When Doctor Fumi was on the point of dismissing them, the visit of "a priest" was announced. "Who is it?" Don Lorenzo Corpi asked to be heard, because of an urgent communication he had to make, "regarding the painful case in Via Merulana." He had spoken to the corporal on duty. Fumi, with a gesture, sent the two from the room: Valdarena under guard. He asked Balducci to remain in the station.
Don Corpi was brought in. He removed his hat slowly, a prelate's gesture.
He was a handsome priest, tall and stocky, with rare strands of white amid his raven hair, and with a pair of owl's eyes very close to his nose: which, metaphorically, between such eyes, could be compared only to a beak. Decorously sheathed in his cassock, he bore in his left hand, along with the new hat, a black leather briefcase, the kind priests carry sometimes, when they have to visit their lawyer and let him know who has the right on his side. Black shoes, very shiny, long and sturdy, good for walking on the Aven-tine, as well as the Celian, with double soles. A man of remarkable appearance: and of exceptional robustness, judging from his walk and his movements, from the handclasp that he gave Doctor Fumi, and from the fullness of his cassock, above, and down to the waist, and from the flapping it made below, where it belled out in a skirt of strong cloth that looked like the Banner of Judgment.
After some slightly embarrassed or, at least, very cautious preamble, as the softer glances of Doctor Fumi led him on to speak, he said that: he had been out of Rome, visiting certain friends at Roccafringoli, at the very top of the mountains, at Monte Manno almost, which you reach from Palestrina on donkey-back, and having come back from there a mere twenty hours ago, "as soon as I heard of the terrible event," he had hastened to bring here the holograph will, entrusted to him by the "late lamented" Signora Balducci with her own hands, whom he had also "gone to visit" the evening before at the morgue, "may she rest in peace."
"At first," he stated, still deeply upset and horrified by the "thing," he had had reason to fear. . that the document had been stolen from him. He had hunted for it all over the place, turning out all his papers, from all the drawers in his study: but he hadn't been able to dig it up. At night, all of sudden, it had come to him: he had deposited it with other envelopes and with certain.. certain personal mementoes, in the Banco di Santo Spirito. In fact, this morning he had gone there, the moment they opened, just after he said the six o'clock Mass. His heart had been pounding, at times.
From that black calfskin case he took out and handed to Doctor Fumi — who received it with his very white hand — a white, fairly large, square envelope, with five seals of scarlet sealing wax. The envelope and the seals seemed to be in perfect order: "Holograph Will of Liliana Balducci."
The three officials, or rather Doctor Fumi and Ingravallo, decided to open it forthwith: and to read the "last wishes of the poor lady": dictating a report in the presence of Don Corpi and of four witnesses, in addition to Balducci, who had been called in again. Last wishes, which still must date back to a couple of months ago: last, since they had remained unchanged.
First of all, and by telephone, they consulted the royal notary Doctor Gaetano De Marini in Via Milano: 292.784: who, according to Don Lorenzo, "must know about this matter." After some calling and recalling, finally he answered. He was deaf. A Neapolitan secretary assisted him at the receiver. Both of them were dumfounded. Balducci knew De Marini, to whose services both he and Liliana's father had on many occasions had recourse: but he "felt that he could rule out the notion" that, for her personal will, Liliana had gone to that old cockroach, likable and sly, but horribly deaf in the fortress of his competence.
To act as witnesses, two clerks and two policemen were called in. The ceremony was quickly carried out: it was noon, or almost: another morning had drifted by, without their resolving anything.
The will, as Doctor Fumi went on reading it aloud, in vivid accents, with Neapolitan resonances from the four corners of the ceiling, gradually revealed an unforeseeable turn: as if it had been drawn up in a state of particular emotion by a person whose pen was running away with him, a person perhaps not in full control of his faculties. From that soft, warm, suave reading, effectively conducted in the most harmonious Parthenopean tones, the listeners present realized, with mounting interest and with mounting wonder, that the poor Signora Balducci was leaving her husband heir to the lesser part of her substance, with some gold objects and jewels: the strictly legal share, so to speak: almost half. A conspicuous portion, on the other hand, fell to "my beloved Luigia Zanchetti also known as Gina, daughter of the late Pompilio Zanchetti and Irene Zanchetti nee Spinaci, born at Zagarolo on the fifteenth of April, nineteen hundred and fourteen." To her, poor child: "since the inscrutable will of God has not seen fit to grant me the joy of motherhood."
