"Skip the grass and the hay, and the meadows and the pastures. And forget about the dead. Just answer me."
"But, Sergeant dear, let me get a word in. How can I answer you, otherwise? I was saying, how everybody nowadays has a sister, no? And if you have one, then I'm sure.. that day comes around for your sister, too, poor lamb; maybe she has a little headache. We women, he he he, have our headaches here." And she touched her belly, almost caressing it. Her eyes flashed satanic, intoxicated. The black oven between the incisors' gap. The tongue drawn back, now, like a parrot's when he gurgles in his throat, in spite. Her hair seemed to be summoned aloft, by electricity, as if it were about to burst into flame and crackle like brambles, when a spark, on the baked earth, kindles them.
"Yes, I understand, you women here get a headache from all the knitting you have to do. But don't start nagging me with headaches now. Cut it short. Enough of this chatter. You have to tell me when it was that they stayed home, these two girls: Mattonari and Farcioni. I already know, but I want to check with you, to see if you're telling the truth, or if you're lying. If you're lying, if you're lying to put the investigation off the track, here, here are the handcuffs, all ready for them and for you." And he took from his pocket and dangled before her nose an example of the ill-famed hardware. Seated, the witch didn't bat an eye: those armillae, in any case, didn't concern her. "Well?"
"Well, let's see. . it must have been last month, the one before this. Now that I think of it, we're just at the new moon." Obstinate, she harped on this theme: "How can I remember the monthlies of all the girls? I think that's asking too much. ."
"Too much? Moons? Now look here, Zamira Pacori! Have you lost your mind? Who do you think you're talking to?"
"But last month. ."
"Last month my ass! Watch what you're saying. Last month! I'm asking you if they were absent on Tuesday the fifteenth, or Friday: one of the two." (He didn't dare bring his Saturday into play.) "This is what I'm asking you. And this is all I want you to answer, because you know very well."
At that point, as if summoned from the darkness, from the slightly opened door of the little stairway which led into the store (of which the young boys daydreamed, others mythicized, and more than one, because of the palm-reading, knew from experience), there peered in, then hopped onto the chill tile floor, here and there, with certain cluck-clucks of hers, among two piles of sweaters, a surly and half-featherless hen, lacking one eye, with her right leg bound by a string, all knots and splices, which wouldn't stop coming out, coming up: such, as from the ocean, the endless line of the sounding where the windlass of the poop summons it back aboard and yet a fringe of beard decks it out, from time to time: a mucid, green seaweed from the depths. After having hazarded, this way and that, more than one lifting of the foot, with the air, each time, of knowing quite well where she meant to go, but of being hindered by the contradictory prohibitions of fate, the pattering one-eyed fowl then changed her mind completely. She unstuck her wings from her body (and she seemed to expose the ribs for a more generous intake of air), while a badly restrained anger already gurgled in the gullet: a catarrhous commination. Her windpipe envenomed, she began a cadenza in falsetto: she pecked wildly at the top of that mountain of rags, whence she sprayed the phenomena of the universe with the supreme cockledoodledoo, as if she had laid an egg up there. But she fluttered down without any waste of time, landing on the tiles with renewed paroxysms of high notes, a glide of the most successful sort, a record: still dragging the string after her. Parallel to the string and its chain of knots and gnarls, a thread of gray wool had caught on one leg: and the thread this time seemed to be unwoven from a rhubarb-colored scarf, beneath the dyed rags. Once on the ground, and after yet another cluck-cluck expressing either a wrath beyond cure or restored peace and friendship, she planted herself on steady legs before the shoes of the horrified corporal, turning to him the highly unbersagliere-like plume{61} of her taiclass="underline" she lifted the root of the same, revealed the Pope's nose in all its beauty: diaphragmed to the minimum, the full extent of the aperture, the pink rose-window of her sphincter, and, plop, promptly took a shit: not out of contempt, no, probably indeed to honor, following hennish etiquette, the brave noncom, and with all the nonchalance in the world: a green chocolate drop twisted a la Borromini like the lumps of colloid sulphur in the Abule water: and on the very tip-top a little spit of calcium, also in the colloidal state, a very white cream, the pallor of pasteurized milk, which was already on the market in those days.
