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A different Mess

A taster of Robert de Lucca’s new translation
of Pasticciaccio

Everybody by now called him don Ciccio: (1) il dottor Francesco Ingravallo, one of the youngest, and most inexplicably envied officers assigned to investigations: ubiquitous on cases, omnipresent at shady affairs. (2) Of average height and rather round in build, perhaps on the plump side, with thick and coiled black hair whose roots protruded mid-forehead as if to guard the temporal bones from the fair sun of Italy, he had the solid, trudging step, the listless look and dull ways of someone battling a difficult digestion; dressed in keeping with his small government salary, with a nearly invisible dot or two of olive oil on his lapel, like a souvenir of his native Molisan hills. (3) Though still young (thirty-five) (4) he must certainly have had some rough experience of men, and of women; various dealings with our so-called «Latin» world. His landlady (5) adored, not to mention worshipped him for (and in spite of) the pandemonium of ringing doorbells, nocturnal phone calls, manila envelopes out of the blue and feverish hours which made up the tormented texture of his existence. «He just comes and goes! Yesterday he comes in, the sun’s up already!» In her eyes, he was the «mature professional» so long coddled in her dreams, preceded by five AAAAA in the want ads of Il Messaggero: (6) evoked, pumped out of the infinite collection of professional males by the lure of «spac. sunny studio», despite the injunction «excl. females» which offers, as everyone knows, in want ed jargon of said want ads, a dual possibility of interpretation. (7) In addition, he’d managed to get his colleagueas to look the other way on that absurd tale about a fine… a penalty for failing to obtain a rental permit… money the police commissioner and city hall divvy up between them. «A lady like myself! Widow of Commendatore Antonini! (8) Like all Rome knew that man like a brother, and people who knew him treated him special, I’m not saying because he was my husband, rest his soul. And now they take me for a rooming house keeper? Me keeper of a rooming house? God, I’d just as soon chuck myself off a bridge.»

In his sagacity and his Molisan poverty, il dottor Ingravallo – who seemed to subsist on silence and on sleep under the black jungle of that mop, as glossy as tar and curly as the fleece of an Astrakhan lamb (9) – in his wisdom he broke out sometimes of that sleep and that silence to utter some consideration of a theoretical nature (a generalization, that is) on the sayings and doings of men, and of women. At first sight, or rather first hearing, they sounded like banalities. Banalities they weren’t. And if following an obscure period of incubation, those quick statements, that burst from his lips with the sudden crackle of an illuminating match, came to life again in the tympanum of his listener hours, or even months, after they had been uttered. «Hm!…» his interlocutor thought, «That’s just what Ingravallo said.» He maintained, among other things, that unanticipated disasters are never the result or, say, the effect of a one and only cause, but resemble a vortex, a point of cyclonic depression in the world’s consciousness: a spot towards which a multiplicity of conspiring factors have converged. He also uttered the words snarl, or knot, or pickle as they said in his hometown, or muddle. And the legal terms «motive» or «motives» habitually popped out of his mouth, nearly against his will. The opinion that we had to «revise the sense we attribute to the category of cause», handed down to us from the philosophers, Aristotle or Immanuel Kant, (10) and substitute for «cause» the plural «causes», was a central, persistent one with him: a fixation, almost: a notion that melted from his swollen though rather wan lips, from which dangled a spent butt that seemed to keep company with the somnolence of his expression, and that quasi-grin, half bitter half skeptical, he stamped by old habit on the lower portion of his mug, beneath the sleepiness of his forehead and eyelids and the gleaming pitch-darkness of that shock of hair. He used the same sort of arguments concerning «his» criminal cases. «If they call me…!» he said, garbling the Neapolitan and Molisan dialects and Italian, «When yours truly’s the fella they call in, you bet there’s some bona-fide pickle… doggone ruckus.»

