The door of Alduccio’s house was ajar, and the light was burning. His sister was sitting on a chair; his mother, standing on the other side of the messy kitchen, was still shouting. The plates in the sink needed to be washed, the floor was littered with garbage, and on the table, in the light of the bulb that made the wet table sparkle, there were still two or three pieces of bread, a dirty bowl, and a knife. The door of one of the two bedrooms was also partly open, and in the darkness Alduccio’s father could be seen, dressed, on the bed, where the youngest daughter also slept; the other children slept on mattresses on the floor. The other room, where Riccetto’s entire family slept, was closed, and it seemed as if no one were there.
“I’ll kill myself, I will,” his sister was yelling, squeezing her head between her thin bare arms, as if she had cramps. “If only,” Alduccio muttered, without looking anyone in the face, and heading for his cot, against the wall of the room where his father was lying. Suddenly his sister got up from the chair and rushed toward the door. “Stop,” said Alduccio grabbing her by the waist and pushing her back into the middle of the kitchen, with a shove that knocked her to the floor.
She remained as she was, between the overturned chair and the table, continuing to weep without tears, in a rage, writhing on the wet floor.
“Close the door,” the mother said to Alduccio.
“You close it!” he said, taking a piece of bread from the table and putting it in his mouth.
“You good-for-nothing!” his mother shouted at him, but not too loud, so as not to be heard by the neighbors, and therefore even more furious: she was disheveled and half naked as he had left her, with her sweaty tits almost falling out of her open dress. She went to close the door, dragging her bare feet over the tiles.
“You vile pimp!” she resumed, while, lying on the floor, the sister made a sound as if she were gasping for breath, saying every so often in a low voice, “God, God.” Alduccio swallowed a mouthful of bread and went to the tap for a drink of water. Swaying, in underpants and still wearing his black work jacket, the father crossed the kitchen, blind because of the wine he’d drunk, his hair uncombed and sweaty on his forehead. He stood unmoving for a moment, maybe because he had forgotten what he intended to do: then he raised one hand, brought it to his mouth, and moved it up and down, in the air, from his heart to an indeterminate point near his nose: as if he were giving emphasis to a long and complicated speech that wasn’t coming out of his mouth. Finally, when he realized he couldn’t manage to express himself, he hurried back to the bed. Alduccio went outside a moment to relieve himself, because in the apartments in the complexes there were no toilets, and when he returned, his mother went after him again: “All day out of the house,” she said. “He drinks, he eats, and never once does he bring home a lira, never.”
Alduccio turned suddenly: “I’m fed up with you, Ma, cut it out,” he cried.
“And when I cut it out,” she said, tossing the hair out of her eyes and pulling off the hair that was pasted to her throat, sweaty and bare almost to her nipples, “you’ll wish you heard me hollering still, you disgusting delinquent!”
Alduccio, blind with rage, spit out at her feet the mouthful of bread he had started to eat: “Here,” he said, “take it, spit!” Turning to go to the other room, he banged into the table, making the bowl and the knife that were on it fall. “You give it back to me?” the mother said going toward him, “you think you can make up for it with that?” “Fuck off,” Alduccio said to her. “Fuck off yourself, you filthy pig, which is what you’ve always been,” his mother cried. Alduccio could no longer see and he bent down to grab the knife, which had fallen at his feet on the dirty floor.
8.
LADY DEATH
. . . the Lady Death
of Via Giulia raises her scythe.
—G.G. BELLI
It was late Sunday morning. The entire beautiful landscape that could be seen from the San Basilio bus, on the long, unbroken stretch from Tiburtino to Ponte Mammolo, seemed to be made of many marvelous fragments bathed in the blue of the sky from there, at the foot of the slope, all the way to the mountains of Tivoli, which, fading against a sliver of cloud, encircled the countryside dotted with trees, bridges, gardens, factories, and houses.
On Via Tiburtina, the bus, which at that point was speeding along at sixty, with a great clanging of glass and metal, only occasionally skimmed past idle, noisy youths dressed in their holiday best, walking or on bicycles, or groups of girls. Everything seemed freshly painted after the rain of the evening before, even the Aniene, which curved amid the fields and the expanses of reeds and the huts, and wound through the Prati Fiscali down toward Monte Sacro.
