As the days passed, the pain in his ribs and his lack of appetite, rather than improving, got worse. He became paler and thinner every day, and he could barely move between the sheets. If he merely turned his eyes he felt faint. But he didn’t think about it, and endured without much complaint both the pain and the weakness.
In the meantime at Donna Olimpia somehow or other the rubble had been piled up against the schools, freeing a passageway; funerals had been held for the dead; and, thanks to the mayor’s intervention, the homeless had been housed—housed, in a manner of speaking, because some ten families had been crammed into a single big room in a monastery in Casaletto, and the others placed here and there in the outlying neighborhoods, in Tormarancia or Tiburtino, in evacuees’ houses or in barracks. At Donna Olimpia, one or two Sundays later, life had returned to normal. The older kids had gone looking for entertainment in Rome, the old people were having, a glass at a time, their liter at the bar, and the army of boys invaded meadows and courtyards. Marcello’s father and mother, with their six or seven other children, went to visit Marcello in the San Camillo hospital, walking, because it didn’t take more than half an hour, going up through Monteverde Nuovo and down again along the Circonvallazione Gianicolense: slowly in the sun they walked up Via Ozanam, husband and wife with the older daughters, all in silence, heads lowered, and the younger ones running around and harassing each other and arguing in low voices. So they passed, in a line, behind the Grattacieli and in front of Monte di Splendore, where, in the small clearing amid the garbage, the boys had begun to play ball. Agnolo and Oberdan were there, too, all dressed up, watching the others, and they were already tired of it, sitting there on a patch of grass, taking care not to get their pants dirty. When Agnolo saw Marcello’s family going by, he nudged Oberdan, and, gripped by a feeling that he was already proud of, said: “Hey, why don’t we go, too, and see Marcello?” “Let’s go,” Oberdan said quickly, since they didn’t know what to do there, and he stood up immediately, with a decorous expression, pleased with his good intentions. The two left the field with determination, through the dips and mounds that surrounded it: but some friends of theirs, coming from Monteverde Nuovo, stopped them. “Where are you going?” they asked, with the idea of getting them to go somewhere with them. The temptation was strong. But Agnolo, by now, answered gravely: “We’re going to the hospital to visit Marcello.” “Who’s Marcello?” said Lupetto, who didn’t know him. “Marcello, the tailor’s son,” someone else explained. “You know he’s gonna die?” Agnolo said then. “What do you mean die,” the other asked in disbelief. “He broke a rib, why, how can you die from a broken rib?” “Fuck that,” said Agnolo, “his sister told me a rib went into his liver, I don’t know, or the spleen, whatever . . . ” “C’mon, Agnolè,” said Oberdan in a hurry, “we’re getting behind.” “See you,” said Lupetto and the others, swarming down toward Donna Olimpia. Agnolo and Oberdan ran to catch up with Marcello’s family, who were turning onto the path over the field that led to the big square in Monteverde Nuovo, and without a word followed them through the deserted streets of Sunday afternoon, pounded by the sun, until they reached the gates of the hospital.
Marcello was happy to see them. “They didn’t want to let us in,” Agnolo told him right away, still indignant at the guards. Marcello didn’t miss the opportunity to express his opinion on the subject: “Here,” he said, “they’re all suspicious! And the nuns worse than the others, believe me . . . ”
The effort he had made to speak had turned him whiter than the sheet, but he ignored it.
“Have you seen Zambuia?” he asked right away, looking at Agnoletto and Oberdan, eyes bright with curiosity.
“Who’d ever see him,” said Agnolo, with some contempt, not knowing about the puppy.
“If you see him,” Marcello insisted, a little upset, “tell him to be nice to my puppy, and I’ll give him another hundred lire. He knows what it’s about.”
“Okay,” said Agnolo.
“Keep it down, will you,” said Marcello’s mother, worried, seeing her son grow tired and pale as he talked. Marcello shrugged, almost laughing.
“You know what,” he said instead, with even more energy and satisfaction, to his companions, ignoring his father and mother, who were looking at him from the foot of the bed, “they’re giving me insurance.”
“What insurance?” Agnolo asked, not knowing about it.
“Insurance for the broken ribs, you don’t know there’s insurance?” Marcello said, all excited.
