Читать книгу Sun Alley - Cecilia Ştefănescu - Страница 4

If that darkness had suddenly burst like a bubble, it would have spilled its odourless juice and spread all over the walls of the concrete cube, melting the white shadows that constantly circled the bed and furrowed the room. Their terror and dreadfulness would have evaporated in a second, leaving them cast into oblivion forever. But they kept undulating in the air, squirming across the walls and slicing the darkness; swelling and trickling down the fresh duck-egg-blue paint and between the snowy peaks of pargeting. Then they fell still, resuming their places and watching over the boy who slept peacefully, legs wide apart, with one knee bent and one arm dangling.

Above him, a couple of hairy guys clad in studded leather bent slightly forward with their guitars resting on their hips, were gazing into the distance, their eyes shiny embers scanning the rocky horizon. Ten cars stood aligned nearby, ready to shatter the thick air and plunge into a devilish race. A layer of dust had covered their smoky windscreens like a fishnet, and the huge wall of open engines behind them rose menacingly in anticipation of the start of the race. The drivers sat perfectly still, not a fibre on their waxen faces moving: all gazed straight ahead. Only the iris of one of the drivers had been erased, leaving a white, cold globe that seemed to presage death.

A fine and scintillating fog had descended, and from behind it the big, round sun prepared to emerge, like a chocolate coin covered in tinfoil. Right next to the cars, though keeping a certain distance, a wooden knight bent over the body of an unconscious girl. She was frozen still, with her skirt plumped up and her boots hanging in midair, while the knight gripped the sabre at his waist with one hand and with the other helplessly clutched her arm. The girl lay on the green grass, and her ruby lips, her rosy cheeks and her golden hair matched his embroidered uniform, teeming with blazonry and insignia.

Yet in the half-bent body of the helpless and desperate young man, in the way he concealed his face beneath the khaki felt hat and held her lifeless hand, sinking his fingers into the pinkish flesh, a well-kept secret lay hidden. Any minute, tears could start falling from his well-shielded eyes, and you might see him collapse over the girl’s stone-still body while, at the same time, you wouldn’t have been surprised to see her opening her blue eyes, stirred by the pain of the one who, rather more dead than alive, pressed her now with all his might, with all the years he had gathered in his bones, his flesh, his muscles and his skin.

But the only motion in the room came from the rolled-up bedclothes. It was the chubby toes with close-cut nails that first started to twitch, followed by an arm that fell limp over the margin of the bed. Lastly, the hypnotic head with dishevelled hair emerged, partly from a dream and partly from reality: balancing on a narrow edge, leaning now on this side, now on the other.

Sal half-opened his eyes, staring through his eyelashes at the striped wall in front of him. Then he closed his eyes again and the stripes resumed their rocking against the rattling of a car that had just passed on the street. He rose for a second, staring at the ceiling, and then turned on his side. The darkness in the room was furrowed by the golden ribbons of light flickering through the lowered blinds. Sal sat up, staring sleepily ahead.

It was late afternoon and, by the faint light straining to pass through the wooden slats, he was sure it was long past the time he was supposed to call Emi. He thought of crashing back down and searching for the warm hole the crown of his head had left in the pillow’s down, but was deterred by his neck, wet with perspiration, and the sweaty palms that he had been waving in the air for a few moments, cooling him down. He was waiting for the moment in which he would realise that it was terribly late and that Emi, poisoned by the endless minutes passed in relentless countdown, would no longer answer.

He jumped up like a robot and fumbled around the room, stumbling over a chair and moaning in pain. Finally he managed to spot his trousers, pulled them on quickly and, after a few seconds of lying in wait to make sure there was no one spying on him on the other side of the door, scuttled away. He left behind a big, golden dust cloud, a glittering powder that glazed his footprints, while the pink soles of his feet sparkled, nested in their footwear, releasing pheromones and bright messages.

When finally outside, at an adequate distance a few houses away, he sniffed the air happily. Then, cautious not to bump into one of the boys, he started for Emi’s place, balancing on the edge of the pavement.

Emi’s mother had called him ‘the special boy’, accompanying the words with a deprecating grimace and shaking her head in a way that meant that she had seen boys of that kind before. She used ‘special’ like some people do when trying to be condescendingly polite, referring to some kind of handicap or simply to a death-row convict whose case, in their opinions, is totally hopeless, but to whom they magnanimously lie one last time. But he never answered her spiteful words – on the one hand because she was his friend’s mother, and he understood very well that if you had a girl like Emi, you lived with the permanent terror that the world, seized with admiration or possessed by envy, would sooner or later make her disappear; on the other hand because Emi herself was more important than his hurt pride, and last but not least because he had been brought up never to engage in arguments with older people, regardless of what they said. He would flatly say ‘Good day’ and reply ‘Thank you’ when he was offered something and even before refusing; he never left the house before saying goodbye to everybody and he usually never phoned between three and half past five in the afternoon, because that was when people took naps.

Emi was the only one with whom he ignored the rule: for three years, excepting the times they were on vacation with their parents, every day at four o’clock Sal would lift the receiver and insert his finger in the rotary dial of the telephone. At the other end of the line, after no more than two rings, he would hear her thin voice: always surprised, as if she had absolutely no clue who could possibly call at that hour, feigning her indifference so poorly and so touchingly when she seemed to recognise him at last. He imagined her rounding her mouth in a prolonged and demure ‘Hello’, followed by an interval and then by a short ‘Ah!’ that set everything back in place. So that it would always be clear that he had been the one calling and it was also he that wished to see her, he invited her out – he lured her out of the house, out of her safe shell, her hospitable cocoon.

She was merciless, especially on herself; she had enforced a draconian schedule that she followed unfalteringly and mysteriously. She would wake up at six every morning, and she never went to bed before midnight. She would constantly complain that the eighteen hours were barely enough for her to do all that she had in mind; she had lists of books to read, diaries to keep, places to go, people to see. Her vacations were similar to her school hours except that, when she became the manager of her own time, she became maniacally rigorous and punished anyone who would upset, even by a minute, the meticulous agenda of the day. He liked her like that, paradoxical and conceited – he took her conscientiousness as a whim – but he had no doubt that behind her struggle against time another secret lay hidden, well guarded and terribly seductive.

He had liked her right from the start, when he had found her on Harry’s rug swimming among piles of Pif, Pionniers de l’Espérance and Rahan magazines. A thick cloud of dust had risen around her, making all the other boys seek refuge in the hall and leaving her to rule over the magazines, the pages of which were covered in a layer of slime mould mixed with dust and the grease left by the tips of fingers that had once turned them over.