In the empty, hot bus, enjoying that fine panorama, were two carabinieri. Two dark-haired men from Ciociaria or Salerno, bathed in sweat like fountains, with their summer uniforms unbuttoned in every place where they could be unbuttoned, caps in hand, and their converted camorrist faces locked in expressions of irritation, swallowed bitterly when they thought of all that trouble because of a boy getting a few little burns. When the bus, speeding, crossed the bridge over the Aniene, passing the bleach factory, and stopped in front of an old tavern, they got off, in no hurry and, in no hurry, drying the sweat with their handkerchiefs, prepared to walk the length of Via Casal dei Passi, which, from the tavern, headed endlessly toward the horizon shimmering with hot air: at the end, Ponte Mammolo, like an Arab city, spread its two rows of small white houses along the wavelike curves of the fields.
The two carabinieri, walking slowly on the heat-softened asphalt, reached the intersection, turned onto Via Selmi, and entered the neighborhood. The boys they were looking for, however, weren’t there. They weren’t in one of the last houses on Via Selmi, half built, with curtains in place of window frames and women quarreling around the spigot of the water tank. And they weren’t playing with the other boys in the street or in the fields. If by chance they could have imagined it, the two dark men, they could have spared themselves that long walk. If only! And to think that, bad luck, when the bus was turning onto the bridge over the Aniene, if they had happened to glance at the landscape, and had observed the gardens just beyond the bend in the river where the crowd of boys was going to swim, they might have seen them . . .
The boys they were looking for were, in fact, there, in the middle of those gardens, or, rather, in the middle of a kind of jungle of tangled brush and willows, of reeds and brambles, between the gardens and the bank that dropped down to the Aniene. Mariuccio, who was so young that he hadn’t even started school, was squatting with his little bottom on his heels, playing peacefully with two or three ants, poking them with a stick. Borgo Antico was watching him, and Genesio, serious and aloof, was also squatting on the ground, smoking. Sitting next to him was their little dog, named Fido, also, in a moment of repose. He was sitting on his hind legs, his front legs planted on the ground: and every so often, with one of his hind legs, he scratched himself under the armpits. Having settled down, he looked around almost politely, now left, now right, into the distance, observing the totality of things, from the apartment blocks of Tiburtino to the bends in the river, and now and then casting a placid glance at his three masters, who, compared with him, were indeed very small boys, and you had to let them alone, even when they were a little silly.
Suddenly, right in the middle of his contemplation, he got up and went to sniff Mariuccio’s heels. “Here, Fido,” said Genesio, but without the hint of a smile: he grabbed the dog, who had immediately run over, and, setting him between his knees, petted him. The beast, blissful, let him, and, eyes half-closed, seemed to sink into a kind of half-sleep, the better to enjoy the satisfaction of that moment of favor that the favorite of his masters had granted him. And it was rare, because Genesio, though he had a good heart, was always battered by emotions and affections, poor kid, and hid everything inside, speaking as little as possible, in order not to expose himself. His brothers had fou
nd him out, and though they always obeyed, they weren’t afraid of him, and sometimes, even obeying with complete respect, they dared to lightly make fun of him. The dog on his lap was almost napping: but all four, that morning, were dead tired: it was their first morning of freedom; and there in the dry grass amid the bundles of crushed reeds, they could still see the hollows where they had slept, like sparrows in the nest, or rabbits. They hadn’t regretted it, leaving home: in fact, the two little ones were very content, since Genesio would think of everything. And Genesio was frowning, in fact, thinking of everything, while they played with the ants.