Balducci didn't draw a breath: he made a face, as if he had been the guilty one. Or perhaps, more likely, it was the thought of all that good stuff (and how!) heading for Zagarolo. Until the ward reached her majority, the swag was to be assigned, to be administered, to some caretakers or executors, as it were, one of whom was Balducci himself, "my husband Remo Eleuterio Balducci, father in spirit, if not by blood, of the abandoned Luiggia." The mother of Luigia, according to the will, "was condemned by an incurable illness" (tuberculosis, probably complicated by priapomania): from time to time she went on a drunk in Tivoli with her lover a butcher: and it took plenty of pull to keep the carabinieri from sending her forcibly back to Zagarolo: given her "inability to support herself with her own means" and given the circumstances, too: a public scandal. The butcher, it was never quite clear how, managed to hush things up every time: almost certainly with the argument of the "prime fillet" (top quality): which is to say that, to the poor sick woman, his roast beef was much more salubrious than the all-too-thin air of Zagarolo, with the consequent unsatisfied appetite. At other times he beat her like a rug: she coughed and spat blood, poor thing, if not raspberry gelatin: "What did I do, after all?" She had gathered spring violets at Villa d'Este or some March daisies in Villa Gregoriana, just before you get to the waterfall. A future subject of the Mustached-Beast, armed with his Zeiss, exploring with that perfect binocular the whole slope of Venus Slut, inch by inch, from one blade of grass to the next, Teuton fashion, all of a sudden, happens to see under the blazing sun a kind of spider, inhaling-exhaling: a strange clump in the shadow of a great laurel bush, the most Gregorian, according to his Baedeker, of all the bushes of Tivoli: a kind of back, in a kind of digger's jacket: with four legs and four feet, however; two of them upside down. And that back, so full of Macht, seemed gripped by an irrepressible agitation of an alternating nature, metronomic in its cadence. The binoculared seal then thought it his duty to report this to the management—"Verwaltung, Verwaltung!. . Wo ist denn die Verwaltung? druben links? Ach so!. ." — which he long sought, in the sweat of his brow, and finally found: and where there wasn't a soul, because they were all home eating or enjoying a little after-dinner nap. Padre Domenico, the following Sunday, thundered at nine A.M. from the pulpit of San Francesco: what a pair of lungs! He had it in for certain shameless women, generally speaking, and he guaranteed them hell, the very bottom: a lodging adapted to them — he triptyched here and there with his head, his fist raised, as if one moment he were addressing Marta, then Maddalena, then Pietro, then Paolo. But everyone understood from his opening roar where he was going to end up: with those eyes bulging and that rage that looked as if he wanted to bite somebody, which then, however, calmed down, slowly, and went straight to strike the devil, where he got it all off his chest: and the devil, without a word, down, crouching, at the fear Padre Domenico inspired: then he climbed up gently towards "the beauties of nature so plentifully lavished by God's Providence on this, your Tibur" as well as the "miracles of art and our national generosity so wisely given to this ancient land by the provident hand of the Roman Pontiff Gregory Sixteenth, after the great telluric cataclysm of 1826 and the fearsome flooding of our own Aniene": when it came to the flooded Aniene he could share the local pride, being a native of Filettino, only a short distance from the river's source and 1,062 meters above sea level. "Today, alas contaminated," both miracles and beauties, "by the pestilential and stinking breath of Utter Darkness: which is always lying in wait: wherever he realizes that he can cause the loss of a soul, when he can wrest a soul away from its own salvation": even in the Villa Gregoriana.