But while they did what they had to do, and Nadia held the boy tight in her arms with his face sunk between her breasts, she slowly slid one hand along his pants hanging on the wall, stuck it in the back pocket, took out the bundle of bills, and put it in her purse, which was hanging next to them.
* * *
Riccetto lived at the Giorgio Franceschi elementary schools. Coming up by the street that runs from Ponte Bianco and rises on the right to the houses of Monteverde Vecchio, the first thing you see on the left is Ferrobedò, sunk in its valley, and then you arrive at Donna Olimpia, also called the Grattacieli. And the first building on the right, when you get there, is the school. Above the cracked asphalt rises an even more cracked façade, with a row of square white columns in the center and in the corners four massive structures, like towers, two or three stories high.
The Germans had been there first, then the Canadians, then the evacuees, and last the homeless, like Riccetto’s family.
Marcello, lived a little farther on, in the Grattacieli: as big as a mountain chain, with thousands of windows, in rows, in circles, in diagonals, opening toward the streets, the courtyards, the stairs, to the north, the south, in full sun, in shadow, closed or wide open, empty or with laundry waving, silent or filled with the clamor of women or the whining of children. Abandoned fields extended in every direction, with their hummocks and knolls, crowded with kids playing, in snot-stained smocks or half naked.
On Sunday you’d see only the kids; the youths and young men no, because they’d gone into Rome to have fun, or, if they had money, like Riccetto, to Ostia, where it was lively! Marcello, who had stayed alone at Donna Olimpia, without a cent, poor guy, was dying of boredom. He was hanging around with his hands in his pockets in the courtyards of the Grattacieli, where he’d been playing cards with some boys of eight or nine, who after a while had grown tired of it and had gone to play Indians on Monte di Splendore. He was alone in all of Donna Olimpia, in the open space in the midst of the buildings, with the blazing sun. He crossed the street, went straight up the four crumbling steps of the schools, and took the stairs of the building on the right. Riccetto’s family didn’t live in the classrooms, like the evacuees or those who had settled there first, but in one of the corridors that the classrooms opened onto, which had been divided by partitions into many small spaces. That left, only a narrow passageway along the windows that faced the courtyard, down which Marcello now ran. In those makeshift rooms, you could see the cots and small beds that had just been made, because the women, with all those children, didn’t have time to clean up until after lunch; and broken tables, chairs without seats, stoves, boxes, sewing machines, children’s clothes hung on lines to dry. At that hour there was almost no one in the schools: young people certainly not, and the old were at the tavern, in the basement of the Grattacieli, so only a few old women were home.
“Sora Adele!” cried Marcello, advancing along the strip of corridor that remained along the windows. “Sora Adele!”
“What do you want?” cried the voice of Sora Adele, already impatient, from within one of those rooms between the partitions. Marcello stepped through the swinging door.
“Is your son back, Sor’Adè?” he asked.
“No,” said Sora Adele, fed up, because it was already the third time in an hour that Marcello had come to ask about her son. She was sitting on a chair that had lost its straw seat, sweating; the newspaper had fallen on her feet, and her rear was spreading in every direction. She was combing her hair in front of a small mirror propped against the sewing machine.
It was parted in the middle, and there were two bands of curled, singed hair, as hard as wood, on either side of her forehead. She was irritated, knitting her brows and clamping the hairpins tight in her mouth, combing her hair as if it were a girl’s, and she could afford to be impatient and mistreat it: she was dressing up to go to the pizzeria with her friends. “Bye, Sora Adele,” said Marcello as he left, “tell your son if he comes home I’m downstairs.” “I’ll see him tomorrow, when he’s back,” grumbled Sora Adele to herself, “my dear!”
