‘You little pimp … little pimp …’ people call down from the windows at Pin, not too loudly though, as one never knows with those Germans.
‘I may be a pimp, but I know what your wives are up to behind your backs …’ Pin shouts back, copying their voices, and gulping down cigarette smoke that feels sharp and rough against his tender throat, but which has to be gulped down, who knows why, till his eyes water and he breaks into a violent fit of coughing. Then, with the cigarette still in his mouth, off he goes to the tavern and calls out: ‘By God, I’ll tell anyone who stands me a glass of wine something he’d like to hear.’
In the tavern are the same men who have been there all day long for years, sitting with their elbows on the tables and their chins in their fists, gazing at the flies on the sticky paper and the purple stains in the bottom of their glasses.
‘What’s up?’ says Michel the Frenchman. ‘Your sister dropped her prices, has she?’
The others laugh and pound their fists on the zinc table-tops: ‘You asked for that one, Pin!’
Pin stands there looking them up and down through the spiky fringe of hair standing up on his forehead.
‘God, just as I thought. Look at him, he thinks of nothing but my sister. Never stops thinking of her, I tell you. He’s in love. In love with my sister, God help him …’
The others roar with laughter and clap him on the back and pour him out a glass. Pin does not like wine; it feels harsh against his throat and gives him goose-flesh and makes him long to laugh and shout and stir up trouble. Yet he drinks it, swallowing down each glassful in one gulp, as he swallows cigarette smoke, or as at night he watches with shivers of disgust his sister lying with some man on her bed, a sight like the feel of a rough caress against his skin, harsh like all sensations men enjoy; smoke, wine, women.
‘Sing, Pin,’ they say. And Pin begins singing, seriously, tensely, in that hoarse childish voice of his. He sings a song called ‘The Four Seasons’:
When I think of the future
And the liberty I’ve lost
I’d like to kiss her and then die
While she sleeps … and never knows.
The men sit in silence, with their eyes lowered, as if listening to a hymn. All of them have been in prison; no one is a real man to them unless he has. And the old jail-birds’ song is full of the melancholy which seeps into the bones in prison, at night, when the warders pass hitting the grills with a crowbar, and gradually the quarrels and curses die down, and all that can still be heard is a voice singing this song which Pin is singing now, and which no one shouts for him to stop.
At night I love to hear
The sentry’s call,
I love to watch the passing moon
Light up my cell.
Pin has never been in a real prison yet; once when they tried to take him off to a reformatory he escaped. Every now and again he is picked up by the municipal guards for some escapade among the stalls in the fruit-market, but he always sends the guards nearly crazy with his screams and sobs, until finally they let him go. He has been shut up in their guardroom once or twice, though, and knows what prison feels like; that’s why he is singing this song so well, with real emotion.
Pin knows all those old songs which have been taught him by the men of the tavern, songs about violence and bloodshed such as ‘Torna Caserio’ or the one about a soldier called Peppino who killed his lieutenant. Then, when they are all feeling sad and gazing into the purple depths of their glasses, Pin suddenly twirls round the smoky room and begins singing at the top of his voice:
And I touched her hair –
And she said not there
Go down where there’s nicer hair:
Darling, if you love me,
Touch me lower down …
Then the men begin pounding on the tables and shouting ‘hiuú,’ and clapping time, while the serving-girl tries to save the glasses. And the women in the tavern, old drunks with red faces like the one called the Bersagliera, sway to and fro as if to the rhythm of a dance. And Pin, his blood up, grits his teeth with the effort, and seems to be throwing his very soul into the song as he shouts at the top of his voice:
And I touched her little nose –
And she said, that’s a foolish pose
Go down to my garden rose …
And all of them, clapping time to the swaying of the old Bersagliera, break into the chorus: ‘Darling, if you love me …’
That day the German sailor had come up the alley in a bad temper. Hamburg, his native town, was being ravaged by bombs every night, and every day he was waiting for news of his wife and children. He had a warm nature, this German had, a southern nature in the body of a man from the North Sea. He had filled his own home with children, and now, when the war had moved him far away, tried to find some outlet for his feelings of human affection by befriending prostitutes in the occupied countries.
