All seven of them went into a pizzeria over by the Termini station, and drank a bottle on Picchio. Then they came back by the Via Veneto, with their shirts billowing out over their pants, or with their knitted shirts draped over their shoulders, the sleeves tied around their necks, yelling, singing, insulting the rich people who were still at that hour parading around all dressed up, their Alfas waiting for them. The Villa Borghese was almost deserted by now. You could scarcely hear the violins playing in the Casina delle Rose. When they passed by the bridle path, Picchio woke up and started in yelling again at the top of his lungs, “Hey, bitches!” He vaulted the fence, went down the slope, and as soon as he hit the clearing fell facedown in the dust, and was asleep.
“Jesus, I’m feeling horny,” said Riccetto. “All that good-looking stuff on the Via Veneto.”
“Let’s go see if the whores are still there,” said Caciotta.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Calabrese, “they’ll want money.”
“Well, don’t we have it?” Caciotta asked triumphantly. The others pricked up their ears.
“Let’s go then,” said Negro, grinning under the woolly mop that curled down to his ears. “What are we waiting for?”
They crossed the entire playing field in the moonlight, reached the riding enclosure, and looked around. But the whores were all gone.
“The paddy wagon must have come by,” said Calabrese knowingly.
“Well,” said Caciotta, “tonight …” And he made the gesture for nothing doing, shaking his hand with the thumb and forefinger extended.
Lenzetta goosed him. “Nicest ass in Rome.”
“Nicest prick, you mean,” Caciotta corrected.
“What, stuck on behind?” asked Lenzetta, the one from Acqua Bullicante.
“Sure, and I got a little something in front for you, too,” said Caciotta.
“Fucked you that time,” said Negro, as one might say “Amen.” They went up the other side of the playing field and turned into the street where they had first met. But it was too busy a place for sleeping. They went on to the gardens by the Casina Valadier, stretched out on the benches, and dropped off.
The night passed quickly: The trams at the foot of the Muro Torto hadn’t started running yet, the city was still fast asleep, and the sun was already beating down on the fields and trees of the Villa Borghese, shedding a white, white radiance on the walls and on the small statues among the flower beds.
Riccetto was awakened by an odd sensation of cold on his feet. He turned over onto his stomach for a moment and tried to drop off again, but then he lifted his head to see what the hell had happened to his feet. A dazzling ray of sunshine, filtering through the branches, lit up his holey socks.
“What, did I take my shoes off last night?” Riccetto asked himself, bouncing into a sitting position.
“No, I didn’t take them off,” he answered himself, looking under the bench, on the grass, among the bushes. “Hey, Caciotta! Hey, Caciotta,” he cried, shaking the still-sleeping boy, “they stole my shoes!”
“What’d they do?” said Caciotta, numb with sleep.
“They stole my shoes. And my money, too!” he said, searching through his pockets. Still half-asleep, Caciotta went through his own pockets: not a cent, and his sunglasses were gone. “The bastards!” Riccetto yelled in despair. The others had awakened too, and were watching from where they lay.
“I didn’t have a thing on me,” said the kid from Acqua Bullicante, Lenzetta, sitting up on his bench. But Calabrese looked on out of his puffy face, not saying a word, just shaking his head, like someone who knows what’s what but doesn’t choose to tell. Riccetto and Caciotta went away without speaking, not even glancing at the others, who were playing dumb, their little crooks’ faces looking so preoccupied and innocent that nobody would dare say a thing about them. There wasn’t a soul to be seen in all of the Villa Borghese, bleaching under the already hot sun. They went down to the field where the bridle path was, and crossed it. Picchio was still sleeping on the far side, lying on his stomach. He was wearing blue and white canvas shoes, all frayed and with holes in the bottoms. Riccetto slipped them gently off him and put them on, though they were rather tight. Then they headed down toward the Porta Pinciana.
That day they went to the friars’ to eat. They had to; though they had spent the entire morning wandering around the Piazza Vittorio, they hadn’t been able to pick up a single lira.
