By Paul Mirabile
In order to build a new low-cost residential complex twenty kilometres to the West of Rome, hundreds of hectares of low-lying hills, orchards, several depopulated hamlets and unplanted vineyards had been cleared by an army of bulldozers, cranes and cheap labour with picks and shovels. In the 1960s, housing construction in Italy had mushroomed out in an erratic, rampaging spectacle beyond any public or private circumspection.
Pier Paolo and his middle-aged mother benefitted from one of these new, but hastily built residential flats on the tenth floor of a fifteen-storey tower. His father had abandoned the family four or five years ago, forcing the boy’s mother to work as a seamstress for the hundreds of residents of their tower. He himself had dropped out of school to work at a nearby wine factory in the industrial zone. Their meagre incomes paid the rent, permitted them to eat two or three meals a day and dress decently.
Everyday, Pier Paolo shuffled lazily to the factory at eight o’clock. To reach the small factory, he crossed an immense horizonless, treeless esplanade paved in the most banal ugly grey paving stones. What caught his attention, however, was a low rising stretch of grassy dirt mounds which ran for a lengthy distance along a high, barbed wire metal barrier which separated the dirt mounds from a rocky embankment leading downwards to a newly build avenue. These low dirt knolls, according to the season, blushed a poppy spring red, a leafy, autumnal brown, a wintry white then a lush, verdant green in the summer. On his off days, he would walk through the low hillocks from one point to the other. They covered an area of about twenty-five metres by ten metres. His constant crossings in this forgotten pile of dirt had traced footpaths in and around the knolls, the low bushes and over broken roots.
Pier Paolo enjoyed these pleasant promenades. Below, on one side, buzzed speeding vehicles. On the other, lay the empty, treeless esplanade where hardly a soul appeared, save a few workers, housewives pushing carts of food, flowers or trinkets to be sold in the neighbourhood market, one or two old school comrades and stray dogs. It was at that particular movement of contemplation that Pier Paolo experienced a tinge of excitement, a mounting commotion that would endorse and embolden his existence, would prompt his escape from the boring walls of a suffocating flat, the ugly concrete and metal of their block residence …
Returning from the factory one afternoon at the beginning of June, Pier Paolo walked briskly over the range of shaggy mounds of piled up dirt for an hour or so before finally deciding upon a spot that would suit his adventure nicely. Hidden from the eyes of those who crossed the esplanade, a small concavity in the rim of a grassy hillock would afford him a place to sleep. He only needed to erect a make-shift lean-to, not to protect him from the rain — during the spring and summer months it never rained — but from the scorching heat. Yes, Pier Paolo resolved to live with nature on this diminutive tract of earth that had miraculously survived the building contractors’ bulldozers and cranes.
He hastened home to his mother who was busy sowing a marriage dress for her second storey neighbour. Pier Paolo excitedly explained his adventure. It would last through not only for the summer months, but also through autumn before the heavy rains set in. She listened passively, her mouth agape. Had her son gone completely daft? No, he appeared quite normal, even serious. He would rise with the rising sun, have his breakfast at the café near the factory, lunch at the factory canteen, and as to diner he would buy deli meats, olives, cheese and bread at the grocer’s.
“Why not eat diner here with me?” his mother suggested in her soft, meek voice.
“Of course I’ll eat with you mummy, but only on weekends. I must live permanently in my new environment. I’m eighteen year’s old, and it will be an adventure to sleep out in such primitive and natural surroundings without neighbours’ screaming and shouting, loud parties until four in the morning, lifts breaking down all the time. I want to breathe fresh air, if that is all possible in this godforsaken dump.”
His mother flushed at these last words, but held her tongue, astonished at her son’s resolution. “You see mummy, I want to look up at the stars and not at the cracks in the ceiling of my room.” His mother nodded her head, thimble on her thumb, needle and thread between her index and middle finger. He was right, there were many cracks and fissures in the ceilings and walls of their ‘new’ flat ! Well, he did show ingenuity and imagination. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and besides, he wouldn’t be far from home …
So Pier Paolo packed a few belongings in his back-pack, rolled up his sleeping bag, kissed his mother on her wrinkled forehead and strolled to his ‘earthy paradise’ as he facetiously called his up-coming ‘residence’.
The first two weeks Pier Paolo did eat with his mother on Sundays and also gave her his clothes to be washed, cleaned and dried, made ready for work on the morrow. However, the following weekends he did his own washing at the launderette for a few lira, and ate sandwiches at his hilly home instead of with his mother. It certainly was not out of anything against her. He loved her very much. But Pier Paolo wished to be on his very own, especially on his off days and at night, lying on his sleeping bag outside the lean-to, observing the stars and the moon as they moved slowly across the universe. Up till then, no one had disturbed him. A stray dog did sniff about his installation on several occasions, but the animal seemed friendly, and Pier Paolo threw it some slices of salami and pepperoni. The only other ‘visitors’ to his comfortable solitude were the sparrows who gayly pecked at the crumbs of bread that he scattered for them just below his shelter.
