By now Alduccio was dressed, sporting his pegged pants and his striped shirt with the open collar, the tails hanging outside his pants. Now he had to comb his hair. He went to the mirror in the kitchen, and after wetting the comb under the faucet, he began to primp, standing spread-legged because the mirror was set too low for him. Finding him in her way again, his mother started in on him once more, choking with fury. “Good-for-nothing hog!” “That’s enough, Ma,” Alduccio burst out, “I’ve had just about enough of that now!” “I’ve had enough of you!” his mother retorted, louder still. Alduccio began to sing, bending over the mirror. “He doesn’t work, he doesn’t help out in the house . . .” “Ma,” Alduccio interrupted her, “I’m telling you I’ve had enough. How about dropping it now?” “I won’t drop it. If I want to complain, I’ll complain as much as I like, understand, you no-good loafer!” “Let me out of here!” Alduccio said in a fury, and he went out, all neatly combed, slamming the battered door. He didn’t even glance at his sister, who was sitting huddled up on the stair with her skirt pulled down to her ankles. Her face was sickly green, and her painted mouth looked like a wound. Her hair fell to her neck, smooth and dry, and a few locks hung over her eyes. “That pig!” Alduccio said to himself as he went by. From the time she had got into trouble with Sor An; .on, the fruit-seller who lived on the corner, there hadn’t been a minute’s peace in Alduccio’s house. Now she had to get married, but the fruit-seller’s son couldn’t stand her any more. The night she had been kicked out of her parents’ house, he had kept her company, sleeping by her side conspicuously on the stairway in front of his house in Block III—but that was just to impress people. After she found out that she was pregnant, they got engaged, even though neither her parents nor his had been willing before. Out of shame, she had cut the veins in her wrists with a piece of glass, and she had nearly died. She still had two nice fresh scars on her wrists.
Waiting for Begalone, Alduccio strolled around the neighborhood. The storm had blown over and the air was warm, almost springlike. Begalone had changed his clothes too. He had knotted a kerchief around his neck like a tough, and had combed down his tow-colored mop just as smooth as smooth, so that it looked as if it had been baked that way, parted on one side and long on the neck. “Hey, Beglaò,” Alduccio called. “How much you got on you?” Begalone asked him immediately. “Thirty lire,” said Alduccio, “just enough for the bus.” Begalone said, “Me too.” “What about the rest of it?” Alduccio asked suspiciously. “Right here! Right here!” said Begalone, slapping his back pocket where he carried the hundred and fifty lire he had lifted from Caciotta. “We can get two cigarettes,” Alduccio said as they went by a bar. “Wait, Aldo!” Begalone said, and then, “Farewell forever!” to the bus that was going past them. “There’ll be another one coming,” said Alduccio, stretching contentedly.
Begalone had not eaten either. Beneath his yellow hair his face was a greenish yellow that made his reddish brows stand out all the more. He was so weak that not even his fever could give him a bit of color—he had at least a degree or two of temperature every night, since the time he had been discharged from the Forlanini hospital. He had had TB for two or three years now, and nothing could be done about it. They gave him a year or so to live.
Walking along with Aldo, he put his hands over his empty stomach, leaning forward, cursing his brothers, his father, and most of all his poor mother, who one night—the first of a succession of terrible nights—had jumped out of bed screaming like a madwoman that she had seen the devil. She said a snake had come into the bedroom and coiled about the foot of the bed and gazed at her fixedly, forcing her to strip naked. And she had started to scream. And then, all the next day, she had burst out yelling repeatedly, whining like a dog about the headache that was killing her, seizing on her daughters or whomever was around and begging them to protect her from God knows what. The following night she woke up screaming again, but this time it wasn’t the devil. She had moved to one side in the rumpled bed, to make room for somebody, though her body was as dried up as an anchovy and didn’t take up much room. Beside her on the gray sheets, as she told it later, a dead girl had sat down—at least she must have been dead, seeing that she was wearing her best dress, white wool stockings, and a crown of orange blossoms, because she was supposed to have been married in a few days. She had begun to weep and told Begalone’s mother that the slip they had made her wear was too short, and the wreath of flowers they had put on her head was too tight and hurt her temples. Then she complained that they were saying too few masses for her, that little Pisspants, her baby cousin, never came to visit her in the cemetery, and so forth and so on. Begalone’s mother had never met the girl before, but the next day the neighbors, talking about the yells that streamed through the broken windows of Begalone’s apartment and echoed among the courtyards in the middle of the night, learned that the dead girl was a relative of some people who lived just a few doors farther down in the same block. All the details matched exactly, including her little cousin Pisspants, who was living, healthy and happy, in Prenestino. Then the devil began to appear again, in various forms: one time a snake, another a bear, still another a neighbor whose teeth had turned to tusks—and these apparitions came and went in Begalone’s apartment as if they were quite at home there, tormenting his mother. Then the family had decided to take steps, and they sent to Naples for an old relative of theirs who was skilled in such matters. First, the old man had them boil every single thing that belonged to Begalone’s mother. In a few days they used up twenty kilowatts of gas for all that boiling business, and nobody bothered about fixing a meal. The three brothers and four sisters and all the neighbors were concentrating on getting rid of the spell. In Begalone’s mother’s pillow they had found feathers twisted into dove-shapes, crosses, and crowns, and they had boiled them all right away. They had put bits of iron in boiling oil, and then poured cold water into the pot to see what shapes would emerge, and for several days all that could be heard in that house were knockings on the tile floor to make charmed circles around the possessed woman, who did nothing but moan and beg for help.
