Read Online The Crocodile by Maurizio de Giovanni - Free Book Online

Greek that he’s supposed to be explaining to us. And when it’s all said and done, have you seen my grades? Eight out of ten, as smooth as silk, and you know I never even bought the textbook.”
    Giada shakes her head, laughing. “You’re going to get arrested sooner or later, I guarantee it. Leave aside the fact that you’ll have him on your conscience. I mean, he’s ancient, he must be at least fifty, and you’re going to give him a heart attack. Plus he’s a priest. You’ll go straight to hell is what’ll happen.”
    Allegra dismisses her objections with a delicate gesture of her hand. “Priest or no priest, he’s a leering, drooling old man and he’ll never have the courage to take action. The other day he even said to me: ‘Signorina, when you have time we should talk. You have need of spiritual comfort.’ Oh right, as if! I already know the kind of spiritual comfort he has in mind for me; you wouldn’t catch me dead alone with him. Anyway, whatever, you want to come to my house? I’ll give you a ride.”
    “No way. The other day we came this close to dying in a car crash. Whenever I’m in the car, you talk to me instead of watching the road. No thanks. I’ll take the bus.”
    “All right, do what you want. If you insist on being a pathetic loser, be my guest. Go to hell, talk to you later.”
    “Go to hell, see you later.”
    Giada doesn’t mind taking the bus; it’s taller than the wall that runs alongside the road and she can take in the whole panorama on both sides of the hill. On one side, Nisida, the beach at Bagnoli that’s gradually emerging from the ruins of the old factory that’s being knocked down; and on the other side, the bright blue bay, crisscrossed by the wakes of boats. When all’s said and done, she decides, this is a beautiful city. When viewed from a distance.
    She has a fuzzy memory of a day when her father took her running down by the sea. She was small, and he’d pretend to leave her behind, then he’d stop and stand there, laughing. She treasures that memory, tucked away in a corner of her mind. She pulls it out every now and then, secretly, when she’s alone.
    She boards the bus and sits in the front, as usual. She thinks about her mother. Yesterday they had another fight and in the end, like always, her mother broke down in tears. You can’t have an argument with her mother; before you know it, tears well up in her eyes, whatever you say, like turning on a tap. And she’ll say: you’re the only thing that matters in my life. The only thing.
    Giada doesn’t like that sense of responsibility. It keeps her from feeling free to have fun, like any ordinary kid her age. The thought of her mother, who practically lives only for her, paralyzes her.
    With her head resting on the filthy glass, she thinks back to the argument. She wants to stop going to violin lessons, she doesn’t feel any particular aptitude, and that old bitch of a music teacher scheduled her lesson from eight to nine at night, so when she comes home the park is deserted and it kind of scares her. Her mother retorted that in that case she should be scared on Saturday nights too, when she comes home at midnight. And Giada shot back that everyone else in the world, comes home at four in the morning on Saturdays, while she is the only one who has to be home by midnight, and anyway, at that time of night on a Saturday there’s lots more people around than on a Wednesday night at nine o’clock. And then her mother said that if that bastard of a father of yours, instead of going to America with his girlfriend, had stayed here to be a father, he could have helped you with school. And then she broke down crying. As usual.
    Recalling this, Giada sighs gently. She decides that she has a lot of life left to live, that she wants nothing more than to live it, and she doesn’t understand why they won’t just let her.
    Almost her stop. She looks up. The bus is empty. No, wait, there’s someone all the way in