Sun Alley

by Cecilia Stefanescu

  ‘Do you remember the lemon tree in my garden? The one we planted together?’ she finally asked him in a coarse voice.

  He shook his head.

  ‘That’s impossible. We sang incantations one night so that it would grow. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No. Maybe you planted it after I left.’

  ‘No, no, you left a year after the lemon tree died. I’m quite sure of that. You forgot. Anyway, a few days ago I bought one from the market.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to feel that sour-green smell in the house.’

  He stopped. Her face looked tired and all her features drooped, flowing downward and making her look older.

  ‘When are you supposed to be back home?’

  ‘I don’t know. In an hour. Why?’

  He didn’t answer, because he had no idea why he had asked. He wished she would have said she had to go now. The questions in his mind reached hers in a strange way and then nestled there, tormenting her. There were different suspicions every day, and they would take shape and grow according to various signals she received from him or from around them. Every minute reality changed and, the more minutes passed, the more she expected to find an ogre at the other end who would gobble her lungs, pierce her chest and tear out her guts, wrap them around her neck and choke her with them, all the while watching her suffer and comforting her in his real voice with the same pompous words they used to speak long ago when no suspicion troubled them.

  They had met again after more than twenty years. They were both standing, back to back, in a crowd of sweaty and impatient people by the counter of a downtown post office. Each of them was immersed in their own thoughts about what they were going to do that day. He was thinking especially about his daughters who were going to start school in autumn, although they already knew, at six, how to add and subtract, and occasionally they could also multiply if their father gave them simple numbers. They would read The Little Prince by themselves in the evenings, in two voices, and they wouldn’t ask how children were made. He was charmed by his taciturn girls; he felt them threatened by the premature discoveries they would make on their own, and sometimes he was tempted to sound them out, to rummage through their minds, to find out how it worked. In the warm and humming post office, like an animal in whose belly they had all found refuge, he thought about his girls, who were more silly than brilliant.

  It made him drowsy to lean on the backrest of the huge armchair, nicely dressed and wearing yellow shoes whose rubber soles, upon which you could still discern traces of a label with the number 33, squeaked at every move. He wanted to get out but, while he pushed his way through the crowd, he bumped into her face: almost paralysed with excitement and staring at him in disbelief, seeking assurance. They embraced and exchanged telephone numbers. Before long, she called him to confess how happy she was at their reunion. He added that his only regret was they had lost so many years without knowing a thing about one another. Yes, she said, carried away, especially as all this time she had often been thinking about him.

  The hardest part was getting over the self-consciousness in the beginning. But once they went beyond it, the embarrassment of the reunion worked like an aphrodisiac, inebriating them. Not for a second was there any feeling of guilt toward their partners. They had found out from the first sentences that they were both married, and he had proudly added that he had two daughters. They laughed, congratulated each other with hypocrisy and immediately chased from their minds the details of their lives so far. They had to reestablish an order in the universe and, little by little, the order really started to be re-established. They weren’t essentially taking anything that hadn’t already been theirs before; that they hadn’t been robbed of long ago. And now they were mending the abandoned machine and tying together the broken links.

  Yet the pure relationship, overcast by vague purple clouds, had changed into an ordeal, a small-scale apocalypse, an amor mundi. ‘It’s all about the look you cast around you,’ someone had said to them once, and someone else had sententiously proclaimed: ‘Break-ups harden souls.’ Now he would have told the first one that they were right and the second one that they were mistaken. ‘Breaking up cannot nourish what we no longer have,’ they both said to themselves and continued to see each other serenely, without the slightest shade of guilt.

  She waited for his answer and, as it was slow in coming, she continued, ‘But it’s not mandatory. I mean, I can delay it. I can say that I had work to do in the office, which is true.’

  He threw her an angry gaze. She said things like that with such serenity, as if she didn’t realise. She complained that they were living like outlaws and that their lives were interlaced with lies, and a few minutes later she volunteered to make up stories only to stay together a bit longer. And this ceaseless swinging between two equally unreasonable extremes – between the reproach of not having had the life they deserved and the guilt of having to find subterfuges that humiliated them and made them feel cruel – exhausted him. He foresaw nothing good in the future. Where to search for happiness when it had ceased to exist for you?

  ‘But then again, if I lied for so little, it would only do us harm. I would always think I did it for you and would later come to hold it against you.’

  Sometimes he fancied he could hear her thoughts, as if she stood nestled in his mind and answered him with that air of superficial innocence. He wasn’t sure she had really thought about him while they didn’t see each other, but he had been thinking about her. The memory had grown, inflated from within like a bubble about to explode, and she had become different: many-faced, many-featured, with many personalities, all loved, adored and, in the end, loathed and punished. The game had repeated indefinitely, in the marital sheets, in the official postures, in respite, in their sleep and in their dreams. If he were to feel guilty, the guilt would be found there and not here, where solutions were simple and so familiar to them. He had even made up a defense speech in his mind. It was one of the overwhelming arguments prepared for Matilda: that betrayal had taken place long before it had been consumed and that the absurdity of it all resided right in these indisputable yet delusive and belated facts.

