Casaubon joins the Alley Gang

Casaubon joins the Alley Gang after a childhood encounter with the more violent Canal Gang leaves him without his magazine and with no safe route through town. The episode turns a fearful newcomer into a member through a rough, improvised rite: mocked for his carefully styled hair and his Italian speech, he nevertheless submits to the gang’s test and emerges proud of having endured it. The scene establishes belonging not as a welcome freely given, but as something negotiated through local rivalries, performance, and endurance.

Setting and Gang Rivalries

The memory begins with a house isolated among vineyards on a hill and a road descending toward the town’s last or first row of houses, depending on one’s direction. The young evacuee leaves his family’s protection and ventures into town, where the Alley becomes a place he both envies and fears. To reach the square, the newspaper kiosk, or the stationery store, he must either make an impractical detour or cross the Canal’s territory.

The Alley Gang consists of country boys whom Casaubon remembers as dirty and loud; he initially regards himself as too citified to approach them. The Canal Gang takes its name from an old stream that has become a drainage ditch running through the poorest part of town. In his account, the Canal boys are substantially more dangerous: Alley members who enter their area risk being attacked. The gangs’ names mark not merely two groups of children but the territorial divisions that shape the newcomer’s daily passage through town.

The Encounter That Prompts His Decision

Casaubon does not initially understand himself to be an Alley boy. The Canal Gang has already identified him as an enemy simply because he walks through its territory. He tries to cross with a children’s magazine held open before his face, reading as he goes. When the boys see him, he runs; they pursue him and throw stones. One stone pierces a page of the magazine he is still holding, and he escapes but loses it.

The encounter makes the choice immediate. Rather than continuing to pass through the Canal’s territory alone, Casaubon decides the following day to join the Alley Gang. The decision is prompted by exposure and exclusion, but the gang he approaches is not an obvious refuge: its members greet his arrival with laughter, and membership requires him to face their judgment on their own terms.

Preparing to Be Admitted

Before approaching the boys, Casaubon tries to make himself look like the young men whose appearance he admires in films, advertisements, and Sunday walks after Mass. The fashion he recalls features broad-shouldered, double-breasted jackets, greased mustaches, and hair combed straight back. His own thick hair tends to stand up, so he buys boxes of brilliantine in the market square on a Monday, spending what feels to him an enormous amount.

He spends hours applying the thick grease until his hair is compressed beneath a net. After two hours indoors, he removes the net, checks the result in a mirror, and sets out to meet the gang. The elaborate preparation cannot hold: as he approaches, the brilliantine loses its grip and his hair slowly rises again. The boys gather in a circle, nudge one another, and delight in the spectacle. The comic reversal is central to the attempted transformation: Casaubon arrives hoping to present a polished, accepted version of himself, while the gang sees the effort unravel before he can ask for admission.

The Initiation and Its Meaning

Casaubon asks to be admitted but speaks in Italian, marking himself as an outsider to the group’s dialect. The leader, Martinetti, appears enormous to the child and decides on a test of one hundred kicks. Casaubon agrees and stands against a wall while two boys hold his arms. Martinetti carries out the task, and the gang counts along in its dialect. Afterward, they shut Casaubon in a rabbit hutch for half an hour and release him when he complains that his legs have gone numb.

The account presents the episode as a severe children’s initiation rather than a straightforward welcome. Its ritual form is unmistakable: a leader sets the condition, assistants hold the candidate, the group keeps count, and confinement follows the test. Casaubon’s brief speculation that the kicks might awaken Kundalini imports the language of esoteric practice into a rough neighborhood ordeal, turning the gang’s rite into an incongruous precursor to the book’s later attention to ritual and initiation.

Once released, Casaubon feels proud that he has stood up to what he calls the liturgy of a savage tribe. He is now, in the gang’s terms, a man called Horse. The name makes the result both comic and consequential: the boy who began as a solitary, frightened newcomer has gained a place in the group, but that belonging arrives through mockery, endurance, and the gang’s power to name him.