Читать книгу Sun Alley - Cecilia Ştefănescu - Страница 5

In the summer afternoons, when it is very hot, the neighbourhood seems to be asleep. Yet it is actually all an illusion, because real life runs its course inside the houses, away from the heat, in the shady corners where people stay still for hours on end or move very slowly to preserve their body temperatures. During those afternoons, in which the heat pervaded all living spaces, Emi was bored to death and would have given the world to run about at leisure on the empty streets, alone but for her thoughts. Her body, throbbing in all its joints, didn’t seem to be inconvenienced in any way by the heat but with things as they were, she had to stay inside, pretending to sleep and waiting for the call from Sal that would announce four o’clock. Emi hated to sleep, and that was partly because she had no patience. She felt she was losing precious time which she could have used for thinking or for doing lots of other things. For instance, she could have crept to the attic and from there onto the roof, from where she could have spied any movement up to two blocks away. She could have stayed indefinitely like that, watching people swarming by and passing one another blindly. Up on the plate roof soaked in sunshine, she felt that nobody could know she was there, the small god of the neighbourhood.

She pricked up her ears. Fully dressed, she was sitting up in bed, with her knees drawn to her chin and her toes outstretched. Her forehead rested on her kneecaps, and she scrutinised the streaks in the bed’s upholstery, inside the grooves of the fabric where the threads blended in a secret mesh. She heard the same noise again. Jumping out of bed and rushing to the window, she caught sight of Sal, staring up at her from the pavement below. When he saw Emi, he waved his hand and signalled to her to come down. She opened her window.

‘Why are you so late?’

Sal threw her an outraged look – what did she mean by ‘so late’? It was raining, that’s why.

‘Come down, will you?’

He was late because strange things had been happening to him, things he could talk about with no one but her.

‘In a minute!’

Emi slammed the window shut and dashed to the door. Behind her, a woman’s voice squeaked angrily: ‘Emilia, where are you off to?’

Emi darted through the front door and rushed into the street, bumping against Sal, who was just about to enter. They stopped and gazed at one another for a moment until Sal, happy to see her at last and still excited, put his hands on her face and brought his lips to her mouth. It seemed to Emi that she completely abandoned herself to the kiss, staring straight into his eyes while he was kissing her. There was a sweetish, slightly off-putting that somewhat turned her stomach but at the same time gave her tingles up her spine: that dampness that met hers, the slippery tongue that groped around and clumsily cuddled itself around hers. Then Sal let go of her, taking a step back. Emi remained with her eyes riveted upon him, visibly thrilled.

‘What was that?’ she babbled.

Sal broke out in laughter. ‘Are you afraid?’

His question was mistimed and turned a key in the girl’s interior mechanism. Emi’s expression suddenly changed and she cast a nasty glance toward him, ready to fight, then rushed upon him and thrust him away, ‘Oh, dear. You love to show off, don’t you?’

Sal made a wry face. Then he swung around and started off down the street, heading back to the apartment building. Emi stared for a few seconds in his direction, astonished.

‘Sal… Sal, where are you going?’

The air was full of little floating fluff balls, chasing each other on the pavement. Across the street, an old lady was carrying two overflowing shopping bags. She would take two or three steps, then stop, put the bags down, heave a noisy sigh and start again. When she lifted the weight, her face muscles strained in a funny grimace. Although she had started halfheartedly on Sal’s trail, Emi shuffled her feet and had time to study the old woman from a distance, watching her as she crossed the street in front of Emi. The woman had just put the bags down again and was adjusting the silk-spotted coloured scarf on her crown.

‘Do you need any help?’

The old woman gave Emi a long stare. The girl repeated the question, shouting in a high-pitched voice: ‘Missus, do you want me to help you?’

Sal had already reached the corner, but was halted by Emi’s voice chiming in the air. She had stopped across the street from the hag, pointing to her bags. Then, after the hag seemed to have answered, Emi started again, coming his way. When she got near, she put on a dismissive face.

‘Who was that?’

‘I don’t know; how would I know?’

‘Well, I saw you speaking to her…’

‘I speak to a lot of people!’

Emi started ahead, with Sal following her like a good dog.

‘Are you upset?’

Sal’s voice trickled toward her ears, surrounding her, and Emi felt the need to get revenge.

‘Look, if you don’t feel like it, we don’t have to see each other every day. Only don’t have me wait, okay? I hate it!’

