“What’s eating your ass, Nadia?” asked Alvaro calmly, seeing that she was getting edgy. At these words, she blew up. “Let’s get it over with! Let’s do what we got to do, quick, and so long, sweetheart! What are we waiting for, do you mind telling me?”
“Jesus, what’s your damn hurry?” asked Rocco. Her face changed and she turned like a snake, her mouth pulled down at the corners and her eyes glazed with fury, as gray as those of heart-trouble sufferers. “You going ahead with it?” she asked, glaring at Alvaro. “Sure,” said Alvaro. “Well, let’s go, what are you waiting for?” she asked ferociously, her red mouth looking like the pit of hell. Alvaro went on watching her, his eyes gleaming with good-humored irony. “You act as if you hadn’t had any today,” he said, making the gesture of kneading something with the palm of his hand. “You act like you’re hard up for it,” he added cheerfully.
“Drop dead,” she hissed, looking as brutal as a slaughterhouse laborer.
“It’s all right, we’ll help you with your trouble,” said Rocco, following Alvaro’s lead. “We got something for what ails you.”
“Even Riccetto, you know?” said Alvaro. “Kid or no kid. You ought to see how he’s hung!”
Riccetto gave no sign of hearing, still kneeling on the sand with his legs spread apart. He too had on a Mexican hat, pushed back behind his ears so that his curls could be seen in a tangle on his forehead, and held in place by a cord beneath his chin.
“Let’s go, O.k.?” Alvaro said at last, gesturing toward the bathhouse with his chin. Nadia concealed her satisfaction under a dignified and indifferent expression, and putting her hands down and turning so as to get up bottom-first, she tried to raise, a little at a time, the hundredweight of sausage distributed in varying portions from her breasts to her calves.
“Wait!” Alvaro ordered. “I’ll go first.” He rose and walked off, disappearing among the beach umbrellas and sprawling bodies. After a while, Nadia, first getting onto her knees, rose to her feet and followed after him, planting her big feet in the burning sand.
Riccetto and Rocco stayed behind, waiting their turns. Rocco stretched out with his hands under his head, looking sly, as usual. Since neither Rocco nor Alvaro had said a word all morning about going in swimming, but just leaned against the bathhouse looking at the tasty dishes cooked up in Trastevere, or Prati, or Maranella, or Quarticciolo, Riccetto asked, “Hey, Rocco, can you swim?”
”What do you mean, can I swim?” Rocco said without moving. “You should see me in the water. I’m a mermaid.”
“Well, what are we waiting for, let’s go in, come on,” said Riccetto.
“I don’t feel like it, I just don’t feel like it,” said Rocco with a sigh. “Go in yourself if you want.”
“I’m going in,” said Riccetto firmly, with some emotion. He took off his sombrero and ran toward the water’s edge. He stayed there half an hour, thinking it over, putting one foot in the water and taking it out, then the other one; and then he waded out till the water reached his knees, giving a jump each time a wave came by and seemed to give him a slap on the bottom. The watery mirror before him was full of people who were nearly out of their depth, and there was a horsefly dipping among their heads. Finally he made up his mind and plunged in like a duckling. The rest of his swim consisted of his standing in one place, shivering, with the water up to his nipples, watching some boys shinning up a plank and belly-flopping off the top of it.
When he came back in front of the Marechiaro dance floor, the other two had already done their business. Now it was his turn, but he sat down again, put his Mexican hat back on his head, and said nothing. But Alvaro said, shifting his jaws as he spoke, “Say, Riccetto, before you go too, don’t you think you should buy us all something to drink? Just a suggestion. But you know the two of us have just enough money for the train and the bathhouse.” “Why, sure,” said Riccetto. He darted into the bathhouse, took the roll of bills from his pants pocket, peeled off one, came out again, and gestured to his companions to follow him. They rose, and everyone moved over to the bar to drink Coca-Cola.
The sun had already begun to go down, and the uproar was increasing. The sea glittered like a sword beyond the crowd of bodies. The buildings and bathhouses echoed with thousands of cries, and the showers were full of older and younger boys, and looked like carcasses swarming with ants. The band from Trastevere was going full blast and the Marechiaro loudspeaker was stupefying. “Hey, Riccetto,” said Alvaro after a while, “it’s your turn now.”
