Sun Alley

by Cecilia Stefanescu

  ‘Who’s George?’ Sorin broke in, perplexed.

  But Emilia completely ignored him and kept addressing the cuckolded husband with the same even voice she would use when calling him to breakfast in the morning. ‘It’s a long story. Maybe Sorin will tell it to you some other day.’

  And so the conversation between them stopped as abruptly as it had begun. An unabated rage was growing within him. If the world had been built otherwise, he would have killed the reserved and decent husband. Instead, he directed his hate toward her, who had remained with her fat eyelids lowered like an immaculate saint, concealing her shame in a hypocritical attitude stolen from one of the paintings that used to send her into raptures. He knew her too well. If she imagined she could hoodwink him, of all people, she was wrong.

  ‘Emilia, who the hell is George?’

  ‘Why is that any of your business?’ Matilda whispered to him, obviously bothered but struggling to keep up the appearance of respectability.

  It was Matei who calmly answered Matilda. He told her that George was his brother, who had come, together with his family, for a couple of days and was staying in a nearby village, three miles away from the villa in which they were now. He was sorry for the conversation that had just taken place, but he had known neither the details of the meeting between Matilda and George, nor that they had dropped by their place. He understood from his wife, however, that it wasn’t a story they were willing to continue and therefore suggested instead a toast in honour of the hosts. In no more than a couple of seconds, the glass sparkled above them in the light of the candles sizzling away, each in its own tiny box. Matilda monopolised the conversation, carefully leading it away from the flaming subject. Emilia had remained huddled up in her chair, her hands folded in her lap, partially covering the yellow stain on her skirt; she was following the conversation between the other two without seeming to understand a thing. She looked like a little girl – only it was a mean and false little girl, who dared believe that by wearing those white clothes, with her white face not betraying her hidden thoughts, she could trick them all and wrap them around her little finger.

  ‘I see that you’re wearing the ring!’

  The two stopped. They looked at Sorin as if they had seen a corpse sitting up, ruining the joy of the wake.

  ‘The ring…’

  Matei looked at Emilia’s hands, which had quickly disappeared in the folds of fabric. Amusedly, he took her hand, revealing a huge, black stone sitting in state on her long, lean finger. ‘This one?’ he asked.

  Emilia drew back her hand, but Matei wouldn’t let go. He kept holding it in the air, showing it to everyone. She forcefully jerked it loose; the first time unsuccessfully, the second time managing to pull Matei’s hand down as well.

  ‘It’s very beautiful,’ Matilda said. ‘Is it special in any way?’

  ‘It’s a ring from her mother,’ Matei laughed.

  ‘It’s not from any mother. I gave her that ring.’

  ‘You? When?’ Matilda studied it more carefully. ‘When did you give it to her?’

  ‘A long time ago. When we were kids.’

  Matei looked at the stone again, then at Emilia, who had started to weep quietly. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I think we’d better leave. I don’t know what’s going on, but I think we’d better go home.’

  He stood up ceremoniously and held out his hand to Emilia, who took it obediently. Matilda, trying with all her might to keep cool, followed them without insisting on their staying as a good host would have done. She was waiting for the same thing: to see the strangers who had broken her silence gone, to be over with the day that had started badly and threatened to end even worse. She wanted to turn back time and never to have made that uninspired invitation. Matilda and Sorin silently followed the couple, not caring anymore about mimicking the basic courtesy they would have been supposed to show to each other before saying goodbye. Everybody seemed to be waiting for the door to close and then, suddenly, in an unguarded moment, Sorin dashed upon Emilia, snatched her from her husband’s iron hand and pulled her inside the house behind him, as if she were a sack of meat. He threw her to the ground with a strong blow and closed the door.

  His first concern was to lock the kitchen door, which opened onto the back of the house. He could hear the other two whispering outside, but the noise of the wind and the sea prevented him from hearing what they said. Then it seemed to him that the voices were too high-pitched, and he suspected that it wasn’t the adults outside, but the girls speaking in their room, only pretending to be asleep till then. Maybe they had witnessed the scene and were now thinking about how to get rid of their mad father. He looked at Emilia. She was clutching her waist where he had grabbed her. Her face had changed; it shed an evil light, and a feeling of victory floated above, revealing her appreciation that he had managed to overcome the fear and civility he had been fighting over the last years, even if pathetically and inadequately.

