But as he drank, the Neapolitan grew stranger and stranger. By the end of the second glass, his face looked as if it had been smoothed with sandpaper, and the features rubbed away: it looked like a piece of scorched meat, with its half-closed eyes lit with an intense light that came from God knows where, and thick lips that hung down and seemed stuck together. When he spoke it was as if he were complaining; his staring eyes laughed in spite of the serious, deeply felt words he was uttering. Now he spoke only in his own dialect. He sat bent forward, his shoulders hunched, pouring out sweat, his face pulpy and swollen, staring at Riccetto with eyes shining with brotherly love. “Listen,” he said, “I’m going to make a confession to you.” “What do you want to tell me?” asked Riccetto, who was feeling no pain himself.
But the Neapolitan smiled sadly, shaking his head, and was silent for a moment. Then he said, “It’s something very serious. I want to tell you about it because you’re my friend.” Both of them were deeply moved by that declaration. The Neapolitan fell silent again, and Riccetto, grave and dignified, encouraged him to go on. “Tell me what you want to tell me, but only if you want to. I don’t want to press you.”
“I’ll tell you,” said the Neapolitan, “but you have to promise me one thing.”
“What?” asked Riccetto promptly.
“Not to speak of it to anybody,” he said solemnly, completely dizzy by now.
Riccetto realized what was up. He grew even more serious, stuck out his chest, and put his hand on it. “Word of honor,” he said.
As if he had regained his courage—his eyes still laughing on their own account in their two slits—the Neapolitan began to tell his story. He said he had killed an old woman and her two old-maid daughters in the Via Chiaja, killed them with an iron bar and then burned the bodies. It took him a quarter of an hour to describe this feat, repeating things two or three times and making a grand mess of the story. Riccetto wasn’t at all impressed, for he caught on right away that it was all just drunken maundering. But he listened attentively, giving the man lots of rope and making out that he believed him, so that he would have the right to tell his own stories next. And did he ever have them to tell, things that had happened to him in the two years after the Americans came!
In those two years, Riccetto had turned into a grade-A bastard. Maybe he wasn’t quite like that kid he knew, to whom, one day when they were together at Delle Terrazze, somebody came up and said, “Hey, better get over to your house fast, your mother’s very bad,” and the next day when Riccetto asked him, “How’s your mother?” he had grinned and said, “She’s dead.” “What?” said Riccetto. “She’s dead, she’s dead,” he had assured Riccetto, amused at his surprise. Well, if Riccetto wasn’t quite like that, he was well on the way. Already at his age he had known so many hundreds of people of every class and race that by now they were all the same to him. He was almost up to acting like the boy who lived near the Piazza Rotonda, who one day with a friend, when they’d been leaning on a mark to take a lousy couple of thousand lire off him and the friend had said, “Hey, we killed him,” without bothering to take a look had answered, “So what?”
Riccetto had let himself drift with the current of memory, and while the Neapolitan was silent, stirred by his own confession, his face looking like a roasted dog’s, Riccetto too began to talk. But he told the truth.
Since they had started in discussing the Americans, Riccetto took up the subject. “Listen to this,” he said with an amused, worldly air. And he told a number of stories, each one saltier than the last, all from the time when the Americans were around, and in each story Riccetto always turned out to be the prize bastard.
The Neapolitan watched with a look of absorption, nodding his head, smiling a tired smile. Then all of a sudden he took a deep breath, and without changing his expression, still staring at Riccetto, he said, “I have to do penance!”—and on and on for another fifteen minutes, full of theatrical pride over his crime. Riccetto let him blow off steam, as was only fair, but he laughed as he watched. Then, when the Neapolitan began to slow down and stammer, he started up again himself.
“The Americans were all right. They got on my nerves a little, but I got some use out of them. But those fucking Polacks, they were bastards, out and out bastards. I remember one time I was in Toraccia, we had gone over to the Polack camp to see what we could pick up. We’re walking along by the cellars there, we hear yelling, so we go over, and it’s two whores arguing with these two Poles. They wanted their money. So just then one of the Poles comes out of a cellar, and we duck out of sight, and the other one is still in there with the two whores. I guess they thought the other guy went to get the money. But here he comes back with a big can of gas. Before going in he unscrews the top. Then he pours some into another can and calls his friend, the other Polack, and from the entrance to the cellar the two of them throw that gas on the two whores. Then the other guy lights a match and sets them on fire. We hear scream after scream, so we go over, and we see those two whores all on fire.”
Then it was the Neapolitan’s turn again, but by now he was so drunk he could hardly keep his eyes open. “What do you say we have another glass?” Riccetto said jokingly. Perhaps the other didn’t even hear him; he just laughed a little. “Wheels going round and round?” Riccetto asked gaily, making propaganda for leaving. By now they were both tired of sitting and talking. Riccetto took the initiative. “Well, what do you say we go?” The Neapolitan giggled again, with his eyes lowered, and then he rose, swaying, and with long steps headed straight for the exit in the center of the latticework wall. It was already dark out; people had already eaten dinner, and had left their houses to be out in the cool air. Some young men were racing their motorcycles around the plaza, from Delle Terrazze, all lit up, across to the half-empty trolley shed. While Riccetto paid up, the Neapolitan conscientiously went through some fairly difficult maneuvers: he sneezed, blew his nose through thumb and forefinger, and pissed. Then they went over to the shed to get the trolley that was to take the Neapolitan back to Rome.