He threw her a distressful look. He thought she was unfair, and all of a sudden all the expectation and pleasure of seeing her was gone. He noticed that her features had become sharper and felt that nothing was the same: he could no longer tell her what he had found in Harry’s basement. He knew that the woman in the cellar had to remain his secret, and this made him extremely sad. Yet immediately he started to search his mind for an excuse to leave as soon as possible. Emi the girl was extinguished inside him like a flame over which a very weak draught had blown.

With the tip of her shoe, Emi was now prodding a fluff ball that had gathered at the corner of the street. It looked like candy floss without the stick, and this thought cheered her up.

‘Listen, Sal, doesn’t this fluff look like candy floss? If we stuck a stick inside, we could give it to Toma to eat. Wouldn’t that be cool?’

Sal became even more distraught. ‘That seems to me like the stupidest idea I ever heard.’

Emi giggled; she took his anger as spite. ‘Why? I would like to know why, exactly, you find it stupid.’

‘Because Toma would never eat fluff instead of candy floss. Because Toma doesn’t even like candy floss! And because Toma,’ Sal added, almost shouting, ‘is not a moron!’

No sooner had he finished uttering his last word than he swung around and started walking back home – although actually he wasn’t walking toward home. It just so happened that Emi had given him a good idea as to whom he could confide in about the woman in the basement. Even if he decided not to tell him everything, then at least he could intimate, through a parable, that the woman existed and that he had discovered her on that torrid and rainy afternoon. He was ready to share his discovery with a trustworthy person, with someone who deserved it.

He could still feel Emi behind him, thrusting daggers straight into the back of his head, but now that he had escaped, he didn’t mind much. He could bleed at leisure, with the arrows still in his back, until he reached Toma and could forget about her in the rush of conversation. Toma was a true friend, the most honest of all; he was like a boy version of Emi, without her airs and her whims. Sal was relieved. Now that he knew which way to go, the day had recovered its meaning.

A soft breeze had started to move the hot air around a bit. He didn’t want to look back, because he feared he might change his mind and turn around. Yet as he advanced, the thought of Emi, stranded in the middle of the road with tear-filled eyes weakened his determination and slowed his steps. After a few seconds, Sal stopped and looked straight ahead at the street that joined the boulevard. He could hear the faint sound of the joggling trams, dragging in the heat. Suddenly, he didn’t feel like braving their thundering noise, or facing the dust and the squalor; he didn’t feel like waiting for almost three minutes for the traffic light to turn green; he didn’t feel like going to Toma’s anymore. He realised that Toma would insist to be shown the corpse, would want to see it. Toma wouldn’t be satisfied with his simple account of the story; he would go on his own exploratory survey, even if Sal refused to go with him. And maybe, in the end, Toma would discover something absolutely dreadful: that the woman wasn’t even dead, or that she didn’t even really exist because, apart from having seen her and touched her, what other evidence did he have – how could he prove to anyone that it wasn’t just another fancy of his?

Sal turned his head. The street was empty. A few fluff clouds still drifted to and fro.

‘Hey!’

He gave a start. From behind him, Harry had popped up out of nowhere, dressed in shorts and wearing a yellow T-shirt resembling that of the national football team. He had the number 10 printed on his back as a tribute to the great player and, as always when he was wearing this T-shirt, Harry had an overconfident attitude and strutted like a turkey cock.

‘What are you doing here, man?’

Sal looked him up and down.

‘Nothing. Where are you going?’

‘To the playing field, for the game.’

Sal brooded a bit. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

‘Really? When?’

‘Half an hour ago, or so.’

Harry sniffed. ‘Impossible.’

‘How is that?’

‘If you had looked for me half an hour ago, you would have found me. I was at home all day.’

‘Hm. I lingered for a while in your building – it had started to rain. I thought you were at home.’

‘Well, I was, man, didn’t I just say so? But I’ll be damned if I heard you!’

Sal gazed at him. He could have sworn that Harry was telling a pack of lies just because of his uncharacteristically transfixed face and his thoughtful look.

‘Who else is going be there?’

‘What?’

‘For the game, man, who else is going be there for the game?’

‘Oh! Well, who do you think? Those two from 112, the Stoicovici brothers, Maxone, Toma…’

‘Is Toma coming, too?’

‘Yeah, he’s coming to gawk. Are you coming?’

Sal looked over Harry’s shoulder toward the boulevard. ‘That depends…’

‘Come on, are you coming or not?’

