As they entered the Via Casilina, the wind began to blow and columns of white dust and trash began to rise here and there among the fields and vacant lots; the wind strummed the wires over the Naples railroad line like a guitar. In two seconds flat, the sky above the clouds of white dust had turned black, and against that hellishly dark backdrop the pink and white facades of Casilina glowed like tinfoil. Then that light faded too, and all was dark, extinguished, and turning cold under the gusts of wind that filled the eyes with dust.
The four boys took shelter in a doorway just in time to get out from under the first downpour. The thunder came in crashes that sounded as if six or seven of St. Peter’s domes, put into an oil drum that could hold them all, were being banged together up there in the sky, and the concert could be heard miles away, behind the rows of houses and the outer districts, toward Quadraro or toward San Lorenzo or wherever, maybe even over there in that little patch of blue sky where sparrows were flying.
In about half an hour the rain stopped, and the four of them, chilled through and soaked to the skin like drowned rats, arrived at the Porta Metronia, where they had lifted stuff the last time. Though the rain was over, the sky was still dark, as if a curtain had been placed before it to conceal something terrifying and the curtain itself was more terrifying still; red flashes gashed it now and again. Night had fallen at least two hours earlier and the Porta Metronia was deserted and dripping. The four chose lots. Riccetto had to stay outside with the handcart. The others went in, and once inside the warehouse they chose lots again to see who should go in first with the sack. Lello was it. So scared he had the shakes, he went in and filled the sack with axle shafts, drills, and other stuff till he could scarcely budge it. He came out again to call Lenzetta and Alduccio to help him carry it, since the worst part was over. He went out, but he couldn’t find the other two. Then he ran out of the warehouse to Riccetto, who was waiting with the cart, and asked him where the others had gone. And Riccetto said he had seen them go in. Lello went back in again to see if he could bring the sack out by himself. Riccetto saw him disappear inside the warehouse, but when he appeared again after a while, dragging the sack, the watchman came out and jumped him. Then Lenzetta and Alduccio, who had gone into a warehouse behind the scrap-iron dump, which couldn’t be seen from the street, came out with another sack loaded with things that Riccetto couldn’t make out but that looked like round cheeses. But when they reached the courtyard where the dump was, they spotted Lello, and the watchman holding him, and Lello was trying to break loose and run away, but he couldn’t shake the man off. So they dropped the sack of cheese to help Lello, and jumped the guard. The poor bastard began to yell for help, and the baker and his men came running out of a nearby bakery. Only Alduccio managed to make a getaway. But before he got to the street, where Riccetto was standing, looking innocent and waiting for him, other people who had come running up were blocking his path right at the gate. So he ran along the wire-mesh fence to another, smaller gate farther down. He started to clamber over it, but in his haste his foot slipped on the wet iron, and he fell on an upright stake that was pointed like a spear and drove deep into his thigh. But he managed to jump over anyway, and Riccetto ran up to help him. Two or three of the ones who were chasing him, seeing that he was hurt, gave up so as not to get mixed up in anything. Riccetto put his arm around Alduccio, took him a little farther on down by the Passeggiata Archeologica, and since it was a dark spot, he bound up Alduccio’s wound tightly with a strip of his shirt. They moved on after that, caught the tram, keeping on the platform in the back, and got off at the Ponte Rotto. Riccetto left Alduccio at the entrance to the Fatebenefratelli hospital. Meanwhile, it had started to rain again gently, and to thunder in those districts and those streets through which Riccetto, thinking that either Alduccio in the hospital or the other two in detention cells must have talked, prepared to wander about all night long.
It was starting to clear up. Above the rooftops of the houses rags of cloud were shredded and pounded by the wind, which must have been blowing up there the way it did when the world began. But down below it merely chewed at strips of torn posters clinging to the walls, or lifted some papers, sweeping them along the crumbling sidewalk or onto the trolley tracks.
