She loved him, he had no doubt about that, but her love was like leavening dough: although he knew that it would turn into a glorious cake, that raw smell of flour mixed with water turned his stomach.
‘You haven’t answered my question, though.’
He started. ‘What question?’
‘On the terrace of the restaurant… Was she your first love?’
Sorin wasn’t good at lying, and he was used to taking everything seriously. A mere suspicion would have made his life miserable, which is why he made each reckoning extremely fast, with a rapidity he himself was often terrified of. He put his head in her lap and grabbed her waist, sinking his nose in the warm layer of fat on her belly. Matilda had retained a layer of lard, flesh and skin around her waist that was soft and good but stiff to the touch. He liked to sink inside it and not have to look at her, to bury his forehead into that softness and fall asleep. When she lamented and felt sorry for herself because, after two births, her beauty had suffered beyond repair, Sorin would always gently remind her that it had actually been a single birth and that the damage done by it didn’t bother him a bit. He would instantly add, ‘I love to sleep in your lap!’ and Matilda would mellow, believing him, because then he actually spoke the truth.
‘First we were friends, and then I fell in love with her. Actually, she liked me first. But we were very little. It doesn’t count.’
He could feel the body starting to shrink with tension.
‘And?’
‘And… and you know how it is.’
‘I don’t know. What happened?’
Sorin burst into laughter. ‘Oh, come on, I told you, we were very little! What the hell could have happened? My parents and I moved to another neighbourhood, and that’s that!’
Matilda held him for another couple of minutes; then she got up, gently placing his head on the sofa pillows. ‘I’m going to bed. I’m dead tired and tomorrow we’ll have a busy day. Come on!’
That night, everybody in the house slept lightly. Sorin, however, set his inner alarm clock for six in the morning. He had to be up at six and off to the beach in the ten minutes that followed. They needed at least two hours to set the record straight for the meeting, to compare their stories, to make a single one from the two. He fell asleep with her and their story in mind; he had found the perfect version and planned to dream about it till dawn so he wouldn’t forget it.
VIII
THE PARTY
He jumped bolt upright, frightened. A strong light struck through the translucent curtains from outside, falling in blood-red streaks over the bedclothes. Matilda was sleeping quietly with her back to him. She was nestled peacefully like a little girl, her hair unfolded on the pillow as if arranged by hand into a fan shape. He had thought it was later than it actually was, so he left the room in a hurry without washing his face, only stopping to pull on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt he found on the back of a chair in the living room.
When he stepped out, the unripe light of the day and the chilly air assured him that it couldn’t have been later than six. He had decided not to take the car to avoid the noise it would have made. He didn’t know for sure when he would be back, and the missing car would have indicated that he had gone farther away. Without it, he could lie that he had gone for a short walk on the road winding along the seafront, that he had stopped to gather some shells from the beach – he knew Matilda liked to collect coloured seashells, which she would put in a huge, transparent glass bowl she had back home together with the others she gathered every year from all the beaches they visited – and that he didn’t realise how fast time had flown. She would take walks alone in the afternoon herself and was willing to accept that, during holidays, walks were a pleasure she could grant to anyone.
All the way there, he mulled over Emilia and the situation they were in. There were other thoughts as well, mingled together; irrelevant, stray memories popping up on the empty and colourless surface of his fear-stricken mind: the cockroach Dori had mercilessly crushed, the faint remembrance of the indications he had given to his neighbour, the watering schedule for his flowers, each on a certain day of the week. If his neighbour hadn’t respected the schedule, he would have found, upon returning home, that his perpetually blooming plants had withered away. He advanced through the thought thicket, rolling his footsteps on the asphalt and, farther along, on the dirt road that led to the beach. The stones were flying from beneath his soles, noisily hitting the pavement. He was in a hurry because he feared that Emilia would leave. But actually, the only thought he had been obstinately avoiding–although it had been pestering him for some time – was that she might very well not have come at all, that the humiliation and the suffering he had thrown upon her had now turned against him, had made her ripe for retribution.
