“You say no,” said Riccetto, teasing him good-naturedly, “but you’ll see when they catch you if it’s not true!”
“Get out,” said Mariuccio again.
“And why are the carabinieri looking for us?” asked Genesio, as if it were nothing.
“Why-y?” said Riccetto severely. “You have the nerve to ask me? What you did yesterday evening on Monte del Pecoraro? Huh? Tell me about it!”
“What did we do,” said Genesio, this time, staring him in the face, almost with an expression of defiance.
Riccetto frowned, as if he were offended by that obstinacy. “Who was it,” he said, “who burned Piattoletta on the pylon on Monte del Pecoraro?”
Genesio at that remark was dumbstruck for a moment; but then he shrugged, as if dropping the discussion, and said softly, “What do I know about it.”
“You, it was you guys,” Riccetto exclaimed, malicious and triumphant.
“Pst,” said Genesio, shrugging again and looking in another direction, eyes burning under the black hair.
“No, it wasn’t us,” said Mariuccio.
“It’s pointless to deny it, you know,” said Riccetto, enjoying himself more and more. “Please, there are witnesses!”
“What do you mean witnesses!” said Genesio.
“What,” Riccetto replied, “sixty people saw you, yesterday evening! Roscetto, Sgarone, Armandino, all the boys in Building 2, what are you talking about!”
“It wasn’t us,” said Mariuccio again, almost desperate.
“Now you’ll see when they put you in jail, if you still have the nerve to deny it,” Riccetto cried, solemnly. Mariuccio, angry and overcome by emotion, began to cry, his chin trembling, and repeated: “It wasn’t us!”
Seeing him cry Riccetto let up, and, still at the end of the diving platform, sang a little song, crushing under his good humor the three little boys down below.
“Cry, go on, cry,” he said every so often to Mariuccio, interrupting his song for a moment. But he felt a little sorry for them: he remembered when he was like them, when the big boys at the Grattacieli beat him up, and he went looking for cigarette butts, despised and ignored by the whole world, with Marcello and Agnoletto. He recalled, for example, the time they had stolen money from the blind man and had gone swimming at Ciriola, had taken the boat out and he had saved that swallow drowning under Ponte Sisto . . .
In the distance the noon sirens sounded.
“Let’s go swimming,” he said to himself aloud, “otherwise the boss, damn him, gets drunk, and like shit I’ll get the money. God forbid that today I should end up without a cent!”
Saying this, he dived into the river, paying no attention to Mariuccio, who had already recovered and was shouting after him: “You know Genesio’s crossing the river, too?”
Genesio said to him: “Be quiet,” and, rather than swim, sank into thoughts about what had just happened. But then he was curious what Riccetto was doing in the middle of the river, and he watched attentively, like Borgo Antico and Mariuccio. He went to the water’s edge, and, turning toward his brothers, who were absorbed by Riccetto’s display, said in a low voice: “Afterward we’ll go home, it’s better, otherwise Mamma will cry.” Having hurriedly given this order, he could watch Riccetto in peace, as he made a big commotion in the middle of the river. He beat his arms like spatulas, crushing the water and raising buckets of foam, he went under head first, with his bottom and his legs sticking up, like a duck, he did a dead man’s float, belly up, singing at the top of his lungs. Then, with a sudden turn, he retraced the route to the diving platform, climbed up dripping, and, showing off for the little boys, who looked at him open-mouthed, he went in again with a swan dive.
When his head re-emerged, he began swimming with powerful strokes toward the other shore. Genesio, silently, rapidly, splashing in the muck, reached the point of the river below the diving platform where the water came up to his chest and took off, dog-paddling quickly.
“You’re crossing the river, Genè?” Mariuccio and Borgo Antico shouted at him, all excited. But he didn’t even hear them, he couldn’t hear them, swimming behind Riccetto, with his mouth closed tight and held high, and his head turned in one direction, so as not to swallow water.
He passed the current, which dragged him downstream a few meters, along with the garbage, then, with his hands still moving quickly under the water and his head turned, he crossed the other half of the river. Riccetto meanwhile had reached the other bank, under the white stripe of acids from the bleach factory, and had dived into the water again, swimming toward the near shore as quickly as he had left it. He arrived in a few strokes, every so often floating belly up, and, starting to sing again, he climbed the slope above the diving platform and, still singing, did some exercises to dry off. The sun was burning straight down, and all around, below the bleach factory, there was a heat that made it seem as if the very air were on fire, while in the distance, more in the direction of the fields than of the street, with the tanks rumbling in the distance, the blinding silence of midday had descended. In a few minutes Riccetto was not only dry but sweaty.
Genesio remained alone on the other shore. He had sat down like Riccetto under the stream from the bleach factory, on the mud pasted with white. Behind him, like a landslide from hell, rose the brush-covered slope with the factory wall, above which some sort of green and brown cylinders, or tanks, emerged, all a pile of big metal boxes, and where the reflection of the sun was almost black it was so bright.
Mariuccio and Borgo Antico looked at their brother squatting down there like a Bedouin: “You’re not coming back, Genè?” Mariuccio cried in his little voice, still holding Genesio’s rolled-up clothes tight against his chest.
“I’m coming!” said Genesio from down below, without forcing his voice, sitting still with his face between his knees. Riccetto was dressing slowly, putting on his socks, careful not to put them on inside out. “Now I’m going to go warn the cops you’re here,” he cried cheerfully to Genesio, when he was almost ready, “and your father, too!”
