The Ragazzi by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Author:Pier Paolo Pasolini
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2015-07-23T14:00:00+00:00

In the Knife-in-the-Back Bar, the Bar del Tappeto Verde, between shots or watching the game, leaning wearily against the walls of the dreary room which had two pool tables squeezed into it and a ceiling so low that if you raised your arm you hit it, the beardless delinquents of Maranella had another topic among the many on which they could deliver an opinion: Riccetto’s engagement.

According to how it struck them at the moment, they might discuss it in a friendly tone, indirectly, taking it all very seriously, and at other times as if they couldn’t care less. Riccetto, on his part, felt himself to be the most interesting person around; as such, he felt obliged to buy himself at least a new pair of pants. Affable, exchanging pleasantries, but keeping up an air of mystery about his private affairs, he came along with his new pants riding on hips so slim that he looked like a nail taking a walk. They were gray and pegged, with pockets cut on the slant, and he walked slouching forward with his hands on his hips and his thumbs hooked into his belt, dragging his feet a little with his weary and somewhat stupefied plowboy air. The pants looked like a couple of pipes below his butt, and they moved as he walked, one pipe here, one there, one up, one down; and when he stopped, leaning cross-legged against the wall or on the edge of the pool table, they made one solid trunk, taut, calm, menacing. For the rest, he was still sleeping, with Lenzetta, in the oil drums in the field by the Borgata Gordiani. But those living arrangements were to last but a short time longer, since they were ill-suited to his new circumstances.

Lenzetta knew of a place in the Via Taranto on the top floor of a seven- or eight-story building—a landing that opened at one end, through a lopsided door that was always ajar, into a kind of loft where the water tanks were, and at the other end into a vacant apartment whose door seemed to have been shut for months. They carried a bunch of newspapers up there, hiding them by day among the water tanks, and all their stuff, and used the landing for a bedroom.

The engagement implied a responsible attitude, and Riccetto —glad to play the role of responsible young man, which was the one that got him the most favorable comments in the Knife-in-the-Back Bar and gave him the most pleasure—had gone to work. He worked as helper to a fish-seller who had a stand in the little market in Maranella. And on Sunday, playing his part to the hilt, he mysteriously gave up roaming around with Lenzetta and the others in Centocelle or in Rome itself, and took his girl to the movies. Now his girl wasn’t the twenty-year-old or even the eighteen-year-old, but the redhead with freckles, who was a bit on the ugly side too, the one who hadn’t said

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