, who have to stoop every time they go through a door. At least he must have had the δύναμις of a father. Don Ciccio was rather well-versed in such matters: a vivid intuition, and dating from his years of puberty: opened afterwards to all the demotic encounters of his race, "fertile in works and brave in arms" (to quote D'Annunzio): native genius rather than systematic course of reading. From the dense teeming of generations, from police station guard rooms, from Latium to Marsica, from Picenum to Sannium, or even to his own Molisan hill: hard mountains, hard heads, hard luck! And the holy, unremembering validity of the matrixes. Among his people, rich in children, he had been able to distinguish the facts of prolification from those of non-prolification. What began to amaze him, nonetheless, was that the reservoir of Bal-ducci's nieces was brimming with such buxom or such sweet nieces: or at least, this present one was sweet, while the others simply stupendous. In the time that he had been seeing this couple, he had already met three or four. And there was another thing: once a niece was off the scene, it was as if she had died. She never came to the surface again. Like a consul or the president of a republic, when his term has expired.
    Don Ciccio was about to glimpse the bottom of the last, so-to-speak, chalice—an extra-dry white, five years old, now, from Cavalier Gabbioni Empedocle and Son, Albano Laziale, something to dream of even at the station, the wine, the glass, the father, son, and holy Lazio—when the burden of his private opinions on the affective (he even said erotic) concomitant causes of human events led him to consider, obviously, that a niece in such conditions wasn't an ordinary niece, a Luciana or an Adriana, who comes today to the city to stay with Auntie and Uncle, then goes away, then comes back, then telegraphs, then leaves, then reaches home, then sends a postcard with love and kisses, then is in town again from Viterbo or from Zagarolo because she has to see the dentist again, and so on and on.
    "This here's a more mixed-up kind of a niece," he muttered to himself, with that white wine back in Porta Paradisi still tickling his velum pendulum. Yes, yes. Behind that noun "niece" there must be hidden a whole tangle ... of threads, a cobweb of feelings, of the rarest and most . . . delicate nature. She. He. She, out of respect for him. He, out of regard for her. So she dug up this niece, after years: suffering and weeping at night, and during the day candles to Sant'Antonio in all the churches of Rome: and hopes, taking the cure at Salsomaggiore, and other cures at home, and examinations by Professor Belt-ramelli and Professor Macchioro. And with each new candle, a hope. And with each new hope, a new doctor.
    She dug up this Gina, poor Ginetta! But before Ginetta the story had quite a different direction, a different flavor. A strange thing, indeed it is, thought Ingravallo.
    Virginia! (her image was a flash of glory, a sudden thunderbolt in the darkness): and before Virginia, that other one from Monteleone, what was her name? And the maids! Of course they flutter off like