As he left his optimism revived: but this time he was satisfied just to make the usual threatening sign with his arm at the little boys who were looking at him suspiciously from below. But as he was leaving, half turned back like that, he happened to glance at the walls of the factory, and high up, in a small window lost amid the big armored cylinders of the tanks, he glimpsed the figure of the custodian’s daughter, who was furiously cleaning the windows. “Sexy!” said Riccetto, immediately getting excited. He went on a few steps, then regretted it and looked again, took a few more steps toward the bridge, and regretted it again. She was still up there, polishing the glass that shone as if liquefied in the air. “Fuck, I’ll just stay a minute,” he said; he stopped and made his way in between two rough thickets and a stand of nettles, so that neither the boys who were down at the river nor anyone passing on Via Tiburtina would see him. But then not a soul was passing at that hour, in that sun: he heard only a few cars, and, in the distance, the rumble and jerks of the tanks.
When he was hidden in the bushes, he took off his pants, pretending to have to wring out his underwear and stood there naked and half hidden, looking at and trying to be seen by the girl in the window.
“Genè, aren’t you coming back here?” Mariuccio meanwhile continued to cry in a sorrowful voice. Genesio at those cries was silent; then suddenly he jumped in the water, swam to the current, but returned immediately and sat down again sullenly at the foot of the slope and the wall.
“Won’t you come back, Genè?’ Mariuccio repeated, disappointed at how things were going.
“I’m staying here a little longer,” Genesio said from downstream, “it’s very comfortable here!”
“Come on, cross!” Mariuccio insisted, the sinews of his neck swelling with the effort he made to shout. Borgo Antico, too, began to call him, and Fido barked, jumping back a
nd forth with his nose turned toward the other shore, as if he, too, were calling.
Genesio stood up, stretched a little, as he never did, and shouted: “I’ll count to thirty and then go in.” He stood, silently counting, then he stared at the water with eyes burning under the black wave, still carefully combed; finally he jumped in with a belly flop. Swimming quickly, he almost reached the middle, just at the point below the factory where the river curved, turning toward the bridge of Via Tiburtina. But the current there was strong, and pushed him back, toward the factory side: on the way over, Genesio had managed to get through the current easily, but now, on the return, it was something else. The way he swam, dog-paddling, kept him afloat, but he couldn’t advance: the current, holding him in the middle, began to move him down toward the bridge.
“Come on, Genè,” his brothers, who couldn’t understand why Genesio wouldn’t move forward, shouted at him from under the diving platform, “come on, let’s go.”
But he couldn’t get across that flowing strip of foam, of sawdust and burned oil, which was like a current within the yellow current of the river. He stayed in the middle, and, rather than moving toward the shore, he was dragged downstream toward the bridge. Borgo Antico and Mariuccio, with the dog, rushed precipitously down from the rise of the diving platform and began to race along the black mud of the shore, on all fours when they couldn’t go on two, falling and getting up, following Genesio, who was being carried ever more rapidly toward the bridge. So Riccetto, who was still playing his game with the girl, though she continued, indistinct as a shadow, to polish the glass panes, saw all three go by down below, the two little ones crying as they tumbled along through the undergrowth, frightened, and Genesio in the middle of the river, who kept working his thin arms quickly in his dog paddle, but without moving forward a centimeter. Ricetto got up, took a few steps, naked as he was, down toward the water, amid the briars, and there stopped to see what was happening right before his eyes. At first he couldn’t understand, he thought they were joking; but then he understood and he ran, sliding, down the slope, but at the same time he saw that there was nothing more to do: to jump in the river under the bridge meant saying you were tired of life, no one could have done it. He stopped, pale as death. Genesio no longer put up any resistance, poor boy, and flung his arms around, still not asking for help. Every so often he sank under the surface of the current and then re-emerged a little farther down; finally when he was almost at the bridge, where the current broke and foamed over the rocks, he went under for the last time, without a cry, and all that could be seen was his small black head coming up for a moment.
Riccetto, his hands trembling, quickly put on his pants, which he was holding under his arm, without another glance at the factory window, and stood there a moment, not knowing what to do. He heard from below the bridge Borgo Antico and Mariuccio screaming and crying, Mariuccio still hugging to his chest Genesio’s shirt and pants; and already they were starting to clamber up the slope with their hands.
“Let’s split, it’s better,” Riccetto said to himself, almost crying, walking in a hurry along the path, toward Via Tiburtina; in fact he was almost running, to get to the bridge before the two boys. “Hey, I’m for Riccetto!” he thought. Slipping and sliding he scrambled up the steep dusty slope scattered with burned brush, and, grabbing hold of the stumps of bushes, he got to the top; without looking around he turned onto the bridge. He could get away unobserved because, both in the countryside that extended, deserted, toward the piles of small white houses of Pietralata and Monte Sacro, and on Via Tiburtina, at that moment, there was no one; not even a car was passing, not even one of the old buses of the area. All he could hear in that great silence was the rumble of an isolated tank or two, plowing the horizon behind the playing fields of Ponte Mammolo.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922. He was an Italian film director, poet, writer and intellectual. Throughout his life he exhibited extraordinary cultural versatility and became a highly controversial figure in the process. While his work remains controversial, since his death in 1975, Pasolini has come to be seen as a visionary thinker and a major figure in Italian literature and art. American literary critic Harold Bloom included Pasolini in his seminal work, The Western Canon.
The Street Kids Page 24