Vipers by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar Read Free Book Online

Go on, go on: I give up here. That means that the dog and I will just have to eat alone tonight, in a trattoria some friends of mine own down by the sea. He’s getting used to fish, turning into a real salty dog. Good evening to you, my friend.”
    Â 
    What do you want from springtime?
    What do you ask of this season, which brings you gifts of new flowers and new ideas, borrowed from the scent of the sea?
    Maybe to get away from the cold and the damp of winter. Maybe only that. To take off the grey overcoats, the galoshes, to furl the umbrellas having waxed their canvases one last time. To cover your trousers with sheets of newspaper to keep them from creasing.
    Or perhaps to eat fresh fruit and rediscover flavors longed for like relatives away on a trip, new and forgotten but still familiar.
    What gift do you ask of springtime?
    Not to have to lay eyes again for months on the heavy gloves, slightly worn at the fingers, and the woolen stockings with an impertinent hole that defies any attempts at darning. And maybe to dig out a cheerful silk scarf or a straw boater that’s survived the moths.
    Perhaps spring can give you the gift of a deep breath of fresh air, scented by new budded leaves in the forest of Capodimonte, if the wind blows in the right direction; or the image of a coachman dozing in the seat of his carriage, a hazy smile on his toothless lips, lost in a dream of youth, indifferent to the flies attracted by the smell of his nag.
    And even the
scugnizzi
dangling like bunches of raggedy grapes from the ends of trolley cars rattling up Via Medina will seem more cheerful in springtime, as they shout obscene compliments at the girls emerging from the boarding school in Piazza Dante, walking silently, their books bound together with a strap. And their fellow students, the boys who are head over heels in love with them, will shake their fists in the air and invite them to fight bloody duels, but by then the laughing
scugnizzi
will already be at the far end of Via Toledo, on their daily ride down to the sea.
    What do you ask of springtime, while you melt into new hopes you never thought you’d have, as you start to think that perhaps a life of happiness may still await you?
    Ask springtime, and perhaps she, in her giddy madness, will grant you your wish.
    Ask her for death.

VIII
    T aking care to avoid the corner from which the suicide was calling to his lost love, as he returned home Ricciardi paid his own silent tribute to Dr. Modo’s nose, which was certainly right: this was about a woman. But the matter was a far more complicated one.
    Last Christmas Eve had certainly reshuffled the cards on the table as far as his relationship with Enrica Colombo, the girl who lived in the building across the street, was concerned. After all that time spent looking at her through the window—first of all because he was drawn by the allure of a normality he felt excluded from, then attracted by the faintly hidden delicacy of her features and by the memory of a voice that he’d once heard by chance in an interrogation—things had suddenly accelerated.
    An hour before the city’s bells pealed out in celebration of the birth of Our Lord, as he was hurrying back to his usual solitude, depressed and weary, he’d found her standing in front of the door of his apartment building as if in some dream, just as a fine snow began to fall; she’d walked right up to him and, as in a dream, she’d softly kissed him.
    That kiss, nothing more than a faint wisp of breath on his lips, had given flesh and blood to his thoughts, unleashing an unceasing tempest in his soul. Ricciardi was a man just over thirty, sentenced to solitude because he was aware of the curse that he bore; but that didn’t mean that his flesh and his hands didn’t yearn to touch and move to the rhythm of his beating heart.
    Ever since that strange Christmas Eve, rationality had begun to slowly succumb to emotion. Day after day,