She was a pretty girl, barely twenty, wearing a nightdress that fell straight down from her shoulders. She was all rumpled, her eyes swollen with sleep, her flesh warm. When she saw the two guests, she slipped behind a dilapidated screen that stood in the middle of the hallway.
Antonio went in, stood the sack against the screen, and called in a loud voice, “Hey, Nadia!” No one came out, but from the other side of the wall you could hear the whispering noises women make when there are three or four of them together.
“Jesus,” Riccetto thought, “what they got in there anyway, a tribe?”
“Hey, Nadia!” the old man called again.
You could hear louder shufflings, and then out came the eldest girl again, with her nightgown set to rights, wearing shoes, her hair combed.
“Meet some friends of mine,” said Antonio. Nadia came forward smiling, bashful, keeping one hand at the neck of her gown and stretching out the other to them, with its slim little fingers soft and white as butter; the two friends grabbed at it immediately.
“Claudio Mastracca,” said Riccetto, shaking that pretty little hand.
“Alfredo de Marzi,” said Lenzetta, doing the same, his face reddening and softening, as it did in moments of emotion. The girl was so bashful that you could see she was on the point of tears, especially since they were all four standing motionless, staring at each other.
“Sit down,” said Antonio, and he led them through a doorway covered with a curtain into the kitchen. Between the stove and the sideboard, among four or five chairs, there was a cot against the wall, and two little girls were sleeping in it, head to foot, red and sweaty, with the sheets, more gray than white, twisted around them. On the table were frying pans and dirty dishes, and a cloud of flies, awakened by the light, swarmed and droned as if it were midday.
Nadia had followed them, and she was standing to one side near the doorway.
“Don’t mind the way the place looks,” said Antonio. “This is a working man’s house.”
“You should see mine!” said Lenzetta with a giggle, to encourage him, but as a little kid who was used to talking with other dirty little kids might say it. Riccetto too laughed at his friend’s feeble attempt. Lenzetta, inspired, went on without scruples, as if he were in a discussion in the Knife-in-the-Back Bar, pissing sarcasm out of both eyes: “Our kitchen at home, you’d think it was a shithouse, and the mice hold conventions in the bedroom!”
Meanwhile, Antonio had come to a sudden decision. He darted through the doorway and dragged the sack of cauliflower into the kitchen, stowing it beneath the sink with a satisfied air.
“These two fine young fellows have been giving me a hand,” he told his daughter. “Otherwise, when do you think I could have brought these things here? Christmas, maybe!”
At that sally from her father, Nadia’s chin began to tremble, though she was doing her best to smile. She looked as if she would burst out crying, and turned her face away.
“Oh, come on,” said Lenzetta expansively, sticking out his stomach and raising his arms, “you don’t want to cry about a thing like that.”
But the girl, as if she had been waiting for just those words, began to cry in earnest, and ran behind the screen.
“You little idiot! You half-wit!” someone yelled from behind the wall after a moment.
“That’s my wife,” said the old man.
Indeed, in another minute she came into the room, also in her nightgown, but nicely combed and her chignon stuck full of hairpins, Adriana by name, preceded by two fine protuberances that put the sack of cauliflower to shame. “The mother’s better-looking than the girls,” Riccetto thought. She came wheeling into the kitchen, still vibrating with scorn, continuing the speech she had started inside. “That little imbecile. She starts crying because you got to manage in order to live, look at that, will you? With times being what they are nowadays! I don’t know who that girl of mine takes after.”
She stopped short, somewhat calmer, examining with two brief glances the somewhat shopworn guests presented for her inspection.
“I want you to meet some friends of mine,” said the old man.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said, frowning a bit, and complying with the formalities hurriedly. “Claudio Mastracca,” Riccetto repeated. “Alfred di Marzi,” Lenzetta repeated. The necessary parenthesis of greetings once out of the way, she started in again on the matters nearest her heart, although in a more confidential voice. “Where could you find a girl of twenty crying like a baby, and for what, I ask you? For four lousy cauliflowers. Will you tell me what there is to be ashamed of in that?” And she lifted her head in a gesture of defiance, her eyes aflame, her hands on her hips, confronting an invisible audience, probably composed of gentry. “Hey, Nadia,” she called, thrusting her head through the doorway, “Nadiaaaa!”
