The old man assumed a crafty and confidential air that made his white face look even sharper under his limp cap. “I’m hiding it,” he said with a wink, “because the night watchman wants to arrest your friend. I’m giving him a hand. Could be that the watchman’s gone to get help.”
“Fuck you too,” Lenzetta thought, but you never can tell, and he started off at a run, followed by Riccetto, toward the place where they had left Alduccio, and grandpa trailed after them, carrying the axle shaft.
But that jerk Alduccio wasn’t there. They looked in doorways, behind grilles. “Aldo! Aldo!” they yelled. At last Alduccio came running out of a dark alley where he’d been hiding.
“What’s the matter? The cops come by?” Riccetto asked.
“How do I know?” Alduccio said. “I just took off for the alley.” The three did not investigate further but pretended to believe the old man. He was standing nearby, legs apart, looking innocent, still hanging onto the axle shaft. He smiled, and his mouth drew inward over his jaws with their toothless gums.
“O.k., let’s load up,” said Riccetto anxiously. While Alduccio dragged the three-wheeler into the alley for safekeeping, Riccetto and Lenzetta, assisted by the old man, began loading the cart. When it was all loaded, Riccetto winked at Lenzetta, who said thoughtfully to Alduccio, “Say, Aldo, you go on ahead with the cart. This way, if we all go together people will spot that something’s up.” Aldo obeyed, but unwillingly, and protesting a bit. Sulking, but moving carefully, he started to push the cart and lead the march.
The others followed a short distance behind, ready to take off through the alleys and leave him holding the bag if there was an alert. Lenzetta was flushed, and looking at Riccetto with a satisfied grin, he said, nodding toward Alduccio, “Work, slave!” Riccetto lit up at that comment, grinning too, feeling like a big shot too. The old man walked beside them, taking long steps, dragging his canvas shoes along the pavement.
Under his left arm, tucked in tight against his armpit, he carried a rolled-up sack, which gave him a roguish, almost sporting air. “Where you going with the sack?” Lenzetta asked, just to include him in the conversation, Riccetto sneering meanwhile behind his back. “Stealing cauliflower to feed five mouths,” he said. “Five boys?” Lenzetta inquired. “No, five girls,” the old man replied. Lenzetta and Riccetto pricked up their ears. “And how old are they?” Riccetto asked casually, feeling out the ground. Lenzetta began to walk with more conviction, like the donkey that smells the stable. “One’s twenty, one’s eighteen, one’s sixteen, and the other two are still little girls,” said the old man, looking stupid but not missing a thing.
Riccetto and Lenzetta exchanged glances. They walked on a while, and then Lenzetta, after quietly nudging Riccetto, stopped to take a leak.
Riccetto stopped too, and moved alongside Lenzetta, while the old man’s feet took him a few steps farther before he slowed down.
“Let’s dump Alduccio,” Lenzetta whispered swiftly.
“But how?” asked Riccetto, pained.
“Oh, make up some excuse, go on,” said Lenzetta impatiently.
Riccetto was silent for a moment and then, as if he’d had an idea, he said, “Leave it to me,” and after he’d hurriedly buttoned up, he started to run after Aldo, who could be seen far ahead looking like a shadow. But Lenzetta held him back. ”Make him give you the money, too,” he whispered.
“O.k., leave it to me,” Riccetto repeated, starting off at a run.
Lenzetta, arranging his trousers with well-bred composure, caught up with the old man, and out of the corner of his eye watched to see what the other two were up to, down there under a big scaffolding by the outermost fields of Acqua Santa.
Riccetto was saying yes and Alduccio was saying no, Riccetto yes, Alduccio no. But after a while Riccetto came running back, and Alduccio started to push the cart again, bending over the shafts.
“We had him go on to Maranella by himself,” Riccetto felt he had to explain to the old man. “If they saw all three of us together they might catch on to what we’re up to.”
“You did the right thing,” said the old man.
Now they were nearly up to Acqua Santa; on the right were the empty fields and the ponds, and on the left the beginning of the Via dell’Arco di Travertino, that ran straight toward the Porta Furba, and from there to Mandrione and Maranella.
