The hands, stark white, with their delicate nails, periwinkle color now, revealed no cuts: she hadn't been able, hadn't dared grasp the cutter, arrest the slaughterer's determination. She had submitted to the slaughterer. The face and the nose seemed scratched, here and there, in the weariness and pallor of death, as if the hatred had surpassed death itself. The fingers were stripped of rings; the wedding ring had vanished. Nor did it occur to anyone, then, to impute its disappearance to the Fatherland.{10} The knife had done its job. Liliana! Liliana! To Don Ciccio it was as if the world's every aspect were darkened, all the world's gentility.
The man from the criminological bureau said a razor was out of the question, because it makes a neater cut, more superficial, he opined, and in general, in such cases multiple cuts are required; since it has no sharp tip, and it can't be used with such violence. Violence? Yes, the wound was deep, all right, a horrible thing: it had hacked away half the neck, just about. In the dining room, no, no clue… except for the blood. And, after looking around the other rooms: nothing. Only more blood: clear traces in the kitchen sink: diluted, until it looked like frog's blood: and many scarlet, or now black, drops on the floor, round and radiated, as blood characteristically behaves when you let it drip on the ground: like sections of asteroids. Those horrible drops indicated an obvious itinerary: from the abandoned encumbrance of the body, the still-tepid evidence of the deceased. . Liliana! to the kitchen sink, to the chill, the ablutions: the chill which absolves us of all memory. Many drops in the dining room, there, of which five or perhaps more were contiguous to that other blood, to that mess, the stains and the largest pool, from which they tracked it all around with their shoes, those stupid louts. Many drops in the hall, a little smaller, and many in the kitchen: and some rubbed off, as if to erase them with the sole to keep them from being seen on the white, hexagonal tiles. The men had a go at the furniture: eleven drawers and cupboards, closets and sideboards they couldn't open. Giuliano, in the living room, was guarded by two policemen. Cristo-foro had brought some sandwiches and a couple of oranges. All these big men kept wandering and tramping around the house. It jangled the nerves. Don Ciccio sat down, brokenhearted, in the vestibule, waiting for the magistrate. Then he went back in there again: he looked, as if in farewell, at the poor creature over whom the photographers were arguing in whispers, taking care not to stain themselves or their traps, their bulbs, screens, wires, tripods, their big box cameras. They had already discovered two light plugs behind two armchairs, and had already blown a fuse two or three times, one of the three fuses of the apartment. They decided to use magnesium. They fiddled around like two sinister angels, full of a desire not to attract attention, above that terrifying weariness: a cold, poor derelict, now, of the world's evil. They buzzed around like flies, maneuvering those wires, snapping the shutters, agreeing in a whisper on steps, trying to keep from setting the whole kit and kaboodle on fire — these were the first hum of eternity over her opaque senses, that body of a woman which no longer possessed modesty or memory. They operated on the "victim" with no regard for her suffering, and unable to spare her ignominy. The beauty, the clothing, the spent flesh of Liliana were there: the sweet body, still clothed from their gaze. In the obscenity of that involuntary pose — whose motives, beyond doubt, were the skirt lifted back for the outrage, the parted legs, and above them, and the swell and furrow of voluptuousness to inflame the weak (and those sunken eyes, horribly open on to the void, fixed on an inane object, the sideboard) — death seemed to Don Ciccio an extreme decompounding of possibles, an unfocusing of interdependent ideas, formerly harmonized in one person. Like the dissolving of a unity which cannot hold out any longer, the sudden collapse of relationships, of all ties with organizing reality.
The sweet pallor of her face, so white in the opaline dreams of the evening, had given way through funereal modulations to a cyanosed tone, a faded periwinkle: as if hate and outrage had been too harsh, when encountered, for the tender flower of the being, of the soul. Shudders ran down his spine. He tried to reflect. He was sweating again.
From his pocket, mechanically, he took the tram ticket: from the right pocket of his jacket, where he had placed it that morning, and where it still rested, after all the day's grief: with half a cigarette and with a few crumbs: the elongated greenish-blue ticket of the Tranvie dei Castelli, with the hole at the 13th, and another hole, or tear, at Torraccio. He turned it over, then turned it back again. He went into the vestibule, into the master bedroom. He flung himself down in a chair, worn out.
He pondered, trying to put together the pieces of the evidence — disconnected as they were — to set in order the moments, the worn moments of the sequence, of the time that had been lacerated, dead. First of alclass="underline" the two messes were to be connected, weren't they? The incredible burglary of that poor old parrot, la Menegazzi, that woman. . that collection of spinach stains: and this horror, here. Same building, same floor. And yet. . It seemed impossible. Three days apart?
His reason. . told him that the two crimes had nothing in common. The first, well, a "daring" burglary, performed by a criminal very well-informed, if not personally acquainted with the customs and ways of number two hundred and nineteen, stairway A. "Stairway A, stairway A," he grumbled to himself, swaying his head imperceptibly, curly and black: staring at a point on the floor, his hands clasped, his elbows on his knees: "a burglary, all right, homemade."
With that unfindable grocer's boy as informer: hah, or as lookout. More likely lookout, since la Menegazzi, the old fool, hadn't the slightest idea: which means, when you come right down to it, still an accomplice. And with that flat toy trumpet, the Commendatore of the Economy, who had truffles delivered to him. "Commendatore Angeloni!" he sighed, with a certain emphasis. "He has a little weakness for artichokes. We'll have to look into that. And the country ham from Via Panisperna is another weakness. Down at the corner of Via dei Serpenti."
And the ring at the Balducci door? A mistake, surely. Or an alternative? Or a precaution? Rewarded with silence? In any case — this much was clear — a thief. Armed robbery, breaking and entering. .
This other mess, for God's sake, was enough to drive you crazy! Who ever saw such a thing? Still, the robbery motive couldn't be overlooked here, either, not at all, not till Balducci got back. And then. . then what? The drawers would tell their story. Yes, but. . this was a different thing. The manner of the crime, that poor encumbrance in there, those eyes, the horrible wound: a motive, perhaps, a murkier one. That skirt. . thrown back like that, as if by a gust of wind: a hot, greedy gust, blowing from Hell. Summoned by a rage, by such contempt, only the gates of Hell could have granted it passage. The murder "seemed, at this stage of the investigations, a crime of passion." Rape? Desire? Vengeance?
His reason told him to study the two cases separately, to get the feel of them, each on its own. The double number doesn't come up so rarely on the Naples or Bari lottery, and also in Rome it's frequent enough, so even here in the merulanian street, in this stingy phalanstery of two hundred and nineteen stuffed with gold, another fine double combination could turn up. The unwanted double of a pair of crimes. Bang. Bang. Without any connection other than the topical, that is the external, cause: the great fame of the sharks, and their evil gold. A fame omnipresent in the San Giovanni neighborhood, from Porta Maggiore to the Celian, to the ancient cloaca-swamp, the Suburra: where, however, the wine is icy, in summer. He looked at the ticket, again. He turned it over, twice. He scratched his nose lightly (extending his mouth like a tuber) with the thumbnail of his right hand, the back of the naiclass="underline" a gesture habitual with him, and one of remarkable refinement.