Childhood burned

Childhood burned

That look! All gagè despise him. But they accept his money, don’t they?
“Via Appia Nuova,” Raul says fixating the taxi driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. “I’ll tell you where to stop.”

The driver crams the taxi between the coaches who are pulling up Piazza della Repubblica. They circle round the sparkling fountain. Like ants, tourists emerge from the Underground and commuters arrive marching from Termini. The Eternal City prepares for another barbarian invasion.

Raul takes a fistful of bank notes out of his pocket. He has earned seven hundred forty Euros in one weekend. At fourteen years of age, he makes enough money to stand on his own feet.

When he had left home Friday afternoon, his little brother Franco was asleep. Father and mother were getting water from the nearest fountain. No sound or movement had come from the other four shacks. The neighbours avoid Raul’s family. Their eldest, an arrogant teenage girl, once told him: “We are Romanians, not Roma. We are not like you people.”
To leave the camp, Raul had to unlock the rusty gate. He had then crossed the dump yard where trucks were unloading bursting bags of rubbish. Night and day, the inhabitants of the camp inhale the escaping biogas. He had to jump from one stone to the next on the narrow trail between the rubbish. It had rained the night before and the water that had filtrated through layers of bags was turning the plane into a toxic puddle. On Via Appia Nuova, he had taken the bus to Piazza della Repubblica where he had savoured an ice-cream before starting work.

The taxi is standing still behind a lorry. Raul puts two hundred and ten Euros in the left pocket of his trousers. Every night, he has to make seventy Euros for father. Strange father hasn’t called yet. Usually he is eager to know how much money he’ll have. When Raul puts the remainder back in the right pocket, he catches the driver looking at the bank notes. “What are you looking at? I have money for the trip,” he shouts. The driver shrugs and turns his head.

As the taxi strolls over Via Appia Nuova, Rome’s wall of apartment buildings breaks off. After a series of service stations, open spaces covered with high weeds and solitary rocks appear on both sides of the road. Raul recognises spots his family has squatted. Time after time, the gagè evict the family. Whereas in the large gypsy camp the family lived in a shed of corrugated iron, it now dwells in makeshift shacks of wood and hardboard. Raul rolls the window down. The early spring sun is burning away the chilly night. Plastic bags and wrappings, tissues and sheets of paper cling to holed fences. Empty bottles and packages of cigarettes litter the pavement. The gypsies are pushed ever farther from the wall.

On the crossing with Via di Arco di Travertino, a small gypsy boy is standing at a traffic light. He wears a dirty ITALIA t-shirt and holds a window cleaner. Little Franco also works at the traffic lights. He would do anything for father. He still calls father ‘daddy’.
When the traffic lights turn red, the gypsy boy walks between the cars and attempts to clean the windows. Raul worked at the traffic lights after he dropped out. Franco, however, never even went to school. He can’t read or write. In the large camp, a bus took the gypsy children to a faraway school. They arrived the second hour and had to leave the one-but-last. Roma were to sit in the back row. Yet, at the traffic lights Raul could earn a top-up phone card, a pair of sneakers –he had dozens– or a Big Mac. A driver signs at the boy. The boy walks over. The driver talks to the child. Fai anche altro oltre a lavare i vetri? Qualcosa che guadagna di più?

The lights switch to green. The car in front of the taxi turns right. Raul knows where it is heading to; he has been taken there many times. A small square at the back of a dead-end street. Some drivers dress as a woman: nobody minds when a child gets in the car of a female driver. Raul recalls drivers with/who had a child car seat in the backside: they pick up boys who are hardly older than their own children!

Suddenly, a hyperkinetic tune fills the taxi. Raul takes his mobile phone. The screen says ‘Marco’. What a tosser! Raul left barely an hour ago and the old fart is already calling. Raul had spent he weekend with a fifty year-old. For a seven hundred Euro “affitto”, Raul’s body had been his. Raul had made the man pay for the extras –clients like to take photos and exchange them on their smart phones. Raul particularly enjoys the moments after sex, when the lust is gone. Dai. Ancora cinque minuti, ti prego. Twenty Euros for listening to their whining about how young and beautiful he is and how old and lonely they feel, and about how hard life is in Italy when one is gay. This faggot had picked him up at night at Piazza della Repubblica. Before, clients came to the camps where Raul and his friends would be waiting, their eyes liquid of cocaine.

A gypsy woman and her two daughters walk along the road. The woman, devastated by obesity, is pushing a pram; the girls are dragging a trolley. They are examining waste containers.
Why not marry Zayra? After the authorities had cleared the camp, her family settled in Tor Sapienza. Zayra’s parents will agree. At Raul’s age, father had already married mother. Raul will become father. They will have a child. Raul will show everybody that he is a man, and that his antics at Piazza della Repubblica were just innocent experiments. He will be the leader of the group at the piazza. He knows all the tricks. He’ll pimp the younger boys. They will pay him seventy Euros a night. But will father agree? He’ll only have Franco to work for him.

The taxi passes a golf resort. “Stop over there,” Raul tells the driver, “beside the garage.” He points at the other side of the road, at a field before a Porsche car dealership. Without saying a word or looking at Raul, the driver taps the meter. Raul pays and gets out.
On the four-lane road he watches left and crosses the first part. Then he times his jump over the concrete separation before crossing the second part –the busy road has taken the life of many a gypsy child.
On the car dealership’s drive a fire engine stands next to ambulances and police cars with flickering siren lights. Raul walks past campers with satellite dishes on their rooftops. An old man is ranting in front of a cameraman and his camera: “I told them this was going to happen. I told them a thousand times.” A bit further, a woman says to a camera that is pointing at her: “They shouldn’t use gas cylinders to heat a wooden shack. They really shouldn’t.”

A large crowd stands in a circle. Raul joins the crowd and makes his way through it. In the middle stands an elegant man. He is wearing a long, dark coat. To his right and his left is a policeman standing. He is talking to a dozen of microphones and cameras. “I shall ask the government for special powers. We shall build new authorised camps.” When the man stops talking, the crowd whistles and boos. From the back of the crowd people shout Liar and False promises.

Raul leaves the crowd and hurries to the camp. The iron gate lies torn on the ground. The air smells of burnt wood and plastic. Three pairs of male nurses walk past Raul. Each pair is carrying a stretcher: two with on top a big zipped-up bag; one with a smaller one.
Wisps of smoke arise from the family shack. The trees that held up the shack are charcoal-burnt. A woman wearing white clothes and plastic gloves is standing beside the trees. She keeps a small plastic car in her hand. Franco’s toy!

He runs to the spot. Only the scorched carcass of a bed remains. The bed in which mother gave birth to Franco amid piles of rubbish and criss-crossing rats.
He turns. Firefighters are rolling up a hosepipe. A television crew is installing a camera on a rock. The other shacks are untouched! Police officers are putting a ribbon of yellow-black tape around each shack. The Romanian family stands in front of theirs. But how? Why? The Romanians turn away.

An airplane makes a deafening descent towards Ciampino. The radiating sun stands at its zenith. The wide open sky seems endless. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” someone shouts. It is the woman in white. “Do you live here?” she asks. “You do? Then… then you must be Raul.” She approaches. “Are you? Are you Raul?” She stiffens. “Poor child!”