In fact there could be only one apparent motive, one primary motive. But the misdeed resulted nonetheless from an entire litany of motives that had blown on it in a whorl (like the sixteen cherubim of the winds when they whirl together forming a cyclonic depression) until they twist into the vortex of the crime the poor «reason of the world». (11) Like wringing the neck of a hen. And then he would add, but with a certain weariness, «there’s always some… female pops up in there someplace…» Belated Italic emendation of the shopworn «cherchez la femme». (12) He seemed to regret his words then, as if he’d badmouthed the… ladies, and to want to take it back. But in that case he would have run into problems. So he kept his peace, absorbed, as if afraid of having overspoken. He really wished to suggest that a certain passionate motive, a certain amount or, as you might say today, a «quantum» (13) of emotion, a «quantum of eros», was also mixed up in «money matters»: in the crimes seemingly at the farthest remove from the storms of love. Some colleagues, feeling a twinge of jealousy over his insights, some priest more communicant with the ills of the here below, some subordinates, some clerks, his supervisors contended that he read odd books: from which he hoarded all those meaningless, or nearly meaningless words that signify nothing, or almost nothing, but are just the ticket for bamboozling the uninitiated or the ignorant. The couch-terminology of some shrink, issues leading to a straitjacket. Good for nada on the job! Better leave smoke screens and metaphysics to the pundits: the work of the commissioner’s office and of the mobile force is a whole other affair. It takes boundless patience, a big heart, not to mention a cast-iron stomach, in addition to a sense – provided the Ytalians’ (14) whole house of cards isn’t tumbling down – of responsibility, and of swift determination, and even-handedness… yessir, and a cool head. In the face of these pertinent objections he, don Ciccio, didn’t even blink. He kept on doling out philosophy on an empty stomach, drowsing on his feet, pretending to smoke his perpetual half-cigarette.

from chapter 1

At that moment Signora Bigassi, her hair fixed, appeared on the scene, coughing faintly. A large lilac-colored foulard around the scrawny gullet of her neck, a sort of languor about all her traumatised person. A slightly unexpected negligée between japanese and madrileno, kimono and mantilla. That hint of mustache on her lightly puckered face, that pale skin, like a floured gecko, those lips forming two fused hearts varnished in the most provocative strawberry red would have conferred on her both the look and the temporary formal prestige of a madam or ex-tenant of a brothel somewhat in decline had it not been for a neo-virginal touch of aridity and the typical solicitude-devotion of the untarnished, which moved one to range her on the spot among the romantic roster of available, respectable women. She was a widow. The houserobe-mantilla stretched over the foulard, or foulards for there were two of them, powdered also and vaguely varied in hue, the first shading into the second and number two into the flower petals, or were they butterflies, of that pseudo-castiglian kimono. She overlapped her statement onto that of the concierge, specifying and correcting. Her voice, chiming in, her poor voice carried a tremolo and her eyes shone with the hope, not perhaps the hope of recovering her jewels, but the certainty… of benefiting from the protection of the law, so validly embodied in Ingravallo. At the ring of the doorbell, Signora Bigassi had emitted the customary «Who is it?»: now she repeated the call, the few notes between worried and lamentful she piped at each trill of the bell. Then she’d opened the door. The murderer was a tall young man in a cap and gray workman’s overalls, or so it seemed to her, dark-complexioned, with a greenish-brown wool scarf. A handsome young man, yes, a good-looking boy. But the kind who struck fear into you right off. «What was the cap like?» don Ciccio asked, his eyes on his writing. «It was ahnn… It’s, I can’t remember rilly… Couldn’t say how it was rilly…»

«And you?» he asked the concierge, «When he took off, ran right in front of you. You didn’t see anything, you can’t tell me how his hat looks?»

«Gee officer… With a stress like that! Who’s thinking of his cap right then I mean, you know? You tell me, when all the bullets’re shooting past a lady’s gonna think of a hat?»

«Was he alone?»

«Alone, alone» the two women said in chorus. «Officer!» Bigassi implored, «You’re the only one can hep us, please hep, Mother Mary! I mean a widow all alone in the house, my God! What a world this is, I mean these aren’t human beings they’re animals, I swear! Wild animals…!»