Sal nodded and set off beside Harry toward the school’s football ground. When they crossed Emi’s street, Sal looked along its distance, hoping to see her sulking on the street kerb waiting for him, but Emi was nowhere to be seen. He wished he had stayed with her; he really didn’t feel trashing it out on the field with the others. He was bored and tired. Shoving his hands in his pockets, his fingers sought the creases of fabric, trying to find their place, when something stopped him dead. In his trouser pocket he had encountered the regular shape of the metal box in which he had put the severed finger.

‘You know, man, I don’t know what to say, but I’d rather not go…’

Sal stopped and apprehensively dropped this line to Harry, hoping that he wouldn’t hear it and wouldn’t even notice his absence; that he would keep walking to the football field on his own. But Harry pulled a long face. ‘What’s with you, man, have you gone crazy? Why would you rather not come?’

Sal shrunk. ‘I don’t have my gear…’

Harry burst into laughter. ‘Big deal! Like it’s Champions League!’

He hurried off and Sal followed him. Harry had started talking again about the last game, the one Sal had missed, during which they – the guys from school 122 – had scored ten goals. As he struggled ahead with the hot air pressing upon his skin, he heard Harry’s words as from a dream.

The two crossed the road and turned left. At the end of the street, they could see the school, a white building with grates over the windows and casements painted bright blue. Harry continued to talk, kicking every now and then at any stone he would encounter on the road. Two silhouettes slowly started to move toward them, the only people they had met on the street in the last half hour.

Sal took the hand he had been keeping on the metal box out of his pocket. His palm was sweaty, so he wiped it against his T-shirt. The approaching figures could now be seen to be a man and a woman. The woman, wearing big sunglasses, was dressed in a sheer green skirt, through which one could discern the shape of her legs, and a white linen blouse. She was gesturing in an exaggerated manner and, from a distance, Sal thought she looked angry. The man was walking beside her, his hands behind his back and his head slightly lowered in a reverential attitude, paying close attention to her. After a few steps, Sal overheard pieces of what the woman was saying. Here and there, her voice acquired acute inflections and she would lose her temper. They were quite close to each other, and this slow approach made Sal feel drowsy. He turned to Harry, who kept talking: ‘Shut up a little!’

Harry cast him a puzzled glance. The man and the woman had stopped. She was still talking, but just as they passed by the man looked up from the ground and straight into her eyes, saying, ‘You know, for me nothing has changed; everything is just the same…’

Sal felt like turning around to look again at the dark-haired woman with shoulder-length curly hair and the tall, blue-eyed man with a youthful face. No sooner had they taken a few steps away than their voices faded away as if they had vanished into thin air; still he looked back spitefully. The two were moving slowly away, the man still holding his hands behind his back and the woman brooding beside him with her arms hanging limply alongside her body. Sal kept walking beside Harry, who was now engrossed in a stubborn silence.

They reached the lattice fence surrounding the school’s football field. A few boys were already on the field warming up, shaking their legs, running on the spot or doing squats. Seeing them, Harry started to shout at the top of his voice, followed by the other boys who shouted in return. He turned to Sal, reiterating, ‘Are you a fool, man? Would you have missed this?’

Sal appeared to be about to answer, but then he changed his mind. When he stepped onto the hot concrete amidst the cheers welcoming Harry, a breeze touched his cheeks, and when he reached the middle of the field, a wave of heat hit him right in the face, rising like a curtain between him and the girls perched on the dilapidated benches who were watching the boys get ready for the game. And from that moment on, Sal forgot all that had happened to him. He jumped in place together with the others, he swung his hands in the air, he bent down and leaned sideways while the blended voices of the boys and the stifled giggles of the girls roared in his ears. And when they started to play, he let his feet carry him over the field in a continuous dash, with an almost indiscernible flight over the concrete.

His mind was empty and his eyes brushed only intermittently against the faces of the girls who giggled and bashfully tried to cheer them on; his feet barely touched the uneven surface that covered the endless distance between the two goalposts. The boys were shouting, swearing, tugging his T-shirt, but without stopping for even a second, Sal kept running after the ball that rolled on tirelessly. At a certain moment he thought he saw Harry gesturing something, but he didn’t bother to find out what it was. He was chasing the ball, and then he was touching it with the tip of his shoe – bouncing it off his toes straight between the goalposts. It was then that he heard a choir of voices covering his own, after which came the arms and bodies of the boys swooping upon him in an upsurge of joy. A wave of sticky sweat trickled down his whole body. The other bodies touching his own made him shiver with bliss, and soon he was driven, just like the other boys, by the desire to win.

