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him lose his hard-on.
15
    Danilo Aprea looked at the old Casio digital watch on his wrist.
    A quarter past eight and there was still no sign of Quattro Formaggi.
    He took out the purse in which he kept his coins. He had three euros and … He brought the small coins closer to his eyes. Twenty … Forty cents.
    Four years had passed since they had changed the currency and he still found it confusing. What had been wrong with the lira?
    He got up and ordered another grappa.
    This’ll be the last one, though …
    At that moment a mother entered the bar with a little girl bundled up in a white parka holding her hand.
    â€œHow old is she?” he restrained himself from asking the woman.
    â€œThree,” she would have answered. He was sure she was three, or four at most.
    Like …
    (Stop it) Teresa’s voice reproved him.
    Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Teresa came round this afternoon?
    Teresa Carucci, a woman as insipid as a bowl of celery soup (as Rino had put it to him once) and whom Danilo had asked to be his bride one evening in 1996, had left him four years ago to set up home with a tyre dealer who she had been working for as a secretary.
    Yet Teresa continued to see Danilo. Unknown to the tyre dealer she brought him trays of lasagne, spezzatino and rabbit cacciatore to put in the freezer. She would always arrive out of breath, sweep the flat and iron his shirts and he would start begging her to stay and give it another try. She would retort that it was impossible to live with an alcoholic. And, in the early days, sometimesshe had felt sorry for him, and had lifted up her skirt and let him screw her.
    Danilo watched the little girl happily eating a huge croissant. Her mouth all smeared with icing sugar.
    He took the glass off the counter and went back to his table.
    He knocked back the grappa. The alcohol warmed his oesophagus and his head became lighter.
    That’s better. Much better.
    Until five years before the most Danilo Aprea had been able to drink was a finger of moscato. ‘Alcohol and I don’t get on,’ he would say to anyone who offered him a drink.
    This remained the case until 9th July 2001, when alcohol and Danilo Aprea decided that the time had come to bury their differences and become friends.
    Until 9th July 2001 Danilo Aprea had been a different person with a different life. He had worked as a night-watchman for a freight firm, had had a wife whom he loved and Laura, a three-year-old daughter.
    On 9th July 2001 Laura Aprea had choked to death, with the cap from a bottle of shampoo stuck in her windpipe.
    A year later Teresa had left him.
16
    Cristiano arrived at the bus stop, but the bus had just gone. And with it his chances of making the first lesson.
    If only he had been a year older … If he’d had a motorbike he could have got to school in ten minutes. And he would have had the fun of riding across the fields and rough tracks. As soon as he finished school next year he was going to get a job – he should be able to earn enough to buy one in six months.
    The next bus wasn’t due for half an hour.
    What do I do now? he asked himself, kicking at a little mound of snow that was melting away on the pavement.
    If he could find someone to give him a lift maybe he could slip into class without being noticed.
    But who’s going to stop here?
    Along that stretch of the highway everyone drove flat out.
    He set off, with his woolly hat pulled down over his head, his headphones in his ears and his hands in the pockets of his jacket. The air was saturated with water; the drops were so small you could hardly tell it was raining.
    With Metallica shrieking in his eardrums he looked around and lit a cigarette.
    He wasn’t really all that keen on smoking, though he enjoyed the sensation when his head started spinning. But if his father caught him with a cigarette in his mouth he’d kill him.
    â€˜One of us committing suicide by nicotine is quite