Some of them went straight home by the Via Boccaleone, while others wandered around for a while. Slowly they went along the river up to the outskirts of Tiburtino, and stopped for a half-hour or so by the Silver Cine to look at the ads outside and horse around. Then they went down again among the big bushy oleanders of the Via Tiburtina, all the way to the bus stop, which was the meeting place for the gangs of little boys and the groups of older boys, in the piazza by the Pecoraro hill.
There were a bunch of little girls down in the yellow field stretching out between the four or five ridges of the hill and the Via Tiburtina, which was filled with workmen cycling home, some of them going on toward Ponte Mammolo or Settecamini, some turning off right by the field, over toward Tiburtino III and Madonna del Soccorso. By this time, too, there were some who had already been home and had gone out again to take a walk with their friends toward Pietralata or one of the two movie theaters in the neighborhood, their polo shirts or dress-shirts flopping outside their trousers.
The younger boys, leaving the river still half-undressed, went up by the dark road that split the craggy crest of the hill in two, starting at the edge of a limestone pit and then winding among the brambles of the Pecoraro hill.
The little girls followed them, and the two groups met halfway up the hill, where the road was no longer in sight, at a flat place full of abandoned excavations that deepened in the middle into miniature ravines. Since a squall was coming up from around St. Peter’s, it was almost as dark as evening; the sinking sun was already obscured by clouds split here and there by lightning, although the sky above was clear, ruddy with reflected light and heat. And instead of sun, the hillside was now being bathed by the south-west wind, freighted with the sounds of all the suburbs. Even Piattoletta was walking along behind the gang of boys, laughing under his floppy cap, staying by himself so that he could be with them without their noticing him. But by now they had calmed down a bit, since the girls were there. They gathered around the lamppost, and Sgarone and Tirillo began to play the finger game; at first they played good-humoredly, but then they grew excited and began to call the numbers loudly, one of them kneeling and the other squatting on his heels on the bit of grass at the foot of the lamppost.
Armandino stretched out in the thread of shadow cast by the lamppost, hardly noticeable now that the sun had disappeared behind the storm clouds—though its glow still lingered in the air. The other boys, scabby as a band of apes, had begun teasing the girls. They kept their distance, however, because no matter how tough they acted they were still a little shy, and they bunched up together, their arms about one another’s shoulders, making wisecracks and slouching about. But the girls always had an answer to shut them up.
Armandino said in a self-satisfied voice, “Ah, send them on their way,” and began to sing. But the other boys acted as if they hadn’t heard, and went on horsing around with the girls. Roscietto, running out of things to say, grabbed one of them and gave her a slap on the head that nearly knocked her down. Then the girls, angry and offended, went off to the other side of the lamppost, to where Pietralata could be seen, the boys following behind them, growing more outrageous as the girls became more reserved. Below, on the other slope of the Pecoraro hill, among the old limestone quarries, was the Fiorentini factory, making the air tremble with its running engines. From time to time the white flashes of the automatic welding-machines shone through the patched panes of the factory windows. Pietralata lay farther away, its lines of pink shacks, housing squatters, encrusted with dirt and filth, and farther still were the tall rows of huge yellow project-buildings in fields so parched by the sun that they were as bare as in winter.
But the girls moved off by themselves to a little clearing between the edges of two large pits, and they didn’t answer any more, hardly talking among themselves until the boys would make up their minds to go away. The boys were gathered together farther up on the slope, cutting up; but the girls’ calm restraint enraged them, though they tried not to show it. For that reason they became even more quarrelsome and provoking: Since they couldn’t assert their superiority in words, they began to throw sticks and branches at the girls, who were dressed in torn pull-overs, their hair full of dust but nonetheless combed just like that of young ladies.
The girls did not respond, but merely moved off once more, farther downhill, but not before giving the boys a piece of their mind. “Why don’t you go screw around with your sisters, you stupid idiots?” Their voices shook with rage, sounding more strident now, and at the same time their drawls were more marked than ever. Hearing them, the boys began to snicker and answer back in the tone of voice they had caught from their older brothers when they talked about Via Veneto hustlers, and the most sophisticated one yelled, “Hey, you cunts!” And moving off up the hill, they walked with long, slow steps, their left hands on their hips, and the right now extended before them, now brought back to caress the hair at the napes of their necks.