He felt Harry hug him and shout in his ear how good they were, what a sucker he had been, what he had almost missed, how the chicks were staring at them now and so on and so on.

‘Sal…’

Harry’s voice seemed to emerge from somewhere deep inside his mind, hot-blooded with success and heat. He managed to escape the boys’ embraces and, just as unexpectedly as before, he bolted and started for the exit. Outraged cries followed him, and Harry started jumping around in a desperate attempt to stop him.

‘Where the hell are you going, man? We haven’t finished the game – don’t be an asshole!’

But Sal had peeled off. He was running as fast as he could; he was running back, on the tree-shaded street, stirring the yellow dust behind him. When he slowed his pace, he was already halfway there. Carefully, he studied the houses that languished like old ladies with their hands crossed in their laps and their chins cast down. The heat had been eased, and the leaves rustled above his head. From one of the houses came the noise of a coffee grinder, and he stopped and sat down on the pavement. He felt short twinges of pain in his tired legs, the still-tense muscles twitching from time to time. He watched the skin’s surface contract slightly and wince, as if animalcule colonies were swarming underneath. The coffee grinder’s noise suddenly stopped and a female voice cried from the bottom of the yard: ‘Would anyone like coffee?’

Each morning at his grandmother’s after breakfast, the coffee steam would reach out to him and lure him out on the veranda. Next to his grandmother’s cup and that of one of her friends stood a small cup with a drowsy layer of cream floating on top. She was the only one who had offered him, as far back as a year ago, that token of maturity, his passport to the grown-up world. And despite the fact that the place smelled of lavender and mothballs, and mole-crickets would show up now and again from under the old furniture, his grandmother remained the only woman in the family with whom he got on well and who didn’t pester the life out of him. She was the one who listened to his long soliloquies when he woke up dripping wet, scared and eager for anything but sleep, after one of the nightmares in which a huge butterfly chased him through a thick-walled house.

The loneliness felt in dreams was tremendous, more dreadful than all he had been through in Harry’s basement, uglier than the mole-crickets crawling undisturbed in his grandmother’s house, more shocking than Emi’s long silences she hoped to impress him with. That loneliness contained something overwhelming that would crush him, as if the mere effort of the mind produced an earthquake that crumbled down the whole stone-made edifice of his enforced and self-inflicted enclosure. He couldn’t tell Emi about his dreams, but in those moments when his grandmother sipped the hot coffee with her puckered lips, Sal would take heart and start to spin the yarn of his dreams. Grandmother Meri, after heaving a deep sigh with every sip, would nail her fat-lidded brown eyes upon him and appear thoughtful. She would neither reprehend him nor make fun of him the way his parents did at home. In those summer mornings, his grandmother would concentrate on his mouth as it uttered a rapid-fire stream of words like balls hurtling down a bowling lane.

Sal would have loved to tell Emi about everything that crossed his mind, but especially about his dreams and his fear of death, about the colonies of insects that swarmed under his skin every time he made a great physical effort. Right now, he especially wanted to talk to her interminably, to describe in great detail–if he had had enough words to do so – the woman in the basement whom he had just discovered and to whom he could talk to nobody about.

The back gate opened and a woman his mother’s age, dressed in a homely dress with pink and blue flowers, looked up and down the street. Sal, with his head turned in her direction, felt the urge to say hello, slightly bowing his head as his mother had taught him to. The woman looked him up and down, then shouted something behind her, but Sal couldn’t understand what she had said. He stood up hesitantly and hit the road again. If he had had the choice, he would have gone to his grandmother’s to take a nap in her living room, with its windows shaded by trees.

With his grandma in mind, he retraced the whole street and crossed Emi’s street as well. When he came to himself, he was on the boulevard at the traffic light, unwilling to do anything. The metal box was bumping against his leg, through the fabric of his shorts, as he walked. The cars were zooming on one side and then on the other, and the red traffic light flickered its countdown. The people gathered on the other side were gazing straight ahead, waiting for the green light.

‘Sal!’

He looked right and then left. Someone was tugging his shirt from behind. When he turned around, he spotted Emi, who was panting with her hands on her knees. ‘Sal, where the hell have you been?’

He looked at her delightedly. Emi straightened her back and started to talk, waving her thin arms in the air. Sal was watching her and, listening to her discontented talk, full of indignation at the unreliable people who left girls standing in the middle of the street and went God-knows-where, Sal decided that now was the best moment for him to share his finding with her. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her for a few steps.

