Journal of Italian Translation

Roberto De Lucca/ Carlo Emilio Gadda
115
shoulders sagging, with a bearing that seemed tired, absorbed. He saw him
pull a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, engrossed in unknown cares. The
door closed behind him.
Don Ciccio sensed he’d already known it for a while, that whole story.
What he’d already vaguely grasped on his own was confirmed for him by
the impressions and recollections that Liliana’s cousin and husband, in a
sort of recuperative agony, were in the process of dragging out of her so
atrociously voided days. Even that notion of wanting to die if no kid came: a
bit of it had been his “imagination,” (or perhaps belief, through his acquaintance
with Signora Liliana); a bit had surfaced from the cousin’s disclosures.
And now from the talk of the husband, made garrulous by hardship, by his
sense of being at the center of attention and collective commiseration (A
hunter, he was! Saw himself tramping in with a bagged hare, shouldering
his gun, muddied boots, panting hounds), needing to get it off his chest after
the blow: and holding forth, untrammeled, on the delicacy of the female
spirit and that extreme sensitiveness of women in general: which in them,
poor things, is widespread. That widespread he’d picked up in Il Secolo, an
article in the Milan paper by Maroccus… the medical correspondent for Il
Secolo: a brain!
Liliana’s posthumous case history was then rounded out by the compassion
of her female friends and beneficiaries: crying orphans, Sacred Heart
nuns, dry-eyed because they’d cross their hearts she was already in heaven,
and auntie Elvira in weeds, plus a couple of other aunts from Banchi Vecchi,
pretty black also: and miscellaneous acquaintances, figuring in the countess
Teresa (Bigazzi) and milady Manuela Pettachioni, plus some other gentle
women tenants at two hundred nineteen: the two rival triads made up of the
Elodia woman, Enea Cucco and Giulietta Frisoni (B stairs), on one side, and
from that other the Cammarota woman, Mrs. Buttafavi and Alda Pernetti
(stairway A), whose brother counted for an extra six. Females all, demonstrating
that widespread sensitiveness, in consequence: though of that sort
which Liliana… kept at arm’s length. A widespread and delicate ovarianism,
that’s the word, impregnated, in all of them, the soul’s stem, like ancient
essences in the earth and fallow fields of the Marsica might the stem of a
flower: pressed at length until they burst in the perfume of the corolla; but
their corolla consisting of the nose, that they could blow to their hearts’
content. Females all, both in memory and hope, and in the hard, stubborn
pallor of their reticence and the purple of the non-confiteor which dottor
Fumi, those days, was soliciting them to recall in detail, with the courtesy
and tact which set him apart during the whole of a long and busy career (the
just reward of which, today, is his nomination to the position of sub-prefect
of Lucunaro, adnuente Gasparo: no, sorry, better still, of Firlocca, delightful
little spot where his manifold qualities find more than ample range) and
with that warm voice… which announced him, right off the bat, even before
the buzzer (room number four), to the ears of every corporal or criminal, as
soon as he’d set foot in the office.