Even if all of them hadn’t lost their hair (although a percentage that Riccardo estimated at between twenty-five and thirty-five resembled him in a striking manner), they could be defined in every respect as young people who were heading toward a rosy future. Young people with ideas, a little like Riccardo, who maybe struggled to express them completely, perhaps because (a little like Riccardo) they worked in cold and coercive structures (even if the furnishings of those structures conveyed the contrary). And yet these young people wanted to react to all this, to create an image of themselves that would nurture optimism. Therefore, the young people seemed truly young, and those who were forty or older did their utmost to seem like young people.
The neighborhood was in the process of transformation, so Riccardo would have written. The houses, built of mortar and stucco, without solid foundations, and once inhabited by poor people who got by as best they could, were gaining value in the real-estate market. Those poor people, since they had reached the age limit (approximately seventy) beyond which it is no longer possible to pretend that everything is all right, were selling (en masse) the houses they owned. With the money obtained they had (almost en masse) decided to move out of that neighborhood (or die in exotic places). The young people who bought (using in part the family inheritance) spent more than the value of the apartments (thus contributing to the distortion of the market) and proceeded to renovate them. Wealth was arriving and the pace of life was changing; the young seemed younger, hence with more future before them.
The neighborhood was in the process of transformation, so Riccardo would have liked to begin and end his report. It was, in fact, the last thought that his mind formed before he came out of the bar in a pitiful state, with his blood pressure falling rapidly and his legs trembling in a truly suspicious manner.
Francesco
The only thing Francesco, now nearly eighteen years old and a longtime resident of the Pigneto neighborhood, had understood in his life was: My father is a moron. This discovery had become a source of pride and power. His father was a moron because he didn’t understand anything, he wasn’t aware of anything, he didn’t look at anything: a moron, that was all.
Awhile back, Francesco had stolen a motorbike (Honda SH). Not that he needed it; he just wanted to go to the stadium. Since his motorcycle was broken, and since there are always people (Francesco said) who leave their bikes unlocked, hoping, therefore (not just unconsciously), that they will be stolen, Francesco, after seeing all the fans setting off for the stadium with their folded banners, was not overcome by fear (which a first theft generally involves) and, instead, inserted a screwdriver in the starter of the Honda SH, turned on the engine, and headed for the stadium on the stolen bike.
The motorcycle had to do with his father’s moronicness. It was really a perfect example.
His father was a moron, Francesco thought, on the way to the stadium, mounted on the stolen bike. Especially as Francesco considered him responsible for everything, even his own passion for the Rome team that he had transmitted at a tender age but then hadn’t known how to cultivate. Something that morons do in general — they open a pathway and are unable to follow it. Precisely because they are morons.
His father had in recent years suffered a financial collapse. It wasn’t that he had attempted to scale a significant height and, just before the peak, had fallen. In that case one might have appreciated his courage. No, he, the father, had had a financial collapse because he had fallen in love with someone else and had left the family: Francesco, his mother, and his sister. Not to say that the father had ever made a lot of money. Occasionally he wrote for television. They had come to live in Pigneto when it was not yet fashionable and prices were low. Francesco’s mother had repeated every other day that it was time to buy a house in this neighborhood, where houses were cheap. But he, the father, like the idiot he was, kept putting off the purchase: These houses are going to fall in on themselves soon, they’ll implode, they’re old, decaying. Let’s wait, when we have more money we’ll move to another neighborhood. Typical moron’s rationale. They continued to rent. Then he, the father, had the clever idea of falling in love with someone else. Another moron, worse than him. Of course, morons seek each other out, so to speak, they pair up. So the mother thought she’d better kick him out on his ass, and now he has to work double to pay two rents, for the house in Pigneto and for his own, practically a hovel, on the Prenestina. And this he does, the moron, a little to his woman and a little to the family. A little money here, a little there. Both women kick him in the ass, and he goes along like that, like the moron he is.
Now, Francesco thought, the day he went to the stadium on the motorbike, is it possible that a person never learns from his mistakes? Because his father was like that, someone who never learns. Even when Francesco was caught with the stolen motorbike and all hell broke loose, and he was taken to the police station in handcuffs, even then, when his father came to get him, the first thing he did was hug him, tight. In front of the cops, who looked on in embarrassment. They all expected his father to slug him, kick him in the ass or whatever, whereas he, on the contrary, in front of the cops, had hugged his son. Then, as if that were not enough, he said to the police captain: When your son steals something, it’s the time to give him a present. Like a moron, no? A father who quotes an old Zen saying, a saying that among other things he was using in a TV script. He says it in front of everyone. To explain that a son who steals is only asking for attention and affection, that’s why it’s a good time to give him a present. The captain had run his hands through his hair and said under his breath, How will we go on like this...
The Father... and His Lover
One morning, early, Mario Cirillo, motorman on the Metro, found a person locked in a car. There’s another one, he thought. He didn’t expect that there would be any further surprises. It can happen that a passenger doesn’t get out at the last stop. And then gets stuck. The train, at the end of its run, is taken to the local yards. The doors are closed, the electricity is turned off, and the train is abandoned. And then generally the locked-in passenger begins to yell like a madman and the motorman, hearing these shouts, thinks: There’s another one. Every year, at least one passenger, for one reason or another, forgets to get out at the last stop and finds himself alone, on the point of tears, on the edge of a panic attack, stuck in the car.
That morning, it happened that Mario Cirillo had found not one but two people locked in the train. A sign, said the motorman, that those two not only hadn’t realized that they were at the last stop; they hadn’t even noticed that the train was heading for the yards. They hadn’t realized anything, they hadn’t shouted, or begged, or stamped their feet. Nothing. Or maybe they had, but it was too late, the train had already been sitting for a while.
Francesco’s father, Carlo Chirico, was one of the two locked in the car. There’s another one, thought the motorman, not suspecting that there was a second person with him. A woman, Marta della Rosa. Two morons, the motorman had remarked to his friends while they were having coffee. Today I found not one but two morons.