Under the lamppost, Armandino was still singing at the top of his lungs, full of passion, and the other two were still playing the finger-game, standing up now, the fingers of their left hands out stiff to count their points. “Well, for Christ’s sake, what’s going on here?” cried the group coming up the hill. Some of them fell upon the three by the lamppost, excited, wrestling and rolling around. One lit a butt, and the match, tossed away burning, set fire to a clump of grass that shriveled and flamed in the gusts of air blowing on those heights.
The clouds were swelling with rain, and glowing with flashes of lightning. The bursts of light from the welding in the factory below were swifter and more frequent now—since in the darkening air they showed more boldly—and the engines covered the sounds of the poverty-stricken life of Pietralata and Tiburtino with their constant hum.
Piattoletta was sitting on the ground, his legs crossed, his floppy cap pulled as far down as possible over his ears, and a laugh came from his long, pendulous lips.
“Hey, Piattolè,” yelled the others, rolling around on the cracked mud, “look at this, will you?” But then they went on wrestling with one another, not bothering with him any further. Sgarone was stretched out on his back, Roscietto on top of him, belly to belly, holding him down, his hands pinning Sgarone’s wrists to the ground on either side.
Sgarone tried to get loose. “Don’t move,” Roscietto said, red in the face from the effort of holding him. But Sgarone, who was beginning to get bored with the whole thing, started squirming like an eel. “Fuck you!” he yelled. “Hold still, Sgarò,” said Roscietto. “Well, get off my cock,” said Sgarone, getting really mad now, his voice beginning to break. Roscietto began to jiggle around on top of him as if he had St. Vitus dance. “Watch it, for Christ’s sake, Roscie, it’s getting ready to stand at attention,” said Sgarone, laughing. Roscietto let him go, jumping up excitedly. “Let’s play Indians!” he yelled. “Ah, cut it out!” said the others disgustedly. “Come on, we’ll have fun,” Roscietto insisted. “What a bunch of shit,” said Armandino with a sneer. “Eeyee, eeyoo-oo-oo-oo, eeyoo,” Roscietto yelled, jumping up and down. “Come on, Piattolè.”
Piattoletta stood up and began to yell too, hopping now on one foot, now on the other, “Eeyoo, eeyeeyoo.” Roscietto stood next to him so that they could jump up and down together. “Eeyoo, eeyeeyoo-oo-oo, eeyoo,” they yelled, laughing.
The others began to jump around too, leaning over far forward and far back, yelling, “Eeyoo, eeyoo.” The girls had come up to see what was going on, and watching the commotion, they made a circle around the boys and said, “What a bunch of idiots!” But the boys jumped and yelled all the more in order to annoy them.
“Let’s do the dance of death, the dance of death!” Roscietto cried. The others began to shriek even louder, “Eeyoo, eeyoo,” and as they came near the girls they aimed a kick or a slap in the head at them. But the girls were alert and ducked away smartly. “Gee, what a bunch of jerks,” they said. “Why don’t you stuff it, you idiots?” But they didn’t go away, a
nd stood watching the dance; and the boys, though exhausted from yelling and jumping, nonetheless redoubled their efforts, showing off.
“Burn ’em at the stake!” Roscietto yelled.
“Yeah, burn ’em at the stake,” the girls said, sneering. “It’s ridiculous.” And they looked on, contemptuous and annoyed.
Roscietto pounced on Piattoletta, who was in the middle of the mob, hardly moving his feet because he was dead tired, but still yelling “Eeyoo, eeyoo.” “To the stake!” Roscietto yelled, as soon as he had caught him.
Yelling, the others helped him, and they dragged Piattoletta up to the lamppost.
“Tie him up!” someone cried. Piattoletta was struggling, and then he went limp. Roscietto was holding him under the armpits, and he yelled, “Stand up, you little shit!”
But Piattoletta didn’t want to play, and fell to the ground kicking; the others went on screaming around him. “I’ve had enough out of you,” said Roscietto, kicking him in the belly.
Piattoletta began to cry so loudly that he could be heard over the boys’ yelling. “Now he’s crying, the little prick,” said Armandino. “If you don’t get up …” yelled Roscietto. But Piattoletta paid no attention and went on struggling furiously, crying at the top of his lungs.
“Ten of them, and they can’t handle that little runt there,” said the girls. But Roscietto pulled him upright by his shirt-collar, and when Piattoletta yelled, “Lemme go, you fuck!” he said, “Here!” and spat in his eye, and then grabbed him, and with Sgarone and Tirillo helping, pushed him against the lamppost, and with a cord tied his wrists to an iron spike protruding from the concrete.