  Today these facts no longer meant anything: that they were fucking like horny dogs in parks, afraid they would be found out, in cheap hotels neighbouring the railway station or on the outskirts of the city; at work or in the greenhouse where he grew his plants and took his daughters every week. Nothing of what they hadn’t already accepted as inevitable could be disclosed. It was weird to acknowledge that their perceptions, albeit naïve, extended to all the other people around them. They were sure that witnesses lived with the notion that they were tied by the cause-and-effect chain, and that it wasn’t out of the ordinary for them to be seen together, to touch one another in public or to behave more intimately with each other than normal, since their previous friendship seemed to condone this. They passed unnoticed; sometimes eliciting sympathy and other times envy for the fact that a friendship could be resumed after so long. The world around existed as a setting, an imitation of an abstract reality, a surrogate in which it was easy to leave the secret life exposed. This excessive and newly experienced freedom discouraged them at first. And later they had used it, in all its details that supplied them with alibis and covers.

  ‘Last night I dreamt that I was home alone, lying down on the couch. There was a purple light in the room, and I just stayed anesthetised, overcome by fatigue. Suddenly, an image appeared on the TV screen, fuzzy at first. But after a few seconds I realised that it was actually me. I was speaking about us. I was very tense. I had on garish makeup; my lips were extremely red. I was recounting to the man in front of me, a dark-skinned midget of a man, how unhappy we had been together. I was amazed by the fact that he seemed interested in the story. I threatened to describe our relationship in the smallest details: I was telling him how you had left me although you promised not to; how, when we broke up, I had threatened to ki
ll myself. Then I burst out crying. The midget tried to comfort me, but he kept this awkward smile on his face and, every now and again, he would turn and wink to the camera. I wished I could turn off the TV, but that deplorable image of my abandoned self kept me awake. In front of me, I could see a cunning and self-assured woman bearing my features and my name, collapsed with her head on a desk in a demonstration of agony. And although I loathed her, with her cheap clothes and her grotesque countenance, I somehow commiserated with her and wished to see her avenged. ‘

  ‘So, it wasn’t really us.’

  ‘Yes, it was us, unfortunately. Our names and our bodies.’

  ‘I find it strange.’

  He stopped. The city unfolded before them. Only a few steps away, the greenery and the light disappeared. ‘I find it strange that you chose to tell me about this dream now, of all moments. I understand it otherwise: you feel you are living promiscuously and you would do anything to escape.’

  The woman grabbed the bottom of her dress. They had both calmed down; the argument had worn off and only its remains lingered now, scattered across the path of the park.

  ‘Stop talking to me like that. You have no idea what’s in my mind. I’m very tired now and I feel totally worn out. I think I have been too accommodating and that I’ll soon hate you, because everything that I did today was entirely for you in order to protect your pride.’

  On the balcony of a two-storey house with large arcades stood a man, his elbows leaning on the railing, absently contemplating the view. He was a famous actor and they both flinched when recognising him.

  ‘Isn’t it that actor…?’

  ‘Yes, it’s him. Although it looks as if it’s just someone who resembles him. He looks better on TV.’

  They waved to him, and he waved kind-heartedly in response. He acted as if he were on a steamboat, waving good-bye to relatives standing on the pier flapping their tear-soaked handkerchiefs, while they felt like travellers just having discovered a compatriot in a totally foreign country. They cheered up, as everything else around them had cheered up. The voices of the children remained behind them in the park, echoing over the vegetation, beyond the fences.

  ‘If we had met that man on the street, you wouldn’t have dared show you recognised him, would you?’

  He laughed. She wasn’t very brave herself, but her hidden glance, like that of an introverted girl, made her seem self-assured and contemptuous. ‘If we had met, he would have looked at you, not me at him.’

  ‘Nobody looks at me. Sometimes, when I walk on the street, I feel invisible. Most people look at me as if they didn’t see me. I realise why they say that beauty comes from within.’

  ‘What do you know? You are a fool. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. And you have no idea.’

  That was where the park ended. They had stepped beyond the safe zone. Cars buzzed by in smooth motion, slaloming around the marks that seemed like gigantic hopscotch courses made for adults. The playground was full; the cars came in all colours and shapes so that grownups didn’t want for anything. They came with different horns, with leather interiors from which lifeless dummies breathed in the clean air ventilated from the outside in, while music filtered note after note out the exhaust pipes. The music rose up to the sky, but not very far, because halfway up it would evaporate into small particles that pricked the noses and eardrums of passersby. Confined in their beautifully smelling bubbles, the dummies would weigh their gestures, pull away and stop correctly, at statutory distances. The slightest deviation would have created chaos. But there was no deviation. Strung out on the road, nicely aligned, the coloured bubbles flowed before their eyes, making their way to mysterious destinations.

  ‘I should take a bus from here.’

  ‘I’ll see you off.’