Riccetto got up at once, without saying a word, ready to go into the bathhouse with Nadia. The others laughed, even Nadia, for she had grown somewhat more cheerful sitting at the table. “You want to pay first, don’t you?” said Alvaro good-humoredly and rather gently, not wanting to make capital of Riccetto’s mistake. “I forgot,” Riccetto apologized, laughing, but his feelings were hurt. He paid, and went on ahead as Alvaro had done. The cabin was suffocatingly hot now that the air and the sand had cooled a bit; it was like an oven inside. The clothes stank a little, particularly the socks, but there was also a good smell of salt and brilliantine. After a while, when Riccetto had grown used to the relative darkness, Nadia knocked at the door and he opened it. She slipped inside, followed by those buttocks which, when slapped by some joker around the Arenula or the Farnese, felt as if a python’s tail were bunching and coiling. Riccetto was in the center of the room, his Mexican hat on his head. In silence she unfastened her bra, and peeled the two-piece bathing suit from her sweating flesh; at that Riccetto took off his trunks. “O.k., let’s go,” he said in an undertone.
But while they were doing what they had to do, and Nadia was holding the boy tightly in her arms with his face buried between her breasts, she slowly passed one hand up along his pants, hanging on the wall, slipped it into the rear pocket, took out the wad of bills and put it into her purse, which was hanging close by.
Riccetto lived in the Giorgio Franceschi elementary-school buildings. Coming up by the street that runs from the Ponte Bianco, with a hill on the right and on top of the hill the houses of Monteverde Vecchio, first you see on the left the Ferrobedò sunk in its little valley, and then you come to Donna Olimpia, better known as the Grattacieli. And the first buildings on the right when you get there are those of the school. Rising from the crumbling asphalt is the dilapidated facade, with a row of square white columns in the center and at the corners four massive structures like towers, two or three stories high.
First the Germans had been there, then the Canadians, then the stragglers, and finally the refugees, like Riccetto’s family.
Marcello, on the other hand, lived a little farther along, in the Grattacieli—huge as a mountain range, with thousands of windows, in rows, circles, diagonals, giving onto streets, courtyards, stairways, facing north, facing south, in full sunlight, in shadow, closed or wide open, empty or filled with flapping wash, silent or loud with women’s chatter or the wailing of children. All around stretched more abandoned fields, full of humps and hummocks, swarming with children at play, some wearing little smocks stained with snot, some half-naked.
On Sundays, in fact, there was no one to be seen but children. None of the older boys or girls, for they all went to Rome for a good time, or if they were flush like Riccetto, to Ostia where it was lively. Marcello, who was left all alone in Donna Olimpia—broke, the poor kid—was dying of boredom. He walked along with his hands in his pockets, going through the courtyards of the Grattacieli, where he had been playing cards with little eight- and nine-year-olds—but they had soon gotten tired of that and had gone off to play Indians around the Monte di Splendore. He was all alone in Donna Olimpia in the open court in the center of the buildings, and the sun was scorching. He crossed the street, scrambled up the four broken steps of the school stairway, and started up the stairway of the building on the right. Riccetto’s family didn’t live in the classrooms like the squatters or the ones who had settled in first, but in a corridor, one of those that opened on the classr
ooms; it had been divided by partitions into so many little cells, leaving a narrow strip for a passageway along the windows that gave onto the court. Marcello ran through that passage. Those improvised rooms were full of half-made cots and beds, because the women, with all those children to take care of, had scarcely had time to do any straightening up after lunch: Rickety tables, cane chairs with broken seats, stoves, boxes, cooking implements, sewing machines, baby clothes hung up on cords to dry. At that time of day there was hardly anyone in the school buildings—certainly no children, and the grown men were all in the tavern, in the cellars of the Grattacieli, so that the only ones left at home were a few old women.
“Sora Adele!” Marcello called, as he went along the strip of corridor by the windows, ”Sora Adele!”
“What do you want?” It was Sora Adele’s voice, already impatient, coming from one of the cells among the partitions. Marcello appeared in the open door.