Oh how after a hard day’s work at the factory he relished those calm, starry evenings, the light whir of vehicles below beyond the barbed-wire barrier, the absolute silence of the esplanade behind him! He really felt quite at home amongst the natural elements; the ants building their ant-hills, the bees doing their dance amidst the honeysuckles, the birds chirping in and out of the bushes. The poppies and daisies were in bloom, too. Alas, many of the grassy knolls and thorny footways had been littered with coke bottles and caps, beer cans or liquor bottles, yellowed magazine and newspaper pages, cigarette studs, all thrown there by returning workers from the industrial area or gangs of drunken adolescents. Pier Paolo, struggling through the prickly weeds, would clean the mess the best he could, but invariably the same lot or other litter-louts would fling whatever trash they had into his ‘paradise’ as if it were a huge rubbish bin. Did these individuals know that Pier Paolo had taken up residence in those piles of grassy mounds? Even if they did, nothing would have prevented them from tossing whatever they had into it, accompanied by drunken guffaws and mindless giggles.
The sea must not have been far off, or so he imagined. For at times he heard the whir of a winged seagull. He stood to catch sight of it, but only the blurry orange glow of the high rising tower lights far off at the end of the esplanade marked the sky. The towers resembled so many indistinct parapets of flickering light-bulbs which loomed ominously at the end of the soundless esplanade. That vastness of ugly emptiness had always frightened him, and at those times he would turn his back to this sinister, featureless urban landscape and dwell upon the images of faraway scenes that crossed his imagination. No, those electric lights would not chase away his stars …
One star-filled night, he envisaged pink and amber sands of a horizonless desert whose barkans[1] and chots[2] left him breathless; the heat of the sands made him sweat under the blazing hot sun in an azure sky of pure, unpolluted, untainted opal. In another vision, he pictured himself deep in a chain of snow-clad crested mountains, trekking with difficulty over ribbed glaciers and ice-laden passes, the blues of the mountains inviting him to penetrate ever deeper so as to discover the arcane entrance to the subterranean kingdom of the King of the World.
Pier Paolo’s imagination soared to new heights night after night following a hard day’s work. It were as if he had mounted a magic carpet which floated under rainbows, over wide forests and turquoise seas. These fantastic images slid him slowly into a deep, healthy sleep. He awoke refreshed and vigorous, ready for a hearty breakfast at the café and work. In fact, he had never worked as hard as he did now, loading the train cars with heavy cartons of wine, working rapidly at the conveyor belt packaging wine bottles.
Many of the workers admired the young Pier Paolo for his renewed energy, his replenished stamina and spirit. At the sound of the whistle, he showered, bought some prosciutto, pepperoni, provolone, olives, pistachios and bread from the grocer’s, then returned merrily to his shaggy-mounded home. His muscles ached, but gradually relaxed when the stars began to pop out forming clusters of scintillating comfort …
He saw himself on the Niger River somewhere in Mali, drifting in a canoe on the slow moving current, wild geese cackling on the wing, hippopotami bellowing and rumbling in the deep waters, camels grunting from the arid sand-filled shores. He drifted and drifted as the heat bore heavily upon him, lying upon sacks of corn, munching on dates, tomatoes and boiled fish …
A sudden barking! It was the stray dog. Pier Paolo shook himself out of his dreamy stupor, threw the poor scraggy creature a slice of pepperoni, then closed his weary eyes and slept soundly. Darkness crept over the hilly mounds, mantling their denizen in another tranquil night of peaceful repose.
Oddly enough, after having devoured the slice of pepperoni, the dog never returned to visit our grassy-mounded denizen. He had other visitors, however — a motley lot of out-of-schoolers who seemingly scented the presence of someone living amidst the abandoned lot, and who endeavoured to confirm it. It was a Saturday afternoon. Pier Paolo was busy reading an interesting detective story when suddenly he found himself encircled by three ragamuffin boys and two very buxom girls! They all sized him up, noses in the air as if sniffing the warm breeze of a July day.
“Who are you mate?” a skinny boy questioned with overt contempt. He appeared to be the ‘chief’ of the pack. Pier Paolo stood up. He was much taller than any of them and more broad-shouldered. The others held their ground, but one or two scraped the dirt with their worn-out shoes, biting their lips.
“I’m the king of these mounds. What of it?”
“The king?” guffawed the skinny chap out of the corner of his distorted mouth.
