* * *
Begalone and Alduccio were again hurrying toward Campo dei Fiori, hands in their pockets, their shirts open and flapping over their pants, but neither joking nor singing.
“Are you a man, too?” repeated Alduccio, walking hunched over.
“Look at this!” cried Begalone, stopping in the middle of the street and pointing his hand at him, palm open, fingers pressed together. “Did you go by yourself?”
“Well, what does that have to do with it, he only said it to me, please,” said Alduccio, cupping his hand around his mouth.
“Ah you’re certainly cute!” said Bégalo, resuming his pace. “Moron,” he added, slapping his forehead with two fingers.
“And then I didn’t tell you only I’d do it,” said Alduccio, “you idiot, I told you let’s flip a coin!”
In the meantime, arguing, they had arrived at Campo dei Fiori, where the pavement was wet but littered here and there with cabbage stalks and bits of peel, and where the boys were still playing a game with the rag ball. At the end of the piazza, in the darkest shadow, was the start of a narrow alley—which was Via dei Cappellari—lined with stinking doorways, archways, and narrow crooked windows, its cobblestones bathed in old pee. The two companions stopped in the last bit of light before the entrance to the alley, near some old women sitting in a doorway, under a broken street lamp, and Begalone took out a coin, turned it over in his fingers, and tossed it in the air.
“Heads!” cried Alduccio.
The coin hit the paving stones, which stank of fish, and rolled close to a manhole cover: Bégalo and Alduccio, shoving and pulling each other by the shirt tails, practically tearing them, rushed at it, falling on hands and knees to look.
“Mine,” Alduccio shouted calmly, and, puffed up with pride, he led the way along the narrow street. Bégalo stayed behind. The only light on the pavement, which was like the floor of a stable, was the light that came from tiny windows set into the livid walls, and it wasn’t that simple to recognize the door of the brothel. But luckily it was painted a nice pea green, which anyone would have recognized among a thousand, and then it was ajar, and opened onto a white-tiled hallway, like the ones in public toilets.
They went up a stairway and reached the landing of the mezzanine; on one side the stairs, covered by a threadbare carpet, continued under a white vault, while on the other was the door to the waiting room: in the middle was the madam’s desk.
Since at that moment there was no one there and the door of the waiting room was closed, they continued calmly up the second flight of stairs. A roar stopped them. “Hey, you filthy bums!” It was the madam shouting, and loud enough to burst her bladder. “Look at this,” she continued, “you think you’re in your own house?”
Those words were followed by laughter and sarcastic remarks from the smoky waiting room. And in fact two or three clients who were already inside had stood up and were leaning against the doorframe, sneering.
Begalone and Alduccio hurried back down the stairs, and, also laughing, presented themselves to the woman, who, meanwhile, dragging her feeble legs, had returned to her pulpit. But it was no joke to her, or to the servant, who stuck to her irritatingly, like a pest.
“Those idiots,” said the madam, who every so often spoke in Italian, because, as a property owner, she considered herself a member of the upper class. “What, you want to have a session without spending a lira? Madness.”
“Signora,” said Begalone, in a conciliatory tone, “we made a mistake.”
“Mistake my ass,” she said; she was a woman who, when her interests were at stake, spoke like a true Trasteverina, even though she was from Frosinone, and she rudely stretched out her hand. They took out their identity cards, and showed them to her; then, with cheerful expressions in spite of the bad showing they’d made, they went into the waiting room. There was a crowd of clients, sitting on the sofas along the walls, smoking, as red as shrimp, most of them looking like victims, silent and aroused.
And there she was, the old Sicilian whore, sitting on a padded stool at the center of the room, with two or three layers of mint-colored gauze around her stomach, smoking a lipstick-smeared cigarette.
The men in the room stared at her silently, and she looked them in the face with irritation, blowing out mouthfuls of smoke, her tits sagging to her bellybutton.
When he entered, Alduccio sat down in front of her, turning his back on the entire clientele, and, making a sign with his head, said between his teeth: “Let’s go.”