Meanwhile the two little girls who were sleeping head to foot woke up, and lying there open-eyed, they began to take everything in, happily. Nadia came back after a while, still bashful, wiping her eyes with one hand, and smiling over her foolish conduct earlier, as if to say, “Please don’t mind me!” “You idiot!” her mother repeated, still in that defiant voice, for the benefit of those persons she had in mind. “Would you mind telling me what there is to be ashamed of?”
“And don’t we go robbing stuff ourselves?” asked Lenzetta, subtle as ever, to give her morale a boost. “We’re unemployed, that’s what we are.”
“Nothing to wonder at,” Riccetto added, almost in a drawing-room voice. “Everybody steals, some more, some less.”
These consolations were just about enough to make the girl start bawling again, but luckily at that moment her sister, the eighteen-year-old, came in all dressed up. She had taken so long to put in an appearance because she had been putting on her good dress, the black silk one, and she had even put on some lipstick. She was counting on the tactical surprise of her arrival, and she came forward modestly. “I want you to meet these two fine boys, friends of mine,” the old man announced ceremoniously for the third time. “This is my other daughter.”
“Lucian-na,” she drawled, looking kittenish like the girls in the magazines.
“Claudio Mastracca,” “Alfredo di Marzi,” said the two fine boys.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said, smoothing her hair back with one hand.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” mumbled Riccetto and Lenzetta, pleased and flushed as two turkey cocks. A moment later the third daughter showed up too, a redhead with freckles and a ribbon in her hair who didn’t come into the kitchen but stationed herself half-in and half-out to watch the two fine boys wordlessly, like the two little girls in the cot.
And as a matter of fact, she was hardly more than a little girl herself, standing there in her flowered dress, loose as a friar’s gown, and beneath it her two bony little legs. Meanwhile her mother had begun her off-stage complaining again, driven to speak by profound, deep-rooted conviction, and God knows why and whom she had it in for.
“You’re absolutely right, ma’am,” Lenzetta said when she had finished. “It’s only natural.” But his warmth arose for another reason—he was deeply stirred by that dairy she carried around with her.
“What can we offer you?” Antonio asked. “Would you have some coffee?”
“Don’t bother,” said Riccetto, while Lenzetta pricked up his ears at the suggestion. “You think we’d let you go to any trouble for us?” Riccetto added, with a gay and unexpected air of contempt for the starvelings they were. Antonio hadn’t noticed that at the word “coffee” the four women, and even the little girls in bed, had looked at one another. So he insisted. “What do you mean, trouble? On the contrary. It’s a pleasure,” he said, dragged headlong by courtesy. The glances around him reflected dismay. Adriana opened her mouth halfway as if she meant to speak, but she closed it again and stood mute, her daughters watching her with apprehension and feigned indifference.
“Well, how about that cup of coffee?” Antonio asked his wi
fe, full of his duty as the master of the house.
She didn’t stir, standing among the girls who were looking now at her, now at one another, Nadia on the point of bursting into tears again and Luciana displaying an embarrassed little smile, tossing her head so as to settle the hair behind her shoulders. Adriana, shaking her head rapidly, and putting a hand to her bosom, said, “As far as the coffee’s concerned, I’ll be glad to fix it, only—what can I say—we forgot to buy sugar.” Antonio looked stunned. “Antonio, what can you expect?” his wife said. “With all these worries, I don’t have my head screwed on right any more.”
“What’s all the fuss?” Riccetto said swiftly, still sticking to his policy of completely undervaluing himself and his companion. “It’s fine for us without sugar.”
Lenzetta agreed with a laugh, red blotches all over his face. At this escape route, the entire Bifoni family felt its courage revive. Saying, “I’ll fix it right away,” Adriana picked up the coffeepot and lit the stove, attended by her daughters, and these activities spread such enthusiasm about that while the two fine young fellows and Antonio chatted affably, even the little girls emerged from under the sheets in their nighties and began to make a racket all over the room.
