The Ragazzi

by Pier Paolo Pasolini

  “Here you go,” said Riccetto. “You go down there to the right,” and he pointed to a kind of path among the bushes, winding down along the spine of the hill, looking as if it had been designed for goats. “It takes you right to a cave. You can’t miss it. Nobody’ll bother you there. So long now, take it easy.”

  “Where you going, you leaving us now?” cried the fairy, looking downcast and hunching up his shoulders. “He’s going to attend to his own fucking business, what’s it to you, fellow?” asked Alduccio, who didn’t mind Riccetto’s departure one little bit.

  “What?” said the queer. “Is that any way to be?”

  “O.k.,” said Riccetto magnanimously, “I’ll go as far as the cave with you.” They went down by the path, holding onto the bushes, and soon they were in a small clearing, green and muddy—for a little stream ran out of the cave close by, carrying black drain-water. “There you are, right in there,” said Riccetto. The fairy couldn’t bear to see him leave, and he took hold of Riccetto’s arm, smiling invitingly at him, and coyly keeping his face tucked behind his shoulder so he could pitch Riccetto a covert little smile.

  Good-humoredly, Riccetto laughed too. Since he had been in Porta Portese he had put on weight, and he wasn’t as touchy any more. By this time he was a man with a broad experience of life. “Jesus,” he said, almost in a tone of complicity, “what’s the matter, two not enough for you?”

  “No-o,” drawled the fairy, bending one of his knees like the girl who says no because she wants to be coaxed.

  “Jesus,” said Riccetto again, “you really like a good time, don’t you?” Full of understanding, and full of the sense of his own superiority, he went on down the path, waving jauntily without turning around.

  Halfway down the hill, the path ran another twenty yards and then turned right into the center of Donna Olimpia. Just one hop over a crumbling wall and then a little way down the road brought him right smack in front of the Franceschi Elementary School. There was still a great pile of rubble, as if the building had caved in only a couple of days ago, except that garbage had accumulated upon the rain-washed, sun-scorched stones. His hands in his pockets, Riccetto stopped by the heap of ruins to look things over. It was true that the masses of stone that had rolled out into the middle of the street, and the tide of rubble, had been more or less piled up to one side. There was only an occasional stone still in the roadway; it could be seen that when election-time had come around, they had given a lick and a promise to rebuilding everything, and those few stones had been left behind, and then the elections were over and nobody bothered to come and shift them out of the way.

  Riccetto looked all around him with great interest. He went around in back to inspect the courtyards with their washbasins and outhouses, and then he came out again to the foot of the hill of rubble and the corner buildings that were still standing, deserted, with rotten boards nailed over the windows. He stayed there a while, for he’d come to Donna Olimpia expressly to look around again. Then he pulled his shirt collar up and hunched his shoulders slightly, since it was beginning to be a little chilly, and started walking slowly through Donna Olimpia, seeing the crumbling sidewalks and the closed newsstand, and just a few people coming home, silent and sleepy, and right by the entrance to the Case Nove, something new: two policemen on guard, shivering and bored to death, sometimes standing still and sometimes walking a few steps either way, like two shadows in the shadow of the buildings, with pistol-holsters on their belts.

  Riccetto had nothing on his conscience. He was in the neighborhood for sentimental reasons only. He walked by the two cops very slowly, looking as if he didn’t give a damn; and he went off toward the Grattacieli—four buildings so designed that the levels and diagonals formed by the rows of windows were uninterrupted and made lines hundreds of feet long, and so did the stairwells that could be detected from the outside by the long verticals of rectangular windows. Below them, among arcades, passageways, and porticoes done in twentieth-century fascist style, a half-dozen interior courts stretched away, all of trodden earth, showing the remains of what must once have been flower borders, strewn with rags and paper, forming the bottom of the vast funnel of the building-walls that stretched up as high as the moon. At this hour, in these courts with their darkened passageways, almost nobody was coming in any more through the gateway that opened onto the Via Donna Olimpia, or if anyone did come in he walked swiftly along past the basement gratings, slipped into some archway, and made for his own apartment up the long flights of stairs smelling of dust.

