The bus stopped by the Pietralata fort. From the still-open bar a shaft of light grazed the asphalt surface of the Via Tiburtina. Amerigo jumped down from the footboard, taking up the shock with his knees like a tumbler, without moving his hands from his pants pockets. “Let’s go,” Caciotta said to Riccetto, who couldn’t quite figure out the turn that things were taking, and the two boys followed Amerigo. “What say we walk it?” said Amerigo, starting off by the bersaglieri barracks and heading toward Tiburtino. When they had gone a little way, he took hold of Caciotta’s elbow; he walked on, setting one foot in front of the other, looking so evil that you felt you’d get a shock if you touched any part of his body. He dragged his feet like a punchy fighter, and yet his tired shuffle somehow seemed as quick and agile as an animal’s. For Caciotta’s and Riccetto’s benefit, he was still playing the steady type, as if he were quite unconscious of his strength and of his reputation as the toughest nut in Pietralata. He had the air of a man plotting a business deal with an equal, someone who didn’t fool easily. “You come with me,” he told Caciotta, “and you’ll be glad you did.” “Where to?” asked Caciotta. Amerigo nodded his head toward Tiburtino . “There,” he said, “to Fileni’s.” Caciotta had never heard that name before. He kept silent. Amerigo went on talking, pretending to believe that Caciotta had understood him. “Today’s Saturday, we’ll clean up,” he said in a weak, womanish voice, perhaps imitating his mother, and his face looked even yellower. “Let’s go,” said Caciotta, sounding like a hood; since there was no way out of it, he was going to play it for laughs.
But Riccetto was walking behind them, his eyes narrowed into a squint. When they reached the place where Tiburtino III begins, he said, “So long, I’m taking off.” “Where you going?” asked Caciotta, stopping. Amerigo stopped too, and looked sideways at him, his hands half-sunk in his pockets. “To sleep, where the fuck you think? I’m so sleepy I’ll die if I have to take another step.”
Amerigo came over to him, looking at him with bloodshot eyes, but it seemed as if he were laughing; he was laughing because it just wasn’t conceivable that anything could be done that was contrary to what he had decided.
“Look, kid,” he said in a low voice, still calm and conciliatory, “I told you already that if you go along with me you’ll thank me for it. You don’t know me.” Caciotta, who did know him, was looking on, amused. He knew that Riccetto would go with them to that Fileni’s place.
“I tell you I’m sleepy,” said Riccetto.
“Sleepy? What are you talking about?” asked Amerigo, laughing under his wrinkled brows, still happily convinced that it was sheer absurdity to refuse his advice. “Let’s go.” He put his hand on his heart. “Caciotta here can tell you, ain’t that right, Cacio? I’m a guy that nobody can’t say nothing against, and if I make a promise, kid, listen, it’s gonna be like I say. Why? ’Cause we’re all friends here, that’s why. I do you a favor, like, and another time you do me a favor, ain’t that right? We gotta help each other out, right?” He had grown solemn. This was like saying that you had to be a jerk not to go along with him. But something was eating Riccetto about this business with Amerigo and Caciotta; it smelled bad to him. Caciotta was watching him with a funny expression. “Do whatever you like,” he seemed to be saying, “I’m not butting in.” Riccetto shrugged. “Who’s saying anything?” he asked Amerigo. “You’re right, you’re right. Go there with Caciotta. What do you need me for anyway?” But Amerigo didn’t know which of the two had the money. He looked at Riccetto very patiently, very seriously. He came so close that his breath, smelling of wine, mixed with Riccetto’s. But at that moment two familiar forms loomed up against the yellowish light of the first buildings in Tiburtino, coming down toward the fountain where the boys had stopped.
“The cops,” said Caciotta. “They know me. They’re the ones that wanted to pinch me in the movies the other night.”
Watching them out of his sick eyes, Amerigo saw them come; he put his hand to his face and gripped his forehead with his fingers. He was white as a sheet and he was grimacing as if he were about to cry. When the two figures with their carbines slung over their shoulders had passed and had gone a little farther along toward the suburbs, he passed his hand over his face again. “Oh, God, how it hurts,” he said. “Like there’s a nail driving right through my head.” But it was already over.
