The Street Kids

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

  Amerigo and the other two entered softly as people moved aside, making some room, content to give them a glance; then they all began to watch the cards, from behind the players. Amerigo observed the game as if he were no longer thinking of Caciotta and Riccetto; hands were played quickly, with continual wins or losses, followed by a few audible whispers and a comment or two spoken out loud. Caciotta couldn’t care less, but although he was dying of sleepiness he kept looking around cheerfully, while Riccetto, his cheeks flushing and his eyes shining, remembered when he was a boy at Donna Olimpia, playing with the money from stealing pipes. When a hand ended, Amerigo turned, not toward his companions but toward one of the old men who were standing around, shaking their heads or whispering in a hoarse voice: “Damn.” In front of him, shoulders bent, was a cart driver named Zinzello, his smooth hair pulled back Rudy Vallee style, who was always losing, and whose face was growing ever more harsh and furrowed; finally he got up and someone else took his place. At that moment Amerigo, who was behind him, made up his mind. He turned toward Caciotta, and, as if they had already come to an agreement, said confidently, a bitter expression in his eyes: “Lend me that hundred you got in your pocket.” “I don’t have it,” said Caciotta.

  Amerigo’s yellow eyes focused on Riccetto, who was a little farther back. “Get out that money,” he said in a low voice, so as not to be heard above the noise of the kitchen. Riccetto was silent. “Come on,” Amerigo said brusquely, almost exasperated, “I’ll give it back, I’m not gonna rob you, you know.”

  “Take it out, what do you care,” said Cacciotta.

  Riccetto said: “We split the winnings fifty-fifty, okay?” He took out the bill, clutching it tight in his hand. “But if you lose you give me five hundred . . . ” he added. “I’m not going to rob you,” Amerigo repeated, “we’ll do what you say, come on,” and impatiently grabbed the money from his hand. He put three or four hundred on the table and bet; the cards slid from one hand to the other as if they were oil—a stack here, one there, all in a minute—and a glance was enough to see if it had gone well or badly.

  Amerigo won the first hand, and he turned slightly toward Riccetto, who was following along with a dark expression. Caciotta laughed, his mouth wide: “I feel like a smoke,” he said, and searched his pockets for a butt, found it, and lighted it. Amerigo won the second hand, too; he turned, as he put his winnings in his pocket, to trade observations with the guy with the Rudy Vallee-style hair, who stayed mute beside him. The other two he merely glanced at, with a look of satisfaction, to keep them on good terms. All the money Amerigo won he stuck in his pocket. Then suddenly things began to go badly and after five or six hands he was broke. He looked at the other two with his corpselike gaze. Riccetto’s eyes were hard, pained, as if he were about to cry; they said nothing. Amerigo went back to observing the game, to try to understand it and figure out how it unfolded; every so often he exchanged a few words with the cart driver, explaining the reasons that he, too, had lost. After a while he turned to Riccetto. “Get out the other money,” he said. “You’re nuts,” said Riccetto. “Who’s gonna give it back to me tomorrow if we lose again?” Amerigo was still patient; he said nothing for a few seconds, then resumed: “Come on, give me that money.” “But I don’t feel like playing again, I’m telling you,” said Riccetto, in a low voice. Yet he was uncertain; Amerigo stared at him. “Just a word,” he said, squeezing Riccetto’s arm tight between two of his iron fingers as if it were a twig, and leading him out through the knot of people to the balcony. It had begun to drizzle again; but through the ragged clouds the moonlight fell on the buildings. “You’re like a brother to me,” he began, “you got to believe me, what’s on my lips is in my heart. Ask anyone in Pietralata, in Tiburtino, about me, about Amerigo, there’s no one, not a one, who doesn’t know me, I’m the most respected guy in the whole neighborhood, who if I can help someone, I help him, I don’t stop to think, and if later another time I need something, what does it matter, he helps me, isn’t that fair?” Riccetto was about to open his mouth. “But why?” Amerigo interrupted him, grabbing him by the lapel of his jacket with two fingers. “But why?” he repeated, shaking his head, so strong was his belief in what he was about to say. “If someone asks you a favor, why shouldn’t you do it? Another time, to give you an example, you might be in need, it’s fair?” “You’re right,” said Riccetto, “but if I lose that two thousand what do I eat tomorrow?” Amerigo relaxed the two fingers that were gripping the lapel of the jacket: he brought a hand to his forehead, shaking his head hard, as if he lacked the words to explain something so simple. “You didn’t understand what I wanted to tell you,” he said; and he began to laugh. “Tomorrow,” he continued, “we meet; what time for this meeting?” “I don’t know, three,” said Riccetto. “Three,” said Amerigo, “in front of Farfarelli’s, okay?” “Why not,” said Riccetto. “Tomorrow at three in front of Farfarelli’s,” said Amerigo, raising his arms, “we meet and I give you back your money. How much do you have in your pocket?” “I don’t know, it must be four bills,” said Riccetto. “Let me see,” said Amerigo, putting the viselike fingers back on his shoulder. Riccetto pulled out the few bills he had in his pants pocket: Amerigo took them and counted. Then he went back into the room, without waiting to see if Riccetto was following. Caciotta was chatting with the cart driver, who was following the game. Amerigo reached between the backs of the seated players and put the money on the table, and lost again. He bet another hand, and lost again. Not even this time did anyone say a word. Amerigo apologized after a while to the carter and to Caciotta. They stayed another half hour, then they left, without anyone noticing.

