Train to Budapest Read Free

he is easygoing, always ready to start a new adventure. He might seem fragile, but he isn’t really. Together they climb the highest walls, braving the sharp fragments of pottery along the top to reach the wild pears that set their teeth on edge. Together they open manhole covers and go underground with a torch to explore the city sewers. Together they read books about fabulous voyages. Together they race through the avenues of Florence on two ramshackle bicycles with tyres that constantly get punctured. And no matter whether it’s her tyre or his, they always stop and crouch together by the roadside to mend the puncture. They pull the patches and rubber solution out of their rucksack and get down to work: you hold the tyre while I pull out the inner tube. You open the rubber solution because my hands are full. Two heads close together, one fair and one chestnut brown. They have something in common. Like a brother and sister. No sooner is the tyre fixed than they’re off again, hands sticky with rubber solution, pedalling at breakneck speed down Viale Michelangelo.
    ‘Are we friends?’ he asks from time to time, stopping in the middle of the road with one foot on the ground and the other on the pedal, as if seized by sudden fear.
    ‘Friends in life and death!’ she answers, repeating a formula they often use between themselves and which undoubtedly comes from one of the adventure books they’ve read together. Most of all they love sea stories. Ones in which a small boy (unfortunately smallgirls aren’t expected to get into difficulties of this kind) goes to sea as a cabin boy and everything imaginable happens to him. Like the very young Redburn whom Melville describes as an awkward and naïve adolescent. The first time he is sent aloft up the mainmast to unreef the sails, he is seized by vertigo and grabs the shrouds so as not to fall, while the sailors on the bridge laugh with scorn and amusement. Another book they read with their four eyes tells of a ship wrecked on a desert island. In the disaster everyone is killed except one young adventurer who explores the island and learns how to survive, fighting ferocious animals at night and wandering about by day in search of water and food. He invents a language of his own that enables him to communicate with the clouds and the stones, sews clothes together with strands of grass and learns to swim like a fish.
    ‘I’ve got a plan,’ says Emanuele in a mysterious voice.
    ‘What plan?’
    ‘A secret. You mustn’t tell anyone.’
    ‘You can’t think I’m a spy!’
    ‘I’ve found out how to fly.’
    ‘Like the birds?’
    ‘Like the birds.’
    ‘But how?’
    ‘You need two light wings. And a small structure of wood that must be very strong but weightless. I know how to do it.’
    ‘Did you find it in a book?’
    ‘Just trust me.’
    ‘But what if we fall?’
    ‘We won’t fall if we follow the logic of flight.’
    ‘And how is it done?’
    ‘Shhh, they’ll hear us.’
    When he squeezes her hand like that her tummy feels as hot as if a little stove was boiling inside it. She knows he can feel how hot the stove is too but they’ve never discussed it. He’s the most mysterious child I’ve ever known, little Emanuele. He doesn’t like chatter, except when he’s writing, then he lets himself go. He knows lots of words, like someone who reads a lot and memorises the most difficult expressions for things. ‘He writes like a professor,’ Mamma Stefania says of him with admiration. ‘A know-all!’ comments Papà Amintore. Amara watches him walking confidentlybut cautiously, his grazed knees nimble, his supple back straight, expressing at the same time fear and defiance.
    The first love of her life. She knows that now. She has told herself so at night as she watches the reflection of the street-lamp on her window. She has repeated it again and again: I love Emanuele and he loves me. And they will go on loving each other whatever happens because you can’t