Riccetto ran back down toward the grade crossing, and he found Agnoletto there, walking alongside his bicycle. The two of them started to go through the crowd. “What’s up?” Riccetto asked someone else, because he was dying of curiosity. “Probably a fire at the Ferrobedò,” the man said, making a gesture that pleaded ignorance, and shrugging. But after they had elbowed their way to the grade crossing, they found a line of police there, blocking the street. Agnolo and Riccetto tried to argue their way past, on the ground that they lived in Donna Olimpia, but the cops had orders to let no one through, so the boys had to turn back. They tried to go down from the Viale dei Quattro Vend on the side where there was a sheer drop, taking the path that the workmen had made, down past the grade crossing. But there were policemen stationed there too. The only thing left was to go the long way around to Donna Olimpia by Monteverde Nuovo. Agnolo and Riccetto returned to the Ponte Bianco, where still more people had gathered by this time, and went up the hill by the Gianicolo, taking turns riding on the handlebars, and doing long stretches on foot when the hill was too steep. It was at least a mile and a quarter to the piazza at Monteverde Nuovo, and then another quarter-mile downhill, across fields, by the barracks-like buildings housing the refugees, and the construction lots, to get down to Donna Olimpia from the opposite side. Riccetto and Agnolo got there as the sun was setting. They rolled down the first part of the hill at a good clip, but after that they had to stop again. A little before the Grattacieli, they ran into a big crowd moving along the street at the foot of the Monte di Splendore and filling the courtyards. You could hear cries and shouts, and the voices of the people all crowded together sounded deadened and suffocated. Riccetto and Agnolo got off the bike and silently made their way into the crowd. “What happened? What happened?” Riccetto asked people whom he recognized. They looked at him and did not answer, melting away into the crowd. Then, while Riccetto pressed on, white as a sheet, one of them took Agnolo by the sleeve and said, “Didn’t you know the school caved in?” At that instant the sirens sounded again from Monteverde Nuovo, and in a moment more fire engines came speeding by, cutting a swath through the crowd, and parked alongside the others by the main intersection of Donna Olimpia. When the wailing of the sirens died, the talking and shouting sounded louder. Where the corner building of the school had stood there was now a ruin, still smoking, and below in the street a mound of stones and white plaster that blocked the road and hid the line of white columns, still standing, in the center of the facade. The firemen were working a crane among the wreckage, and a score of men were digging with picks in the fading light, yelling orders and calling to one another. There was a cordon of police all around, and the crowd, pressed back, was intently watching the firemen at their work; the women in the building opposite, standing at their already lighted windows, cried out and wept.
Marcello had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance, still covered with dust, like a fish dipped in flour, and they had found two of his ribs broken. They had put him in a ward whose windows opened onto a garden where convalescents took the sun; they stowed him on a cot between an old man with liver trouble who chattered and laughed and grumbled endlessly about the nurses, as if he were continuously drunk, and a middle-aged man who, two or three days later, without his ever having said a word, was carried off to die in a room reserved for that purpose down the corridor. The next day, in the dead man’s place they installed another old man who complained night and day and got on everyone’s nerves; like children, they all imitated him and made faces. Marcello wasn’t uncomfortable there. He spent the day waiting for mealtimes. Not out of hunger—on the contrary, he almost always let his share go to waste—but out of gluttony. His face would light up when he heard the clang of metal down the corridor, the soup cauldrons that a nursing sister pushed along on a little cart. He would turn his head in that direction immediately, and with a connoisseur’s glance he would look to see what was being served that day, watching the mixture that poured out of the cauldrons to fill the metal dishes of the patients in the first row of beds. They would begin to eat carefully, making the white iron night tables, loaded with medicine bottles, ring and tinkle. You could see their jaws moving, and their narrowed eyes glittering with ill-concealed satisfaction. Nevertheless, most of them grumbled about the food, acting refined, and always finding something to criticize while swallowing down their few mouthfuls with an air of resignation. Marcello was one of these, and his main subject of conversation when his family came to visit him was the bad hospital food, as if his people didn’t know what he was used to getting at home. He let most of his share go to waste and justified his lack of appetite by saying how bad it was, how badly cooked, and by claiming that the sisters gave him the worst of the stuff in order to annoy him. The truth was that he didn’t eat partly because the slightest motion gave him severe pain in his broken ribs, and partly because he really wasn’t hungry and no food could have appealed to him, not even the restaurant food that he so often used to dream about.
