At the merchant’s “Dogs!” he barely raised his head off his paws without opening his eyes, only wiggling his ears a little sorrowfully. Were they talking to him? He waited for a kick. The kick didn’t come. Then they weren’t talking to him. He settled down to sleep again.

The Roman street sweeper observed: “They’ve done with their meeting.”

“And they want to kick in the windows,” the other one added. “You hear? You hear?”

A cacophony of whistles rose from the next piazza and right after that a shout that reached the heavens.

The chaos there must be awful.

“There’s a police barricade, no one can get through.” Without moving from the shaft, the placid street sweeper sang out after the people who were rushing by, and he spat again.

Attilio Raceni hurried off in a huff. Fine thing if he couldn’t get through! All these obstacles now, as if the worries, cares, and annoyances plaguing him since he got the idea of that banquet weren’t enough. Now all he needed was the rabble in the streets demanding some new right, and the tremendous April weather didn’t help things: the fiery warmth of the spring sun was inebriating!

At Piazza Venezia Attilio Raceni’s face dropped as though an inner string had suddenly let go. Struck by the violent spectacle before him, he stood open-mouthed.

The piazza swarmed with people. The soldiers’ barrier was at the head of Via del Plebiscito and the Corso. Many demonstrators had climbed onto a waiting trolley and were yelling at the top of their lungs.

“Death to the traitors.”

“Death!”

“Down with the minister.”

“Down!”

In a fit of spite toward these dregs of humanity, and not about to take it quietly, Attilio Raceni got the desperate idea of elbowing his way quickly right across the piazza. If he managed that, he would plead with the officer guarding the Corso to please let him pass. He wouldn’t refuse him. But suddenly from the middle of the piazza: “Beep, beep, beep.“

The trumpet. The first blare. A crushing confusion: many, roughed up in the rioting, wanted to run away, but they were so crammed and squeezed together they could only struggle angrily, while the most overwrought ruffians tried to force their way through the crowd, or rather, push ahead of the others among the ever more tempestuous whistles and shouts.

“To Palazzo Braschiiii!”

“Go! Go ahead!”

“Break through the barriers!”

And again the trumpet blared.

Suddenly, without knowing how it happened, Attilio Raceni, choking, crushed, gasping like a fish, found himself bounced back to Trajan’s Forum in the middle of the fleeing and delirious crowd. Trajan’s Column seemed to be teetering. Where was it safe? Which direction to take? It seemed to him that the greater part of the crowd was moving up a street northeast of the Forum, Magnanapoli, so he bolted like a deer up Via Tre Cannelle. But even there he stumbled onto soldiers blocking off Via Nazionale.

“No passing here!”

“Listen, please, I must. . . .”

A furious push from behind broke off Attilio Raceni’s explanation, causing his nose to squirt on the face of the officer, who repulsed him fiercely with blows to his stomach. But another very violent shove hurled him against the soldiers who caved in at the onslaught. A tremendous discharge of rifles roared from the piazza. And Attilio Raceni, in the terror-crazed crowd, was lost in the middle of the cavalry that appeared suddenly from heaven knows where, perhaps from Piazza Pilota. Away, away with the others, away at full speed, he, Attilio Raceni, followed by the cavalry, Attilio Raceni, director of the women’s (not feminist) magazine The Muses.

Out of breath, he stopped at the entrance to Via Quattro Fontane.

“Cowards! Riffraff! Scoundrels!” he shouted through his teeth, turning into that street, almost crying with anger, pale, shaken, trembling all over. He touched his ribs, his hips, and tried to straighten his clothes, to remove every trace of the violence suffered in the humiliating rout.

“Cowards! Scoundrels!” and he turned to look behind him, afraid someone might have seen him in that condition, and he rubbed his quivering neck with his fist. And there, to be sure, was a little old man standing at a window taking it all in with his mouth open, toothless, scratching his short yellowish beard with pleasure. Attilio Raceni wrinkled his nose and was just about to hurl some insults at that blockhead, but he looked down, snorted, and turned again to look toward Via Nazionale. To regain his lost sense of dignity, he would have liked to throw himself into the fray again, to grab those rascals one by one and grind them under his feet, to knock that crowd around that had unexpectedly assaulted him so savagely and had made him suffer the disgrace of turning tail, the shame of his fear and flight, the derision of that old imbecile.