‘No cigarettes,’ he had said to Pin who was coming towards him to say guten Tag. Pin began to frown at him.
‘Well, Kamerad, back again today? You’re getting homesick for this place, eh?’ he said.
Now it was the German’s turn to frown at Pin; he could not understand.
‘Are you on your way to visit my sister, by any chance?’ said Pin innocently.
The German then said: ‘Sister not home?’
‘What, haven’t you heard?’ Pin’s expression was so sly he might have been brought up by priests. ‘Don’t you know they’ve taken her off to hospital? Poor thing! It’s bad, that disease, but curable now, if it’s treated in time. Of course she’d had it on her for a bit … think of her in hospital, poor thing!’
The German’s face looked like curdled milk. ‘Hos-pit-al? Di-sea-se?’ he stuttered and sweated. Then in a window just above the ground floor appeared the head and shoulders of a young woman with a horse face and frizzy black hair.
‘Don’t you take any notice of him, Frick, don’t take any notice of the little squirt,’ she screamed. ‘I’ll make you pay for this, monkey-face, you nearly ruined me! Come on up, Frick, don’t take any notice of him, he was only joking, devil take him!’
Pin put his tongue out at her. ‘I got you into a cold sweat, Kamerad,’ he said to the German, as he slipped away down a side-alley.
Sometimes, after a malicious joke of that kind, Pin finds himself with a bitter taste in his mouth, and wanders round the alleys alone, with everyone cursing him and pushing him aside. Then he longs to go off with a band of young companions to whom he could show the place where spiders make their nests, or with whom he could have battles among the bamboos in the river-bed. But Pin is not liked by boys of his own age; he is the friend of grown-ups, Pin is, he can say things to grown-ups that make them laugh or get angry, while other boys can’t even understand what grown-ups say to each other. Pin sometimes feels a longing to join boys of his own age and to ask them to let him play with them, to show him the way into the underground passage that goes right under the Market Square. But the other boys leave him out of their games; sometimes they even set on him, for Pin has tiny thin arms and is the weakest of them all. Now and again they go and ask Pin to explain what happens between men and women; but he begins making fun of them in a loud voice down the alley, and the mothers call their sons inside: ‘Costanzo! Giacomino! How often have I told you not to go about with that nasty little boy!’
The mothers are right. All Pin talks about is men and women in bed, or men murdered or put in prison, stories picked up from grown-ups, fables they tell among themselves – the other little boys think – and which would be nice to stop and listen to if only Pin did not intersperse them with jeers and remarks they cannot understand.
So Pin is forced to take refuge again in the world of grown-ups, of men who turn their backs on him and are as incomprehensible and far-removed from him as they are from the other little boys, but who are easier to make fun of, with their yearning for women and their terror of the police, till they tire of him and begin to clip him rou
nd the ear.
Now Pin will go back into the smoky violet air of the tavern, and mouth obscenities and insults to the men there until he has whipped them up into a frenzy and they begin attacking each other; then he’ll sing sentimental songs with all his might till he makes them cry and is crying himself, then invent new jokes and grimaces till he’s hysterical with laughter, all to disperse the cloud of loneliness which settles round his heart on evenings like this.
But the men in the tavern now all have their backs turned, forming an impenetrable wall; there in the middle of them is a newcomer, a thin serious-looking man. As Pin comes in the men frown at him, then at the unknown man, and say something. Pin feels that the atmosphere is different; all the more reason to go up to the group with his hands in his pockets and say: ‘God, you ought to have seen that German’s face!’
The men don’t make their usual joking replies, but turn slowly round one by one. Michel the Frenchman first frowns at him as if he’s never seen him before, then says slowly: ‘You’re a filthy little pimp.’
The freckles cloud up like wasps round Pin’s eyes, then he says calmly, though his eyes are slits: ‘Perhaps you’ll tell me why?’
Giraffe twists his neck slightly round towards him and says: ‘Off you go, we don’t want to see anyone who deals with Germans.’
‘With your contacts, you and your sister,’ says Gian the driver, ‘you’ll end up as Fascist big shots.’
Pin tries to put on the expression he uses when making fun of them.
‘Perhaps you’ll tell me what all this is about,’ he says, ‘I’ve never had anything to do with the Fascio, not even the Balilla, and my sister goes with whoever she wants and does no one any harm.’