“If only they’d given me a slice of bread, just a slice of bread, the bastards,” Begalone said, pressing his hands over his stomach. “Here we are, each a more miserable pauper than the other,” said Alduccio with a laugh, his handsome face distorted with a sneer of ironic resignation. They buried their hands in their pockets, and went on foot as far as the Pecoraro hill.
The heat wasn’t sultry and it wasn’t dry; it was just hot. It was like a warm hand laid on the light breeze, on the yellowish walls of the district, on the fields, the carts, the buses with clusters of people hanging on outside. A warm hand that was all the joy and misery of summer nights past and present. The air was as taut and reverberant as a drumhead. The sprinkling that traced wet lines on the sidewalk dried immediately; the garbage heaps were baked and odorless. The only smell came from stone and ironwork still hot from the sun, perhaps where wet rags had been spread out and then had dried in the heat. In the few remaining gardens here and there, full of vegetables growing fine and plump, untended as if in an earthly paradise, there wasn’t a drop of moisture. And in the center of each district, by the trolley tracks, as here in Tiburtino, there were crowds of people running about and shouting so that you thought you were in the slums of Shanghai. Even in the most deserted places there was a bustle, with gangs of boys out looking for whores, stopping to talk at the doors of workshops that were still open. And after Tiburtino, there was Tor dei Schiavi, Prenestino, Acqua Bullicante, Maranella, Mandrione, Porta Furba, Quarticciolo, Quadraro…. Hundreds of neighborhood centers like the one in Tiburtino, each with a cro wd by the traffic light, flowing off into the streets round about that buzzed with their comings and goings like an entrance-hall, on the broken sidewalks and along colossal ruined walls with lines of hovels at their bases. There were young men racing on their motor scooters, Lambrettas, Ducatis, or Mondials, half-crocked, their greasy jumpers open
on their hairy chests, or else dressed to kill as if they’d just stepped out of a show-window on the Piazza Vittorio. There was a great encirclement of Rome and of the countryside around about on the part of hundreds of thousands of human beings, swarming among their blocks of dwellings, their squatters’ shacks, or their skyscrapers. And that teeming life wasn’t confined to the suburbs but invaded the city itself, the city’s very heart, even under the dome of St. Peter’s. Yes, right under the dome, all you had to do was to peer out through the colonnade of the Piazza San Pietro toward Porta Cavalleggeri, and there they all were, shouting, horsing around, acting up in crowds and gangs around the movie houses and the pizza joints, fanning out farther down in the Via del Gelsomino and the Via della Cava, in the empty lots of trodden ground bordered by garbage heaps where the little kids play ball, lying in couples among the bushes, covered with sheets of newspaper, between the Via delle Fornaci and the Gianicolo. And farther down, once through the damp tunnel, here there is the same scene again, in the Piazza della Rovere, where lines of tourists are going by, walking erect and arm in arm, wearing knickers and heavy shoes, singing mountaineers’ songs in chorus, while the young punks in their pegged pants and pointy shoes, leaning against the Tiber embankment near a flooded public toilet, watch the tourists pass, looking angry and sarcastic, calling words out after them that would kill them on the spot if they understood. And down below by the river where an occasional empty tram goes by under the arcades of plane trees along broken pavements, and Lambrettas bank on the curves, carrying a young fellow or two looking for trouble; over by the Castel Sant’Angelo, with Ciriola’s all lit up at its feet, reflected in the river; over by the Piazza del Popolo, the Pincio, elegant as a great theater, and the Villa Borghese, its violins murmuring softly to the whores and hustlers walking by in groups, singing ”Sentimental,” eyelids lowered and mouths drooping, and looking around out of the corners of their eyes to see if by chance the paddy wagon is cruising around. And again, in the opposite direction by the Ponte Sisto where, beneath the dirty, glittering Funtanone, two teams of young boys from Trastevere are playing soccer, yelling furiously, surging like a flock of sheep among the swell cars driven by pimps who’ve brought their girls from Cinecitta to have dinner in Antica Pesa—while from all the alleys of Trastevere beyond can be heard the sound of male and female jaws chomping on pizza or French toast in the open air, in the Piazza Sant’ Egidio or by Mattonato, and babies whining or children quarreling and running along the pavements, as light as the bits of dirty paper that the wind drives here and there.
“Hey, Aldo, let’s get off here,” said Begalone, jumping down from the cowcatcher, bone-weary but as fast on his feet as a witch.
Aldo stood up on the footboard so that the conductor could get a good look at him, and tapping on the glass, he called, “So long, pie-face!”
He jumped down from the trolley to the pavement, and the conductor treated himself to the pleasure of sticking his head out and yelling—clutching his sheaf of tickets while the passengers waited to get theirs—“Young punks!”
