Free Steal You Away by Niccolò Ammaniti Page A

couldn’t even watch cartoons, because that bully took the remote control and watched those soap operas that Pietro detested.
    ‘Eat up and shut up,’ Mimmo would say.
    ‘At Gloria’s house everyone eats together,’ Pietro had told his parents once, when he was feeling more talkative than usual. ‘Sitting at the table. Like in the TV series about the Bradford family. They wait till Gloria’s father comes back from work before starting. You always have to wash your hands. Everyone has their own place and Gloria’s mama always asks me how things are going at school and says I’m too shy and gets cross with Gloria for talking so much and not letting me get a word in. Once Gloria told them how that moron Bacci stuck pieces of snot in Tregiani’s exercise book and her father told her off because you mustn’t talk about filth at the table.’
    ‘It’s all right for them, they have nothing to do all day,’ his father had said, as he guzzled away. ‘We’d like to have a maid too. And remember, your mother used to do the cleaning in that house. You’re closer to the maid than to them.’
    ‘Why don’t you go and live there, if you like it so much?’ Mimmo had added.
    And Pietro had realised that it was far better to avoid the subject of Gloria’s family in his own home.
       
    But today had been special because after lunch they had gone to Orbano with Gloria’s father.
    In the Range Rover!
    With the stereo and the lovely smell of leather seats. Gloria sang like Pavarotti, putting on a deep voice.
    Pietro sat in the back. Hands clasped together. Head against the window with the Aurelia flashing past. He looked out. The petrol pumps. The small ponds of the bass farm. The lagoon.
    He wished he could go on like that, never stopping, all the way to Genoa. Where, he had heard, there was the largest aquarium in Europe (they even had dolphins). But Mr Celani had flicked theindicator and turned off towards Orbano. In Piazza Risorgimento he had double-parked the off-roader, nonchalantly, as if he owned the whole piazza, right in front of the bank.
    ‘Let me know if I’m in anyone’s way, Maria,’ he’d said to the traffic warden, and she had nodded.
    His father said Mr Celani was an absolute shit. ‘Always so polite. Full of chit-chat. A true gentleman. Do sit down … how are you? Would you like a coffee? What a nice boy your son Pietro is. He’s become such good friends with Gloria. Sure … Sure … The bastard! He’s bled me dry with that mortgage. I won’t have finished paying him even when I’m dead. Those people would suck the shit out of your arse given half a chance …’
    Pietro really couldn’t imagine Mr Celani sucking the shit out of his father’s arse. He liked Gloria’s father.
    He’s kind. He gives me money to buy pizza. And he’s promised to take me to Rome one day …
    Pietro and Gloria had gone to the hospital to see Dr Colasanti.
    The hospital was a three-storey redbrick building right on the lagoon. With a small garden, and two large palms flanking the entrance.
    He had been there once before, in the accident department. When Mimmo had taken a fall doing motocross behind the Marchi Spring and had started cursing and swearing in the waiting room because he had bent the fork of his bike.
    Dr Colasanti was a tall gentleman with a grey beard and thick black eyebrows.
    He was sitting at the desk in his ward. ‘So you want to know all about the notorious Anopheles?’ he had said, lighting his pipe.
    He had talked for a long time and Gloria had recorded him. Pietro had learned that it wasn’t mosquitoes that gave you malaria but micro-organisms that lived in their saliva, which they injected into you when they sucked your blood. Microbe-like things that got into your red corpuscles and multiplied there. It was strange to think that mosquitoes had malaria too.
    With all this information they couldn’t fail to make a good impression in class.
    * * *
    Dark and cold.
    The wind swept the