“I’ve got a ball,” Agnolo18 told his friends on Saturday night. “And tomorrow is going to be a nice day.” And that Sunday morning a splendid sky, in which even the light veil of clouds glowed, spread over Rome.
Agnolo came down from Monteverde19 on his motorbike, with his father. Fabbrí,20 Alfredino and the others came, some of them on foot, some on their bicycles. They met at the Collina Volpi21 football field just as the sun was starting to come down hard. The president of the soccer club was there with his gray car and his stiff shoulders, killing time with the coach. The players stripped off their clothes near the fence at the end of the playing field; the field was suspended like a terrace above the houses and construction sites and the tops of the pine trees. They threw their clothes in a pile near the club president’s car. Agnolo was the first one ready, and he dribbled the ball to the middle of the field. Their opponents, the Collina Volpi players, had much older equipment; their blue T-shirts were worn thin with sweat and their sneakers were ragged. But they were older. “Look at them, they could be our dads,” said Fabbrí. One of them, a short guy, was about 22 years old and hairy, cheerful, and round as a ball. He teased the kids from Monteverde like an older brother. Agnolo had light reddish hair. His eyes hardened, became like shards of glass as he listened to the short guy, but he said nothing. He turned with exaggerated indifference toward Gino: “Did you see Jolanda this morning?” Gino finished tying his shoelace before answering.
“Yeah, I saw her.”
“Where was she?” asked Agnolo.
“At Villa Sciarra.22 We went as far as the Janiculum together.
“So what’d she say?”
“She didn’t say anything.”
“What about Luciana?”
Gino started to laugh. “She was lost in her thoughts, that one!”
“Did she believe you?”
“You should have seen it! She turned completely pale. At first she talked and talked, then she shut up completely, she didn’t say a word. They all believed it. Even Giannino, he was there too.”
“Ammazzalo,” said Agnolo.
“What, you playing on the left?” Alfredino yelled to him.
“This is where they put me,” answered the redhead.
“Our bosses are shits, and you’re an even bigger one, ’cause you voted for them.”
The team president watched the boys as they got ready. The others were almost all on the other end of the field, taking turns shooting at goal.
Fabbrí, Alfredino, and two or three others were on the bench. Maybe they would play in the second half of the game. They felt humiliated, but pretended not to care, chewing their gum as they sat there in their shorts, with their lovely sky-blue team shirts. “Hey Giannino!” yelled Alfredino, from the bench, across the field. “Aww, shut up,” said Giannino as he did squats, annoyed.
Alfredino said to Fabbrí: “His leg hurts so bad he can’t hardly move it. And he don’t say nothin’ ’cause he don’t want them to take him out of the game.” And loudly, cupping his hands over his mouth, he yelled over to Giannino, who was crossing: “Go Gianní!”
Alvaro, who at nineteen was the oldest of the bunch, stood off by himself, minding his own business. He didn’t feel like listening to the others’ snide comments: Alfredino told Agnolo again that Giannino was done for, and Agnolo, lighting a cigarette butt, murmured: “If he’s expecting me to pass him the ball, he’d better not hold his breath.” Then they laughed some more about the joke they’d played on Luciana.
“What’d you tell her?” Agnolo said again. “Did you tell her I was in the hospital?”
“Yup. With a broken leg.”
“And I’m tellin’ you, she was white as a sheet,” said Alfredino, covering his face with his hands.
“You guys ready, you sons of…?” Giannino yelled, kicking the ball. Behind him, beyond the field, you could see the neighborhood around the San Paolo church turning white under the sun. A sung Mass was plying on the radio in the club.
By half-time, the Monteverde team was down, three to zero. The short guy had scored two of the goals. Alvaro was playing badly. Agnolo felt out of place as a left wing; he and Giannino didn’t click; he wandered like a lost shadow on the opponents’ side. In the second half Fabbrí and Alfredino got a chance to play, but this hardly changed the course of events. By the end of the match, two more balls had gone into their goal.
The air at noon was on fire, but even so two other small teams came onto the field superbly happy, content to play until two o’clock under that merciless sky. While the new arrivals shot at the goal, the slightly older buddies of the boys from Monteverde, who had tired of teasing their defeated friends as they dressed, walked over to a corner of the field with a ball: they formed a small quadrilateral shape, elastic as a rubber band, and started passing the ball. They kicked the ball with the neck of the foot, so as to keep it moving on the ground, without spin, at high speed. Soon, they were all bathed in sweat, but they didn’t want to take their jackets off, or even their woolen jerseys decorated with yellow or black stripes, so as not to alter the casual, jokey tone of their exhibition. They did not want to appear fanatical: but the truth was that they were a bit fanatical, playing under that sun, dressed as they were, and their game revealed a loud, threatening joyfulness that abolished any possibility that one might find them comical. Between passes, they chatted. “Ammazzalo, Alvaro was slow today,” a member of the group said, his dark hair slathered with brilliantine.
“Women,” he added, turning around.
“Forget women!” shouted someone else, with a look on his face that fulminated anyone who might want to contradict him. “The guy’s a fool.”
“A maschio!” he shouted to one of the boys; the ball had rolled past the fence, and he wanted one of the boys to kick it back over. As he spoke, he had attempted an audacious and contemptuous heel kick and had missed; the others hadn’t paid the least attention to the kick or to the fact that he had missed. The boys, now dressed, were sitting on the dirty grass under the wall, burning hot under the sun.
Fifteen minutes later, the next group of twenty-two boys were left playing on the field, yelling and insulting one another in the suburban silence of the sky, dazed by the midday sun.
Il Popolo di Roma, January 14, 1951.