But even though he was tied up, Piattoletta went on kicking out, squirming and screaming. The others started dancing around him again, but far enough away from him to avoid the kicks. “Jesus, doesn’t anyone have another piece of rope?” cried Roscietto.
“Who the hell would have one?” asked Tirillo.
“Piattoletta, Piattoletta,” said Sgarone. “He’s got one holding up his pants.”
They jumped on Piattoletta, who was groaning and pleading, and while the laughing girls cried, “Just look at them, will you?” they took the cord that held up his pants and tied his ankles together.
“O.k., I’ll set fire to the stake,” Armandino yelled, lighting a match.
But the wind blew it out. “Eeyoo, eeyoo, eeyoo,” the others yelled with all the breath in their bodies.
“Lets see your lighter!” Sgarone cried to Tirillo.
“Here,” said Tirillo, pulling it out of his pocket. He lit it, and while the others kicked together a heap of branches at the foot of the lamppost, still yelling and dancing, he set fire to the dry grass here and there.
A strong wind was blowing from every direction on the nearly dark Pecoraro hill. As the flashes came from the welding plant and lightning flickered from the squall, a peal or two of thunder sounded, and the air smelled damp.
The dry grass caught fire at once, the blood-colored flames took hold of the branches, and a bit of smoke began to rise around the screaming Piattoletta.
His pants, no longer held in place by the cord, slipped down, exposing his belly, and fell to his bound feet. From the burning grass and the branches that the boys were still kicking at, the fire seized on the dry cloth, crackling merrily.
7 • In the City
Opposite the Pecoraro hill there was a broad piazza, and right by the sign reading “Zone Ends—Zone Begins,” just before the broad expanse of fields stretching toward the Aniene, was the old tram-line shelter of the route 309 that turned off at that point, leaving the Via Tiburtina, and cut through the district housing project toward Madonna del Soccorso. Alduccio lived’ in Block IV, as did Begalone, toward the end of the project’s main street, a little beyond the market place, with a line of street lamps that, lighting up at dusk along the building fronts just two stories high, gave the place the air of a poor quarter in some summer resort, the road climbing for a short way and then seeming to lose itself in the darkened sky, and the sounds of the householders echoing among the walls or in the courtyards as they had their dinner or made ready for the night. At that hour there were many boys and young men walking around, but the real toughs were off in groups here and there, in the cafés or on the street corners, waiting for night—not to go to the movies or to the Villa Borghese, but to get together in some gambling house or other and play cards till morning. And while some young men strummed guitars here and there in a courtyard, there were women still washing dishes or sweeping up, their children whining; and the buses were still pulling in loaded with men coming home from work.
“So long, Begalò,” said Alduccio when they reached his friend’s house. “So long,” said Begalone, “see you later.” “I’ll look for you at nine,” Alduccio said. “Whistle for me.” “O.k., but you be ready,” said Begalone, going on up the dilapidated stairway that was crowded with little boys. Alduccio lived three or four doors farther down, on the ground floor. In front of the entry there was a sort of open gallery, as in all the buildings, its walls and columns battered and falling to pieces. Alduccio’s sister was sitting on the stair. “What are you up to?” Alduccio asked. She didn’t answer, but went on watching the street. “Well, up yours,” he said, and passed into the kitchen, where his mother was busy at the stove. “What do you want?” she asked without turning around. “What do you mean, what do I want?” said Alduccio. She turned around in a rage, all disheveled. “You don’t work, you don’t eat, you hear?” She was a tall, fat woman, almost naked under her sloppy bathrobe; the perspiration had plastered her hair to her forehead, and the bun tumbled down behind over her neck and the collar of her bathrobe. “O.k.,” said Alduccio, playing it cool, “you don’t want to give me anything to eat, is that it? So who gives a damn?”
