The Ragazzi Read online

  The ragazzi

  Pier Paolo Pasolini

  TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY EMILE CAPOUYA

  The “ragazzi” are the children of the streets of Rome, the children who grow up in the bombed-out ruins, the desolate housing developments, the clutter of the markets, the age-old streets and squares standing like monuments to the past.

  Pasolini’s novel—which aroused a storm of controversy when it first appeared in Italy—relates the story of Riccetto and his friends, the ragazzi of the title. When the book opens, they are nine or ten years old, and the German soldiers are straggling out of Rome as the Americans arrive; it ends when they are sixteen or seventeen, as the “new prosperity” is beginning to dawn. They get their education in the Roman streets: perpetually hungry, they steal from everyone in sight —blind men, beggars, each other; they are in and out of jail; and, for sport, they have only an occasional swim in the filthy Aniene river.

  In the background are the shadows of the larger tragedies of the times: women rioting for food and trampling each other to death; a jerry-built slum building collapsing to rubble on one of the boys; a police search for a gang of youngsters who have tied a boy to a stake and set him on fire; the unrelenting rumble of tanks on maneuvers.

  The author, who is well known in this country for his films, has brilliantly captured and recreated the blunt, bitter actuality of being poor— a poverty that has made these children relentlessly cynical, yet passionate; grotesquely cruel, yet often ingratiatingly innocent. Unparalleled in the fiction of this stark postwar period, closely related to the neo-realism of such Italian films as Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Paisan, and Open City, this novel is a bold portrayal of the awfulness of deep poverty.

  DESIGN: KUHLMAN ASSOCIATES

  The ragazzi

  by Pier Paolo Pasolini

  Translated from the Italian

  by Emile Capouya

  Grove Press, Inc.

  New York

  Copyright © 1968 by Grove Press, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Originally published as Ragazzi di Vita, copyright

  © 1955 by Aldo Garzanti Editore, Milan, Italy.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-27895

  First Printing

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Contents

  1

  The Ferrobedò

  7

  2

  Riccetto

  32

  3

  Night in the Villa Borghese

  65

  4

  The ragazzi

  88

  5

  The Warm Nights

  116

  6

  Swimming in the Aniene

  159

  7

  In the City

  187

  8

  The Old Hag

  232

  Table of Contents

  1 • The Ferrobedò

  2 • Riccetto

  3 • Night in the Villa Borghese

  4 • The ragazzi

  5 • The Warm Nights

  6 • Swimming in the Aniene

  7 • In the City

  8 • The Old Hag

  1 • The Ferrobedò

  Below Mazzini’s monument…

  —Popular song

  It was a very hot July day. Riccetto, who was going to make his first Communion and be confirmed, had been up by five o’clock, but as he went down by the Via Donna Olimpia in his gray long pants and his white shirt, rather than a first communicant or a little soldier of Jesus, he looked like a kid roaming around down by the Tiber, trying to make a pickup. In a troop of boys like himself, all in white shirts, he went down toward the church of the Divina Provvidenza, where at nine o’clock Don Pizzuto gave him Holy Communion and at eleven the Bishop confirmed him. But Riccetto was in a hurry to take off. From Monteverde down to the Trastevere station, all that you could hear was a steady drone of motor vehicles. You could hear the horns, and the motors revving up on their way uphill and around the curves, filling with their deafening rumble the outskirts of the city, already burning under the morning sun. As soon as the Bishop’s short sermon was over, Don Pizzuto and two or three young priests led the boys to the playground to have their pictures taken. The Bishop walked among them, blessing the parents kneeling in his path. Riccetto felt a gnawing in his insides and decided to skip the whole thing. He went out through the empty church, but at the door he ran into his godfather, who said, “Hey, where you going?” “Going home,” called Riccetto, “I’m hungry.” “Come to my house, you little bastard,” his godfather yelled after him, “we’re having lunch.” But Riccetto took no notice of him, running away along the asphalt pavement that was simmering in the heat. All Rome was one droning rumble. Only up on the heights was there silence, but the atmosphere there was as charged as a land mine. Riccetto changed his clothes.

