Stories from the City of God Page 2

  In another file, entitled The Ferrobedò (and other notes and stories, some of which were included in “The Ragazzi”) (1950–1951), we find the manuscripts of “The Dogfish,” “The Passion of the Lupin-Seller,” “Sunday at the Collina Volpi,” “Santino on the Beach at Ostia,” and “Terracina.” These are the most extroverted and narrative stories, in which action and adventure prevail over introspection. The “realist” style is less consciously “artistic.” (“The Passion of the Lupin-Seller” is the only story that is in both files, and it represents a midpoint between these two tendencies.)

  It should be noted that, while the stories in the first file were conceived from the beginning as autonomous stories, those in the second file form part of a narrative whole, a kind of ur-Ragazzi in three parts: “The Ferrobedò,” “Li Belli Pischelli,” and “Terracina.”

  “Terracina” is, as we haved pointed out, a special case. It was conceived originally as a digression within the ur-Ragazzi: the protagonists, Lucià and Marcè, tired of their messy lives in Rome, decide to escape by going to stay with Marcè’s country relatives. The story was probably conceived as a possible ending to the novel, and concludes with the death of Lucià.

  In 1950, a literary competition was held in Taranto for an unpublished story with the sea as “protagonist or setting or background.” Pasolini submitted “Terracina.” The story did not win the competition, but was commended by the jury and an excerpt from it was published the following year in the paper Voce del Popolo, in Taranto, in five parts from July 7 to August 4. An editorial note included with the second excerpt pointed out that the “excessive length and crude language render unwise the publication of the full work.”

  It has been impossible to find the story in the form in which Pasolini sent it to the literary competition; we have presented here the excerpt published in The Roman paper Il Quotidiano under the title “Santino on the beach at Ostia” as well as all of the typescript entitled “Terracina,” which contains the remaining Voce del Popolo excerpts, integrating and completing them. Two of these were slightly reworked by Pasolini for Il Quotidiano and were published on April 19 and June 8, 1951, with the titles “Night over the Sea at Terracina” and “Dissolve over the Sea of the Circeo.”

  The reportages included in this volume are certainly more fragmented and “servile.” But underneath a certain routine quality and the superficial verve (worthy of the crime pages), we find the drive to combine emotion and clarity, the attempt to use poetry as a political instrument, which foreshadows Pasolini’s later extraordinary journalistic style.

  Because of their Roman theme, we have included two drafts of screenplays, Roman Deaths and (Ri)cotta Cheese, keeping in mind that Pasolini’s film drafts were usually a genre unto themselves, a sub-genre of narrative.

  We decided to close the book with a 1973 interview in which Pasolini declares his disgust with Rome, which has been rendered unrecognizable by urbanistic destruction and cultural genocide. Here his love story with Rome ends, with the announcement of painful separation.

  Let me talk for a moment about the reason we chose the title Stories of the City of God. This title can be found in one of Pasolini’s manuscripts dating from sometime in the mid-fifties. This manuscript contains a list of possible titles for his Roman works. Beyond the obvious Augustinian connotations, Voci nella Città di Dio—Voices from the City of God—is the title of a book by Danilo Dolci, which Pasolini reviewed in 1951. The notion of identifying Rome with the phrase “city of God” is perhaps inspired by the fact that 1950 was a Jubilee year, and is expressed not only in the list of possible titles but also in his wish (expressed in “The Periphery of My Mind”) to give this title to his third Roman novel, which he never wrote. Once this project was abandoned, the phrase reappeared in the second chapter of the first section of A Violent Life, which is entitled “Night in the City of God.”

  In two cases (“The Drink,” and “The Passion of the Lupin-Seller”) we have published the earliest version of the text, because a later version written ten years later seems more calculated. The author augmented the number of phrases in dialect, muting the immediacy and freshness of the story.

  The stories contained in this volume were all checked against typescripts, and certain sections that had been eliminated at publication were reintroduced; subtitles added at publication were also eliminated.

  The author’s inconsistent transcriptions of dialect were also respected.

  At the bottom of each piece we have indicated where that piece was first published (or, in the case of unpublished pieces, the folder of the Archive in which it was kept).

  In general there is no discrepancy between the date of composition and the date of publication of each text. Because of this, we have only indicated the date of composition in the case of unpublished pieces, or when the piece was published after the death of the author (dates indicated by the author are in parentheses; conjectural dates are in brackets).

  Walter Siti, Rome, 1995

  PART I

  SKETCHES OF ROME

  TRASTEVERE BOY

  The kid who sells roasted chestnuts at the end of the Ponte Garibaldi gets down to work. He sits in a groove in the parapet of the bridge with a small stove between his legs, looking no one in the face, as if his relationship to the rest of humanity were at an end, or as if he had been reduced to only a hand, not the physical hand of a small boy or an elderly lady, but an abstract hand, a mechanism for accepting payment and delivering merchandise in a rigidly calculated and predetermined exchange. And most likely the young man—he is as dark as a violet, dark as only the boys from Trastevere neighborhood can be—subtracts a few chestnuts from the abstract hand of the customer: one chestnut more on the grille and less in the hand amounts to nothing more than a mathematical calculation, a sum or a subtraction. The customer is an abstract figure, and, morally speaking, the fraud hardly registers.

