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The Ragazzi

Page 22

by Pier Paolo Pasolini


  Everything was as usual: The madam was cursing out the servant-girl in the corridor. She yelled as if she were being disemboweled, and the words couldn’t be made out too well.

  “Hey, big-mouth, shut up!” a couple of young men yelled at her from a corner of the parlor—also as usual, after some of that racket. Their voices were so deep and powerful that they sounded as if they came from down in the guts somewhere, stretching the cords in their necks and making their eyes go bloodshot. They immediately assumed their ordinary expressions again, and nobody could have known who had shouted. The madam paid absolutely no attention—just went on screaming at her handmaid. Everything as usual, in short. After a while, two more of the girls came downstairs; one of them took the unoccupied stool, and the other sat down on the lap of one of the young men who had called out and then shut it off quickly, making a sacrificial face so that he looked as if he had just swallowed the Host. The two soldiers left, followed by insults from the two whores. The younger men all laughed, getting as red in the face as peppers. The stench of tobacco smoke, sweaty clothing, and sneakers got worse and worse—but that was as usual too. Suddenly …

  Right at the height of the racket going on in the parlor, above the voice of the madam, who was working on the last paragraphs of her speech, and those of the girls, who were bitching, suddenly laughter was heard upstairs, and it went on and on. At first, nobody paid any attention. Not the madam, or the girls, or the customers, or Begalone. But since the laughing kept up, they all began to prick up their ears. The madam started throwing suspicious glances up the stairs from the vantage-point of her throne. Then she put all the money away in a drawer—she had been counting it all the time that she had been giving the servant what-for—and she walked as far as the staircase, looking up. The girls fell silent, too, and gathered in the doorway, dragging their trains behind them, and their plump flesh shaking beneath their skins, which smelled of powder and fried food. The young men from Panigo also got up and crowded together in the doorway, leaning on the door frame or piling up behind each other. The other clients crowded behind them, and after them Begalone, stretching his neck to see what was going on.

  The one who was doing the laughing was still up on the third flight of stairs, out of sight under its little plaster vault beyond the landing where the threadbare carpet gave out. But she was coming slowly downstairs. She must have been stopping every once in a while to throw her head back or to double up, in order to laugh better. She was laughing hard enough to be heard out in the street, but you could tell she didn’t mean it all that much. She’d go ha-ha-ha-ha-ha for a good while, then she’d stop, and she’d start in again, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, a tone higher, till you thought the wench would split her gullet. At last she got to the landing, and there she stopped again, to laugh for the benefit of the audience, who were watching from the foot of the stair. Open-mouthed, they watched her going through her spasms up there, her heart not in it any more but carrying on more than ever just for the hell of it.

  “Hey, loud-mouth, you mind telling us what you’re laughing at?” yelled one of the young men. She looked down at him and the others, and laughed at them too.

  “Shut up and give your ass a chance!” one of the others said.

  She turned toward the stair above her, which was out of their view, and still laughing she screamed, “Hey, come on, shake it, what do you need, a wet nurse?” Then Alduccio showed up on the landing next to the Sicilian woman, his head bent over as he tightened his belt another notch.

  “Go get yourself an eggnog,” she said between explosions of laughter.

  “Fuck you,” said Alduccio in an undertone, having found the right hole at last. The Sicilian woman came slowly down the carpeted stair, leaning against the wall in order to laugh at her ease, and he followed her down as if he were hiding behind her. The ones below, who had all caught on by now, were laughing too, but not very loud, rather discreetly, and muttering among their laughter, “Well, damn her anyway, what’s all the fuss for?” But she kept it up, laughing fit to die, in order to spite them all. “He’s in such a tearing hurry, and then he just shoots blanks. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” “I’m just run down is all,” Alduccio stammered by way of excuse, but in such a low voice that he was the only one who heard it. Now they were down on the lower landing among the others. The Sicilian woman went into the parlor laughing hysterically, pushing her way through the crowd around the door, while Alduccio—in a towering rage, but not daring to look anyone in the face—tore down the last flight of stairs to the street door, and Begalone, having hastily paid the madam, who was already beginning to yell, ran after him.