  Riccetto wandered around among the courtyards, hoping to meet someone he could talk to for a bit. And in fact after a while he saw the outline of a young fellow coming down the iron stairway from the Via Ozanam. “Maybe I know that boy,,, Riccetto thought, and he walked toward him. He was a redhead, covered with freckles, two bushy red eyebrows hiding his eyes, and his hair carefully parted on the side. Riccetto watched him as he came up to him, and the boy, feeling eyes on him, looked attentively at Riccetto, ready for all eventualities. “Say, we know each other,” said Riccetto, going up to him with his hand outstretched.

  “If you say so,” said the boy, taking a closer look.

  “Isn’t your name Agnolo?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Riccetto,” he said, as if he were revealing a great secret.

  “Oh,” said Agnolo.

  “Well, how’s things with you?” Riccetto asked courteously.

  “So, so,” said Agnolo. You could see he was dead on his feet.

  “Well, what’s new?” asked Riccetto, who, for his part, was feeling full of beans.

  “What could be new? Same old stuff. I just knocked off work, and I’m so tired I can’t see straight.”

  “You’re a bartender, aren’t you?”

  “Yup.”

  “And the others? Oberdan, Zambuia, Bruno, Lupetto?” “Well, they’re all more or less working, and that’s about it.”

  “Rocco, Alvaro?”

  “What Alvaro?”

  “Alvaro Furciniti—you know, old Straw Boss.”

  “Oh, him,” said Agnolo. Rocco was living in Risano, and he was only seen once in a blue moon. But Alvaro was in a big mess, and the whole thing had ended just a few weeks before. It was during the early part of March. It was raining. Alvaro was in a bar down in Testaccio, where a group of weary-looking boys were shooting pool. He was playing too, passing the time. Everybody in that bar was a hood, including the owner, who was a fence, a fat guy with curly hair running all the way down his neck like the Emperor Nero. All the boys playing pool were in their work clothes because it was a weekday—Monday, as a matter of fact—but every one of them had just pulled off at least two or three big jobs, and now they were living on their capital, that day anyway. So they’d been playing in that damp room behind the bar all afternoon, and they were bored with the whole thing, so they decided to take a little trip into town. When they went by the Piazza del Popolo, they saw a chance to steal an old heap, an Aprilia, so easily they’d have had to be real jerks to let it go. There was nothing in the car, not even a pair of gloves, but they were thinking of joy-riding around that evening and then dumping it someplace. They’d had a few drinks in the bar in Testaccio, they had some more while strolling around the Piazza di Spagna and the Via del Babuino, and then they had some more, running around Rome in the Aprilia they’d just liberated. They got stinking drunk and started to drive like madmen. They headed for the Piazza Navona to play race-track, but since the circle around the piazza was too small, they buzzed off toward the Cerchi by the Archeologica promenade, keeping the engine in top gear and doing seventy-five, eighty through the wet streets. Two cops on motorcycles took off after them, but they shook them by turning in by the Anagrafe and then through the alleys around the Piazza Giudia. They went back to the Piazza Navona, and racing around it they smacked into a baby carriage and sent it sailing off fifteen or twenty feet; it was empty, as luck would have it, because the baby was holding onto its mother
’s hand and walking. A man yelled something after them, they stopped short, got out, jumped him, stomped on him, left him with blood running out of his mouth, got back into the car, and took off at top speed for Governo Vecchio and Borgo Panigo. They turned into the Lungotevere and sped up toward the Ponte Milvio. Around the Naval Ministry, one of them spotted a good-looking woman, all dressed up, walking by herself beside the railing. They slowed down; one of them jumped out, went over to the lady, grabbed her purse, and they were off again. They turned around, crossed the bridge, and turned down again toward Borgo Pio. They careened around a while in the Piazza San Pietro, and landed back in Testaccio to have two or three shots of cognac. It was night by this time, and they decided to take a spin out to Anzio, or Ardea, or Latina—somewhere out in the country. They climbed back into the Aprilia, gunned off toward San Giovanni, and turned into the Via Appia. In half an hour they were in a little town that they didn’t even know the name of, and they went into a tavern to drink some wine, and after that they spun up and down those country roads, always doing better than sixty, until, almost by chance, they found themselves in a place near Latina that one of them knew about. It was well on into the night by now. They left the car parked on the shoulder of the road, and broke into a farmyard where they grabbed about twenty chickens and shot the dog dead. They piled the chickens into the car, took off at eighty miles an hour, got back onto the Via Appia, and about twenty miles from Rome, just before Marino, they smacked into a trailer-truck, God knows how. The Aprilia was a heap of twisted metal, and the inside was a mess of bloody bodies and chicken feathers. Alvaro was the only one who got out alive; he lost an arm and he was blind.