Signora Bigassi, like women alone in their homes the world over, wasted away her hours in a condition of suffering or, at minimum, of anticipation rife with suspense and torment. Long since her constant dread at every ring of the bell had crystallised into a phobic complex of figures and figments. Close-ups of masked men with felt-soled shoes; sudden albeit silent eruptions into her hallway; a hammer coming down on her skull; choking by a pair of hands (or suitable length of rope) preceded, possibly, by «molestation»: a word or idea, this last, that hurled her into an unspeakable fit. In short, mixed fantasies and agonies perhaps compounded by a sudden heartthrob at any sudden creak in the dark of some settling wooden cupboard. And these greedy anticipations of the occurrence had been so effective that in the end mister O’Ccurence couldn’t possibly have failed to show up after all. The long wait for a break-in, Ingravallo imagined, had swollen into a compulsion, not so much belonging to her, or to her thoughts and actions as already staked victim, as to destiny; a compulsion belonging to destiny’s «sphere of forces». The foretokening of the catastrophe must have evolved by increments into a historical predisposition: its action not only operating on the psyche of the burglarise-violate-and-bludgeonworthy featherhead but even more on the circumambient «sphere»: on the sphere of external psychic tensions. For Ingravallo, like certain philosophers of ours, attributed a soul, indeed a doggone sumbitch of a soul, to that system of forces and probabilities surrounding each human creature which we usually call destiny. In short, Bigassi’s terror had landed her rotten luck. Her fixation, at every ring of the doorbell, coagulated into that «Who is it?»: the bleat or bray common to recluses the woeful gods of the hearth failed to shelter. From her it sounded like a plaintive antiphon to the bell, to the button’s most homely bidding.

from chapter 2

The body of the poor Signora lay in an obscene position, face up, the gray wool skirt and white underskirt flung back nearly to her breast, as if someone had wanted to unveil the engrossing milkyness of that dessous, (15) or investigate its state of freshness. She was wearing finely knit underpants, very sheer, that were bordered, midthigh, with the most delicate edging. Betwixt the edging and the hose, impalpable and silky light, the extreme whiteness offered itself with the chlorotic pallor of denuded flesh; those slightly parted thighs that the garters – in a shade of lilac – seemed to underscore no longer harbored any warmth; were already disposed to the cold: the chill of the sarcophagous (16) and of the voiceless abodes. The precise handiwork of the embroidery uselessly molded, to the eyes of those chasers of serving girls, the wearied proposals of a voluptuosity whose ardor and whose shudder appeared to have just exhaled from the sweet softness of the mons, and from that central line, the carnal mark of the mystery… the trace that Michelangelo (don Ciccio saw his labor again, at San Lorenzo) had thought it sage to omit. (17) Nitpicking! Cut it out!

The garters taut, though slightly frilled at the border. That elastic of mauve silk, in that hue from which a perfume seemed to emanate, all but witnessed the frail distinction of the woman and her caste, the spent charm of the garments and gestures, and the secret mode of her submission henceforth transformed into the immobility of an object, or like a disfigured mannequin. Taut in the blond elegance of a nearly new skin bestowed (above the created warmth) by the modem wizardry of blasphemous knitting machines, the stockings girded with their sheen the shapes of the legs and superb knees… the legs a bit spread, as in horrible invitation. O, the eyes! Where, at whom were they looking? Her face!… It was scratched, poor thing!… Just under one eye, on her nose!… And how weary she was, poor, tired Liliana, tired… that head in a wreathing nimbus of charitable hair, the face gaunt in its paleness, drained… Emaciated by the atrocious suction of Death.

A deep, terrible red gash opened her throat, ferociously. It had taken half the neck, from the front to the right, that is toward left for her, right for those looking: its two edges gristly, as from a repetition of blows of a razor or point. A horror! that you couldn’t bear to lay eyes on. It brought to light what looked like red strands, inside, mixed with the black froth of blood, already clotted, nearly; a hash! what with that spume congealed in the middle… Strange forms, to the officers’ eyes. A novice would’ve made out tubes, little red or pink maccheroni… (18) «Trachea», murmured Ingravallo, bending over. «Carotid! Jugular!… My God!»

Gore’d plastered all her neck, the front of the blouse, a sleeve, one hand. Frightening winecolored gouts out of Faiti or Cengio… (don Ciccio recalled suddenly, with a faraway soul’s cry: poor mama!). (19) It’d curdled on the floor as well as on the blouse between the two breasts. There was also a stain on the hem of the skirt, on the underside of that thingy of wool flung back, and on the other shoulder: seemed on the tick of shrivelling any second. Sure it was headed into a coagulate all gluey like bloodpudding.

The nose and the face thus fallen, rolled to one side a bit like that of someone who’s got no fight left, that face! resigned to the will of death, looked scored with scrapes an’ fingernail scratches, ’s if that butcher’d got his kicks, wanting to slash her that way. Murderer!