Emi had been waving a pair of scissors above her head and looked like an Amazon determined to decimate her subjects, hacking their faces and limbs to pieces and cutting off the roots that kept them alive in their intergalactic environment. Thanga the R roller, the fair Maud, Tsin-Lu with her slanting eyes and the handsome Rodion lay at her feet. She had abandoned Mr Wright and Tom, for their lives had been shortened from the beginning anyway. The girls’ images, she had cut out carelessly, while she had preserved every millimetre of suit and every hair on the images of boys. Disaster lay all around her, but nobody knew; she had been left alone because she had promised to dust the magazines, to wipe them clean and put them in chronological order – and they, the boys, were now peacefully relaxing around a full can of elderflower fizz in the kitchen, all chatting at the same time, boastful and impatient.

He stopped in the doorway, pop-eyed. The warrior girl grinned at him, exposing the gap between teeth and gums, and wiped her lower lip with the pointed tip of her tongue. She continued to manipulate the scissors, plunging them into the paper without seeming to mind the newcomer, while he, instead of leaving, remained still, watching her and wishing he could find inside himself the courage to stop her, to snatch the torture tools from her hands and to expose her, shame her, humiliate her.

He came closer and stopped right next to her, stepping on the precious scraps of paper that lay on the floor. He heard neither protests nor sighs. Like a little robot, she had returned to her snipping, and he stood still for a long time, waiting for her to reach for the pages beneath his feet, looking forward to her asking him to set her loot free.

When she touched the tips of his toes, she looked up, languorously and all feline; he saw her imaginary tail twirling and coiling up his ankles like poison ivy, her eyes beseeching without a word. But he didn’t yield. He knew her – he had seen her wandering around the neighbourhood – and he had also heard various boys making passes at her; he had heard of their escapades and the cheerful hormones that made their eyes bulge. They had gone soft and tearful, and they had exiled him from the centre of the group to the margin; they had shown him what real loneliness meant, how different it was from the imaginary kind he hypocritically liked to cultivate.

He had found himself watching her moves and waiting, in horror, to find her one day at the centre of the gang, a merciless ruler. He expected her to execute him in a trice, ignoring him and thus teaching the others a lesson: they needn’t stand gaping at his stories, listening to him piously and even believing him, for they could do perfectly well without him – they could even feel freer and happier, for they would discover by themselves what he once gave them for nothing, enslaving them by his omniscience.

And now, as he stealthily entered the room, sniffing her scent from the doorway (for her skin had the stench of hell and of terrible banishment), he was facing the end and had decided to confront it with woe and helplessness. This was an unexpected decision that had thrust its claw in his head and now held him as a light bulb, strenuously screwing him into a smaller and smaller socket as it increased its urgency: to conquer her, as he had done with the rest of the gang, to subdue her and then to annihilate her with their boyish weapons.

‘Do you need any help?’

She put on a wry smile; pushing out her lower lip slightly and making it tremble. He was enjoying the moment and would have died to be able to capture it, to stick her dumbfounded face on a poster and to put it at the head of his bed next to the hairy rock stars – to remember, a long time from now, that instant of ephemeral glory, and to show it to anyone who might doubt him and his leadership qualities.

He knelt and handed her the magazines; she took them, half cautious. She hesitated before opening them but, because his humble attitude could have tricked the most skilled double agent, she opened them and went on hacking. With her nose in the cloud of dust, she uttered a stifled ‘Thanks!’

Sal rose to his feet and sat down on the couch, right in front of her. The slender body and the sharp shoulders supported a round head on which a round mouth, two round eyes and a small nose with a pinkish tip were drawn. The black hair, cropped short, made her look like a tomboy. Only the thick, long and beautifully curved eyelashes gave her away for what she was: a girl infiltrating the sterile and safe environment of the trouser-wearers. His daydream was interrupted by a grumble that sounded more like a noise in the beginning.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Are you angry at me?’ she asked in a loud, authoritative voice that suggested the answer.

Sam was sure now that she had done it on purpose. ‘No,’ he answered idly.

‘I have the impression that you are enraged… because of me.’

‘Nonsense. I don’t even know you!’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘That’s strange. I know you. I know you well. I have seen you several times on my street.’

‘On your street?’ he exclaimed, emphasising the words. ‘A friend of mine happens to live on your street. Maybe that’s why you saw me, if you did see me.’

An ardent smile had bloomed on Emi’s face. She had no need to say anything else; he could say it himself, he could blurt it out before she opened her mouth to mumble who knows what nasty thing.

‘So,’ she drawled, slowly and clearly, ‘you know where I live, which proves that you also know me, just as I supposed and said before.’

The only noise remaining was the drill of the scissors advancing, this time through his flesh. He wanted to leave, but the very thought of the effort it would take to rise from the couch and to walk all the way to the door, across the carpet of paper scraps, followed by her eyes, exhausted him. There was no way for him to win her over now, because the girl had bared her teeth and, in an ambiguous yet significant way, had declared war, making him understand that she was not willing to leave the battlefield very soon – at any rate, not before a few drops of blood had fallen on the carpet.

He was hurt by the unspectacular defeat. Of course, it was a matter of time to allow for the intruder’s thin-skinned image to wear out, but was he really powerful enough to last that long under the soft, fluffy slippers that burned the crown of his head?

In the midst of this thought, he felt the couch slip from underneath him and, before managing to come back to his senses, he realised that the girl, having turned around like a whirligig, had already seized his calves with her arms and was now pulling him, with an unbelievable strength, off the couch and down beside her. He fell on his hands with all his weight.

He let himself down on his behind, shaking his head a few times uncomprehendingly. It was only after seeing the tiny beads of blood flowering through the pores on the soft skin of his hand, as if through blotting paper, that he started to feel the smarting pain. And over the pain, burning like acid on flesh, lay the shame.

Emi was frozen in a funny position, in full assault, but seeing that Sal was struggling not to whimper or release the whines that would have eased his pain and calmed his scare, she started to laugh doltishly. Then she settled down and looked him up and down with eyes in which he could see the mad sparkle of victory.

‘It hurts; say that it hurts! A chicken would be braver than you!’ she concluded, turning her back on him and muttering away in her sleeve. She grabbed the scissors and bent over the magazines, as if, in the same instant, she had already forgotten he was there.