‘Emi, I have to show you something, I really have to!’

Emi stared at him in disbelief. He grabbed her other hand as well, the one that was hanging close to her body. ‘Actually, I want to give you something!’

Emi seemed to cool down a bit. ‘Well, give it to me!’

‘No, no, not here. Let’s go to your place!’

‘You know perfectly well that, if we go to my place, my mother will stuff us with food and get in our hair and not allow us to talk.’

Sal was silent.

‘See?’ Emi went on. ‘We’d better go up to the roof of my building.’

They remained still for a while, pondering. It was the first time she had told anyone about her secret place. Something in his tone and in all the events of the day had made her mention it, and now she regretted doing so. It was the place from which she could watch over all, including Sal, and now that place was about to disappear, open to all the eyes in the neighbourhood. It was exactly as her mother had told her: boys couldn’t keep a secret, and only girls had the inner strength to love others and keep secrets for themselves.

‘On the roof at your place?’ Sal marvelled.

Emi had pursed her lips, but now it was difficult to back off. ‘Let’s go, Sal, and make sure you hold your tongue and don’t tell anyone!’

They started to walk slowly back to Emi’s building. The heat had abated and a soft breeze had started to blow. Sal put his hand into his shorts pocket and rested it on the metal box. Coming across Emi had changed his state of mind: she hadn’t abandoned him, she had looked for him, and now the fact that she was disclosing her secret place proved that she had been thinking about him.

‘Where were you?’ Her voice had a squeaky sound. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I went to your place and your mother told me you were out to buy ice-cream… Jesus, Sal, is that what you tell your mother when you come to see me-that you go out for ice-cream?’ Emi laughed, flinging her head back. When she laughed, her black, round eyes had a mischievous look. But they also had a bright shimmer that simultaneously subdued Sal and amused him.

‘I say all sorts of things… today it was ice-cream, tomorrow it will be something else. Tomorrow I’ll tell her I’m going to a table-lifting séance.’

Emi stopped, laughing even harder. ‘I see your point!’

She dropped down with all her weight, then jerked him forward, running and forcing him to run behind her. Sal complained, telling her that he was tired, but the girl had rushed ahead stubbornly, pretending not to hear. Sal’s temples were twitching, and he could feel how the small insects under his skin had started to rebel against the tyrant who was bothering their sleep. But despite his somnolence, his legs were rolling forward, obeying the girl who had suddenly become his bright spot. Eventually they reached her building and Emi, panting and her face gleaming with sweat, pressed both her palms onto his chest.

‘Not before you swear that you won’t say a word!’

Sal hurried to swear: ‘I swear!’

But Emi shook her head in distress. ‘Not like that; that’s rubbish!’

Sal stood perplexed. ‘Come on, say what you want me to do!’

The girl’s round, black irises disappeared behind her eyelids. Emi kept her eyes closed for several seconds, and when she lifted her eyelids again, fluttering her long eyelashes, she had once more that exhilarated look that somewhat scared Sal.

‘Look, it’s no big deal, but you need to have guts! Can you do it?’

‘You bet I can!’ Sal rushed to answer.

‘So this is what we’ll do: we’ll snick our fingers, drip a little blood on a shard of glass left over from my father…’

‘On a glass slide…’

‘Right, and then we’ll spit and mix it well together. You’ll smudge my forehead and I’ll smudge yours, and then we’ll swear to keep the secret.’

Emi’s face was beaming with delight, but Sal just watched her with amusement.

‘So what? Do you think that will prevent us from talking? Spit and blood?’

Emi put on a long face – not because Sal was deeming risible the importance of the oath, but especially because he could never participate in her games, or in any games for that matter. He did the same with the boys. That’s where his funny lies and pretences also came from, because it was beneath his dignity to take part in their nonsense. Sometimes she had the impression that Sal would rather have stayed alone all day, lolling about or meditating on the things he thought he saw, because Sal had this gift, which many thought was just a fancy, to see things that were invisible to everyone else. But she believed him, because she could read on his face the uneasiness bestirred by the beauty or the horridness of his findings – like now, when he showed reluctance in swearing to keep her secret.

They stood by the gate looking at one another, sweaty and panting.

‘All right, Sal, we’ll do as you wish!’ Emi started to climb the stairs, two at a time, while he followed her at a slower pace. They went up all four floors, and on the last one, Emi squatted while she waited for Sal to catch up.