“Yea, the king,” repeated Pier Paolo, heightening his voice with an added tinge of condescension.
“Very well, king. Then what if we were to dethrone you and turn your monarchy into a democratic state?” The others sniggered at this show of rhetoric, albeit hesitantly.
“Go ahead, Mister Democrat!” responded the monarch, tightening his fists, smiling through clenched teeth. No one moved. The warm breeze made the democrats sway in their fixed positions like a herd of paper tigers.
“Ah, let it go,” interrupted one of the girls. “Let him rule over his trash-filled kingdom.” And she turned to leave, followed shortly by the other girl then the three boys, who exchanged menacing glances with Pier Paolo. The ‘chief’ bowed in affected reverence to the ‘king’ and mumbled something unintelligible. When they had reached the esplanade, Pier Paolo scoffed at this unexpected intrusion, crawled under his lean-to and went back to his afternoon reading …
The August heat dried all the perfumed poppies and dainty daisies that Pier Paolo had planted around his lean-to. The heat had become unbearable, driving through the palm-leaf roof of his make-shift shelter. It was holiday for most of the workers at the wine factory, but Pier Paolo volunteered to work the whole month, not only for higher wages, but for showering and the afternoon hot meals. He did visit his mom every now and then, but was living mostly on deli meats, olives, cheese, fruit and bread. Because of the heat, he showered every day and took his clothes to the launderette every two days. It’s true that this kind of a diet began to bore him, however, his solitary refuge had really become his royal paradise!
Every Saturday and Sunday, he roamed through his ‘kingdom’ searching the nooks and crannies for unusual objects: a broken tombstone dating from the seventeenth century judging from the Latin inscription, a yellow-paged book of verses by a poet unknown to him, several of which he managed to read but hardly understood. He discovered a rusted compass and magnifying-glass, half-buried in one of the weedy mounds. In a riot of dead roots he rummaged out a photo of a young girl dressed as if to go to church, all in white with a huge black crêpe de chine hat. He collected these treasures and put them in a box for safe-keeping. They represented objects reminiscent of some by-gone era.
One day he stumbled upon a huge footprint, much bigger than any print he had ever seen.
“A dinosaur?” he thought excitedly.
He scoured the knolls for any dinosaur bones but found none. Where did that enormous footprint come from? Pier Paolo grew somewhat apprehensive. His kingdom indeed enclosed a myriad mysteries. And this one drew him further before the advent of humankind …or so he thought.
One fine sunny morning, the black dog he had fed, suddenly appeared with a huge bone in its mouth. Pier Paolo threw it a few slices of salami he had been munching on but the dog shook its shaggy head and plodded off behind a knoll. He raised a quizzical eyebrow. Did the dog not like salami? Perhaps that bone was a dinosaur bone. He shrugged his shoulders sniffing the hot air.
During the month of August he hardly visited his mother. He hardly spoke to his colleagues at the factory. They eyed him nervously. The boy seemed so estranged, aloof with a distant look in his eyes. He would look straight through you and beyond, somewhere far, far away. His gait too had slackened. This being said, he carried out his tasks as usual.
He let his hair grow long, dishevelled. He grew a wispy beard, uncombed. His clothes, although clean, hung on him like a bag, and a bit bedraggled to boot as if he had slept in them. Which he always did, needless to say. All he yearned for was to return to his solitary retreat in the evening, lie down and stare at the emerging stars. They drew him upwards and outwards. The sun having set, the heat ceased to vex him. The crickets discontinued their August chorus. Other sounds, alien, rose to a high pitch in his head…the tinkling of camel bells across the sandy wavelets of the Gobi or the Sahara deserts. There he was again, riding atop a camel, a white, gleaming, silken turban wound about his head, his body protected by a satin djellaba. He had sailed the high seas for many moons before disembarking in this ocean of ergs[3] whose vibrant colours made his eyes squint. The cleanliness of such an expanse delighted him, such a contrast to the concrete ugliness and filth of all those horrid towers! As the ship disappeared over the rim of the watery horizon, he stood between the vastness of the desert and the sea, the first in front of him, the second behind, ready to penetrate unknown territories. Above, a translucent blue sky. The camels plodded onwards; a sudden crispy sound alerted him to a change in the landscape, the camels’ hooves now trudged over stetches of slaty black sands that the dried lava of a volcano eruption had deposited thousands and thousands of years ago. The camels trudged and trudged ; the crusty slaty sands crunched and crunched until Pier Paolo fell asleep …
Pier Paolo, after five weeks of not visiting his mother, spent a Sunday with her. So happy was she to see her son that the cheerful woman cooked him his favourite dish: eggplant parmigiana. She bought him the best provolone and caciocavallocheeses that she could afford, and served him a vintage Chianti wine. As a special treat for dessert, she fried him Sicilian sfince[4]. How he wolfed those delicious delicacies down! Pier Paolo hadn’t eaten such sweets for over three months. He had become so thin, his long hair and beard framed an emaciated face, whose bulging eyes bore a wild look. Yet he remained very polite, mild-mannered, even tender towards his loving mother throughout the afternoon. When he closed the door behind him, she held back her tears. Would she hold them back when his final hour came?