As the days went by, far from stopping, the pain in his ribs and his lack of appetite grew worse. He got paler and skinnier every day, and he could scarcely stir under the sheet. Just turning his eyes this way or that made him feel as if he were about to faint. But he didn’t think about it, and bore the pain and weakness without complaining very much.
At Donna Olimpia, meanwhile, they had been piling the rubble up against the school buildings as best they could, clearing a passageway, burying the dead, and with the cooperation of the mayor shelter had been provided for those made homeless. Shelter is the word, for they had jammed ten families into a single hall of a monastery in Casaletto, and the rest were scattered, one here, one there, in the Tormarancio or Tiburtino districts, in refugee shacks, or in soldiers’ barracks. A couple of Sundays later, life was going on as usual in Donna Olimpia. The young people went off to Rome to have a good time; the older ones downed their liter of wine, a quarter-liter at a time, in the wineshop: and the army of children invaded the lots and courtyards. Marcello’s mother and father, and the six or seven other children in the family, went to pay him a visit in the San Camillo hospital, going on foot because it was scarcely a half-hour’s walk up by Monteverde Nuovo and down again by the Circonvallazione Gianicolense. They went along slowly in the sunshine, going up the Via Ozanam—the husband and wife and the older girls all silent, walking heads-down, and the smaller children running along with them and quarreling among themselves in low tones. They passed in procession behind the Grattacieli and in front of the Monte di Splendore where, in the small cleared space among the garbage heaps, the neighborhood boys were starting to play ball. Agnolo and Oberdan were among them, all dressed up, hanging around watching the players, tired of the whole thing already, sitting on a little mound that had a bit of grass on it, taking care not to soil their trousers. When they saw Marcello’s family go by, Agnolo nudged Oberdan, and suddenly filling up with emotion, he said, “Hey, why don’t we go see Marcello too?” “Let’s go,” Oberdan said quickly, seeing that there was nothing much doing where they were, and he got up at once, putting on the appropriate expression, all fired up with his pious intentions. Then the two of them left the playing field, picking their way among the surrounding holes and trash heaps. But they were stopped by some of their friends coming over from Monteverde Nuovo. “Where’re you going?” their friends asked, thinking of joining forces and taking them along someplace or other. The temptation was strong. But Agnolo said with a serious air, “We’re going to the hospital to see Marcello.” “What Marcello?” asked Lupetto, who didn’t know him. “Marcello the laundress’s boy,” someone else explained. “You know he’s dying?” said Agnolo. “How can he be dying?” the other boy said, not believing him. “He’s got a broken rib. Do you die of a broken rib?” “Get lost,” said Agnolo. “The sister told me that the rib stuck into his liver, or his diaphragm, or something.” “Come on, Agnolo,” said Oberdan impatiently, “we’re going to get left.” “See you,” said Lupetto
and the others, swarming down toward Donna Olimpia. Agnolo and Oberdan ran after Marcello’s family and caught up with them as they were turning into the path across the field that led to the piazza in Monteverde Nuovo, and without saying a word they all walked along together in the burning sun, through streets that were deserted on this Sunday afternoon, till they came to the hospital gates.
Marcello was very glad to see them. “They didn’t want to let us in,” Agnolo said right away, still feeling outraged by the behavior of the guards. Marcello didn’t pass up the chance to deliver an opinion in the case. “They’re all nosy here. And the nuns are worse than the others, would you believe it?”
The effort of speaking made him turn paler than the sheets, but he paid no attention.
“Hey, have you seen Zambuia?” he asked suddenly, looking at Agnolo and Oberdan with eyes that were shining with curiosity.
“Who ever sees him?” said Agnolo contemptuously, for he didn’t know about the puppy.
“If you see him,” Marcello went on, a little put-out, “tell him to take good care of my puppy for me, and I’ll give him another hundred lire. He know’s what it’s all about.”
“All right,” said Agnolo.
“Be quiet for a little, won’t you,” said Marcello’s mother anxiously, seeing that the boy was tiring himself and growing paler as he talked. Marcello shrugged, almost laughing.
But he said to his friends even more enthusiastically, looking pleased and paying no attention to his mother and father, watching him from the foot of the bed, “Say, do you know they’re going to give me the insurance?”
“What insurance?” Agnolo asked blankly.
