‘I would feel more comfortable if you told me when you leave and how long you’re going to stay,’ he insisted. ‘You can ask. It seems a natural question to me.’
‘It would be a natural question if it didn’t come from you. I never requested that you ask anything on my behalf. You told me exactly what you thought appropriate, and I did my best to understand. It didn’t kill me to not know what you did at the weekends or in the evenings or during the day when we didn’t talk and didn’t see each other. You’ll have to deal with the same.’
‘You’re amplifying it. It won’t help us to hide.’
‘Well, it seems to me that it helped us so far. If it doesn’t suit you, then I suggest that we let it all out! Let’s tell the others the truth!’
‘Oh, dear,’ he sighed. ‘When did we start bringing the others into our conversations? Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realise it was impossible for this to turn out differently.’
Now was the moment for them to say all that they hadn’t managed to tell each other throughout the day. It seemed that one of them wanted to receive what the other couldn’t possibly offer. And there also was that constant feeling of dissatisfaction, of a promise that was fading day by day, worn out from their playing with it.
‘As far as I’m concerned, you can call me and ask me where I am or what I am doing anytime. You are free to tell me whatever crosses your mind. You are the only one to constantly remind me that we need to behave. Come on, drop it – didn’t we argue enough today?’
Nothing could be heard any more from beyond the receiver, not even breath.
‘Are you still there?’
The answer came from a choking voice that struggled to repress its trembling. ‘Tomorrow at four, as usual. All right?’
She could have said no. She had the feeling that, if they had chosen a different hour, they both would have ended up groping in the dark and everything would have come easily apart, as if they had woken from a dream.
‘Yes, it’s all right.’
‘Are you going to bed now?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll read something before I do. I had fallen asleep when the phone rang. I have no idea what time it is.’
‘It’s nine. We separated four hours ago.’
‘Four hours. Then I must have slept. I had the feeling I had barely closed my eyes…’
‘Good night.’
A bluish fog floated into the house. There was a single table lamp on in the living room, its light filtering through the slits. She cautiously opened the door and looked around the room. The TV set was turned off, its remote control neatly placed on the coffee table in front of the couch. All objects waited inertly for the return of their owners. She went on with her inspection: in the kitchen, in the remaining rooms, in the pantry, in the bathroom. She was still alone.
She could have sworn that she had only fallen asleep for a few minutes. This meant that it was sheer luck that she hadn’t been found out and, deep inside, she was angry that things had not taken another turn. No sooner had she finished her thought than she heard the key turn a couple of times in the front door lock, with that monotone noisy snap. The smell of cologne rushed in, invading her nostrils. A big man entered the room, rattling a big bunch of keys in his hand.
‘I’ve been calling over and over, but the line was busy.’
He drew near and squeezed her in his arms. She relaxed. Her weariness showed, but she smiled like a saleswoman trained to sell her goods. She watched herself from the outside and loathed it.
‘I don’t know what to say. I’ve been sleeping.’
Matei left the living room and she followed him, thinking of what she had just said. Her words had echoed as if in a bottomless cave. When they had moved into the house, ten years before, everything seemed to invite happiness. They had arranged it all according to her taste, according to her extreme attention to detail. Each corner of the bright rooms, painted in different colours, had been imaginatively enhanced. It had taken her half a year to decorate the whole house, during which they migrated from one room to another, as they were finished. His patience and her passion had pleasantly enlivened the place so that, when all of the work was finished, they had both sighed in relief and lounged on the uncomfortable couches in the living room, thinking that, from that moment on, at home had acquired a new meaning for them. ‘At home’ was a cabinet with lots of precious and useless shiny objects on display, a meeting place in which movements needed to be adjusted so that they didn’t disturb the objects.
When you are poor, you dream of wealth is like this simple sandwich that beckons to you from beyond the TV screen, and when you are unhappy, happiness is this suckling pig stuffed with delicacies from which you eat continuously and never satiate yourself. And when poverty is replaced by wealth, you get the idea that you are a step away from being wealthy and happy too. Their home was the sandwich she had eaten without any appetite. She had been chewing on it for ten years. Now, as time went by, that dream of endlessness was becoming a tiny, personal nightmare, about which there was no one to complain to. The rooms had worn out in time, the order had been disturbed and the initial neatness had faded. The furniture was scratched, the sofas had lint on the edges, the fibre of the carpets had thinned, and objects had chipped or broken or been lost. Eventually, she came to think that nothing lasts forever and that, once objects wore out and even disappeared, your habits, and even the life you lived would disappear as well. You start a regression back to the time before the reality you built. But it hadn’t happened exactly like that.
All that was left of the sulky girl was a discontented woman. Over ten years, she had built herself an elaborate history made up of conflicting parts. Her mother represented a part, her father the other. Her father was more visible and more spectacular, while her mother withered day after day, the exact opposite of what happened in real life. The stories came and went like the tide, and she would dress up and embellish some of them so that the whole picture didn’t look gaudy. Matei would sit and listen, and the image of the woman standing before him achieved more sophisticated shades, the light falling at different angles that she frugally left exposed to view. Habit insinuated itself between them, one way or another, along with the stories: the TV set glowed upon their faces every evening, providing them with new conversation topics, and they would have fed it nectar and ambrosia, as if it were a god, only to keep it on. Spending weekends away and planning holidays twice a year took up an important space, preceded by intentions and followed by solutions and ideas – the weekly shopping, the small presents he bought her, the bills–which provided continuity and bore witness to their united life.
