MAGISTRALE 1 - Material for 15th November

Put th text below into  Italian

I come home the next night to  the sound of trouble; even  as I’m  putting the key in the lock I can  hear  Tom shouting and Molly crying.

“What’s going on?” David and  the kids are sitting around the kitchen  table , David at  the head,  Molly to  his left, Tom  to  his right. The table has been  cleared of its usual  detritus -  post,  old newspapers, small  plastic models found in  cereal  packets –apparently in the attempt to  create the atmosphere of a conference,“He’s given  my computer away,” says Tom. Tom doesn’t often  cry  but his eyes are glistening, either with  fury or tears, it’s hard to  tell.

“And now I’ve got to  share mine ,”  says Molly,  whose ability to  cry has never been in any doubt , and who  looks as though  she has been  mourning the deaths of her entire family in  a car crash.

“We didn’t need two,” says David. Two  is …Not obscene, exactly. But certainly greedy. They’re never on the things at  the same time.”

“ So  you gave them  away. Without consulting them. Or me.

“ I felt that  consultation would have been  pointless.”

“ You meant that they wouldn’t have wanted you to  do  it?”

“ They  wouldn’t have understood why I wanted to. “

It was David,  of course,  who  insisted on  the kids having a computer each for Christmas last year. I had wanted them  to  share,  not because I’m  mean, but because I was beginning to  worry about spoiling them, and the sight of these two  enormous boxes beside the tree ( they  wouldn’t fit under it) did nothing to  ease my queasiness . This wasn’t the kind of parent I wanted to  be, I remember thinking, as Tom and Mary attacked the acres of wrapping paper with  a violence that  repelled me;  David saw the look on my face and whispered to  me that  I was a typical  joyless liberal, the sort of person  who  would deny their kids everything and themselves nothing, And here I was six months later, outraged that  my son  and daughter aren’t allowed to  keep  what  is theirs, and yet still, somehow, an  agent of the forces of darkness. 

                                                                                           Nick  Hornby, How To  be Good  ( 2001)