At first the boat wouldn’t budge. The more Marcello rowed, the more it stayed where it was. Then, little by little, it began to pull away from the barge, ranging this way and that as if it were drunk. “You little fuck-up!” Agnolo yelled with all the lung power he had, “you can row, can you?” The boat acted as if it had gone crazy, and wandered aimlessly back and forth, now toward the Ponte Sisto, now toward the Ponte Garibaldi. But the current carried it to the left, toward the Ponte Garibaldi, even if it happened that the bow was pointing the other way, and Guaione, appearing at the railing on the barge, began to yell something to them, the cords standing out on his neck. “What a dope,” Agnolo kept shouting to Marcello. “They’re going to be fishing us out at Fiumicino.” “Will you get off my back?” said Marcello, struggling with the oars, which either waved around in the air or plunged into the water up to the handles. “Why don’t you try it? Go ahead.” “I don’t come from Ostia,” Agnolo yelled. Meanwhile Ciriola’s was retreating, rising and falling behind the stern of the boat. Under the green of the plane trees, the whole length of the levee was coming into view, all the way from the Ponte Sisto to the Ponte Garibaldi, and the boys scattered along the bank, some at the seesaw, some at the diving board, some on the barge, grew smaller and smaller, and now you could no longer hear their voices.
The Tiber carried the boat toward the Ponte Garibaldi like one of the wooden crates or one of the carcasses floating along in the current; and below the Ponte Garibaldi the water foamed and swirled among the shoals and rocks of the Isola Tiberina. Guaione had realized what was happening, and he kept yelling in his hoarse bargeman’s voice. Now the boat had reached the shallows where the little boys who didn’t know how to swim ducked and splashed behind a paling of boards. In answer to Guaione’s cries, Orazio and some other loafers came out of the main shed to observe the scene. So then Orazio began waving his arms; the older boys were all laughing. Riccetto was looking at Marcello with his eyebrows raised and his arms folded on his chest. “‘Can’t you get this tub to go anywhere?” he asked. But Marcello was beginning to catch on. Now the boat was pointing more or less steadily toward the opposite shore, and the oars were managing to get a grip on the water. “Let’s go that way,” said Agnoletto. “What the hell do you think I’m doing?” Marcello answered in disgust, running sweat like a fountain.
While the bank near Ciriola’s was in full sunlight, the shore here was in soft gray shadow. On the black rocks, covered with two inches of grease, little bushes and green brambles were growing, and here and there in a quiet eddy the water bore nearly motionless scraps of garbage. At last they were alongside the bank, scraping the rocks, and since there was hardly any current, Marcello managed to turn the boat upstream toward the Ponte Sisto. But the port oar kept striking the rocks and Marcello was kept busy trying to see that it didn’t splinter or go skittering off along the water. “Let’s go out in the middle. What is this, anyway?” Riccetto said, not paying the least attention to Marcello’s efforts. He liked to be out in the middle of the river, where he could feel himself surrounded by all that water, and it enraged him that by lifting his eyes a bit he could see, a stone’s throw away, the Ponte Sisto and its gray reflection in the turbid water, and then the Gianicolo, and the dome of St. Peter’s, fat and white as a cloud. Little by little, they floated down toward the Ponte Sisto; there, around the right-hand piling, the river broadened and slowed, deep, green, and filthy. Since at that point there was no danger of being carried off by the current, Agnolo wanted to try his hand at rowing, but he had no luck. The oars smote the air, or else caught crabs, filling the bottom of the boat with water. “Aw, fuck you!” shouted Riccetto indignantly, while Marcello, dead tired, stretched out on the bottom in two inches of tepid water. Seeing Agnolo, who was killing himself and getting nowhere fast, two boys who had come down to fish with a cane pole on the steps by Fontanone began to make fun of him and laugh. Panting, Agnolo yelled, “What’s it to you?” The boys shut up for a moment. Then they said, “Who taught you how to row? Can’t you see, even the walls are laughing.”
“Who taught me how to row?” said Agnolo. “My prick.”
“Shove it up your ass,” they returned promptly.
“Up yours,” yelled Agnolo, red as a pepper.
“Oh, you jerk!” cried the boys.
