Chatting about this and that they had almost reached Maranella, and weren’t thinking about Elina anymore. The phonograph music from the carousels could be heard nearby, but at the same time, even closer, a clamor of voices, a scurry of footsteps at the intersection in Maranella, at the tram stop. Everyone was going in that direction, as if something had happened or there were a festival, even though it was already late. “It’s the circus, damn!” shouted one, starting to run. “What do you mean circus,” Lenzetta replied calmly, though idly he quickened his pace with the others: a small crowd was visible coming down from Via Casilina, black against the potholed, poorly lit pavement. At the little cinema of the Due Allori it halted, dotted with hand-held lights. “It’s the religious procession, fuck,” said Lenzetta, disappointed.
The boys, having rushed to the intersection, stopped, uncertain whether to go to the field where the carousels were, and maybe the blonde’s shooting gallery would still be open, or stay and watch that bore there, in Maranella. They sat down ostentatiously on the edge of the sidewalk between the legs of the growing number of people who had gathered to watch the procession: one sang, one hit another, who was staring, others were entangled, rolling in the dust.
Meanwhile the procession approached. “Damn,” said Riccetto, “we should have stayed in Prenestino, it was better.” “What would you do there?” said Lenzetta. “Elina was there, wasn’t she,” said Riccetto slyly. A band of old, wizened women was advancing, with an old man here and there and some kids: all held in their hands a candle inside a paper cone, so that the night wind wouldn’t blow it out. Every so often they began to sing, each on his own. Reaching the intersection, they stopped and drew together on the sidewalk in front of a pizzeria; two young men set up a table against the flaking wall, and an old man climbed up on it and began to make a speech against the Communists, exalting the spirit of Christ.
Around where Lenzetta, Riccetto, and the others had stopped there was a big commotion, so that the voice of the old man, who was speaking a northern Italian, could hardly be heard. “You hear? Listen!” said one. “What, you want to be an altar boy, Mozzò?” said Lenzetta; Mozzone was silent for a moment, his ears straining. “How he talks!” he said then in a voice sweetened by amazement. Riccetto elbowed Lenzetta: “Hey,” he said, “listen, I’ve had it with this.” “What do you want,” said Lenzetta. “Let’s go back,” said Riccetto, nodding in the direction of Prenestino. “You’re crazy,” said the other. “I’ve got money, believe me,” Riccetto explained, “but just for us two.” Lenzetta glanced at him, then looked around: “Wait,” he said. The others were distracted. “Get up,” he said then, “and go down along Acqua Bullicante, I’ll follow you.”
Riccetto got up and quietly slipped away amid the crowd that was watching the old man mockingly; not five minutes later the man broke off and the procession resumed its march, singing, and turned toward the center of the neighborhood. Lenzetta ran to join Riccetto. “The others?” said Riccetto.
“We dumped them,” said Lenzetta. “They went to the carousels.”
Talking, they retraced all of Via dell’Acqua Bullicante, while behind them the sambas playing on the phonograph and the songs of the procession were fading. There were now only a few people, returning from Preneste or from Impero to Borgata Gordiani or Pigneto, or a drunk going home, sometimes singing the workers’ “Bandiera Rossa” and sometimes the “Royal March.”
They found Elina amid the shadows where she was queen, beyond some narrow pitted streets and the squalid fields dotted with mounds of dirt where the trams turned around, in an open space dominated, behind, by the immense shadows of two or three apartment blocks under construction and, opposite, by one already built but still without streets or courtyards, abandoned amid the weeds and the trash. The enormous big box, with all its windows illuminated, rose alone in the middle of the sky, where a few stars glittered sadly. Elina was holed up back there, near the plots of land surrounded by fences or hedges, still reduced to enormous garbage dumps, with a few shacks and piles of rubble on the edges or in the middle.
Lenzetta and Riccetto approached the woman, who was small and fat like a roll of salami, came to an agreement, and, climbing between the wires of a fence, ventured in amid wet piles of reeds.
It didn’t take long; as soon as they came out again they went calmly to wash in a fountain, in the middle of the square where the trams ended their route. Lenzetta took care of where they would sleep. Behind Borgata Gordiani, at the back of a dew-soaked vegetable patch in a field from which you could see the entire periphery, all the neighborhoods from Centocelle to Tiburtino, there were some big rusty drums, abandoned in an enclosure with other old scrap metal. They were big enough so that you could crawl in on your knees, and the length of a person. In one of these Lenzetta had put some straw; he took a little and put it in a neighboring drum. They stretched out and slept until after ten the next morning.