Along the Via dell’Arco di Travertino there were two great collections of shacks, and walking along the road you got a splendid view. There were pink and white shanties, sheds, huts, gypsy wagons without wheels, warehouses—all jumbled together, some spread out among the fields and some piled against the walls of the aqueduct in picturesque disorder.
Among the buildings there was one set right in the clay by the roadside, a little better looking than the others, with a branch over the door* and a signboard on which was written in red, in childish characters, “Wine.” There was still a ray of light showing through a crack in the door. “It’s open,” said Lenzetta, glancing swiftly at Riccetto for support. Riccetto promptly winked, slapping a hand to the bottom of his pocket almost by his pecker. “Say, you in a hurry to pick up that cauliflower, Pop?” asked Lenzetta.
“Not at all, no hurry,” said the old man amiably.
“Then maybe we could both go and give you a hand if you didn’t mind, huh?” said Lenzetta.
“On the contrary,” said grandpa. “Be a pleasure.”
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* The sign of a wineshop.—Trans.
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“I believe you,” Lenzetta said to himself. And then, out loud, “What do you say to a drop of wine first, Pop? That way you get oiled up a little—all that dampness in those fields!”
The old man didn’t find a thing wrong with that, and his eyes gleamed cannily, for, while he played the country cousin, he didn’t mind letting them understand that it was all understood. Nevertheless, before accepting he demurred a little for courtesy’s sake. “You shouldn’t go to all that trouble,” he said, passing the sack from one armpit to the other.
“No trouble at all,” said the boys, scrambling down the clay slope, and since the old man followed after them more slowly, Lenzetta remarked to the tavern wall, “Life is tough if you got tender feet.”
In five minutes the two ne’er-do-wells were already loaded. They began to talk about God and religion. The old man was the audience. Riccetto, blushing with pleasure at his own originality, put the case to Lenzetta, and Lenzetta listened attentively to make it look good. “Say, tell me something. You believe in Mary, the one they call the Madonna, up there?”
“How should I know?” Lenzetta answered promptly. “I never seen her.” And he looked at the old man with satisfaction.
“Well, there are certain facts,” the old man said, “that go to show that the Madonna’s there all right.”
But one particular aspect of the question interested Riccetto. “You do know she was a virgin and she had a son, don’t you?” he said to Lenzetta.
“Jesus,” said Lenzetta, getting even redder, both hands stretching out toward Riccetto, “don’t you think I know that?”
“What you think about it, Pop?” Riccetto asked, pressing on with the investigation. The old man’s face lengthened and he drew his head into his shoulders. “Do you believe that, kid?” he asked, evading the question. Riccetto, perfectly content, started in with his speech. “You got to look at it all according to the point of view. As a human woman she could have actually existed. From the point of view of holiness and virginity, she might not have. Holiness, well, that could be too, but not virginity! Now they’ve invented the fact of artificial children with test tubes, but if a woman has a child with test tubes she’s not a virgin any more. Then there’s faith in Christ, faith in God, and all that. And if you start in reasoning from faith, then you believe in the virginity of the Madonna, but scientifically as far as I’m concerned I don’t see how it can be proved.” He looked at the other two with great satisfaction, as he always did when he recited tha
t speech, which he had learned from a young fellow from Tiburtino, and he looked ready to take on anybody who might contradict him. But Lenzetta grabbed the table edge with both hands and began to make “Pff, pff, pff” noises, like jets of steam issuing from under a loose-fitting lid.
“You look like a movie director,” he said, trying hard not to burst out laughing.
“You ignorant shithead,” said Riccetto, feeling justly offended.
“Let’s have another half-bottle!” Lenzetta cried, and offered him his hand. “O.k.?”
But Riccetto slapped away the proffered hand. “I’ll spit in your eye,” he said.
Lenzetta spread his arms wide. “What do you want to talk about Jesus Christ and the Madonna for, hungry as you are?” he asked, his face as red as a raw cutlet. Then, looking steadily at Riccetto, he burst out laughing. “Why do you want to drink milk when you’ve always drunk pure water right out of the gutter? Right out of the drains.”
“You shut up,” Riccetto answered. “With big feet like yours you can go around town begging.”
