Suffer the Little Children Read Free

Gustavo had the presence of mind, and enough experience with frightened children, to make a joke of it and ask, ‘And who is trying to climb into his
papà
’s sweater?’ Holding Alfredo against his chest, he pulled at one side of his cardigan and wrapped it around the boy’s back, laughing out loud to show what a wonderful new game this was.
    â€˜Oh, no, you can’t try to hide in there. Not atall. It’s time to go to sleep.’ He lifted the boy and placed him on his back in the cot. He pulled up the woollen blanket, making sure his son’s chest was covered.
    â€˜Sweet dreams, my little prince,’ he said, as he had said every night since Alfredo had begun to sleep in the cot. At the door he lingered, but only for a moment, so that the boy would not develop the habit of trying to delay his father’s exit from the room. He looked back at the tiny lump and found tears in his eyes. Embarrassed at the thought that Bianca would see them, he wiped them away as he turned from the open door.
    When he reached the kitchen, Bianca had her back to him, just pouring the penne through the strainer. He opened the refrigerator and took a bottle of Moët from the bottom shelf. He put it on the counter, then took a pair of crystal flutes, from a set of twelve that Bianca’s sister had given them as a wedding present.
    â€˜Champagne?’ she asked, as curious as she was pleased.
    â€˜My son called me
Papà
,’ he said and peeled the golden foil from the cork. Avoiding her sceptical glance, he said, ‘Our son. But just this once, because he called me
Papà
, I want to call him my son for an hour, all right?’
    Seeing his expression, she abandoned the steaming pasta and moved to his side. She picked up the glasses and tilted them towards him. ‘Fill both of these, please, so we can toastyour son.’ Then she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.
    As in the first days of their marriage, the pasta grew cold in the sink, and they drank the champagne in bed. Long after it was gone, they went into the kitchen, naked and famished. Ignoring the dry pasta, they ate the tomato sauce on thick slices of bread, standing at the sink and feeding chunks to one another, then washed it down with half a bottle of Pinot Grigio. Then they went back to the bedroom.
    He lay suspended in the afterglow of the evening and marvelled that, for some months now, he had feared that Bianca had somehow changed in her . . . in her what? It was natural – he knew this from his practice – for a mother to be distracted by the arrival of a new child and thus to seem less interested in or responsive to the father. But that night, with the two of them behaving like teenagers gone wild at the discovery of sex, had eliminated any uncertainties.
    And he had heard that word: his son had called him
Papà
. His heart filled again and he slid himself closer to Bianca, half hoping she would wake and turn to him. But she slept on, and he thought of the morning, and the early train to Padova he had to catch, so he began to will himself towards sleep, ready now to drift off to that gentle land, perhaps to dream of another son, or a daughter, or both.
    He became vaguely conscious of a noise beyond the door to the bedroom, and he forcedhimself to listen, to hear if it was Alfredo calling or crying. But the ringing noise was gone, and so he followed it, his lips curved in memory of that word.
    As Doctor Gustavo Pedrolli sank into the first and most profound sleep of the night, the sound came again, but he no longer heard it, nor did his wife, sleeping beside him, naked and exhausted and satisfied. Nor did the child in the other room, sunk in happiness and dreaming, perhaps, of the wonderful new game he had learned that night, hidden and safe under the protection of the man he now knew was
Papà
.
    Time passed, and dreams played in the minds of the sleepers. They saw motion and colour; one of them saw