“Certain low points of humanity seem impossible to treat in art.” Thus Pier Paolo Pasolini in an article on the shantytowns of 1950s Rome. His unduly short career saw him go to great lengths, across all available media, to defy the impossible. In his first novel, Ragazzi di vita (1955), now translated by Ann Goldstein as The Street Kids, the nadir is the liminal existence of a ragbag troupe of characters cast out of society’s new parameters of respectability.
The setting is Rome’s invisible and isolated borgate – “working-class suburbs” as dic¬tionaries have it. The realities were altogether grubbier, akin to post-war slums. Built on the outskirts initially under Fascism as Mussolini disembowelled the Eternal City to parade it as the capital of his projected Italian Empire, these peripheral mass housing projects were continued after the war by the Christian Democrats, with Pasolini seeing little distinction between the two regimes. Essentially, the aim remained to displace unsightly poverty from the historic centre. In one letter, he describes the borgate as an “inferno”. Elsewhere he calls them “concentration camps”, as does the narrator in this novel.
Although life in these half-constructed, half-dilapidated wastelands had been depicted before, especially in neorealist film, Pasolini felt the portrayals lacked authenticity. And he could speak with authority: having lived precariously in the borgate himself after leaving Friuli in 1949 in disgrace when convicted (and later absolved) of obscene acts and the corruption of minors, he considered himself an “informal expert” on life at the margins. Ragazzi di vita is his attempt to record in cartographic detail the “real” and “other” Rome, as he put it in another article, “unknown to tourists, ignored by the right-minded, and nonexistent on maps”.
Like neorealist film, the eight loosely connected chapters of the novel sketch a theme rather than resolve intricate plot lines. Pasolini presents a roster of not so lovable rogues who survive their harsh adolescence on their wits, by scavenging, pawning and stealing, even from each other. These anonymous ragazzi are distinguished from the great “swarm of boys” only by their nicknames. We meet Shameless, Blacky, Fattie and Shorty in passing, but Goldstein shies away from rendering most of the main characters in English. This is probably wise where names echo Roman mythology, but “speaking names”, as in Boccaccio, are often a crucial form of characterization. Monnezza, for instance, meaning “rubbish” in the vernacular, is named after the dominant feature of their surroundings, and sobriquets such as Pisciasotto (Pisspants?) suggest a character’s place in the relative hierarchy.
Riccetto, presumably a reference to curly hair, emerges as the quasi-protagonist, though others take centre stage too, as if interchange¬able representatives of generations destined merely to clone themselves. In this anti-Bil¬dungsroman, the usual support networks of family, Church and State are all but absent. Riccetto is orphaned. Later we learn of his real identity as Claudio Mastracca, revealed only on his meeting the daughter of an accomplice in pinching cabbages, and the relationship seems to bring some personal development. But life’s school of hard knocks, his sole form of education, teaches him to suppress any innate morality or altruism: early on he saves a drowning swallow in one of the many bathing scenes along the Tiber, whereas in the final episode he is a passive witness to a boy drowning, only to flee in self-preserving contemplation, “Hey, I’m for Riccetto!”
Pasolini does in prose what Giuseppe Gioachino Belli had done in poetry a century before, namely voice society’s dregs in their own distinctive idiom. “Rome’s great poet”, as the narrator calls him, had seen this as a broken, corrupt language: “not Italian, not even Roman, but Romanesco” – something distant from and inferior to the official tongue. Pasolini updates the philology and the politics, but concurs in finding the language worthy of celebration. For despite their dearth of worldly possessions, their speech is rich: every other word is dialectal, standard terms are modified by exuberant suffixes, and traditional rhyming proverbs abound. Pasolini sees this linguistic invention as a conscious attempt to forge collective identity from expulsion, “a form of evasion from the margins to the centre”. As proof of its otherness, he appends a slang glossary to the novel for the use of outsiders. Under¬¬¬standably, this disappears in translation, but Goldstein’s sinewy prose is reliable and resourceful, and gives a hint of what Anthony Burgess called the “unexportable language of the Roman streets”.
The Street Kids only goes so far in capturing the Italian title. The book is wholly about boys, largely of no fixed abode, and who therefore walk the streets. In one scene, Alduccio and Begalone are framed by some of Rome’s iconic landmarks – Pasolini thus offering them as champions of an ancient rite – as they advertise their services by singing “Zoccoletti, zoccoletti . . .”. Goldstein keeps this in the original, leaving the anglophone audience nonplussed at this Roman version of Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale”. Pasolini’s glossary informs the Italian reader that zoccola, now standard, means “prostituta”. Tellingly, we first meet Riccetto properly on Via delle Zoccolette. Ragazza di vita, in the feminine, is a common euphemism. Pasolini’s ragazzi are thus male members of the oldest profession, earning their money from prostituting themselves and pimping. Their primary obsession is la grana (dosh), source “of every pleasure and every satisfaction in this filthy world” where sex amounts to a basic transaction. Pasolini is reclaiming the qualifier di vita to some extent in celebrating their pre-consumerist, pagan vitality, but reference to the erotic is essential. Ragazzi like these had become the author’s real-life guides (linguistic, topographical, sexual), and he explored the figure widely in his other Roman works in prose and film, resulting in obscenity charges. Moreover, it was after an encounter with at least one such ragazzo, seventeen-year-old Giuseppe Pelosi, that Pasolini met his murky, violent death in 1975. Perhaps “Rent Boys” would have been too frank a title, but a note to explain some of this might have helped.
