"Why, officer dear… I was that upset! How could I think about caps, at a time like that? You see. . Now tell me yourself, frankly: when they start firing all these bullets, do you think a lady notices a cap?. ."
"Was he alone?" "Oh, yes, alone, alone," the two women said, in unison. "Oh, officer," la Menegazzi implored, "you must help us, you who can help us. For pity's sake. Maria Vergine! A widow! Alone in the house! Maria Vergine! What a nasty world we live in! These aren't men, they're devils! Ugly devils that come back from hell. ."
La Menegazzi, like all women alone in the house, spent her hours in a state of anguish or, rather, of suspicious and tormented expectancy. For some time her constant fear of the doorbell's ring had become intellectualized into a complex of images and obsessions: masked men, seen in close-up, with felt-soled shoes: sudden, and equally silent, intrusions into the hall; a hammer brought down hard on her head, or her throat clutched by hands or strangled with a length of string brought for the purpose, preceded perhaps by horrible torture: a notion — or a word — this last, which filled her with unspeakable emotion. Mixed anxieties and fantasies: to the accompaniment, perhaps, of a sudden palpitation of the heart, the sudden creak, in the darkness, of some cupboard, its wood more seasoned than the others: fantasies, in any case, greedily anticipating the event. Which, after so much insistence, couldn't fail, in the end, to arrive. The long wait for house-breaking and aggression, Ingravallo thought, had created a compulsion not so much for her, her actions and thoughts, a victim already marked down, but a compulsion for destiny, for destiny's "field of forces." The prefiguration of disasters must have evolved into a historic predisposition: it had acted: not only on the psyche of the woman to be robbed-strangled-tortured, but also on the "field" of atmosphere, on the field of the external psychic tensions. Because Ingravallo, like certain of our philosophers, attributed a soul, indeed a lousy bastard of a soul, to that system of forces and probabilities which surrounds every human creature, and which is customarily called destiny. To put it simply, her great fear had brought bad luck to her, to Signora Menegazzi. Her dominating thought, at every trill, used to coagulate in that "Who is it?", a bleat or bray habitual in every female recluse whose lares are too weak to protect her. In her it was a moaning antiphony to the ring itself, to the doorbell's most domestic requests.
It turned out that the young man, as soon as Signora Teresina resolved to take off the chain and open up, had said he was sent by the management of the building to check the radiators, which he was to inspect one by one. In fact, some days before, there had been an argument over the radiators because, at centrally heated winter's official end, they were more tepid (towards the cold) than the tenants' desire to spend money.
The flame of all heating equipment, in Rome, was extinguished on the Ides of March, at times it was the Nones instead, or indeed, even the Kalends. During double winters with prolonged epilogues, as was the winter of Twenty-seven, the flame was fed for the whole month, then it was allowed to waste away in a prolonged languor not without discussion and diatribe among the opinionated tenants, vociferous in proportion to the event: among pros and cons, the penniless and the wealthy, the stingy careful ones and the carefree, urinators in hope and glory. As to the rooms on the upper floors of two hundred and nineteen, they could be numbered, beyond any doubt, among the most Romanly sunny of all Rome: for which reason, since in that early spring it was snowy-raining, the inhabitants quaked with cold.
The mechanic had with him neither bag nor sack: the implements of his position for the moment were not required. It was merely an inspection. The Signora Teresina added — but this Don Ciccio did not write down — that she was sure that young man. . yes, the murderer, the mechanic. . she was sure, and could have sworn it in court, was sure that the boy had hypnotized her (Don Ciccio stood there and listened, his mouth agape, with a sleepy manner) because at a certain point, while they were still in the vestibule, he had stared at her. "Stared!" she repeated, almost declaiming, enthusiastic at the stern fixity of that gaze: "his eyes were merciless, steady and hard," from beneath his cap, "like a snake's." And she had, then, felt her strength fail her. She told how, indeed, at that moment, whatever the young man had asked or commanded, at that point she would have done it, would have unquestionably obeyed him: "like a robot" (her very words).
"Maria Vergine! Hypnotized! That's what I was. ." Don Ciccio, in his thoughts, couldn't help editorializing: "These women!"
And so it happened that he, the mechanic, was able to go all over the apartment. In the bedroom, glimpsing some gold objects on the dresser, on its marble top, he had scooped them up with one movement of his hand, opened with his other hand beneath it, like a bucket, the large pocket at his disposal, over his hip, in the overall.
"What are you up to?" la Menegazzi had screeched at him, not totally helpless despite her hypnotic condition. He, turning, had aimed a pistol at her face: "Shut up, you old witch, or I'll fry you to a crisp." Having taken the measure of her terror, he opened the drawer, the top one, where the key is. . And he had guessed right. There was all her gold, her jewels: in a little leather coffer. There was the money. "How much?" Ingravallo asked. "I couldn't be absolutely sure. Four thousand six hundred, I think." The money in a man's wallet, dry and old: a memento of her poor husband. (Her eyes became damp.) And that boy, without a moment's hesitation, had already wrapped the coffer in a kind of dirty handkerchief, or maybe it was a rag, yes, it was, with a fever in his fingers: the wallet he had simply slipped into his pocket, so quickly! Maria Verginel "In the pocket here. ." and the signora slapped her hip with her hand.
"Devils. I don't know how they do it. The devils! Devils."
"Aw shut up," the young man had said to her in a grim, menacing voice, keeping his eye on her, his face almost touching hers. They looked like a tiger's, now, those eyes: the evil soul had seized its prey: he would have defended it at whatever cost. He sneaked away without any difficulty, like a shadow. "Keep quiet!": the terrible injunction. But instead, as soon as she had seen him go out, she had flung herself at the window, yes, that one, that very one, which looked down on the courtyard, and opening it, had shouted, shouted, the tenants said rather that she had screamed wildly: "Thief! Thief! Help! Stop him!" Then… She wanted to follow him at once, but she was taken ill, worse even than before. She had fallen, or thrown herself, on "her" bed: there. And she pointed it out.
Two hundred and nineteen, five floors plus the roof and the two stairways, A and B, with some offices on B, on the mezzanine: it was like a railroad station. The stairs, both of them easily climbable, and one darker than the other. Stairway A was a bit quieter than its counterpart: all real respectable on that side, du cote de chez madame.