The brief caravan of the tympanic importuning, rail-roadward, having passed, and almost extinguished the mad animality in calamitous growls and snarls, teeth clenched in rage: I'll show you, I will, Pestalozzi also forgot the old woman: behind or within whose empty and badly hung skirt, tatters with appendices of threads, he had seemed to hear some devilment grumbling, or some toad gargling. There was no evil spell, as at the sorceress's shop, but perhaps jactura: preterintentional. Yes. And he interpellated the girl directly. "Are you Mattonari Camilla?" He recognized her as a seamstress of I Due Santi, but hadn't known her name: the least elect, the least "friendly." He drew from his pocket, twice folded over, and slowly unfolded with official decorum, the sheet: in legalitarian justification of his question: the list of topazes already displayed in the shop. "Yes," she said. She was a medium-sized dumpy girl with pale gray skin that looked like greasy paper: a flat, rather potato-like face, little eyes, tan, drowned in the redundance of suet. "Do you recognize this?" and he put the ring under her nose.
"How should I know? Why should I recognize it?" she shrugged.
"Your cousin Mattonari Lavinia states. . that she was lent it by you."
"No, no, she's a big liar. I don't have anything to do with it."
"That she picked it out," he improvised, "from the others that you have."
"That liar! The nerve! She probably got it from her boy friend. I've never had a ring like this in my life.."
"Like this! You mean, however, that you have others, or some others, different from this one. I want to see them. Show me where they are. And who is your boy friend?" but he neglected to linger on that quite ordinary image of the boy friend, completely gripped, now, by the idea that the fat girl was lying to him, that an almond or two, in some hole, she kept hidden. "And, while we're about it, why didn't you go to work this morning?" The girl, lips white, with the gesture of a robot, raised the pin with its double skin, and with eyes avoiding the corporal's glance, as if to say: "through the fault, or merit, of this here."
"Yes, I see that you've got that flag in your hand: but. . are you the signal-man? Is that what you're trying to make me believe?"
"No, my uncle had to go down to Ciampino, to the office. He's the chief here. But when he has to go someplace, then I stay here for him."
Chief, in her lexicon, meant signal-man.
"Let me have a look at the other rings, if there are any: at your corals: all the jewelry you have: your Sunday earrings."
"Jewelry? I don't have any corals, not even earrings. What do you think? Poor as we are, hungry all the year round?"
"Your uncle is a government employee: you work as a seamstress, when you work. Let's not waste any time. Show me what you have. If the stuff is yours, nobody's going to touch it. And if it isn't, I have a search warrant. And if we start searching and then something funny turns up. . Seek and ye shall find: and if you find, you have to report to the superiors. I hope I'm making myself clear. I don't know if you know the regulations. ."
"What regulations? I don't know what you mean. ."
"The re-gu-la-tions," he shouted, "the law! what the law says!"
"Sorry, Corporal, I don't follow you."
"There's a law, right? And a list of regulations, where it tells us what to do, how we're supposed to proceed. We. . have to obey the regulations. So watch out. Don't force me to search the house," which was, really, no more than a cabin, "or the room where you keep the stuff. . your things. It would be an aggravating circumstance for you: Article 788": (788 my ass: he invented it on the spot): "the article is clear as a bell." The girl peered at him, now that she was a little more self-confident in answering, her big tan eyes set in the pork fat of her eyelids, with the miserly hesitation of the peasant who demurs at opening her mouth, between fear and suspicion. The old woman had acted as if she had things to do in the garden: and had gone down there with a little hoe which was heard intermittently striking the ground. The dog, its snarling passed, still stared fiercely, with that zeal peculiar to the stupid.