He was angry, but at the same time he realised that much of their encounter – and of his defeat in their confrontation – was his fault, the outcome of carelessness and weakness and of the confidence with which he had entered the room, underestimating his opponent. His tailbone and his palms hurt and, while standing up, he felt the ground slipping under his feet. He staggered a bit, so slightly that it was as though the room seemed to have staggered and then fallen upside down, and then the ceiling fell over him like a blanket full of glass wool: heavy like glass and light as wool, or like a cloud with the appearance of candy floss, only it was neither glassy nor sweet or sticky but dense and fluffy.

The girl hurried to lift his head off the floor. She had made a net around him, had spread her legs sideways and was all over him, suffocating rather than saving him. He pretended to be sick for a few minutes – he surrendered, benumbed in her arms, and secretly, through his eyelashes, watched her fidget and make wry faces, full of regret and grief. He was gaining ground just watching her change, but her image – the struggle between crying for help and her suspicion that his illness might be feigned -gave him confidence and made him feel sorry that he hadn’t really fallen sick so that he could squeeze out all her pity and compassion, all her guilt and promises for the future. Because that’s what usually happened on occasions like these, and a man of honour knows what it means to do someone wrong and to pay for one’s mistakes.

‘Get up, please do get up, please be okay, will you? Can you hear me? Will you tell me if you’re okay? You’re okay, aren’t you? Please forgive me, come on! Speak to me! Are you sick? Please, speak to me! Don’t be sick! Wake up! Open your eyes!’

And to the tune of her words, Sal released within, through his whole inside-out body, a moan of pleasure. She had said it, and all that was missing now was a recording tape to capture, clearly, her whimpering voice. If only someone could have fetched him a tape recorder at that moment, so that he could play it again and again to the boys, let it unwind, flowing through huge loudspeakers. He would let it haunt them as the ghost of their feeble consciences, throughout the neighbourhood, as if his eyes were watching over the whole neighbourhood and they were that whimpering voice, pining and begging for forgiveness. He got himself together and jumped up, before her spiteful eyes.

‘You faked it!’

‘Yeah, I wanted to see your reaction. You’re putting on too many airs. You know it’s not right, don’t you?’

‘I have no idea what you mean,’ she replied, offended, straightening her back.

‘I mean cutting up Johnny’s magazines – the ones he bought under the counter, the ones he paid for, went to great lengths for. I mean sneaking into Harry’s room, snapping at me. Do you think you can take my place?’

With her small, scattered teeth sparkling in the light, Emi threw her head back and started to giggle, waving the scissors and sawing the air.

‘Ha-ha! Is that what you think? I couldn’t care less.’

She turned her back on him, sniffing a few times in contempt. He let her scissor on and left the room, closing the door slowly as if he feared he might wake her.

In the kitchen, the boys chatted heartily. Max’s voice covered all the others, trying to command the noise. Max was famous for the lies he intricately constructed, like a professional storyteller; but because his stories were flamboyant, with countless ambitiously and thoroughly rendered details, he forgot them in a few days and started to mix them up, to alter them to the extent that a girl he had met at a certain moment on the street, and with whom he allegedly engaged in conversation, soon became a grown-up woman around thirty whom he had noticed in his mother’s consulting room when waiting for an opportunity to snitch a couple of medical leave of absence forms to use at school. They all made things up: they all had an imaginary girlfriend, kept in a drawer, well hidden, who popped out swaying her hips like an odalisque at convenient times.

The only one Sal was really tempted to believe was Harry. He was, in their small gang, the conqueror. He also seemed to have a secret life, helped by the fact that Mrs Demetrescu, his cheerful and masculine mother, who had been single since forever, was away most of the time. She would climb inside her white Dacia, which was always splattered with mud; she would manipulate it, jerk it, turn it around, spinning the wheel like a truck driver, and she would shout that she was leaving him to rule over the house and to remember always that he was the only man she could count on, as she slammed the door and exited like a hurricane.

Of course, Harry wasn’t exactly the only one, but he definitely was the one in sight. For Mrs Demetrescu, despite her lack of femininity and coquetry, constantly had suitors buzzing round her, but she had chosen to protect Harry and she preferred to carry on her romances, be they few or many, out of his sight. Ever since Mr Demetrescu had gone overseas (to a place seemingly at the other end of the world: somewhere, according to Mrs Demetrescu, in South America), forsaking them to the extent that for several years they hadn’t even received Season’s Greetings in embossed golden print with a signature scribbled underneath, Harry had become the gravitational centre of their three-bedroom apartment and the embodied idea of force and manhood behind the golden plate on which a name was carved, in luxurious type: Fam. Engineer Paul Demetrescu, Ph.D.

Nobody seemed to miss Mr Demetrescu, except for the neighbours who pitied the woman left behind, alone, to manage her good-for-nothing boy. But all this seemed exaggerated because Mrs Demetrescu didn’t seem to worry about her son’s blunders, nor did Harry, ‘good-for-nothing’ as they called him, allow any glimpse inside his secret life. There were only assumptions and hunches, encouraged by his perpetual wry smile, by the skinny jeans he wore emphatically and by the chewing-gum he champed noisily and ostentatiously, bursting from time to time huge green, pink or yellow bubbles. But Sal liked him like that, boastful and unreliable, perhaps because, due to his boastfulness and undependability, Harry was the only one Sal could trust. He was absentminded and, though inquisitive, Sal was only really interested in his stories about girls: beautiful or ugly girls, toothless or big-eyed, tall or stubby, swarthy or rosy, naïve or clever, long-lashed or thick-lipped, flat-chested or clad in puffed shirts – they only had to be girls to emanate that smell that threw them all into cruellest torment and burned their nostrils, sharpening them.

And in Harry’s puffed-skirt pursuits, he had also hunted Emi, positive that shortly after the boys gathered in his kitchen finished recounting their fantasies and clumsily emptying their sacks full of erotic dreams, he would return to the room and the girl, lost among the pages of the magazines, would allow him to fondle her breasts, moistening her deer eyes when he made her lean her head back and surrender with a moan. Maybe not even he, skilled as he may have been, knew exactly what the surrendering of a girl was like, but from the bottom of his muddy heart, he was hoping to find out.

‘Hold on!’ yelled Max in a hoarse voice. ‘Hold on, you haven’t heard the best part yet! After my mother left the consulting room, the bird started to undress.’

‘No kidding!’