“Sons of bitches!” yelled Agnolo.
Meanwhile he kept straining away at the oars, but the boat didn’t move an inch. On the other piling, to the left, were some other sons of bitches. They were stretched along the joints in the stones like lizards taking the sun half asleep. The boys’ yelling stirred them up. They got to their feet, covered with white dust, and moved to the edge of the piling nearest the boat. “Oh, boatman,” one of them called, “wait for us.” “What does he want?” asked Riccetto unsuspectingly. Another boy clambered halfway down to the water’s edge on the rings let into the stone, and dived in with a yell. The others jumped from wherever they were, and they all began to swim across the river. In a few minutes they had reached the boat, their hair in their eyes, their faces looking mean, and their hands stretched out to grasp the gunwales. “What do you want?” asked Marcello. “Want to get into the boat. Why, don’t you want us to?” They were all big, and the others had to keep quiet. They climbed in, and without losing any time, one of them said to Agnolo, “Let’s have them,” and took the oars. “Let’s go on the other side of the bridge,” he said, looking Agnolo right in the eye as if to say, “Is that O.k. with you?” “Let’s go on the other side of the bridge,” said Agnolo. The boy started to row with all his strength, but downstream from the piling the current was strong, and the boat was heavily loaded. It took more than fifteen minutes to go those few feet.
“Borgo antico,
gray-roofed under a dull sky,
1 sing of thee . . .”
caroled the four big boys from the Vicolo del Bologna, lounging in the boat, as loud as they could so as to be heard by the people passing by on the Ponte Sisto and along the banks. The overloaded boat moved forward, sunk nearly to the gunwales.
Riccetto was still stretched out, paying no attention to the new arrivals, sulking in the water-soaked bottom of the boat, with his head barely showing above the gunwales. He was still pretending to be at sea, out of sight of the mainland. One of the group from Trastevere, who had the face of an old thief, cupped his hands into a megaphone, and standing up in the bow, yelled, “Here come the pirates!” The others went on singing at the tops of their lungs. At one point Riccetto turned on his elbow to look more closely at something that had caught his eye on the surface of the water near the bank, almost beneath the arches of the Ponte Sisto. He couldn’t make out what it was. The water was trembling there, making little circles as if it were being splashed by a hand—and in fact in the very center was something that looked like a bit of black rag.
“What’s that?” Riccetto asked, getting to his feet. They all looked in that direction at the almost motionless mirror of water under the last arch. “It’s a swallow, for Christ’s sake!” said Marcello. There were many swallows about, flying close to the retaining wall, under the arches of the bridge, and out on the river, grazing the water with their breasts. The current had sent the boat back a little, and you could see it was a swallow that was drowning. It beat its wings, and kicked. Riccetto was kneeling at the gunwale, leaning out of the boat. “Hey, you dope, don’t you see you’re going to capsize us?” said Agnolo. “Look at it,” cried Riccetto, “it’s drowning!” The Trastevere boy who was rowing kept his oars suspended over the water, and the current slowly drew the boat near to where the swallow was struggling. But after a while he lost patience and began to row again. “Hey, you, buddy, who told you to row?” said Riccetto, putting his hand on him. The boy clucked his tongue in disgust, and the biggest boy said, “What the fuck do you care?” Riccetto looked at the swallow, still struggling, its wings quivering spasmodically. Then without a word he jumped into the water and began to swim toward the bird. The other
s called after him and laughed, but the one at the oars kept on rowing away against the current. Riccetto moved downstream, carried swiftly by the current. They saw him grow smaller in the distance, swim up to the bird in the mirror of stagnant water, and try to catch hold of it. “Hey, Riccetto,” yelled Marcello, with all the breath in his body, “why don’t you catch it?” Riccetto must have heard him, because they could just make out his voice calling back, “He’s pecking me!” “Fuck you!” yelled Marcello, laughing. Riccetto tried to grab the swallow, which escaped by beating its wings, and now both were being carried down toward the pilings by the current, which at that point was strong and full of whirlpools. “Hey, Riccetto!” his friends in the boat yelled at him, “give it up!” But just then Riccetto managed to catch the bird, and he began to swim with one arm toward the bank. “Hey, turn around, come on,” said Marcello to the boy who was rowing. They turned. Riccetto was waiting for them, sitting on the dirty grass by the water’s edge, with the swallow in his hands. “What good did that do anyway?” said Marcello. “It was nice watching it drown.” Riccetto didn’t answer at once. “It’s soaking wet. Let’s wait for it to dry out.” It didn’t take long for it to dry out; five minutes later it was wheeling among its companions above the Tiber, and Riccetto couldn’t tell it from the others.
