He walks down from Monteverde and saunters around the Campidoglio, and finally into the Altieri, followed—as by a sharp wake—by the stench of poverty and police vans that emanates from his clothes. Cutting the air with his smell, he enters the room where healthy men and boys like him cheerfully shake off their weaknesses. Molded from a race which for centuries has internalized the color of ruins and the Tiber, with a face like a Leonardo Cortese before he became “civilized” and hair that would make Marie Antoinette go green with envy, the darkness of the hall coats his temples and the gaunt, glowing, and sun-burned profile of his cheek. He is a Roman king, marvelously young and alive in the depths of his sarcophagus.
That mask of beauty, which disappears into the darkness, gives his face a corpulence which disappears in the light of day, or is only faintly visible; his face is bronzed by a metallic, unhealthy sun, filtered through the dirty clothes hanging outside windows in alleyways, and pressed against walls covered with filth, a sun that feeds only the surface of his flesh, devoured from the inside by vice and malnutrition. What lies underneath the marvelously anonymous order of his sketched, conventional beauty? Certainly, some creatures float above the filth with the grace of a dragonfly in the mud.
But…misery settles like dust in an abandoned room; if one takes a step one is engulfed in it. Hidden inside that ragazzo are a few April nights, experienced far from the countryside and the sky, within walls against which voices ring out like lilies, with a limpid, sharp clarity that, for just a moment, transforms the Vicolo del Bologna into a field of wheat…but, ingrained in the stone, the stink of filth and of dirty laundry warmed by the sun persists, as if it were its soul. This atrociously fragrant April is only a sibling inside the boy just as his Trastevere beauty gilds his face. In reality, the flow of his feelings could, if one stopped to think, produce the same horror as the Lungotevere at night…if one were crazy enough to think about such things….But, practically speaking, no one is so unwise, and, under the feverish streetlights, the water flows along with a great shudder for a bloodless, anonymous death….
In the end, the ragazzo from Monteverde begins to cry as he sits in the Altieri theater. There is no doubt about it: against his hazelnut eyes, fixed, and seemingly sucked in by the stage, a teardrop distinctly trembles. Onstage, the woman and her son speak in Romanesco, and it is true, there is nothing like a “core de mamma.”26 And the woman pronounces her s’s mawkishly, in dialect; she is hell bent on tearing at the hearts of the public, who watch her with the same admiring absorption with which they would listen to a Sunday sermon, or which a paterfamilias, making an unusually deep pronouncement, would employ to affirm to his neighbors that he has always believed in the existence of a Supreme Being. So it isn’t much of a surprise that the ragazzo from Monteverde has forgotten the aphrodisiac Aprils of his recent adolescence in side streets and neighborhood movie theaters, darkened with sex, and has rediscovered in himself an ancient but persistent vein of family feeling. The conversion of the criminal son before the tumultuous compassion of the mother, soaked with tears like a freshly washed bedsheet hung out to dry, seems completely believable to the ragazzo. (Was the other class turning his insides like a soup pot full of watery broth? Rhetoric, like the Lord, moves in mysterious ways. Perhaps both lie in wait in ballerinas’ dressing rooms in theaters that show movies and a variety show for fifty lire. And, in fact, the ballerinas come out just a few moments later; as soon as their rubber band legs appear, the parentheses of virile reflection and all talk about Supreme Being and other “serious” subjects, draws to a close.)
So, the ragazzo from Monteverde has cried. And this despite the fact that he has nothing much to get teary about where his mother is concerned, and his father, even less; his father is a thief with nothing to resemble a core de mamma, and it is quite likely that at that very moment he has a foot in hell and the other in a brothel, and that all he will leave his son is his stink of poverty. And what about his brothers, elder, and younger? They are all on the other side of the Tiber, trapped in their wolflike hunger, their anonymity marked with such mystery as would make even Giuseppe Belli27 blush with embarrassment if he returned to life in Babelian postwar Rome. But, where mystery is concerned, the ragazzo from Monteverde, with his faintly southern cheekbones, exhaling oil and blood, is not at a disadvantage to his brothers. Why then has he just committed this enormous, unbearable act of ingenuousness; why did he cry at the Altieri? If one were to think about it too much, those tears in the eyes of the wolf would become intolerable. Anything but tears could be expected from his immutable destiny. If at least he had cried out of the hoodlum’s soft-heartedness…but no, he cried out of obedience, stupidly. What can one do? Pick up a hammer and bash in the windows of the first fancy car that drives by the Piazza Colonna? Beat up the first diplomat’s wife who, coifed and polished as a bibelot, looks out over the Janiculum to admire the view? A protest is essential. A blood donor, a guerrilla, a missionary. The ragazzo’s tears must be abolished. Our world has played a trick on this emblem of mystery, and we should all be eternally ashamed. Luckily, the rubber band legs of the ballerinas have come to save the day.
Laughter, the kind of laughter which emerges directly from the sex, transfigures the ragazzo from Monteverde. This is another of the strange ways of the Lord. By now, the theater is boiling over with a mysterious fever, the exultation of sex, which is the most incomprehensible thing in the world. Out of Monteverde, the ghetto, and Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, life bubbles over, a life as anonymously simple as original sin and as complex.
Their eyes, fixed on the pale thighs of the ballerinas—thighs that evoke sunless boarding houses stuffy with the smell of rancid oil—vibrate with the gluttony of sex, the hook, the wire that locks the eyes of roosters when they are about to tear each other to pieces, with a heedless, prejudicial tension, which appears almost false, but in reality is profoundly authentic. More than gluttony, what emanates is the honor of sex, the practice, the skill: that terrible skill which is always attributable to others, an inimitable figure. The ragazzo from Monteverde lets himself be sucked in by that air that stinks of the chalk that boys use to write obscenities in public toilets.
Folder in the Archive entitled “(Articles, essays, etc.) and Roman stories,” 1950.
We placed the story after “Chestnuts and Chrysanthemums” because this is the relative position of the texts in the folder.
26 Core de mamma, in Roman dialect, means a mother’s love. A powerful concept.
27 Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, 1791–1863, Italian poet. Born in Rome into poverty, Belli earned his living as a government clerk. He drew from his knowledge of street life in writing more than two thousand humorous and satirical sonnets, often in Roman dialect. His poetry is noted for its vigorous realism.