The eyes were fastened atrociously: on what, then? Peeled towards who knows what, way way up, toward the top of the buffet or maybe the ceiling. Zero blood on the panties: they left two bits of thigh bare: two hoops of skin over the satiny blond of the stockings. The groove of her sex… like in Ostia or Viareggio (20) inna summer when they shove it right in your face, stretched out on the beach t’ cremate themselves… With those skintight suits they wear nowadays.

from chapter 3

The new energies effectuating within Italian society that radical regeneration which, adopting the severe mien if not the actual severity of the ancient Roman lictors, (21) had nevertheless already seized on their clubs (bundled staves clenched about an axhandle, no mere emblem), devoted themselves then without pining away on philosophistries (primum vivere) (22) to paving, with the most verbose good intentions, the patent road to Hell. Thus gassifled into funeral threat and become wind and word, they conspired spasmodically pellmell midst a swirl of air and dust kicked up unto the clouds’ posteriors, destroyer of all separation of powers (23) as well as the sentient being we are wont to label fatherland; of the distinction between the «three powers», those which the great sociologist of modest and fairly cockeyed periwig (24) had so lucidly distinguished, having observed the choicest institutions of Rome and those more recent and wise out of English history. As for Italy’s fresh resurrection, it was superadded to a not-very-attired renaissance of the natural species as well as the pictorial and poetic that the world is pleased to note as together shameful and sublime. This selfsame revival also fastened upon, with an air of fancying itself the perfect conclusion, a Risorgimento (25) a trifle too generous in its manner of disburdening pathos from the manes of its hirsute or bewhiskered troubadours, sumptuously moustachioed or gloriously endowed with muttonchops or sideburns, all needful (to our taste) of the radical treatment of a drastic scissored Figaro. (26) The effect that the aforementioned verbal resurrection pulled out of its own entrails, all hot to trot at being finally able to dispose of all the resources raked within in its range by power, was that which never fails to be produced under the circumstances, that is to say at every complete and entire possession of said power: conglomerate the three bailiwicks (so opportunely bisected by Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, book eleven, chap. six of his 800-odd page tract on l’esprit des lois); conglomerate them, all three, into a sole, trinitary, impenetrable and irremovable mafia. In such an event «le même corps de magistrature a, comme exécuteur des lois, toute la puissance qu’il s’est donnée comme legislateur. Il peut ravager l’état» (you see? Ravager l’état!) «par ses volontés générales et, comme il a encore la puissance de juger, il peut détruire chaque citoyen par ses volontés particulierères»: (27) particular to it, that is, to the corps cited above. In our case, in the fledgling ravage brought about by overly-hotblooded reminisces of the antique bludgeon (which if anything had bludgeoned in the name in the law, and not to the tune of the mob), the telephone was discovered nothing loath to lend, to the triplo-potent mafia, the eminent services of a liason officer controlled by the zeal and endowed with the hypersensitive ears of an official stoolpigeon. (28) Bureaucratic exhortation could thus assume that tone or, better, that harshly injunctive, indeed imperative character, befitting only in the homines consulares and the homines praetorii (29) of the neo-empire in concoction. He who is sure of being right by his might never suspects he can be wrong in law. He who fancies himself a genius, beacon to mankind, is never assailed by the doubt that he is in actuality a lump of sputtering candlewax or a four-clubbed jughead. One would never call upon a guardian, or commissar, of the truth made fresh to have every morning upon awakening to micturate fresh idiocies into the yawning mouth of the josser waiting there open-mouthed. Right. The small niagara of telephone calls, like every self-respecting niagara, was, and remains, irreversible in a determined force field, such as the gravidictational field or the obsequient-buckconveyant field. Nor was there any need to mobilise a pair of toughs, greasecurls on their noses, two shiny leather holsterbelts adorned with sidearms and butcherknives, (30) so that the subaltern sitting on his schlong on the other end of the line might make out by the seat of his pants what he had better answer, or how best proceed. «Yours… Yours to command, mine to obey» Dring! Thus it occurred also in the case of the misdeed, the first, of Via Merulana two hundred nineteen, directly the second, the gruesome crime, entered the picture. «The unwarrantably delayed investigation» had to «assume a brisker pace», and adapt itself spur-of-the-moment to the chafing at the bit of the coxswain, who hammered at the bow, instead of the stern, but, in recompense, with all four hooves. The Commendatore-statistician, leisure-hour truffle-paramour, (31) eighty-six hours after nine pm on Monday, was invited to show his face again at Santo Stefano. After ninetytwo hours, more dead than alive, he was sent to blow his nose down at Lungara, into the most capacious and least-expected of his nose handkerchiefs. (32)

from chapter 4

The Pirroficoni (33) case had not yet vexed the columns of the Eternal City’s local news. Death’s-Head-in-a-felucca was already droughty, however, for the suspect’s peacock panache, to be able to stick it where He stuck feathers, peacock’s or rotten chicken’s that stinks.