‘Yes, man, why are you so surprised? She took her blouse off, slowly, one button at a time, while she was swinging to the beat of the song…’

‘What song, man? Didn’t you say you were in the consulting room?’

‘Yes, I was, you dick, but my mom keeps a radio on so she can hear the news.’

‘And tell me, who was singing? Marina Voica?’

‘No, Harry, it was that one with The House on the Hill…’

‘Look who’s talking,’ Max snapped. ‘Tommy, maybe you want some spanking!’

‘Come on, settle down!’

Sal had spoken from the doorway, and they all turned around to face him. He had felt the need to intervene and break in abruptly on the conversation in order to make the boys forget about his absence and, especially, to take up Toma’s cause. Actually, Toma had nothing to be afraid of because they all liked him, even though they called him ‘chicken’ and sometimes made fun of him, for in the end they were all touched by the mousy face and the small lively eyes moving behind the thick lenses. He seemed helpless, but they knew it was very likely that he was the smartest of them all, which is why all the exercise books for algebra and geometry homework succeeded each other on his desk and he filled them with fractions, root signs, integrals and exponents, tangents, bisectors, theorems and axioms. But if you asked Toma himself, the one he got on best with was Sal, because when they were alone Sal was the only one who listened to him talking about the gigantic computers that controlled space missions on the moon and on Mars and about the triangular-headed and mucilaginous-bodied mammals on other planets.

‘Bam! What did I say?’

Max, annoyed, had taken a step back. He was always cautious; he would rarely upset his parents and seldom disobeyed them, definitely not before holidays or vacations, and to his friends he would nourish some sort of perpetual promise: the promise of procuring medical leave of absence forms or of bringing them magazines, full of naked women, or cigarettes and chocolate, or office supplies from his doctor mother’s safe full of goodies. But he would leave lingering behind him the message of certain obligations that, when the time came, his indebted friends would have to fulfil for him. He hadn’t asked them anything yet, but Sal was watching him and was expecting to hear him utter the magic words any day now.

‘You didn’t say anything, man; it’s just that you yelled at him like…’

‘Like what?’

‘You know perfectly well like what. Leave him alone – he didn’t want anything.’

Max headed for the door, disappointed. ‘Very well, then! You’re the ones who are going to be sorry. I won’t tell you another word!’

The boys began to beg him to continue, mimicking disappointment in false voices: ‘Come on, Maxoooooooo, pleaaaaaaase, tell us!’

But Max went out, shaking his head and slamming the door behind him. Everybody was relieved; it was hard to withstand his chattering. They had to constantly mimic listening to him, feigning interest, while in fact each of them was waiting for the appropriate moment to recite their own stories and compare their delusions in order to check their authenticity and the likelihood of ever manifesting themselves in the real world. Silence fell and Sal noticed Harry’s impatience. It was the first time he felt his knees give way under him. He knew what Harry was waiting for: he wanted to see all of them gone as soon as possible and to be left alone, at last, with the girl who kept on scissoring a room away.

‘Why on earth did you call that one?’

‘Who?’ Harry asked, pretending not to understand.

‘You know, that one,’ Sal said, pointing his chin toward the back room.

‘Oh.’ Harry played on. ‘Well, never mind – I gave her some magazines so that she wouldn’t bother us.’

‘Well, it seems that she has been bothering us already!’

‘How come?’

‘Well, Max left because he was ashamed of her, that’s why; you know him too well. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left before telling us all. He wouldn’t have given up so easily.’

Johnny nodded in consent, convinced on the spot by Sal’s theory. Toma had been convinced before, while Harry remained gaping at him, unable to express eloquently and quickly enough his astonishment and his indignation.

‘Next time you better tell me who I should invite over to my house,’ he answered slowly, enraged.

Sal spread his arms akimbo and a generous, conciliatory smile bloomed on his face, suggesting Isn’t it a pity for us to fight over a girl?

‘Next time bring Clitt or Iss!’

Each time the boys laughed their hearts out. It was their favourite dirty joke; even Toma laughed when hearing it, although they suspected he had no clue what it meant whatsoever. But the laughter was infectious, and even when angry they couldn’t resist the joke. ‘Clitt or Iss’ had become the character haunting their dreams, wetting their sheets, tickling their senses and rousing their laughter; she was their dearest imaginary friend and, in secret, they all thought about her when happily awakening from sleep at night. And it was her, again, who conciliated them now, when they were close to butting each other with their thin and clumsy horns. ‘Clitt-or-Iss’… Sal smiled just hearing her name ring in his mind.

Behind them, however, standing stiff in the doorway with angry blazing eyes, was Emi. The boys had fallen silent; he was the only one still laughing, trying to keep the good spirits going. But the girl had already overheard part of their conversation and, probably bored with so much scissoring; she had left Harry’s room full of scattered papers and was getting ready to scuttle away.

Later, when he had returned home, Sal would never cease to wonder what on earth had made him so obstinate about helping her get away and why he hadn’t just left her to the ogre in that empty apartment that invited debauchery and neglect. He left right after her and found her in front of the apartment building waiting for him. They stood there a long while just staring at each other, not daring to talk. After a while, she suggested she should walk him home and, even though he knew it should have been the other way round, he allowed her to walk him home. When she stopped him and pushed his back against the fence-while around them mulberries were falling, staining their T-shirts with cherry-coloured traces – he stuck to the rough planks and felt her small palm resting on his bony shoulder for only a moment, while inside his eyelids, images flickered before her lips touched his hot cheeks.

‘Why be enemies when we can be friends?’

Who could have resisted such an honest question, whispered closely on the edge of the road; who would have given an ambiguous answer? When they reached his building, Sal suggested that, to honour their new friendship, he should walk her home too, and so they went one way and then the other several times forgetting which way they were headed, for in the meantime darkness had come and they had to hide from their friends who were out to play in the evening shift. Harry, Toma, Johnny, Max the karate kids of year seven, the garrulous girls living in the horseshoe-shaped building, the tramps living next to the brewery: they all roamed the streets and had to be avoided by sneaking into buildings and unlocked gardens or behind the thick trunks of the trees in the small circular park in the middle of their neighbourhood.

In the end, remembering that they were expected at home, they said goodbye in front of Emi’s gate and promised each other that they would speak very soon. Only when they were both in their rooms did they realise, and the discovery shocked them alike, that they hadn’t exchanged phone numbers, so Sal called directory enquiries and recited the address. The harsh voice on the other end of the line asked if he was noting it down and then recited the digits, which he scribbled in a hurry on the off-white cover of The Castle in the Carpathians. And since then, for three years, at four o’clock sharp, Emi answered his phone call no matter what.