He left the kitchen and went into the only bedroom, the one in which his entire family slept—Riccetto’s slept in the other room—and began to undress, whistling in order to show his mother that it didn’t bother him a bit. “Whistle some more, you bum,” she yelled from the kitchen, “and I hope you choke, you and that lousy drunken father of yours.” “Yeah, and that sewer-mouthed mother of mine,” Alduccio muttered, as he sat naked on the bed, pulling on his moccasins. “If you’re upset because of that whore you’ve got for a daughter, just button it up, will you, instead of taking it out on me. You don’t want to give me any dinner? Then don’t give me any dinner! What the hell do I care? Just so long as you shut up.” “Shut up? Shut up? Just show me another son who’s nearly twenty years old and ready to be a soldier and doesn’t bring home a single cent, not one, the loafer!” “Man, what a pain!” Alduccio yelled as he dressed. Screams could be heard from out in the street, the voices of quarreling women. Alduccio’s mother was silent for a moment, listening; in the bedroom, where Alduccio was, the voices sounded indistinct. “Ah, you stupid idiot!” she said, talking to herself at the stove. She dropped something in her hurry to go outside, and went to the door. She stood there a moment in silence, listening, and then she went out and you could hear her voice too, yelling with the others. “Listen to them! Why don’t they all go piss up a rope?” said Alduccio to himself. After nearly ten minutes of yelling and shouting, in the street or perhaps on the stairway landing, the door banged open again—but it didn’t close, for Alduccio’s mother had stopped in the doorway, perhaps because she still had something she wanted to get off her chest. Instead she turned back toward the landing. “You slut!” she yelled in the direction of the street. “You’ve been a whore all your life, and now you come and call my daughter a tramp!” A voice answered her from above; the words were hard to make out. “Boy, do they burn my ass!” said Alduccio bitterly. “And a good thing, too!” yelled his mother, putting her hand on her hip, in answer to the jumbled words that Alduccio couldn’t distinguish. “Just look who’s talking! You who get your boyfriend to give the kids money to go to the movies so you can stay home alone with him!” The voice from the courtyard or the l
anding went up two or three tones in fury, and at that high pitch began to vomit out a splendid collection of insults. When the voice stopped, it was the turn of Alduccio’s mother again. “Do you remember,” she shouted, in a shrill voice that the suffering Christ himself couldn’t have persuaded her to moderate, ‘you slut, when your husband came home and found you in bed with your boyfriend right in front of your two little kids?” She came into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her, and there she went on, talking to herself, her voice vibrating in her throat with a cutting-edge like a knife’s. “So just shut up, you miserable whore, and when I see you in the street tomorrow, I’ll pull every hair out of your head, and I hope you croak!” After a moment the door opened again, and Alduccio’s father came in. He was drunk, as he was every evening. He went up to his wife and tried to catch hold of her, but she put her hand against his chest and pushed him away; he spun completely around and collapsed into a chair. But he got up again, and tried stubbornly to grab her. Riccetto’s little sister came out from the farther room, where Riccetto’s family lived, to see if anything serious was afoot. She was just in time to see her uncle fall into the chair once more. “What do you want here?” Alduccio’s mother asked, turning on her in fury. “What do you want?” The child, carrying another little Riccetto in her arms, turned on her heels and went straight back to her room. “You and your whole miserable family of spongers and deadbeats,” Alduccio’s mother yelled after her, “it’s four years you been here and not once did you ever say, here, take these thousand lire, pay the electric-light bill!” The father, after some moments of reflection, managed to get his voice working again, and after a couple of tries managed to say something like, “Always yapping, that tramp!” He stood up, and delivered an address all in gestures, weaving back and forth, lifting his hand two or three times from breast-level to his nose, then making his fingers do a pirouette as if to indicate that some highly original idea was going through his mind. At last, running so as not to fall down, he went into the bedroom where Alduccio was dressing, and fell flat on the bed, fully clothed. The wine he had been drinking all afternoon had made his face as white as a sheet and seemed to have singed the two inches of bristly whiskers, dark, damp, and rough as a dog’s, beneath his nose and at the corners of his mouth. He was completely limp— arms stretched out on the bed, half-open mouth, slack jaw, and drooping eyelids, and lank hair, still black, and shining with sweat as if with brilliantine. The lighted lamp which hung over the bed showed up each separate chocolate-colored stain of ancient grime on his face, together with newer incrustations of dust and sweat upon his forehead; the web of wrinkles shifted about upon his face, stretched and swollen with wine, yellow from God knows what kind of liver disease hiding somewhere in that frame draped with old rags. Here and there were the shadowy traces of wounds, dark-colored, encircled by little spots, that went back to his childhood, perhaps, or his young manhood, when he had served as a soldier or worked as a day laborer, ages ago. And over all that was a grayness that came from going hungry and drinking wine, plus the stubble of a four-day beard.
The Ragazzi Page 18