  ‘You don’t love me anymore!’

  The voice that had sounded in the room was the voice of his childhood friend, but he was sure that it was she who had spoken. His head was swarming, and the thoughts inside were a tangle. He no longer knew for sure why he had pulled her inside and why he had locked himself in. He looked at her without even remembering what attracted him about the woman lying crouched on the floor, with her stained skirt, her bony legs covered here and there with tiny hairs visible in the light, with her white face and her ruffled hair, broken loose from the order in which it was usually kept. It was an ordinary woman, neither beautiful nor ugly, with no distinctive features, no bright ideas and no charm. It was a shapeless continuum that became repulsive when taken out of its bed. He leaned over her, full of pity. He had been sweating, and the smell spread in tiny streaks, making the air heavy. He wished he could open the doors and the windows at once, but he was trapped inside.

  ‘Forgive me, please… I don’t know what happened.’

  She shook her head and all her hair came loose.

  ‘It’s my fault.’

  He kissed her chest, her breastbone, then grabbed her breasts with both his hands and held them carefully, leaning against them. All this while he could feel her heart beat steadily, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, as if it had been a usual meeting, on the beach or in Bucharest, in one of their secret places.

  ‘Emilia…’ He stopped. He hadn’t called her that for a long time, since they were little and he wanted to tease her. ‘What did you say, at the table? What did you mean?’

  After her breasts, her shoulders and then her cheeks followed. He touched her to make sure it was her, to find her familiar marks on the strange body that stood stiff and meaningless before him.

  ‘I didn’t say anything. It’s all in your head.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he shouted, irritated, ‘but what did you want to tell me? You started something… you wanted to say something!’

  ‘I wanted to tell you that, if you hurt me, if you ever hurt me again as you did a long time ago, I will answer in kind. ‘ She stopped and drew a deep breath. ‘You kept me waiting. You are a filthy pig!’

  ‘What have you done? Tell me, God damn it, forget the waiting. I kept you waiting, but now it doesn’t matter anymore. Now we are together, aren’t we? Didn’t you want to see everything? Well, here it is! The girls, the wife, the vacation, everything! Now, go on saying what you started at the table!’

  She took him in her arms, begging him to tell her that he loved her, and he repeated to her, syllable by syllable, that he wasn’t going to say a thing before she finished her story.

  Emilia cringed, making a wry face. He saw the folds in her cheek, her big pores, her pimples, the shiny skin, the fuzz above her upper lip, the dimple in her chin, similar to the dimple of a corny singer who used to be very popular in his childhood. He realised now what exactly he didn’t like about her; what made her, on certain occasions, insufferable. It was that dimple, more prominent when she was angry, distorting her face. She
had lost her roundness and her softness, and all that was left was the mark, reminding him of the songs listened to and played to exhaustion beside his parents in the gardens of Neptun and Olimp:

  Haaaaaryyyy, Haaaaryyyy, going on safari!

  Toooooma, Toooooma, scared of his aroma!

  Max-wax, on his tracks!

  Eeeeemi, cockamamie!

  Sal, Sal, be my pal!

  She cried, and he kissed her and comforted her. He told her again that he loved her and that they would never part. They started to hear the noises from behind the door more clearly, and soon the knocking started: first reasonably, then louder, changing to full-blown, nervous, threatening bangs.

  ‘Come on, say it! What did you want to tell me at the table?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Do you remember that you used to call me every afternoon? At the beginning, you were like an alarm clock: every day, with absolute accuracy, at four o’clock sharp, the telephone rang and I heard my mother’s voice calling me. But after a year, you started to be late. The first time I waited a quarter of an hour for your call, I thought it was all over. It seemed like forever, and I could have sworn that I would never hear you and never see you again. It was hard for me to say what that suffering was about, where it came from, but I just stayed like that, dumb-founded, in my bed.