“The insurance for my broken ribs. Don’t you know there’s insurance for that?” Marcello said contentedly.
His face flushed at the thought of what he would do with the insurance money. He had already settled it with his parents. His eyes gleaming, he said to Agnolo, “I’m getting myself a bike, better than yours.”
“What do you know?” said Agnolo, raising his eyebrows.
At that moment the old man in the bed on the right began his complaint, making little groaning noises over and over, and holding his hand to his belly. The old man on the other side, who for some reason had been behaving himself all this time, roused up suddenly, turned round, grimacing with his toothless mouth, and began to groan too, “Ugh, ugh, ugh,” partly for a joke and partly from pain. Then he started in with his usual tiresome complaints, sitting upright on his bed. Marcello gave his friends a cheerful look, as if to say, “Do you see that?” Then he said in an undertone, “They’re always carrying on like that.”
But as he spoke he seemed to fall into a kind of faint, for a little moan almost escaped his lips too. His mother came to his side and smoothed down the sheets. “Are you going to be quiet?” she asked. Marcello’s sisters, who had been woolgathering, came around him too, and his little brothers, already tired of being indoors, stopped their squabbling and came to the head of the bed.
“And Riccetto, what’s he up to?” Marcello asked as soon as he had come to.
“It must be a couple of weeks since anyone’s seen him.”
“Where’s he staying now?” Marcello asked.
“I think in Tiburtino, or Pietralata, somewhere around there,” said Agnolo.
Marcello was thoughtful for a moment. “And what did he say when he found out his mother was dead?” he asked.
“What did he say? He busted out crying, naturally.”
“Oh, God,” Marcello said with a grimace of pain, feeling a sharper twinge in his side. His mother was frightened, and she took his hand, and with her handkerchief wiped the sweat from his forehead and neck. Marcello was faint with weakness and pain; his family knew that the doctors gave him only two or three more days to live. Seeing his pallor, his father went to call a nurse and his mother fell on her knees by the bed, still pressing her son’s hand, and started to weep quietly. His father came back with the nurse, who looked at Marcello, put her hand on his forehead, and with a dead expression on her face went away again, saying, ”We must be patient.” At those words, Marcello’s mother raised her head a little, looked around, and began to cry more loudly. ”My boy, my boy,” she said between her sobs, ”my poor boy.”
Marcello opened his eyes once more, saw his mother crying and sobbing, and all the others standing around weeping and looking at him with a strange expression on their faces. Agnolo and Oberdan were now standing a little apart from the others, by the foot of the bed, having moved away to make room for Marcello’s family.
”What’s the matter?” asked Marcello in a faint voice.
His mother went on weeping even more desperately, unable to control herself, trying to stifle her sobs against the sheets.
Marcello looked around more sharply, as if he were thinking intently.
After a moment he said, ”Oh, then I must be dying!”
No one spoke. “Oh,” said Marcello, staring at the faces around him, ”I must really be dying.”
Agnolo and the other boy were silent, frowning. After a few minutes of not speaking, Agnolo plucked up his courage, went over to the head of the bed and touched Marcello’s shoulder. ”So long, Marce, we have to go now, we have to meet some of the others.”
“So long, Agnolo,” Marcello said in a weak but steady voice.
After thinking for a moment, he added, “And say hello to everybody in Donna Olimpia, in case I don’t get back there. And tell them not to feel bad about it.”
Agnolo turned Oberdan around by the shoulder and they went off down the ward, nearly in darkness now, without saying a word.
