The Street Kids by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Author:Pier Paolo Pasolini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2016-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

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Among the many topics on which the toughs of Maranella gave their opinion at the Bar della Pugnalata or the Tappeto Verde—between one shot and the next, as they played pool or watched the game, leaning wearily against the walls of the room where the two pool tables barely fit and if you raised an arm you touched the ceiling—was Riccetto’s engagement.

Depending on how they felt, sometimes they discussed it like brothers, with an allusive air, taking it very seriously; other times, instead, without giving a damn about it. For his part, Riccetto felt he was the most interesting, there among them, and as such obliged to at least buy a new pair of pants. Friendly and joking, but preserving an air of mystery concerning his private business, he moved with a swagger, the new pants tight over his hips. They were gray tube pants, with the pockets cut crosswise, and he walked slightly hunched, his thumbs in the belt, dragging his feet, with the tired and clumsy look of a country kid. They were like many tubes around his fly, and they shifted as he walked, tube here, tube there, tube up, tube down, and when he stopped, leaning against a wall or the edge of the pool table, with his legs crossed, they formed a single bulge, tense, tranquil, and threatening. As for the rest, he still slept with Lenzetta in the oil drums on the fields of Borgata Gordiani: but that arrangement didn’t last much longer, because it didn’t suit Riccetto’s new situation.

Lenzetta knew a place, in Via Taranto, on the top floor of a seven- or eight-story building: on a landing that on one side led, through a broken-down door that was always open, into a kind of loft where there were water tanks, on the other into an uninhabited apartment, whose door must have been closed for several months. They carried up a pack of newspapers, which during the day they hid amid the water tanks, and their stuff, and chose as their bedroom that landing.

Engagement required a serious life: and in fact Riccetto—content to play the part of a serious youth, the part that at the Bar della Pugnalata inspired the most substantial comments, those which gave him the most pleasure—had started working. He was working for a fishmonger who had a stall at the market in Maranella, and on Sunday, to be completely faithful to his role, he gave up, mystically, going out with Lenzetta and the others, to Centocelle or into Rome, and took his girl to the movies. His girl, though, wasn’t the one who was twenty, or even the eighteen-year-old: but the freckled redhead, who wasn’t that pretty, the one who, the night the two friends had gone to Sor Antonio’s, hadn’t said a word and had stood listening to them near the dirty curtain at the door. When he was with her, and they weren’t necking—and this was rare, because they were never really alone, but then neither of them minded much—Riccetto was so bored that sometimes he got in a really bad mood.

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