‘You know,’ Sal told her out of breath, ‘my word should be enough. I would never betray you!’

Emi lifted her head, gazing at him. Then she braced herself, took off and jumped to catch the hanging metal ladder that led to the roof. She lifted the hatch and put her head out, scrutinising her territory with her legs still hanging inside and half her torso outside. After a few seconds she disappeared, thumping on the hot roofing sheets. Sal heard her voice trilling from above, urging him to climb faster. Her secret was safe, he thought. When he had said that he would never betray her, the words had bound him more than an oath. While saying them, a thrill had crossed his body. He was stirred by a commitment that opened a long road ahead of them. He had butterflies in his stomach and felt a choking happiness.

Emi was holding on to a television aerial and leaning over the gutter, inspecting the space below them. Sal advanced falteringly. When he reached her, he sat down on his bottom. The roof was still hot, burning and diffusing the heat stored at noontime and in the early afternoon, but as the seconds passed the unpleasant feeling started to wear off.

‘Look!’ Emi pointed somewhere in the distance. ‘I can see the roof of your house. In the afternoon, when I can creep out of my room, I climb here and stay on watch. I imagine what you could be doing under the roof. I imagine you living in a rum baba, Sal…’

Emi turned to him and burst into laughter. Sal was delighted by the comparison of his house to a cake.

‘I remove the top and watch you sleeping on piles of cream… ‘

The sun was melting into the horizon and, although the air was still sultry, the heat had somewhat abated. Sal invited her in a subdued voice to sit beside him. He groped again for the shape in his shorts pocket, just to check: it was still there, sitting quietly. He realised he didn’t exactly know what he was looking for with that strange gift on the roof, with Emi who was already staring at him with her round eyes wide open, waiting for the secret he was offering in exchange. Because that’s what Emi was waiting for, actually: an honest exchange, so she could set her heart at ease and keep on spying on her friends perched up here.

‘I have something very important to tell you. But you have to promise, like you had me promise, that you’ll keep your mouth shut and that you’ll take my word for it. What do you say?’ Sal smiled at her, but Emi remained still. She didn’t seem to hear his jokes; she was eager for the swap.

‘Okay.’

He put his hand in his pocket and took out the metal box. There were a few beads of sweat on its lid. Sal wiped it clean with the back of his palm and handed it to Emi. His hand remained, hanging aimlessly in the air, for several long seconds. Emi was still watching him, uninterested. ‘What’s that?’

Sal held the box forth again, but Emi continued to stay in the same position, refusing to look at it. ‘Is this your secret, Sal?’

He nodded. Emi extended her fingers for the metal box and grabbed it with disappointment. She opened it hastily and a slanting light splashed her face. The hacked finger, with the black-stoned ring sitting stately upon it, smiled to her from inside. Sal was beaming with joy. His sweaty face had ecstasy written all over it, and his eyelids were closing with excitement. Emi touched the stone with the tip of her index finger, stroking it gently. Dumbstruck with amazement, she looked at Sal with tears in her eyes and exhaled in a slow sigh. ‘Oh, my, Sal, what a beautiful ring!’

Then she cautiously touched the red-lacquered fingernail. ‘How beautiful!’ she went on wondering, and then lay down on her back, satisfied.

Sal lay down beside her. He thought about the things he had done during the day, about his walks, home from school and then out to Harry’s, about the goal he had scored and about the cheering girls and about the flower vases that smiled on the windowsill of the dentist’s office.

‘Did you buy yourself an ice-cream after all?’

‘No…’

‘Maybe we’ll go down later and buy some waffles at the corner.’

They could hear a siren wailing from below. Emi sighed. ‘Do you realise, right now, at this very moment, someone is passing by–someone who is sick, maybe even dying, someone who is going to die tonight…’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Do you realise, Sal?’

At least twice a month, Emi had fits of melancholia that sometimes led to a sorrow that lasted a whole day. He liked to listen to her thinking out loud, because that was when she dared to reveal her tiny anxieties, speak honestly about herself and admit that behind her naughty face and her inquisitive glance, her girlish fears lay hidden.

‘Look at the sky in that direction! I think it’s going to rain again.’

Emi looked where Sal’s finger was pointing. In the distance, the sky had turned purple. The colour of their skin had changed, too.

‘It hasn’t been raining today,’ she sighed, wiping her forehead dry with the back of her hand. ‘Where did you get this finger from?’

‘Harry’s building…’

‘You found it there? On the ground?’

Sal put his arms under his head. ‘No, I actually cut it off.’