Michel scratches his face a little. ‘The day everything changes – you know what I mean – the day everything changes we’ll send your sister round town with her head as shaved and bare as a plucked chicken … And for you … for you we’ll think up something you haven’t even dreamt of.’
Pin does his best to look unconcerned, but is obviously suffering inwardly, and is biting his lips. ‘On the day when you get a bit brighter,’ he says, ‘I’ll explain how things are. First, that I and my sister each go our own way, and as for pimping you can go and do it for her yourself if you feel like it. Second, that my sister doesn’t go with Germans because she particularly likes them, but because she’s as international as the Red Cross; and the same way she goes with Germans now she’ll go later with English, Negroes and anyone else who happens to turn up’ … (all these are things Pin has learnt from listening to grown-ups, probably the very same ones talking to him now. Why should he have to explain them?) ‘Third, the only dealings I’ve had with that German is getting cigarettes out of him, in return for which I’ve played tricks on him like the one I did today, which I won’t tell you about now as you’ve put me in a bad temper.’
But the attempt to change the subject does not succeed. Gian the driver says: ‘Tricks! I’ve been in Croatia and there a bloody German only had to go looking round a village for women, and he was never seen again, nor was his corpse.’
Michel says: ‘One day or the other he’ll be found dead in the sewers, your German will.’
The unknown man, who has been silent all this time without smiling or showing any signs of approval, now pulls Michel by the sleeve a little: ‘That’s the sort of thing you mustn’t say. Remember what I told you.’
The others nod and are still looking at Pin in silence. What can they want of him?
‘Listen,’ exclaims Michel, ‘have you seen what a pistol that sailor has?’
‘Yes, a hell of a big pistol,’ replies Pin.
‘Well,’ says Michel, ‘you must bring us that pistol.’
‘How can I do that?’ exclaims Pin.
‘Try.’
‘But how? He always wears it clamped to his bottom. You go and steal it.’
‘Well, let’s see … He’s got to take his trousers off at some stage, doesn’t he? Then he must take his pistol off too, surely. Go and steal it. Try.’
‘I will if I feel like it.’
‘Listen,’ says Giraffe, ‘we aren’t joking here. If you want to be one of us you now know what you must do. Otherwise …’
‘Otherwise …’
‘Otherwise … D’you know what a G.A,P.1 is?’
The unknown man gives Giraffe a nudge and shakes his head; he does not seem to like the way the others are behaving.
New words to Pin always have a halo of mystery, a hint of something dark and forbidden. A Gap? What could a Gap be?
‘Yes, of course I know what it is,’ he says.
‘What is it?’ asks Giraffe.
‘It’s where you all blasted well belong, you and your family.’
But the men aren’t listening to him. The unknown man has signalled to them to bring their heads closer and is whispering to them and seems to be rebuking them for something, and they are making signs of agreement.
Pin is out of all this. He can creep away without saying a word; perhaps it’s best, he thinks, not to mention that business of the pistol any more, it probably wasn’t important, and they may have forgotten all about it.
But Pin has just reached the door when Michel raises his head and says: ‘Pin, then we’re agreed about that.’
Pin would like to begin acting the fool again, but suddenly he feels a child surrounded by grown-ups, and stands there with his hand on the jamb of the door.
‘If not, don’t put your face in here again,’ says Michel.
Now Pin is outside, in the alley. Dusk is falling and lights are going on in the windows. Far away, down by the river, frogs are beginning to croak; at this time of the year boys spend their evenings hanging over pools, trying to catch them. When caught, the frogs feel slimy and slithery in their hands, smooth and naked as women.
A little boy in glasses and long trousers passes by: Battistino.
‘Battistino, d’you know what a Gap is?’
Battistino blinks with curiosity. ‘No, tell me. What is it?’
Pin breaks out into a peal of laughter. ‘Just go and ask your mother what a Gap is. Say to her, “Mummy, will you give me a Gap?” Say that. She’ll explain, you’ll see!’
Battistino slopes off, looking humiliated.
Pin wanders up the alley, which is almost dark now, and feels alone and lost amid all this talk of bloodshed and naked bodies which makes up men’s lives.