As the houses spread out, among piazzas and overpasses silent as a cemetery, among subdivided lots where there was nothing but building sites with steel framework five stories high or filthy little open stretches, you could see the whole sky. It was covered with thousands of pimply little clouds, in every shape and color, descending to the saw-toothed disappearing summits of the skyscrapers in the distance. Black sea shells, yellowish mussel-shapes, bluish mustache-shapes, yolk-colored gobs of spit, and farther off, beyond a streak of blue, as clear and glassy as a river in the polar regions, a big white cloud, curly, fresh, and so big it looked like the Mount of Purgatory.
Pale as a sheet, Riccetto was walking along slowly toward the Via Taranto, waiting for the stalls to open up in the market and for the people to begin to do their shopping. The poor devil was so hungry he felt faint, putting one foot in front of the other, hardly aware of where he was going. The Via Taranto was somewhere in the neighborhood; how much farther was it? He came upon the Via Taranto just then, found it as deserted as a minefield, thousands of drawn blinds on the house fronts heaped up darkly along the hill, against a sky suffused with an artificial, candied light. And the cool breeze that made things look white and blue by turns before your eyes, like fennel in the wind, gave an occasional shake to the two lines of dozing tubercular trees rising together with the house fronts on either side of the street toward the sky over San Giovanni. But over where the market was, by the intersection with the Via Monza or the Via Orvieto, there was no sign of stalls. There wasn’t even a scrap of paper in sight, not a cabbage stalk or a clamshell or a squashed garlic clove; nothing; it looked as if there had never been a market there and never would be. “O.k,” said Riccetto, plunging his hands so deep into his pockets that he pushed the crotch of his pants down to his knees, huddling in his shirt with the collar turned up. And he took the first cross street that came along. “Fuck this shit,” he said, suddenly enraged, speaking almost out loud, clenching his teeth. “Who’s there to hear me anyway?” he said, with an exploratory glance around. “And if they hear me, what do I give a goddamn?” He was shaking like a leaf. The street lamps, still lit, went out suddenly. The light from the sky fell still more raw and sad, and hung upon the walls. Everyone, from the janitor to the white-collar worker, from the cleaning woman to Sir Somebody, was asleep behind the shutters of the Via Pinerolo. But all at once down the street there was a shrieking of brakes that could have been heard as far away as San Giovanni, and then, suddenly, banging noises that echoed through the quarter, now invaded by the whiteness of full daylight. Riccetto turned unhurriedly in that direction, and came to the Piazza Re di Roma. That’s where the racket was coming from. Behind the trees in their black and soaking little plots, beside the row of empty benches, a garbage truck was parked, and lined up on the sidewalk there were a dozen garbage cans, and the garbage men were standing around with their sleeves rolled up, cursing. The driver had got down from the truck and was leaning against a dirty fender listening to them, his hair falling over his eyes and his hands in his pockets. A boy was standing silently a little apart, with a piece of board in his hands, and a smile twisting his mouth; he was enjoying himself too, because he didn’t give a damn about the argument in progress—on the contrary, he liked it fine, since as long as it kept up he didn’t have to work. “But didn’t you go call the son of a bitch?” the driver asked, turning to the boy. He flushed a little, and then said quietly, “Why, sure.” “Look, you guys,” said the driver to the two garbage men, “what do you want me to tell you? Settle it between yourselves.” And he climbed back into the cab, stretching out on the seat and shoving his feet out through the window. But it wasn’t such a terrible tragedy for the garbage men. They just had to empty the cans into the truck t
hemselves in place of the missing boy; the other boy, with the impudent face, dirty as a gypsy, was right there. And then, after all, the bastards, if it weren’t for the boys in the Borgata Gordiani or Quadraro who, for the privilege of poking around in the garbage, would get up at three in the morning and work four or five hours, wouldn’t they have had to do that work themselves all the time? But by now they were spoiled rotten, and it burned them to get stuck like that. Riccetto was standing there, his hands already half out of his pockets, and his eyes doing all the talking for him.