Marcello went down the stairs and found himself yet again on the empty street. He was discouraged, he almost felt like crying; he vented by kicking the stones. “Damn that shit,” he thought, talking to himself, “where could he have gone, I mean, where, without saying a thing to anyone . . . how can you act like that? Treat your friends like that? . . . Makes me so mad I could poke his eyes out, the bastard!” He sat down on a step where there was a little shade: the whole radius of his dejected gaze encompassed just four or five little boys playing with a knife in the dust at the corner of the schools on the Ferrobedò side. After a while Marcello got up and went over to watch them, hands in his pockets. They paid no attention to him and continued their game without saying a word. After a while, one looked up toward Monte di Splendore and, staring, his eyes sparkling, began to shout: “Hey, it’s Zambuia!” They all turned their eyes that direction and, jumping up, ran toward Monte di Splendore. Marcello followed, very slowly. Passing the excavations, he reached the rise of Monte di Splendore; the others were already there, squatting in the shade of a scaffolding on the slope, from which you could see all of Monteverde Nuovo to the right and, below, half of Rome, as far as San Paolo. They were squatting around Zambuia, each holding a puppy between his knees, while Zambuia followed all their moves with a practiced eye. The boys were silent and well behaved: they laughed, and not too loudly, only when one of the puppies did something funny. Every so often Zambuia picked one up, as if it were a bundle of rags, turned it every which way, opened its mouth, then dropped it on the ground again, between the boy’s knees. The one that had been examined stretched a little, gave a faint wail, and then, with its crooked little legs, leaped between the boy’s bare knees, or went boldly wandering along the slope. Then the boys cried, amused, “Where’s that son of a bitch going.” One got up and, hopping like the puppy, went to catch it. Then he played with it, blushing with embarrassment as he tried to hide the rush of affection the puppy wrung from his heart. “Whose puppies are they?” asked Marcello as he approached, with an air of superiority, though he showed some interest and some liking for the little dogs. “They’re mine,” said Zambuia darkly. “Who gave them to you?” “You blind,” said Zambuia, busy scratching one on its belly, “don’t you see, there’s the bitch?” The boys laughed. The bitch was between their legs, tiny as a mosquito, and very quiet. “Come on,” said Zambuia, commanding. He collected all the puppies, picking them up from between the boys’ legs, and pushed them against the belly of the bitch. Immediately they all attached themselves to her nipples and, fat as little pigs, began to suck, which so amused and excited the boys that they cheered them on and commented, laughing. “Hey, will you give me one?” Marcello asked with an air of pretended indifference. Zambuia, busy maintaining a certain order among the nursing puppies, looked at him. “Yeah,” he said. And after a moment: “You got five hundred lire?” “Crazy,” Marcello said, laughing, and hitting his forehead with two fingers, “you know that at the zoo they’ll give you German shepherd puppies for less than a lira?” “Fuck off,” said Zambuia, going back to tending to his dogs. The boys were all ears. “Really, German shepherds?” Zambuia asked after a while. “No, I’m telling lies now,” Marcello said right away, expecting the question. “Go ask Obberdan, the shoemaker’s son, if it’s not true,” he added. “And what do I care,” Zambuia said, “if it’s true, it’s true, if it’s not, then there you go.” Two of the puppies had begun to growl like wild beasts and were biting each other on the nose, attracting the attention of the boys, who began to laugh, rolling like puppies themselves on the grass. “Let’s make it a hundred lire,” Marcello said then. Zambuia didn’t open his mouth, but it was clear that he would agree. “Okay?” Marcello insisted. “As you like,” Zambuia admitted between his teeth. “I’ll take this one,” said Marcello quickly, as he’d already made his choice: and he pointed with his finger
at a fat black one, the biggest son of a bitch, the one that wanted to suck all the milk himself. The boys looked at Marcello with envy, and tried to incite the black puppy to bite the others’ noses again. Marcello fished out of his wallet one of the two hundred-lire notes he possessed. “Here,” he said. Zambuia extended a hand without a word, and the hundred lire vanished into his pocket. “I’ll be right back, wait for me here, okay,” said Marcello, and he went back down the slope to the school. “Hey, Sora Adele,” he shouted again in the corridor. “Sora Adele.”
“Ah, all right!” she cried, having just finished dressing. “You still here?” she said, appearing in the doorway stuffed like a sausage into her good dress. “My,” she added, her impatience turning to good humor, “sweetie, if I were in your place you know where I’d send that good-for-nothing son of mine! But what is it, precious?” “We were supposed to go to the movies,” Marcello said quickly. “That kid,” said Sora Adele, putting one hand on her chest, with a dispirited and knowing gesture, thanks to which her chin disappeared into the fat folds of her throat, “I don’t think he’ll be home till midnight! If you only knew what a rat he is, and how much he gets from his father, well then!” “Tell him I’ll be back,” said Marcello, who was not so gloomy this time, consoled by the thought that he had a dog even better than Agnolo’s. “Bye, Sora Adele!” Squeezed into the gray dress that, because she was so fat, seemed as though it would rip at any moment, and with the bands of stiff hair like brooms on either side of her forehead, she went back into the room to put on some powder and get her purse. Marcello raced down the crumbling, blackened stairs, next to the wall, from which pieces of twisted pipe protruded, and went out to the street, but he had barely taken a few steps past the doorway when he heard a huge crash behind him, which sounded like a bomb, and felt a sharp blow, as if someone had sucker-punched him. “Son of a bitch!” Marcello thought, falling on the ground on his belly, with a deafening roar in his ears and a blinding cloud of white dust in his eyes.
Riccetto had just a few cents left, enough to buy two or three cigarettes and take the tram. He walked as far as the Cerchi, all alone, like a dog, and waited there for the 13, which was half empty, because it was still early, not even six, and there was light and heat as if it were the middle of the afternoon. Riccetto sat at the back of the tram, leaning halfway out the window, to be alone with his sad thoughts, and as the tram traveled its route along the almost deserted riverbanks and Viale del Re, the breeze mussed his curls into a clump on his forehead and pasted them around his ears, and made his shirt, which he had untucked from his pants, flap against him. He stared, unseeing, at the façades of the houses that passed before him, sorrowful, his face burned by the sun, his eyes nearly bright with tears. He got off like a thief at Ponte Bianco, but then he stood still, struck by an unexpected scene. Around the spires of Ponte Bianco, in the grassy areas, amid the construction sites of Viale dei Quattro Venti, where usually there was no one, and along the narrow street that led to Ferrobedò and the Grattacieli—used only by the people who lived there, and those who didn’t have corns on their feet or tight shoes—there were crowds. “What happened?” Riccetto asked someone who was standing nearby. “Don’t know,” the man said, looking all around to see if he could understand something. Riccetto pushed his way forward, running, through the throng down the slope that first descended to a level crossing and then rose steeply, turning toward Ferrobedò. But at that moment, at the end of Viale della Circonvallazione Gianicolense, from the direction of the Trastevere station, the wails of sirens could be heard. Riccetto turned, again made his way through the surging crowd, and was back on Ponte Bianco just in time to see the fire trucks and an ambulance going at full speed toward Monteverde Nuovo. Their wail faded slowly amid apartment buildings and construction sites.