  In one direction the sky had cleared, and big moist stars shone, lost in its expanse, as if in a boundless wall of metal, from which a few wretched breaths of wind spilled out over the earth. In the other direction, toward Rome, there was still bad weather, but the clouds dense with rain and lightning flashes frayed as they moved toward the horizon dotted with lights. In yet another direction the sky extended, here over Tiburtino, as if above the funnel of a courtyard, and the moon rested fearfully on the shiny edges of a patch of drifting fog. There was no one now on the identical streets of Tiburtino, and only on the main street could any sounds be heard. The three ambled toward Via Tiburtina, past the lots where a few blades of grass grew in the packed earth, and Caciotta hummed while the other two dragged their feet, in the wet, pointy-toed, black-and-white shoes, without saying a word. “Now it’s goodbye,” said Riccetto. Amerigo looked at him with his broad face and the jaws that, bending, appeared enormous and white in the moonlight. He had no expression, but his distended mouth that opened like a wound, more livid than red, and his unhappy eyes left no doubt about his thoughts. “Since we’re at Via Tiburtina,” said Riccetto, just to say something, “now we’re here, I’m just around the corner, you can go home, too.” Amerigo’s gaze was contorted not only by his real anger at being opposed but, even more, by the fact that someone should dare to be so reckless as to oppose him. But these were things that had to be explained to Riccetto, and he had to have the patience to explain them: and Amerigo endured it, but with such a black displeasure in his eyes that it made shivers run down your spine. He began again, full of good will. “Now we go back,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll win, now I get the game, understand what I’m trying to say to you.” Riccetto didn’t answer; he looked at Caciotta, whose face, because of the cold wind, was white and purple like an onion. “Okay, but we need money,” he said then, hoarsely. Amerigo looked at him impatiently, and he seemed on the verge of shaking his head and smacking his lips to indicate that neither he nor anyone else in his place would be so stupid as to accept that conclusion. He leaned against the worm-eaten jamb of a silent door. “Now if you get out another five hundred,” he said, as if Riccetto had admitted that he still had some money, “we’ll get back what we lost, and we’ll make double.” His voice was increasingly weary, in contrast to his body, which, against the do
orjamb, looked like the enormous carcass of a pig hanging lengthwise on a hook in front of a butcher shop. Even his eyes had become small and dim like those of a hanging pig; and in the grimace of his handsome face you could see that his patience was about to end. Riccetto murmured again, his eyebrows raised like a boy’s: “But I don’t have a lira left!”