“I got something here for you,” Begalone yelled, kneeling down, and thrusting out his stomach, and with his fingers at the level of his chest he made the sign for two black eyes.
On their right was the Colosseum, as hot as a furnace, and out of the hollows of the arches rose ruddy smoke in puffs and columns, pomegranate-colored and bright as candy wrappers, rising up and up and covering the sky over toward the Celio and the Oppio, above the Via Labicana, gleaming with cars, above the Via dell’Impero, in the crossfire of searchlights.
“What do we do now?” asked Alduccio.
“Lets take us a little walk,” said Begalone.
“Lets take us a little walk,” repeated Alduccio. They went over by the Colosseum, circled around it, and went off under the Arco di Constantino along the Viale dei Trionfi, dark and hot, sunk among the ruins and pine trees of the greenish Palatine hill that ran along smoothly, making a great curve toward the Cerchi.
They walked along some distance apart from each other, their hands in their pockets, swaggering and slouching, and, as was their custom, each of them singing a different song.
“Two-bit whores, two-bit whores …”
Begalone sang. Interrupting himself, he said, “Did you get a load of Caciotta’s face?
“Two-bit whores, two-bit whores . . .”
he began again, more loudly, making a whole stretch of the deserted street resound under the umbrella pines, green as pool tables, among the broken stones of the ruins. But Alduccio paid no attention because he was too busy singing himself, leaning forward, his hands thrust into his pockets, his head high and swaying, his eyes half-closed, and his neck sunk into his shoulders.
A tiny, dusty moon shone down upon the Cerchi, endlessly lighting up the whole empty field, the black bushes, the pebbles, the piles of stone and rubbish. Everybody was looking at the moon out of the corners of their eyes, disgusted because the only places in shadow were the ones at the foot of the walls that surrounded the enormous oval of the Circo Massimo. On the wall just above Alduccio and Begalone, beyond which the Circo stretched away in the powdery moonlight with here and there a ruined tower, some men were already seated, some young boys, and even a few kids; farther along, by the trolley stop, but out in the field, shadows were moving about, coming together and dispersing.
“Hey, the cops!” Begalone shouted for a joke, making a megaphone of one hand, and guffawing. They both went on laughing even when the whores could no longer hear them, bending over, leaning against the wall, or shoving at each other; besides laughing, they made raspberries with their mouths, and spat. But they got over that quickly because they would have been glad to go with those fat whores, or at least tear off a piece on the run. By now they were both so worked up that they would have gone for an old woman of seventy. That’s why the laughing jag broke off suddenly, and they walked on very seriously, almost angry, glancing over the wall with tough expressions on their faces, exploring the great oval space full of ruins and brush that looked black in the powdery white glow of the moonlight. There were rows of soldiers there, some young boys, and the usual prostitutes screaming at one another bitchily as if they were fighting over their purses.
“We come all this way for nothing!” said Begalone as he walked along gloomily. “We ought to get ourselves committed to the poorhouse, that’s what. Jesus, how I’d like a piece tonight. Fat chance of that. Fuck this being without any money! Hey, look at that,” he said, pointing to a man driving by in a custom job, “he’s got it made. How do you like that, him riding around with that swell cunt, all dressed up, lousy with cash, and we got nothing! Those pricks! But that stuff ain’t gonna go on forever. There’s gonna to be some changes made.” And he walked on for a while in silence, his mouth twisted in an expression of disgust.
But as they turned into the Via del Mare by the little gardens on the slope in front of the Tempio di Vesta, Begalone said, “Look at that!” And he stopped to stare into the gardens with his eyes half-closed.
“What’s up?” Alduccio asked, undecided whether to ignore him or to show some interest.
Begalone started to whistle, bending over double. “What are you doing, calling the cows home?” asked Alduccio.
“What dishes!” Begalone exclaimed. The “dishes” were two girls sitting on the steps of the little temple, two well-endowed blondes wearing come-hither skirts that were about to split, and blouses cut so low in the bosom that you could see the best part of what they had.
They were roosting there in grave silence, turned toward each other, but as if they couldn’t even see each other, staring at the gardens and the flower beds that ran down to the Tiber, way off yonder, by the Piazza di Bocca della Verita, by the Arco di Giano, by the old church—all bathed in moonlight; you could see everything as clear as day.
Going down from the Cerchi toward the Ponte Rotto, Begalone and Alduccio swaggered by, humming as they went. But after they had walked a little f
arther, they thought better of it and turned back again.
The two beauties had not stirred; it seemed as if they hadn’t even breathed. Walking side by side, like two mongrels who have just been driven off with a stick and stop by some filthy sidewalk, their tails plastered to their rumps, the boys came back along the Via del Mare, and then separated again. They stationed themselves in the gardens, and stared at the two flaming roses. But the girls seemed not to be aware of their existence. The boys moved down toward the temple once more, but approached it from the opposite side, the one facing the slope; they entered the shadow of the small colonnade and slipped quietly toward the side that faced the Piazza Bocca della Verita, glowing in the moonlight.
The Ragazzi Page 19