He approached the beach with big strides; another three hundred feet and the monotonous expanse, interrupted by a thin line that opened another scene of monotony, would show itself, revealing the truth. He was barrelling along; he would have bolted if he could, but he feared she would see him from a distance and that he would seem ridiculous. Beads of sweat were hanging from his chin, tickling him slightly, and the T-shirt had stuck to his chest and shoulder blades. Because of the sweat, his shoes had started to eat into his flesh: first as a faint burn, then penetrating to the interior layers, delicately excoriating them. At the end of the three hundred feet, he stopped. First, he checked his hurt heel; the edge of his shoe was coloured a bloody reddish-brown. Then he looked up and gazed toward the beach.
A woman wearing an exaggeratedly large-brimmed hat lay on a mat, propped on her elbows. Her skin had, in that position, a couple of folds. From his angle, she seemed old, but her face was hidden under the brim’s shade and he couldn’t precisely tell her age. He stopped and sat down, then remained hunched, watching the sea. He had known ever since leaving home that he wouldn’t find her, but he had secretly hoped, nonetheless, that their meeting again and his daughter’s illness had softened her. However, it was not the fact that she hadn’t come now that alarmed him, but the thought that she might not ever want to see him again. Was it possible that this wasn’t just a momentary impulse, a wish to teach him a lesson, but that maybe love had died for her the morning she had waited for him in vain, just as they had so often spoken about? It happens. He knew that people ended up like that sometimes.
The woman stretched her feet and pulled the hat upon her face, like a peasant lying on the grass after mowing it. He stretched, too, fanning his toes. That tiny, insignificant motion made him relax and see the situation with much more optimism. They would see each other in the evening, anyway, and they would have the opportunity to set things straight. As the air stroked his fanned toes, his plans gained momentum. He would tell her that he had decided to break up with Matilda and would summon her to do the same with Matei. Now, after seeing him, he was certain that she had nothing to do with that ape, who talked about her as if she were a schizophrenic, a hypochondriac, a lunatic. Who spoke much without saying anything, and gestured time and again and acted as if he knew it all – except what was happening right under his nose.
He had no idea when he had drowsed off and fallen asleep while watching the sea and the lady on the beach who was sitting graciously with a raised knee soaking in the sun. He only knew that he woke up a couple of hours later. The sun was shining high in the middle of the sky, in an angry blaze. His body was numb, wrapped in a corset of sweat and exhaustion. The awakening was painful and the lack of any will to open his eyes and come back to reality made him assume that the presence of death must be similar. But it was not death itself that scared him at that moment, but the way they would find him: the position of his body, the stench, the swelling and the burns the masters of embalming would have to conceal. He had resigned himself to the thought that, ultimately, there was no age for settling your accounts. When he was a child, his parents had always told him before going to bed that only old people had to worry and that he had nothing to be afraid
of. He had always suspected they were lying or, better, that they had left out a pretty important detail: to mention when exactly old age began. Emilia complained that she was getting old, that she wouldn’t have time to be happy. Matilda always told the girls that, from now on, the future was ahead of them while she and Sorin would only be left with the past. At work, they had asked him whether he considered, or already had, a private pension plan.
His heart was pounding in his chest like a brass band with drums and woodwinds. He had the feeling that the now-populated beach resonated from their shrill noise. He started to get up, but only managed to move his arms and find that his entire left side was stiff and painful. ‘Maybe I’ve died!’ he said to himself, and then was embarrassed by the unworthy thought. His wet clothes had penetrated his skin, turning into a set of armour on his inert body. Finally, after several attempts, he managed to get up and, barely standing, tried to find his way back.
As he advanced on the stony path toward the road, the feeling that he had forgotten something on the beach became stronger and stronger. He felt his trousers to see if he had the house keys, and the keys dutifully clinked in his pocket. Only when he reached the road did he realise that the pain radiating throughout his body was emphasised by the fact that he was barefoot, and that blood was trickling from the bare soles of his feet as they scratched against the thin, little stones, sharp as ground glass. But it would have been inconceivable for him to go all the way back. It wasn’t really that important that his shoes were missing.
