The diminution of the little hoard (with the personal passbooks, however, there was no real danger) seemed to crush Signor Remo: even more perhaps, judging from outside, from the immediate psychic and physiognomical reactions, than the horrible news which had been brought to him at the station. It was a completely gratuitous, false impression, you might say: but none of those present managed to dispel it, not the (top) sergeant, nor Orestino: and still less Aunt Marietta and Aunt Elviruccia, embittered and malicious as they contemplated that gross man sunk in tribulations: "yes, yes, go out on your hunting trips now, now that the rabbit has run off," that huge man who went up and down the house, pulling out all the drawers of the furniture and looking into them. . just in case a pin had been stolen.
Made grim and greedy, the aunts were, just thinking about it, in the great fermenting that the latent avarice common to all the Valdarena relations had created in those hours of the incredible night with its troubled counsels, after the many-regioned voices of the police and the unquestionably Roman one of Sora Manuela in the telephonic shock of the preceding day: and now both of them, Aunt Marietta and Aunt Elviruccia, disappointed in the disappointment of a moment. Lilianuccia, eh? Not even a little souvenir left to her cousins? to her aunts? to her own Aunt Marietta, who had been a mother to her, you might say, since her real mother died? not even a little medal of the Madonna? with all that jewelry (You could have stocked a shop with it) that she kept under lock and key? Poor child, it had never occurred to her to make a will. When a person has to die like that, she can't think about it beforehand, she can't foresee such a thing. Madonna! it was enough to drive you crazy! What a world! What a world, indeed!
And besides they had Giuliano on their minds. That arrest, they felt, was an outrage: an offense against them, the splendid house of Valdarena, "a high-class family whose like you can't find in the whole of Rome"; a family of the most florid, the most solidly rooted: men, women, and kids. The thought of a girl like that, plunged into the devil's arms, with all her finest wedding presents, all her gold and jewels, leaving nothing to remember her by, not even a word of farewell! The idea, for the poor aunts! was about to become a torment, heartache. Murdered that way. Rancor, horror, terror, a cry in the darkness! At the bursting out of a demoniacal tension which acts to lacerate in such a drastic way the folio certificates of one's civil status, demos or parish, and the long, the many-eyed precautions of living — on such occasions, the human kin, the gentes, tend to repeat, as a right, even if they don't achieve it in fact, the thing lent. Commodatam repetunt rem. They summon it back from the darkness, from the night. They want it back, they want once more the flower! with its broken stem, the quantum that has been lost from their life. Like filings on the magnet, the tiniest fibers of their viscera are polarized on the tension of return. They feel they must suck back the gamic unit that has been expelled, the biological unit, the person once alive, eternally alive, and sacra-mentally alienated into marriage with some Tom, Dick or Harry. They would like to control again the possibility, the nuptial valency offered to another, to the husband (in this case): to the brother-in-law or son-in-law given them by the demos. And the gamic unit whose possession they claim implies, at the same time, an economic quantum. She was a splendid girl, and there was a coffer of jewels: former and latter ripened by the years: by the slow, tacit years. She was a girl with a little box; and they, the Valdarenas, had entrusted her husband with the key: and the right to make use of it, clickety-click: the sacrosanct use. And Christ's coadjutor, at the church of the Santi Quattro, had blessed the pact. With a wealth of asperges in nomine Domini: without too much splashing, however. She, beneath her orange-blossom crown, within her veil, had bowed her head. So let him give back, back what was wrongly taken, this fool of a hunter, this traveler in textiles. How had he used her beauty? Or how wasted it? such gentle beauty? and the cash? the grand old cash, equally beautiful? Where had he stashed it away, the loot? Those gold pieces with the Gentleman King's ugly face on them? Those nicely round, bright yellow pieces of the days before this Puppet in Palazzo Chigi, yelling from his balcony like an old-clothes man. She had forty-four of them, Liliana had, forty-four gold marengos: which went clink-clank in a little bag of pink silk, a bag her grandmother had sent wedding sweets in.{14} And they weighed more than a pair of kidneys at Christmas. "And now where have they gone to?" the kinfolk thought. "What does he know about them, our hunter friend here?" Manet sub Jove frigido. To what marriage indeed has he reserved his wife, his bride's carnal and dowrial validity? What has he made of that tender flesh, this apoplectic salesman? and with that nice nest egg? which was so much a part of it? Yes, the tidy bundle! left her by a stubborn rumination of time, of the economic virtues of the lending clan? Thus, as she had inherited that tepid flesh from the accumulated vehemence of generations, after many a hard morning. Liliana's relatives seemed to be saying: "Oh! gentle bride, stuffed with nice cash! treasure of the years! Unexpected accrediting of the equinox! Let him cough up, that is to say, spit back, this hick of a commercial traveler! Let him not dare accuse Giuliano, splendid offshoot of the old stock, only because he has to face comparison with him now." Their minds, the minds of those two old bags Aunt Marietta and Aunt Elvira, pursued their private whims: "Giuliano, flower of the Valdarena clan! Replete with fertile days! Bud of life!"