  “Now we got to walk all the way to the terminal,” he said worriedly to Alduccio when he had caught up with him and the door of the cathouse had closed behind them.

  “So what?” said Alduccio. He walked on without turning around, like a mangy wolf with its tail tucked in between its hind quarters. They were all alone in the Via dei Cappellari, walking one ahead of the other, along the housefronts decorated with two courses of encrusted soot, sopping wet, black, and pierced with windows out of which rags were hanging; the alley was so narrow that hands stretched out could touch two facing windows. It was so dark that they had to walk along like blind men. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” said Begalone. “We’re going to end up with our faces in a puddle of piss at this rate.” Almost feeling his way along, being careful where he set his feet down, he suddenly burst out laughing.

  ‘‘What’s so funny?” said Alduccio, turning halfway around in a hurry. Begalone went on snickering, moving along the pavement that seemed to be smeared with grease. “Keep it up, why don’t you,” said Alduccio weakly.

  Still walking one behind the other, they crossed the Campo dei Fiori, quiet now, and went by the Largo Argentina and the Via Nazionale toward the terminal, and got there after half an hour of forced march. “Should we grab a hitch here?” Alduccio asked dully. “Be better farther down,” said Begalone, his face sagging and yellow with fatigue. They grabbed a ride on the number 9 farther down, by the Macao barracks. Begalone was in high spirits. Hanging onto the cowcatcher, he started in singing, over and over, “Two-bit whores, two-hit whores . . .” If by chance someone passing by turned to look at him, he tried to start something right away. “What you looking at?” he said. Or else, according to what the man looked like, or how fast the trolley was going, “Yeah, chief, I’m stealing a hitch, what’s it to you?”—and he thrust out his hand in a questioning gesture, the fingers spread stiff. Or if it was a young boy, “Hey, you going to lend me the fare, buddy?” Or if it was a woman, “Hey, good-looking!” And carried away with enthusiasm, he’d start in singing louder than ever. “Why don’t you cut it out?” Alduccio said to him seriously during a stop, while they wandered around the trolley, looking innocent. “Or why don’t you just phone the cops and tell them to pick you up—there’s a stupid son of a bitch hitching a ride on the trolley, on the number 9?” “What do I care if they stick me in the can? You think I’m any better off at home?” asked Begalone, catching hold of the cowcatcher on the run.

  The lights of Verano glowed around them, twinkling, calm, thickly clustered, hundreds of them, through the cypresses and the tombs that jutted out above the retaining-walls. But Portonaccio, at the head of the line, just the other side of the overpass by the Tiburtino station, was deserted—just a couple of empty trolleys and empty buses parked there, showing like dark stains in the dim light, made more gloomy rather than illuminated by some street lamps and the calm sky. A 309 car was stopped in front of the shut-down newsstand, and beyond it was the station shelter. There wasn’t a soul around.

  “Let’s see what I’ve got in my pockets,” said Begalone, turning them inside out and pulling out the money. “Fifty-five lire,” he said, “forty for the bus, and with ten more we get ourselves a bun, what do you say, Aldo?” “O.k., let’s get a bun,” Alduccio said hoarsely. He was dying of hunger, but he didn’t care one way or another about that bun; he stood be
hind Begalone, all bent over. Begalone bought the bun from an almost empty stall. “Here you go,” he said, lifting the cold bun to Alduccio’s mouth. Alduccio took a bite with his mouth twisted up. “Take another one,” said Begalone. “No, that’s enough,” said Alduccio, turning his head away. “O.k.,” said Begalone, “so much the better. I’ll eat the whole damn thing.” And he began to eat it, laughing with his mouth full. “Laugh, laugh, and fuck you too,” Alduccio muttered, looking even grimmer. “What do you say we hop on?” said Begalone after a while, when he had finished chewing. And he jumped up onto the bus platform, lively as you please. Alduccio followed him into the half-empty bus, not saying a word, dragging his feet, not even taking his hands out of his pockets. But Begalone was whistling a Charleston. “Two tickets, conductor!” he yelled. “I can hear you, I can hear you,” said the conductor, slowly pulling two tickets from his pad. “You don’t have to shout.”