  The dark-skinned boy calculates his two sets of parallel figures—chestnuts and lire—with a completely internalized avidity: the trick is destined to succeed. Perhaps even these hours between the afternoon and the evening are an abstraction to him. The evening is nothing less than the moment when the ratio between two contrasting figures reaches its emotional zenith, the moment of truth, conclusive and extraordinary….At that moment (where? On the Via della Paglia? In some neighborhood alley, gloomily perfumed with springtime?) he will calculate his profit.

  Will the wolf smile then? With his distracted air, a perfect simulation of the most honest indifference, masking his faulty arithmetic, will that embezzled chestnut make his heart leap with joy like any normal heart? It’s a sad truth, but it’s preferable for his heart to beat faster for ten lire won through trickery than not at all.

  In any case, at this moment he is so preoccupied with his calculations that if there were even a flash of another thought in his head, it would appear in his eye only as the faintest shadow. And so, little by little, in the compact, colorless avidity of the eye, a shadow has begun to form; after all, it would be completely unnatural for an eighteen-year-old boy to have no thought for anything but the struggle between two numerical series. True, it is a struggle for survival: but how many and what diverse vocations coexist in the life of a young Trasteverino1?

  For my part, I would like to understand the mechanisms by which the Trastevere—shapeless, pounding, idle—lives inside of him. His eyes are like two sigils: two black wax seals impressed on the gray of his face which emanates no light from within, an opaqueness amply compensated, certainly, by the intense light of the Roman sky. His heart is like a tapeworm that constantly digests innumerable sighs, screams, smiles, and exclamations; which has digested, without its host’s knowledge, an entire generation of his peers, young men made of something slightly more than clay, young men who are less than Apollos….

  Behind him the Tiber is an abyss drawn on tissue paper.

  And one has the hopeless sense that he does not see it, as if to him it were something so external as to have no place in his reality. Or as if, like a horse with blinders, he can only see a small portion of it, determined by the strictly functional nature of his reality. Thence the pain; and the pity. With his knees open savagely wide around the small stove and his torso leaning over it, he compresses himself into a circle which no magical formula can break open. The entire length of the Tiber, with its deathly haze over the Tiber Island and its landscape that weighs on the eye, the domes light as veils in the wind, bears down on his back with the weight of a child’s little finger against the Great Wall of China.

  So, Rome does not interest him; c’est la vie. His Baedeker is as dangerous as a pistol. The chapter on the Trastevere does not include Santa Maria with its flaccid figures by Cavallini, but instead perhaps the five toughs who were hanging around the intersection of Via della Scala and Via della Lungara last night, drunk with a joy that stank of blood like a butcher’s shop. Perhaps it also includes the boy—brown as a statue pulled from the mud of the Tiber—who lingers near the Cinema Reale. What else can be found in this harsh guidebook which reduces Rome to its own obsession? Things perhaps that we civilized types cannot even imagine. A particular, functional segment of the Tiber…a functional itinerary through the boy’s neighborhood….The chestnut-seller knows much, of that we can be sure; he knows, but he remains silent as the tomb. In order to communicate the topography of his life, he would need to stand outside of it; but where does the Tiber end and the boy begin?

  Incredibly, at a certain point he speaks to me. “A moro2” he says, “what time is it?” If he had stood up and flung the red-hot grille in my face I would not have been more surprised: I believed I was completely external to his functional reality, to those segments, angles, or layers of Rome which I thought were the only things that could leave a mark on his retina. The fact that I do not own a watch is for him a small sudden explosion of irrationality just as the sight of the shadow in his eyes was for me. But I am quickly swept out of his mind, while for me the mystery has only been slightly transformed, and even intensified. Now his Baedeker threatens to become an undecipherable catalogue: the Trastevere, from the Cinema Reale to the Cinema Fontana…a few shows at the Altieri Theatre (where for 50 lire you can also watch the variety show)…the Via delle Stalle and San Pietro in Montorio, on spring nights….

  I hover around the circle created by the boy, but do not enter: the boy’s heart, which existed already before the hour which does not appear on my nonexistent watch, has lived too submerged in poverty for too many years.

  There is a smell of laundry left to dry on the balconies of the alleyways, of human feces on the little stairway down to the water, of asphalt warmed by the spring air, but the boy’s heart appears and disappears on the side of the Stazione Trastevere or on the 129 bus, so distant that poverty and beauty are one and the same.

  Il Mattino d’Italia, Rome, June 5, 1950.

  1 A person from the neighborhood known as the Trastevere, or “beyond the Tiber.”

  2 An expression in Roman dialect that means something like “Hey, you,” or “Hey, mister.”

  THE DRINK

  The floating platform was almost empty at that hour. There were just a few office workers who would be gone by 3.

  Then, the real customers started to wander down from the Ponte Garibaldi and the Ponte Sisto. After half an hour, the patch of sand between the embankment and the floating platform was as busy as an ant-hill. Nando3 was sitting on the swing, his back to me. He was about ten years old, scrawny and misshapen, with a large tuft of blond hair above his narrow face, on which a large mouth smiled brightly.

