“What’s there to tell? I told you already. Same old stuff.”
“Say, do you know Caciotta, the one who lives in the new development?” asked Riccetto.
“What do you mean, do I know him?” Alduccio answered. “Sure I know him.”
“What’s he doing?” Riccetto inquired. Alduccio’s handsome face became lively. Not saying anything, with the tips of his thumb and forefinger he pinched the skin of his cheek beneath his eye. That meant Caciotta was in the can, in Porta Portese.
“Jesus!” Riccetto murmured, laughing inwardly.
“They picked him up in Fileni’s joint, while he was gambling,” Alduccio explained.
“I know, I know,” Riccetto said wisely, “I was there too.” Alduccio looked at him with interest. “Amerigo is dead,” he said. Riccetto sat up on his elbows and stared. The corners of his mouth trembled as though he were smiling in amusement; it was exciting news and he was very curious. “What did you say?” “He’s dead, he’s dead,” Alduccio repeated, pleased to be imparting this unexpected piece of intelligence. “He died yesterday at the Polyclinic,” he added. That same damned night that Riccetto had cut out from Fileni’s place, Caciotta and the others had all been picked up; they hadn’t tried to resist. But Amerigo had let himself be led out by two carabinieri who were holding him by the arms, and as soon as they were out on the balcony he had slammed them against the wall and made a jump of some nine feet into the courtyard. He had hurt his knee but he had managed all the same to drag himself forward along the wall of the project. The carabinieri had fired, and they had hit him in the shoulder, but he had managed to reach the banks of the Aniene. They were on the point of grabbing him there, but, bleeding as he was, he threw himself into the water to cross the river and hide among the gardens on the far shore, and get away toward Ponte Mammolo or Tor Sapienza. But in the middle of the stream he had lost consciousness, and the carabinieri had grabbed him and taken him to the station dripping blood and mud like a sponge, so they had to transfer him to the hospital and set a guard over him. After a week his fever went away, and he tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists with the glass from a tumbler, but that time too they saved his life. Then some ten days later, before Alduccio and Riccetto had met here at Acqua Santa, he had thrown himself from the second-floor window. He had lingered on for a week after that, and finally had gone on to his rest.
“His funeral’s tomorrow,” said Alduccio.
“Son of a bitch,” Riccetto said emphatically under his breath. Lenzetta, to show that he wasn’t easily impressed and that his motto was “Worry about your own fucking troubles,” started in singing,
“Two-bit whores, two-bit whores …”
and stretched out on the grass as best he could, with his fingers intertwined beneath the weight of his big cauliflower head.
Riccetto, however, thought it over for a while and then decided that it was his duty to attend Amerigo’s funeral. It was true that he had hardly known him, but Amerigo was a friend of Caciotta’s, and besides, he felt like it. “I’m going to Pietralata tomorrow,” he told Alduccio, “but don’t tell anybody so my father won’t find out.”
Amerigo was stretched out on the bed in his new blue suit, white shirt, and black shoes. They had crossed his arms over his chest, or rather over that double-breasted jacket that he had been so proud of for a couple of Sundays, going around Pietralata with his tough walk. He had gotten the money from a man he had mugged in the Via dei Prati Fiscali; he had lifted something like thirty thousand lire off him, and then, just for his own satisfaction, he had stomped him bloody. That’s how he had come by the blue suit, and he wore it around, looking meaner than ever. You had to watch out how you looked at him; his friends in the neighborhood, who were cowardly and hypocritical with him, knew how to butter him up without being too obvious about it, but there were some young boys who didn’t know him, whom he met in the Communist Party dance hall, or in some poolroom, and who went home with their eyes swelled up and their gums bleeding. It was their good luck that Amerigo had been officially warned not to carry a knife. The trousers of the suit were as wide as a Dutchman’s, and the jacket was broad and full in the shoulders. The collar of his white shirt was unbuttoned, and his hair was brushed back. He had submitted patiently to being laid out, like a sacrificial victim, his hands crossed over the double-breasted jacket, but the shirt collar was still unbuttoned like a hood’s, framing the face that had looked like a corpse’s even while it was alive, so much so that it seemed as if he had just fallen asleep, and he was frightening still. When his nap was over, he’d quit being so easygoing, and he’d push some faces in for having gotten him up like that. Sullen and still, he lay in the bed that was too small for him, his curly mop shiny with hair oil on the gray pillow.