He went back up to Riccetto, and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder with a friendly squeeze. “Look, Riccè,” he said, “if that’s your name. Don’t be a jerk. Better come with me.” He assumed again his expansive, oratorical air. “Honest,” he said, “if you was the worst son of a bitch going, afterward you’d come to me and say, hey, Amerigo, I really gotta thank you, and I gotta apologize.” His hand weighed down on Riccetto’s shoulder as if it were a casket.
They went down the main street of Tiburtino where the only light was the glow from two bars, and among the one-story buildings, crumbling and dirty, with some kind of cloth hanging over the windows, they heard the thrumming of a guitar. They turned down by the covered market, damp and green with fish-slime, cut through two or three identical streets that divided the low buildings, and came to a house with a balcony in nineteenth-century style, battered and falling to pieces. They went up a stair, then through an open gallery that gave onto the street, and knocked at a door that was already ajar and from behind which a bit of light was shining. A hand on the inside opened the door, and they found themselves in a kitchen full of silent men grouped around a table. Six or seven of them were playing cards; the others, leaning against the walls or against a sink that was full of dirty dishes, were watching the game.
Amerigo and the other two slipped into the group of men, who after glancing at them drew back a little to make room. Then they all watched the cards from behind the players’ backs. As if he weren’t thinking about Caciotta and Riccetto any more, Amerigo watched the game, each hand going quickly, with continual wins and losses, followed by some audible whispering, or even by a remark made out loud. Caciotta felt that he couldn’t care less about the whole thing, but though he was dying to sleep he kept looking around in a lively way, while Riccetto, remembering when he was younger in Donna Olimpia gambling with the money he had made from selling old pipe, began to look flushed and his eyes gleamed. Whenever a hand was finished, Amerigo would turn to one side, not toward his companions but toward one or another of the older men standing by, shaking his head, or muttering hoarsely, “Jesus!” In front of him was a man named Zinzello, with hunched shoulders and sleek hair brushed straight back, a carter, who lost every time, and whose face grew harder and more wrinkled. At last he got up and someone took his place. At that moment, Amerigo, who was behind him, made up his mind. He turned to Caciotta, and as if they had already come to an understanding, confidently, with a bitter expression in his eyes, said to him, “Lend me the thousand lire you got in your pocket.” “I’m not the one that’s got it,” said Caciotta.
Amerigo’s yellow eyes fixed on Riccetto, who was standing a little farther back. “Hand it over,” he said in a low voice, so as not to be heard above the rumbling in the kitchen. Riccetto played dumb. “Come on,,, said Amerigo hurriedly, almost exasperatedly, “I’ll give it back. What do you think, I’m gonna rob it off you? You know better. Come on.”
“Hand it over, what do you care?” said Caciotta.
Riccetto said, “Let’s go halves on the winnings, all right?” and he pulled out the bills, holding onto them tightly. “If you lose, you give me back five hundred,” he added. “I ain’t gonna rob it off you,” said Amerigo. “We’ll do like you say. Come on.” He grabbed at the bills impatiently. He put three or four hundred lire down on the table, and made his bet. The cards flowed like a stream of oil, a hand here, a hand there, and one look was enough to tell you whether things were going well or badly.
