The Pirroficoni case had not yet afflicted the pages of the city papers: the Death's Head in his diplomat's ceremonial hat twisting already, on the other hand, the peacock's feather of the suspect, to be able to stick it where he stuck his feathers: peacock's or of spoiled chicken that stank.
In any case it was wise, already in those days, to proceed with caution: Don Ciccio had a whiff of this, and Doctor Fumi as well, after public opinion — that is to say, the general racket — had taken possession of the event.
"To exploit" the event — whatsoever event Jove Scoundrel, big-cheese in the cloud department, dropped in your lap, plop — to the magnification of one's own pseudo-ethical activity, in fact protuberantly theatrical and filthily staged, is the game of the institution or person who wishes to endow propaganda and fisheries with the weight of a moral activity. The displayed psyche of the political madman (a narcissist of pseudo-ethical content) grabs the alien crime, real or believed, and roars over it like a stupid, furious beast, in cold blood, over an ass's jawbone: behaving in such a way as to exhaust (to relax) in the inane matter of a punitive myth the dirty tension that compels him to action, action coute que coute. The alien crime is exploited to placate the snaky-maned Megaera, the mad multitude: which will not be placated with so little: it is offered, like a ram or stag to be torn to pieces, to the disheveled women who will rip it apart, light of foot, ubiquitous and mammary in the bacchanal which their own cries kindle, purpled with torment and blood. In this way, a pseudo-justice assumes a legal course, a pseudo-severity, or the pseudo-habilitation of the finger-pointings whose manifest countersigns seem to be both the arrogance of the ill-considered magistrate's investigation and the cynobalanic{15} excitement of the anticipated sentence. Reread the sad and atrocious tale in War and Peace, book three, part three, chapter twenty-five: and understand the summary execution of the helpless Verestchagin, thought a spy, not being one; Count Rostopchin, governor of Moscow, play-acting on the steps of his palace before the grim, waiting crowd, orders the dragoons to kill him with their sabers, there, in the crowd's presence: on the fine old principle, by God, "quit leur faut une victime." It was in the morning, ten o'clock. "At four in the afternoon Murat's army entered Moscow."
Much more base and theatrical, chez nous, that Fierce-Face with his plume: nor can we grant him, as we can Rostopchin, the immediate attenuating circumstances of fear (of being lynched himself) and of anguish and rage and the pandemonium (total psychosis of the mob) and of the enemy approaching, after the brusque cannonades and the slaughter (at Borodino).
The hapless Pirroficoni was almost killed by the blows of an Italian of the same stripe: because they wanted to wring from him, in any way, in the "interrogation chamber," the truthful admission that he had raped certain little girls. He was stunned and pleaded no, there wasn't a word of truth in it: but he was beaten to a faretheewell. O generous Manes of Beccaria!{16}
The Urbs, in the very period of his fits of public decency and of police-enforced Federzonism,{17} was to know (1926— 27) several periodical stranglings of little girls: and on the meadows there lay traces of the remains and the torment, and the poor, slaughtered innocence: there, there extra muros, after the shrines of suburbicarian devotion, and the epigraphs of the ancient marbles and sacella. Consule Federsonio, Rosamaltonio enixa: Damnato Shittonio dictatore syphlitico{18}. Pirroficoni, the wretch! was master at that time of a mistress, rather plump not to say overripe, but somewhat difficult of access: fifth floor, a modern building: concierge in her lodge: husband, present and in working order… in his carpet slippers: clusters of neighbors ad libitum, natural glossators superior even to Irnerius.{19} Whence, that is, because of these factual premises, a pathetic up-and-down of autographs of various import thanks to a gentle maiden (thirteen years old) who bore them with some circumspection and with equal palpitation of the heart to their destination. And conversations in sign language and various finger play from window to street: and vice versa. The expert and fingersome swain was arrested on the sidewalk, just when he was transmitting some of his signals with six or seven fingers (the hours of love) towards that window on the fifth floor (this, in the opinion of headquarters, was a "strategic feint"): and as he was entrusting a note for Madame, second stratagem, to her little messenger, a little maid, thrilled and frightened by her mission, her face all flushed. Pirroficoni had also given the child, as usual with him, a caress or two: this action, and his own blushing, were his perdition. On this splendid array of evidence the plumed Death's Head belched that "the Roman police in less than forty-eight hours etc. etc." And the cop, comforted by the lofty words of the Deuce, fell to with a will. The doubting intervention of some honest official saved Pirroficoni's bones, but not before they were sorely beaten.
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Then it was Balducci's turn to be questioned: the afternoon of that same day, March 18th, at Santo Stefano del Cacco: for several hours: by the Chief himself: the coroner also took part, pro forma, "the police were still taking the initiative in the investigations." Ingravallo, this time, didn't really feel up to questioning him. A friend, after all! He didn't even want to watch. And besides, it was clear, they would touch on difficult matters: the delicate questioning was bound to end in the hairsplitting of a particular kind of interrogation, or else it would break out in disgusting crudities, an interrogation of the crudest kind. The relations between. . Balducci and his wife: moods, her frame of mind. There came to the surface again that incredible story of the nieces: the strange "mania" of the victim, wanting a daughter at any cost. She would have bought one, secondhand, at the Campo de' Fiori market, all else failing. As to the dough, Doctor Fumi was quick to convince himself that the married couple, him and her both, were in an enviable economic position. With that ballast down in the hold. . there was no rough sea that could rock the boat, no inflation scare.