Traitors to All by Giorgio Scerbanenco Read Free Book Online Page A

tomorrow night?’
    ‘Yes,’ he said.
    ‘What a laugh!’
    ‘Don’t laugh, please.’
    ‘No, I’m not laughing, but you men are such idiots.’
    Anything, provided she started talking again. Yes, idiots, what else could they be?
    ‘We women are sluts, but you’re just idiots.’
    He liked this sweeping verdict: on one side the sluts, on the other the idiots, that’s the world, there you are. But talk,please, start talking again, tell me about your butcher, about your prince Silvano.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, smoking in the darkness, lying down, the way she liked, ‘you have to be idiots, I can be a virgin and still have been with two hundred men, and when you think about the things my fiancé wanted in the car, as an advance, things you couldn’t imagine, what kind of virginity is that?’
    Don’t talk about virginity, talk about your fiancé, he was begging her, sitting on the stool by the window. Talk, talk.
    ‘You make me laugh, all of you.’ Her voice was getting blurred. ‘As soon as I see a pair of trousers, I get the urge, but I also feel like laughing.’
    Duca saw ash fall from her cigarette, and he stared at that point of light, waiting for her to speak again, but there was silence and in the silence he heard heavy breathing. He got up and went to the couch and saw that she was asleep. He angrily stubbed out the cigarette, although it was still alight. He left her alone and went into the kitchen. According to the alarm clock with the pink dial and the second hand in the shape of a hen, it was after ten.

6
    At half-past, after helping Mascaranti to solve almost all the crosswords, he heard a noise in the surgery and went to see.
    She was sitting up on the couch. ‘What time is it?’ she asked.
    ‘Twenty to one.’
    ‘I was in a deep sleep, I feel as if I slept the whole night.’
    It was better that way. He went and closed the shutters, then switched on the light, and her red slip burst into flame.
    ‘Can I go?’
    He approached her. ‘Get off the couch, slowly, and try to walk.’ After all, he wasn’t a specialist in certain kinds of work, he might have made a few mistakes.
    She got down, slowly, walked up and down the cramped surgery, without suspenders her black stockings slowly slid down her slim legs, and she swayed a bit, but as a joke, because she was smiling at him, and even shaking her head to make her dark, smooth hair fall straight on her neck. ‘So it’s all right?’
    ‘Do you feel any pain?’
    ‘It burns but only a little bit.’
    ‘Any discomfort?’
    ‘Not really.’
    Congratulations, Dr Duca Lamberti, you’re a good hymenologist: after all those years of study, all those years when your father ate almost nothing but mortadella – you’refrom Emilia Romagna, you should like mortadella – and all those books you read, and Esculapius 3 , at last you’ve made it, now you have a future in front of you, as a great restorer. He covered his face with his hands, almost as if he was sleepy. ‘Lift a leg, slowly, as high as you can.’
    ‘It’s like a gymnastics lesson,’ she said, doing as he said, very smoothly, showing off: she was like a cat on a roof.
    ‘Does it hurt?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Lift the other leg.’
    Her black stocking slid down to her calf as she shamelessly lifted her leg, shamelessly raising the short slip and looking him in the face.
    ‘Do you feel any pain?
    ‘A bit of discomfort, but not very much.’
    He picked up her handbag and took a cigarette from the packet of Parisiennes.
    ‘What time are you getting married?’ he asked.
    ‘At eleven, so that everyone can be there, the whole of Romano Banco and the whole of Buccinasco, and the whole of Ca’ Tarino, and they’re even coming from Corsico.’ In the meantime she had put on her knickers and then her suspenders. ‘The little church in Romano Banco is lovely, you should come and see it, you know he arranged for traffic police on motorcycles? They’re going to stop all the traffic, from