Chapter Two
His sister’s room, from where Pin is looking at it, seems filled with mist; he can see a vertical strip crowded with objects and surrounded by muzzy shadows, with everything changing dimensions according to whether he puts his eye nearer or farther from the slit. It’s like looking through a woman’s stocking; the smell is the same too: his sister’s smell emanating from the other side of the wooden partition and coming perhaps from those rumpled clothes and that bed which is never properly made, the sheets just flung back without ever being aired.
Pin’s sister has always been careless about household matters ever since she was a child; when Pin was a baby and used to cry loudly in her arms, his head covered in scabs, she would leave him on a ledge of the wash-house and go off to skip with urchins around the chalk squares marked on the pavements. Every now and again their father’s ship would return; all Pin could remember of him was being swung in the air in his big, bare arms, strong arms marked with black veins. But after their mother’s death his visits became rarer and rarer, until he was never seen again; people said he had another family in a city beyond the sea.
Pin now lives in a cubby-hole of a room, a sort of kennel beyond a wooden partition, with a high narrow slit of a window, cut sideways through the thick wall of the old house. Beyond it is his sister’s room, which he can see filtered through the cracks in the partition, cracks which make Pin’s eyes squint with the effort to see what’s going on in the rest of the room, The meaning of everything in the world is supplied by what goes on beyond that partition; Pi
n has spent hours and hours at those cracks ever since he was a baby, and he’s trained his eyes to be like needle points; he knows everything that happens inside there, though the reasons for it all elude him. When, in the end, he curls up in his little bunk with his arms round his chest, the shadows of the tiny room transform themselves into strange dreams, of naked bodies chasing, hitting and embracing each other, till something big and hot and unknown comes and hovers over Pin and yet caresses and warms him too; and this is the explanation of everything, like the faint distant memory of some forgotten happiness.
The German is now wandering round the room in his vest, his arms pink and meaty as thighs; every now and again he comes into focus at the crack in the partition; at one moment Pin can also see his sister’s legs, twirling in the air, then plunging under the sheets. Now Pin has to twist round to see where the German is putting down the belt with the pistol on it; there it is, hung on the back of a chair like some strange fruit; Pin wishes he had an arm as narrow as the slit so that he could slip it through, reach the weapon and pull it towards him. Now the German is naked except for his vest; he’s laughing; he always laughs when he’s naked because he is shy, deep down, like a girl. He jumps into bed and puts out the light. Pin knows that a little time will go by in darkness and silence before the bed begins to creak.
Now is the moment. Pin must enter the room with bare feet, on all fours, and pull the belt down from the chair without making any noise; all this is not just a game to laugh and joke about afterwards; no, it is connected with something secret and mysterious said by the men in the tavern with an opaque look in the whites of their eyes. Yet, Pin would like always to be friends with grown-ups, for them always to joke with him and to take him into their confidence. Pin loves grown-ups, he loves winding them up – those strong stupid grown-ups all of whose secrets he knows. He even loves the German. And now he is doing something irrevocable; perhaps he’ll never be able to joke with the German again, after this; and things will be different with the men in the tavern, too; they’ll have a link with him beyond laughter and obscenities, and will always look at him with those mysterious frowns and ask him stranger and stranger things in low voices. Pin would like to stretch himself out on his little bed and lie there thinking with his eyes open, listening to the German panting and his sister moaning on the other side of the partition, lie there imagining himself being accepted by bands of boys as their leader because he knows so much more than they do, and them all going out against the grown-ups together and beating them up and doing such wonderful things that the grown-ups are forced to admire him too and ask him to be their leader, loving him and stroking his head at the same time. But now, instead of that, he has to move about at night all on his own, with the grown-ups hating him, and steal a pistol from a German, things not done by other boys, who play with tin pistols and wooden swords. What would they say if Pin went among them next day, and gradually revealed to them a real pistol, all shiny and menacing and looking as if it were about to go off on its own? Perhaps they would be frightened, and Pin would also be frightened of keeping such a thing under his jacket; all he needs, he thinks, to terrify the grown-ups so much that they fall down fainting and asking for mercy, is one of those toy pistols that fire a strip of red caps.