* * *
Lenzetta was hanging around near Via Tuscolana, Piazza Re di Roma, Via Taranto, where there were some small neighborhood markets, barracks, soup kitchens run by the brothers. When he was out of the house he got by partly by working (as little as possible) for some fish seller or commercial traveler, partly by stealing from the stalls or on the trams. When he felt like it he stayed on the outskirts, going from the Prenestina neighborhood to Quadraro, with a shapeless sack, looking through the garbage for scrap iron or pieces of lead: but this he did rarely, because it hurt his back to bend over, and then his mouth got so pasty with dust that after a while he needed a liter of wine to disinfect it, and there went half the money he had scraped together. Riccetto didn’t much like that business of the scrap iron, either, partly because it was kids’ stuff; so they went to the outskirts just to sleep in the drums and spent the day in Rome. If then one day they managed to get enough money for the next one, too, then damn if they’d go to work and slave: they’d take the bus and go to Acqua Santa. They’d enter past four stunted bushes along the Appia Nuova, climb up a dirt-encrusted slope, and, amid pits and caverns, crests, small burned fields, shallow ravines, stumps of towers, cart tracks, venture into the boundless and rugged promised land that was Acqua Santa. Their hope was to meet, at the top of a hill, or at the intersection of rough-edged paths, some prostitute, positioned to wait for beardless clients from the villages of shacks or the housing projects that loomed in the background; or, positioned at the entrance to a cave, or amid the mulberry thickets around a stream, with a newspaper spread out beside him and gold eyeglasses, some fat German from whom to take what they wanted. They’d look at him, pretending nothing was going on, or they might stop to pee: and he would run after them, up and down the slopes and ravines, to the muddiest streams, as the great poet of Rome put it:
Mi sentivo quer frocio dì a le tacche
Cor fiatone: “Tartaifel, sor paine,
Pss, nun currete tante, che so stracche.”
I heard that fag behind me pant,
“The devil! Signor Dandy,
Not so fast, I’m tired, I can’t.”
One day the two dandies—all alone, however—arriving at the stream with the red gate, found a youth from Tiburtino, who was simply Alduccio. Riccetto forced the pace a little, to go and give him a friendly handshake. “Cuz, what’s up?” he said cordially as he took off his clothes. Alduccio was lying in his underpants on the dirty grass in a wisp of shade cast by a thicket of reeds. He responded gallantly. “The usual,” he said. “The longer you stay the more you want to say fuck it all, and live like an outlaw.”
“I’ll say,” said Riccetto, slipping his t-shirt over his shining head.
“If you don’t work you don’t eat, you know, and when do you find work?” He was chewing gum with a decadent and contemptuous air.
“So,” said Riccetto, continuing in Alduccio’s humorous vein, “if we get two Berrettas we can start a gang.” Alduccio looked at him with the expression that said t
his is no joke. “Exactly,” he said. Lenzetta, who couldn’t bear not to interrupt a discussion for more than a minute, and who at the word “Berretta” had pricked up his ears, exclaimed mockingly: “What do you mean Berretta, a Cappella, not a Berretta!”
Riccetto and Lenzetta also stretched out on the edge of the ditch. “So,” said Riccetto, “what can you tell me about Tiburtino?”
“What should I tell you,” said Alduccio, “I already told you, the usual.”
“Hey, you know Caciotta, right, the one who lives in Building 9 . . . ” said Riccetto.
“What, not know him,” answered Alduccio, “yeah I know him.”
“What’s he up to?” Riccetto inquired. Alduccio’s handsome face had a gleeful expression: and, without saying anything, he pinched the skin of his cheeks under his eyes with the tip of his thumb and index finger. He meant that he was in jail, at Porta Portese.
“Damn,” Riccetto muttered, laughing to himself.
“They caught him in Fileni’s gambling place, playing cards,” Alduccio explained.
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Riccetto said shrewdly, “I was there, too.” Alduccio looked at him with interest. “Amerigo’s dead,” he said. Riccetto rose onto his elbows and looked him in the face. The corners of his mouth trembled as if for an amused smile; it was exciting news, and he was full of curiosity. “What happened?” he asked. “He’s dead, he’s dead,” Alduccio repeated, pleased to give that unexpected news. “He died yesterday at the Polyclinic,” he added. That goddam night when Riccetto had cut out of Fileni’s house, Caciotta and the others had been caught, but they hadn’t resisted. Amerigo, however, had let two cops lead him out by the arms but once they were on the balcony he had thrown them against the wall and jumped the two or three meters down into the courtyard; he had crushed his knee, but had nevertheless managed to drag himself along the wall of the building. The cops fired and shot him in the shoulder, but still he had made it to the bank of the Aniene; there they were about to capture him but, though he was bleeding, he had jumped into the water, intending to cross the river, hide in the vegetable patches on the other side, and escape in the direction of Ponte Mammolo or Tor Sapienza. But in the middle of the current he fainted, and the cops had seized him and brought him to the police station, soaked as a sponge with blood and mud; so they had had to transfer him to the hospital and guard him there. After a week the fever passed and he tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists with the pieces of a glass, but they had saved him that time, too; then, about ten days later, before Alduccio and Riccetto met at Acqua Santa, he had thrown himself out of a third-floor window: for a week he had lingered and finally he had given up the ghost.