But Lenzetta was still staring at him, and, struck with a thought that gave him an irresistible desire to laugh, he cried, shaking both his hands, fingers outspread, before Riccetto’s face, “You remember when we went looking for empty tin cans, and we wanted to sell them?”
Riccetto burst out laughing too. Lenzetta was about to explode. He stood up in order to speak more comfortably. “Don’t you remember when you went to the hospital, to the soup kitchen there, and you got two or three cans—” he imitated Riccetto, looking very humiliated, getting a canful of soup from the hospital porters—“and one guy ate it up on you and another guy tripped you, and you’d been hoping to sell the stuff to starving wrecks like yourself!”
Both boys began to laugh like madmen at the recollection. Lenzetta made a clumsy movement, and as he stamped and roared, something fell at his feet under the table with a dull sound. Riccetto looked, and on the tile floor he saw Cappellone’s Beretta, which had fallen out of Lenzetta’s trousers. “That little bastard,” he thought. “Then it was him that stole my shoes on me in the Villa Borghese!” Lenzetta stooped swiftly under the table and slipped the revolver back under his waistband.
The old man looked like someone who’s just been kicked in the backside and, turning round, sees that his attacker has dislocated his foot and is howling with pain.
“You got any pictures of your daughters?” Lenzetta asked him, straightening up, gay as ever. “If they’re ugly,” he thought, “we’ll make him pay for the wine, and then we’ll cut out.” The old man, his face looking lengthened and puffy with drink under the lamp that was coated with fly-specks, pulled out his wallet, and exploring it with his grubby fingers compartment by compartment, showed them the picture of a little girl dressed for her first Communion.
“What’s she like now?” asked Riccetto, who was still a little annoyed.
“It’s true, this isn’t exactly the way she looks now,” said the old man, and he plunged into the wallet once more. He couldn’t resist showing them his identity card. There he was, all cleaned up, in a black suit, shirt and tie, a self-satisfied look on his face. Antonio Bifoni, son of Virgilio, born in Ferentino 11|3|96. Then there were a couple of small-denomination banknotes, his Communist Party card, two welfare claims, and his unemployment card. At last he pulled out some more photos. Lenzetta and Riccetto dived at them.
“Hey, will you look at that!” Riccetto said softly, almost more in gestures than in words.
“I’ll take this one,” Lenzetta said under his breath, turning away from the old man, “and you take that one.”
To get from the tavern to where they were going, they went by Porta Furba, turned down to Quadraro, through a group of lonely houses that looked like shacks, and arrived at a kitchen garden, bounded on one side by a white path and disappearing on the other side among some fields, with a villa and a pine wood beyond them.
There was a smell of manure and rotten straw, and the strong perfume of fennel, which could be seen spreading out like a green cloud, with the salad greens growing in the middle of the fennel beds, beyond the wire-mesh fence, and among the gaps in the hedges of soppy cane that ran along it.
“Let’s go this way,” said the old man with a werewolf expression on his face, and he moved off, bent double, taking noiseless steps to where the mesh fence ended in a tangle and a paling of wet, uneven poles began. Here there was a breach, a gap, covered over with spiny bushes and a few canes. The old man began scraping and scratching to widen it, down on his knees among the canes, the weeds, the mallows, and rows of spinach, all soaked with dew. They crawled through the gap and slipped into the garden.
The moonlight bathed the entire plot, which was so large that the walls on the far side were out of sight. The moon was high in the sky by this time; it had shrunk in size and appeared not to want to have anything to do with the world, absorbed instead in contemplating what lay beyond. It was as if it were now showing the world only its backside, and from that silvery rear end a great light streamed down, suffusing every object. At the end of the garden the light shone upon peach trees, willows, cherries, and elders, springing up here and there in clumps as hard as wrought iron, twisted and insubstantial in the white dust. Then it raked the garden itself, making it glisten, or else coating it with a gleaming patina, shining on the curved shapes of beets and stalks of greens, half-lit, half in shadow, and on the yellow lettuce beds and the green-gold plots of leeks and endive. And here and there lay heaps of straw, and gardening tools dropped by the field hands, in the most picturesque disorder, for the earth did so much on its own that you didn’t have to break your back tending it.