Riccetto came with some friends from Tiburtino to take a look at him, and went into the little room on the ground floor of the house. In front of the entrance to the house, which had no door, and had two stairways, to the right and left, there was a small group of people wearing dark clothes: The entire Lucchetti family, come to fulfill their duty as relatives and as actors in the events of the day, were wearing their holiday clothes—bright-colored in the case of the little children and adolescents, and more suitable for a dance than for a funeral in the case of the young men. The neighbors living in the same building, ten or twelve to a room, so that they almost amounted to a neighorhood all by themselves, were standing a little farther off, and farther still were Amerigo’s friends, all dressed up. There was Arduino, whose nose and one eye had been blown away by a grenade when he was a kid, the boy with T.B. who lived in number 12, and Rats, and the Neapolitan, and Capece, and Sor’Anita’s boy, who played the guitar and sang, especially on nights when they had come back home from pulling some job or other, and were up late dividing the take, arguing, or taking a walk in the mud, the moon shining down on the squatters’ shacks. There were a few younger boys, too, leaning lazily against the house wall, talking among themselves in low voices, or watching the little children playing ball farther down, in an open space in the center of Pietralata.
Riccetto and the others had scarcely entered the room where the dead boy lay than they were ready to leave. It was damp and dark in there, as if it were winter, and Amerigo’s aunts and sisters, all of them fat, filled the room so that you couldn’t even move. They glanced at the corpse, and, embarrassed because they hadn’t done so since the day of their first Communion, they made the sign of the cross, and went back out into the street, where the men were standing talking. In the midst of them, but with a preoccupied air, like someone busy with his own affairs, was Alfio Lucchetti, the youngest of Amerigo’s uncles, dark as Amerigo had been, and with the same cheekbones and curly hair, but taller and thinner. He was the one who had stabbed the owner of the bar by the tram stop three years before, getting him in the belly with a bayonet, and now people said he was ruining himself for the sake of a prostitute he was keeping in Testaccio. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t talking to the others as much as coming out with a word or two now and again, looking remote, as if he were hinting at something, and shaking his head. And all of a sudden he would break off, as if he didn’t want to discuss his affairs with all those people standing around listening. He looked beyond the circle of heads, his hands buried under his black coat in the pockets of his gray pin-striped trousers, grinding his teeth so hard that his jaw muscles swelled and subsided, just as Amerigo’s used to do, and so tall that if he raised a hand he could touch the electric wires.
He was stewing quietly, brooding before them all over the secret that nearly everybody in the neighborhood had an inkling of. There were a number of things behind Amerigo’s death whose implicit menace was reflected in every face there. Alfio’s face, under his gray stubble, fairly glowed with it; his skin was very dark near the roots of the hair that grew low upon his forehead, and his boyish neck rose out of a turned-down white collar. It showed as well in the faces of the other uncles and cousins, filled with t
heir sense of duty and the wordless bitterness that made them the most important people in Pietralata, determined not to talk, to keep their opinions on the state of affairs that arose from Amerigo’s death in the family, or at most making some partial revelation or other in allusive and threatening language. Then, among the other young punks there was Arduino, a piece of black cloth hiding the scarred eye-socket but not the remains of his nose, and Sor’Anita’s boy, and Rats, and Capece, all with the look of beasts of prey in their shifty eyes, and beneath their serious air a hint of quiet enjoyment, like soldiers taking a shower. Alduccio picked up on the fly the half-sentences exchanged by Alfio and the other men. His face was bathed in a dignified look, and twisting his mouth and nodding with his head drawn into his shoulders, he muttered, “It’s their fucking business.”
“Whose?” asked Riccetto alertly, sounding a bit naive in his curiosity. Alduccio didn’t answer him.
“Whose? Hey, whose?” Riccetto repeated.
“The guy that was talking,” Alduccio said, noticing him in a kindly but abstracted fashion. Riccetto thought immediately of the new building and its gambling joint, and he didn’t say another word. He looked at Alfio with great respect. Meanwhile, Alfio had taken a step or two, leaving the group behind, and he was standing there, silent and self-assured, his hands buried in his trousers pockets.