There exists a dramatic region of every rancor, from the spleen and from the gall bladder inside the gnawing liver, to the very penumbras behind the household furniture where the lares officiate: the gods that see and remain silent, breathing in the dead odor of naphthalene in cupboards. But at the first appearance of the blade, they had trembled, unable to cry out: and in the room's opaque volumes, now, they were shocked and weeping, with the nerves of martyrs. Well, it was there, between the legs of the corporal and the locksmiths, when Manuela's globes had been shoved aside, that all those envenomed phantoms wandered. Erect and hard, the aunts awaited justice: Oreste didn't know himself how to behave.
Valdarena, at the Collegio Romano, had been subjected to repeated questioning: the alibis he had produced (office, clerks in the office) were watertight up until nine twenty, but not after that. He said he had been out, downtown. Out where? With whom? Clients? Women? Tobacconist? Two or three times he blushed, as if at a lie. He had even trotted out his barber, but then had immediately retracted this affirmation: no, he had had his hair cut the day before. Actually none of the tenants had seen him, at that earlier hour. Only at ten thirty-five, when he had called for help. The Felicetti kid: brought before him, face to face, denied having seen him on the stairs: the one who went to say good morning to the Bottafavis, who had met the cheese-bearers: "n. o. ." she said, with great tugging at her lips, so that she could hardly blurt out: "he… wasn't… there…" After which she went mute: and pressed by new and repeated questions, then by exhortation of every kind, she hung her head, in tears. She almost said yes, but she couldn't quite make up her mind: she wouldn't open her mouth. Finally, as big drops ran down her cheeks, it seemed to everybody that she wanted to shake her head: no. Her Mamma, kneeling beside her, face to face, patted her on the head, from which statements issue; she whispered in one ear, kissing her: "Tell the nice man, dear, tell the truth. Tell me, yes, now didn't you see this gentleman here, on the steps? See how blond he is? Like an angel, isn't he? Tell us, sweetheart, Mamma's baby doll! No, don't cry, your Mamma's right here with you, your Mamma who loves you to pieces. Here," two kisses smacked on the kid's cheeks, "you mustn't be scared of the officer. Doctor Ingravallo isn't the bad kind of doctor, those mean ones, who hurt my poor baby and make her stick out her tongue and say ah. He's a doctor in a black suit, too, but he's a good one!" and she squeezed the little stomach under the dress, as if to ascertain whether it were dry or damp: in certain cases, testimony is not necessarily unaccompanied by suitable outpourings of another nature. "Tell me, tell Mamma, there's my sweetie. Tell us, and Doctor Ingravallo will give you a nice dolly, the kind that shut their eyes, with a pink apron with little blue flowers on it." Then the kid hung her head still lower and said: "Yes." Giuliano paled. "And what was the gentleman doing? What did he say to you?" She burst out weeping, yelling desperately amid her tears: "I — want — to — go home! Home!" after which her Mamma blew her nose for her: and that was that, nothing more to be got out of her. Mamma, "Oh, I tell you!" insisted that she was an extraordinarily bright child, for her age: "you know how it is… with kiddies, you have to know how to handle them." To Ingravallo, on the other hand, she seemed an idiot, in every respect a daughter worthy of her mother.