It was a warm September afternoon, 1975. Next to his lean-to, Pier Paolo sat reading a novel by Alberto Moravia, ‘Gli Indifferenti’[5], the 1929 edition. He sniffed the cool autumn air, admired the pleasant scents of the poppies and honeysuckles around which the bees were busily buzzing. From behind the mounds, he heard a few vehicles screech to a halt, followed by many coarse voices. The boy stood, walked over the mounds and noticed five or six men in ties and two policemen staring up at him. A big fat man, probably a building contractor by the look of his clothes, waved to him to come down. With overt disdain, he turned and returned to his novel. Shortly after, though, he found himself surrounded by these intruders to his privacy. He stood, miffed to the marrow!
“You’re trespassing, sirs. And encroaching on my afternoon reading.” This was stated with calm but obvious scorn. All the men laughed so loud that it brought a series of yowls from the stray dog, who had been observing the scene from atop the knoll where Pier Paolo had built his lean-to. It was showing its teeth, yet uttered not a growl.
“Clear out boy, you’ve had your fun for the summer. The neighbours are complaining about you. Anyway the city is about to level all this and pave it clean.” The fat man certainly gave himself airs, puffing out his chest.
Pier Paolo, with a thin smile, replied wearily: “What neighbours? No neighbour has ever said anything about my being here. They don’t even know I’m here.”
“Listen, don’t muck about with us. I’m telling you to push off or we’ll be forced to drag you off,” the other said in a offensive tone, his face turning a beet-red.
Pier Paolo clenched his fists: “This is my kingdom, fatty. I and only I decide when to leave!”
The dog yowled again. The fat contractor kicked down the lean-to in a spate of anger. Pier Paolo, taken aback by this display of uncalled for violence, lashed out at him with two or three well-placed blows to the face. ‘Fatty’ fell backwards to the ground, spitting out a tooth and much blood.
One of the policemen grasped Pier Paolo by the shoulder ; the young boy showing unusual strength knocked his arm away and struck the policeman’s jaw with his elbow, then continued to strike him in the ribs with a volley of punches. Just then from above, the dog leapt into the crowd barking hysterically. It fell onto one of the men biting into the neck. The dog had gone mad. The other policeman took out his pistol and shot it dead.
Pier Paolo, stunned by the gunshot and the dog lying limp next to his broken lean-to, flew into a rage and attacked the policeman, seething like an animal, gnashing his teeth. He struck blow after blow, uncontrollably. Now the rest of the men pounced on the boy beating him mercilessly to the ground, kicking him in the head. The policeman broke up the beating, handcuffed the half-unconscious Pier Paolo and dragged him off to the police car …
The badly beaten boy was taken to hospital. Upon his release, he was immediately arrested and charged for assault and battery on the two policemen and on two municipal civil servants. At the trial the accused, who had no defence, was sentenced to two years imprisonment and a 50.000 lira fine, which he refused to pay on the grounds that neither he nor his mother could afford such a sum. The judge slapped on another year of imprisonment.
Confined to stare at four concrete walls many hours a day, Pier Paolo gradually slipped out of the reality of his circumstances. He took no food nor spoke to anyone. He merely lay prostrate on his little cell bed like one awaiting death. No more wonderful images of deserts, mountains and seas crossed his benumbed mind.
Death stole upon Pier Paolo in violent spasms on the evening of the second of November, 1975. Apparently, he had starved himself to death.
His lonely mother sewed and sewed, no longer able to retain her tears. No neighbour came to comfort her; no religious authority to commiserate with her grief.
As to Pier Paolo’s kingdom or paradise, on one dreary November day, several bulldozers levelled the shaggy mounds. The area that had been his home now became an extension of the paved esplanade up to the barrier of the embankment.
[1] Crescent-shaped sand dunes.
[2] Large lake-like salt deposits.
[3] Large wavy dunes.
[4] Made of ricotta, unbleached flour and unsalted butter, rolled into balls and fried. When cooled, sugar powder is sprinkled on them. They are generally eaten on Saint Joseph’s day in Sicily.
[5] Translated in English as ‘The Indifferent Ones’ or ‘The Time of Indifference’ by Alberto Moravia(1907-1990)
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Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.
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