All these aerodynamics, naturally, and the consequent release of chocolate, or mocha, as may be, were exploited by Zamira to avoid answering: while some surly little feathers, snowy and delicate as those of a baby duckling, lingered above, in midair, softly swaying, till they seemed the dissolving rings of smoke from a cigarette. In this new wonder Pestalozzi's imperative faded away. She got up quickly from the chair with all her bluish behind, and started kicking her slipper and waving her skirt after the sulky beast, since she had no apron, and screeching at it: "Get out! Out! dirty, filthy thing! The idea! Of anything so nasty! To the sergeant here! Filthy animal!"
So that the filthy thing in question, still trilling a thousand clucketyclucks, and spewing them, all together, towards the ceiling in a great cackling resume, doubly anchored though she was by string and yarn, took flight up to the top of the sideboard: where, pissed off, and resuming her full dignity, she deposited, on the pewter tray, another neat little turd, but smaller than the first: plink! With which she seemed to have evacuated to the full extent of her possibilities. Fear (of the carabinieri) brings out the worst in all of us.
And there, at the glass door, the brass handle began also to show signs of restlessness. The door opened. A young girl, from the March outside, burst into the large room like a gust of wind. A dark shawl around her neck: umbrella in hand, already closed before her entry. A wave of handsome chestnut hair from the forehead back, almost in a cascade over the shawclass="underline" March had invaded it, with lunatic arabesques. At the sight of the olive drab, as soon as she had come down the step, she stopped, lips parted, dumfounded. The two soldiers and Zamira, all three, sensed an unexpected emotion which had flamed up from her uterus through the lymphatic glands and the vaginal tracts into the fullness of her boobs: in a faint gasping, but certainly a vivid palpitation. Her face paled, or so it seemed: it was, at this point, the slightly hysterical white of a desirable girl. She remained with her lips parted, then said: "Good morning, Corporal": and hurled a larboard glance at the other one, whom she had already discerned on coming in and descending the step, but whom she saw for the first time, cornered in his corner as if in a modest penumbra: over whom prevailed, in any case, the chevroned dazzle, that is to say the hierarchical precedence of Pestalozzi. After the glance at the other simpleton, she made as if to look around for a place to set her umbrella: but the lynx-like gaze (lynx was the word he used to describe himself) of the above-named sergeant. . no, the lynx-like gaze did not miss a movement of her left hand (which held in the ring and little finger that scarecrow of an umbrella), to the charge or benefit of the other hand: a kind of scratching or massage inflicted or practiced with the thumb, from below, and externally with the index and middle finger, on the long, central fingers of the right hand: as if to warm them up, foreseeing the work to come. In the apparent casualness of the gesture there was an insistent, a premeditated quality: it was the gesture, not casual, of one who wishes to remove a ring, with some effort, and who proposes, at the same time, to conceal the not-easy operation from others present. The corporal glared at the girl, approached her by two paces, bang, bang, gently but firmly took her right hand by the fingertips: an invitation to the dance which admitted no refusal. He seemed to be pressing and squeezing them, one by one, those fingers, one after the other, as if to feel if there was a pimple, or a callus, as he went on looking into her eyes, fixed and perplexed, with the manner of a magician on the stage in a demonstration of hypnotism. Finally he turned it over, that hand, and stood there looking into its palm, to read her fate, one would have said. A handsome yellow stone, a topaz? glowed like the headlight of a train, a hundred facets, on the inner part of the finger, the ring finger, after her surreptitious half-twist. It gave forth, from itself, the bumptious and slightly silly gaiety, at moments, of colored glass, under the sudden appearance and alternate fading, among the March clouds, of the sun, also seized with a uterine languor: for in that first month, when he has barely caught a whiff of the rain in the skies, he too is seized with the vapors and palpitations: like that Apollo that he is.