  While telling this story, the redhead began to feel a bit chilly, maybe because he was so sleepy, and looking rather pale-faced, he glanced impatiently out of the corner of his eye at the people coming in from time to time, going silently into their doorways, all hunched up.

  “Let me go on home and get some sleep, or my old man will raise hell,” he said at last, stretching.

  “O.k., see you,” said Riccetto, who was sorry to see him go but didn’t want to show it.

  “So long, uh, Riccè,” said Agnolo. He shook hands and disappeared into the broad black maw of stairway M or N, with its dusty steps, splashed at intervals by the light of a feeble electric bulb.

  Riccetto went off across the courtyards in a quiet, thoughtful mood. In the Via Donna Olimpia he passed by the policemen again, and whistling, hands in his pockets, he took the road at the foot of the Casadio hill that led down to the Ponte Bianco, beyond the Ferrobedò. He had no further business in that neighborhood, and he quickened his step a bit, still whistling. He was in a hurry to get to the Ponte Bianco and take the tram home and go to sleep.

  The Ferrobedò—or, to speak properly, the Ferro-Beton*— stretched out on his right in the sugary moonlight, that fragrant white powder; everything was as it should be, and so still that you could hear a night watchman singing to himself behind some warehouse.

  _____

  * Literally, reinforced concrete.—Trans.

  _____

  Beyond him, raised on a sort of plateau against the light and looming above some huge black mounds, the enormous semicircular outline of Monteverde Nuovo could be seen, dotted with lights, under wisps of cloud that looked like shards of porcelain in the smooth, smooth sky. Riccetto hadn’t been in that district since the old school buildings had collapsed; it was a little hard to recognize the place. Everything was too clean, too orderly. Riccetto could scarcely make out where he was. Beneath him, the Ferrobedò was like a mirror—with its tall chimneys that rose nearly as high as the road from the floor of the little valley, its yards full of railroad ties piled in neat rows, perfectly aligned, its lengths of track gleaming near some dark motionless freight car, its rows of warehouses that, at least when seen from above, looked like ballrooms, all clean, with neat rows of reddish roofs.

  Even the wire-mesh fence that ran along the road, following the bushy slope above the factory, was brand new, not a single gap in it. Only the old watchman’s shelter by the fence remained as foul and smelly as ever; people passing by still used it as a toilet—the shit was inches deep inside and even outside, all around the hut. That was the only place that looked familiar to Riccetto, just the way it used to be when he was a kid right after the war.

  Begalone and Alduccio were again walking swiftly toward the Campo dei Fiori, their hands in their pockets, their open shirts flopping outside their pants, but not horsing around any more, and not singing.

  “What kind of a guy are you, anyway?” Alduccio said again, walking with his shoulders hunched.

  “Will you listen to him!” cried Begalone, stopping short in the street, and thrusting out his hand with the fingers spread stiff. “Were you all by yourself, for Christ’s sake?”

  “What’s that got to do with it? He was talking just to me, like a decent guy!” Alduccio hollered, putting his hand to his mouth like a megaphone.

  “Oh, what a little sweetheart you are!” said Begalone, starting to walk again. “Goddam idiot!” he added, striking his fingers against his forehead.