  He watched me out of the corner of his eye. I went over and asked him: “Would you like a push?”

  He nodded, joyfully, grinning more widely than ever.

  “Get ready! I’m going to make you go really high!” I warned him, smiling.

  “That’s okay,” he answered. I sent him flying, and he yelled to the other little boys: “A maschi!4 look how high I am!”

  After about five minutes he was on the swing again, and this time he didn’t keep quiet. “Moro,” he said, “will you give me a push?”

  He got off the swing, but continued to hang around me. I asked him his name.

  His shoulders were burned, as if by a fever rather than by the sun. He told me they stung. By now Orazio’s floating platform was a merry-go-round of people: some lifted weights, others did chin-ups, others stripped their clothes off or just lazed around. People yelled at each other, sarcastic, arrogant, and relaxed. A group went over to the diving board and started jumping in, doing cannonballs, falling into the water, somersaulting. I went over to swim, under the pylons of the Ponte Sisto. After half an hour, back on the sand, I saw Nando, gripping the side of the platform; he was yelling over to me.

  “Hey!” he said to me, “do you know how to row a boat?”

  “Sort of,” I answered. He turned to the lifeguard. “How much?” he asked. The lifeguard didn’t even lift his head: he leaned over the water as if he were talking to it, and he was clearly in no mood to joke around:

  “One-hundred and fifty lire for an hour, two people.”

  “Yikes!” Nando blurted, his little face still beaming. Then he disappeared into the dressing rooms. He reappeared next to me on the sand, like an old friend.

  “I have a hundred,” he said.

  “Lucky you,” I answered, “I’m completely in the red.” He didn’t understand. “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “I’m broke,” I explained.

  “Why? Don’t you work?”

  “Nope.” “I thought you had a job,” he said. “I’m a student,” I said, to simplify matters. “Don’t you get paid?” “Actually, I pay.” “Do you know how to swim?” he asked. “Yes, do you?” “No, I’m too scared. I only go in the water up to here!”

  “Shall we go for a dip?” He nodded and followed me like a puppy.

  When we were near the diving board, I pulled my bathing cap out of the pocket of my swimming trunks. “What is that?” he asked, pointing at it.

  “A bathing cap,” I answered.

  “How much did it cost?”

  “I paid four hundred lire for it, three years ago.”

  “I love it!” he said, putting it on. “We’re poor, but if we were rich my mother would buy me one of those.”

  “You’re poor?”

  “Yes, we live in one of those shacks on the Via Casilina.”5

  “So how come you have one hundred lire?”

  “I made it carrying luggage.”

  “Where?”

  “At the station.” He was a bit reticent; perhaps he was lying. Perhaps he had begged for it. Those little arms of his could hardly have carried a suitcase. I took the bathing cap back, patted his tuft of hair, and asked: “Do you go to school?”

  “Yes, I’m in the second grade…I’m twelve years old, but I was sick for five years…Aren’t you getting in?”

  “Yes, I’m going to dive in.”

  “Do an angel dive,” he yelled as I balanced on the diving board. I did a normal dive, swam a little, and clambered back to shore through the weeds, muck, and garbage.

  “Why didn’t you do an angel dive?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know, this time I’ll try it.” I had never done one, but I attempted to just to please him. When I came out again, he was happy. “That was a nice angel dive,” he said. In the middle of the Tiber, a young man was rowing upstream in a canoe-like boat. “What’s so hard about that?” said Nando. “The lifeguard wouldn’t let me take a boat out.”

  “Have you ever rowed a boat?” I asked. “No, but what’s so hard about it?” When the young man reached us, Nando stretched out on the diving board and started to yell at the top of his lungs, his hands cupped around his mouth: “A moro, a moro, can I get on with you?” The man didn’t even answer him. So Nando, still smiling, came back towards me. At that moment, some friends of mine came by and I joined them. I watched them play a game of cards at the bar on the platform.

  Nando reappeared, holding a copy of a newspaper, L’Europeo.

  “Here,” he said. “Read it. It’s mine.”

  I took it, just to make him happy, and started to leaf through it. But Orazio came over and grabbed it out of my hands without a word and started reading it, annoyed: it had been a joke. I laughed, and went back to watching the game. Nando came up to the counter.

  “I’ve got one hundred lire,” he said to the lifeguard. “What can I buy?”

  “Orange soda, beer, soda pop,” he answered, blankly.

  “How much for a soda pop?” Nando asked.

  “Forty lire.”

  “Give me two.”

  A moment later I felt a tap on my shoulder, and there was Nando holding out a bottle of soda pop. I got a lump in my throat, so that I could hardly find the voice to thank him, or say anything at all: I swallowed the drink and said to Nando: “Will you be here Monday or Tuesday?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “So next time it’s on me,” I said, “and we’ll go for a boat ride.”

  “Will you be here Monday?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure; I might have to go out with some friends.”

  Nando counted the money he had left. “I have twenty-two lire,” he said. He stood there, lost in thought, staring at the price list with his happy face. I wanted to help him in some way.