  Amerigo sat down on the crumbling step. “Maybe I’ll do ten years in Regina Coeli, but tonight I have to play,” he said in a low voice. Riccetto thought, trembling: “We’re fucked,” and said nothing, to avoid humoring him. But, after a short silence that was intended to lend force to his words, Amerigo resumed in a voice that was hoarse but stronger, in order to erase the previous impression, and to start his friendly discussion all over again from the beginning: “I’ve already done time, a few years!” “Where, at Porta Portese?” said Caciotta. “Yeah,” said Amerigo. He darkened, and his round, wrinkled lips trembled. “They locked me up me for sexual assault,” he said. “Gosh, who’d you do it to?” “A sheep,” said Amerigo, desperately. “And the shepherd saw me stick it up her ass, shit, and he reported me.” He was about to cry, with his mouth half open and his eyebrows raised on his forehead, with its youthful wrinkles among the marble-like curls. “Damn,” he said, pained, “they gave me so many, so many! . . . ” His voice had become shrill, like that of a woman lamenting some old injustice that still makes her suffer. “So many!” he repeated. “Wait, look,” he said, pulling his shirt out from under his belt and showing his back, “the marks are still there.” “What’d they do to you?” asked Caciotta. “The lashes they gave me, God damn them,” said Amerigo grinding his teeth. “And look, the marks are still there,” he repeated, pulling up his shirt to his neck. His back was bare, broad as a steel plate, with bluish reflections in the moonlight. There were no marks visible at all on that smooth, tanned flesh. Caciotta leaned over and conscientiously explored the big bridge of the vertebra suspended, curving, between his belt and the nape, hidden under the shirt; and after a careful examination he went “Hmm, hmm,” and stood up. “Did you see,” said Amerigo in the weary voice of his mother. “Don’t see a fucking thing,” said Caciotta. “What,” said Amerigo, “look more closely.” Caciotta leaned over his big back again, and had of necessity to see something, given the fierce look that Amerigo cast through his pained expression. “Damn,” he said at the top of his lungs. Amerigo pulled his shirt down and, straightening, tucked it into his pants. The film of tears over his eyes had dried, and they were naked and dry and brown. That boast about the lashes and his whine had had the effect of bringing to the discussion subjects in the face of which, now by common agreement, Riccetto could only give in, and without a word. “Let’s go,” said Amerigo, as if, in fact, everything had become clear, and he had at last been understood. Since Riccetto was still silent, he went up to him and carefully gripped the collar of his jacket with his fingers: “You,” he said, “kid, let’s go. What, you want me to lose patience now . . . ” he added, with a desperate gaze, as if those were words that he himself wouldn’t have wanted to say, and the fault, therefore, was all Riccetto’s. So they headed back toward the gambling den, and when they were on the outside stairs Riccetto, at a look from Amerigo, wordlessly took out another five hundred. Inside the gambling den everything was going as it had earlier. No one noticed that they had left or that they had returned. Before Amerigo lost everything again, however, while he was intent on the game, Riccetto slowly backed away, through the crowd of people, past the sink, and ducked out the door and vanished.

  * * *

  And good thing he did, because he hadn’t even turned outside the door of Building 9, behind the loggia, when the cops arrived. He was just in time to see them and dash around the corner. “God damn,” he said to himself aloud, as if he were singing, so great was the satisfaction he felt in not having been caught; and he started running through the deserted streets between the buildings, toward Via Boccaleone, and then, still running, along the main street of Tor Sapienza. There was no longer a cloud in the sky; to the left lights were burning—the lights on the pylons, the floodlights of the electrical plant, and behind, already distant, Tiburtino, with the big new apartment blocks lined up against the black sky. In the distance, in the great warmth, shone the lights of the other neighborhoods, as far as Centocelle, Borgata Gordiani, Tor de’Schiavi, Quarticciolo. Very slowly, dead tired, Riccetto reached Via Prenestina and began waiting for the bus from Quarticciolo. He fished out the five hundred-lire bills he had managed to save, and chose the most crumpled to give the conductor.

  “And now?” he said when the empty bus dropped him at Prenestino. He looked around, hiked up his pants, and seeing that there was really nothing for him to do there, he burst into song, philosophically. Some tram arrived from Via Prenestina, stopped, glistening, under a stunted tree, then turned around behind three or four shacks in the garbage-strewn fields, and came to a stop on the other side of the street. Meanwhile the passengers had gotten off, some hurrying toward the buses to the outlying neighborhoods, standing in a line in front of a run-down café with its lights on, some going slowly to their beds nearby—in Borghetto Prenestino, where there were a lot of small houses, like dice or chicken coops, white like Arabs’, or black like cabins, crowded with peasants from Puglia or the Marches, Sardinia or Calabria, young and old, who at that hour were returning drunk and ragged; or in the villages of hovels crammed into the construction areas, between the slopes of the narrow streets that led to Via Prenestina. Riccetto decided to buy three cigarettes, because he’d been wanting a smoke for a while; relaxed, he crossed the small square, and went into the café, counting his money. He came out with the cigarette pasted to his lower lip, and his furtive eyes circling in search of someone who had a light. “Got a light, kid?” he said to a youth who was smoking, leaning on a light pole. Silently he held out his lighted cigarette, Riccetto thanked him with an insolent nod, stuck his hands in his pockets, and, singing, strolled along the narrow bruise-colored street where the tram turned.

  All around rose scaffolding and apartment buildings under construction, and big fields, junkyards, building sites; in the distance, maybe from Maranella, behind Pigneto, you could hear the sound of a phonograph magnified by a loudspeaker. The carousels must be in the field on Via Casilina, before Maranella; and Riccetto went in that direction, his hands in his pockets and his head lowered between his shoulders because of the passion he put into singing the song to himself.

