She had brought to her student-husband, in addition to serene days and nights happy in the communion of souls and tongues, she had brought him. . everything that a girl can bring in the practical and welcome line, for a student-husband: a great nonchalance in ironing pants, after having scorched six or seven pairs of Balducci's. That, we know, had been her discipline, her gradus ad Parnassum. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We learn by mistake. Trial and error.
The third, Virginia! Don Lorenzo lowered his eyes, looking at the ground, though he was a grown man; then he raised his eyes to heaven for half a second, as if to say: be still, my lips! He joined his pious hams in a brief swinging beneath his nose, before his beard: a to-and-fro in the plane of the azimuth, an Italic, decent gesture. "The less said the better!" he seemed to be pleading with Doctor Fumi. It had to be said. The two officers were waiting: Ingravallo, indeed, was on his feet, grim, nervously tapping one leg. The giant's ten huge fingers slumped in his lap, still tightly intertwined: comb and counter-comb: like an apostle of marble, the kind that stand on the balustrade over the big cornice of San Giovanni Laterano. Twenty-five pounds of finger bones, good for cracking nuts, in that black furrow of the cassock: where, in rapid succession, the black caravan of the priest's buttons descended: which had neither beginning nor end, like the catalogue of the centuries. The two shoes, at rest, shiny gravedigger color, but no more so than all the rest, priapated from beneath the garment, like two forbidden objects, camping by themselves near those of Doctor Fumi, under the rack of dossiers, among the four legs of the desk; and inside them, no doubt, two hunks of double feet like a stone Saint Christopher.
"Well, what about Virginia?" Little by little, her character emerged: her headstrong vitality, the impudent type. It turned out that the charmer had charmed two souls: in two unconnected directions. The neighbor women, indeed, said that she had put a spell on both: and some of them played the numbers on the lottery. Her provocative beauty, her health, like a coral devil inside that ivory skin, her eyes! one could really believe that she had hypnotized husband and wife: "those brash ways," that somewhat rustic air, which revealed, however, "a big, sincere heart" (Petac-chioni), or as was said, with a smile and a frown at the same time, with the professional tic of Doctor Ghianda, "a case of violent puberty." To this same Professor Ghianda, without being called upon to do so, Virginia had displayed her tongue, with a very rapid expulsion and an equally rapid return to its place, as if automatic, and with the tip pointed in a special way that was her trademark: sustaining then with the cold authority of her full face, though with a spark of malice in her eyes, his irritated, sulphurous gaze, filled with wrath and pitchy emanations. Hearing him called— she thought — piedatrician, or piediatrist, with great respect, by all the ladies of Stairway A, but even by some of B, she had believed that the distinguished man of science, whom she had seen for years going up and down the steps of the building in that mortician's overcoat to worm the kids, was, at the same time, the Monsignor's callus doctor,{30} Don Lorenzo's, that is: that this, in fact, was the basic profession of old frock-coat. An idea which, once it had entered her head, nobody had been able to drive out. The dimensions of Don Lorenzo's dogs made her certain she was in the right, believing that for such feet you'd need a piediatrist of that high rank. For the rest, my God! she had a pair of hips, two marble breasts: two teats so hard you'd need a scalpeclass="underline" and with her way of shrugging all the time, so haughty, and that contempt on her lips, as if to say: shit to you! Yes, sir.
After hours of silence, her bizarre insolence, her cruel laugh: with those white, triangular teeth, like a shark's, as if she were going to tear somebody's heart to shreds. Those eyes! from below the black fringe of her lashes: they flamed up suddenly in a black lucidity, narrowed, apparently crueclass="underline" a thin flash, which escaped, pointed, oblique, like a lie revealing a truth, which still unspoken, preferred to fade already on the lips. "She was a spoiled girl, but all heart," the chicken-seller opined, after an hour, when he had been summoned in his turn. "A fine figure of a girl, believe me; she liked to act saucy," the grocer's wife from Via Villari confirmed: "Ah! Virginia, from the third floor? She was a bag of tricks!" "That girl? She had the devil on her side," her girl friends said. "She had a devil inside her." But one girl, who was from the Patrica hills, let out a different expression: "She had a poker up her ass": and blushed at once. Commendatore Angeloni, extracted from Regina Coeli for an hour, to let him get a breath of fresh air, too, poor man, when titillated at Santo Stefano del Cacco, promptly drew his head down between his shoulders like a frightened snaiclass="underline" "Well," he merely grumbled, showing a pair of melancholy eyes, till he looked like an ox in a bad humor: yellow, they had become, after only a few days on the Lungara{31}: "I remember bumping into her a couple of times on the stairs, but I don't know her at all; I can't tell you anything," he affirmed sententiously, "about a person I don't know. She was the Balduccis' niece, or so I was told."
Once, several times (Don Lorenzo went on to say), without being much aware at that point of the "figure" or "position" of mother that Liliana Balducci intended to assume, she — that is to say, this Virginia — in the house there in Via Merulana, when the husband had escaped to his trains, and when the maid was out, she had embraced and kissed the signora. "When she got certain whims in her. . her head." Don Lorenzo managed to recover himself: with the steady voice of charity he reported: she, at those moments, well, it had to be one of two things: either she was out of her mind, or else she felt she had to play-act like that. What was certain was that she used to embrace and kiss the mistress of the house.
"Mistress?" interrupted Doctor Fumi, narrowing his brows.
"Mistress, stepmother — it's all the same." She kissed her, the way a panther might give a kiss: "Oh Signora Liliana, darling, you're like the Madonna for me!" then, in a low low voice, in an even more stifled tone of ardor: "I love you, love you, love you; one of these days I'm going to just eat you up": and she grasped her wrist, and twisted it, staring at her: she twisted it like a vise, mouth to mouth, till each could breathe the other's breath, tit to tit. Don Corpi rectified, naturally enough: "I mean, moving close to her with her face and bosom." But both Ingravallo and Doctor Fumi had understood the first time.
One day, in an access of filial love, she really did bite her ear: and that time Liliana took fright. Madonna! How it hurt! She ran all the way to the Quattro Santi, at full tilt. Pale, breathless, she had displayed the part known as the lobule, still dotted by the little circle… of those teeth! My God! All in fun. . but nasty fun, just the same. If fun is the word for it.
Then they had tried to drag her into the church, "to make her say some prayers, as many prayers as she could. Prayer, you might say, is the ticket to Paradise: or to Purgatory, at least. If you're carrying a heavy suitcase, you don't get past the Customs in Paradise. . not the first time. But her pray? Not on your life! She hummed them under your nose, till you wanted to slap her, like a song, those Roman songs they sing with the guitar. . sad ones, between nose and throat: or else shaking her head all the time, with her eyes on the tips of her shoes, avemaria avemaria, la-la-la-la gratiaplena gratiaplena, as if to mock the whole lot of us, the Madonna included. The Madonna! Now really! A singsong that would have put a baby to sleep. Shameless! Because if there's somebody who can help us out in this world, it's the Madonna, and her alone: because the good Lord. . it looks to me like we do our best to give him a pain in the. . the heart. ." Don Corpi recovered himself: a second time.