The weeping of the women could be heard coming from within. The men, on the other hand, betrayed no sign of emotion; on the contrary, the features of the beardless youths, and the old bastards too, showed traces of amusement. At Pietralata, simply as a matter of good breeding, nobody showed sympathy for the living. You can imagine whether they gave a fuck for the dead.
The priest came in hurriedly, not looking at the faces around him. Behind him trotted two boys as skinny as starved cats, dredged up out of some of the ragpickers’ shacks scattered here and there in the burned-over fields and among the garbage heaps on the outskirts of Pietralata. They trotted along in their surplices, swinging the censer, making their way through the people standing in the broiling sun among the houses and shacks, or walking around, or playing, or calling out. The children kicking the ball, running after it like a swarm of hornets, dressed in their beggars’ rags, went on yelling in the distance, in the violet light, and in the bar by the tram stop there were the usual comings and goings of people who were idle at that hour. They jabbered away, yapping like dogs in the half-empty bar, or leaning against the dried-out young trees or the door frames, their faces leering, their thumbs buried in the waistbands of their beltless trousers, pushing them down till the crotches were at the level of their knees. Others stood around in the courtyards, under the dirty windows, near the remains of junk that had been sold to the peasants bit by bit during the war. Now they were all busy watching the funeral from afar. The priest entered the house, did what he had to do, and came out in a short time, followed by his two puppies, the crowd of women, and the coffin carried by the men. It was placed in the black car, and the cortege, on foot, went slowly down the Via di Pietralata. The marchers passed by the bar, keeping a bus that was at the stop from moving on again; then by an open stretch with two or three merry-go-rounds set upon its hillocks, by the clinic, naked as a prison, by scorched fields, pink shacks, shanties, a factory so rundown that it looked as if it had just been bombed; and then they reached the foot of the Monte del Pecoraro, near the Via Tibertina and the broken ground of the abandoned quarries.
“What do we do now?” Riccetto asked Alduccio in a low voice, from among the straggling mourners, some falling behind, some up in front escorting the automobile and the priest. “How should I know?” said Alduccio, slouching along with his hands in his pockets under his billowing shirt tails. They were walking very slowly at the end of the procession, which was itself moving more slowly now; but the boys walked more slowly still, and every now and then they had to hurry to catch up again. They walked stooped over, abstracted, looking as if their feet were hurting. Riccetto said with a pained air, “I sure didn’t know funerals were such a drag. Jesus, what a drag!” “Me neither,” said Alduccio, glancing at him. When their eyes met, and each saw the figure his companion was cutting in the midst of the silent cortege, they wanted to laugh, and they turned their eyes away and stretched their neck muscles trying to control themselves and not cause a scandal. The air was as soft as oil, and the pure outlines of things, the warm wind that seemed to bear an April somnolence, made it seem as if the day were a holiday—one of the first Sundays in the season of fair weather, right after Easter, when people begin to go to Ostia. Even the traffic on the Via Tiburtina seemed noiseless, deadened, as if it were enclosed in a bell jar, in the sunshine that, though colorless on the low walls and on a gray garbage dump, burned golden on the slopes of the Monte del Pecoraro. Inside the fort, the bersaglieri bugle gaily sounded mess call.
In front of the bar on the corner formed by the Via Tiburtina, after a brief pause, and with its accustomed disorder, the little procession broke up. The funeral car started up, and, followed by the taxi carrying the most important of the Lucchetti clan, went off at full speed toward Verano.
5 • The Warm Nights
Panza piena nun crede ar diggiuno …* —G. G. Belli
Meanwhile, Lenzetta was waiting for Riccetto and Alduccio, sitting in the dust by a low wall, dressed to kill in his velveteen pants and his red-and-black-striped jersey, which, according to him, knocked their eyes out in Maranella. He was dripping with sweat because he had taken a kick or two at the ball with some boys who were still playing below him in a small field between the Via dell’Acqua Bullicante and Pigneto. Above the wall, squatting on the tin roof of her shanty, which looked like a sheep pen, and enjoying the view, was Elina, with two hoops of phony gold dangling from her earlobes, and in her arms her smallest baby, who was whimpering. Lenzetta paid no attention to her, for he was absorbed in contemplating life, and every once in a while cursing Riccetto for not having shown up. But he was mildly happy. He sang, his wrinkled neck pressed against the crumbling wall, now and then bringing down a bit of plaster or dust because he moved his head with great emotion from left to right, from right to left, slowly, as he sang. His eyes were half-closed, and since he was singing in a low voice, as if he were in the confessional, or as if he wanted to give just a small sample of what he could have done as far as singing goes, anyone who was more than four steps away would only have seen his mouth opening and closing, and the cords in his neck drawn so taut that they stuck out on both sides of his windpipe.
