When his head rose above the surface, he began to swim toward the far shore with long strokes. Without saying anything, Genesio floundered through the mud to a spot below the swimming-place where the water was up to his chest, and took off, dog-paddling swiftly.
“You crossing the river, Genè?” Mariuccio and Borgo Antico called after him excitedly. But he didn’t hear them, couldn’t hear them, swimming after Riccetto with his mouth shut tight and his head turned to one side so as not to swallow any water.
He passed through the strong current, and was carried downstream a few yards, along with the garbage, and then, still moving his hands swiftly under the water, his head turned to one side, he swam across the far half of the stream. Meanwhile, Riccetto had already reached the other bank, beneath the white stripe made by the acids flowing from the processing plant, and he plunged into the water at once, swimming back as fast as he had come. He reached the shore in a few strokes, doing the dead man’s float now and then, and starting to sing once more, he went up the bank above the swimming-place and singing away, began to do gymnastics in order to dry off. The sun was at its zenith, scorching, and all around below the processing plant it felt as if the air were on fire, and on both the fields and the road, with the tanks rumbling off in the distance, the numbing silence of high noon was descending. In a few minutes, instead of being dry, Riccetto was in a sweat.
Genesio was still on the far bank. He was sitting down in his customary position under the discharge-pipe of the processing plant, on the thick white slime. Above him, like a landslide in hell, the bushy slope crowned by the factory wall rose up, with cylinders and tanks, green or maroon, jutting out, and a bunch of metal boxes on which the sunlight looked almost black, it was so intense.
Mariuccio and Borgo Antico watched their brother squatting over there like a Bedouin. “Aren’t you coming back, Genè?” Mariuccio called in his child’s voice, still clasping Genesio’s rolled-up clothes tightly against his chest.
“I’m coming,” Genesio called over, without straining his voice, still sitting in the same position, his head down to his knees. Riccetto was dressing slowly, pulling on his socks and taking care that they weren’t inside out. “Now I’ll go tell the carabinieri you’re here,” he yelled cheerfully at Genesio when he was nearly ready, “and your father, too!”
As he went off, another wave of well-being swept over him. But this time he contented himself with making the customary menacing gesture with his fist at the boys who were watching him suspiciously from the foot of the bank. As he was starting off, half-turned around toward the boys, he happened to look toward the factory wall, and high up in a small window lost among the great metal cylinders of the tanks, he spotted the face of the watchman’s daughter, who had suddenly begun to polish the panes. “Will you look at that!” said Riccetto, who began to get excited on the spot. He went on a few steps, then thought better of it and took another look, then took a few more steps toward the bridge and changed his mind again. She was still up there, polishing away at the glass, which was gleaming in the bright air as if it had turned to liquid. “Fuck it, I’ll stick around a while,” he said. He stopped, and slipped between two clumps of brush and a patch of nettles, so that he couldn’t he seen by the boys down at the river’s edge, or by people going by on the Via Tiburtina, though nobody was stirring in the hot sun at that hour. All that could be heard was the sound of cars, and in the distance the rumbling, rending noise of the bersaglieri tanks.
When he was hidden behind the bushes, he took his pants off, pretending that he had to wring out his shorts again. He stood there naked, half-concealed, looking at the broad in the window and trying to get her attention.
“Hey, Genè, aren’t you coming back over here?” Mariucccio kept calling sadly.
Genesio didn’t answer the summons. Then he suddenly jumped into the water, swam as far as the main current, and then turned right back and sat down gloomily once more under the bank and the factory wall.
“Aren’t you coming back, Genè?” Mariuccio asked again, disappointed at the turn of events.
“I’m going to stay here a while,” Genesio said. “It’s nice here.”
“Come on, swim back!” Mariuccio insisted, the tendon standing out on his throat with the effort of calling. Borge Antico began to call him too, and Fido barked, jumping around, but with his muzzle pointing at the far bank, as if he too were calling Genesio.
Then Genesio stood up, stretched a bit—something he never did—and yelled, “I’ll count up to thirty and then dive in. He stood silently counting, then stared at the water, his eyes burning below his still neatly-combed black hair. At last he took a belly-whopper into the river. He swam rapidly almost to the middle of the stream just at the level of the factory, where the river turned toward the bridge that carried the Via Tiburtina. But the current was strong there, eddying back toward the bank on which the factory stood. Going over, Genesio had passed through the current easily enough, but coming back was another story. Dog-paddling the way he was doing amounted to treading water in that current, not to making headway. Held in the current, he began to be carried down toward the bridge.
“Come on, Genè!” his brothers yelled from the swimming-place, unable to make out why Genesio wasn’t moving toward them. “Come on, let’s go home!”
But he couldn’t get past the current running like a stream within the yellow river, full of foam, sawdust, and burned oil. He stayed within it, and instead of drawing near the bank, he was carried farther down toward the bridge. Borgo Antico, Mariuccio, and the dog tumbled down the bank and began to scramble downstream, on all fours when they couldn’t make it upright through the black mud at the edge of the river, falling and getting up again, following behind Genesio, who was being carried faster and faster toward the bridge. Thus Riccetto, as he was showing off for the girl, who went on polishing the window, dim as a shadow, saw all three boys go by below him—the two little ones tumbling among the bushes and yelling in terror, and Genesio out in the river, still paddling swiftly without gaining an inch. Riccetto got up, took a few steps, naked as he was, down toward the water through the puddles(?), and stopped to stare at what was happening before his eyes. At first he didn’t catch on, and he thought they were playing. Then he understood, and he tore down the slope, slipping and sliding, but in the same moment he realized that it was useless. To jump in there beneath the bridge would only mean you were tired of living; nobody could get away from it there. He stopped, pale as a corpse. Genesio wasn’t fighting it any more, poor kid, just thrashing his arms aimlessly, but still he did not cry out for help. Every now and then he sank below the surface, and came up again farther downstream. At last, when he was quite close to the bridge, where the current split and foamed over the rocks, he went down again, without crying out, and only for an instant did his little black head near the surface again.
His hands shaking, Riccetto slipped on the pants he had been holding under his arm, not looking at the factory window now, and stood here a moment longer, uncertain what to do. He could hear Borgo Antico and Mariuccio screaming and weeping down by the bridge, Mariuccio still clutching Genesio’s pants and undershirt to his chest. Already the two boys were starting to climb up the bank, helping themselves along with their hands.
“Be better to beat it out of here,” Riccetto said, almost weeping himself, walking hurriedly down the path toward the Via Tiburtina. He went on almost at a run so as to reach the bridge before the two boys did. “I got to look out for Riccetto,” he thought. He scrambled upward, slipping and sliding, and grasping at the bushes on the slope that was covered with loose dust and burnt stubble, got to the top, and without looking back, turned onto the bridge. He managed to get away unobserved, for in all the lonely countryside stretching as far as the white jumble of houses in Pietralata and Monte Sacro, and on the Via Tiburtina, there wasn’t a soul around at that moment. There wasn’t even a car going by, or one of the old buses that ran through that section. In the enormous silence,
all you could hear was a tank, lost somewhere beyond the playing fields in Ponte Mammolo, plowing up the horizon with its roar.
The Ragazzi Page 25