Chapter three

After Dad's sudden death, our lives changed, or to be more precise, my life changed. Mom started smoking and drinking; she slept until the middle of the day. I would get up in the morning, make myself breakfast, bathe, get dressed, and walk to school. When I would come home around noon, sometimes I would find Mom still in bed, "My head hurts, sweetie, get me a pack of cigarettes," she would ask me hoarsely.

This routine lasted for many months until Marco came into our lives. Marco was ten years younger than Mom, they met in the circumstances I do not know about, but it has been impossible to separate them since then.

I cannot say bad things about him, but also not good. He was all concentrated on my mother's curves; he did not take his eyes off her for a moment. His long octopus hands were glued to her limbs on every occasion she was in. For example, when we ate lunch, he held her hand and prevented her from using her knife, "Eat with your fork, some populations eat with one hand because the other is for wiping their ass and you should not use this hand to eat" he would tell my mother as she tried to pull her hand. At times, his obsession infuriated her, and then he was offended like a spoiled child and apologized to her in a childish voice.

Our financial situation deteriorated considerably, and Marco had to contribute his share of the cost of living. Nevertheless, he worked as a tour guide and made good money, and knew places and tourist sites that I would never have reached without Marco. You could say that life would have continued quietly if Marco's long octopus-like hands had not crept towards me as well. I thought naively that Marco had taken the place of my late father, and his hugs are from a father's love to his daughter. Still, my mother interpreted things differently. One day after seeing him carrying me like a sack of flour on his back, holding my small buttocks, she told him he had to leave the house; otherwise, she would complain to the police.

And so, after a year and a bit, we had to say goodbye to Marco and his generous support, an act that my mother must have regretted for a long time afterward.

Marco went, and Matteo arrived. Matteo was the hairy-ass neighbor. He would occasionally enter our house on any pretext, lock himself with Mom in her bedroom, and after a quarter of an hour, he would come out all red and pant and cross the stairwell to his apartment. It happened that they were in the bedroom, and his wife came looking for him. I had to lie that he was not with us.

I grew up fast. At the age of eleven, I could have already written a book about the unbearable facts of life in light of everything that took place in my short life, but compared to what would still happen, it could only have been the prologue.

Apparently, with the food came the appetite, and Matteo came to our house sometimes twice a day; it was only a matter of time until he would be caught, and indeed it happened. One day I came back from school, it was one o'clock in the afternoon, Matteo's wife, Clara, was standing in the stairwell, I greeted her, but she did not answer me, when I opened the door to enter, she pushed me aside and ran straight to the bedroom. I hurried after her, and the spectacle that unfolded before my eyes shocked me as well. Matteo was tied to the bed, and Mom leaned over him with his penis deep in her throat. It was an act I did not know, and many years passed until I understood why he was tied. I thought Mom abused him against his will, and Clara came to save him. But that was not the end of the story; Clara screamed, dropped herself on the floor, called Mom all the existing despicable names, then banged her head against the wall and fainted.

This affair left me with a deep scar; I could not look Mother in the eyes for several days. I was terribly ashamed and also angry, then we reconciled when Mom said she will buy us train tickets to Milan to visit the Duomo and see the shroud display that was said to be wrapped around the dead Jesus when taken down from the cross.

And as for Matteo? If you are curious to know what happened to him, let's just say that he was thrown out of our house and disappeared from our lives, he and Clara rented an apartment somewhere else, and now a lovely old couple lives in front of us.

Then came a relatively quiet period in my life, but not to be confused, it was the calm before the storm. Mom found a respectable job as a bridal makeup artist and a consultant to women who needed fashion advice. It was a tailor-made job for her, and I hoped it would last a while.

My breasts started to grow, and some hair started to show in my pubic area; I was happy that I got to the point where I was on my way to becoming a woman. Apparently, it is impossible to skip stages in physiology, so after breast buds came the great flood. I was lucky to be at home and not at school or outside. I did not have any sanitary pads, so I used a towel which I placed on the toilet lid and sat there. Mom came looking for me, and when she opened the bathroom door, she almost fainted. I was sitting on a blood-soaked towel, and Mom thought it was a suicide attempt. I shouted at her that it was menstruation, but she refused to hear and cried out, "A doctor should be called, oh my, what did you do?" I got up with blood dripping on my legs and shook her, "Do you hear? I'm at the age of menstruation. "Only then did Mother realize what was going on and immediately crossed herself." O Santa Maria nel cielo, thank you. Thank God, everything ends well" It was strange for me to hear my mother praying since she would not go to church regularly. But one positive thing was clear nonetheless; I understood that my mother loved me very much and was anxious for my well-being, and it made me feel good all over because I also loved her very much.

Now that I was a "woman" in every aspect and a good student in all subjects, I decided it was time to contribute to the home economy.

My mother worked and made a living, but she did not even have the option of taking me by train to Milan, as she had promised. So the first job I immediately found was as a dog walker. I had a few regular customers, and I would come to their house, take care of the dogs, and take them out for a walk. One of the dogs, a cute and average-sized Cocker Spaniel named Snoopy, really liked me, but it turned out that Piero, his owner, probably liked me more because he offered me ten times the amount of money he pays me for caring for his dog if I would take care of him too. Of course, I was not naive and immediately understood what he wanted from me; I agreed on the condition that he would not physically touch me, only I would touch him, and to this, he agreed with no choice.

After I got home from school, I ate something Mom had made the night before, I did the homework I had, and so, towards four, I walked along the street to his house at the end of it, near the big public park. Piero opened the main door to the building for me, and I climbed up to floor one. First, I took Snoopy for a half-hour tour of the public park. Then, after doing his needs and smelling some bitches under their tails, I brought him home. Piero was already eager for the encounter as the bulge in his pants testified. He sat down in the armchair, and I approached him, I unfastened his pants, and his dick was revealed in front of me, a handsome erected limb that was about to explode. I started sliding my hand up and down and in circular motions, and Piero responded with a sigh of pleasure. "Put it in your mouth," he demanded in a low voice, almost in a whisper. Instead of arguing with him and claiming that I was not doing this, I started massaging and rubbing his penis at a crazy pace as I played with his testicles with the other hand. The moment I felt my muscles begin to ache, he splashed its whitish contents in a wide arc that missed my face and hair narrowly. "Keep going," he pleaded, and here miraculously another stream, a shorter one, followed; then he grabbed my hand and pushed it away.

I left his apartment with an amount I had never held in my hands. My only concern was to make up a story for Mom from where I have such a sum of money she earns in a week of hard work.