His face almost regained some color at the thought of what he would do with the money from the insurance: he had already agreed with his family. He explained with shining eyes. “I’m going to get a bicycle better than yours,” he said to Agnolo.
“Wow,” said Agnolo, raising his eyebrows.
At that moment the old man on the right began his whine, a series of faint, identical groans, keeping one hand on his stomach. The old man on the other side who, oddly, had been quiet until that moment, suddenly woke up, turned, and, grimacing with his toothless mouth, began to imitate the other: “Whee, whee, whee,” partly in fun and partly in real anger. Then he took up some little tasks, sitting on the bed. Marcello glanced laughingly at his friends, as if to say: “You see them?” Then he said in a low voice: “They’re always going on like that.”
But as he spoke he felt a kind of dizziness, perhaps, because something like a faint groan escaped him, too. His mother went over to him, tucking in the sheets: “Stay quiet, won’t you?” she said. His sisters, too, who had been distracted, gathered around him, and his little brothers, who were tired of being in the hospital, stopped annoying each other, and attached themselves to the headboard.
“And Riccetto, what’s he up to?” asked Marcello as soon as he recovered from his dizzy spell.
“Who knows,” said Agnolo, “it must be two weeks since we’ve seen him.”
“Where’s he gone to live now?” Marcello asked.
“I think Tiburtina or Pietralata, somewhere around there,” Agnolo said.
Marcello was thoughtful for a moment. “What did he say when he found out his mother was dead?” he asked.
“What did he say,” Agnolo said, “he burst out crying, of course.”
“Ohhmygod,” said Marcello with a grimace of pain, feeling a more intense stabbing in his side. His mother was frightened, and took his hand, drying the sweat on his forehead and neck with a handkerchief.
Marcello had almost fainted with weakness and pain; and his family knew now that the doctors hadn’t given him more than two or three days. Seeing him so white, his father called a nun, and his mother fell to her knees against the edge of bed, squeezing her son’s hand and weeping silently. The father returned with the nun, who looked at him, passed a hand over his forehead, and, with a weary gaze, said as she left: “You must have patience.” At those words the mother raised her head, looked around, and began to weep more loudly. “My son, my son,” she said amid sobs, “my poor son . . . ”
Marcello opened his eyes again, and saw his mother weeping and sobbing like that, with all the others around, some weeping, some looking at him differently. Agnolo and Oberdan were standing apart now, at the foot of the bed, leaving the place nearest Marcello to his family.
“What’s wrong?” said Marcello in a whisper.
His mother continued to weep even more desperately, unable to contain herself, trying to muffle her sobs against the sheets.
Marcello looked around more carefully, as if he were thinking of something intensely.
“So then,” he said after a while, “I really have to go!”
No one said anything. “So then,” Marcello resumed, staring at everyone around him, “I really have to die . . . ”
Agnolo and the other were silent and frowning. After a few minutes of silence Agnolo gathered his courage, approached the bed, and touched Marcello on his shoulder: “W
e’ll say goodbye, Marcè,” he said, “we have to go now, we’ve got to meet some friends.”
“Bye, Agnolè!” Marcello said, weakly but firmly. Then, after thinking for a moment, he added: “And say goodbye for me to everyone down in Donna Olimpia, if it’s really true that I won’t be back again . . . and tell them not to be too sad!”
Agnolo pushed Oberdan by the shoulder, and they went out through the ward that by now was almost dark, without saying a word.
3.