“Your son back yet, Sora Adele?” he asked.
“No,” said Sora Adele, annoyed because this was the third time in the past hour that Marcello had come inquiring after her son. She was sitting in a broken-down chair, perspiring, fallen newspaper at her feet, the chair leaking straw all around her, and she was combing her hair before a mirror propped up against the sewing machine.
Her hair was parted in the middle, and on either side of her forehead were two curly scorched-looking strands, stiff as wood. She was combing them violently, frowning and tightening her mouth on the hairpins, as if it were some little girl’s hair that she was combing and she could permit herself to be impatient and hurt. She was getting ready to go to the pizzeria with her friends. “Good-by, Sora Adele,” said Marcello, turning away. “If your son comes back, tell him I’m downstairs.” “I’ll see him when he comes back tomorrow, you brat!” she muttered to herself.
Marcello went downstairs and once more found himself in the deserted street. He was feeling low as could be. He felt like crying. He started to kick pebbles around. “Damn that little shit,” he thought, almost out loud, “where the hell did he go, that’s what I want to know, where the hell did he go without saying nothing to nobody? Is that the way to be? Is that any way to treat your friends? Makes me so mad I’d like to knock his goddamn eyes out, the little bastard.” He sat down on a stairway where there was a bit of shade. The entire area that he could sweep with his dejected eyes held nothing but four or five little boys sitting in the dust at the corner of the school buildings that was nearest the Ferrobedò, amusing themselves playing with a penknife. After a while Marcello got up, went toward them, and stood watching, his hands in his pockets. They paid no attention to him but went on playing without saying a word. After a while one of them glanced up toward the Monte di Splendore, and after staring with shining eyes, yelled, “There’s Zambuia!” All the boys turned to look in that direction, and then they jumped to their feet and ran off toward the Monte di Splendore. Marcello followed slowly after them. By the time he had passed the excavations among the hillocks of the Monte, the others had already reached Zambuia, and had gathered together in the shade of a scaffolding on a slope from which one could see all of Monteverde Nuovo on the right, and straight down, half of Rome, all the way to San Paolo. The boys were all sitting around Zambuia, each one with a puppy between his knees, and Zambuia was following all their move-merits with an expert eye. The boys were silent and well-behaved. They laughed only when one of the puppies did something funny, and not too loudly even then. Every so often, Zambuia would pick up one of the puppies as if it were a bundle of rags, turn it every which way, open its mouth, and then drop it between a boy’s knees again. The puppy would shake his skin a bit, whimper, and then jump about on his bandy legs between the boy’s bare knees—or he would go bravely off on a ramble along the slope. “Look at that little bastard go!” the boys would cry gaily. One of them would stand up, and lurching along like the puppy, go and fetch it back. Then he’d play with it, trying to hide—even blushing a little with shame—the current of affection that the pup stirred in his heart. “Whose pups are they?” asked Marcello, coming forward, assuming an air of superiority but evincing a certain interest in the little dogs, a certain sympathy even. “Mine,” said Zambuia noncommittally. “And who gave them to you?” “You blind?” said Zambuia, busy scratching a puppy’s belly. “Don’t you see the bitch there?” The boys laughed. The bitch was sitting among their legs, about as big as a mosquito and as quiet as could be. “Give ’em here,” said Zambuia shortly. He picked up all the pups from among the boys’ legs and slung them against the bitch’s belly. All of them went for the nipples immediately and started to nurse, fat as suckling pigs, the boys watching, amused and excited, cheering them on and joking. “Hey, give me one?” asked Marcello, trying to sound casual. Zambuia, who was keeping order among the feeding pups, looked at him. “Yeah,” he said. And then, after a moment, “Got five hundred lire?” “You’re nuts,” said Marcello, laughing, and touching two fingers to his forehead. “Don’t you know that at the zoo they give you wolfhound pups free for nothing?” “Fuck you,” said Zambuia, turning to his animals again. The boys were all ears. “Real wolfhounds?” Zambuia asked after a while. “No, I’m making it all up,” said Marcello promptly, for he had been expecting the question. “Go ask Oberdan, the shoemaker’s son, if it’s true or not,” he added. “What the hell do I care?” said Zambuia. “If it’s true it’s true, if it ain’t it ain’t.”