  It’s a short way from Monteverde Vecchio to the Granatieri. You go by the Prato, and cut in among the buildings under construction around the Viale dei Quattro Venti: garbage piles, unfinished houses already in ruins, great muddy excavations, slopes heaped with junk. The Via Abate Ugone was just down the way. The crowd streamed up from the quiet asphalt streets of Monteverde Vecchio toward the Grattacieli.* Now you could even make out the trucks in endless columns, with halftracks, motorcycles, and armored cars among them. Riccetto plunged into the crowd heading for the warehouses.

  ________

  * Literally, “skyscrapers.”—Trans.

  ________

  Over there the Ferrobedò was like an immense courtyard, a walled-in field sunk in a valley, as big as a town square or a cattle market. Gateways were set into the rectangular wall. On one side were the rows of wooden dwellings, on the other the warehouses. Riccetto traveled the length of the Ferrobedò with the yelling crowd and stopped in front of one of the houses. But there were four Germans who kept them from going in. Beside the door was an overturned table. Riccetto shouldered it and ran toward the gateway. Just outside he bumped into a boy who said, “What you doing?” “I’m taking it home, what do you think?” said Riccetto. “Come on with me, stupid, we can get better stuff than that.”

  “Coming,” said Riccetto. He dropped the table, and someone passing by picked it up.

  He went back into the Ferrobedò with the boy and made his way toward the warehouses. There he picked up a coil of hemp rope. Then the boy said, “Come here and get these nails.” So, with the rope and nails and other stuff, Riccetto made five round trips to Donna Olimpia. The midafternoon sun was cracking the paving stones, but the Ferrobedò was still full of people competing with the trucks running by Trastevere, Porta Portese, Matatoio, and San Paolo, making the scorching air ring with deafening noise. Returning from the fifth trip, Riccetto and the boy saw a horse and cart by the wall, right between two small buildings. They sidled over to see if there was any way they could pull the job off. Then Riccetto found a cache of arms in one of the buildings and slung a submachine gun over his shoulder and stuck two pistols in his belt. Armed to the teeth, he got up on the horse’s back.

  But a German came and chased them away.

  While Riccetto was carting coils of rope from the warehouses to Donna Olimpia, Marcello was with the other boys, among the buildings in Buon Pastore. The pond swarmed with kids, ducking themselves and yelling. In the dirty field surrounding the pond other kids were playing with a football.

  Agnolo asked, “Where’s Riccetto?”

  “He went to his first Communion,” Marcello shouted.

  “The shitheel!” said Agnolo.

  “He’s probably having lunch with his godfather,” Marcello added.

  They still hadn’t heard the news up there by the pond in


  Buon Pastore. The sun beat down in silence on the Madonna del Riposo, the Casaletto, and beyond it, Primavalle. On their way back from swimming they passed by the Prato, where there was a German camp.

  They started to reconnoiter, but a motorcycle and sidecar came by, and the German in the sidecar yelled at the boys: “Rausch! Contaminated area!” The military hospital was close by. “What the hell do we care?” yelled Marcello. Meanwhile the motorcycle had slowed down. The German jumped out of the sidecar and gave Marcello a slap that sent him spinning. With his mouth swelling up, Marcello twisted away like a snake, and stampeding down the slope with the others, he made a vulgar noise at the German. Running away, laughing and yelling, they finally came to the barracks. There they met some other boys. “What you been doing?” said the others, who were dirty and messy.

  “Why?” asked Agnolo. “What’s there to do?”

  “If you want to see something, go on up to the Ferrobedò.”

