The Rose Hernia - A short story

Carlo said he’d call soon, and he kept his word. He’s direct, no-nonsense, practical, an entrepreneur. At least, I think that’s what you call it. We buzz his intercom, in the Alessandrino neighborhood, eastern Rome, 1980s.

“Come on up,” he croaks.

He has us sit down in a messy room: a sofa, a low glass table, papers everywhere, pens, a desk clock, a Genesis poster on the wall, a few books. They look like university textbooks.

He grabs a chair and gets straight to the point.

“My clients need extra hands whenever they need them. I’ll tell you where and when. I pay right away, no problem.

“If you’re up for it, there’s a truckload of bananas to unload on Via del Maggiolino. Right now. One hundred and fifty thousand lire in total. You two can go, or bring someone else, but the money stays the same. You finish when you finish. The guard will let you in and tell you what needs doing.”

I look at my friend Antonio, then at Carlo. He wears round John Lennon glasses, is tall and lanky, with curly brown hair. Jeans and a checked shirt, desert boots on his feet—Clarks, but in a street-kid kind of way. One day, perhaps, they’ll call it gauche caviar, or radical chic, but nobody uses those terms yet. We all have Tolfa bags, anyway, and they’re good for carrying sandwiches. Okay, we’re in. Bananas it is.

There are three of us; Roberto joins in. The truck is huge, tractor and trailer, but with more than three people the pay becomes too little. Green bananas in cardboard boxes. A big American multinational. The guard says that if we find any yellow ones, we have to stack them separately. We can eat a few if we want.

We organize ourselves: one person on top of the boxes passes them to the next person, on the truck, who passes them to the one underneath, who stacks them. Then all three of us carry them into the warehouse. There’s a pallet jack with a platform we can use to speed things up. Every now and then, a break: cigarette, water, banana. By the end we’re eating six or seven each. They smell wonderful, but the pleasant-smelling phase won’t last long.

We collect our pay the next morning. John Lennon tells us, “Good. Now there’s a job at the Big Dairy on Via Tiburtina. Same place as the bananas. A van will bring you some wheels of pecorino to package. Easy work. The three of you go. Six thousand lire an hour.”

Easy, but Roman pecorino doesn’t smell like bananas. The wheels are monsters weighing thirty kilos each, with black rinds that have to be cleaned with a little knife and a brush. Delicate work. Then you assemble the cardboard box and package the whole thing. Roman pecorino destined for export.

The job lasts a few days. When we come out of there, we stink like mountain goats; no amount of showering helps. In the evening we drive around in Antonio’s A112, which smells of cheese, and, stinking of sheep, we cruise around Centocelle to stun our friends and acquaintances. Not a girl in sight. Too bad, because the sheep smell might have given us a wild, outdoorsy vibe. Maybe we could have picked someone up.

A few days later, when the job is over, John Lennon raises the stakes.

“Okay, guys, the Big Dairy on Via Tiburtina needs your help. Show up tomorrow morning at eight. Bring a sweater. You might have to work underground.”

Done.

The cave is damp, with hundreds of wheels of pecorino waiting to be cleaned, moved, stored and stacked.

They give us a big trolley and a waterproof apron to wear. Take the wheel from the shelf, bring it to the worktable, clean it, pass it to the person who has to package it. We load three wheels at a time onto the trolley. On the way back, empty-handed, we race each other, sliding across the wet floor. A trail of unspeakable, indelible stink follows us everywhere.

A few days later, a small change of assignment: Roberto moves over to the ricotta, while Antonio and I are put on turning the little wheels of cheese inside their molds.

There’s a large room with long wooden tables. On them is a spread of cheeses sitting in plastic containers whose bottoms have a slightly mesh-like pattern, which gets imprinted onto the cheese.

The job is simple: take the plastic mold in one hand. It’s a beige cylinder, twenty or thirty centimeters tall. Bang the cylinder against the edge of the table, and the little wheel of cheese slips out and gently lands in your other hand.

Turn it over, put it back into the cylinder, put the mold back in place, move on to the next one.

All day long.

We wear uniforms, something like blue coveralls, except white: trousers, T-shirt and jacket, rubber boots. There’s a palm’s depth of dirty water on the floor.

Every now and then a wheel of cheese falls onto the floor, but it doesn’t matter. Pick it up and carry on.

Roberto has it better, though. He scoops curds out of the ricotta vat with something like a slotted spoon. Hot. Extremely hot. He puts them into little baskets and carries on.

Meanwhile, we keep banging out little wheels of cheese as if there were no tomorrow. They weigh about a kilo each. Our fingers are boiled inside our gloves.

When things are going well, they let us label them: sitting-down work, with a little brush, water and diluted glue that looks like white glue, and a paper label bearing the Famous Name of the Cheese produced by the Famous Dairy on Via Tiburtina, a brand that casually appears on Carosello and is all over the private radio stations.

Roberto bonds with the “official” staff. We, on the other hand, remain off to the side, never mixing with the others. Ghostlike. All white, too.

We carry on until the season ends.

We even wear the white trousers when we go out, haute couture, with the little pile of money John Lennon has paid us.

I wonder how much the Big Dairy on Via Tiburtina pays him for this supply of extra labor.

At some point, though, the story ends.

John Lennon stops calling.

Who knows why. Maybe someone found something out?

Meanwhile, a few decades later, the Big Dairy on Via Tiburtina has closed down.

Must have been karma.

Instant karma’s gonna get youGonna knock you right on the headYou better get yourself togetherPretty soon you’re gonna be dead.

All that’s left for us is to sell flowers with D’Artagnan, at the Porta San Sebastiano traffic lights. Sun beating straight down.

“Five red roses, a thousand lire. Wet them well or they’ll all go limp. Make sure there’s always a fresh little drop of water on the plastic wrapping, so they look freshly picked. Sell the more open ones first, otherwise you’ll be stuck with them.”

Terrible pay. Ten thousand lire for half a day’s work. The Big Dairy on Via Tiburtina, doomed to perish under the weight of negative karma, had been better.

We skim a little off the top, make a bit extra if sales go well, then everybody piles into the 850 van, together with the buckets full of roses, and we head home.

When the Roma kid who washes windshields is there too, we play with him. For fifty lire, he’ll stick his head into the bucket of ice-cold water. He cleans the windshields with a filthy sponge. He’s cheerful.

One evening, on the way home, the van hits one of those Roman potholes.

I’m sitting on a little metal folding seat. I slide off, fall, and slam my lower back hard against something. I even get cut—a pretty nasty scrape.

A few years later, I’ll discover that I have a herniated disc right there, at L5-S1.

The rose hernia.