But it seemed wise to proceed with a certain guardedness, already in those days. Don Ciccio sniffed this out, and dottor Fumi likewise, after public opinion, in other words the collective spasm, had got its hands on the event.

«Making use of» the event – that whatsoever incident that rogue weatherman Zeus may’ve dunged in front of your nose, plup, plop – to the greater glory of a characteristic pseudo-ethical activity, in verity protuberantly put on and slimily staged, is the game of whosomever, individual or body, wishes to confer on propaganda or tirade the weight and scope of a moral activity. The psyche of the frenzied politico on display (pseudo-ethical narcissism) gets its claws on another’s real or supposed felony, to roar over it like a brute with dick for brains pointlessly furious over an ass’ jawbone; (34) managing in that way to exhaust (to pacify) with the inane paradigm of a punitive myth, the sordid tension that forces him to act, whatever act, as long as he acts, acts coûte que coûte. (35) And presto, the other’s crime «made use of» to placate anguimaned Megaera, (36) or mad multitude mollified not wi’ so little, like sacrificial goate or hart unto the whirling, dissheveled wretches or maenads who rend it to pieces, everywhere ravenous in the pyrall combustion of the bacchanalia kindled by their howls, and festooned purple-red with blood and torment. A pseudo-justice and a pretend severity, an ersatz patent given the vox populi (37) thus acquire legal course, of which both the arrogance of a rash and summary trial and the cephalobalanitic hysteria of an overhasty sentence are plain confirmation. Pray reread, in War and Peace, (38) book III, part three, chap. XXV, the rueful and atrocious story of the summary execution of the wretched Verestchagin, wrongly imputed a spy: Count Rostopchin governor of Moscow, preening on the Palace staircase before the stormy expectation of the mob, orders his dragoons to bleed him to death with the cuts of their sabres with the populace as witness, in virtue of those fine inner grounds «qu’il leur faut une victime». (39) It happened in the morning, at ten o’clock. «At four in the afternoon, Murat’s (40) troops entered Moscow».

Much more base and theatrical, chez nous, (41) that plumed Beastyface; nor is it for us to grant him, as to Rostopchin, the immediate and attenuating circumstances of the dread (of being lynched himself), and of the anguish and of the anger and pandemonium (total mob psychosis) and of the enemy at the ramparts, after the sharp cannonnades and the bloodbath (of Borodino). (42)

The hapless Pirroficoni was walloped to within an inch of his life by an ad hoc gang, there in the «observation room», for the cushy reason that they wanted to extort from him, at any cost, the earnest confession of having violated certain bimbettes. The accusation hit him, and him ’im again, like a ton of bricks and he begged no, there must be shome mishtake, s’not true, but he was tarred to a pulp anyhow. O, the generous Manes of Cesare Beccaria! (43)

In the middle of one of its throes of public decency and federzonitis, (44) the Urbs was to become acquainted, in fact (1926-27), with several intermittant stranglings of female minors: the sorrow and the remains forsoken in the meadowes, with the forlorn, prostrated innocence, down there, yonder extra muros, (45) past the suburbicarian votive shrines, past the antiquity of the marbles, the sanctuaries. Consule Federsonio, Rosamaltonio enixa: Maledito Merdonio dictatore impestatissimo. (46) The Ficoni Pirro, poor ass, was courting his courtesan, rather more suety than not as well as a lil’ ripe roun’ the edges, but of somewhat obstacled access: fifth floor; solid apartment house with concierge on the qui vive; husband present in working order… in houseslippers what’s more; clusters of neighbors ad libitum (47) greater glossators by nature than Saint Irnerius. (48) Wherefore, considering the circumstances, a pathetic vertical oscillation of autographs of various import thanks to the intercession of a wee colleen bawn (aged thirteen), who bore them up and down with a modicum of discretion, her heart pit-a-pat, to their target. With confabs in sign language and mixed pantomime from window to lane, and viceversa. The chivalrous expert in dactylology was removed under arrest from the sidewalk in the very act of dispatching certain six- or seven-fingered signals (love, when) towards a fifth floor window (a «planned distraction» in the eyes of the police) and of confiding a billet for madame, diversionary tactic number two, to the petite colleen of hern, all atremble and blushed to the tips of her ears at having to carry out a like assignment. Pirroficoni, as he was wont, had extended some caresses to the maiden: which gesture, and the flushing of her cheeks, were his undoing. Armed with this nice evidence Skull-with-a-wangdoodle belched forth «the Roman police in less than 48 hours, etc. etc.» At which the fuzz, comforted by the lofty words of the Dook, on with the brass knuckles. Only the dubitative intervention of some honest official saved the said Ficoni’s hide, by then pretty well tanned, to tell the truth.