“Where do you live?” Riccetto asked while they were waiting. The Neapolitan treated him to a subtle, devilish smile, but kept silent. Riccetto returned to the charge. “What, you don’t want to tell me?” he asked, looking a little hurt. The Neapolitan took his hand and pressed it between his own warm and swollen ones. “You’re my friend,” he began solemnly, and off he went again, with assurances of friendship, vows, declarations. Riccetto didn’t get caught up in the other’s enthusiasm because he was so hungry and sleepy that he could hardly stand up. It turned out that the Neapolitan’s situation was like this: He and his friends had come to Rome just a few days ago, hoping to clean up. That’s why the Neapolitan had been willing to go along with Riccetto for five hundred lire. If it hadn’t been for that, do you think he’d have bothered, for Christ’s sake? You could make millions with the card game, millions. But meanwhile he and his friends were sleeping in a cellar down by the Tiber, in Testaccio. Riccetto knew the place; he pricked up his ears. “But in that case,” he said, seeing great possibilities, “you need somebody to give you a hand, show you the best spots…”
The Neapolitan embraced him, then he put his finger along his nose, signing to Riccetto to say no more, it was all understood. He liked the gesture, and he did it again a couple of times. Then he took Riccetto’s hand again and started in once more with his vows of friendship, topping it all with certain confused and majestic General principles that Riccetto—who had a much clearer notion and a much simpler scheme in his head—found it hard to follow. “Sure, sure,” he said. One trolley had already gone by, and there went another one. Finally, when the third one came, the Neapolitan climbed aboard with five hundred lire in his pocket, and they made a date for the next day, repeating it two or three times, down by the Ponte Sublicio.
At last Riccetto had found himself a trade. Not like Marcello, who had taken up bartending, or like Agnolo, who worked with his brother as a painter. Something much better, som
ething that put him out of that class, so that he could now think of himself as being on a par with Rocco and Alvaro, for example, who had gone on from stealing manhole covers to much more serious and responsible undertakings, with the result that they never had a lire in their pockets and their faces had a stingier look than before. Riccetto was now spending more time with them than with boys his own age, going on fourteen. Rocco and Alvaro would never think of going around with a kid who was always flush and not have a lira in their own pockets, or at the very most two, three hundred lire. To tell the absolute truth, a couple of times, maybe more than a couple of times, Rocco and Alvaro had been flat broke. But that was different! Just how different, Riccetto was to find out the Sunday he went to Ostia with them, flush as a prince.
The card game had gone very well in the beginning. Riccetto and the con men would set up on some good corner over by the Campo dei Fiori, or at the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele or the Prati, and then, when instead of the umbrella they had made themselves a little bench and instead of the cards they had three pieces of nicely planed wood and a rubber band, two of them without cards and one with a card slipped under the rubber band, they could even set up in the Piazza di Spagna or some other elegant place. They would call out invitations to the passers-by, and a fine crowd would gather, everybody well-heeled and ready to go. In appearance, Riccetto was only the boy-helper—the boy who sets up the bench—but in actual fact he had a more delicate job; he pulled down a thousand lire a day, sometimes even more. But one Saturday night around the first of June, when they had attracted a crowd in the Via dei Pettinari, all of a sudden the cops came, running down across the Ponte Sisto. Riccetto was the first to spot them, and he took off through the Via delle Zoccolette. A cop yelled at him, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” Riccetto turned around and saw that the cop had his pistol in his hand all right, but he thought, “He doesn’t want to kill me, I don’t think,” and went on running till he came to the Via Arenula and disappeared in the alleys by the Piazza Giudia. But the other three got pinched. They were taken to the police station, and the next day they were sent back to Naples on a travel pass, and so much for them. That same Sunday night, Riccetto went down to a cellar on the banks of the Tiber—it had been the wine cellar of a great house in centuries past—and threw away the collection of rags that had served the three unfortunates as a wardrobe, then went gaily to work pulling up the tiles covering the hole where the savings from a month’s work were hidden away: fifty thousand lire.
So on that first Sunday in June, Riccetto was loaded and ready for action.
It was a fine morning, the sun beating down on the Grattacieli, which looked clean and fresh, shining through miles and miles of blue and spilling a golden shower everywhere, on the gleaming humps of the Monte di Splendore or of the Casadio, on the facades of the buildings, on the inner courtyards, the sidewalks. And amid that golden freshness, people in their holiday clothes swarmed about in the center of Donna Olimpia, by the house doors, around the newspaper stand… .
