That Awful Mess recounts the police investigation of two criminal cases, one trivial and the other inhuman. Both take place in the same apartment house in the center of Rome within the space of a few days: a widow, eager to be consoled, is robbed of her jewelry; a married woman, disconsolate because she cannot bear children, is stabbed to death. An obsession with infertility is central to the noveclass="underline" Signora Liliana Balducci surrounded herself with girls whom she considered adopted daughters, but then, for one reason or another, they become separated. The figure of Liliana, dominant even as victim, and the gynaeceum atmosphere that surrounds her seem to open the prospect, full of shadows, of femininity, a mysterious force of nature in the face of which Gadda expresses his perturbation in scenes where contemplations of woman's physiology are joined with geographical-genetic metaphors and to the legend of the origin of Rome, where the rape of the Sabine women insured the city's continuity.
A traditional antifeminism that reduces woman to a procreative function is expressed with great crudeness: is this merely the method of Flaubert recording idees regues, or does the author himself share this view? To see the problem more clearly, we must bear two circumstances in mind, one historical and the other personal to the author. Under Mussolini, the first duty of the Italians, inculcated unremittingly by official propaganda, was to present sons to the Fatherland; only prolific mothers and fathers were considered worthy of respect. In the midst of this apotheosis of procreation, Gadda, a bachelor oppressed by a paralyzing shyness in any female presence, felt like an outsider, and he suffered an ambivalent feeling mingling attraction and repulsion.
Attraction and repulsion animate the description of Liliana's corpse, her throat horribly cut, in one of the most elaborate scenes of the book, like a Baroque painting of a saint's martyrdom. Officer Francesco Ingravallo conducts his investigation of the crime with a special interest: first because he knew, and desired, the victim, and second because he is a Southerner, steeped in philosophy and moved both by scientific passion and by sensitivity toward all that is human. It is Ingravallo who theorizes about the multiplicity of causes that concur to produce a single effect, and among these causes, as if reading Freud, he discerns always Eros in one form or another.
If the police officer Ingravallo is the author's philosophical spokesman, Gadda identifies himself with another character on a psychological and poetic level. Angeloni, a retired government official and a tenant in the building where the murder takes place, becomes so embarrassed when questioned that he immediately falls suspect, although he is the most inoffensive of souls. An introverted and melancholy bachelor, Angeloni is given to solitary walks along the streets of the old center of Rome. A man subject to gluttony, and perhaps other temptations, he orders hams and cheeses from food shops which are delivered to his home by boys in short trousers. As the police track one of these boys, a suspected accomplice in the robbery and perhaps also in the murder, Angeloni lives in fear of being accused of homosexual tendencies and, overly protective of his respectability and privacy, he becomes entangled in reticences and contradictions that result in his arrest.
But greater suspicion is focused on a nephew of the murdered woman, who must explain his possession of a gold pendant containing a valuable stone that belonged to the victim. This investigation soon shows every sign of being a false lead. The inquiries about the robbery, on the other hand, seem to garner more promising information, as they move from the capital to the Alban Hills (and thus become the responsibility no longer of the urban police but of the carabinieri) in search of a gigolo-electrician, Diomede Lanciani, who had visited the eager widow. In this rural setting we rediscover the traces of various girls on whom Signora Liliana lavished her motherly attentions. And it is here that the carabinieri find, hidden in a chamber pot, the jewels stolen from the widow.
The description of the jewels is not simply an outburst of virtuosic writing; it adds to the rich depiction of circumstances — beyond the linguistic, phonetic, psychological, physiological, historical, mythical, gastronomic, and others — yet another level, a mineral, plu-tonic level of hidden treasures, bringing geological history and the forces of inanimate matter to bear on the sordid story of a crime. And it is around the possession of these precious stones that the knots of the characters' psychology or psychopathology are tightented: the violent envy of the poor, along with what Gadda calls the "typical psychosis of the frustrated woman" that led Liliana to bestow gifts on her protegees.
We might have been brought closer to the solution of the mystery by the first version of the novel, published in installments in a literary review in Florence in 1946, but the author suppressed a crucial fourth chapter when the novel was prepared for publication in 1957, precisely because he did not want to show his own hand too clearly. In this chapter, Ingravallo questions Liliana's husband about his affair with Virginia, one of his wife's "adoptive daughters." The sapphic atmosphere enveloping Signora Liliana and her gynaeceum is underlined, and the girl's character reveals lesbian tendencies, as well as amorality, cupidity, and social ambition (she had obviously become the man's lover to blackmail him later); there is evidence of a fit of blind, violent hatred as she utters obscure threats and slices into a roast with a kitchen knife.
Is Virginia the murderess then? Any doubt this raises is resolved by the posthumous discovery and publication of a film treatment that Gadda seems to have written at about the same time as the first draft of the novel. Here, the plot is developed and clarified in every detail, and we learn that the jewel thief is not Diomede Lan-ciani but Enea Retalli, who, rather than allow himself to be arrested, fires on the carabinieri and is killed. This treatment was ignored when Pietro Germi made a film from the novel in 1959 without Gadda's collaboration, and it was never considered by producers or directors. Their indifference is not surprising: Gadda had a rather ingenuous notion of writing for film and relied heavily on dissolves to reveal characters' thoughts and further the action. It makes interesting reading as a sketch for the novel, but it creates no real tension either as action or as psychology.
In other words, the problem is not "who done it." From the first pages of the novel, we are told that what determines a crime is the "field of forces" that emanates from the victim's situation as it relates to the situations of others in the complicated web of events: "that system of forces and probabilities which surround every human creature, and which is customarily called destiny."
Rome, March 6, 1984
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD
THERE is hardly anything about Carlo Emilio Gadda that is not contradictory. Stately and courtly, he lives in a lower-middle-class apartment house in Rome, where the yelling of children, the clatter of dishes, and the laundry hanging on the balconies contrast violently with the cloistral austerity, the shy solitude of the writer's quarters. And this solitude, the timid elegance of his speech and manner are, in turn, a surprise to one who has read his most famous book, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, a teeming canvas of Roman life, many of whose characters speak the city's expressive, but not always elegant dialect. The contrasts are, to a supreme degree, present in the book itself, a pastiche — as its title implies — of languages and dialects that has been compared to the work of Joyce.