1
Rome
Everybody in Rione dell'Angelo called it the shit wagon. It came by once a week, on Mondays.
This Monday, after five days of rain, the shit wagon lurched down the narrow Via della Pescheria, scraping against some of the house walls. The six jailbirds chained to the shafts sank into mud up to their ankles, groaning with the effort of heaving the wheels out of the potholes that had swallowed them. Their rough wool leggings, coarse and ripped, were soaked crotch-high. Another two prisoners walked ahead, chained together, hoisting buckets of trash and excrement from outside house doors or from courtyards, then emptying them into the cart's huge tub. Four armed guards, two in front and two at the rear of the nauseating procession, kept watch over the eight prisoners.
A heterogeneous small crowd remained blocked behind the cart, mostly composed of foreigners, as often happened in the Holy City. There were two German scholars, with heavy books under their arms; and three nuns whose wimples seemed like great upturned wings, advancing with downcast eyes; a North African with skin brown as toasted hazelnuts; two Spanish soldiers in red and yellow tights, stumbling forward, eyes shut to blunt the pain in their heads after a night at the wine shop - now all they wanted was to get back to the barracks. There was even a turbaned Indian, leading a camel that brayed in the cold, heading back to their circus across the Tiber; and a Jewish merchant, too, wearing the yellow cap prescribed by law. And all of them had the same look of disgust painted on their faces: The nearer they came to Sant'Angelo in Pescheria, the more pungent the stink from the shit wagon grew, enriched by the reek of fish market scraps that had been rotting on the ground for six days.
When they came to a wide place in the street, the group of stragglers managed to shove past the shit wagon and disappear into the little Babel of people crowded into the piazza.
The merchant Shimon Baruch quickened his pace, glancing around nervously: A fearful man. He'd just concluded a profitable business deal at the nearby rope market, selling a large quantity of braided ropes that came from a ship anchored at the port of Ripa Grande, and they'd paid him the whole sum in cash rather than the usual credit. And so now he hunched over as he walked, uneasy about being out in the Roman streets with a leather pouch full of coins tucked into his belt.
Shimon Baruch took note of the dignitary from some exotic land: mustachioed, two giant Moors as escort, the engraved blades of their scimitars glinting beyond the ivory grips. He glanced at the olive-skinned jugglers and at a little group of elders sitting in front of their houses on straw-bottomed chairs while they cast dice from a wooden box on the ground. And then three poor women, hovering around the fishmonger's marble slab where now only a few wicker trays remained, with mackerel from Isola Sacra and a few perch from Bracciano. The women rummaged through these leftovers, looking for a head or a tail to flavor the broth of weeds that was all they'd have to serve tonight. Two of the women were in their forties, with lips clenched against the cold and unnaturally wrinkled, hinting at missing teeth. The third woman, however, was very young. She had dark-red hair and skin that looked white and as transparent as alabaster under a crust of dirt. Shimon Baruch thought she looked like Susanna, spied on by the elders in the Book of Daniel.
"Move along, whores, or I'm tossing you in the shit tank too," shouted one of the jailbirds pulling the cart. The soldiers laughed and motioned the women away.
Shimon Baruch, his head lowered, started towards Teatro Marcello, where he could finally store his moneybag safely. But he turned back one last time to look at the pretty girl with coppery hair, and he saw her exchange a glance with a ragged boy. His skin was yellowish and he had long dirty hair; he was sitting a little way off in the ruins of the Portico of Octavia, lazily throwing stones at a she-goat browsing on the nettles and moss that grew from cracks in the wall. For a moment Shimon Baruch thought he'd seen the same boy earlier that morning, at the rope market. And as he watched him, hunching over even more, the boy looked at him and shouted, "Good-looking cap, mister Jew! Prosperity! Prosperity!"