“Tomorrow is the funeral,” said Alduccio.
“Damn,” Riccetto mumbled, stunned. Lenzetta, to show that he wasn’t surprised by anything, and that his motto was “always mind your own fucking business,” began to sing.
Zoccoletti, zoccoletti . . .
Little shoes, little shoes . . .
And he sprawled as comfortably as he could on the grass, with his hands entwined under the fresh broccoli flower of his head.
Riccetto instead thought a while, then decided it was his duty to attend Amerigo’s funeral: it was true that he barely knew him, but Amerigo was a friend of Caciotta, and then, well, he felt like it. “Tomorrow I’m coming to Pietralata,” he said to Alduccio, “but don’t tell anyone, so my father doesn’t find out.”
Amerigo was lying on the bed in a new blue suit, a white shirt, and black shoes. They had crossed his arms over his chest, or rather over the double-breasted jacket that for a couple of Sundays he had been so proud of, going around Pietralata with his vicious walk. He had gotten the money in a robbery in Via dei Prati Fiscali: he had stolen thirty thousand lire from the twit, and for his own satisfaction had beaten him bloody; and so he had gotten the blue suit, and when he wore it he was more savage than usual. You had to pay close attention to how you looked at him; his friends from the neighborhood, craven and phony with him, knew how to flatter him without letting it show, but kids who didn’t know him, met in Communist Party dance halls, or in some poolroom, had returned home with swollen eyes and bloody gums: and lucky for them that Amerigo had been warned against carrying a knife. The suit had pegged trousers and a short jacket with broad, rounded shoulders: he wore the collar of his white shirt unbuttoned, and his hair combed like Ghigo—parted on the side and smoothed with brilliantine. Now, here, he had patiently, like a victim, allowed his hands to be crossed over his jacket; but the shirt collar was still unbuttoned, gangster style, framing his face, which had been like a dead man’s even when he was alive. So it was as if he had just fallen asleep, and he still inspired fear. When his nap was over, he would certainly be patient no longer, and would smash the faces of those who had dared to arrange him like that. He lay there grim and silent, on the bed that was too small for him, with his head of curly hair, still shiny with brilliantine against the grayish pillow.
Riccetto entered the small room on the ground floor of the building, with some of his friends from Tiburtino, to see him. In front of the building’s entrance, which had no door, but staircases to the right and the left, there was a small crowd of people in dark clothes: all the Lucchettis, who had come to perform their duty as relatives and as protagonists of the day in their good clothes: bright colors for the boys and teenagers; outfits more suitable for dancing than for a funeral for the young men. The neighbors, who lived in the same building complex, ten or twelve in every room—so it was practically a neighborhood—stood a little apart, and even farther away were Amerigo’s friends, all dressed up: Arduino, whose nose and eye had been ripped out by a hand grenade when he was a boy, the boy with tuberculosis who lived in Building 12, Carogna, the Napoletano, and Capece, the son of Sor’Anita, who played the guitar and sang, especially nights when they returned to the neighborhood from some exploit and stayed up late to divide the money, argue, or take a walk in the mud under the moon, glowing red-hot above the shacks of the homeless. There were also some younger boys, who were leaning idly against the wall of the building, chattering in low voices, or watching the kids playing ball, farther away, in an open space in the middle of Pietralata.
No sooner had Riccetto and the others entered the room where the dead man was than they wanted to get out: it was damp and dark, as in winter, and Amerigo’s aunts and sisters, fat as they were, filled the room so that you couldn’t even move. The boys glanced at the dead man and, ashamed because they hadn’t done it since the day of their first communion, made the sign of the cross and went back out to the street where the men were talking. In the center, but distracted, like someone absorbed by his own business, was Alfio Lucchetti, the youngest uncle, dark, like Amerigo, with his cheekbones and curls, but taller and thin: it was he who three years earlier had stuck a bayonet in the belly of the owner of the bar there at the tram stop, and now they said that he was ruining himself for a prostitute he kept in Testaccio. In truth, he wasn’t really talking to the others, but every so often he spoke a word or two, with a closed and allusive expression, shaking his head. And immediately he dropped the conversation, as if he didn’t want his business to be known by too many of the people who were standing around listening. He looked past the circle of heads, hands sunk in the pockets of his gray striped pants under his black jacket, clenching his teeth so hard he made his jaws swell and deflate, the way Amerigo did, and so tall that if he’d raised a hand he would have touched the electric wires.
The Street Kids Page 10