Behind the Parco Paolino and the golden facade of San Paolo, the Tiber flowed past a levee covered with posters. The river bank on this side was empty—no buildings, no boats, no bathers—but over on the right it bristled with cranes, masts, and chimneys; there was an enormous gas tank outlined against the sky, and then all Monteverde on the horizon, rising above the smelly, sunburned terraces with their old houses looking like little boxes drowning in the sunlight. At the boys’ feet were the pilings of a bridge that had never been completed, and the dirty water was making whirlpools around them. The bank near San Paolo was all reeds and brush. Riccetto and Marcello ran down to the first piling, and were right at the water. But the place where they went to bathe was nearer the sea, a quarter of a mile downstream, where the Tiber began a long curve.
Riccetto was naked, lying on his back in the weeds with his hands clasped beneath his head, looking up at the sky.
”You ever been to Ostia?” he asked Marcello suddenly. “Hell, yes,” answered Marcello, “didn’t you know I was born there?” “Hell, no,” said Riccetto, looking at him speculatively, “you never said nothing about it.” “So what?” said the other. “Were you ever out at sea in a boat?” Riccetto asked curiously. “Sure,” said Marcello slyly. “Whereabouts?” asked Riccetto. “Jesus, Riccè, you ask a lot of questions,” Marcello said, quite pleased with himself. “Who the hell remembers? I wasn’t even three years old then.” “Yeah, you’ve been out in a boat about as much as I have, fathead,” said Riccetto sarcastically. “What a pain,” Marcello promptly replied. “We went out every day in my uncle’s sailboat.” “Fuck you,” said Riccetto, making a noise with his mouth. “Hey, salvage!” he said, watching the water. “Hey, salvage!” The current was carrying some wreckage, a broken chest and a chamber pot. Riccetto and Marcello moved to the water’s edge, which was black with oil. “Jesus, I’d like to have a ride in a boat,” Riccetto said, sounding discouraged, as he watched the chest pursue its destiny, bobbing up and down among the garbage. “Don’t you know you can rent boats at Ciriola’s?” asked Marcello. “Yeah, and who’ll give us the money?” Riccetto said dejectedly. “Why don’t we go after pipe ourselves, what the hell?” asked Marcello, all excited at the idea. “Agnoletto’s already got hold of a wrench.” “Hey,” said Riccetto, “I’m with you.”
They stayed till late in the afternoon, stretched out with their heads resting on their dusty, sweaty pants, but at last they found the energy to get up and leave. All around them were bushes and dry reeds, but under the water there were only pebbles and gravel. They played at skipping stones across the water, and even after they had made up their minds to leave they kept it up, still half-naked, throwing the pebbles high into the air, toward the opposite shore, or at the swallows skimming over the surface of the river.
Then they started throwing whole handfuls of gravel, yelling and laughing: the pebbles fell everywhere among the bushes. Suddenly they heard a shout, as if someone were calling to them. They turned, and a short distance away through the already darkening air they saw a Negro kneeling in the grass. Riccetto and Marcello understood right away, and started to leave; but as soon as they were a little way off they each picked up a handful of gravel and threw it toward the bushes.
With her breasts half out of her dress, the whore got up in a spitting rage and started to scream at them.
“Ah, shut up!” yelled Riccetto, making a megaphone with his hands. “Your ass is sucking wind, you dirty no-good bitch!” But at that moment the Negro sprang to his feet like a wild man, and holding up his pants with one hand and brandishing a knife in the other, began to run after them. Riccetto and Marcello ran out from among the bushes, shouting for help, toward the high bank and the path that led over it. When they got to the top they dared to look back for a moment, and they saw the Negro down below, waving the knife in the air and yelling. Riccetto and Marcello went on running, and looking at each other, they laughed and laughed. Riccetto finally threw himself down on the dusty ground and rolled over and over. He laughed at Marcello and shouted, “Jesus! It felt like you was paralyzed, didn’t it, Marce?”
They had been running along the Tiber, in the direction of the facade of San Paolo, still glowing faintly in the sun. They went on down toward the Parco Paolino, full of workmen scattered among the young trees and soldiers on passes from the barracks. They went past the Basilica and turned into a dark, empty street where a blind man was begging, sitting with his back against the wall and his legs stretched out before him on the sidewalk.