The coffee was ready quickly and was served to Riccetto and Lenzetta in two cups that didn’t match, while Antonio and his wife drank theirs from large, chipped cups. Blowing on the coffee to cool it, Riccetto said, “We’ll drink up, and then we won’t trouble you further.” “No trouble at all,” said Antonio grandly. Adriana, tasting her coffee, didn’t conceal her disgust, even spreading her hands before her. “What swill!” the two fine young fellows thought, suppressing a shiver of nausea under an air of cordiality and good breeding, sipping the coffee cheerfully, and at last setting the cups down on the table among the flies.
“Time for us to go,” said Riccetto.
“What, so soon?” asked Antonio, astonished, as if instead of being two or three in the morning it was just after dinner.
“Be noon in a little while,” said Lenzetta.
“Stick around a while, won’t you?” the old man insisted, reaching out his arms.
“We’ll say good-by to you,” Riccetto said swiftly, extending his hand to the old man with a manly and somewhat roguish air.
“Well, I’ll go a ways with you,” said the old boy. Long and white as a strip of dried codfish, he went ahead of them to the door, and waited on the landing while they said their good-bys, sedulously shaking hands one by one with Adriana, Nadia, Luciana, and the last grown daughter, who came forward for the operation, still mute as a fish, but sharing in the polite buzz of farewells. She extended her hand without batting an eyelash, without saying a word, after the other two had already gone off about their business behind the screen, by this time wearing the expressions they had when they were alone.
Antonio went down the stairs as if exhausted, taking them on the slant, moving noiselessly in his canvas shoes. Riccetto nudged Lenzetta’s elbow, taking advantage of Antonio’s being ahead of them. Lenzetta looked at him. “Give me the money!” Riccetto said in a low, ferocious voice, for fear that Lenzetta would refuse. Indeed, Lenzetta’s face darkened, and he made believe he hadn’t heard. “Don’t play dumb!” said Riccetto in the same hollow voice, expressing himself with his eyes more than in words, grinding his teeth, throwing a furious look at Lenzetta. “Give me the money, come on!” Lenzetta felt obliged to give it to him, and he unwillingly got it out of his pocket. They reached the bottom of the stairs in the dilapidated entryway and the old man opened the street door. It was already getting light outside; beyond the forty packing-crates in rows in the Borgata degli Angeli, beyond Quadraro, beyond the stretch of countryside, beyond the misty shapes of the Alban hills, a rosy light was suffusing the sky as if from behind a glass casement, and it seemed that, down on the other side of the skyline, there was another Rome silently catching fire.
“Well, I’ll say good-by to you, boys,” Antonio said. “I’m going to bed now.”
“Of course,” Lenzetta said. “We wouldn’t want you to go to any more trouble.”
The old man smiled, his head down, chomping his jaws as if he were chewing a mouthful of dry chestnuts.
“Here, take this, Pop,” Riccetto said quickly, handing him one hundred and fifty lire in a crumpled heap of worn notes. Sor Antonio looked at the money, examining it carefully. “Oh, no, I couldn’t,” he said.
“Go on, take it,” Lenzetta said encouragingly.
The old man debated with them a little longer, but nevertheless he finally took the hundred and fifty lire.
“Jesus, all that sunshine!” Lenzetta said when the old man had gone back into the house and the boys were alone among the buildings. And indeed, a thin, clear violet light had begun to shine in the open spaces of the streets, between the buildings, reflected from that remote invisible conflagration beyond the hills, while among the cornices two or three owls took flight, hooting.
Lenzetta, listening to them abstractedly, his thoughts a mixture of the fine-young-fellows-role they had played, the Bifoni family, and death, felt his knees go weak, and he stood still for a moment, preoccupied, and as if withdrawn in contemplation; then he lifted his knee to his belly and loosed a fart. But he had to force it, because it didn’t come from the heart.
In the Knife-in-the-Back Bar, the Bar del Tappeto Verde, between shots or watching the game, leaning wearily against the walls of the dreary room which had two pool tables squeezed into it and a ceiling so low that if you raised your arm you hit it, the beardless delinquents of Maranella had another topic among the many on which they could deliver an opinion: Riccetto’s engagement.