Pale with hunger, they slouched along under the station roof and reached the Via Marsala. There was a door at number 210 with the word “Refectory” above it, of the Sacred Heart or the Blessed Virgin—one of those names. They stuck their noses in the door, and then their heads, and took one step forward and a half-step back, dressed as they were, all barefoot except for Riccetto in his canvas shoes. They found themselves in a short corridor leading to a courtyard of trodden earth, full of young penitents like themselves who were playing basketball, and you could tell that they were playing just to please the friars. Riccetto and Caciotta each looked at the other to see what expression he was wearing, and they almost burst into tears at what they saw. But instead they began to snicker, nudging each other, and entered the courtyard looking like two grinning imps.
A big-bellied friar came toward them, all sweaty and sloppy, and they hung back thinking, “What’s he want?” But the friar yelled, “Want to eat, boys?” Riccetto turned away in order to conceal the fact that he was about to burst out laughing, while Caciotta, who had been to this place once before, said, “Yes, Father.” At the word “Father,” Riccetto couldn’t hold it in any longer, and he began to chortle so hard that he had to make believe he needed to tie his broken-down shoes. The friar said, “Come on in,” and led them through an entrance on the other side of the court, where there was a small table with a register and a book of tickets on it. Pulling up his cassock so that you could almost see his belly, the friar asked for their particulars. “Our what?” asked Riccetto, surprised but agreeable, and ready to cooperate in any way required. When they found out what the hell particulars were, they gave false ones, and respectfully took the ticket from the friar as a reward.
Riccetto was in a good humor, seeing how smoothly everything was going, and even a little touched and embarrassed, which was not like him at all. “Well, when do we eat?” he asked expectantly. “In a little while,” Caciotta told him. Meanwhile, the other waifs were still at that game. “Hey, let’s play too,” Riccetto said decisively, ready to assert his rights. They went to the center of the courtyard, argued a little with the others, who looked to be no better off for clothes than they were, and started to play without knowing the first thing about basketball, a game they had never heard of. They played for half an hour, and the whole time Riccetto concentrated on not yelling out, “Fuck you!”
Then the friars called them, clapping their hands, and took them to a hall beyond the little entrance where the ticket table was; inside there were tables thirty feet long, and chairs set around them. They gave the boys two slices of dry bread and a plate of spaghetti and beans to each, made them say, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” and let them eat.
Riccetto and Caciotta went there for about ten days. Only at noon, though, for the friars closed up shop in the evening. Many times the boys ate just once a day. In the evening they managed as best they could. Maybe with money that they’d picked up at the station in the morning, or in the Piazza Vittorio market, or hooking stuff from the street stalls. At last, one evening Fortune smiled on them, and they could tell the friars to get lost. It happened on a tram. A lady had got on, carrying a bag with a coin purse inside it. That little purse, first seen through a butcher’s window in the Via Merulana where the lady had been a little earlier, had appeared to bulge in a promising manner. When she came out, the lady put the coin purse into the bag, which was brimful and didn’t seem to close properly. By good luck, Riccetto and Caciotta had exactly thirty lire between them. They divided it up on the run,
caught the tram, which was already in motion, and climbed aboard. Each one struck out for himself, and they stationed themselves near the lady. She was standing up, hanging onto the handrail, and looking balefully at her neighbors. Riccetto drew up closer still, because he was the one who was going to work on her, and Caciotta stood behind him to conceal his movements while he opened the bag very gently, removed the coin purse with his right hand, and slipped it along his left side until he could tuck it under his armpit. Then, still protected from behind by Caciotta, he made his way through the passengers and they both got off at the first stop, cutting across the gardens in the Piazza Vittorio, and disappeared, as the saying has it, in less time than it takes to say ‘‘Amen.”
They headed for San Lorenzo, going through the Santa Bibiana arch. And since they were in the neighborhood, they thought of paying a little visit to Tiburtino, to see how things had developed since the time they had run off with the armchairs belonging to the upholsterer in the Via dei Volsci… .