  “And besides, I never said it had to be only me,” said Alduccio. “You dope, I said let’s toss for it!”

  Arguing like that, they got to the Campo dei Fiori, where the pavement had been wetted down but there were still cabbage stalks and empty shells lying around, and the boys were still playing soccer with a rag ball. At the far end of the piazza, in deep shadow, there was an alley, the Via dei Cappellari, lined with crumbling entryways, crooked windows, and sagging arches, its cobbled pavement splattered with stale urine. The two friends moved into the last patch of light before the intersection, near two old ladies sitting in a doorway under a rickety lamppost, and Begalone produced a coin, turned it over in his hand a couple of times, and tossed it into the air.

  “Heads!” Alduccio cried.

  The coin struck the cobblestones that stank of fish, and rolled over by a manhole cover. Begalone and Alduccio, giving each other the elbow and grabbing at each other’s flapping shirts, both threw themselves on the coin.

  “I win,” Alduccio said calmly, and feeling pretty full of himself he led the way into the alley. Begalone was right behind him. The only light on the pavement, which looked like the floor of a stable, came from some tiny windows let into the sooty wall, and it could have been a real trick finding the door to the cathouse. But as it happened the door was painted pea-green, so it could have been picked out among a thousand, and besides it was ajar, opening onto a white-tiled corridor that looked like the ones in the public baths.

  They went up the stairs and got to the first-floor landing. On one side the stair, covered with a threadbare carpet, continued upward under a white vault; on the other was the door to the parlor. In the center of that room, the madam had her presiding-officer’s chair.

  Since there was no one in the hall at that moment, and the parlor door was closed, the two friends went calmly up the second flight of stairs. But a roar stopped them in their tracks. “Hey, you lousy bums!” The madam was doing the roaring, hard enough to bust her bladder. “Will you look at that! Making yourselves right at home, aren’t you?”

  Laughter and jeering voices issued from the smoke-filled parlor. A couple of customers got up and leaned against the doorway, grinning.

  Begalone and Alduccio ran back down the flight of stairs they had climbed, and, laughing themselves, went to pay their respects to the madam, who had already turned back toward her throne, her fat thighs waddling. She wasn’t amused one little bit, and neither was her servant-girl, who glumly stuck to her like a leech.

  “Imbeciles!” said the madam in choice Tuscan, for she considered herself high-class because she was a property owner. “You want to close the deal without laying out one lira, don’t you? What are you, crazy?”

  “Ahh, lady, we just made a mistake is all,” said Begalone conciliatingly.

  “Mistake my ass,” she replied. When
it came to money, she could talk the Trastevere dialect loud and clear, even though she was from Frosinone. She shoved her hand out toward them. They pulled out their identity cards and showed them to her. Then, looking cheerful in spite of the asshole trick they had pulled, they mingled with the customers, who were sitting on couches along the walls, smoking, red as lobsters, most of them looking like born losers, silent and horny.

  And on an upholstered stool in the center of the room, a couple of greenish veils draping her belly, an old Sicilian whore was sitting smoking a cigarette daubed with lipstick.

  The company stared at her in silence, and she stared back in a rage, puffing smoke all around her, her tits reaching down to her navel.

  When he came in, Alduccio marched right up to her, turned his back on the audience, and motioning with his head, he muttered, “Lets go.”

  “What a jerk!” Begalone thought, moving over toward one of the couches and sitting down. “All these guys have been here an hour and none of them goes upstairs. He comes in and right away he’s got to go up to her room.” Meanwhile, Alduccio and the whore had left the room and gone up the stair with the threadbare carpet. Begalone had a smoke, sitting with one ham on the couch and one off it, next to two soldiers from the country south of the Po who didn’t say a word and acted as respectful as if they were in church instead of in a cathouse. “When the hell is he coming back down, a fucking year from now?” Begalone mused darkly. “The next time, if he don’t lay out the money, I’ll break his balls.” He took the last drags on the cigarette that was scorching his fingers, and dropped the butt at the foot of the couch, crushing it with his heel.