Suddenly, he felt happy and motivated. He remembered the feeling of exaltation he had fallen asleep with and tried to revive it, but he was too exhausted and all he actually wanted, upon closer consideration, was to get home and take a nap, to gather his strength before the evening. He started to walk slowly along the road toward their house. Thirty feet ahead of him, the road sign showed that the village ended there. A little over a mile and he could say he was home.
A red car coming from the opposite direction passed him by, honking, and then slowed down two dozen feet away. Sorin stepped away from the margin of the road and gestured to the driver with his middle finger. Then he walked on, wearily, but after a couple of steps, he stopped. He turned his head and saw that the car hadn’t moved. He bent over, leaning his head against his knees, and all his blood rushed into his temples, making him dizzy. He remained like that for several minutes and, finally, he burst out crying in loud, angry sobs. All the absurd events of that day were jammed in his throat, bursting to get out. When he couldn’t cry any longer, he started to howl in a shredded voice, regardless of the people around who had stopped to watch the show put on by the flushed, sweaty, madman.
After a while, he woke up at home. He had no idea how he had got there. He could hear Matilda working around the kitchen and the girls’ stifled voices from somewhere farther away. He stretched out on the bed that was covered by a sticky, dusty synthetic bedspread and leaned his head against the headboard. He fell fast asleep in an instant and, in almost another instant, he woke up. The direction of the wind had changed and so had the light, whose brightness had faded. He realised that he had slept deeply and for a long time. Only now did he feel overcome by a feeling of guilt and pressure, since he would have to explain what he had done in the morning and how he had got home. Matilda walked in on tiptoe and inspected him.
‘You woke up.’
He answered half-heartedly, with a groan. She came close to him, still standing.
‘If you had slept a little longer, the guests would have arrived.’
‘What time is it?’
‘It’s almost six.’
‘You should have woken me.’
She threw him a reproachful look. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
He sank into a gloomy silence. He didn’t want to answer right away, because he lacked the power to say anything. He didn’t feel like fighting with her and he wished he had been granted a respite to recompose his social mask, to be eloquent again. He wished he could have slept a little longer; he would have closed his eyes and, that way, Matilda would have gently disappeared, without him having anything to do with her elimination.
‘Do you at least remember what happened? Have you been drinking?’
‘In the morning?’
‘I don’t know, I was just asking. I see you don’t want to say anything. Anyway…’ She drew a few steps away and looked out the window. ‘Now is really not the moment, with those people coming over, but I wasn’t delighted at all when a stranger brought you to the door, carrying you in his arms. And I wonder what that woman must have said!’
‘I wasn’t drunk.’
‘But you behaved as if you were.’
‘I fell asleep on the beach.’
‘But what were you doing, sleeping at the beach? I thought you said you were jogging! Is that jogging? Going to sleep on the beach and dreaming of running?’ Her voice was rising, piercing the walls.
‘What woman?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said that a woman brought me home.’
Matilda shrugged her shoulders. ‘I didn’t say that a woman brought you home. I told you that it was your ex-girlfriend, Emilia.’
‘You must be joking. That’s impossible!’ ‘Why?’
He looked carefully at her face, but Matilda was unchanged; no nerve was shaking, no sign betrayed her.
‘Did her husband carry me home?’
‘It wasn’t her husband. And I really don’t know what difference it makes who brought you, how they brought you… the question is what happened? If you’re sick I think I should know, shouldn’t I? You say that you haven’t been drinking… what is wrong with you?’
Sorin got up, feeling all dizzy. ‘I’m fine. I told you, I went for a walk, I wanted to pick some shells for you… I sat down for a bit because I had been sleepless all night, tossing and turning in my bed. I fell asleep on the beach, and probably I had a touch of sunstroke. No sun shade, at over forty degrees. But I don’t understand how it was Emilia who found me, of all people. It’s unbelievable. I will apologise in the evening, when they come.’