  So they rushed off, and when they got there they trooped noisily into the workshop. “Let’s take the engine apart!” yelled Agnolo. But Marcello left the workshop and found himself right where everything was happening, in front of the oil sump. He was just about to fall in, and drown like an Indian in quicksand, when a yell stopped him in his tracks. “Hey, Marce! Look out! Hey, Marce!” It was that little bastard Riccetto, with some friends. So he went off with them. They entered a warehouse and grabbed cans of grease, drive-belts for lathes and bundles of steel rods. Marcello carried home a hundred pounds of iron and dumped it in the alleyway where his mother wouldn’t notice it right away. He hadn’t been home since morning. His mother cuffed him. “Where have you been, you good-for-nothing?” she yelled. “I was only in swimming,” answered Marcello, a bit round-shouldered and skinny as a grasshopper, trying to fend off her slaps. Then his big brother came home and saw the loot in the alleyway. “You little jerk,” he yelled. “He stole this stuff, the little bastard.” So Marcello went back to the Ferrobedò with his brother, and this time they carried off auto tires from a wagon. Evening was falling and the sun was hotter than ever. The Ferrobedò was still as crowded as a carnival; you couldn’t move at all. Every once in a while someone would yell, “Run! Run! Here come the Germans!” so that the others would run away and he could steal everything himself.

  The next day Riccetto and Marcello, who were beginning to enjoy the whole thing, went down to the General market, which was closed. A big crowd was milling around and there were some Germans, walking up and down and shooting into the air. But even more than the Germans, it was the Italian African Police who were keeping people out and in General breaking balls. The crowd kept growing anyway, pushing against the gratings, screaming, howling, cursing. Then the attack began in earnest, and even those stinking Italian cops decided to give it up as a bad job. The streets around the market were black with people and the market itself empty as a graveyard, under a sun that beat down mercilessly. When the gratings went, the market filled up in a second.

  There wasn’t a thing in the market proper, not even a cabbage stalk. The crowd began to swirl around the warehouses, under the sheds, among the stalls; they couldn’t resign themselves to going away empty-handed. At last a group of kids found a storeroom that seemed to be full of goods. Through the grating you could see piles of auto tires and inner tubes, oilcloth, tarpaulins, and, on the shelves, molds for pressing cheese. The word went out immediately. Five or six hundred people swarmed in after the first few. The door was kicked in and the crowd poured into the storeroom, jammed together.

  Riccetto and Marcello were right in the middle. They were sucked in by the human tide and went through the doorway almost without touching their feet to the ground. They went down by a spiral staircase; the people in back pushed forward, and some women, half-suffocated, began to scream. The spiral stair overflowed with people. The thin iron handrail gave, then broke, and a woman fell through screaming and pitched headfirst against a step. The crowd outside kept pushing forward. “She’s dead!” a man inside the storeroom yelled. Panic-stricken women began to shriek, “She’s dead!” No one could get in or out. Marcello kept on moving down the stairs. At the bottom, he hopped over the woman’s body, charged into the storeroom, and began to fill a basket with inner tubes; so did the other boys, who were picking up anything that wasn’t nailed down. Riccetto had disappeared; he must have managed to get out. The crowd had thinned. Marcello stepped over the dead woman again and ran toward home.

  At the Ponte Bianco there were some militiamen. They stopped him and took the stuff away. But he wouldn’t leave. He stood to one side with his empty basket, feeling terrible. In a little while Riccetto came up to the Ponte Bianco from the Caciara.

  “Well?”

  “They took the inner tubes off me, they robbed them off me,” said Marcello, looking black.

  “What do those bastards think they’re doing? Why don’t they mind their own fucking business?” yelled Riccetto.

  There were no houses by the Ponte Bianco, only a huge construction lot at the end of which, right where the Viale dei Quattro Venti passed through a ravine as deep as a stream-bed, Monteverde’s limestone hill rose up. Riccetto and Marcello sat down in the nearby sunbeaten field, all black and bare, to watch the Italian African Police giving people a hard time. Then after a while a group of boys carrying sacks full of cheese reached the Ponte Bianco. The Italian African Police threatened to stop them, but the boys faced up to them and started to argue, and they looked so mean that the police thought it better to give it up as a bad job. They let the boys keep their stuff, and they even returned the stuff they had robbed off Marcello and the others, who had come back looking ready for trouble. Running and skipping, and figuring up the profits, Riccetto and Marcello started for Donna Olimpia, and the others went their own ways too. The only thing left at the Ponte Bianco, besides the Italian African Police, was the smell of garbage stewing in the sun.