Shimon Baruch turned away quickly without answering, and now he saw a hulking youth, who'd been leaning oafishly against the opposite wall of the piazza, come suddenly lumbering towards him. He was big and heavy, with thick pale hair like donkey straw, growing so low and brutishly on his scalp that his brow almost disappeared. He was dressed in rags and moved his short sturdy legs awkwardly, swaying his stocky torso. His arms were short, too, disproportioned, stubby. Like a giant dwarf, thought Shimon Baruch. At first glance, he took him for a crazy person. And then he was certain of it when the giant, squinting timidly as if he feared a beating, spoke in a guttural voice without inflection, in an odd language where the syllables kept tangling together: "Niceman me want piece money beg lustrous signor."
"Go away," said the merchant, flapping his hand at the air as if he were shooing a fly.
The giant shielded his face with a hand but stayed close, insisting:
"One piece money, one piece most exulent mister sir, me only one." And then, just in front of the church of St. Angelo, he grabbed the merchant's arm and clung to him eagerly.
Shimon Baruch turned towards him, alarmed. "Keep your dirty hands off me!" he growled, trying to hide the fear that was clutching at his throat.
At that same moment a boy of about sixteen, with sun-browned skin and hair black as pitch, lanky, with a yellow cap perched crosswise on his head, came running around the corner of the church. He almost bumped into the merchant and clung briefly to his shoulder to keep from falling.
"Sorry, signore," he excused himself at once, and then, noticing the merchant's yellow cap, he added, "Shalom Aleichem," bowing his head in respect.
"Aleichem Shalom," Shimon Baruch replied, somewhat reassured at seeing someone who shared his religion, yet still agitated because he couldn't free himself from the loony's grasp.
"No, me see him first!" the giant protested, flaming with wrath at the new arrival. "Good gennulmun he give alms for me!" And, clinging to the merchant's arm, he gave the boy a violent shove. "Go way!"
"Let go of me, wretch!" shouted Shimon Baruch, with a note of fear in his voice.
"Let him go!" the newcomer also cried, flinging himself at the giant who, however, bent him in half with a fist to the stomach. But the youth didn't give up and again hurled himself forward, punching the oaf in the face.
The giant emitted a guttural roar, released his grip on the merchant, grabbed the youth, and twirled him in the air before flinging him against Shimon Baruch so that both of them tumbled to the ground.
The guards, who at first had seemed ready to break up the fight, now laughed at seeing the two wearers of yellow headgear struggling in the mud, as if they were fighting each other. And all the fishwives laughed, hands on hips, breasts bouncing. And the two Moors with scimitars and the Grand Vizier's dignitary roared with laughter too. The jugglers stopped lofting their balls, and the two Spanish soldiers, never slowing their pace, were now marching backwards so as not to miss the spectacle. And even the German students stopped and peered through their eyeglasses.
"Kill, kill!" screamed the boy who'd been throwing rocks at the she-goat a little further on, inciting the demented lad.
The jailbirds roared with laughter and one of them yelled to the giant: "Teach 'em a lesson! Kick 'em where it hurts!"
At which point the oafish lad landed a kick to the stomach of the boy in the yellow cap just as he was helping the merchant to stand. The youth gasped, turned towards Shimon Baruch, and told him, his eyes dark with fear: "You'd better run!" Then with a shout he hurled himself at the giant with the strength of desperation. He punched him one more time and then fled away. The giant came shambling after him towards the bank of the Tiber, and the longhaired boy with jaundiced skin also joined the pursuit, shouting "Shitty Jew! You're dead meat now, you shitty Jew!"
Shimon Baruch thought that he should come to the aid of the young member of his tribe. But that thought lingered only for an instant, until the fear that tyrannized his life won out, and the merchant fled in the opposite direction, towards Teatro Marcello.
Fishwives, jailbirds, armor-bearers, and everybody who'd clustered around Sant'Angelo in Pescheria laughed out loud, watching the little boy and the giant who were chasing the youth in the yellow cap.
In the confusion, the alabaster-skinned girl rummaging through the fish scraps dipped her white hand into a wicker basket at the very edge of the marble slab, snatched up as many mackerel as she could, slipping them into her billowing sleeve, and then, holding her breath, she moved away without the fishwives even noticing her.
Meanwhile the boy in the yellow cap had rounded the corner and the two pursuers were on top of him now, still howling insults about Jews. A drunkard lurched into the middle of the alley and stretched out his arms, shouting at the...