Riccetto and Marcello sat down near him on the edge of the sidewalk to get over their panting, and the old man, hearing their movements, began his complaint. His legs were thick, and between them he held his cap, which was full of coins. Riccetto nudged Marcello with his elbow and nodded toward the blind man. “Hey, relax,” Marcello whispered. When his breathing had quieted down, Riccetto nudged Marcello again, looking annoyed and gesturing with his hand as if to say, “Well, how about it?” Marcello shrugged, meaning, “You’re in this all by yourself, friend,” and Riccetto, turning red with anger, gave him a pitying look. Finally he said in a low voice, “Wait for me over there.” Marcello got up and crossed the street to wait for him among the small trees on the other side. After Marcello had gone, Riccetto waited a moment to make sure that no one was coming, moved near the blind man, grabbed the handful of coins in the cap, and ran off. When they were safely away, they stopped to count the coins under a street lamp: It came to nearly five hundred lire.
The next day the Monache convent and the other buildings in the Via Garibaldi had no water.
Riccetto and Marcello had bumped into Agnolo in front of the Giorgio Franceschi elementary-school buildings in Donna Olimpia. Agnolo and some other boys were kicking a ball around with no light other than the moon’s. They asked him to go get the wrench, and he didn’t wait to be asked twice. Then all three went down toward Trastevere by the Via di San Pancrazio, looking for a quiet spot. They found one in the Via Manara, deserted at that hour, where they could start in on a manhole cover without anyone coming to bother them. They didn’t get scared even when a window opened above them and an old woman, half-asleep but all made-up, started to yell, ”What’s going on down there?” Riccetto raised his head for a moment and called, “It’s nothing, lady. We just come to see about a broken water main.” By that time they were finished with the job; they took up the manhole cover by either side, Agnolo and Riccetto got under it, and they went off very quietly to a tumbledown building below the Gianicolo that had once been a gymnasium. It was dark there, but the practical Agnolo found a sledgehammer in a corner, and with that they pounded the cover to pieces.
Now they had to find a buyer, but in this case too Agnolo knew the right answer. They turned into the Vicolo dei Cinque, deserted except for a few drunks. Under the junkman’s window, Agnolo cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “Hey, Anto!” The junkman came to the window, then came down and let them into his shop, where he weighed the metal and gave them 2700 lire for the seventy kilos. Now that they were at it, they felt like finishing the job. Agnolo ran to the gymnasium to get a hatchet, and they all went off toward the Gianicolo stair. There they lifted up a sewer manhole cover and went down among the pipes. With the hatchet handle they beat in a pipe to stop the flow of water, and then they cut it, removing sixteen or eighteen feet of pipe. They took it to the gymnasium, pounded it to pieces, put it all in a sack, and took it to the junkman, who paid them 150 lire a kilo. Toward midnight, with their pockets full of money, they strolled happily up to the Grattacieli. There Alvaro, Rocco, and the other older boys were playing cards, curled up or sprawled silently on the first landing of the stairway at Rocco’s house, which faced one of the many inside courts. Agnolo had to go by there on his way home, and Riccetto and Marcello were keeping him company. So they stopped to play cards with the older boys. In a little over half an hour, they had lost all their money. By good luck, they still had the five hundred lire stolen from the blind man i
n case they wanted to go for a boat ride down at Ciriola’s; Riccetto had it all in his shoe.
“Here comes the kindergarten,” said one of the boys on the bathing barge, watching them come down the burning-hot pavement. Riccetto couldn’t resist the temptation to jump up and balance himself on the handrail. But he jumped down again to catch up with the others, who had already crossed the short gangplank to the bathhouse afloat on the Tiber and who were each forking over fifty lire to Orazio’s wife. Giggetto didn’t act pleased to see them. “Over there,” he said, and pointed out a single locker for all three. The boys hesitated. “What are you waiting for?” Giggetto burst out, thrusting his arm toward them with the hand held wide open to emphasize how unbecoming their conduct was. “What, am I supposed to take your clothes off for you?”