Amerigo won on the first hand, and he barely turned his eyes toward Riccetto, who was watching, looking gloomy. Caciotta laughed with his mouth wide open. �
��I’m dying for a smoke,” he said, searching his pockets for a butt, finding one, and lighting it. Amerigo won the next hand too. Collecting the money, he turned around to say something to the man with his hair slicked back, who was standing silently beside him. He merely glanced at the other two with a satisfied look, to keep them quiet. He put all the money he’d picked up into his pocket. Then things suddenly began to go badly, and in five or six hands he was cleaned out. He looked at the other two with his corpse’s stare. Riccetto’s eyes were hard, pained, as if he were going to cry; he said nothing. Amerigo went back to watching the game, trying to figure it, calculating how it would turn out. Every now and then he said a word to the carter, explaining why he had lost too. After a while he turned to Riccetto. “Hand over the rest.” “You crazy?” said Riccetto. “Who’s going to give me some more tomorrow if we lose again?” Amerigo waited for a moment. Then he started in again. “Come on, give me the money.” “But I’m telling you I don’t want to play any more,” Riccetto said in a low voice. But he wasn’t sure of himself. Amerigo stared at him. “Lemme tell you something,” he said, grasping Riccetto’s arm, which seemed no more than a twig, with two iron fingers, and leading him out among the crowd until they were outside the door to the gallery. It had started drizzling again, but moonlight was sifting through the ragged clouds and falling upon the low buildings. “To me, you’re just like a brother,” he began. “You gotta believe me, what I say comes right straight outta my heart. Ask anybody you like in Pietralata, in Tiburtino, ask about me, Amerigo, there ain’t nobody, nobody at all, who don’t know me there, and I’m the most respected guy in the place, and if I can help somebody I help him, I don’t stop and think about it first, and if I need help some time, what’s the difference, that guy helps me, ain’t that the way it is?” Riccetto was about to open his mouth. “Now, why,” Amerigo interrupted, taking hold of his lapel with two fingers, “now, why,” he repeated, shaking his head, such was the force of conviction he felt in what he was about to say, “if somebody asks you a favor, why should you go ahead and do it? Another time, for the sake of argument, it might be you that needs the favor, ain’t that the way it is?” “You’re right,” said Riccetto, “but if I lose these two hundred lire, how am I supposed to eat tomorrow?” Amerigo’s fingers slackened their hold on Riccetto’s lapel. He put his hand to his forehead, shaking his head as if words failed him in trying to get something so simple across. “You don’t understand what I’m trying to tell you,” he said, and he started to laugh. “Tomorrow you make a date with me. What time do you say?” “Oh, I don’t know—three o’clock,” said Riccetto. “Three,” said Amerigo, “at Farfarelli, O.k.?” “Sure,” said Riccetto. “Tomorrow at three at Farfarelli,” said Amerigo, raising his arms. “I’ll see you and I’ll give you your money. How much you got in your pocket?” “Oh, I guess four hundred,” said Riccetto. “Let’s see,” said Amerigo, getting a fresh grip on Riccetto’s shoulder. Riccetto took out the few hundred-lire notes he had in his pants pocket. Amerigo took them and counted them. Then he went back into the room without looking to see if Riccetto was following him. Caciotta was talking to the carter, who was watching the game. Amerigo reached past the backs of the seated players and put some money on the table. And lost again. He bet on another hand, and lost once more. This time no one said anything. Only after some time did Amerigo defend his play to the carter and Caciotta. They stayed there for another half-hour, and then they left, and no one paid any attention to their leaving.
One part of the sky was quite clear, and big stars shone wetly, lost in its vastness, as if on a boundless wall of metal from which insignificant gusts of wind blew toward the earth. In the other direction, when you turned around toward Rome, the weather was still bad, the clouds charged with rain and lightning, but it was lifting near the horizon, which was studded with lights. In still another quarter, right overhead here in Tiburtino, the sky was stretched as if over the funnel of a courtyard, and the frightened moon leaned upon the bright edges of wandering rags of cloud. Down among the identical streets of Tiburtino there was no one stirring, and only from the main street could you hear any sounds. The three walked listlessly toward the Via Tiburtina, among the building lots with wisps of grass pushing up out of the trodden ground, and Caciotta hummed while the other two dragged along their pointed, worn-out black-and-white shoes, wordlessly. “Well, so long,” said Riccetto. Amerigo turned his broad face to him, and his set jaw seemed enormous and white in the moonlight. There was no particular expression on his face, but the swollen mouth, open like a wound, more livid than red, and his discontented eyes left no doubt about the tenor of his thoughts. “We’re going to the Via Tiburtina,” said Riccetto, for the sake of talking, “and there it is, just a couple of steps away, so I’ll be leaving you here.” Amerigo’s twisted face expressed, even more than genuine and natural rage at being crossed, astonishment that anyone should be so witless as to cross him. But these conversations with Riccetto were something you just had to get through, and you had to be patient about it. And Amerigo took it all, but with an expression of such dissatisfaction in his eyes that it sent a shiver up the spine. He began once more, summoning up all his good will. “Now, if we go back again, I know we’ll win, now that I’ve caught on to the game. Understand what I’m telling you?” Riccetto didn’t answer; he looked at Caciotta, whose face in the cool wind was as pink and violet as a Roman onion. “Yeah, but you’d need some money,” he said hoarsely. Amerigo looked at him impatiently, and it seemed as if he were about to shake his head and smack his lips to show that not only he, but anyone in his position, would never be dumb enough to accept such a conclusion. He leaned against the glistening frame of an empty doorway. “Now, if you shell out another two hundred and fifty lire,” he said, as if Riccetto had already admitted to having more money on him, “we get back everything we lost, and we make double that.” His voice grew still more feeble, in contrast to his body, which looked, as he stood in the doorway, like an enormous hog carcass hanging from a hook in front of the butcher’s shop. His eyes, too, had grown small and dull like those of a hanging hog; and the sneer on his handsome face indicated that his patience was growing thin. Riccetto murmured once more, his eyebrows drawn up like a little boy’s, “But I don’t have a single cent left!”