  At the foot of the Monte di Splendore was an area of beaten earth, a plateau, six or eight feet above the level of the surrounding ground, which cut off the view of Monteverde and the Ferrobedò, and, on the horizon, the line traced by the sea. There, one Saturday when the younger boys were tired of playing, some older boys began to kick a soccer ball around near the gate. They formed a circle and passed the ball around, giving it nice quick taps with the insides of their feet to make it sail along close to the ground, not trying to score. In a little while they were all soaked with sweat, but they didn’t want to take off their good jackets, or their blue woolen sweaters with black or yellow stripes, because of the casual, joking way they had started playing. And since the younger boys who stood around watching might have thought they were showing off, playing in the hot sun all dressed up like that, they laughed and clowned around, but in a way that didn’t encourage anyone else to join in.

  Passing and blocking the shots, they kidded one another. “Jesus, you’re half-dead today, Alvo,” cried a dark boy whose hair was slicked down with brilliantine. “Those women’ll get you in the end,” he added, returning the ball. “Fuck you,” answered Alvaro, a youth with a bony, pushed-in face, and a big head that would make a louse die of old age before it could finish the round trip. He tried to pull a fast one, using his heel on the ball, but he didn’t connect right and he drove it a long way, over toward Riccetto and the other younger boys who were sprawled on the dusty grass.

  Agnolo, the redhead, got up and, taking his time, sent the ball back. “You don’t want to strain your milk,” Rocco yelled to Alvaro. “We’re going to have to sweat tonight.”

  “They’re going after some pipe,” Agnolo said to the others. At that moment the three o’clock whistle blew at the Ferrobedò and at the other distant factories, down by Testaccio, the Porto, and San Paolo. Riccetto and Marcello stood up and without saying a word to anyone went down along the Via Ozanam, and slouched along half-dead under the burning July sun toward the Ponte Bianco, where they could hitch a ride on the number 13 or the number
28. They had gone into business with their Ferrobedò stock, and had kept it up when the Americans came, but now they were back to picking up butts. It’s true that Riccetto had worked at a job for a while: he had been taken on as helper at a truck service station in Monteverde Nuovo. But then he had stolen five hundred lire from the boss and the guy had fired him. So now he did nothing all afternoon, hanging around Donna Olimpia on the Monte di Casadio, that little yellow hummock in the sun, playing with the other boys, or bothering the women who came to spread out their wash on the shriveled grass later in the day. Or else they went and played ball in the empty space between the Grattacieli and the Monte di Splendore, hundreds of boys playing in the back lots invaded by the sun, in the dried-up fields around the Via Ozanam or the Via Donna Olimpia, or in front of the Franceschi elementary-school buildings, filled with hooky-players and dropouts.

  The Ponte Garibaldi, when Riccetto and Marcello got there and started climbing down the pilings, was empty under the African sun; but among the pilings under the bridge the stream was alive with bathers. Riccetto and Marcello stopped for a while, the only ones on the bridge, and with their chins on the ruined iron railing, they stood and watched the river men taking the sun in their boats, or playing cards, or shuttling across the stream. Then, after arguing a little over the best way to go, they hitched a ride again on the half-empty old trolley that creaked and rumbled its way toward San Paolo. At the Ostia station they jumped down and fooled around among the tables in the station bar, around the newsstand, the waiting-room benches, and the railed passage in front of the ticket office, looking for butts. But they were already sick of the whole thing. The heat made it hard to breathe; it would have been murder if it hadn’t been for the bit of breeze that was coming from the sea. “Hey, Riccè,” said Marcello in a rage, “why can’t we go swimming?” Twisting his mouth and shrugging his shoulders, Riccetto said, “Let’s go.”