Two of the pups had started to growl at each other like ferocious beasts and were now nipping at each other’s noses. The boys saw them and began to laugh, rolling around on the grass as if they were puppies themselves. “Make it a hundred lire,” said Marcello. Zambuia never opened his mouth, but you could see that he was interested. “O.k.?” asked Marcello. “If you want to,” Zambuia conceded. “I’ll take that one,” said Marcello swiftly, for he had already made his choice. He pointed to a fat black one, the cockiest little bastard of them all, the one who wanted to suck up all the milk himself. The boys looked enviously at Marcello, and they tried to egg the black puppy on to bite the other dogs’ noses again. Marcello fished one of the two hundred-lire notes he owned out of his billfold. “Here you go,” he said. Wordlessly, Zambuia stretched out his hand and slipped the hundred-lire note into his pocket. “I’ll be right back. Wait for me here, O.k.?” asked Marcello, and he went down the slope toward the school buildings. “Sora Adele!” he called again from the corridor. “Sora Adele!”
“What is it now?” she cried. She had just finished dressing. “You still here?” she asked, appearing at the door, stuffed into her good dress like sausage into its casing. “Jesus,” she said, her impatience changing to good humor, “look, if I were in your shoes, you know where I would have sent that no-good son of mine by this time? What do you want him for, anyway?” “We were supposed to go to the movies together,” said Marcello promptly. Sora Adele put her hand to her bosom and half-buried her chin in the folds of her throat in a gesture of distrust. “I know he won’t show up around here till midnight.” vWill you tell him I’ll be back?” asked Marcello, who was a little less discouraged this time, consoling himself with the idea that now he had a puppy even better than Agnolo’s. ” ’Bye, Sora Adele.” Stuffed into her gray dress, which looked as if it was ready to split open, and with her stiff hair sticking out on each side of her forehead, she went back into the room to put on a bit of face powder and get her purse. Marcello ran down the worn and blackened stair, from whose walls sections of twisted pipe protruded, and went out into the street. But he had scarcely crossed the threshold when he heard a terrible racket behind him, like a bomb exploding, and felt a violent blow on the back, as if someone had given him a sneak punch. ’That son of a bitch!” Marcello thought, and he fell on his face, an enormous crashing in his ears, and his eyes blinded by a cloud of white dust.
Riccetto had just enough money left to buy two or three cigarettes and take the trolley. He walked all the way to the Cerchi, lonely as a dog, and waited th
ere for the number 13, which was half-empty when it came by, for it was still early, and as light and as hot as it had been in the middle of the afternoon—it couldn’t have been six o’clock yet. Riccetto sat down in the rear of the trolley, where he could be alone with his gloomy thoughts, and leaned halfway out the window; during the run along the nearly deserted river banks and along the Viale del Re, the wind blew his hair into ringlets on his forehead and flattened it down around his ears, and rippled his shirt, which had come out of his trousers. He stared unseeingly at the façades of the houses as they passed, heartsick, his face sunburned, and his eyes as close to glistening with tears as they could be. At the Ponte Bianco he got off the trolley like a thief, but when his foot touched the ground he stood still, struck by the unexpected scene. Around the pillars of the Ponte Bianco, on the green lots among the construction sites on the Viale dei Quattro Vend, all of which were usually deserted, and in the little street that ran up to the Ferrobedò and the Grattacieli, where normally the only passers-by were people who lived in the neighborhood and had no corns on their feet and weren’t wearing tight shoes—in all these places there were crowds of people. “What happened?” Riccetto asked a bystander. “Who knows?” the man said, looking all around to see if he could figure it out. Riccetto broke into a run among the people down by the slope that dropped to a grade crossing and then rose again steeply and turned toward the Ferrobedò. But at that very moment sirens began to wail at the end of the Circonvallazione Gianicolense, near the Trastevere station. Riccetto turned around, made his way through the surging crowd, and reached the Ponte Bianco just in time to see the fire engines and an ambulance go by at full speed toward Monteverde Nuovo. The noise of the sirens slowly died out among the buildings and construction lots.
The Ragazzi Page 5