“That jerk,” thought Begalone, sitting down on the edge of a couch, “all these people have been waiting here an hour, and no one was going, he barely gets inside, and takes her to a room!” Meanwhile, Alduccio and the whore had left and gone up the stairs with the threadbare carpet. Begalone began to smoke, with one buttock on and one off the couch, next to two soldiers from the north with reddish hair who hadn’t said a word, respectful, as if they were in church, not a brothel. “Now when is he coming down, in a fucking year,” Bégalo thought darkly. “The next time, if he doesn’t take out the money, I’ll bust his butt!” He took the last drags on the cigarette, which was burning his fingers, and threw it under the couch, crushing it with his heel.
Everything was normal: the madam in the hallway was arguing with the servant; she was yelling as if she were being eviscerated, and they couldn’t make out clearly what she was saying.
“Hold it, sweetheart,” two or three youths in one corner of the waiting room said to her,—as was normal, after listening to the uproar for a while: and the sound was so low and forced that it seemed to be coming out of their guts, straining the tendons in their necks and squirting blood out of their eyes. They immediately resumed their ordinary expressions and no one could have said who it had been. The madam paid no attention and continued to harangue the servant. Everything was normal, in other words: after a while two more girls came down; one sat on the empty stool, the other on the knees of one of the young men who had shouted and then immediately turned silent, looking like victims who’d just swallowed the holy Host. The two soldiers got up and furtively left, followed by the insults of the whores; the younger men laughed among themselves, as red as peppers, and the stink of smoke, of sweaty clothes, of cloth shoes, kept getting worse, but that, too, was normal. When all of a sudden . . .
In the din in the waiting room, over the voice of the madam who was hurling the last bits of her tirade, and of the girls who were complaining, suddenly from above came a laugh, which wouldn’t stop. At first no one paid attention. Neither the madam nor the girls nor those four clients, nor Begalone. But since the laughter continued, they all began to listen. From behind her counter the madam cast some suspicious glances upward, then she put away her money, which she hadn’t stopped counting even while she was scolding the servant, and went out as far as the stairs to look up. The girls, too, became silent and followed her, dragging their gauze trains, their flesh throbbing under skin that smelled of powder and fried food. The young men from Panìgo also got up and crowded the doorway, leaning against the frame or against one another. The other clients gathered around them, and last was Begalone, craning his neck to see what was happening.
The girl who was laughing was still on the third flight of stairs, which disappeared under the small plaster vault, beyond the landing where the threadbare carpet ended. But very slowly she came down the stairs. She had to stop every so often, to throw back her head or double over her stomach, to laugh harder. She was laughing loudly, so that it could be heard in the street, and yet not really heartily: she went ha-a-ha-a-ah, for a bit, then stopped, and started the ha-ha-a-ha-ah up again on a higher note, until it sounded as if it would choke the little good-for-nothing. Finally she reached the landing, and there she stopped again, laughing, facing the audience that was looking at her from the lower landing. For a moment they observed her in astonishment, as she doubled over, laughing now almost reluctantly
but, out of spite, even louder and more raucously.
“So can you tell us what you have to laugh about, big mouth!” cried a young man. She looked at him and the others below, and laughed in their faces, too.
“Okay, laugh at this dickhead!” cried another.
She turned back toward the flight of stairs that couldn’t be seen, and, continuing to laugh, shrieked: “Come on, hurry up, you want a wet nurse?” Alduccio, too, appeared on the landing, beside the Sicilian, searching, head down, for a hole in his belt so he could tighten it.
“Go drink some warm milk,” she continued, amid her bursts of laughter.
“Fuck off,” said Alduccio to himself, half aloud, finally finding the right hole in his belt. The Sicilian was going down the carpeted stairs, leaning with one hand on the wall so she could laugh more easily, and he was following, as if hiding behind her. The others below, who had now understood, also laughed, but not too loud, a little discreetly, and muttered in the midst of their laughter: “God damn, what’s all the commotion?” But she kept roaring with laughter, unimaginatively and in order to infuriate all of them. “Such a hurry,” she said over and over, “and then you can’t get it up. Ha-a-ha-a-ah!” “It’s just that I’m weak!” Alduccio stammered, to give a justification, but so softly that only he could hear it. They had reached the bottom landing, where the others were; the Sicilian, with her hysterical laughter behind her, entered the waiting room, advancing amid the men who were gathered around the door, while Alduccio, without the courage to look anyone in the face, in a black rage, escaped immediately down the last flight of stairs, toward the door, and Begalone, having quickly paid the madam, who had already started yelling, ran after him.
