“To terrorize us,” Signora Iolanda chimes in.
“When we’re asleep, when a person... How does one defend oneself, Sor Quirì? How can a person defend herself alone,” Signora Lavinia wails.
“By talking to the district committee,” Sor Antonio speaks up. “That’s how we defend ourselves!”
Quirino gives him a dubious look. “And since when has there been such a committee?”
“The district committee,” Sor Geno says sarcastically. “That bunch, all they do is make up questionnaires ‘to survey people’s needs,’ they say... And what are the people’s needs, according to them?” He spreads his fingers and starts to count: “Bike and pedestrian paths, maintaining the green spaces, urban quality of life, chemical toilets... chemical toilets, for God’s sake! How much do you think people like us are worth in their eyes, huh? A bunch of penniless old people...” He feels his brother nudge him in the ribs and turns. “Am I wrong, Paole?” he mutters, his face livid.
“So what do they want, then? For us to go away? Is that what they want? To throw us out?” Sor Pietro says in a low voice. “To hang us all?”
“They want to eat our hearts,” Signora Lavinia breaks in, pressing her hands to her chest.
“All those drunken kids, those filthy immigrants, those Chinese, those junkies, those spoiled daddy’s boys, those building speculators who buy and sell and buy... and open new businesses... and we don’t have the slightest idea what they’re planning to do with this neighborhood of ours...” Signora Iolanda rants, to a murmur of agreement. She fidgets in her chair while her husband grabs her by the arm and casts a furtive look at the door.
“Calm down,” he says quietly. Then he turns firmly toward Quirino. “Let’s get back to the point. Who’s the one who has keys to our houses?” he hisses. “Who’s the one who can come and go as he pleases? Who’s the one who takes the bread out of our mouths...” He breaks off, stifling his rage and continuing to stare at Quirino, who turns pale.
“What are you trying to say, Sor Antonio?” Quirino murmurs, sneaking a glance at his watch and cursing his son, who still hasn’t shown up. Finally, trying to compose himself, he says: “If you want the keys, we can give them to you,” as if to evoke, with his words at least, the son who should already be there, at his side.
“Keys, what keys?” snaps Sor Pietro. “I... I’m going,” he says, leaving them all dumbfounded.
“Where are you going? To Stazione Termini?” Sor Geno asks with a flare of sarcasm.
“To join the beggars?” Sor Paolo is more precise, helping his brother out.
Signora Lavinia, looking around as if lost, moans: “Now what will we do? After forty years...”
“We’ll occupy a building,” Sor Antonio interjects. “We’ll certainly be better off than here, with all this moisture—”
“It’s eating us alive,” Signora Iolanda interrupts. “It’s eating us alive,” she repeats, glancing at Quirino, who leans against the wall.
“I’m eating you alive,” Quirino mumbles in bewilderment, clinging to the key to the drawer jammed in the bottom of his pocket. Then he bends down and opens the leather folder on his chair. Feeling the breath of all those angry dogs hot on his neck, he begins rummaging, dumps everything out, then lifts his head, his hair falling over his forehead. “They’re not here,” he whispers with a groan, “the keys... they’re not here.” A voice insinuates itself furtively amid the confusion of his thoughts, rivets him there in the middle of the lobby. Well? What do you think, Sor Quirì? Then the voice impels him up the stairs. He’s getting away now, Sor Quirì! One floor, then another. He’s going down, he’s going down... and he finally reaches his door.
Ready to drop, he rushes to the drawer and searches it frantically. “They’re not here,” he repeats, sunk in evening shadow, while the voice has now become a phrase stuck in the exact center of his brain: We have to be shrewd...
“That son of a bitch!” he hisses in a flash of lucidity, slamming his fist on the table. “He thinks he can throw people out just like that!”
He feels a sharp pain start along his arm and spread throughout his body, now trembling with rage. He takes a deep breath. He tries to calm down. “Cesarì, see what he did, that son of mine?” he groans, holding onto the credenza and making his way with unsteady steps toward the cage — “Cesarì... Cesarino... Cesa...” — which hangs there, shattered.
Part IV
La Dolce Vita
For a Few More Gold Tokens
by Antonio Pascale
Translated by Ann Goldstein
Quartiere Pigneto
The Architect
On May 20, 2006, a hot sunny afternoon, the young architect-in-training Riccardo Tramonti, thirty-one, was completing an exploratory tour of the Pigneto neighborhood. In a few minutes — at 4:10, according to the police report — and just a few steps away (around two hundred meters) from the café where he had stopped (he had felt himself becoming weak, and dizzy, and he wanted something cold), the crime would take place. Of what happened next, which he would witness as the involuntary protagonist, Riccardo knew nothing. At 5 in the afternoon the next day, which is when he woke up, after nearly twenty-four hours in a coma, the first thing the nurse said to him was: You’re in all the papers.
It was, in truth, the only sentence that impressed itself in his memory, at least until, finally, after seventy-two hours in intensive care, he was taken to a rehabilitation ward, where he could have visitors. The first people to cross the threshold of his room (his mother and father; his girlfriend came that evening, just before visiting hours were over) said to him, taking for granted that he was fine, You’re in all the papers. There are even television cameras outside.
Riccardo was supposed to draft a report on “structural changes in the Pigneto neighborhood.” The job had been commissioned by the City of Rome and was part of a larger project of assessing the redevelopment of outlying neighborhoods. The firm (quite a well-known one) where Riccardo had been working for three years now (without anyone having recognized his ideas, Riccardo claimed) had won the contract; as a first step, it was supposed to review “the anthropology of the neighborhood,” and the young architect-in-training had been sent there on this exploratory mission.
Riccardo’s first sensation, as soon as he set foot in the neighborhood, was that of belonging: His appearance was not at all out of place among the inhabitants. Riccardo was tall and thin. He always knew what to wear, how to dress, in order to emphasize the idea that he was an architect — that is, someone who could devote himself to the spaces of others because he was able to devote himself to (taking care of) himself. Although he had undergone a notable loss of hair while preparing for an exam (which covered engineering concepts through difficult and obscure applications of mathematics and physics), he had pretended not to be very concerned about this change in his physical appearance. The reaction to this unpleasant development had occurred in three stages: He had shaved his head, grown a beard, and bought some stylish nonprescription glasses with thin gold frames. He could see perfectly well but thought that the look he had created for himself more closely resembled what people expected to see when they shook the hand of an architect.
The neighborhood was in the process of transformation, this was the first thing he would have written in his report. What had at one time been a neighborhood on the outskirts, in every sense, was on the verge of becoming fashionable. There were fewer and fewer old men playing cards, cursing some saint because luck wasn’t on their side. Fewer and fewer old ladies sitting outside doorways on straw chairs, while hens pecked in the dirt nearby. And more and more young people like Riccardo.