Now, on his way to see Emi, Sal went past Toma’s house and looked up, just to make sure the two lenses weren’t visible behind the windows. Sometimes, Toma stood for minutes languidly watching Sal speak at random. Emi insisted, with raised eyebrows suggesting certainty, that Toma was in love with Sal and that he himself knew it quite well. Whenever Emi trumpeted her theories, Sal would blush angrily and fall silent, while Emi would laugh sharply and then encircle her arms around his neck, embracing him tightly.

While walking away from Toma’s house and thinking about all that, walking on the margin of the kerb as on an imaginary beam, Sal spotted a big, black cockroach on the pavement that had just emerged through the sewer grate and was now crawling idly along-side him. He squatted and got closer to better study the insect, slowly lowering his finger above the black shell that was sparkling in the sun.

Sal was fascinated by bugs. At home, in the living room, he had framed an insect collection in which all sort of specimens, from cockroaches to Mantis religiosa, lay pinned and which he had aligned like soldiers, scribbling below them the date when each had been captured. ‘Funeral stones,’ Sal explained to those staring in disgust at the still life hanging on the white wall of the room.

He thought a while and then lightly touched the cockroach’s hump with his nail. It stopped, curled up and slowly moved its legs, seemingly begging to be left alive. Sal lifted his finger and sat down on the kerb next to the cockroach. On his knee he had a freshly cicatrised wound he had received after falling off his bike. He lowered his nail onto the thick, brown crust that covered the old wound and started to scratch it. As he poked at the crust on his knee, a thin thread of blood began to trickle under his index nail. He moaned. A piece of the crust was coming off, revealing raw flesh. Raw flesh, as if, he thought, the flesh were raw only under this thin cover, so pleasant to the touch, called skin. While it was under the cover, the flesh lived independently.

The cockroach was gone. Birds were fluttering noisily above, and clouds had covered the sky. He could smell the rain; the air around him was electrified and he could almost hear it buzz, prompting him to get up and walk farther. Before long, raindrops started to whip his cheeks and arms. Suddenly, the rain started to patter: a summer whim, as his grandmother used to say while bustling him inside, sheltering him as well she could from the short, rich gusts with all her body, with her large, soft breasts and with her armpits. He instinctively lifted his arms up, pulling his T-shirt over his head, and looked around at the slender trees and the plastic roof supported by four posts before deciding to seek refuge in the lobby of Harry’s apartment building to wait there for the rain to calm down.

Once inside, he shook the water off like a dog and then remained still, listening for noises in the building. Although he heard murmurs and squeaks, short cracks followed by a slow friction, a rugged rustle coming from the elevator shaft and brief trampling, the silence was still overwhelming. All these noises meant nothing compared to the absence of people and of the sounds made by them.

He breathed in several times, filling his lungs with air. A stench, at first faint as a breeze, then increasing as his sense of smell got accustomed to the interior, remained clinging to his nostrils like icicles in winter. It became stronger, stinging his nose and reminding him of the nail polish remover that diffused throughout the bathroom after his mother wiped the polish off her nails and left the soaked and reddened cotton swabs on the sink. He looked up through the tunnel made by the staircase handrail, making sure there was no one there. The flow of air made the smell grow stronger and then fade in waves. From upstairs he could hear a window banging rhythmically against the wall. After slamming like that for several minutes, while Sal pricked up his ears to hear the other noises inside, the noise of its shattered glass falling on the floor followed.

Sal expected someone would come out in the hallway to see what had happened, but nobody did. He decided to go upstairs despite the nausea already filling his chest and forcing up all his lunch: chicken soup with noodles, roast meat with boiled potatoes and tomato salad, followed by a jam and meringue cake topped with grated chocolate especially sent by Grandmother in a greased, paper-lined suitcase. Upon reaching each new floor, he leant with his hands upon his knees and tried to take a deep breath to push the food back down, but the inhaled air only managed to disturb his bowels more and bend him under the weight of his rebelling body.

On the second floor, from behind a massive wooden door with a carved golden handle, he could hear a recurrent rustle. Putting his ear to the varnished surface, Sal tried to make out what was on the other side. The rustle was pretty close, but its regularity betrayed a spring-loaded device.

He drew back and climbed to the next floor. There, overwhelmed by the heavy air, by the decomposed mixture of sweet and sour smells, he stepped on the floor covered with shattered glass, lifted his body with a powerful push by grasping the window sill and, with all his weight resting upon his thin wrists, leaned on the edge, then bent out and let the drops of rain fall on his face.

The feeling of relief only lasted for a few seconds, because as soon as he trickled back in, careful not to make any sounds, the nausea reappeared. He bent his head between his legs, curled up at his joints and threw up until only a thread of saliva trickled from between his red and swollen lips, trembling lightly like a murmur echoing the spasms of the flesh. He remained bent with his eyes covered by the fog of effort and nausea, his mind empty and his temples beating like a heart. With a last struggle, he straightened his back and limped up the remaining stairs to Harry’s apartment in what looked more like a crawl.

Outside, the heavy rain kept falling, while the smell made it harder and harder for him to stay inside. Thinking about the moment he would breathe in, filling his lungs with the stuffy air in his friend’s rarely aired house, hidden from light behind the thick, velvet, tasselled curtains, he dashed up the stairs to the last floor, moaning and cursing. Once there, he pushed his finger into the bulging electric bell and made it ring in a short spurt; when he saw that no one was coming to open the door, he rang a second time, this time for longer.

In front of the closed door, he began to ponder. It wasn’t the best idea to enter Harry’s house, for Harry would insist that he stay and, if he showed eagerness to leave once the rain had stopped, Harry would certainly sound him out, curious as he was. He crouched, rummaged through his pocket and took out a piece of chocolate wrapped in tinfoil. It had melted and its shape had changed, but Sal used his nail to remove the wrapping that was stuck to the brownish mass.

He had felt a softness in his legs, some kind of tremor hidden in the flesh, and had lost contact for a moment. However tempted he may have felt to lie down on the doormat and allow himself to be carried by his thoughts, he still thought that somewhere above him drifted Emi’s tousled and impatient head, with a well-defined wrinkle already visible between her eyebrows and a sparkle in her eyes that could have ignited the whole neighbourhood. Perhaps he could wait until Mrs Demetrescu found him and, in terrible alarm, lifted him and carried him under her arm as if he were a bundle of woodchips, bringing him inside the house and calling his already-worried parents in a firm voice with little trace of excitement. Sal heaved a long sigh and leaned against the doorjamb, calmly munching the piece of chocolate. He thought he heard, on the other side of the door, a stifled noise followed by a thud, and he stopped and listened.

