Momo’s friends are confined to child depots

The confinement of Momo’s friends in the Child Depots is the Men in Gray’s indirect answer to a bond they cannot break by confronting the children openly. While the children keep Momo present through their games and shared certainty that she will return, adults and authorities recast their independence as neglect, disorder, and wasted time. The policy that follows separates the children from one another and replaces their play with supervised activities, until even their ability to amuse themselves has withered.

The children keep Momo present

Before her disappearance, Momo’s presence had changed the children’s games without her needing to supply elaborate ideas: simply joining them seemed to release their own inventiveness. They made up new games every day, each better than the last. When a gathering of roughly fifty or sixty children later assembled at the amphitheater, they came from different backgrounds and included both familiar companions and newcomers. Momo was saddened that nearly all her grown-up friends were absent, but the children had gathered to hear what she had to tell them about the Men in Gray.

Her account unsettled them. When the silence that followed was broken, Guido Guide asked how many had the courage to join a campaign against the Men in Gray. The question made the children’s agency explicit: they were not merely an audience for an adult decision, but potential participants in resisting the threat. Yet after Momo vanished, they continued to meet at the amphitheater even when their circumstances made it difficult. Old crates and boxes became castles, palaces, or galleons on voyages around the world; they also went on telling stories. By behaving as if Momo were still among them, they made her an active focus of their games and gatherings even in her physical absence. They never doubted she would return, though they did not need to say so aloud.

Adults turn play into a public problem

The Men in Gray could not detach the children from Momo by bringing them directly under their control, so they enlisted the children’s elders instead. The children’s earlier street demonstration, once a sign of their collective action, became material adults could recast as evidence that something had to be done. Parents and other adults described children left alone as neglected, complained that they loafed about and obstructed traffic, and invoked the cost of road accidents. Others warned that unsupervised children might become morally depraved or turn to crime.

The argument also turned childhood into a matter of economic planning. Adults called children raw material for a future dependent on computers and nuclear energy, and condemned time spent on childish games as wasted preparation for that future. Their stated concerns ranged from parental busyness and public safety to discipline and technical usefulness. The timesavers supported the proposed policy, and their growing numbers helped convince the authorities to act promptly. In this way, a campaign framed as care, safety, and preparation for the future served the Men in Gray’s effort to separate the children from the influence of Momo and one another.

The Child Depots impose separation

Large buildings called Child Depots soon appeared in every neighbourhood. Children whose parents were too busy to look after them had to be deposited there and collected when convenient. Playing in streets, parks, or any other place outside the depots was forbidden; a child caught doing so could be taken to the nearest depot, while the parents faced a heavy fine. An argument about supervision thus became a system of compulsory containment, enforced both against children and through penalties on their families.

None of Momo’s friends escaped the regulation. They were divided according to the districts they came from and sent to different depots. Inside, they were forbidden to invent games of their own. Supervisors selected activities that were required to have a useful educational purpose. The children learned those prescribed games, but in the process lost other capacities: happiness, pleasure in little things, and, finally, the ability to dream. The contrast is not simply between one kind of game and another. The children retain activities labelled educational, while the freedom to invent, imagine, and take delight without an assigned purpose is stripped away.

The cost of containment

As the weeks passed, the children began to resemble miniature timesavers. They were sullen, bored, and resentful, and did as they were told. Even when left alone, they no longer knew what to do with themselves. Their noise remained, but it had become angry and ill-tempered rather than the happy commotion of their former gatherings. The change shows how thoroughly the policy reaches beyond where children may play: it alters what they are able to feel and initiate together.

The Men in Gray need not approach them directly. Their citywide network of restrictions seems too close-meshed for even the brightest and most ingenious children to escape, and the amphitheater falls silent and deserted. Later, when Momo encounters Paolo, Franco, and Maria in the city, she can hardly recognize them. They wear gray uniforms, their faces are stiff and lifeless, and they barely smile at her. When she asks them to return to the amphitheater and play, they look at one another and refuse. Their changed appearance and response make visible the result of the depots’ separation: the children who once kept Momo present through their games have been rendered distant from that shared world.