2 • Riccetto
Summer of 1946. At the corner of the Via delle Zoccolette, the rain coming down, Riccetto sees a group of people and slowly drifts over toward them. In the middle of the huddle of thirteen or fourteen people, their umbrellas shining in the wet, was an open black umbrella much larger than the usual sort, on which three cards lay in a row, the ace of diamonds, the ace of hearts, and a six. A Neapolitan was dealing, and the bystanders were betting five hundred, a thousand, even two thousand lire on the cards. Riccetto stood there watching the game for half an hour. A gentleman who was playing doggedly lost on every bet, while some of the other players, also Neapolitans, were losing one and winning one. When that first crowd had had enough, it was already drawing on toward evening. Riccetto went up to the Neapolitan who was shuffling the cards and said, “Say, can I ask you something?”
“Yes,” said the Neapolitan, sticking out his chin.
“You’re from Naples, right?”
“Yes.”
“You play that game in Naples?”
“Yes.”
“How do you play it?”
“Well, it’s hard, but you get on to it after a while.”
“Will you show me how it goes?”
“Yes,” said the Neapolitan, “but …”
He started to laugh like a man who’s thinking out a plan and saying to himself, “Let’s see, what am I going to tell this guy?” He wiped his face, which was dripping with water; it was a young face but all wrinkled, and he had thick, pendulous, pouting lips. He looked Riccetto in the eye. “I’ll show you, sure,” he said, since Riccetto made no move, “but you have to give me a little something for my trouble.” “Of course,” Riccetto answered seriously.
Meanwhile another crowd was gathering around the umbrella; the other Neapolitans were there too. “Just wait a while,” the dealer said, winking, as he dealt out the cards again. Riccetto moved aside, and began to watch the game again. Two hours went by. The rain stopped, and it was almost dark. The Neapolitan finally made up his mind to quit, closed the umbrella, put the cards into his pocket, and looked meaningfully at his companions. There were two of them. One was light-haired and missing some teeth. The other was a stocky man in a three-quarter-length checked tweed coat who looked like a Jew. They listened good-humoredly to the first man, who told them he had some business to see to, and went off gaily with their stuff, even waving good-by to Riccetto.
“Let’s go,” said the Neapolitan. Riccetto was flush, so they caught the trolley, got off at the Ponte Bianco, and in a few minutes were in Donna Olimpia. Riccetto’s mother, sitting in the middle of the single room that was her home—with four beds at the four corners of the walls, which weren’t even walls but partitions—looked at the two of them and said, “Who’s he?” “A friend of mine,” said Riccetto with an authoritative air, not giving an inch. But since she hung around breaking balls, Riccetto looked into the next room, which belonged to Agnolo and his family, to see if the grown-ups were out of the way. It turned out that only two or three of the littlest boys were there, whining, their noses dripping. Riccetto and the Neapolitan went in and sat down on the bed that Agnolo and his little brothers slept in, with its blanket scorched by the iron. The Neapolitan began the lesson.
“There are five of us. One deals and the others stand around like they just happened to be passing by. Let’s say I’m the dealer. I start the game, and the others come around the umbrella. People start coming up, and then one of the boys takes off so as to open up the crowd, and then one of the people steps into his place. First he doesn’t know whether he wants to play or not. But one of our boys plays. He bets a thousand, two thousand, all according, depending on what he thinks best. While he’s taking out his money, the man that’s dealing, let’s say it’s me, well, I change his card, but when I change it I give him the good card, and the no-good card I put in the middle. So you don’t know the game and you don’t see that I changed the card, so you bet. But then I say, *If you want to lose, I don’t care,’ and our boy goes on playing—win one, lose one, win one, lose one. ‘O.k., let’s see both cards at once.’ Then our boy wins and the other loses. When the sucker’s lost a couple, then our boy plays again, and let’s say he bets a thousand… .” The Neapolitan continued for a while, explaining how the game went, and Riccetto listened to him chattering on and on and didn’t understand a goddamn thing.