Emi opened her eyes wide, screwing up her lips in a surprised O. ‘No kidding!’

She seemed to ponder. Sal’s disclosure weighed more than his secret. She had to consider whether to sound him out further or not. What secret could she have offered in exchange? She rummaged in all the corners of her mind. No, she had none left… Emi’s trunk was empty; there was only some small change left at the bottom, which she was wondering now if she should lay on the table. But curiosity was gnawing her inside. And the finger was luring her with its black stone.

‘How do you mean you cut it? You cut it off someone’s hand? Is that what you mean?’

‘Well, yes…’

Emi stood up, looking blank. ‘I don’t understand. How could you do something like that? Whose hand did you cut it off?’

Sal suddenly felt sleepy. He was dying to close his eyes that very instant and sleep with no dreams. But he knew that Emi was going to use her weapons and, eventually, force all the details out of him.

‘Tell me, Sal, what have you done?’

And, as always, words started to pour out of Sal’s mouth like so many beads. As he told his story, time itself seemed to have stopped, because the light had frozen still and was bathing them now in its dead colours.

‘I want to see her myself!’

He had known perfectly well that this would happen and that, if he was against it, Emi would have gone anyway to Harry’s basement to poke about. And he didn’t find it in his heart to let her grope in the dark by herself. They climbed down from the roof and then dashed to Harry’s building. Sal was silent while Emi ceaselessly chattered about her dream from the previous night, about the ladybird collection she kept in a box, hidden in the bathroom cabinet, about spying from the roof and about the chilled elderflower juice waiting for her in the fridge when she returned home. But when they were about to enter the building, they ran into Harry. Sal sighed with relief.

‘Where did you go, you bastard?’ Harry exclaimed. Then he cast a murderous look at Emi. ‘It’s because of you that we lost the game, you know?’ He turned to Sal again with a mistrustful look and started to sound him out: ‘What were you doing here?’

Sal sized up the circumstances. They were looking for the body of a woman that he – Sal – had discovered in Harry’s basement, that afternoon when he had been the only one to take shelter from an imaginary rain. It was the answer he should have given, serenely, assuming a countenance that would suggest he wasn’t willing to go on with further explanations. It was the answer he felt floating in the air around Emi, who was piqued about the charges that had just been made against her. That’s why he made a step back and mumbled a lie. It was already dark outside, so nobody noticed him blushing. Only Emi, when grabbing his hand, felt his sweaty palm and gave out a muffled giggle because she knew that Sal was an awful liar.

They parted in front of Harry’s building, each heading in a different direction. Emi was mad about the encounter that had broken the spell between herself and Sal, and because she hadn’t been able to see for herself what he had seen so that she could give him the hottest secret in exchange. She wanted to tell him what she had found out pretty late herself, almost half a year before, when Sal had been sick in bed and gone for a week, giving no sign whatsoever.

Back then, Emi had shifted rapidly from feelings of spite and hate to despair, regret and vengefulness. Sal’s disappearance meant a lack of concern for her, carelessness and, ultimately, abandonment. Her mind was filled with a rapidly fading image of Sal, with the memory of his voice and the amazing stories he told when he felt like it, with the places they had roamed together. She understood gradually that these things had become important and were smouldering now inside her, like cake dough on the stove. And, albeit reluctantly, she had begun to register the indescribable feeling that haunted her, and to be scared by it.

When she found out, after three tormenting days of uncertainty, that Sal was sick in bed, febrile and delirious, a happy smile emerged on Emi’s face. Then a shadow covered her face again and she refused to leave her house. She locked herself inside her room, lowered her blinds and took it into her head not to eat anything anymore. She would say she was sleeping and now, looking back, sleep was all she remembered. One day not long before this episode with Sal, her mother had told her – matter-of-factly, while knitting her a pair of leg warmers – that love was a rare thing that you’d better not let someone in on unless you were sure it really existed in your soul. Actually, her mother added after a break, you’d better not ever let anyone in on it, because people are inclined to take advantage of any weakness. It is only in movies and in books that people say ‘I love you’ to one another at every turn.

But love is feebleness of the body, like some kind of disease that takes a long time to heal. And Emi, in all those days in which she had been waiting for Sal, felt her whole body weakened, with a feeling of emptiness inside and a vague pain radiating to the very depths of her being. She had made a vow, in those three days of self-imprisonment, not to breathe a word to anyone about what she had discovered. On the third day she decided to go and see him as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn’t even noticed his disappearance.