“Up yours,” Agnolo muttered. He pulled his shirt over his head without waiting any longer. Giggetto went right on: “Little ball-breakers. You can all go screw. You and whoever sent you.” Humiliated, the three little ball-breakers took their clothes off, and then stood around naked with their clothes in their hands. “Well?” roared Giggetto, coming out from behind the counter. “How about it?” The boys didn’t know the drill. Giggetto snatched the clothes out of their hands, tossed them into the locker, and locked it. His little boy watched the three novices with a grin. The other boys hanging around, some naked, some in sagging bathing-trunks, some combing their hair in front of the mirror, some singing, looked around out of the corners of their eyes as if to say, “Get a load of me, will you?” As soon as the boys had gotten into their ragged oversized trunks, they dashed out of the locker room and gathered by the iron railing of the barge. But they were chased away from there immediately. Orazio himself issued from the centrally located bar, with his paralyzed leg and his blood-red face. “Damn you,” he yelled, “how many times do I have to tell you you can’t stay here, breaking the goddamn railing?” They took off, passing by the showers, followed by Orazio’s music, for he went on yelling for ten minutes, sitting in his cane chair. Inside the bar, some of the older boys were playing cards, others were sitting and smoking with their feet up on the rickety tables. At the other end of the little gangplank that stretched from the barge to the shore, Agnolo’s puppy was waiting for them, joyous, his tongue lolling out. The sight cheered up the three criminals, and they started to run along the retaining wall, with the dog after them. They stopped for a moment at the diving board, and then they ran on again toward the Ponte Sisto.
It was still very early, no more than one-thirty, and Rome was burning in the sun.
From the Cupolone beyond the Ponte Sisto, to the Isola Tiberina beyond the Ponte Garibaldi, the air was as taut as a drumhead. Silently, between banks that stank like a urinal in the sun, the Tiber flowed as yellow as if it were casting up all the garbage it was freighted with. The first bathers to get there, after two o’clock or so, when the six or seven employees who had been hanging around the barge left, were the fuzzy-heads from the Piazza Giudia. Then came the group from Trastevere, down across the Ponte Sisto, long lines of them, half-naked, yelling and laughing, always on the lookout for a chance to play a joke on somebody. Outside Ciriola’s, the dirty little beach filled up, and so did the locker room, the bar, and the deck inside. It was an ant heap. A score of boys clustered around the diving board. Now the first headers, jackknives, and swan dives began. The diving board was no more than five feet high, and even the six-year-olds took plunges off it. Somebody passing by on the Ponte Sisto stopped to watch them. On top of the retaining wall, astride the railing overhung by plane trees, some young boys who were too broke to use the bathhouse watched the bathers. Others lay stretched out on the sand, or on the meager patch of withered grass at the foot of the levee.
Getting to his feet, a dark, hairy little kid yelled to the boys hanging around, “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” But nobody paid any attention except Nicchiola, who took off, with his curved and twisted back, and threw himself into the yellow water, his legs and arms spread out, his rear wriggling. The others, clucking their tongues pityingly at the little dark kid, said, “Well, how about it?” and then, moving lazily, got up and moved off like a flock of sheep, up toward the patch of sand beneath the railing by the bathhouse, to watch Monnezza, his feet in the burning sand and his face all red from the strain, lifting the fifty-kilo weight in the midst of an army of boys. Only Riccetto, Marcello, Agnolo, and a few others, and the dog, who was the youngest of all, were left at the diving board. “Well?” said Agnolo to the other two, threateningly. “Fuck you,” said Riccetto, “you in a hurry or something?” “Fuck you too,” said Agnolo, “what did we come here for?” “What do you say we go in?” said Riccetto, and he walked to the end of the diving board to look at the water..
The dog followed him. Riccetto turned round. “You coming in too?” he asked gaily and affectionately. “You coming in too?” The dog looked at him and wagged its tail.
“You want to dive in, huh?” said Riccetto. He grabbed the dog’s fur and pulled it toward the end of the board, but the dog drew back. “You’re scared,” said Riccetto. “O.k., I won’t make you dive in.” The dog looked at him, trembling all over.
“What’s the matter?” Riccetto asked protectingly, bending down. “What’s the matter, you ugly vicious bloodhound?” He patted the dog, scratched its neck, put his hand in its mouth, pulled it along. “Ugly brute,” he said affectionately. But the dog, feeling itself pulled forward, was still a little frightened, and it jumped back.
“No, no,” said Riccetto, “I won’t throw you into the river.” Agnolo yelled sarcastically, “You diving, Riccè?” “I got to take a leak first,” Riccetto answered, and he ran to piss at the foot of the levee. The dog came after him and watched him, its eyes shining and its tail wagging.
Agnolo took a running jump into the water. “Jesus!” yelled Marcello, seeing him fall lopsided and land belly-first. “Christ!” yelled Agnolo, coming up in the middle of the river. “What a belly-whopper!” “I’ll show you how!” yelled Riccetto, and he dived into the water. “How did I do?” he called to Marcello when he came up again. “You had your legs spread,” said Marcello. “Got to try it again,” said Riccetto, scrambling up the bank.