Riccetto had slipped out of the house, all spruced up and with his pistol pocket bulging pleasantly. All at once he saw Rocco and Alvaro surrounded by a bunch of young boys who were arguing and yelling in front of the entrance to the Case Nove. The two were in their work clothes, for they still had to wash up, and they wore cloth breeches that were very wide in the hips and tight in the ankles, so that their legs moved inside them like flowers in a vase, and were crossed like those of soldiers in the pictures—and their two faces topped off the whole, looking like two exhibits in the criminological museum, preserved in oil. Riccetto went up to them, leaving behind the boys of his own age who were kicking around a ball that they had taken away from a little boy who was crying. On spotting Riccetto, Alvaro turned toward him his face of hammered and flattened bones that moved independently when he smiled, and said, casually, “It’s a great life, huh?”
“Sure,” said Riccetto, no less casually.
He was so self-confident and light-hearted that Alvaro looked at him more closely.
“What are you up to today?” asked Riccetto.
“Aah,” said Alvaro, gaining time, with an expression that was partly weary and partly teasing and mysterious.
“What do you say we go to Ostia?” said Riccetto. “I’m loaded today.”
“Yeah,” said Alvaro, all the bones of his face doing dips and jumps, “you got two hundred lire.”
Even Rocco was listening with interest now.
“Yeah, two hundred,” said Riccetto, shaking the whole wad.
“I got five thousand,” he said after a moment. “Five thousand!” he said again, lowering his voice and cupping his hand around his mouth.
First Alvaro, then Rocco, imitating him, burst out laughing so hard that they had to sit down on the stairs and nearly rolled on the ground. Amused, Riccetto waited a while for them to get over it, and then with two fingers he took hold of the collar of Alvaro’s shirt and said, “C’mere.” All three went around the corner, and Riccetto showed them the fifty bills. The two buddies said, “Hey, you really got it!” and made a resigned gesture that meant, “That lucky bastard!”
“You want to go to Ostia?” asked Riccetto.
“O.k., let’s go to Ostia,” Rocco replied.
“We got to wash first, and change,” said Alvaro.
“Go on, I’ll wait for you,” said Riccetto. The other two exchanged glances.
“Well,” Alvaro finally said hesitantly, with his flat face settling into a satisfied grin, “Hey, Riccè, what do you say we get some snatch in Ostia?” Riccetto rose to the challenge at once. “Sure, if you can find the head.” “We’ll find her,” said Rocco, “we’ll find her.” “So we’ll be back here in half an hour,” said Alvaro. They went into the courtyard of the Case Nove, but instead of going home, or going to scrape up the five hundred lire for the ticket and the dressing room, they went out through the smaller entrance on the right that opened on the Via Ozanam, and went into the tobacco shop, where there was a phone. They approached the phone as if on official business. Alvaro dialed, and Rocco, having fished up the fifteen lire, followed the progress of the call as a full partner in the operation.
“Hello,” said Alvaro, “would you be good enough to call Nadia? Yes, Nadia—it’s a friend of hers.” The person who had answered the phone went to find Nadia, and meanwhile Alvaro looked at Rocco, who was leaning his shoulder against the peeling wall, concentrating.
“Hello,” he said in businesslike tones, “is that you, Nadia? Listen, I got a deal for you. You got some time today? To go to Ostia. Yeah, Ostia. What? Sure. Hey, would I give you a bum steer? But it’s all fixed up, all fixed up. We’ll meet you at Marechiaro, got that? Marechiaro. Over where the dance floor is, right in front of it. Yeah, like last time. Three, three-fifteen. Fine. See you.” He hung up the receiver, and, flushed with satisfaction, left the tobacco shop with Rocco.
Nadia was stretched out on the sand, motionless, her face full of hatred for the sun, the wind, the sea, and all those people who had come to the beach like an army of flies on a cleared table. Thousands of them, from Battistini to the Lido, from the Lido to Marechiaro, from Marechiaro to Principe, from Principe to l’Ondina, lying alongside dozens of bathhouses, some on their backs, some on their bellies—but those were mostly old people. As for the young ones, the males, wearing drooping drawers or else tight trunks that showed off what was underneath, and the females, those show-offs, in tight, tight swimming suits with their hair streaming—all of them were walking up and down ceaselessly, as if they had nervous tics. They were all calling to one another, yelling, shrieking, playing practical jokes, playing games, going in and out of the bathhouses, calling to the attendants. There was even a band of young boys from Trastevere, wearing Mexican hats and playing accordion, guitar, and maracas in front of the bathhouse; and their sambas blended with the rumbas on the Marechiaro loudspeaker, reverberating off the sea. Nadia was lying there amid all that racket, wearing a black bathing suit, and showing a lot
of hair, black as the devil’s, in sweaty coils under her arms, and the hair of her head was also coal-black, and her eyes were glaring murderously.
She was in her forties, a big woman, with firm breasts and thighs that looked like shining links of sausage, pumped up hard. She was in a rage because she was sick of that crowd of fresh-air fiends, and ocean bathing was not for her. She’d already done all the bathing she was going to do that morning in Mattonato, in Sor’Anita’s bathtub. Riccetto, Alvaro, and Rocco had come along only ten minutes before, and she was already of a mind to go on about her business.
The Ragazzi Page 4