That Awful Mess on the via Merulana Read Online Free PDF Page B

sparrows at the first rustling caprice: but the Balduccis, seriously! you might say, had a new one every month. A thought came to him, and a disrespectful word: it was the wine.
    Signora Liliana, since she couldn't dish up any of her own . . . And so every year: the change of niece must have been, in her unconscious mind, a symbol, in place of the one she failed to dish up herself. As for his mother, who had had eight, the real child every new spring. Those born in May are children of August. "A good month!" Don Ciccio thought, "even for cats: the racket they make around here, some nights."
    Year after year... a new niece: as if to symbolize, in her heart, the successive births. "Jedes Jahr ein Kind, jedes fahr ein Kind . . ." that German used to sing to him in Anzio: the one who looked like a seal.
    And he, he, the hunter (Ingravallo looked at him), what does he feel, what does he experience, inside, when the niece arrives in his house, the niece whose turn it is? What had he thought of the various . . . nieces?
    For her, from the Tiber down, there, there beyond the crumbling castles, and after the blond vineyards, there was, on the hills and mountains, and in the brief plains of Italy, a kind of great fertile womb, two swollen Eustachian tubes, streaked with an abundance of granules, the granular and greasy, the happy caviar of the race. From time to time, from the great Ovary ripened follicles opened, like pomegranate seeds: and red grains, mad with amorous certitude, descended upon the city, to encounter the male afflatus, the vitalizing impulse, that spermatic aura of which the ovarists of the eighteenth century wrote their fantastic treatise. And at Via Merulana two hundred and nineteen, stairway A, third floor, the niece re-burgeoned, in the best of cores, there, in the palace of gold.
    The niece! The Alban niece, flower of the eternal Sabellian people. The afflatus of the predators. Yes. There was no need to seize those Sabine women ... so radically! waiting for the night's mediation, the warm flesh of dawn. The Alban women, nowadays, came down to the river-banks on their own. And the river flowed on, and on, overcoming all din, to reach, at the sea's edge, the inexorable, waiting eternity.
    But what about him? Signor Balducci? What did he, the hunter, think of the Alban niece, the Tiburtine?
    The bell rang. Lulu raised hell again. Assunta had gone to the door. After some discussion, in the other room, a young man entered, dressed in a gray suit, not inelegantly cut. He was made to take a seat. "Another cup, Tina,[ sic ] for Signorino {2} Giuliano." He was introduced at once; he introduced himself: "Valdarena." "Ingravallo," grumbled Ingravallo, barely detaching himself from the chair, and barely clasping, almost reluctantly, the hand which the other man extended to him. "Signor Valdarena .. ." Liliana said, dealing with the coffee, the cups. "A cousin of my wife's, Balducci explained, ruddy-faced.
    There was, painful as it is to admit, in Don Ciccio a certain coldness, a kind of prickly jealousy towards the young, especially towards handsome young men, and even more so, the sons of the rich. This sentiment, for that matter, did not go beyond the admissible limits of an internal phenomenon, it would never have influenced his behavior as a police officer; he, no, he was not "handsome"; and he wasn't even able to console himself with that proverb he had heard in Milan from a girl at the prophylactic dispensary in Via delle Oche: "Real men are always good-lookers."
    He felt already, in his heart, a dismay, a voice, una voce poco fa . . . which already whispered in the cells, he himself couldn't have said whether in the cells of the brain or of the heart, but perhaps it was the effect of the dry white of Signor Gabbioni and his son, a rather nervous wine, a voice that was trumpeting awfully: "This is her boyfriend," like the fierce tom-tom of those headaches which used to grip his temples.
    He didn't know why, but he