NIGHT IN VILLA BORGHESE
Two boys were pushing a cart with some chairs in it up the overpass at the Tiburtina station. It was morning, and on the bridge the old buses, the one for Monte Sacro, the one for Tiburtino III, the one for Settecamini, and the 409—which turned right under the bridge and headed for Casal Bertone and Acqua Bullicante, toward Porta Furba—changed gears, grinding in the midst of the crowd, between the three-wheelers and the ragpickers’ carts, the kids’ bicycles and the red wagons of the farmers slowly returning from the markets to the gardens on the periphery. People were thronging, too, on the crumbling sidewalks along the sides of the bridge: columns of workers, the unemployed, mothers who had gotten off the tram at Portonaccio, just under the walls of the Verano cemetery, and were lugging bags full of artichokes and pork rind to the hovels in Via Tiburtina, or to some big apartment block, recently built amid the ruins, amid construction sites, junkyards piled with scrap metal and lumber, the big factories of Fiorentini and Romana Compensati. Just at the top of the bridge, in the tide of vehicles and pedestrians, the two boys who were jerking the cart along, paying no attention as it bumped over the holes in the pavement, and going as slowly as they could, stopped and sat on the sides of the cart. One pulled a butt out of the depths of his pocket and lit it. The other, leaning against the arm of a chair upholstered in red and white stripes, waited his turn to take a drag, and because of the heat untucked his black shirt. But the other continued to smoke, ignoring him. “Hey,” he said then, “you wanna give me that butt?” “Here, just shut up,” the other said, handing it to him. There was such a commotion on the bridge that they could barely hear themselves. A train went by, too, whistling beneath the overpass, without slowing down for the station, below, with all those ribbons of track vanishing in the dust and the sun, against the background of thousands of houses being built in the valley behind Via Nomentana. Smoking the butt that his friend had just given him, the one in the black shirt hoisted himself up onto one of the two chairs in the cart and stretched out at full length, his legs spread and his curly head leaning against the chair back. So he happily inhaled that stub of a cigarette balanced between his fingers, while around him, at the top of the bridge, the traffic of pedestrians and cars increased as midday approached.
The other boy climbed up on the cart and stretched out on the second chair, with his hands on his fly. “Goddam,” he said, “I’m so weak I could die, I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.” But in the din they heard two long whistles at the end of the bridge. Recognizing the sound, the boys who were sprawled on the chairs rolled onto their sides, and in fact where the tram turned, at the far end of the square in Portonaccio, they saw two other lowlifes like them, sweating as they pushed a cart, cheerfully clearing a way past the cars and buses that were pouring in lines onto the overpass. Not only whistling, they waved and shouted in the direction of the boys lying on the chairs. They arrived with their cart, which was piled with garbage and stank like a sewer. They were all ragged and dirty, with a layer of dust and sweat on their faces, but their hair was neatly combed, as if they’d just come from the hairdresser. One was a dark, slender youth, handsome even in that squalid state, with eyes as black as coal and round cheeks of a complexion between olive and pink; the other had reddish hair, with a flabby freckled face. “Hey, cuz, you’re a shepherd now?” the one in the black shirt asked the first, without shifting an inch from his position on the chair, hands on his belly and the cigarette butt stuck to his lower lip. “Fuck off, Riccè,” the other answered. Riccetto—that bastard on the chair was in fact he—wrinkled his forehead shrewdly and lowered his gaze, letting his chin fall against his throat, with a knowing air. Caciotta, who was the other one lying on a chair, alongside Riccetto, sat up and, curious as a child, looked into the friends’ cart. With an expression of contempt he burst into laughter. “Ha, ha, ha,” he laughed uncontrollably, rolling over and sitting on the edge of the sidewalk. The others gazed at him, waiting for him to stop; they, too, assumed almost laughing expressions. “If you get twenty-six lire I’ll break my neck,” Caciotta said at last. Since that was the boast that Caciotta wanted to get out, the boy Riccetto had called cousin clicked his tongue, gave Caciotta a little shove, and without a word grabbed the cart by the shafts and made as if to leave. The other, with the reddish hair, who was called Begalone, followed him, looking out of the corner of his eye at Caciotta, who was laughing, still sitting on the ground amid the feet of the passersby. “Twenty-six lire,” he said to him, “let’s see tonight who’s got more money in his pocket.” “Pff, pff, pff,” Caciotta exploded. Begalone stopped and, turning his big pale Saracen’s head sideways, said seriously, weighing his words: “Hey, you bums, want to come and we’ll buy you a drink?” “Sure,” Riccetto accepted promptly; he had been watching the scene from the height of his chair in silence. He jumped down and, with Caciotta’s help, began to push the cart with the chairs through the traffic behind the ragpickers’ cart. The ragpickers, without another word, took off rapidly down the other side of the bridge, toward Tiburtina, and stopped in front of a bar with a pergola, near two or three shacks and below an apartment building. The four went in and drank a liter of white wine: they’d been pushing carts all morning and were thirsty. And Alduccio and Begalone’s throats were parched and burning, thanks to the four or five hours they’d spent in the sun picking through an avalanche of garbage under a railroad bridge. After the first few gulps they were all drunk. “Let’s go sell the chairs, hey, Riccè,” said Caciotta, leaning on the bar with his legs crossed, “and fuck the rest.” “And where’re we gonna sell them,” said Riccetto, with the air of an expert. “Hell,” said Begalone, “go to Porta Portese!” Riccetto yawned, and then looked at Caciotta with sleepy eyes: “Let’s go, Caciò?” he said. The other drained his glass in one gulp, and now he was truly drunk, and, hurrying out of the bar, shouted, raising one hand: “Bye, you ugly shits.” Riccetto also finished his drink, coughing and spilling on his black shirt, and followed Caciotta.