‘Harry…’ he whispered, concentrating. ‘Harry, is that you, man?’

No answer. He knocked softly, carefully. It was only his breath in the hall, no other noise; his breath that had frosted the wood varnish on the door.

‘Harry, say something if you’re there.’

He drew back, looking up at the dark eye in the peephole. Rising on his toes, he thought he noticed motion behind the concave lens.

‘You must be very stupid not to open the door, Harry. Just stay there and giggle,’ he said, and from inside he could hear clearly now, as if it were very close, a stifled giggle.

He went downstairs two steps at a time, trying to breathe as little as possible. As he got closer to the ground floor and the smell became stronger, diversifying its nuances and penetrating his clothes and his skin, it inebriated him to such an extent that he nearly fainted. This was a building without pets and old people. He knew almost all of them, for together with the boys in his gang, he had harassed them all in various ways. It was not from the cleaned and scrubbed apartments that the smell came, nor from the stairs that were swept daily and then washed with a rag curled around a wooden stick.

By the time he reached the ground floor, he had figured out where the smell was coming from. Outside, the rain would have hidden the putrid smell, annihilating it. There was only one place left that he would have to inspect, although he wasn’t looking forward to doing so and had little courage left: the basement. On the ground floor, there were two apartments and the door that led to the basement, where the storage rooms were located. It wasn’t a very pleasant place to visit, especially when alone. But it was still raining outside, ceaselessly; it was raining cats and dogs, as Grandmother used to say while looking absentmindedly out the window, and Emi would undoubtedly have to wait. He opened the last door, while at the same moment a horrid stench hit him so violently he staggered and moved a step backward.

‘I’ll be damned…’

An infinite disgust impressed itself upon Sal’s face. He slammed the door wildly, as if someone were rushing at him from beyond the threshold, and remained with his hand on the door handle, seemingly trying to figure out what was to be done. A few long seconds passed.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Sal repeated in a stifled voice. ‘What the hell is this smell?’

He stood with his arms akimbo like a bewildered old man, assessing the danger. Opening the door again, he looked inside to the darkness that lay at his feet. He tried his best to be brave, but the pitch-black inferno of the building had opened its huge mouth and was preparing to swallow him, the way children swallowed pickled autumn tomatoes brought from basement storage rooms by the housewifely mothers who had been careful enough to store supplies for winter.

Sal’s fingers had gone white and he could no longer feel his limbs, but he didn’t understand very clearly if this was because of his sickness or because of the cold that had caught him unaware. The door was open, and the dark was already licking the tips of his shoes. Sal felt dizzy with nausea; his body was numb and his head kept spinning.

He took a step inside. There, with the dark swallowing half of his body, the air no longer seemed so unbearable. He took another step. The dark clung to his face. He should go on, he thought, emboldening himself; he should take another step. So he took another. Suddenly, he rolled down the stairs without feeling any pain. His body seemed wrapped in a sponge and, through the soft fabric, thousands of eyes had popped out. For the first time, he saw everything as if in a huge glass panorama. The horizon lay both in front of him and behind him, bewildering him.

He landed on the cement at the bottom of the stairs. Shaking the dust out of his clothes and checking himself for sore spots, he could feel absolutely no pain. He felt neither the nausea that had strangled him upstairs nor the dizziness; he could breathe at will. For a split second, he thought he was dreaming. He stayed still, trying to come back to his senses.

A small, narrow corridor lay ahead of him, with doors to the storage rooms aligned on each side. Sal stood up and, leaning against the wall, advanced one step at a time. With the tips of his fingers, he felt some kind of strange dampness that caused him to draw back his hand hastily. He rubbed his index finger against his thumb, remaining still. A faint, barely perceptible hum floated now in the darkness.

After a few seconds, Sal’s eyes got used to the lack of light, and he began to discern the space around him. The foul smell was gone, and now he began to smell the odour of plants in the air.

‘Oh, God!’ he said to himself. ‘I think I’ve gone crazy.’ Emi was waiting for him in her cheerful room, clad in her transparent dress through which you could see her thighs and her underpants and, sometimes, when you looked closer, even her nipples, but only when it was cold and Emi was all in a shiver. What on earth was he doing here? Why wasn’t he resting in peace, his head in her lap? Maybe he could even have taken a little nap before seeing the boys.

He came to a door that was ajar, pulled away the broken padlock that hung from two metal loops and pushed the door to the wall. The darkness inside was even thicker than it had been in the corridor, and Sal groped slowly along the wall, searching for a light switch, but couldn’t find one. He stepped into the room cautiously, following the slow, deafening rhythm of his heartbeat, and had the strange feeling that everything had frozen still – no heartbeat, no hum in the air, no muffled sounds from outside, nothing at all. And then the stench rushed upon him in even greater intensity, with a hint of jasmine and anise.

‘Is there anyone here?’ Sal whispered, overcome with excitement.

He took another two steps, and time began to rush. He began repeating in his mind, mechanically: ‘Emi, Emi, Emi.’ Then, when he had somewhat recovered from his fear, when he had measured the distance in the dark with his eyes, when his hands had stopped trembling, only then did he think that everything was a big pile of nonsense. How could a smell scare him?

The voice within him gave a high-pitched shriek, like a hysterical woman. Sal advanced blindly through the room, trying to grab onto something. The smell would come and go as if a draught crossed the room, somehow eluding him. Suddenly, there was the metallic edge of something hip-high. Sal cheered up and measured the cold expanse with the tips of his fingers: it was something that seemed to be a table. He closed his eyes and continued to feel the edges with more caution, advancing along a surface that had changed in consistency now; his fingers slid on an unpolished surface less electrifying than the metal on the sides. And then, suddenly, the terrible softness set off the putrid smell again.

Sal! he heard Emi call with a broken voice. Sal! his mother shrieked at the top of her lungs. Sal! the seemingly friendly basement echoed, bathed in a grey light. He turned his head, a scream stuck in his throat. He made a move to go, to run as far from that terrible place as he could, but the buzz clogged his eardrums and the machinery inside him had lost its will to move. He stood there, with his fingers prodding the soft surface, trying to understand what was under the thin membrane of his terror-rippled skin. But because his eyes couldn’t help him see and his nose couldn’t smell a thing, he pinched the softness under his fingers and felt clearly now that under the skin on his fingers lay another skin.