It was early evening, and a pleasant coolness helped to freshen the air at that hour when the workmen are on their way home, and the trams go by packed like sardine cans, and you may have to spend three hours waiting under the shed-roof at the tram stop for a chance to jump onto the footboard. From San Lorenzo to Verano, and all the way to Portonaccio, it’s all one fun fair, a big, buzzing, blooming confusion. Riccetto sang:
“Rome, how beautiful,
How beautiful in twilight . . .”
at the top of his lungs, completely reconciled with life, full of big plans for the immediate future, feeling all that cash inside his pocket: cash, source of all pleasure, all satisfaction in this cockeyed world. Caciotta was walking close by his side, calm and content. They came to Portonaccio; their hands in their pockets, singing, they settled themselves in the middle of the open space beneath the overpass to wait for the bus to Tiburtino. One bus had just left, and they wanted to catch the next one. By the time it arrived, so many people had gathered that it wasn’t worth struggling to try to board it. They waited for the third one; same thing. Two or three rain clouds showed up by St. Peter’s, borne on a wind that blew a bit cool and a bit warm; then it thundered and a little rain fell. Riccetto and Caciotta gave up on the buses, since it was murder trying to ride them at that time of day, and decided to take a walk, along with a column of soldiers, behind the Tiburtina station, among warehouses, excavations, and building sites, through fields that were already soaked—to see if there were any whores around. When they came back to the terminal beneath the overpass, the lights of Verano were already lit, flickering with a rosy glow in lines and circles above the embankments. The bus was there, but so was the usual crowd, taking it by storm. “What time do you think it is?” asked Riccetto. “Must be eight, eight-fifteen,” said Caciotta. As a matter of fact, it must have been at least ten. “It’s late,” said Riccetto, not losing his good spirits however. “Let’s get on.”
They very nearly knocked down two or three old women and two or three old men, gave the conductor a hard time, stepped on a corn here and there, and shouldered their way till they got directly behind the driver’s cubicle. They leaned back against it, ironically observing the human comedy unfolding in the bus. After a while some boys they knew came aboard, and they gave them a big hello as soon as they were installed.
“Well,” said Caciotta confidently and condescendingly, shaking hands with one after another, “what are we all up to?”
“Can’t you see we’ve just knocked off work?” one of them said in a dejected voice, his clothes stinking from the factory.
“I can see all right,” said Caciotta.
The other went on bitterly, “Now we go home, eat, go to sleep, and tomorrow morning get up and sweat all day again.”
Caciotta said, “Yeah, I know,” eyeing him with satisfaction.
“And how’s things with you?” asked a blond boy, Ernestino, noticing something special in Caciotta’s manner.
Caciotta looked at him for a moment, dull-eyed. Then, silently, his motions constricted by the press of bodies around him, he put his hand into his pocket and stirred it around a bit, very cool, staring ironically, detached, at Ernestino and the two or three other boys, who were watching him with amusement.
Then, very slowly, he took out his wallet, opened it carefully, and with great finesse extracted a sheaf of hundred-lire notes from one section. With surprising suddenness he slapped Ernestino a couple of times on either side of the face with the packet of bills, slap, slap, after which he put the money back into his wallet and the wallet into his pocket, all with a tired, self-satisfied air.
Ernestine’s eyes were laughing. He was tickled at having been the butt of Caciotta’s sally. “And what have you been up to?” he asked gaily. “That’s four hundred you got there!”
“Four hundred besides what we got stashed away,” said Caciotta, twisting his mouth as he spoke, his eyes dimming even more.
Riccetto was silent, rather sleepy, though he too was giving himself airs a bit, because he hardly knew Ernestino and the others. They were old friends of Caciotta’s who had been born and raised in Tiburtino.
Caciotta had known Ernestino and a certain Franco, better known as White Feather, who was there too, since they were babies, when Tiburtino and Pietralata were way out in the country, when the subdivisions were new and the fort just built. Every now and then—they were hardly eight years old at the time—they used to leave home and stay away for weeks, starving or else living on onions or peaches hooked from the vegetable stalls, or stuff that dropped from housewives’ shopping bags. They ran away for no reason, just like that, to have some fun. They got smokes from the bersaglieri at the barracks. When it came time for sleeping, they made themselves comfortable under the watermelon-seller’s awning, right in front, on top of the melons.
Good humor and gratitude toward life in General, a consequence of having all that money in his pocket, made Caciotta feel sentimental and disposed to reminisce.
“Hey, Ernestì,” he said, almost tenderly, “remember that business with the melon-man?”