  There were a dozen passengers on the bus, all half-asleep. There was a blind woman who had been begging, accompanied by a man who looked like Cavour; two musicians with their instruments encased in black cloth bags, nodding as they sat; a carabinieri officer; two or three workingmen; and some young boys on their way home from the movies. Begalone and Alduccio sprawled out on the front seats, and while Alduccio kept quiet, Begalone began to sing half out loud. The driver was chatting with the dispatcher, and beyond them, beyond the retaining-walls, the lights of Verano glowed and twinkled. Suddenly, in the midst of the silence and the depressing stink of poor people’s clothes, a young fellow wearing a jacket entered the bus, a little blond with a face that looked like the seventh Generation of a race of starvelings, and set himself in the center of the platform, facing everybody. While everyone ignored him, he cleared his throat conscientiously a couple of times, and then started to sing. So everybody turned to look at him, and, undaunted, he went on singing in a loud, nasal voice, pronouncing all the words of the song very distinctly. “Fly away! Fly away! Fly away!” he sang. Out of the corners of their eyes, Begalone and Alduccio observed their colleague at work. Here and there, someone started to laugh, and some sat with their mouths open, staring; some, on the other hand, felt embarrassed, and kept their faces turned toward the window.

  “‘You don’t hurry up and fly away, the bus’ll start up, and that’ll be all she wrote,” said Begalone, by way of breaking the ice. Alduccio took advantage of the distraction afforded by that idiot who had come here to sing, and concentrated on his own thoughts. But the boy sang his song right through, in the silent bus in the silent square, and then he went around among the passengers to collect what he could. Begalone shook his gravedigger’s head, swelling up his neck like a turkey, and pulled the last five lire out of his pocket. His duty done, the blond kid jumped down from the bus platform as quietly as he had climbed in. “Yeah, now you’ve got the money, scram,” said Begalone, broken-hearted about the five lire. “Fly away, fly away,” he called after him, though the kid couldn’t hear him any more, “fly away, damn you!” Then he thrust his yellow face under Alduccio’s nose. “Fly away, fly away,” he repeated. Alduccio gave him one with his elbow under the chin, so that Begalone’s head struck the back of the seat, and he looked at him in a rage, ready to come to blows if the other said one more word. But Begalone dropped the whole thing. Then the driver climbed slowly into the bus, but instead of starting up he stretched out in his seat with a vacant expression on his dark Judas face. He put his hands between his legs, and seemed to be dropping off to sleep. A dismal voice sounded from the rear of the bus, “Hey, buddy, what are we doing here, digging in for the winter?” But the driver didn’t respond. “Hey, fly away, fly away, fly away,” Begalone said loudly. With those two sallies, the atmosphere in the bus perked up, and everybody more or less put in his two cents’ worth. When they had joked around a while, one after another contributing an observation on the Korean War or on Rebecchini, the driver began to show signs of life. He straightened up, and lazily released the brake; the bus began to shake and spit, and jouncing over the pavement, it took off down the dark and empty Via Tiburtina.

  “So long, Aldo,” said Begalone when they were well into Tiburtino, near their own neighborhood, and he went up the crumbling stair. “So long,” Alduccio muttered. He walked on toward his own house a little farther on down the empty street. But even if it had been crowded with people, he wouldn’t have seen one of them. The street lamps poured out their spattering of light on the pavements and the yellowish walls of the buildings, stretching out in rows of ten, all alike, and with little courtyards of beaten earth, all alike. A half-dozen kids came by playing music, one with a harmonica, one with a drum, one with a pair of maracas, and they went off among the buildings until their samba sounded like an echo in a ghost town. A drunk whose face looked like a burst of flame under his dirty cap let out a whistle now and then, signaling to his girl-friend to let him in while her husband slept. Two young fellows were quietly talking over some private business—their voices distinctly audible, nevertheless—in one of the courtyards, with its row of stone supports for clotheslines, looking like so many gibbets in the shadows.