He could feel her near him, mellowed, her resistance visibly melting; only the traces of worry were left, and he had managed by his voice’s music to chase them magically away. And, still, he had almost told the truth.
‘If they come.’
He looked at her intently. He still controlled his voice, but felt the need to sit down again.
‘Why? Did they say they weren’t coming anymore?’
‘No, they didn’t say. But with this incident today, maybe they changed their minds.’
‘They didn’t change their minds, for sure.’
Matilda headed for the door, conscious of the upper hand she held.
‘I should thank the guy who brought me. Did he say what his name was? Is he a friend of theirs?’
Matilda shook her head without bothering to turn around. She went out, the question still floating gloomily around the room. Soon he would be able to sound her out about what had happened during the day, so he decided to stop questioning his wife.
But time seemed to flow much more slowly than he had expected. First there were the girls, who pestered him about telling them the promised flower stories. He had to give them his word that he would do it after the guests left, but as they knew perfectly well that the guests would leave much after their bedtime, they managed to wring a promise out of their father that the next day they would get two stories. Then there was the issue of getting dressed. Normally he couldn’t care less about what clothes he would throw on, but now it was different. Colour could be meaningful. Seriousness or casualness could have an impact on the outcome of that evening. He spent an hour rummaging in the closet. The combinations of clothes slowly became characters, potential Sorins and possible solutions to the situation. For the most part, the solutions were dramatic and unsatisfactory, so the characters were discarded and a new labour would begin in search of a new character.
In the end, he chose a pair of capris and a white T-shirt.
When Matilda showed up again, after the last preparations, to get dressed, she found him sitting on the edge of the bed, with the closet’s contents turned upside down and clothes strewn on the floor. She stopped in the threshold, her mouth agape. ‘What did you do here?’
But he was satisfied and content with the character he had pulled out of the box: a thirty-three-year-old dull, neutral man without too much imagination, who could have been at the same time a diehard family man or a womaniser.
Matilda got dressed in five minutes and, after another five, she had already settled in the living room, where on a table she had arranged four odd champagne goblets she had found in the kitchen cupboard. She was pleased and happy to have finished everything in time.
‘Well,’ she said, leaning back, ‘now all we need is for the guests to arrive.’ She laughed, opening her fleshy, red-painted mouth, like a jellyfish.
Sorin remained behind in the bedroom, putting his clothes back in order. He caught a fleeting glimpse of himself in the round mirror hanging on the wall opposite the bed. Although he had slept almost all day, he had a tired face; his skin was crumpled from sleeping, and you could see the wrinkles left on his face by the bedclothes. He could hear his ribs clattering in his chest and the blood gurgling in his arteries. He reached out his arm to put the hanger with the neatly arranged shirts back into the closet, but the gesture exhausted him so much that he had to set it down and take a deep breath. Then he repeated the motion and, after closing the wardrobe and lying back in bed, he started to think of the day that had just passed and of what lay ahead. The more he thought, the louder the movements inside rang.
He heard another muffled noise that made him jump out of bed and remain standing, horror-stricken, his sweaty palms stuck to his trousers. He heard Matilda’s sandals shuffle; he heard the door handle go click-clack and, immediately after that, the voices: Matilda’s, squeaking with enthusiasm, as it usually did when she wanted to be more convincing in expressing her emotions, and another one: a man’s guttural voice that extended into a short echo he knew so well, a voice so familiar it seemed like his own. He tried to listen more carefully, but as all the sounds had grown louder and were mingling together, he got up and slid out the door on tiptoe, like a drowsy cat, to the living room, from where he managed to see the guests packed in the small hallway. The girls were holding onto Matilda’s skirt behind her, gaping their round, cherry-shaped mouths at the tall lady all dressed in white, with a diva’s air and strong perfume that had pervaded the house.
Sun Alley Page 18