According to how it struck them at the moment, they might discuss it in a friendly tone, indirectly, taking it all very seriously, and at other times as if they couldn’t care less. Riccetto, on his part, felt himself to be the most interesting person around; as such, he felt obliged to buy himself at least a new pair of pants. Affable, exchanging pleasantries, but keeping up an air of mystery about his private affairs, he came along with his new pants riding on hips so slim that he looked like a nail taking a walk. They were gray and pegged, with pockets cut on the slant, and he walked slouching forward with his hands on his hips and his thumbs hooked into his belt, dragging his feet a little with his weary and somewhat stupefied plowboy air. The pants looked like a couple of pipes below his butt, and they moved as he walked, one pipe here, one there, one up, one down; and when he stopped, leaning cross-legged against the wall or on the edge of the pool table, they made one solid trunk, taut, calm, menacing. For the rest, he was still sleeping, with Lenzetta, in the oil drums in the field by the Borgata Gordiani. But those living arrangements were to last but a short time longer, since they were ill-suited to his new circumstances.
Lenzetta knew of a place in the Via Taranto on the top floor of a seven- or eight-story building—a landing that opened at one end, through a lopsided door that was always ajar, into a kind of loft where the water tanks were, and at the other end into a vacant apartment whose door seemed to have been shut for months. They carried a bunch of newspapers up there, hiding them by day among the water tanks, and all their stuff, and used the landing for a bedroom.
The engagement implied a responsible attitude, and Riccetto —glad to play the role of responsible young man, which was the one that got him the most favorable comments in the Knife-in-the-Back Bar and gave him the most pleasure—had gone to work. He worked as helper to a fish-seller who had a stand in the little market in Maranella. And on Sunday, playing his part to the hilt, he mysteriously gave up roaming around with Lenzetta and the others in Centocelle or in Rome itself, and took his girl to the movies. Now his girl wasn’t the twenty-year-old or even the eighteen-year-old, but the redhead with freckles, who was a bit on the ugly side too, the one who hadn’t said a word that night when the two friends visited Sor Antonio but had just mooned around by the dirty curtain in the doorway. When he was with her and they weren’t neckin
g—and they didn’t do much of that because they were never really alone, and at least one of them minded that a lot— Riccetto was so bored that he sometimes felt like cursing. Then he’d find any old excuse for picking a quarrel, and he always ended up giving her a slap. He couldn’t wait to get to the Knife-in-the-Back Bar and see Lenzetta and the gang of hoods. He’d show up looking satisfied, naturally, like a man whose affairs are all in order, who has outlived all his worries, and has nothing more to expect from life.
At the same time, however, that he played the serious young man, he did not give up the pleasures and preoccupations of a regular tough, just like the rest of the boys. When it came to raising hell, he was always there, and he took part in the brawls they got up now and then at the expense of the owner of the Knife-in-the-Back Bar, who was a good-natured slob, and the next morning, cleaning up the mess, he groaned and moaned with the rest. Since Lenzetta and some of the others had already done time in Porta Portese, they knew all about the “modern” methods for straightening out young delinquents—which they were pleased and proud to be. So, because the owner’s sister gave them a hard time, and in order to absolve themselves and keep their consciences clear—not that they gave a good goddamn but because they had a convenient way of doing it—they used to say that they got up those little ruckuses so as to punish her because she didn’t know how to deal with them. Besides, the poor pay Riccetto got for being assistant fish-man didn’t go very far. How are you going to keep to the straight and narrow like that? When there was something to steal, he stole it, naturally, starved as he was for cash. And now there was that ring he had to buy the girl. So he and Lenzetta decided to pull off something big, to hook enough axle shafts and scrap iron to keep them loaded for at least a month.
Four of them took off, Riccetto, Lenzetta, Alduccio, and a boy named Lello, a friend of Lenzetta’s, one of the gang in the Knife-in-the-Back Bar. They took the handcart along.
The Ragazzi Page 14