  She threw him a distressed gaze. He only said it to be polite, because he knew that he couldn’t see her off properly and that, even if he did see her off, he would only have extended that wearisomely endless day.

  ‘No, no. You don’t have to.’

  She imagined how it would have been if, instead of parting at the bus stop, they had both climbed on the bus and rode together toward the same destination, had got off the bus in the same place, had headed the same way, on the same street, to the same house number, and at the door they had discovered that they had identical keys. Life together was rather what they shared now, she told herself, getting on the bus and watching the man left behind, looking at the vehicle that droned away with coloured array. She had an unsettling feeling of satisfaction, and she had no idea where it had come from. The secret, borne with such style, seemed less terrible. Buried among the people in the bus – some sweaty and fussing with their clothes, others clinging limply to the metal bars waiting for the next stop – it lost its power and became an ordinary secret. All the passengers of that bus had at least one similar secret.

  At home, waiting for her husband, who always came on time or always called when he was late, their affair resumed its dramatic dimensions and had to be buried appropriately. She also had to prepare herself to endure the serene and carefree man from the moment he walked through the door, always cheerful before dinner and drowsy afterward, to the moment he left again the following morning. She heard the telephone ringing in the other room, but she didn’t feel like getting out of bed. If there was a chance she would wake up and still be alone, then she preferred to find out later.

  The telephone gave out another long buzz. Its sound was infinitely amplified by the overwhelming drowsiness that had seized her. Eventually, she woke up and struggled to her feet, groping for the receiver, guided by the tune.

  ‘Did you get home safely?’

  He almost never called her at home, so his voice gave her a start.

  ‘I’ve been thinking that today has been a strange day for us. For me, at least, it has been a hard day.’

  Now she wished she had stayed in bed and not answered the telephone. How could you choose? What time could you set your alarm clock for your life to take a good turn?

  ‘I don’t think we should talk about this anymore.’

  There was silence at the other end of the line. Sometimes they would stay on the phone for minutes on end without talking. The first time she had felt tempted to fill the gaps with chit-chat, but in time she realised that it was enough to just breathe.

  ‘Where are you calling from?’

  ‘I’ve just arrived home myself.’

  He couldn’t have got there so quickly. He had to cross half the city and, even by taxi, it still would have taken him at least three quarters of an hour. And the fact that she had to imagine he was somewhere else, lying to her only to comfort her, drove her out of her mind. He did so only to make a full stop, to invoke her well-being, while in fact she would then have to chew it over, turn the events inside out and find explanations, and then accept the fact that he was somewhere else. For that, he deserved it if she hung up on him and didn’t answer his calls for another week. She could already see him lurking round her building, watching the entrance, spying on her movements at the apartment’s windows, shivering at night and sweating during the day.

  ‘Next week, we’re leaving for the seaside,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to know.’

  ‘It’s good you told me. We’ll probably leave, too, but I don’t know where and when yet. You should tell me the dates you’ll be gone. But we’ll talk again.’

  ‘What do you mean, we’ll talk again?’

  ‘We might go at the same time as you or we might leave exactly when you’re coming back, which would mean that we’ll talk later.’

  ‘And when will you find out?’

  ‘I haven’t got the slightest idea. It might be just a couple of days before, but that wouldn’t help us. Maybe we should let things take their own course and see after that.’

  ‘You drive me crazy. See what?’

  ‘You make it sound as if I knew!’

  ‘But then how can you say, ‘Let things take the
ir own course’? It seems cynical, to say the least, unless you want by all means to hurt me worse than you already did today.’

  She felt him writhe and become shrewd at the other end of the line, where only he knew the truth. If she had hung up on him then, he would have continued to call, and that stupid tune – a piece by Bach, chosen by Matei – would have tingled in her ear, wearing her out. In the end, they would have been in the same situation they were in now.

  When they had started seeing each other again, she made him promise solemnly that they would be honest. He had laughed and said that the last thing two people in love wanted was honesty. But she was careful to emphasise that what disgusted her most was that metamorphosis in people’s behaviour when they suddenly became too intimate, because they knew each other so well to the finest creases of their bodies. It seemed to give them immeasurable freedom that could lead them to destroy the human before them, whom they had previously loved despite the distance. She didn’t like love; she found it aggressive and incomprehensible, and it was because it was incomprehensible that people started to behave ignorantly, wishing to survive it. She assuredly watched him promise that everything between them would stay the same. And in that instant, when the words had flown off their lips, a straight and bewildering road opened before them: a road that seemed endless, even if endlessness was simply their wishes’ fulfilment.

  On that street they had roamed together a thousand times, from one end to the other, love seemed friendly and sincere -and so did the promises. She believed him especially because, ever since she had known him, all he said became true. His words really shaped reality; he was a wizard hidden inside a lonely and moping child. How could she not believe him? After such a long time, after years of searching for his face in crowds of people, after the lush dreams and the lonely nights, after regretting all that she hadn’t said at a certain moment or all that she had hidden deeply, he had appeared out of the blue, just as she had given up hope.