But the old man had spotted the cauliflower, and he didn’t care about anything else. Followed by his two partners, he stepped over the ditch without wasting time and entered the furrow, a little canal with an inch of water in it in the middle of the plot from which furrows stretched right and left, also carrying water, and dividing the plot into so many squares. Along the line traced by the furrows were the rows of cauliflower, each one as big as a peacock, stretching ten or fifteen feet. “Let’s go,” said the old man, his knife already open in his hand. And starting at one border, he plunged into the line of cauliflower that grew as high as his waist, and began to cut them loose. He cut them and stuffed them into the sack, using his hands and feet. The two accomplices, watching from behind, looked at each other and burst out laughing, louder and louder, until their snickers could have been heard in Quadraro. “Hey, keep it quiet!” said the old man, rising anxiously from among the bluish cauliflower heads. After a moment, as the first flush of enthusiasm subsided, they fell silent. They decided to do a little something and plucked up a couple of cauliflower each, without leaving the ditch, picking the first ones that came to hand. They slipped their booty, pulled from the rich earth, stalk and all, into the old man’s sack, squashing the cauliflower, half-spilling the load, and giving it a kick now and then. “Take it easy,” the old man said. Paying no attention to him, the boys amused themselves by stuffing the sack with as many cauliflower as they could, laughing and laughing. At last the old man picked up the sack, heaved it onto his back, and went off at a zigzag toward the gap in the fence. But Lenzetta called very calmly, “Hey, wait a second. I gotta do something.” And without waiting for an answer, he unbuckled his belt, dropped his pants, and heedlessly commenced to let fly upon the wet grass. Seeing how matters stood, Riccetto and the old man started to follow his example, and all three were lined up in the furrow, their butts in the moonlight, squatting by a big cherry tree.
Lenzetta, finishing his business, began to sing. Then the old man gave him a cross-eyed look, squatting by his loaded sack, and said in a worried voice, “Say, what’s-your-name, did you know that my nephew did six months for a cauliflower, a single one? What are you trying to do, get us all locked up?”
Lenzetta fell silent at those sensible words. “Say, Pop,” Riccetto said then, taking advantage of
the confidential atmosphere, while Lenzetta was already pulling up his pants, “is your daughter engaged?”
Lenzetta began to laugh, making his usual “pff, pff, pff” sound, blaming his laughter on the stench and screwing up his nose. The old man, sedulously playing dumb as was called for by the situation, answered affably, “Nope, she’s not engaged.” They pulled up their pants, fastened their belts, and on their hands and knees followed Lenzetta, who was already through the gap in the paling.
Once they were on the road, the two little bastards were unwilling to let the old man do all the work, you know, and they insisted on shouldering the bulging sack themselves. They carried it by turns, very cheerful and insouciant, and making plenty of noise, as they walked along out of breath and cursing to themselves because of the effort it took, behind Sor Antonio —who, having had to play sucker and patsy, now had his own patsies to carry the load for him.
When, step by step, they had put Porta Furba behind them and had penetrated deep into a jungle of gardens, roads, wire-mesh fences, villages of hovels, vacant lots, construction sites, groups of tenements, and ponds, and were almost up by the Borgata degli Angeli, between Tor Pignattara and Quadraro, the old man said, with a polite and worldly air, “Why don’t you drop in at my place?” “Thanks very much,” said the two sweating derelicts, and they thought, “Wouldn’t it just be the last straw if he hadn’t invited us, the old creep!”
The Borgata degli Angeli was deserted at that hour, and among the regular rows of the houses of the poor, looking like big packing cases, could be seen, farther down, four dirt roads heaped with rubbish, and above, the cloudless sky and the moon beginning to set.
The street door of the tenement where the old man lived was open. They went in and began to climb a flight of stairs, two, three, with many landings, doors, windows opening on inner courtyards, everything grimy, children’s dirty drawings done on the walls with a bit of coal. The old man rang the bell at number seventy-four, with his two attendants waiting behind him, and in a little while the eldest girl came to the door.
The Ragazzi Page 13