“Now we’ll have to walk all the way to the station!” he said, worried, to Alduccio, when he had caught him again and the door of the brothel had closed behind them.
“What do I care,” said Alduccio. He went on without turning, like a mangy wolf with his tail between his legs. On Via dei Cappellari there was no one but them, single file, grazing the housefronts encrusted with damp-saturated dirt and pierced by small windows hung with rags; the street was so narrow that if two people were to stretch out their hands from facing windows, they would touch. It was so dark you had to walk like a blind man. “Now we’re gonna trip here,” said Bégalo, “and fall face down in the pee.” Almost groping his way, and paying close attention to where he put his feet, he suddenly burst out laughing. “What’s to laugh about?” said Alduccio turning suddenly sideways. The other, proceeding on the pavement that was as if smeared with grease, went on laughing. “So keep it up!” said Alduccio weakly.
Like that, one in front of the other, they passed through Campo dei Fiori, now silent, and, crossing Largo Argentina to Via Nazionale, headed toward the station, and after half an hour of hard walking they got there. “Get on here?” said Alduccio dully. “Farther down is better,” said Begalone, his face strained and yellow with weariness. So farther down, in front of the Via Macao barracks, they got on the 9. Begalone was happy. Hanging on to the bumper he had started singing in a tired voice: “Zoccoletti, zoccoletti!” If some passerby happened to look at him, he immediately became aggressive. “What are you looking at?” he went, or, depending on the person or the speed of the tram: “Hey, boss, I’m holding on to the tram, so?” and showed him his hand with the fingers pressed together in a questioning gesture; or if it was a young man: “What, you going to lend me ten lire?” and if it was a good-looking girl, “Hey, sexy!” and in the grip of enthusiasm began singing louder. “Cut it out,” Alduccio said to him seriously at a stop, while they wandered around the tram, pretending not to be doing anything. “Why not just make a call to the cops so they’ll come pick you up: there’s a bastard hanging on to the tram, the number nine!” “What do I care if they take me to jail, is my house any better?” said Begalone, jumping up again onto the bumper.
The little lights of the Verano were sparkling, tremulous, tranquil, dense, hundreds of them, among the cypresses, in the burial niches that stuck up above the wall. Even Portonaccio, at the end of the line, a little beyond the overpass at the Tiburtina station, was silent; only a few trams and buses stood empty and unmoving, like a dark stain in the faded air and saddened rather than brightened by some street lights and the clear sky. A 309 was stopped in front of the closed newsstand, and on the platform, farther on, there wasn’t a soul.
“Let’s see how much I have in my pocket,” Begalone said, turning inside out the lining of his pocket and digging out the money. “Fifty-five lire,” he said, “forty for the bus, and with ten lire we’ll have a bomba, what do you say, Ardù?” “Let’s have the bomba,” Alduccio said hoarsely. He was dying of hunger, but he wasn’t interested in the bomba at all, and he stood hunched behind Bégalo. Bégalo bought a bomba at the stall that was by now almost empty. “Come on, eat,” he said, putting the cold bomba near Alduccio’s mouth. Alduccio took a bite with his mouth twisted. “Another,” said Begalone. “No, that’s enough,” said Alduccio, turning his head away. “Okay,” cried Bégalo, “better, I’ll eat it all myself.” And he began to eat, laughing with his mouth full. “Laugh, go ahead, fuck off,” Alduccio muttered, grim. “Shall we get on?” Begalone said after a while, when he finished chewing; and cheerfully jumped up on the running board. Alduccio without a word got up behind him, on the half-empty bus, dragging his feet, without taking his hands out of his pockets. Begalone, instead, was whistling the Charleston. “Two tickets, conductor,” he cried. “I hear you, I hear you,” said the conductor, slowly detaching two tickets from his block, “you don’t have to yell.”