Riccetto turned again, running, down toward the level crossing, but he met Agnoletto walking his bicycle. They made their way together through the crowd. “What happened?” Riccetto asked someone, because his curiosity was irresistible. “It must be a fire at Ferrobedò,” the man he asked said with a frown, shrugging his shoulders. But when, pushing and shoving, they reached the level crossing, they found a row of policemen blocking the way. Agnolo and Riccetto tried to get someone to listen to them insisting that living in Donna Olimpia gave them the right to go by, but the cops had orders not to let anyone pass, and they, too, had to go back. They tried to get down the hill from Viale dei Quattro Venti, taking a path dug by the workers that descended past the level crossing. But the police were there, too. The only way to get to Donna Olimpia was by going around Monteverde Nuovo. Agnoletto and Riccetto returned to Ponte Bianco, where there were even more people, and then took off up the slope of the Circonvallazione Gianicolense, taking turns carrying each other on the handlebars a little way, and walking for long stretches when the slope was too steep. It was at least two kilometers to the piazza in Monteverde Nuovo, and then another half kilometer down, across the fields, past the evacuees’ barracks and the construction sites, to get to Donna Olimpia, on the other side. Night was falling when Riccetto and Agnolo got there. They ran down the first part of the street, and then there, too, they had to stop. A little before the Grattacieli, there was a large crowd, which was moving along the street, at the foot of Monte di Splendore, in the inner courtyards of the buildings. They heard shouts and cries, and the voices of people crammed together like that, talking, were as if muffled, suffocated. Riccetto and Agnolo, getting off the bike, made their way without a word through the throng. “What happened, what happened?” Riccetto asked a few people he knew. They looked at him and didn’t answer, scattering in the confusion. Then, while Riccetto advanced, white as a sheet, someone grabbed Agnolo by the sleeve and said: “Don’t you know that the schools collapsed?” Just then they heard the wail of the sirens from Monteverde Nuovo again, and after a moment more fire trucks came speeding down, clearing a space through the crowd, and stopped next to the others in the square at the intersection at Donna Olimpia. When the last wail of the sirens stopped, the talk and cries of the crowd could be heard more clearly. Where the building at the right corner of the Schools had stood was a big smoking ruin, and below, on the street, a mountain of white rubble and debris, which blocked the way and completely covered from view the row of white columns, still standing, at the center of the façade. A firefighters’ crane was already working above the ruins, and two or three dozen men were digging with picks, in the darkening air, shouting orders and yelling to each other. All around was a cordon of guards, and the crowd, at a distance, was watching the work of the firemen attentively; the women in the building opposite, in their lighted windows, were shouting and weeping.
* * *
Marcello had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance, still white with dust like a floured fish, and they had found two broken ribs. He had been assigned to a ward that looked out on some gardens where convalescents were sunning themselves, and put in a bed between an old man with a failing liver, who chattered, laughed, and always grumbled about the nuns, as if he were constantly drunk, and a middle-aged man who, two or three days later, without ever having said anything, was carried off to breathe his last in a small room for the purpose, on the opposite side of the corridor. In place of the dead man, the next morning another old man was brought in, who complained night and day, irritating the other one, who, like a child, mimicked him by making faces. Marcello was fairly comfortable. He spent the days waiting, especially for mealtimes, not because he was very hungry, and in fact he hardly ate anything, but out of greed: his face brightened when he heard at the end of the corridor the metallic sound of the soup vats, pushed by a nun on a sort of handcart. He immediately turned his head in that direction, and, with the look of an expert, examined what there was that day, observing the brimming ladle that came up out of the vat to fill the metal bowls of the sick men in the first beds. Fastidiously they began to eat, jangling the white iron night tables loaded with pill bottles. He could see the
ir jaws moving and their eyes narrowing, glittering with ill-concealed satisfaction. The majority, however, griped about the food, acting delicate and always finding something to criticize as they swallowed those few mouthfuls with an air of resignation. Marcello was among these last, and the principal subject of his conversations with his family, during visiting hours, was the hospital food, as if his family didn’t know what he ate at home. He left almost everything the nuns brought; and he justified this lack of appetite by saying that the food was bad, that it was poorly cooked, that the nuns purposely gave him the worst bits as an insult, whereas, in fact, he left it partly because the least movement caused great pain in his broken ribs, and partly because he really wasn’t hungry, and all food would have repelled him, even restaurant food, which he had so often dreamed of.
The Street Kids Page 5