“Let’s go,” Genesio said suddenly, getting up. Without asking where and why, as always, Borgo Antico and Mariuccio, curious, stood up, too, waiting for events. The puppy wagged his tail, pleased with the resumption of activity. He ran back and forth, barking continuously, his mouth open and his tongue hanging out. But the place that Genesio had in mind wasn’t far. First they followed the overgrown, curving shore of the Aniene, jumping from one mound to the next, through the tangles of reeds, all the way to the tavern Pescatore and the dredge; then, crossing the river on the old brick bridge, they went down on the other side, which was much clearer, on a path that ran beside leafless bushes, until they were at the bend where the diving platform was, opposite the place where they had been. Just as he had been the day before, the old drunk, all alone, was singing
“Lasseme puntà, solo la puntaaa . . . ”
from under the arch of the bridge, a place that he was evidently attached to. In the big fire-blackened open space, with the grain stubble, not a soul could be seen, not even the four black horses. But then they heard voices, and in fact at the bottom of the slope, near the water, on the ground that was trampled and dirty from the day before, were three or four swimmers, who must have arrived while the three brothers and Fido were rounding the dredge. They were talking and moving peacefully in the still pure light, through which the stinking heat was already spreading; lying in the dust, legs apart, every so often they turned over lazily, and their voices echoed loudly in the silent air, because almost no cars were passing on Via Tiburtina, and the factory, opposite, was closed.
One of those four or five was Caciotta. “If only,” he was saying nostalgically, when Genesio and the other kids arrived, “if only that song had been popular last year!”
Singing that song was Zinzello, who, maybe dissatisfied with his Saturday bath, had returned to give himself a soaping, this time without his two dogs. He was shouting desperately, at the top of his lungs, naked and thin as a rail, behind some bushes:
I’ songo carcerato e mamma more—I’m in prison and Mamma’s dying . . .
“Why would you want that song to have been popular last year?” Alduccio asked; he was there, his eyes so red with sleep they were like scars.
“Why-y?” said Caciotta. “Because when I was in Porta Portese, last year, I could have sung it!”
“Big deal,” sneered Alduccio.
“You know how much I would have liked to sing that song!” Caciotta continued, excited and sentimental. “When I was in prison, too! God damn! I would have sung it every night before I went to sleep.” And, with all that feeling, he began to sing along with Zinzello, but each was singing on his own, one more impassioned than the other, Zinzello on one side of a battered, garbage-littered bush, Caciotta on the other.
“They worked your tail off, eh,” said Begalone, “when you were in jail!”
“What do you expect!” said Caciotta, fatalistic, breaking off his singing for a moment.
“God damn it,” Genesio murmured, frowning, under his breath, as if to himself, crouching a little farther up on the jagged edge of the slope. Mariuccio and Borgo Antico stared at him. It was the first time he had said that curse in its entirety. “If Mamma heard you,” said Mariuccio softly, as if with a sigh, looking thoughtfully at his brother, “what would she do to you?” Genesio gave him one of his inexpressive glances and returned to contemplation of the thugs of Tiburtino. The mother of Genesio, Borgo Antico, and Mariuccio was a woman from the Marches who, somehow or other, during the war, had married a bricklayer from Andria. She got a beating every day, poor woman, and led a life worse than a beast’s. And yet, as she said to her neighbors in moments of reprieve, she still cared about bringing up her children well. Now she was weeping, first because she had realized that her children and their dog were no longer at home, then because she had seen the carabinieri arrive at her house, looking for them: but the three boys, her spitting image, outside and inside, too, were too distracted at that moment to think of her. “Borgo Antì,” said Begalone from below, looking at him, “you sing that song!”
“I don’t know it,” Borgo Antico answered quickly, hardening his small brown face.
“Not true,” said Mariuccio, “he does know it!”
Begalone, suddenly bursting with rage, went over to Borgo Antico and with his finger tapped him under the chin: “You’re making me mad,” he said. Then with a threatening light in his Muslim’s face, he added, “Sing, or I’ll thrash you.” Sullenly, with his head drawn down between his knees, Borgo Antico began to sing “Carcerato” at the top of his lungs.
Aldo took advantage of the moment when no one was paying attention and moved away, as if he wanted to take a nap: he lay down on his stomach on the grass washed by the rain of the night before and burned again by the sun, with his face on his crossed arms.