Amerigo sat down on the broken doorstep. “Even if I get ten years in Regina Coeli, I gotta play tonight,” he said in a low voice. Riccetto thought, with a shudder, “It’s our ass now,” and kept quiet so as not to provoke him. But Amerigo, after a moment’s silence that was supposed to emphasize his words, started in again, more hoarsely but louder too, so as to erase that impression, and began his friendly lecture all over again, from the beginning. “Boy, I’ve put in quite a few years in the can!” “Where at? Porta Portese?” asked Caciotta. “Yeah,” said Amerigo. His face had a gloomy look, and his pouting, wrinkled lips were trembling. “They sent me up for sodomy.” “Jesus, who did you play that trick on?” asked Caciotta. “A sheep,” Amerigo said desperately. “And the shepherd saw me doing it, and he told the cops, the bastard.” He was almost at the point of tears, his mouth half-open and his brows drawn up into a forehead that was crisscrossed with premature wrinkles and framed in sculptured curls. “Damn, what beatings I got,” he said bitterly, “what beatings!” His voice had grown shrill, like that of a woman lamenting some old injustice that still makes her suffer. “What beatings!” he said again. “Here, look.” He drew his shirt out from under the waistband of his pants and showed his back. “You can still see the marks.” “What’d they do to you?” Caciotta asked. “The beatings they give me, beatings, the pricks,” said Amerigo, grinding his teeth. “Here, look, you can still see the marks,” he repeated, pulling the shirt all the way up to his neck. His back was naked, broad as a sheet of steel, with bluish reflections on it in the moonlight. There were no marks at all on the smooth tan flesh. Caciotta bent over and examined it conscientiously along the great ridge that ran from the waistband of his pants
to the nape of his neck, hidden by the shirt, and having looked carefully, he went, “Hm, hm,” and straightened up. “Did you see?” said Amerigo in his mother’s exhausted voice. “Can’t see a fucking thing,” said Caciotta. “What do you mean?” said Amerigo. “Take another look.” Caciotta bent over the great back again, and he had to see something this time, considering the baleful look that Amerigo flashed him from out of his anguished face. “Jesus!” he said loudly. Amerigo pulled his shirt down, and straightening up, stuffed the tails into his pants. The mist of tears had dried in his eyes and left them a hard and naked brown. That stuff about the beatings and his plaint had introduced new arguments into the discussion, in the face of which, it was self-evident, Riccetto could only yield, and without another word at that. “Let’s go,” said Amerigo, as if the light had just dawned and he had finally been understood. Since Riccetto still said nothing, Amerigo went up to him and carefully took the lapel of his jacket between his fingers. “Hey, fella, I said let’s go. You’re gonna make me lose my patience,” he said, looking desperate, as if those were words that he had not wanted to say, so that it was all Riccetto’s fault. So they went back to the gambling den, and when they reached the outer stair Riccetto, at a look from Amerigo, silently produced another two hundred and fifty lire. Inside, the game was still going on. No one had noticed their leaving, and no one noticed their return. But before Amerigo had lost everything again, while he was absorbed in the game, Riccetto quietly slipped through the crowd by the sink and disappeared through the door.
The Ragazzi Page 9