You can’t even tell when a face becomes that familiar, overlapping with your own. In ten years, their faces had come to look subtly alike, borrowing from one another’s countenances, reflecting the lines. Yet the more striking the reflection was, the bigger the differences were as well. As years went by, they would count them like butterfly collectors, happy to complete their panoply with another exhibit pinned in the collection. During her childhood, she had owned a herbarium in which she pressed all sorts of flowers she had picked in parks, the Botanical Gardens, on trips to the mountains with her parents or just from neighbours’ flowerpots. She had arranged them in alphabetical order according to their scientific names, accumulated tirelessly after befriending a caretaker in the greenhouse in Liberty Park. The caretaker looked like the hunchback of Notre Dame, just as the greenhouse itself looked more like a cathedral in which the religiously grown plants – kept at optimal temperatures, preserved, well nurtured and taken care of – seemed to be more a mummification of the former creatures through which sap used to flow and which now were but relics for freaks to come and pray by.
Beside the fact that, in summer, it was pleasant to sit there and admire the exhibits with exotic names she had learnt by heart–Ranunculus acris, Anemone nemorosa, Helleborus purpurascens, Pulsatilla montana, Levisticum officinale, Papaver somniferu
m, Lunaria rediviva, Syringa vulgaris, Atropa belladonna, Centaurea cyanus, Lilium cadidum–the mornings she spent in the greenhouse were surrounded by the mist of sacredly kept secrets. For her, it had been like training for later life when the secrets would diversify, become more serious and more important. By then, the herbarium with pressed flowers would have already rotted in the basement of her parents’ house. She had no reason to complain, because in the ten years that had passed, her thoughts hadn’t been spoiled, maybe only benumbed, while the people she had met, the roads she had travelled, the places she had been were enshrined in her mind like a holiday photo album.
How long does it take for a plant to die when its light is cut off and nobody waters it or speaks to it any longer? The hunchback had told her, and she had checked for herself on the border of the brackish water of the lake in Liberty Park, that if you know how to speak to them, plants have their methods of answering and of showing you their love. Since that moment, she had begun to murmur all her secrets to their stalks, all the experiences of her day, whether great or small. At the greenhouse, she had even started a diary divided according to subject, days of the week and times of the day. She kept talking to them like that until one day when she decided to stop talking to them completely. She suddenly deserted them because she had nothing left to tell them. She deserted them out of sheer selfishness and the plants withered away – though not as fast as she had thought, but much slower, over time, tormenting her and haunting her nights.
When they ran into one another again, in the crowded post office in which sweaty, over familiar people were jostling against each other, she had locked those ten years in a greenhouse compartment. Now she was afraid to go there and find that they were dead.
‘When do you want us to leave on vacation?’
The words had flown solitarily across the room. Matei was seated at the table eating greedily, moving his jaws and the whole bone structure of his face in a reassuring, albeit mechanical, sign of life. It took him several minutes to answer.
‘I don’t know. I was thinking that, if we want to go both to the seaside and to the mountains, we should leave for the seaside next week, maybe go to a more secluded place, and then we can plan ahead at leisure. At the moment, the seaside is the problem; the rest will work out easily.’
She had listened to the answer without thinking. She found it incredible that she had asked. She was trying to trace within her the broken stitches the words had escaped through, but it was impossible for her to examine herself now. She could feel the tears rushing in her throat, but she swallowed a few times and managed to hold them back.
‘So, next week it shall be.’
It was a statement, but it had sounded like a question.
‘Yes, that’s what I say. Did you want something else?’
She shook her head. Suddenly, an unforeseen feeling of relief took hold of her; the thought of their leaving made her inexplicably happy. She almost felt like hugging him. The cologne smell in the room had faded. She took a deep breath and leaned back. The dim evening light had mellowed her as well. She watched her husband eating composedly, his head bent over the plate. His face, carved in that slanting position upon which light fell partially disfiguring him, was the face of a monster. The park was rustling behind him and the trees had entwined their branches, whispering up above. She startled. What if he could hear them, too? What if he heard what they were saying?
‘Emi, let’s leave.’
Emi turned to Sal, whose face was drowsy. She let out a stifled chuckle and scuttled away on the alley that wound among the green hedges.
V
SUN ALLEY
Sorin Alexandru Lemnaru, or Sal as his friends called him, was born at two o’clock in the afternoon. His mother was in the labour room for a week. The doctors looked sceptically at her from behind their white masks, shaking their heads. At the end of the seven days, an overweight, cyanotic and very silent baby emerged. Some find it utterly inappropriate to talk about things like that, but for Sal entering the world was painfully connected to a lot of noise and a very long wait. They say that after so much time, salty water becomes bittersweet and life turns into death. But any generalisation may be hazardous when it comes to extracting the known from the unknown, all the more so because the way back has proved equally dangerous. After another seven days, Sal came home to the house on Sun Alley carried by two sturdy arms and, from that moment on, the world was immersed in dreams and mystery.
