laden like freighters. Each had had the same idea, and now, meeting, they realized they had assembled a complete sampling of all the supermarket's possibilities. 'Papa, are we rich then?' Michelino asked. 'Will we have food to eat for a year?'
'Go back! Hurry! Get away from the desk!' Marcovaldo cried, doing an about-face and hiding, himself and his victuals, behind the counters; and he began to dash, bent double as if under enemy fire, to become lost once more among the various departments. A rumble resounded behind him; he turned and saw the whole family, galloping at his heels, pushing their carts in line, like a train.
'They'll charge us a million for this!'
The supermarket was large and complex as a labyrinth: you could roam around it for hours and hours. With all these provisions at their disposal, Marcovaldo and family could have spent the winter there, never coming out. But the loudspeakers had already stopped their tunes, and were saying: 'Attention, please! In fifteen minutes the supermarket will close! Please proceed to the check-out counters!'
It was time to get rid of their cargo: now or never. At the summons of the loudspeaker, the crowd of customers was gripped by a frantic haste, as if these were the last minutes in the last supermarket of the whole world, an urgency either to grab everything there was or to leave it there-the motive wasn't clear-and there was a pushing and shoving around all the shelves. Marcovaldo, Domitilla and the children took advantage of it to replace goods on the counters or to slip things into other people's carts. The replacements were somewhat random: the flypaper ended on the ham shelf, a cabbage landed among the cakes. They didn't realize that, instead of a cart, one lady was pushing a baby carriage with an infant inside: they stuck a bottle of Barbera in with it.
Depriving themselves of things like this, without even having tasted them, was a torment that brought tears to the eyes. And so, at the very moment they abandoned a jar of mayonnaise, they came upon a bunch of bananas, and took it; or a roast chicken to substitute for a nylon broom; with this system the more they emptied their carts, the more they filled them.
The family with their provisions went up and down the escalators, and at every level, on all sides they found themselves facing obligatory routes that led to a check-out cashier, who aimed an adding machine, chattering like a machine gun, at all those who showed signs of leaving. The wandering of Marcovaldo and family resembled more and more that of caged animals or of prisoners in a luminous prison with walls of colored panels.
In one place, the panels of one wall had been dismantled; there was a ladder set there, hammers, carpenter's and mason's tools. A contractor was building an annex to the supermarket. Their working day over, the men had gone off, leaving everything where it was. Marcovaldo, his provisions before him, passed through the hole in the wall. Ahead there was darkness: he advanced. And his family, with their carts, came after him.
The rubber wheels of the carts jolted over the ground, sandy at times, as if cobbles had been removed, then on a floor of loose planks. Marcovaldo proceeded, poised, along a plank; the others followed him. All of a sudden they saw, before and behind, above and below, many lights strewn in the darkness, and all around, the void.
They were on the wooden structure of a scaffolding, at the level of seven-storey houses. The city opened below them in a luminous sparkle of windows and signs and the electric spray from tram antennae; higher up, the sky was dotted with stars and red lights of radio stations' antennae. The scaffolding shook under the weight of all those goods teetering up there. Michelino said: 'I'm scared!'
From the darkness a shadow advanced. It was an enormous mouth, toothless, that opened, stretching forward on a long metal neck: a crane. It descended on them, stopped at their level, the lower jaw against the edge of the scaffolding. Marcovaldo tilted the cart, emptied the goods into the iron maw, and moved forward. Domitilla did the same. The children imitated their parents. The crane closed its jaws, with all the supermarket loot inside, and, pulley creaking, drew back its neck and moved away. Below, the multicolored neon signs glowed and turned, inviting everyone to buy the products on sale in the great supermarket.
SPRING
17. Smoke, wind, and soap-bubbles
Every day the postman left some envelopes in the tenants' boxes; only in Marcovaldo's there was never anything, because nobody ever wrote him, and if it hadn't been for an occasional dun from the light or the gas company, his box would have been absolutely useless.
'Papa! There's mail!' Michelino shouted.
'Come off it!' he answered. 'The same old ads!'
From all the letter-boxes a blue-and-yellow folded sheet was protruding. It said that to achieve really good suds, Blancasol was the best of products; anyone who presented this blue-and-yellow paper would be given a free sample.
Since these sheets were narrow and long, some of them jutted from the slot of the boxes; others lay on the ground, crumpled, or only a bit mussed, because many tenants, opening the box, would promptly throw away all the advertising matter that crammed it. Filippetto, Pietruccio, and Michelino, collecting some from the floor, slipping some from the slots, and actually fishing others out with a bit of wire, began to make a collection of Blancasol coupons.
'I have the most!'
'No! Count them! I have the most! You want to bet?'
Blancasol had conducted the advertising campaign through the whole neighborhood, house to house. And house to house, the young brothers started covering the area, trying to corner the coupons. Some concierges drove them away, shouting: 'You little crooks! What are you trying to steal? I'm going to call the police.' Others were pleased to see the kids clean up some of the waste paper deposited there every day.
In the evening, Marcovaldo's two poor rooms were all blue and yellow with Blancasol ads; the children counted and recounted them and piled them into packs like bank tellers with banknotes.
'Papa, we have so many; couldn't we start a laundry?' Filippetto asked.
In those days, the detergent world was in great upheaval. Blancasol's advertising campaign had alarmed all the rival companies. To launch their products, they distributed through all the mailboxes of the city similar coupons, which entitled the recipient to larger and larger free samples.
Marcovaldo's children, in the days that followed, were kept very busy. Every morning the letter-boxes blossomed like peach-trees in spring: slips of paper with green drawings or pink, blue, orange, promised snow-white wash for those who used Washrite or Lavolux or Beautisuds or Handikleen. For the boys, the collecting of coupons and free-sample cards ramified into more and more new classifications. At the same time, their collection territory expanded, extending to the buildings on other streets.
Naturally, these maneuvers could not go unnoticed. The neighborhood kids soon realized what Michelino and his brothers went out hunting for all day, and immediately those papers, to which none of them had paid any attention before, became a sought-after booty. There was a period of rivalry among the various bands of kids, when the collection in one zone rather than another gave rise to disputes and brawling. Then, after a series of exchanges and negotiations, they reached an agreement: an organized system of hunting was more profitable than helter- skelter grabbing. And the collection of coupons became so methodical that the moment the man from Washrite or Rinsequik went by on his round of doorways, his route was observed and shadowed, step by step, and as fast as the material was distributed, it was confiscated by the kids.
Commanding operations, naturally, were still Filippetto, Pietruccio, and Michelino, because the idea had been theirs in the first place. They even succeeded in convincing the other boys that the coupons were common property and should be preserved all together. 'Like in a bank!' Pietruccio explained.
'Do we own a laundry or a bank?' Michelino asked.
'Whatever it is, we're millionaires!'
The boys were so excited they couldn't sleep anymore, and they made plans for the future.
'We only have to redeem all these samples and we'll have a huge amount of detergent.'
'Where are we going to keep it?'
'We'll rent a warehouse!'
'Why not a freighter?'