While Borgo Antico was singing, Genesio, without a word, went down the slope, followed by Mariuccio and Fido, who rolled down in the dirt. Reaching the water, Genesio stopped for a moment to look thoughtfully at the river flowing in front of him, beneath the walls of the bleach factory, with the white furrow of the drain on the slope below. Then, unhurried, in front of Mariuccio and Fido, who, squatting on the ground, watched him with the proper respect, he began to undress. Carefully he took off his shorts, hardened with sweat and dust, his shirt, his pink undershirt, his shoes and socks; he remained—slender, almost skinny, his shoulder blades slightly protruding—nearly naked: not completely, because he wasn’t shameless like the boys his age in Tiburtino. He kept on his sack-like underpants, which covered him completely, front and back. “Hold this,” he said to Mariuccio, handing him the bundle of his clothes, which he had carefully rolled up and tied with the belt. “No, wait,” he added abruptly. He unloosened the belt, unrolled the bundle of clothes, and from the pocket of his shorts took a cigarette butt, which he lighted, and a small comb. Smoking, he carefully combed his hair, asking Mariuccio if the part was straight or crooked, and then making a kind of wave over his forehead, black, shiny, and without a hair out of place. Finally, handing his clothes, all tied up, back to his brother, he announced curtly, as if the fact didn’t refer to him: “Today I’m crossing the river.” Mariuccio looked at him for a moment, understanding that it was an emotional moment; then he began to shout in his puppyish voice: “Hey, Borgo Antì, Borgo Antì!” Speeding up, Borgo Antico sang the last words of the song in a hurry, and leaned over toward the water without saying anything.
“Hey, Borgo Antì,” Mariuccio said, quickly and lightheartedly, “Genesio says he’s crossing the river today.”
Borgo Antico listened silently and then began to descend, sliding down the bank on his bottom, as far as the diving platform of hardened mud.
“What, you’re gonna cross the river, Genè?” he asked seriously.
“Yes,” said Genesio, feeling somewhat emotional and letting a half smile escape.
“Now?”
“Not now, later, now I want to rest.”
They all three sat on the black sand, with the puppy, who, seeing that he was neglected for more important things he didn’t understand, couldn’t stay still and jumped from one to another rubbing his muzzle against each in turn. Genesio, smoking intently, was silent, then he said to his brothers: “When we’re grown up we’ll kill our father.”
�
�Me, too,” said Mariuccio promptly.
“All three of us together,” Genesio confirmed, “we have to kill him! And then we’ll go live somewhere else with mamma.”
He spit the butt in the water, with his serious, direct gaze, glistening and slightly moist.
“He must have beaten her this morning, too,” he said. He was quiet for a while, to master himself, and then he repeated with his usual flat, inexpressive voice: “When we’re grown up we’ll show him—we’ll show him.
“Now I’ll try,” he said, without changing his tone of voice.
“You’re crossing?” asked the smallest, quivering.
“What do you mean crossing,” said Genesio. “I’m going to do a trial.”
“You’ll go to the middle?” Mariuccio asked again.
“Yes,” said Genesio. He rose and climbed up the slope.
“Now where you going?” asked Mariuccio, in wonder.
“Over there,” said Genesio, without turning.
The boys followed him up the slope and then back down on the other side of the diving platform, where Zinzello was finishing his bath, while, as if to take his place, another hapless fellow had arrived, who was partly bald and in need of a shave, and had a face that seemed burned by fever. It was Alfio Lucchetti, the uncle of Amerigo from Pietralata, who had killed himself.
“Where do these kids come from?” said Zinzello, playful and good-humored. Alfio, who was still dressed, in striped black pants, looked at them, shaking his head sarcastically and holding against his hip the hand that was clutching the rolled-up towel and soap. A smile swelled his jaw, made prickly by the rough beard, and from his hair, combed like that of a youth even though it showed threads of white, sideburns descended below fanlike ears. Genesio, just as if Zinzello hadn’t spoken of him, and without looking at anyone, had gone to put his feet in the water. He stood a while longer, looking at the river, then he walked out until the water reached his waist, keeping his arms raised, and there he plunged in, swimming quickly in a dog paddle.
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