He cringed in terror. He knew quite well what was on that table. It was someone. A human being, a body, a creature. Maybe Harry himself, wanting to scare him. That would have changed things.

‘Harry,’ he whispered, his voice strangled with excitement. ‘Harry, answer, you son of a bitch…’

He waited for a sign. It wasn’t only his imagination; the tips of his fingers still bore that unexpected touch. He was shaken by a strong shiver. Then he made a decision: to touch again, to see what it was and, if it proved to be Harry, to make that bugger sweat for it. So, with a sudden jerk, he jumped forward as if playing rugby and landed upon the heap of flesh. He flew across the dark room, accompanied by the voices of his mother and Emi as if by two nagging angels; his hands were the first to touch the pane of the table, then his skinny body, his bare knees bruised on the football field, his red and calloused elbows and, with his heart pounding in his flat chest, he ended his flight and landed on a stone-still body. He made a last attempt, gasping in pain and fright: ‘Harry, you fucking wanker, if you don’t answer I’ll beat the shit out of you… fuck…’

No answer; no motion. Sal was shaking all over. He braced himself, and without climbing down, clenching his teeth, he started again to grope, this time consistently: here was something resembling a shoulder, higher up something that felt like a neck, there was an Adam’s apple, the chin, the face… As he proceeded, Sal began to recompose, blindly, the human being – there was no doubt now – beneath him.

He jumped off the table, but didn’t move away. Drawing a deep breath, only then did he feel the heavy plant smell wafting around his nostrils again. This time it was faint, as if a draught moved the air from one side of the building to the other. It was strange, because he could swear it was from down here that the smells had risen.

Sal was more concerned with that presence now, with the body lying still on the table – he imagined it as a dissection table in order to better envisage the dark reality he was just probing. He was dying to find out what was there. It couldn’t have been Harry or another one of the boys. It was in fact, he finally admitted to himself, a woman, and that was the only thing he could say about the body he had plunged upon. He had felt, through his sweaty T-shirt, her breasts; he had clearly sensed their shape, he had anticipated them even before having touched them. He lifted a hand slowly, fumbled in the dark and then lowered it gently. Again, the skin with a silken feeling to it, a bit damp, like Emi’s skin was after she had run a whole afternoon on the streets in their neighbourhood and she fell in his arms, dead tired.

It was then that Sal managed to touch her at his ease, to grip her flesh without the fear of being questioned, without revealing the pleasure that made him tingle all over. But the body of the woman lying on the table was supposed to resist, was supposed to move, to struggle; the woman perched upon the dissection table was supposed to protest and to scold him…

The finger had come to a bend. It was heading upward now, in a slow, almost dreamlike ascension, to the peak, the nipple–he tensed, for he discovered an iceberg on top: the breast was cold, frozen, stiffly jabbing the boy’s palm as it explored larger and larger surfaces. A hand migrated to the abdomen; the other was on its way to the other iceberg. But the encounter with the left breast was even worse. The coldness, the skin wrinkled over the flesh, made him shiver. And time stopped still again, as if the coldness of the body he was groping had overflowed into the surrounding world, freezing it.

Sal blinked mindfully. He lowered his hand and felt her belly – it was a little swollen but soft enough for him to sink his fingers into the elastic surface, pleasant to the touch. He carried on until he encountered a smaller, bony bulge, covered in wiry hair. When he gave Emi a hug or when he touched her, accidentally, on her flat chest or her bare thighs when she wore shorts, he would feel her tense and that gave him immense pleasure – a pleasure that would follow him into the night and into his sleep. But with women it was a different story.

His cheek had many times been buried between the huge breasts of his grandmother’s friends, who admired him and who would always spit three times to guard him from the evil eye. ‘There you go, beauty. Come to Mummy; let me give you a hug.’ And he would abandon himself in their arms, uncomplainingly indulging in their adoration. His nose sunken deep between the two mountains, he was surrounded by the whiff of aged skin and of the perfumes the ladies would dab behind their ears, on their necks and inside their cleavage. It must be that women couldn’t feel boys’ touches; they were but ethereal beings that passed unnoticed through the world of curvy women, and neither their filthy thoughts nor their immodest desires could be read. If it were so – if Sal could at least make sure that the lady lying here on the table couldn’t feel him, if he knew he had the freedom to explore her body while she slept, to inspect every hidden corner, to examine every pore – how he would look down at Harry then, what stories he would have to tell the boys!

He decided to look for something he could light the room with. He drew back slowly and, groping around in the same manner he had got there, he crept back out. The dark hallway had awakened and was moving; the walls were quivering, and along them one could vaguely discern the aligned doors to the storage rooms. Sal got scared and took a step back, trying to calm his own heartbeat now blasting all over the basement: ‘There’s nothing to be scared of, there’s nothing to be scared of.’

Repeating this chorus in his mind, Sal decided to cross the dark hallway that seemed, nonetheless, much friendlier than the den he had just emerged from. Near the door, he stumbled upon something that made the basement resonate with the loud chime of the stuff scattered on the floor. Had he disturbed the sacred order of the stinking vault – had he awoken the haunting ghosts, overcome by boredom and with their ears buzzing from so much loneliness? Now he was filled with regret; he wished he could take his steps back so that the box with its belongings remained in its place undisturbed.

Sal bent down and groped along the ground. His hands bumped against all sorts of objects, and carefully, but still trembling with excitement, he searched among them. He felt an oblong shape like a flute; the material the object was made of, however, felt strange. He put it down and continued his probing, down on his knees. A metal box. He took it in his hands, fumbled for its rims with his nails and tried to open it. The box slipped from his hands and the corridor vibrated in a long, shrill shriek.

Sal stopped dead. Emi’s cheerful image and her luminous face flashed in his mind, and he felt his heart ache while his eyes began to glow. She was looking at him and waving her hand with her fingers unfurled, bidding him ‘Farewell!’ in her childish manner. He was suffering abstractly for the first time, and stopped in his tracks. When the girl’s image had disappeared, he found himself in a panic attack: doubled up in agony, standing on all fours and rummaging indiscriminately through the objects on the floor hoping that, if he made as much noise as possible, either he would be heard by someone who would come down to save him or the ghosts, deafened, would take flight in their shady gullies. He came across the sharp, cold blade of a knife that briefly nicked his skin. Sal released a sigh, this time relieved upon encountering a shape he finally recognised. He took the knife, stood up and headed to the storage room, groping in the dark.

