Sun Alley

by Cecilia Stefanescu

  ‘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.r />
  ‘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.

  III

  EMI IS DREAMING

  He woke up with a heavy head and feeling nauseous. There was a commotion in the house, and he remembered that it was Sunday and that his parents were at home. The thought made him sad, because he would have to lie again that he was going out to play with the boys. For unknown reasons, his mother didn’t like Emi at all, and to avoid wry faces when he mentioned her, Sal preferred to mumble a lie. He heard a few knocks on the door, and then he heard his father’s voice urging him to wake up. It was nine o’clock sharp. He lay back down and closed his eyes. Outside he could hear the automated buzz of a drill press; its long, even noise had invaded his room and had now settled in his mind. In a way, it was pleasant not to think about anything, to let the wish to concentrate on anything in the exterior world beside the noise outside fade away and die. He propped his mind against it and abandoned himself to the feeling that he was floating above the bed, supported by the ceaseless sound. But the noise stopped and Sal jumped upright. His headache was now duller, its bolts seemingly digging into his skull with a squeak. The hustle and bustle outside his room got louder, and he could hear his mother’s shrill voice, chatting with the woman who was helping in the kitchen.

  In less than an hour, Sal was back romping on the streets of the neighbourhood. First he had to stop at Toma’s to exchange games. He had no idea where he got them from, but at Toma’s he could always find Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Treasure Hunt, Spintop, Mikado… and now Tomo had allured him with a new and pompous game Sal had already heard an earful about called The Sphinx. Sal wasn’t much of a game freak, but he found playing in itself mind-expanding and it helped him to better orientate himself. It shed light on his friends and on the way in which he could approach them in tense situations. Actually, for some time, he had been regarding his friends and the streets they lived and walked on as a huge game with several strategic points, whose stakes were survival in isolation, keeping secrets and, last but not least, seducing the girls. Wasn’t that what he longed for all day long? Wasn’t that his carefully pursued aim? What would Harry have thought of him if he confessed one day that he’d rather chat with Emi instead of playing ball with them on the school field? How long would it have taken Harry to tell all the boys what he had found? An hour, perhaps, but Sal didn’t care; he wasn’t interested in what they said but in the fact that, once his friends abandoned him, the game wouldn’t matter any more. Once there would be no one left to hide from, his secret would disappear as well, vanishing with the ones that threatened it. And maybe, he assumed, the pleasure of getting together with Emi would disappear too, the pleasure of hearing her squeaking voice answer his phone calls at four o’clock in the afternoon, pretending not to know who was on the other end of the line as if it made no difference to her whatsoever who it might have been. The freedom of going to her place would have impaired their relationship. And the fact that they were hiding was steering them, one step at a time, to a more complex level, which he had trouble defining precisely but which he felt drew them together in an inexplicable and beautiful way.

  Toma had the wealthiest family among them all. He lived in a proper house, with a ground floor and a first floor, with a terrace on which in summer the ping-pong table sat in state. The boys held championships, and they were always treated with iced Coke and all sorts of cakes laid out on a table brought especially for the purpose and set in a corner of the terrace. The championships made Sal especially happy because, when they gathered there, Toma was considerate enough to also invite the girls in the neighbourhood to liven up the atmosphere, and since the day Harry had decided it was so, Emi was one of those girls. Among the boys, warmed up by the exercise and competition, Sal and Emi felt as if they were in a cocoon. They would dart furtive glances at one another: their eyes speaking thousands of words, secretly making fun of their friends and flirting as if they had just met.

  One day, Emi had dragged him through the labyrinth of what seemed to be Toma’s enormous house. The rooms were arranged in a circle; with doors that opened onto other rooms. You could start at any spot, then cross several rooms stuffed with paintings in thick frames – some simple wooden ones, others adorned and gilded, but now all crammed into each other – along the walls, You would bump against several old armchairs with silk upholstery arranged in symmetrical order and finally come full circle to where you had started. Sal loved to hang around that house and always discovered beautiful objects that he would touch hypnotically; he would have lingered for hours in contemplation if the boys hadn’t almost always called him back to play.

  That day, Emi had sneaked in from the terrace and beckoned him to follow her. They crossed two rooms to get to a third, which was usually locked and where he discovered a cabinet full of old weapons in one of the dark corners they hadn’t managed to explore so far. Getting closer and pressing his nose to the window, Sal saw a few pistols with inwrought wooden butts placed next to two rifles, a harquebus and a musket and, in the middle, three swords aligned next to their scabbards with inlaid oriental decoration. The swords seemed to be the oldest items.

  Sal touched the wooden edges of the cabinet with his fingers. He wished he could open it a little and hold in his hand the marve
ls gleaming beneath the window, but the weapons were locked away.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Emi was glancing at him, amused. He showed her the cabinet. ‘Look!’

  Emi drew near and looked over his shoulder. The weapons didn’t seem to make such an impression on her. She shrugged her shoulders and grabbed his hand. ‘Come on! I’ll show you something else!’

  But Sal stubbornly refused to move. ‘Just stay a little while!’

  Emi pursed her lips and plonked herself in a bergère, as Toma’s mother would bombastically call it. She lifted her knees to her chin and propped her yellow sandals on the pink silk. ‘What are you up to?’

  Sal tried again to see if he could open the glass that separated him from the weapons.

  ‘Do you want me to tell you a story?’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Uh-huh,’ she said, screwing up her face and huddling in the armchair.

  ‘It’s the story of two people, a man and a woman, who loved each other wondrously but, for reasons yet unknown, didn’t manage to stay together, and their story had a sad end…’

  Emi winced, shivering all over. Sal propped his elbows against the cabinet’s window, took a deep breath and started.

  ‘First, I have to tell you about the boy. Ever since birth, Tristan – for that was his name – had an unfortunate destiny. He didn’t get to know his father, who had died on the battlefield, or his mother, who had died while giving birth to him. That’s where, I believe, his name came from: Tristan, from triste… The boy is adopted by his uncle, a powerful king, and raised at his court. But as you can foresee, Tristan is no ordinary child. He is brave and smart and has a magic lamp, but he also has a special capacity; that of seeing things that others don’t see. Moreover, he has warrior blood flowing through his veins. So, hearing that his Uncle Mark’s kingdom is haunted by a child-eating ogre, he sets out to challenge the monster and kills it. During the fight, however, Tristan is poisoned by an arrow. Resigned to the idea of death, he sets out to meet his end like a true hero: at sea.’