She found him lying in bed: pale as a ghost, bathed in a dense sweat, like a pellicle that blurred the features her eyes were used to. The Sal she knew had vanished under that pasty layer and was shouting out voicelessly, begging with his eyes to be released. Emi sat down on the side of the bed and took his hand, gripping it. First she gripped it gently, then harder and harder, with all her strength, but he remained still and his hand didn’t twitch for a split second in her grip. His eyes were open, and he was just staring ahead in a dreamy state. Emi stuck out her tongue, made all sorts of funny faces, but he remained stuck in idle reverie. Finally, convinced that Sal was absent from this world, at least for the moment, she lay down over him and took him in her arms. A few clear tears dropped from her round eyes, through which Sal saw her, magnified. After less than five minutes, Emi fell asleep. She woke up soon afterward and remembered then -which she would later completely forget–that she had dreamt something terrible.

She was fumbling down the dark corridors of a hotel. The hotel was shabby. The walls were covered in textured red silk and the doors, made of black painted wood, looked like embedded coffins. Emi was looking for a man in one of the rooms. She could already visualise him lying flat on his stomach, naked, across the crumpled sheet. With all her senses sharpened, she was advancing slowly on the red corridor, holding on with the tips of her fingers to the silk yarn on the wall to keep contact with reality. She stopped a little, pricking up her ears. From the other end of the corridor she could hear voices and a commotion. And then, out of the blue, she saw a bunch of people rushing toward her. She fumbled anxiously and pressed the first door handle, which opened right away. She entered an empty room, illuminated by two reading lamps; It was perfectly tidy. The noise on the corridor had died out while Emi inspected the room, but the voices burst out again outside the door. Emi opened the closet and hid inside it. It smelled like jasmine. Someone entered the room. She hunkered down with her mouth pressed against her knees, trying to hold her breath. The jasmine smell choked her to the point of suffocation. The person in the room stopped in front of the closet door and leaned against it. Emi squeezed her eyes tight, waiting for the door to open and for her location to be disclosed. And suddenly, outside the closet, she heard the faltering, tearful voice of a woman.

‘Please, tell me, before someone walks in!’

And from somewhere very close, as if he were speaking to her – to Emi – came the husky, tired voice of the man.

‘What do you want me to say?’

After a break, the woman resumed, seeming to struggle: ‘I have the feeling that things have deteriorated between us – that it’s over.’

Emi heard a long sigh followed by loud crying. She wished she could see the woman in the room, but that meant she would have to come out of her hiding place. The voice outside died away in sobs. The woman was panting for breath and in Emi’s mind the desire to see her took shape, stronger than her instinct to stay hidden, stronger than her fear of being disclosed. She wished she could step into their argument and reconcile them. Her soul felt hollow and she suddenly started to miss Sal, to miss him so ardently that she started to cry, too; first silently, then louder and louder, indifferent to whether she would give herself away or not. And the jasmine smell choked her so badly that she darted out and found herself in the middle of an empty room, exactly as she had left it before hiding in the closet. She woke up with her face bathed in tears and saw the boy gawking at her from behind the pellicle of sweat. She tried to fall asleep again and resume her dream, but Sal’s mother had entered the room and her face showed surprise of having found the two children cuddled together in bed.

That’s when Emi had found out what love was, in the strange dream whose story she had immediately forgotten, retaining instead the feeling of fear and apprehension she had experienced upon awakening and seeing the face of the sick boy begging her to stay with him, just like the woman in her dream. So that’s what it was supposed to be: a long suffering, an unceasing array of anxieties, followed by a slow death. Her parents had broken up a year before, but instead of suffering, Emi had been relieved. The coldness in the house had been replaced by some sort of tranquillity and by the freedom to do what she pleased.

She had discovered the roof a long time before, but it was only a year since the pleasure of sitting perched up there and spying on people’s moves had become absolute. And it was there that she retreated again, after saying goodbye to Sal and to Harry, to reflect on what had happened that day. She didn’t have patience to wait until the next day, but she also lacked the courage to go see for herself what was in Harry’s basement. She was experiencing the same curiosity as in that dream of long ago which she barely remembered. She opened the box from Sal and fingered the darkness inside it. The living finger and the dead one met. The living one grabbed the dead one and took off its ring. She put it on her ring finger, but the ring was wide: if she had lowered her hand, it would have slid off, rolling over the gutter and into the air. She lay on her back, put her head down and, a few minutes later, she fell asleep.