A toothless man, coal-black stubble covering his jaws, which were white from the morning wind, and two eyes that made him look like the suffering Christ gleaming like a dog’s or a drunk’s even at four in the morning, said to Riccetto, “Go ahead.” Riccetto didn’t wait to be told twice, and while the garbage men grinned, bending over the cans full of congealed garbage, saying, “Yeah, go ahead, there’s nice greasy stuff here to eat,” and, “Take advantage of it, sonny, there’s a feast waiting for you here,” he paid no attention to them and took hold of the other board, which was sticking out of the truck, and with his colleague he set to work enthusiastically, rolling the cans of garbage into the truck and emptying them.
A stain of dirty gray vapor like diluted ink was spreading over those patches of sky visible among the roofs of the buildings and in the empty spaces of the piazzas. The remnants of the little clouds first lost their color and then merged with the dirty stain. Even the big white cloud with steely glints in it had fallen into rags and lost its radiance, and was disappearing now like snow falling into mud. Summer was ending. For three hours Riccetto and the boy from the Borgata Gordiani emptied garbage cans into the truck, the heap getting higher and higher and rasping their lungs more and more with a smell that suggested a burning orange grove. Already the servant-girls with their empty shopping bags were on the streets, and the screeching of the trolleys on the curves could be heard more often; the truck left behind the well-heeled solid middle-class section, took the Casilina road, and spread its fresh stink among the houses of the poor, doing the samba down rutted streets whose sidewalks looked like sewers, among great dilapidated underpasses, fenced-in lots, scaffoldings, construction sites, districts full of shacks, villages of hovels, passing the Centocelle trolleys, workmen hanging onto the footboards, and arriving at last by way of the Strada Bianca among the first houses of the Borgata Gordiani, as isolated as a concentration camp, swept by sun and wind on a little plateau between the Via Casilina and the Via Prenestina.
On either side of the road where the truck had come to a stop on the outskirts of the town, were stretches of ground that were supposed to be wheat fields but were full of brambles, pits, and canebrakes; farther down there was an orchard whose trees were even older than the tumbledown house they surrounded, and which had not been pruned in twenty years. The ditch was full of black water, and here and there geese were wandering loose over the grass and the even blacker earth of the fields. A little beyond the old house the wheat fields came to an end, petering out as they rose above abandoned quarries that had themselves become fields once more, bare, fit only for the flocks on their way from the Sabine region and the Abruzzi, and broken up here and there by ravines and sudden drops. The path lost itself in the sand there, and there the truck stopped. “Let’s go, hurry it up,” said the driver when he had turned the truck’s nose around toward the Strada Bianca and backed the rear over to the edge of an almost vertical drop. The two helpers opened the rear doors, and the load of garbage spilled down over the drop. When the stuff stopped rolling out by gravity, the two, sweeping exhaustedly, pushed out the rest, Prussian-blue and tomato-red, that was still stinking away inside the body of the truck.
Riccetto and the other boy were left alone at the garbage dump, the bottom of the quarry below them and the cracked fields all around. They sat down, one at the top of the heap and one at the bottom, and began to search among the refuse.
The other fellow was the practical kind; he was bending over attentively, looking serious, as if he were doing a job that called for precision. Riccetto imitated him, but since grubbing about with his hands was too disgusting, he went to pull a limb from a fig tree on the other side of a wire-mesh fence that seemed to go back to the dark ages, and crouched down with the branch and began to pick apart the filthy papers, clamshells, medicine tins, leftover food, and all the other junk that was raising a stink around him. The hours went by, and instead of turning definitely gray in the sultry wind from the southeast, the sky cleared, up there above the Borgata Gordiani, just in time for the hot nine o’clock sun to bore down into the bent backs of the two scavengers. Riccetto was soaked in sweat and every now and then things went black before his eyes; in the darkness around him he saw flashes of green and red; he was on the point of fainting from hunger. ‘’Ah, fuck this shit!” he said suddenly, seething with rage. He got to his feet, and without saying good-by to the other fellow, who didn’t make the effort to turn around either, he walked away. Limping with weariness, he went down the Strada Bianca, which was living up to its name, for it was all white with dust and sunshine under a sky that was beginning to darken once more, and with his ass dragging he reached the Via Casilina. There he waited for a trolley, hitched on behind, and after a half-hour ride he was again in the Via Taranto, circling through the market like a stray dog, moving among the stalls, sniffing the thousands of odors floating on the sultry breeze, all of them appetizing, in the little open space squeezed in among the buildings.