3 • Night in the Villa Borghese
On the overpass by the Tiburtina station, two boys were pushing a cart loaded with armchairs. It was morning. On the bridge, the ancient buses—the one for Monte Sacro, the one for Tiburtino III, the one for Settecamini, and the 409 that turned suddenly below the bridge, going down by the Via di Casal Bertone and Acqua Bullicante toward the Porta Furba—the buses shifted gears, nosing in among the crowd, among the tricycles and the ragpickers’ carts, the children’s bicycles and the red handbarrows quietly returning from the markets to the farms on the outskirts of the city. The worn gangways on either side of the bridge were also full of people; files of workmen, idlers, and housewives getting off the trolley in the Via Portonaccio, carrying bags stuffed with artichokes and greens, going toward the squalid houses of the Via Tiburtina, or to some newly constructed apartment house, surrounded by junk heaps, set down among construction sites and piles of old iron and lumber, by the great Fiorentini or Romana Compensati works. Right in the middle of the bridge, in the tide of cars and pedestrians, the two boys, who were jerking the cart along behind them, paying no attention when it lurched over the broken places in the pavement and taking it as easy as they could, stopped and sat down on the sides of the cart. One of them fished a butt from his pocket and lit up. The other leaned against the arm rest of one of the chairs, striped red and white, waiting his turn to take a drag; because of the heat he pulled his black shirt out from beneath his waistband. But the first boy went on smoking and paid no attention. ”Hey,” the other said, “you going to let me have that butt?” “Here. Anything to keep you quiet,” and he passed it over. The racket on the bridge almost drowned their voices. Even a train had joined the party, running beneath the overpass, sounding its whistle, not slowing down for the station, built low, with its bundles of track disappearing in dust and sun-glare, and set against the thousands of houses that they were building in the hollow behind the Nomentana. Smoking the butt just passed to him, the boy in the black shirt hoisted himself onto one of the two armchairs in the cart and stretched out, his legs apart and his curly head resting on the chair’s back. He began to draw contentedly on the inch-long Nazionale between his fingers, while around him on the high point of the bridge the stream of pedestrians and vehicles swelled in the noon heat.
The other boy climbed up on the cart too, and stretched ou
t on the second armchair, with his hands on the seat of his pants. “Christ,” he said, “I’m dying. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.” But just then, in all the hubbub, two long whistles sounded from the end of the bridge. Recognizing the sound, the boys lying on the armchairs turned halfway round, and where the trolley tracks curved at the end of the Portonaccio plaza, tacking swiftly among the cars and buses lining up for the bridge, they saw two other loafers coming along, pushing a cart and sweating. Besides whistling, they yelled and gestured at the two on the armchairs. They came up, their cart full of refuse, stinking like a sewer. They were all rags and dirt, with two inches of dust and sweat on their faces, but their hair was as neatly combed as if they had just left the barbershop. One of them was a slim, dark boy, handsome even in all that dirt, with coal-black eyes and fine round cheeks a color between olive and pink. The other fellow had reddish hair and a swollen, freckled face. “Since when are you herding sheep, cousin?” the boy in the black shirt asked the handsome boy, not shifting an inch from his position, sprawled on the armchair with his hands on his belly and the butt sticking to his lower lip. “Fuck you, Riccè,” said the other. Riccetto—for it was the little bastard himself—wrinkled his brow meaningfully, tucking his chin into his throat with a know-it-all look. Caciotta, the boy who was stretched out on the chair beside Riccetto, got up and, as curious as a little boy, looked in their friends’ cart to see what was going on there. He made a contemptuous face and then broke into a forced laugh. “Ha, ha, ha,” he exploded, bending double, and falling to a seat on the edge of the sidewalk. The others watched, waiting for him to stop, half-smiling themselves. “If you get twenty-six lire for that, you can cut my throat,” Caciotta said at last. The one that Riccetto had called cousin, seeing what Caciotta was up to, clicked his tongue, gave him a push, and without a word grabbed the cart-handles and started off. His partner, the redhead, whose name was Begalone, went after him, looking out of the corner of his eye at Caciotta, who was still sitting on the ground under the feet of the people passing by. “Hey, twenty-six lire,” he said, “we’ll see this evening who’s got more money in his pocket.” “He, he, he,” Caciotta sputtered. Begalone stopped, his faded Arab face twisted around, and turning serious he said, weighing each word, “Hey, deadbeat, come on and I’ll buy you a drink.” “Sure,” said Riccetto promptly. He had been watching the scene from his armchair, not saying a word. He jumped down, and with Caciotta’s help began to push his cart with its chairs through the traffic, following the two ragpickers’ cart. Saying no more, the ones in the lead went like a shot along the other side of the bridge toward the Via Tiburtina and stopped at a restaurant with an arbor between two broken-down old hovels at the foot of a tall building. All four entered and drank a liter of white wine, thirsty as they were from pushing the carts all morning. Moreover, Alduccio and Begalone had dry throats from the four or five hours in the sun that they had put in fishing in a junk heap under a railroad trestle. The wine began to affect them after the very first sips. “Let’s go sell the armchairs, what do you say, Riccè?” said Caciotta, propped up against the bench with his legs crossed. “Fuck this stuff.”
The Ragazzi Page 6