From there to Porta Portese was certainly at least four or five kilometers. It was a Saturday morning and the August sun made their heads spin. In addition, Riccetto and Caciotta had to make a wide circle around San Lorenzo, where the man who had sent them early in the morning to deliver the chairs to Casal Bertone had his shop. “All we’d need is not to be able sell this stuff,” said Caciotta, with false pessimism, while in reality he was walking quickly and full of hope. “We’ll do it,” Riccetto replied with a sneer, pulling a cigarette butt out of his pocket. “What do you say we’ll get, Riccè?” Caciotta asked naively. “We’ll get maybe thirty thousand,” the other answered. “Then who has to go home anymore,” he added, happily inhaling the last drags of the cigarette. Since his was a home in name only: going there or not was the same thing; as for eating, he didn’t eat there; as for sleeping, he might as well be on a park bench. Was that a home, too? Anyway, Riccetto couldn’t stand his aunt, or even Alduccio, besides, who was her son. His uncle was a drunk who was a constant pain in the ass. And then how could two entire families, one with four kids and the other with six, all live in two small, cramped rooms, without even a toilet—that was down in the middle of the building’s courtyard? Riccetto had been in that situation for more than a year, since the schools disaster, when he had gone to live in Tiburtino with his relatives.
They sold the chairs to Antonio, the junkman in Vicolo dei Cinque, to whom Riccetto, with Marcello and Agnolo, had sold pieces of manhole covers three or four
years earlier. They got fifteen thousand lire, and went to set themselves up with new clothes. A little embarrassed, not looking anyone in the face, they went to Campo dei Fiori, where they could get pegged pants for a thousand, fifteen hundred lire, and smart shirts for less than two thousand: they also got a pair of black and white pointy-toed shoes, and for Caciotta sunglasses he’d dreamed of for a long time; then, limping, because their feet hurt, having swelled on the walk from Portonaccio, they went in search of a place to leave their bundle of old clothes. Easier said than done to find a place in that neighborhood. They left them in the bathroom of a little café near Ponte Garibaldi, entering as if they had nothing on their minds, and thinking to themselves as they passed the bar under the gaze of the barmen: “If we find them again, good, if not, so what.”
They went to have a pizza and a crostino at Silvio’s, in Via del Corso. It was already late, and time to think about how to spend the afternoon, damn! Since they had money, all they had to do was decide on the theater: the Metropolitan or the Europa, the Barberini or the Capranichetta, the Adriano or the Sistina. They left right away, in any case, because—no risk, no reward. They were happy and joking, the thought that the joys of this world are brief, and the wheel of fortune turns, far from their minds. . . . They bought Paese Sera, to consult the movie listings and, fighting, tore it, because each of them wanted to read it himself: at last, angrily, they agreed on the Sistina.
“Man, I love to have fun!” said Caciotta, coming gleefully out of the theater, four hours later, because they’d seen the film twice. He settled the sunglasses on his nose, and, flopping around as he walked along the sidewalk of Via Due Macelli, purposely bumped into the passersby.
“Hey, ugly!” he’d call to a woman who, seeing him come toward her, gave him a look of annoyance. If she then happened to turn around again it was all over: balancing on the edge of the sidewalk, their hands on the left corner of their mouths, the two of them shouted even louder: “Hey ugly, hey dogface, hey slut!”
The Street Kids Page 6