  The door to Alduccio’s place was ajar, and the light was on. His sister was sitting on a chair; inside the messy kitchen his mother was still shouting. The dishes on the drainboard were still unwashed, there was garbage all over the floor, and on the table, in the light of the lamp shining on the wet surfaces, there were still some chunks of bread, a dirty bowl, and a knife. The door to one of the inner rooms was ajar too, and in the gloom Alduccio’s father, still dressed, could be seen lying spread-legged on the double bed, where the youngest girl was also sleeping; the other young children were sleeping on mattresses on the floor. But the door to the other room, where Riccetto’s family all slept, was closed, and nobody seemed to be in there.

  “I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to kill myself,” his sister cried out, winding her skinny bare arms about her head as if she were suffering from cramps. “You bet,” Alduccio muttered, not looking at anyone and moving toward his cot over against the wall in the room where his father was lying. Suddenly the girl jumped up from the chair and hurled herself toward the doorway. “You stay where you are,” said Alduccio, catching her round the waist and flinging her back into the center of the room with such force that she fell to the floor.

  She lay where she had fallen, between the table and the overturned chair, sobbing tearlessly with rage, twisting about on the wet tiles.

  “Close the door,” Alduccio’s mother said to him.

  “Close it yourself!” he said, taking a piece of bread from the table and stuffing it into his mouth.

  “You bum,” his mother cried, not too loud so as not to be heard by the neighbors, and for that reason even more infuriated. She was disheveled and half-naked as he had left her, sweaty breasts nearly out of her open gown. She went to close the door, trailing her bare feet over the tiles.

  “That shameless hog,” she went on, while Alduccio’s sister, still stretched out on the floor, gasped as if the death-rattle were upon her, saying over and over in a half-whisper, “God, God.” Alduccio swallowed a mouthful of bread and went to the faucet to get a sip of water. Wearing his undershorts and the black jacket of his work clothes, Alduccio’s father reeled across the kitchen, blind with drink, his uncombed hair plastered down on his forehead with sweat. He stood still a moment, perhaps because he had forgotten what it was he had meant to do. Then he raised his hand to his mouth and waved it about in the air, from somewhere around his heart to an indeterminate point in the neighborhood of his nose, as if he were giving emphasis to a long and complicated speech that never got past his lips. At last, realizing that he wasn’t managing to express himself, he took off at a run toward his bed. Alduccio went out for a moment to relieve himself, for there were no toilets in the project apartments, and when he came back his mother lit into him again. “He’s out of the house all day long,” she said. “He drinks, he eats, and not once does he bring home
a single lira, not once!”

  Alduccio turned suddenly. “I’ve had it up to here. Can it, Ma!” he yelled.

  “And if I can it,” she cried, tossing the hair out of her eyes, and freeing the locks that stuck to her sweaty bosom, bare almost to the nipples, “you’ll make sure I have something else to yell about, you lousy good-for-nothing!”

  Blind with rage, Alduccio spat out at her feet the mouthful of food he had been chewing. “There!” he said. “Take it back! You can have it!” Turning to go into his room, he bumped against the table, and knocked the bowl and the knife that had been lying on it to the floor. “You give it back to me, do you?” said his mother, moving toward him. “You think you can get even that way, do you?” “Fuck you,” said Alduccio. “Fuck you too, and that filthy sewer-mouth you’ve always had!” screamed his mother. Alduccio saw red. He bent down to grab the knife that had fallen by his foot on the dirty tile floor.

  8 • The Old Hag

  … The withered hag

  of the Via Giulia lifts her claws.*

  It was a Sunday afternoon. The fine view that could be enjoyed from the San Basilio bus on the long express run from Tiburtino to Ponte Mammolo seemed to be composed of wonderful shapes bathed in the light of the blue sky, from here at the foot of the slope to the Tivoli hills, vaguely outlined against a patch of haze, encircling the countryside with its trees, small bridges, gardens, factories, and houses.

  Here and there along the Via Tiburtina, and almost grazed by the bus that at that point speeded up to forty miles an hour with a great clatter of glass and metal, young fellows could be seen going by in lazy, noisy groups, all dressed up, on foot or riding bicycles, and groups of girls, too. After the rain of the night before, everything looked as fresh as a new coat of paint—even the Aniene, curving among the fields, the reedy stretches, and the clumps of shacks, and uncoiling in the Prati Fiscali to flow down toward Monte Sacro.

 

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