Strange, amber-faced creatures crept into the dark universe. Gilded tadpoles, with the innards of their translucent bodies illuminated. You would only need to grab their split tails to wander through the darkness in which the occasional figure would appear from time to time, although the darkness was more like a steam, diffusing in the compact matter; a humid heat would whip you, alternating with a chilliness that clung to your body like cellophane. Glowing, hot circles, chained to one another, flew on both sides, fading into a lilac-coloured horizon. The smell of rain and wet hair pervaded everything, although the dry atmosphere paralysed the breath and arrested any movement, throwing you into an inanimate agony which touched not the inside, but the surfaces.
The touch itself prompted hundreds of thousands of millions of other touches, and their sharpness penetrated the epidermis, piercing every millimetre with painful sensations. From a certain moment, which could not be recorded, the circles became very slightly deformed, breaking the harmony. Although they remained in their places for a while, regenerating and multiplying apparently endlessly, they finally betrayed their exhaustion. Soon, that tender abandon would become an expanse occupied to its fluid borders; an interior territory collapsed over reality or over what would later generate a reality consisting of ticking, sleep and wakefulness, sweat, pilosity, panic and fear. It would be followed by groping in the dark and by the transition into another state, similar to bliss, but disturbed by falls and leaps and smells running through the whole body, by weird outgrowths protruding through the skin like knives prodding the sour air, and then by boulders tumbling down, pushed by a fleshy mass from an abstract point and set in motion by noises. The possibility of leaving a spot, moving in a straight line, and returning to the same place. To see the other end exactly as it is, but to nonetheless cross through full of hope.
The sounds were burning. And sometimes, there was a bizarre regression in the darkness he had come from; translucent waves, through which immobilised limbs struggled to advance, threatened the slippery being that took refuge inside, screaming in terror. During the perfumed sieges that spread the fear of the end around them, you would hear strange cries; the faces would trickle through the liquid, through the wet transparency that was either cold or too hot, while beyond them the starry darkness smiled through a silent disco and the coloured sequins twinkled within, blinking in solitude and revealing the flesh that quivered in shame, touched by the luminous petals of the rainbow.
‘Sssssssssal! Sssssssssal! Sssssssssal!’
A monochrome thread crept peacefully among the kaleidoscopic pieces and the bubbles gurgling on the illusory surface, breathing through the lung-body; it made the darkness open up and start pulsating, made it sonorous and fluid.
‘Sssssssssal!’
The sound goes round, haloing the skull, while the mist dissipates further, pervading the two caves and then going full circle, knotting its ends.
‘Sssssssssal!’
After the whirlpool drags you for an angstrom or so, you remain nailed because the attraction of the fractions is so strong. Each growing part, in ceaseless expansion, hangs down with the weight of death. You go back in your mind to see your point of departure, but once the image has vanished, its memory disappears as well. You are suspended between spaces, and time flows disproportionately.
‘Sssssssssal!’
Then, every now and again, passages would open. But you could hardly see anything because the luminous spots became blinding, their brightness preventing you from distinguishing beyond their own out
lines. The light, dividing the fractals and the quarks, released a callous and lazy smell. It was followed by a furnace-like heat and incandescent vicinities. They would splutter and smoke and cry out for the giant tubes reaching for the water strip suspended in the void. The stifled, thick sounds would tumble down again from over the huge blanket of oily liquid, kneading it and blending the small being into a dense layer that rendered it immobile. And then the raucous sounds would change into hoarseness, into gnashing, and the epidermis would stretch like plastic film, buzzing over the whole atmosphere and rarefying it.
And all the while the breath would weaken, because the silence around acquired a pasty consistency and the motions made gruelling sounds, like spoilt musical instruments with snapped strings and broken parts. It was the music of the inside, and the creatures populating it were identical, continuous and translucent, as no being can ever be in reality. But that breath pounding in your eardrums was the blind and empty outline, and while the sounds projected naïve drawings on the bed of cumulus gathered in the yawning globes, the feeling of closeness would attract celestial shapes. Mimosas gaping in astonishment, their mouths rounded in perfect, incandescent Os, would throw out flames as if heaven’s gates had opened and it was through them that the diurnal wonders would spill out.
The voice trickled along the ears, like dry molasses, and penetrated the words that were nothing more than the cry of the lonesome rhymester.
‘Sssssssssal!’
He was turning on the tips of his toes and the motion hurt, ringing out in the atmosphere and shattering the density. But, as it had been foreseen, the turn had shifted the balance and the painful outgrowths were now protruding from their ethereal picture. It wasn’t easy to cover the distances in such a short time, all the more so as praise would have awaited you at their far end. But the love of life that brings together all creatures changes obstacles into anthills and disgust into tolerance, all because the parts stay in love forever. The surroundings acquire a mottled colour and, thus, the uproar becomes tired.
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