The Crocodile Read Online Free PDF Page B

If you’d been there, you would have laughed till tears came to your eyes.
    How I miss you, my darling. At every moment of the day, the only thing that keeps me going is the thought that every step I take brings me a little closer to when I’ll see you again. At last.
    So everything’s ready. Tonight it begins. I’m so excited, I can hardly wait. Tonight it begins at last.

CHAPTER 10
    Eleonora walks along, hugging the wall, and no one sees her.
She’s clutching a crumpled ball of paper in her hand and she’s crying. Not sobbing, her face isn’t twisted in a grimace, but tears roll freely down her cheeks.
    Passersby look away in embarrassment. Tears scare people.
    The sun strikes her at intervals, wounding her with its light, and her stomach knots in spasms. Eleonora stops in a corner and struggles to suppress the retching.
    Pregnant, she thinks. It says so right here. I’m pregnant. Of course I would feel like vomiting, wouldn’t I?
    But Eleonora knows it’s not because she’s pregnant that she feels her heart racing crazily in her chest. It’s because she doesn’t know how he’ll react.
    She’s in love, she’s head over heels in love. He’s the man she’s waited for all these years, while her girlfriends were describing the qualities of their boyfriends: the Prince Charming who chose to smile at her, of all the girls. A man to show off to everyone else, a man on whose arm she could feel like a woman, fulfilled, natural. The man she wants with her for the rest of her life.
    Eleonora wipes her mouth with a tissue and looks up in time to catch the disapproving glare of a woman who thinks she must be on drugs.
    Disapproval. How will his family react, when presented with the news? She has no doubts about the strength of his love: he’d never lie to her. But she also knows how he dotes on his father, and how strict the old man can be. They’ve talked about him a thousand times, and a thousand times she has dreamed of the moment when she’d finally meet him. But in those dreams, she was never introduced holding this crumpled ball of paper in her hand.
    Pregnant. Six weeks pregnant. She tries to reckon up time, to remember, but every single instant of love with him is marvelous, every single instant is worthy of being branded into her memory.
    Now what’ll happen, Eleonora wonders. How can I tell him? And what will he say when I do? What will we do, the two of us? We’re still in school, there’s a long road ahead of us. I don’t want to force him to change his plans, his ambitions; and I have dreams of my own. I can’t throw Mamma and Papa’s sacrifices to the wind.
    In front of her eyes float the images of her parents. What will she say to them? Another spasm, another surge of retching.
    Eleonora walks along, hugging the wall, and no one sees her.

CHAPTER 11
    Mirko is happy, or at least he thinks he is. He can’t think of anything that could dim the glow of this moment.
    He spent the evening with his longtime friends, who by now consider him something on the order of a minor god. At a certain point, he even pulled out one of the two fifty-euro bills, with feigned distraction, to make them think that it had plenty of company in his wallet, and said, “
Guagliu’
, this round is on me. This is for all the times you guys stood me beers, when I didn’t have a cent to my name.” So cool! And a couple of them have even had their hair cut in a Mohawk, just like his. In short, he feels important.
    And Antonio gave him a hug when he brought back the money from selling the baggies. He pinched Mirko on the cheek and told him, “Bravo,
guagliuncie’
. You did good, believe me.” And he said it right in front of two guys from another neighborhood, guys Mirko knows by sight but understands are in business with Antonio. Those guys looked at him and nodded their heads affirmatively, with serious faces. In other words, the next time they see him, they’ll know him; they might even say hello to him.
    Everything