That Awful Mess on the via Merulana     by Carlo Emilio Gadda, Translated by William Weaver Original title: Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Me Original language: Italian Published by George Braziller Publishers Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 1.06 x 8.26 x 5.55 ISBN: 0807610933 List Price: $8.95 Not available for ordering Published by Quartet Pub. Date: 1985 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £7.95 Not available for ordering

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Written in a polyphony of voices and dialects, Gadda’s detective stories are unique in Italian literature. This story is a real ‘mess’, dominated by the figure of an investigator, Doctor Francesco Ingravallo, who has had to resignedly accept a transfer to the capital. He is given the job of sorting out the intricate crime committed in the Via Merulana, in a condominium housing an avaricious population of shopkeepers, businessmen, well-off professionals and profiteers.


Against the background of a Rome where fascism is preparing its final take-over — the year is 1927 and Mussolini is making the transition from Prime Minister to Fascist ‘Duce’ (‘Führer’) — a woman Ingravallo knows, Liliana, is murdered, and, a few days later, a neighbouring woman is attacked and robbed. These events run into one another, become more complicated, one obscures the other and gradually new characters are brought on who seem to be essential to the resolution of the crime but actually only muddle things further.


The worried Ingravallo tries to ‘twitch the strings of the inert puppet of probability’ and ends up feeling the ground beneath his feet slip away, sure of having got to the bottom of the affair and, finding himself face-to-face with the guilty party, guilt is denied for the umpteenth time.


With amazing effect Gadda then delivers the conclusion to the story, pointing out that what is vital is not the discovery of the guilty party but everything around the crime, the chain of causation that allowed evil to act yet again.

‘>From the right, where the plain was dense with dwellings and went down to the river, Rome appeared, lying as if on a map or a scale model: it smoked slightly, at Porta San Paolo: a clear proximity of infinite thoughts and palaces, where the north wind had cleansed, which the tepid succession of sirocco had after a few hours, with its habitual knavishness, resolved in easy images and had gently washed. The cupola of mother-of-pearl: other domes, towers: dark clumps of pines. Here ashen: there all pink and white, confirmation veils: sugar in a haute pâté, a morning painting by Sciajola. It looked like a huge clock flattened on to the ground, which the chain of the Claudian aqueduct bound....joined....to the mysterious springs of the dream. There, stood the general HQ of the forces: there, there, for many moons, his dreamed-of application lay waiting, waiting. Like pears,- medlars, even an application’s ripening is marked by that capacity for perfectable maceration which the capital of the ex-kingdom confers on all paper, is commensurate with an unrevolving time, but internal to the paper and its relative stamps, a period of incubation and of Roman softening. Bedecked, with silent dust, are all of the red tapes, the dossiers of the files: with heavy cobwebs, all the great boxes of time: of the incubating time, Roma doma; Rome tames, Rome broods. On the hay-stack of her decrees. A day comes, at last when the egg of the longed-for promulgation drops at last from her viscera, from the sewer of the decretal labyrinth: and the respective rescript, which licenses the gaunt petitioner to scramble that egg for the rest of his natural life, is whipped off to the addressee. In more cases than one, it arrives along with Extreme Unction. It licenses the applicant, now sunk into coma — verba volant, scripta manent — to practise that sleeping art, that crippled trade that he had surreptitiously practised until then, till the moment of the Holy Oil: and which from then on, de jure decreto, he will make an effort to practise, a little at a time, in hell with all the leisure granted him by eternity.’ pp264-5