It was chillier still. His head was heavy and his heartbeat was muffled, as if coming from a jar of molasses. He was afraid and, if he had had the guts to let the tears run, he knew the fear would have subsided a bit – or at least it wouldn’t have mattered so much. After a few steps, he stopped and decided to turn back.

He fell on his knees again and started scrabbling in the dark for the metal box he had dropped a few minutes before. The floor was slimy and touching it turned his stomach, but he continued to search and finally returned to his feet holding a box of matches with the tips of his fingers; from inside it he could hear the friendly sound made by the matches in their cardboard shell. Sal carefully opened the box and took out a match; he struck it once, twice, three times, but the cardboard was damp and the match broke in two with a short crackle.

He took another one out, and this time the match caught fire, throwing out a mellow light. But it wasn’t exactly what he wished to see. All along the corridor the moving air carried a cohort of dust specks. With his eyes wide open, he tried to make an imprint in his mind of all the details – the cobwebs hanging in corners like brocades, the black doors, the shiny floor reflecting the dark ceiling – and then he closed them. Two big beads of water trickled down his cheek like two tears. The flame of the match slowly singed his skin, and he let go of it and lit another. He squatted, looked for the metal box, found it, clasped it in his hand and let the cool metal ease some of the pain the burn had caused. A whiff of air put out his flame, but now he was more serene. He had a good supply of light in the matchbox, a penknife and a metal box – the latter he had taken as a souvenir. He returned, fumbling in the dark, to the door that led to the storage room; he opened it with his foot and, after entering, he stopped.

His eyelids felt heavy, as if someone had poured wax on them. Blinking was such an effort that it made him dizzy. The smell was gone and so was the fear; all that was left was a deep exhaustion. ‘That’s because I didn’t sleep enough!’ thought Sal. But instead of lighting the match, Sal groped his way again to the table with the metal pane. His thighs hit the edge and he stopped. Shaking the matches mechanically, as if to make sure they were still there, he opened the box, took out a match and then clenched it with the tips of his fingers for an instant, motionlessly. When he struck it, the light of the match gave out a matte, smoky light.

In front of him lay a woman. Just as he had perceived, the woman was naked, stone-still, with her eyes closed, seemingly sleeping. Sal brought the match’s flame next to her motionless face: a white face, with beautiful, smooth skin, an angular nose and a rather small mouth. There was nothing special about the immobile face and, probably, if he had closed his eyes again now, it would have been impossible to recompose her countenance in his mind.

He looked around. In a corner, there was a pile of floor tiles, some wooden slats and, immediately next to them, a few cardboard boxes and a small chest with broken doors. Sal lit another match and headed to the chest. A petroleum lamp rested on top of the kind his parents had at home and which his father would use whenever there was a power failure. He lifted the part made of glass and lit the snuff; the light grew stronger and the room was enlivened by his shadow on the wall.

He turned his head to look at the table. The woman lying there had long, black hair, carefully combed over her shoulders in a sensible way that contrasted with her cold breasts and her uncovered genitals. He approached her again, put the lamp on the table and took a step back. It was only now that he noticed the walls were gleaming, as if covered by a curtain of water. He wanted to really get a feel of the skin that shimmered unobtrusively in the smoky light of the lamp – to wake up the sleeping woman and ask her what she was doing – but not before sniffing once again the fine, damp skin, not before caressing the stiff breasts that prodded the air.

‘Miss…’ he whispered in a hoarse voice.

She remained silent, unmoving.

Sal lowered his hand to her shoulder, covered in the black hair.

‘Miss!’

A bead of sweat stood hanging on the tips of his eyelashes, distorting his view of the woman into asymmetric shapes.

‘Are you feeling OK? Do you want me to call an ambulance?’

He placed his small, young hand upon her white, smooth-skinned, fine-fingered hand, with red-painted fingernails grown slightly to reveal a pinkish semicircle. Its touch gave Sal the creeps. The woman in front of him either couldn’t feel him or didn’t feel like answering or even opening her eyes. He leaned above her and put his ear to her tightly closed mouth. She wasn’t breathing; everything about her was still. He noticed on a finger of her right hand, hidden behind her body, a black stone, crossed by golden streaks that glittered in the lamp’s light. He lifted her hand and looked at the stone: it was a simple setting, in silver. The ring made him think of Emi – how boyish and hasty she was sometimes and how warm and full of love at other times. Girls lived in a different world altogether. And the lady on the table, with her ring, with her breasts prodding in the air, with her red, overgrown fingernails and the beautifully combed tresses on her shoulders, was, as likely as not, dead – or as dead as a woman as beautiful as she could be.

A cold draught crossed the room, as if all the windows had been opened at once. Sal let go of the woman’s hand and turned toward the door. Then he looked at the lamp, but the flame stood upright in the dark, still throwing its dim light into the room. His whole body was overrun by a wave of heat, accompanied by a pain that gripped his chest. He looked at her again and almost without realising it, he lay down on the table alongside her, draped his arms over her soft flesh, over her damp skin, placed his cheek on her shoulder covered by black tresses – the hair had a herbal smell as well – and the fear, the pain and the cold went away. Never before in his life had he seen such a beautiful woman, such a tantalising nakedness. He hardly felt time pass, but when he sat up the room looked different. He climbed down from the table and rummaged through his pocket to retrieve the penknife and the metal box.

The flame undulated slightly, moving its shadows around. Sal tried the sharpness of the blade, placing its tip against his finger; then, with an unmoving face as if in preparation for an execution, he took hold of her right hand and gripped her ring finger, on which the black stone rested, between his forefinger and thumb. Contemplating the finger, he adjusted it and then started to cut it scrupulously, without even a flinch when the bone gave way. Finally, the finger was severed from the body. Sal put it in the metal box, closed it, and watched the motionless body again.

‘I love you…’

He had started to sober up. He plugged his ears. The summer heat had poured into the basement. From outside he could hear the sound of a racing engine. He took the box, put it into his pocket and dashed out the door, his heart pounding in his chest.

‘I love you…’

The basement smelled bad again, and when he was outside, out of breath, Sal stopped a little and fell to his knees on the burning asphalt. The heat had dried out all traces of rain. And in Sal’s ears, the two words that had been so funny before, giving him butterflies in his stomach, still echoed: ‘I love you…’