He watched the fruit stands, and managed to hook some pears and a couple of apples; he went off to eat them in an alleyway. Then he went back, hungrier than ever from that bit of sweetness in his stomach, drawn by the cheese smells coming from the line of white stands right in front of the alley, on the wet pavement beyond the fountain. There were mozzarella and caciotta cheeses lined up, and provolone hung up, and on the stand already cut pieces of Emmentaler, parmesan, and sheep’s-milk cheese; there were also pieces of a quarter-pound or even less strewn among the whole cheeses. Riccetto stared uneasily at a slice of gruyère that had turned a little yellow—with a smell so strong it took your breath away. He moved up close to it, pretending interest in something else, waiting for the proprietor to become absorbed in talking to his customer, a woman fat as a bishop, who had been there for quite a while, examining the cheese with a venomous air—and with a lightning-quick motion, whiz! he grabbed the piece of gruyère and swept it into his pocket. The owner of the stand saw him. He stuck his knife into a cheese, said, “One moment, ma’am,” came out from behind the stand, grabbed Riccetto by the collar of his shirt—the boy was wandering off innocently—and with relish, for he felt completely justified in what he was doing, he let him have two blows that made him reel. In a rage, as if awakening from a stupor, and without any warning, Riccetto plunged forward with his head down, punching desperately at the man’s sides. The owner of the stand reeled back for a moment, but since he was twice Riccetto’s size, he began to manhandle him in such a way that if the other market people had not come between them he would have sent the boy straight to the Polyclinic. Nevertheless, being a big, powerful fellow, he could afford to calm down fast. He said to the men who were holding him, “Let go of me, let go of me, boys—I won’t touch him. You think I fight with kids?” But Riccetto, all bruised and with a trickle of blood coming from his teeth, went on struggling for a while in the arms of the men who were holding him back. “Give me my cheese and beat it,” the cheese-seller said, in an almost conciliatory voice. “Go on, give him the cheese,” said a fishman standing by him. Riccetto took the piece of gruyère from his pocket and handed it over dully, his face lifeless, chewing over vague thoughts of vengeance, and swallowing bile along with the blood from his gums. Then as the crowd thinned out around him—as if the incident were something that could easily be forgotten—he went off among the shoppers, amid the red, green, and yellow stalls bearing mountains of tomatoes and eggplants, and the vegetable-sellers yelling so
hard they had to bend at the waist, all of them cheerful and lively. He went down the Via Taranto, and slowly mounted the four hundred steps to the landing he was using as a bedroom. He was so weak he could scarcely stand. He did see that the door of the empty apartment, ordinarily closed, was open and swinging to and fro in the intermittent draft; but he paid no attention to it. Swaying, and with the slow gestures of a man swimming under water, he pulled a length of string from his pocket, passed it through two holes and secured it, closing the leaves of the door. Then he stretched out on the tile floor, already asleep. It couldn’t have been more than a half-hour later—just enough time for the janitress to make a phone call and for the cops to arrive— than Riccetto was kicked awake and found two of them on top of him. To make a long story short, the apartment on the landing had been broken into and robbed during the night; that was why the door had been ajar. Riccetto, roused from God knows what dreams, the poor bastard—maybe that he was eating in a restaurant or sleeping in a bed—got up, rubbing his eyes, and stumbled down the stairs after the cops, absolutely in the dark about what was going on. “What can they be picking me up for?” he wondered, still half-asleep. “Oh, well.” They took him to Porta Portese, and gave him three years—he was supposed to stay in the can until the spring of 1950!—to teach him to behave.
6 • Swimming in the Aniene
“Tratti avanti, Alichino e Calcabrina,”
comincid egli a dire, “e tu, Cagnazzo;
e Barbariccia guida la decina.
Libicocco vegna oltre, e Draghinazzo,
Ciriatto sannuto, e Graffiacane,
e Farfarello, e Rubicante il pazzo….
Dante, Inferno, Canto XXI*
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The Ragazzi Page 15