Sun Alley Read online

  ‘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 impa
tience. 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.