Translator's Notes

1. don Ciccio: in proclitic form (usually in front of a Christian name) don is in common use in Southern Italy and corresponds to signore. Ciccio is a short form for Francesco.

2. dottor: Ingravallo is a dottore – i.e., a university graduate.

3. Molisan: region in the southeast central Italy. Because of its rural character and lack of natural resources, molisani tended (like Ingravallo) to emigrate to other Italian regions and seek positions in the national administration.

4. thirty-five: same age as Gadda in 1927, the year in which the novel takes place.

5. landlady: Margherita Gelli, widow of Commendatore Antonini; she will reappear in chapter 10.

6. Messaggero: widely read, daily Roman newspaper, founded in 1878 by L. Cesana. Its early success was largely due to its still ample Roman local and provincial news.

7. dual possibility of interpretation: the literal one and the one which, in code, indicates a brothel.

8. Commendatore: title due to a person belonging to one of the order of knights instituted by the Italian State, graded between cavaliere and grande ufficiale.

9. Astrakhan lamb: so named after the city of Astrakhan on the left bank of the Volga river, 95 km from its mouth at the Caspian Sea in what is now Russia, are prized for their thick, black, glossy fur.

10. Aristotle… Kant: in Gadda’s work of metaphysical speculation, Meditazione milanese (written in 1928), any particular event is the effect of an infinity of causes; here constrasted with the traditional ancient (Aristotle) and modern (Kant) views, which tended, instead, to deal with finite causes.

11. reason… world: the concept of Logos proper to Stoic philosophy.

12. cherchez la femme: «there’s a woman behind this». The expression seems to have entered current use after its employment by the policeman, Jackal, a character in Les Mohicans de Paris by Dumas pére.

13. quantum: a very small quantity. In the language of physics it refers to an energy particle.

14. Ytalians: in an atmosphere perverted by Fascism, the noun Italian, referring to the populace, is only used by the author in a deformed fashion thoughout the novel.

15. dessous: undergarment.

16. sarcophagous: see the reference to Michelangelo below.

17. Michelangelo… omit: allusion to Michelangelo’s unfinished Medici Chapel in San Lorenzo in Florence, stronger in Pl (cfr. l. 8). Central energising principle of the Chapel, commissioned by Cardinal Giuliano de’ Medici in 1520 during the pontificate of his cousin, Leo X, for the interment of his father, Giuliano, his uncle, Lorenzo, his cousins, the Dukes of Giuliano of Nembours and Lorenzo of Urbino, and according to the first plans, himself, is the celebration of the Mass for the dead. Numerous parallels exist between Gadda’s description of Liliana Balducci’s corpse and various figures in the Chapel, in particular the allegorical female figures of Dawn and Night, as well as many between the Chapel’s overall structure and meaning and those of the novel, including the concepts of finito and non-finito. Ingravallo’s repressive reminiscence of the Medicean Dawn, which soon gives way to the crudely comic analogy of a Roman narrator, is mixed with allusions to the figure of Night, as well as to Michelangelo’s writings concerning it, throughout this and other descriptions of Liliana. Given Liliana’s sterility it is notable that the images of the deceased in the Chapel gaze in the direction of the Madonna and Child (a Virgo lactans) and the Medici family saints, Cosmas and Damian, patrons of doctors. Unlike Dawn, Night is represented as no longer a virgin, lying in a tormented pose, surrounded by symbolic images of forgetfulness, dreams and death, imagery which Gadda repeatedly evokes in numerous passages concerning Signora Balducci.

