Sun Alley

by Cecilia Stefanescu

  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 be
gan 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.