I'm Not Scared Read Online Free PDF

Salvatore’s. He was mine. He was my secret discovery.
    I didn’t know if I had discovered a dead person or a living one. Maybe the arm hadn’t moved. I had imagined it. Or maybe they were the contractions of a corpse. Like those of wasps, which keep on walking even if you cut them in two with scissors, or like chickens, which flap their wings even when they’ve lost their heads. But what was he doing in there?
    â€˜What are we going to tell mama?’
    I hadn’t noticed my sister was riding beside me. ‘What?’
    â€˜What are we going to tell mama?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜Will you tell her about the glasses?’
    â€˜Okay, but you mustn’t tell her anything about where we went. If she finds out she’ll say you broke them because we went up there.’
    â€˜All right.’
    â€˜Swear.’
    â€˜I swear.’ She kissed her forefingers.
    Nowadays Acqua Traverse is a district of Lucignano. In the mid-Eighties a local building surveyor put up two long rows of houses made of reinforced concrete. Cubes with round windows, light blue railings and iron rods sticking out of the roofs. Then a Co-op arrived and a bar-cum-tobacconist’s. And an asphalted two-way road that runs straight as an airport runway to Lucignano.
    In 1978 Acqua Traverse was so small it was practicallynon-existent. A country hamlet, they would call it nowadays in a travel magazine.
    No one knew why it was called Acqua Traverse, not even old Tronca. There certainly wasn’t any water there, except what they brought in a tanker once a fortnight.
    There was Salvatore’s villa, which we called the Palazzo. A big house built in the nineteenth century, long and grey with a big stone porch and an inner courtyard with a palm tree. And there were four other houses. Just four. Four drab little houses made of stone and mortar with tiled roofs and small windows. Ours. The one belonging to Skull’s family. The one belonging to Remo’s family, who shared it with old Tronca. Tronca was deaf and his wife had died, and he lived in two rooms overlooking the vegetable garden. And then there was the house of Pietro Mura, Barbara’s father. Angela, his wife, had a shop on the ground floor where you could buy bread, pasta and soap. And you could make phone calls.
    Two houses on one side, two on the other. And a road, rough and full of holes, in the middle. There was no piazza. There were no lanes. But there were two benches under a pergola of strawberry vines and a drinking fountain which had a tap so that water wouldn’t be wasted. All around, the wheatfields.
    The only thing of note in that place forgotten by God and man was a nice blue road sign which displayed in capital letters the words ACQUA TRAVERSE.
    â€˜Papa’s home!’ my sister shouted. She threw down her bike and ran up the steps.
    Parked in front of our house was his truck, a Fiat Lupetto with a green tarpaulin.
    At that time papa was working as a truck driver and would be away for weeks at a time. He collected the goods and carried them to the North.
    He had promised he would take me with him to the North one day. I couldn’t imagine this North very clearly. I knew the North was rich and the South was poor. And we were poor. Mama said that if papa kept working so hard, soon we wouldn’t be poor any longer, we would be well off. So we mustn’t complain if papa wasn’t there. He was doing it for us.
    I went into the house still out of breath.
    Papa was sitting at the table in his vest and pants. He had a bottle of red wine in front of him and a cigarette in its holder between his lips and my sister perched on one thigh.
    Mama, with her back to us, was cooking. There was a smell of onions and tomato sauce. The television, a big boxlike black-and-white Grundig, which papa had brought home a few months earlier, was on. The ventilator fan was humming.
    â€˜Michele, where’ve you been all day? Your