At that moment, the noisy boys who were hanging around watching Monnezza lift weights came in a body toward the diving board. They came along wearing self-satisfied grins, spitting, the younger boys jumping around them or scuffling and rolling along the gangway. There were more than fifty of them, and all together they invaded the little plot of dirty grass around the board. First Monnezza dived, blond as straw and covered with red freckles, doing a swan dive with all the airs and graces. After him came Remo, Wise Guy, Tar Baby, Fats, Pallante, and even the smallest boys, for they wouldn’t back down at all. On the contrary, Ercoletto, from the Vicolo dei Cinque, was probably the best diver of the group; he took his dive running nimbly along the board on his toes with his arms outspread, as if he were dancing. Riccetto and the others moved off a little way, sulking, and sat down on the parched grass to look on in silence. They were like bits of bread tossed onto an ant hill, and they became impatient at being left out, and at having to listen to the pack in full cry. The boys were everywhere, their shanks filthy with mud, their bathing trunks sticking to their bodies, sarcastic looks on their faces, watching and cursing. Mean-faced and bald as an egg, Fats took off, and sliding along the bank at the water’s edge, gave a ferocious laugh as he fell in, yelling, “Hey, fuck you!” Remo, on the bank, shaking his head, muttered happily, “Jesus, that’s the way!” Then Shorty, over by the footpath, grunted as his head stopped a handful of mud. He turned around in a fury, yelling, “Who the fuck—” But he couldn’t find out who had thrown it because everyone was facing the river and laughing. Then he caught another handful with his head. “Fuck you!” he yelled. He started to grab Remo. “What do you want?” Remo asked, looking hurt. “Fuck you and your old man too!” In a minute, hundreds of gobs of mud were whizzing through the air. Someone
up to his knees in the stuff was throwing handfuls against the cornice, making a rain of mud fall all around. Others were sitting down to one side, looking innocent, and throwing a handful of mud once in a while when no one was looking, making the missiles hiss like a whiplash. “Fuck the whole bunch of you!” yelled Remo, in the center of the battlefield, pressing his hand to his eye in fury, and he ran to throw himself into the water to get rid of the mud plastered over his eyelids. Seeing him jump in, Monnezza went in after him, yelling, “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” And he jumped, curling up and turning over in the air, striking the water loudly with back, knees, and elbows all at once. “Up yours!” laughed Wise Guy, wrinkling up his forehead. He took a running jump and landed like Monnezza. “Pallante!” he yelled. “Who’s going to make me?” said Pallante. “Hey, coward,” Monnezza and Wise Guy yelled from the water.
“Ah, fuck those guys,” Riccetto was muttering to himself. “What the hell are we supposed to be doing anyway?” said Agnolo fiercely. The only one of the three who knew how to row was Marcello. It was up to him to commence operations. They moved off to sit on a pile of rotting skiffs. “Hey, Marce,” said Agnolo, “we’ll wait for you, go ahead.” Marcello got up and began to wander toward Guaione, who was doing a bit of work on the barge with his knife, half-drunk. “How much is it for a boat?” he asked point-blank. “A hundred fifty,” said Guaione without raising his eyes. “You got a boat now?” asked Marcello. “When it comes back. It’s out now.” “Will it be long?” Marcello asked after a while. “Christ,” Guaione said, lifting his bleary drunkard’s eyes, “how the fuck do I know? When it comes back.” Then he glanced down the river toward the Ponte Sisto. “There it is,” he said. “Pay now or later?” “Better now.” “I’ll go get the money,” cried Marcello. But he hadn’t thought about Giggetto. He was a great bathing attendant for the older boys, but if they were looking for someone to drown all the little kids, Giggetto would be ready to sign up for the job. Marcello hung around for a while, trying to get his attention, but Giggetto ignored him. He went back to the pile of boats, disconcerted. “How the fuck am I supposed to get the money?” he asked. “Go to Giggetto, you dope.” “I been to him,” Marcello explained, “but he won’t pay no attention to me.” “What an idiot!” Agnolo burst out in a rage. “Look,” said Marcello, pushing out his open hand in the same gesture that Giggetto had made earlier, “why don’t you go?” “Why don’t you both square off and fight?” said Riccetto. “I’ll give that idiot all the fight he wants,” said Agnolo. “I told you already, why the hell don’t you try, you son of a bitch?” Agnolo went off to confront Giggetto, and in fact he came right back with the hundred and fifty and a lighted cigarette. They went to the railing to wait for the boat, and as soon as it touched its berth and the other boys came ashore, the three jumped in. It was the first time that Riccetto and Agnolo had ever been in a boat.
The Ragazzi Page 2