  For a stretch along Via dell’Acqua Bullicante he met only a few old people hurrying home; but at the street that turned, between the walls of two factories, toward Borgata Gordiani, a line of kids appeared, filling the street as they advanced, unhurried, shouting and loutish, disorderly as a swarm of flies above a dirty table. Some were hitting their companions in the head, angering them; some squared off, striking the air to the left, to the right, and then throwing a hook that made their eyes harden with satisfaction; another, instead, showed off his cunning by pretending indifference, his hands stuck idly in his pockets and a look charged with irony that said, “I’m so weak, so who’s making you put out all this effort.” Others talked, sneering, twisting their mouths in disgust, extending their arms and clicking their tongues, or, in the heat of discussion, hands cupped under their chins and pointing toward their adversaries, they stood for half an hour, looking at each other with questioning expressions. All of Via dell’Acqua Bullicante was admiring them with close attention. Riccetto immediately felt angry. Not that those kids with their swagger had it in for him: they wanted, if anything, to confront the world in general, the whole race of men who didn’t know how to have fun like them. But Riccetto was offended that they were acting like hotshots while he was alone there, and excluded, for the moment, from that smartass group, and had to listen quietly to their boisterous din. He began to whistle louder, paying them no attention at all, and went on his own way: but he was barely twenty steps beyond, when he heard a weepy voice coming from the ditch that fa
ced the squalid gardens: he approached and saw a boy squatting, bare-chested, on the grass.

  “What happened,” he said. But the boy wept without saying a word. “Hey, what?” said Riccetto. Coming closer he saw that the boy was completely naked; thin and dripping with dew, he got to his knees and started whining like a little kid: “They stripped off my clothes and hid them, damn those sons of bitches.” “Who was it?” said Riccetto. The boy stood up, bathed in tears, with his little dick erect: “Them,” he said, whining. Riccetto ran after the group of boys he’d met a moment earlier.

  “Hey, you guys,” he shouted. They stopped and, all together, turned. “Hey, did you hide that kid there’s clothes?” Riccetto said firmly but still politely. “They’re right there!” said one of them gleefully. “Just find them.” Riccetto took a few steps back; neither he nor the others wanted to get into a fight; they felt, rather, that they were allies, because they were smartasses, compared with that twerp who was crying. “Forget him, he’s a nobody,” said one, hitting his nose with his index finger. Riccetto shrugged. “Well, poor kid,” he said; now, however, his duty as a defender was done, and in fact the twerp could be seen coming out of the ditch with his pants on, carrying his torn undershirt. But the other boys didn’t move and one of them stared at Riccetto, laughing. “You looking at me?” said Riccetto. The kid had fleshy chapped lips and a delinquent’s face, with a small head covered in curls like a cabbage. “Do you know me?” said Riccetto, who saw him against the light of a street lamp. “What, not know you!” said the other happily. “I’m Lenzetta,” he continued, “we met last night at Villa Borghese, didn’t we!” “Oh, sorry!” said Riccetto generously, recognizing him and approaching with his hand extended. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Where would I be going, when I’m this hungry,” said Lenzetta. The others laughed. “And you?” asked Lenzetta. Riccetto laughed philosophically, turned up the collar of his shirt, sank his hands further into his pockets. “What do I know,” he said, “I’m still out of the house and fuck if I’m going back now.” “Why?” said Lenzetta, amused. “You want me to go to jail?” said Riccetto. “I was playing cards in a place in Tiburtino, the cops came and now the ones they caught are fucked. Damn, you know Caciotta was there, too.” “Who’s Caciotta?” said Lenzetta. “The one who was with me, yesterday night . . . red hair . . . He must be in jail now, shit.” “I’m still away from home, too,” said Lenzetta. “Who goes home? My brother’ll kill me if he sees me . . . ” “What do you mean, kill you,” said one of the group, “they caught him Saturday night, we told you.” “I know, I know,” said Lenzetta, “but, well, there’s still my mother at our house, god damn her, I can’t stand the sight of her.” “Now you’re fucked,” said his friend laughing, threatening him with a hand, “your mother at home and your brother in jail, whatever you do you’re in trouble: if you go home you catch it, if you go to jail you catch it, look out!” They all laughed. “What do I care!” said Lenzetta. Laughing and shoving, scruffy, they went back toward Maranella. “Anyway,” said one, “Elina isn’t there tonight.” “Who told you,” said another, disgusted, “she’s always there, always.” “Yeah,” said the first, “she had a belly as big as a tub, now she must be at the Polyclinic having the baby.” “What do you mean big,” said the first as if to challenge him, “she couldn’t have been more than four months.” “Four months my ass,” said the other, “she already had a fat belly when I fucked her this spring!” “Yeah, ten years ago,” said Lenzetta, “but who cares, if we have a hundred lire between all five of us I’ll slit my throat.” “Would it be the first time we stiffed her?” said one. “We say: give us a fuck and we’ll give you a hundred, we fuck, and we don’t give her a lira.” “What a bastard!” cried Lenzetta.