On the bus were a dozen people, half asleep: a blind woman who had been begging accompanied by a man who looked like Cavour, two musicians with their instruments stuffed into black canvas sheaths, their heads nodding, a brigadier from the carabinieri, two or three workers, and some youths returning from the movies. Bégalo and Alduccio lounged on the front seats, and, since Alduccio was silent, Bégalo began to hum in a low voice. Below them, the conductor was chatting with the driver and behind them, beyond the walls, the lights of the Verano twinkled. Suddenly, in that silence, in the melancholy odor of poor people’s clothes, a boy got on, wearing a short jacket, a fair-haired kid with the face of someone who’s been down and out for seven generations, and he stood in the middle of the aisle, facing the passengers. While no one paid any attention, he conscientiously cleared his throat two or three times, and began to sing. Everyone then turned to look at him, and he, impudently, continued to sing loudly, in a nasal voice, carefully articulating all the words of the song.
Vola! Vola! Vola!
Fly away, fly away, fly away!
He sang: Bégalo and Alduccio eyed their colleague at work. Here and there a laugh escaped someone, and he stood gazing with his mouth open; others instead, in some embarrassment, kept their faces turned to the windows.
“Now if you don’t hurry up and fly away, the bus will leave, and bye-bye, Jesus Christ,” said Begalone, just to break the ice; meanwhile, Alduccio took advantage of that blockhead who had come to sing to think more clearly about his own business. But the boy sang his song from beginning to end, in the complete silence of the bus and the whole square, and then went around among the passengers to see if they’d give him something. Begalone shook his gravedigger’s head, swelling his neck like a turkey, and fished out his last five lire. The fair-haired kid, having done his duty, jumped down from the running board, leaving as silently as he had arrived. “Now you’ve got some coin, beat it,” said Bégalo, his heart pierced by the thought of the five lire. “Fly away, fly away,” he called after him, although by now he couldn’t hear it. “Fly away, damn it.” Then he leaned with his yellow face under Alduccio’s nose: “Fly away, fly away,” he repeated. Alduccio gave him an elbow in the chin that knocked his head against the seat back and looked at him furiously, ready to fight if he said another word. But Bégalo let it go. At that moment the dr
iver very slowly got on the bus, but instead of settling in at the wheel he stretched out on the seat with an expression of boredom in that face, as black as Judas’s. He put his hands between his legs and seemed to be napping. A mournful voice arose at the back of the bus: “Hey, buddy, are we digging a hole here?” No response. “Fly away, fly away, fly away,” Begalo commented in a loud voice. At those two remarks, the bus came to life, and everyone more or less had his say; when they had joked a little, one after another with some remark, on the war in Korea or on the mayor, Rebecchini, the driver gave some signs of life: he straightened up, lazily grasped the brake lever, the bus began to jolt and spit and, swaying on the paving stones, it left on the empty, dark Via Tiburtina.
“Bye, Ardù,” said Begalone to Alduccio when they’d arrived in Tiburtino, near their buildings, and he was going up the crumbling stairs. “Bye,” muttered Alduccio, walking toward his house, a little farther along the deserted street. But even if it had been full of people he would have seen no one. Each of the street lamps spread its patch of light on the asphalt and on the yellowish walls of the buildings, which extended in rows by the dozens, all identical, around identical courtyards of packed earth. Five or six kids came by playing instruments, a harmonica, a drum, castanets, and disappeared among the buildings, until their samba became a tu-tum tu-tum that seemed to be wandering in a dead city. A drunk, his face a blaze of fire under his filthy cap, let out a whistle every so often, so that his lover would come and open the door, while the husband slept. Two youths were talking softly about some private business, but their voices echoed clearly, just the same, in the middle of one of the courtyards, where the rows of stone supports for putting the clothes out to dry, stood, looking like so many gallows lined up in the half-light.
The Street Kids Page 21