_____
* The full belly doesn’t believe in hunger.”—Trans.
_____
He interrupted himself frequently, right in the middle of a trill, to yell something at those who were playing ball, dogged and panting. One of them, barely thirteen, was smoking a butt as he played; another lay stretched out on the ground exhausted, jeering at those who were running around.
“Hey, dead-on-your-feet!” Lenzetta cried, but not too loudly, so as not to expend energy. “You can’t even stand up, what do you expect from us?” the goalie answered, standing idle between the posts, leaning forward, his pants torn and half-unbuttoned, making a magaphone with his hands, which were sheathed in gloves picked up from a rubbish heap. The one who was stretched out on the ground got up and walked out onto the road, abandoning the game and the boys who were knocking themselves out playing. He pulled up his pants, took off his dirty shirt and slung it over his shoulder, and went to meet another boy like himself who was coming along, gay as a lark, carrying a bottle of milk under his arm. They began to play marbles right near Lenzetta, below where Elina sat on the sheet-metal roof, outlined against the white sky like the statue of the Madonna in a procession. “Fuck you guys,” Lenzetta said once more, in an angry voice, meaning Riccetto and Alduccio; but for all his annoyance he wasn’t too much out of sorts, disposed as he was to say the hell with everything. The little boy who had just come up and was chattering merrily as he played, even when he got angry at the other bo
y who was trying to take advantage of him, appealed to Lenzetta, who took him under his wing. The other boy suddenly started to behave himself and play fair, without trying to cheat the little one. They squatted down, took aim, pock! with the palms of their hands on the ground; the marble skidded into the hole. Lenzetta looked on paternally. When the little boy won, he did a dance around the milk bottle which had been left lying on its side on the ground; and then he got back into position at once, with his legs spread and his seat on his heels, shooting for the hole.
“You beat, eh, kid?” Lenzetta said in his condescending voice. The other player was bitter about losing, and stealthily began to win. “Hey, you letting him rob you like that?” Lenzetta said jokingly. Then an empty hearse went by at full speed, racing by the big apartment houses and then among the muddy hedges of Acqua Bullicante.
“So long, sweetheart!” Lenzetta yelled, by way of commentary on the corpse that the hearse was going to pick up someplace. And suddenly he remembered Riccetto, who had also gone off to a funeral. “That shithead,” he said, flushing with anger.
Lenzetta had left home because he was scared of his big brother. And he was right to be scared; his brother had pulled one on him that he didn’t even like to think about, and he’d spit in his eye if he could. Not that he’d behaved badly to him, morally speaking. Morally? What the fuck did he and his brother have to do with morality? To tell the absolute truth, it had been a question of honor, not just some stupid argument over nothing at all. What the hell had come over Lenzetta that night? Well, he must still have been punchy from the beating he’d got, first at the police station and then in jail. When he’d been sent to the can—Regina Coeli, not Porta Portese, because though he looked like a kid he was already eighteen—scratching his curly head, he’d said to himself, “Jesus, it’s my ass now.” And he was right, for one of the first things he heard when he got inside, from a consumptive who looked like Lazarus fresh from the tomb, was, “What a beautiful ass, kid.” But it was his good luck that his brother, Lenzetta number one, was one of the most influential cons in Regina Coeli; out of respect for his brother they let him alone, cute as he was. After a couple of weeks he got out on a conditional discharge, and he went back to Torpignattara. The first thing his mother said to him was, “You don’t work, you don’t eat, right?” “Hey, let me rest up a little, for Christ’s sake! I just got out of the can,” he said, cupping his hands under his chin. And that night he went off to have a good time with his friends at the Bar del Tappeto Verde, also called the Knife-in-the-Back Bar, where the group that used to call itself the Maranella Vice League met, boys of around sixteen who had just started to haunt the bars and shoot pool. He bragged a little to them, giving himself airs because he’d been in Regina Coeli and henceforth rated a certain amount of respect. They drank a half-glass of wine apiece and went off to sleep stone drunk.
The Ragazzi Page 11