“No, what melon-man?” asked Ernestino, who, with no money in his pocket, was unmoved.
“Hey, Riccetto,” said Caciotta, tugging at his sleeve, “listen to this. You remember, Ernestì,” he said, laughing, “how scared we were at night, over in Bagni de Tivoli, and we used to sleep with clubs under our heads?” Ernestino laughed. “That melon-man,” Caciotta explained to Riccetto, “was keeping a pig out in Bagni de Tivoli, in a shed out in the fields. And since we kept careful watch over the melons for him, he got the idea of sending us to guard that pig. And he kept a rabbit there too. One night the melon-man’s mother comes and she says, ‘Go to Bagni,’ she says, ‘and buy a half-kilo of bread.’ You know, that meant better than a mile going and better than a mile coming back. It was dark already. Then, while we’re on our way, the melon-man’s mother takes that rabbit, kills it, cooks it, and eats it up. Then she takes the bones, digs a hole, and puts them in the hole. The old bitch. Then the two of us get there, and right away we go look for the rabbit and the rabbit’s gone. Then the melon-man comes, the boss, and he says, ‘Where’s the rabbit?’ So then, Ernest! and me, we say, ‘Well, we went to buy the bread, and when we come back the rabbit was gone.’ Then the boss says, ‘Couldn’t one of you have gone by himself?’ And we say, ‘We were afraid to go by ourselves, so we went together.’ Then he’s fighting mad, and he pulls five hundred lire out of his pocket. ‘You’re both fired, and don’t ever show up in front of my foot unless you want a good swift kick.’ ”
“Well, a lot we cared,” he went on merrily. “We went back to Pietralata, and we and the neighborhood kids got together and got taken on by the circus—you remember, Ernest!?—with lions and tigers and all… . And the time Rondella, the circus horse, ran away and we ran after her all night, all over the fields beyond Pietralata, and when we caught up with her, she was taking a swim in the Aniene.” Riccetto was listening to him with amus
ement, seeing everything from the same point of view as Caciotta and his old friends. And they were all nodding, laughing, feeling larceny beginning to stir in their souls. Among the boys from Tiburtino there was one from Pietralata, who was listening, looking discouraged. His face and hair were black as a snake. He was tall and skinny, the others came up to his armpits. He stood close by them, holding onto the handrail, looking weary and preoccupied, listening with a tender expression on his evil young face. His name was Amerigo. Caciotta knew him by sight, scarcely more than that. The bus jolted over the pavement of the Via Tiburtina, making its load of human beings dance, though they were jammed together so you could hardly slip a needle in among them, and the gang from Tiburtino was getting more and more lively. “Just look at those beautiful curls he’s got there,” said Ernestino during a pause in the conversation, looking at Riccetto’s head. “What,” Caciotta interposed brilliantly, “didn’t you know that guy makes you fart in his face so’s to make the curls come?” While the others were laughing, without changing his position noticeably Amerigo nudged Caciotta with his elbow. “Hey, what’s-your-name,” he said softly, in an almost toneless voice, “I gotta tell you something.”
4 • The ragazzi
The people are a great savage in
the bosom of society.
—Leo Tolstoy
Amerigo was drunk. “Let’s get off here at the fort,” he said to Caciotta, who listened deferentially. “This here’s a friend of mine,” said Caciotta, just to be saying something. Amerigo lifted his hand toward Riccetto as if it were made of lead. His jacket collar was turned up; beneath his curly hair, matted down with dust, his face shone green and his big dark eyes stared glassily. He shook hands with great force, without seeming to, as if there couldn’t possibly be the least doubt that both of them were great people. But suddenly he forgot about Riccetto, and turning to Caciotta, he said, “Did you get me?” He was playing the steady type, but what Caciotta got was that you better not horse around with this boy: One day at Farfarelli he had seen him with one hand pick up six chairs tied together, and he knew that Amerigo had punched people’s heads in and sent more than one to the hospital at Pietralata. “What you been up to?” asked Caciotta, talking man to man, or bum to bum. “We’ll talk about it,” said Amerigo, pulling his jacket collar higher.
The Ragazzi Page 8