18. hash… maccheroni: key words of the novel (hash = Ital. pasticcio) repeated from the title (where in the original it appears in the more plebian garb of Pasticciaccio). Here the word refers not only to the atrociously disfigured body of Liliana Balducci, but to the literary notions of pastiche and macaronic and to the author’s stylistic, ontological and epistemological vision of the manifold and disorderly nature of reality. The language used throughout the description of Liliana’s corpse is a prime example of macaronic pastiche.

19. Faiti, Cengio: two summits on the northern border of the Triestine Carso and the Asiago plateau, respectively, scenes of Italian engagements again the Austrian troops in 1916, during the First World War. Gadda served as officer and was captured at Caporetto and imprisoned in the Celle Lager in Hannover until the end of hostilities. In January, 1919, on his return to Milan, he learned that his brother, Enrico, a pilot, had been killed when his plane had crashed a few months before armistice. Ingravallo here seems to have shared the author’s wartime experience.

20. Ostia or Viareggio: popular seaside resorts, the former near Rome, the latter in Versilia, on the Tuscan coast.

21. lictors: in Roman history, an officer attending a consul or other magistrate, bearing the fasces, and executing sentences on offenders.

22. primum vivere: abbreviation of the Latin motto «Primum vivere, deinde philosophari» («first it is necessary to live, then philosophise»).

23. separation of powers: the liberal State.

24. sociologist… periwig: Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu (1689-1755), French philosophical historian, author of the L’Esprit des Lois (quoted by Gadda) and, among other works, the Lettres persanes.

25. Risorgimento: the movement which led to the unification of Italy as an independent state in 1870.

26. Figaro: barber. Figaro is the hero of Le Barbier de Séville and Le mariage de Figaro by Beaumarchais (1732-1799), later in operas by various composers, notably Rossini, whose opera, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, is quoted by Gadda in chapter 1.

27. le même… particulierères: «The body of the magistracy, as executor of laws, retains all the power it has given itself as legislator. It can plunder the state by using its general wills; and, as it also has the power of judging, it can destroy each citizen by using its particular wills».

28. telephone… stoolpigeon: allusion to the OVRA, the political police of the Fascist regime.

29. homines consulares… praetorii: members of the Roman high magistrates.

30. pair… butcher knives: echo of the two bravi in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi.

31. Commendatore… paramour: Filippo Angeloni, the hapless functionary in chap. 1.

32. nose… handerkerchief: that is, into the bed sheets provided at the Regina Coeli prison, on Via della Lungara.

33. Pirroficoni: allusion to the real case of Gino Girolimoni, unjustly accused of having sexually assaulted several small girls in 1927 and then absolved in March 1928. He was used as a scapegoat to demonstrate the efficiency and moral reform of the Fascist regime.

34. brute… jawbone: allusion to the Biblical story of Samson in Judges 15, 15-16.

35. coûte que coûte: whatever the cost.

36. anguimaned Megaera: one of the three Furies or Erinyes, usually represented as having their hair entwined with snakes (anguimaned).

37. vox populi: voice of the mob.

38. War and Peace: novel by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910).

39. qu’il… victime: «that they need a victim» (in French in Tolstoy’s text).

40. Murat: J. Murat (1767-1815), who commanded the French cavalry during Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812.

41. chez nous: in Italy.

42. Borodino: Russian defeat of Sept. 7, 1812.

43. O… Beccaria: sarcastic appeal to the Manes (the spirits of the dead to whom relatives pay homage with gifts, in ancient Roman religion), here to the spirit of Cesare Beccaria (1738-1894), celebrated jurist and author of Dei delitti e delle pene, an early attempt to reform the penal code and do away with, among other practices, precisely torture as means to extort confession. The allusion in Gadda to Beccaria is also to Beccaria’s grandson, Alessandro Manzoni, to whom the entire passage pays particular homage for its defense of a victim of official abuse.

44. federzonitis: forced moralisation of Federzoni (see chap. 3, note 6).

45. extra muros: beyond the city walls.

46. Consule… impestatissimo: an inscription invented by the author in macaronic Latin: «Under the consulship of Federzoni, Rosa Maltoni the mother (enixa, «having given birth»), in the time of the pestilent dictator Maledito Merdonio». Rosa Maltoni was Mussolini’s mother.

47. ad libitum: as much as one likes.

48. greater… Irnerius: famous medieval commentator of Roman law, who lived from 1060 to 1130.