When the Neapolitan had finished, Riccetto said, “Look, I didn’t get you. You’ll have to tell me again, right from the beginning, if you don’t mind.” But just then Agnolo’s mother came in. “Excuse us, Sora Celeste,” said Riccetto, leaving hurriedly, with the Neapolitan behind him. “I just had to tell my friend here something.” Sora Celeste, black and hairy as a bramble bush, didn’t say a word, and the two boys ran down the stairs and went to sit on the Franceschi elementary-school steps. The Neapolitan began his explanation again, and he warmed up as he talked and got as red in the face as a plate of spaghetti. He got up, facing Riccetto—who kept saying yes—staring at him with a rather irritated expression, talking on and on, and he stared even more fixedly when he stopped talking for a moment, in order to lend greater emphasis to what he was saying, looking half-questioning, half-inspired, kneeling with his legs apart, his belly sticking out, and his hands raised and spread, like a goalie getting set for a high one.
Then with those big lips of his, looking like one of the starved ones who hang around the Porta Capuana, he made an explosive sound, as if the deep and dazzling thought that had crossed his mind must necessarily enlighten Riccetto also.
He was doing all that for five hundred lire. This time, too, Riccetto understood fuck-all. Meanwhile it was getting quite dark. The thousand lines and diagonals of the windows and balconies of the Grattacieli were lit up, radios were going full blast, and from the kitchens you could hear the clatter of dishes and women’s voices yelling, arguing, or singing. In front of the stair where the two friends were sitting, there were lines of people moving along, going about their business, some of them coming home filthy from their jobs, some leaving their houses all dressed up to go for a walk with their friends.
”Let’s go get a drink, what do you say?” Riccetto said expansively, like a man of the world, knowing his man and supposing reasonably enough that his teacher’s throat must be dry. The Neapolitan seemed to get a new lease on life with that proposal, and, filled with enthusiasm, after responding to the offer of a drink with the casual, almost indifferent words, “Let’s go,” he started talking again as if nothing had been explained, and as they walked toward Monteverde Nuovo, he made a big production out of it, showing Riccetto just how the dealer should act, in the center of the group around the open umbre
lla, or the man who bets, winning one and losing one, or the sucker, who’s a dope but well-heeled and therefore respectable, standing among the players, deciding to play, and with a grand air betting a thousand, two thousand… . The Neapolitan—who incidentally came from Salerno—mimicked his expression and his gestures perfectly, and with a certain amount of deference, too.
They went to Monteverde Nuovo because Riccetto didn’t want his business to be public property around Donna Olimpia, where everybody had nose trouble so bad it was sickening. “Spies always think you’re spying on them,” he said to the Neapolitan sententiously in order to justify that uphill walk, first along a street that was all rubble and broken pavement, and then by a path that led up through trodden fields toward the refugees’ shantytown at the top. There too, and then in Monteverde Nuovo, everything was uproarious and gay, the bustle of Saturday night. The pair went into a little wine bar right on the market square where the trolley terminal was, a bit beyond Delle Terrazze. The bar had an arbor and a coarse lattice fenced it off from the street. It was already dark inside. They sat down on the broken-down benches and ordered a halfbottle of Frascati. They began to feel the wine after the first sips. The Neapolitan began his explanation for the fourth time; but Riccetto had had it by then, and didn’t feel like listening any more. And even the Neapolitan was sick of saying the same thing over and over. While he talked, Riccetto watched him with a half-smile, partly resigned, partly sarcastic, as he got away from the subject little by little. Then, feeling better about the whole thing, they began to discuss other matters. They were two sports, and they had plenty to tell each other about life in Rome and in Naples, about the Italians and the Americans, each listening respectfully to the other and appearing to believe every word of it, but at the same time giving each other little underhand digs whenever they could, and at the back of their minds each thinking the other was an idiot, satisfied when he spoke himself and annoyed when it was his turn to listen.
The Ragazzi Page 3