  ‘You finally called, but nothing was the same again. I would always wait out of breath. Sometimes you were punctual again, talking calmly and saying things that made me dizzy; other times you would arrive an hour late, bored to death already, and you would barely utter a couple of words. It seemed to me that you wanted to be elsewhere, with the boys maybe, I don’t know. Then, there was this time when I waited until close to six for you to call. I called your place, but your father picked up the phone, so I hung up. I felt I was choking, but, more than anything, I wished I could know where you were and what you were doing. So I left home and went to the places where I knew you boys were playing. There was nobody there. And then I got to Harry’s; I was in front of his building, and I found him there on a bench, talking to some neighbours. When he saw me, he seemed very happy; he took me in his arms, he kissed me on the cheek, he turned me around a couple of times, introduced me to the neighbours as his girlfriend and then he called me upstairs, to his house, to see a Corto Maltese cartoon.’

  ‘He called you upstairs, in his house…’ Sorin repeated in a low voice.

  ‘Yes. We talked a lot, he also told me things about you… not much. Then we heard the doorbell. I don’t know why, but I felt it was you; something inside me told me I had come to the right place. But Harry was in this mood, I don’t really know how to explain: he wanted to see how you would react. He seemed to know perfectly well about us, although, as you remember, we hid ourselves as much as we could. Maybe he wanted to see what I would do. Anyway, we stayed behind the door and we could hear you speaking. I never felt worse in my life, just like a traitor. But Harry wouldn’t open the door, and after a while I realised I didn’t want you to see I was at his place either.’

  ‘I knew it! I could have sworn that I heard him speaking!’

  He put his hot head in her lap and breathed in deeply, inhaling her smells. It was a mixture: sometimes she smelt like lemongrass, other times like musky sex between her thighs or like skin washed and pampered with perfumed lotions – she was hard to bear and hard to sniff, and it was hard to think of something when she was around, with all the things she said.

  ‘That’s a lie!’

  He had shouted like crazy, at the top of his lungs, shaking the house and rendering silent all the noises around. Even the bustle behind the door had stopped. He squeezed her arms and shook her, and when he felt her arms go limp, he grabbed her neck, fanned his fingers on her wrinkled skin and thrust them between the atlas and the axis. His fingers sunk in until the colour of her skin changed just for him to see. She was limp in his arms, releasing short groans, with the impression that she had given up the fight. When he let her go, she fell to the floor with a thud.

  ‘That’s a lie! You’re a great liar! I’ve never seen something like that! You’ve tricked me, and I thought that I could see through you! I feel like laughing, but I can’t, because I’m terribly sick!’

  Emilia finally spoke in a strangled voice. ‘Do you want me to go on?’

  Sorin fell silent.

  ‘I heard a thud and a rattle. I think that, for me, that was the end. I knew it was over. I even wondered how, all this time, up to now, despite the fact that I knew perfectly well there was nothing left, we met again and kept seeing each other. At first, Harry thought that you were pretending, but I started hitting him with my palms and fists and he finally opened the door. I found you collapsed on the floor. Actually, your eyes were open and you were babbling, uttering not words but sounds, like an incantation. You came back to your senses after a long time. You were lying on Harry’s bed when I heard you from the living room, calling him. I had stayed to make sure that you were all right, but Harry kept saying that you were making fun of us. It crossed my mind, too, that you might have pretended, but I preferred to wait until you told me yourself. We went home, and in less than half an hour, I heard you calling me from downstairs. You were lucid; your eyes never betrayed for even an instant that you remembered anything. But then I knew it was over.’

  He was still kneeling next to her. He had taken her hands in his again and was stroking them mechanically. The pounding on the door had grown stronger, and soon the barrier between them and the others would be gone.

  He stood up and unbolted the door. Matilda and Matei appeared on the threshold with a bewildered air. They were each holding a candle, and if you squinted, you could imagine that they were ghosts who had come to haunt the two lovers.

  Matei helped Emilia up from the floor and hugged her tightly. To Sorin, the image of the embracing spouses seemed bizarre, to say the least, and his lips curved into a smile – one that froze, however, upon encountering Matilda. She rushed past him fierily, like a storm, heading for the girls’ room. In a few moments, she turned up again with them, holding their hands as if waving a white flag. He couldn’t tell if she wanted to bury the hatchet with him or to levy war against the stranger who had dropped inside her home, but her tense body, ready to fight, and the position of her head betrayed her determination. She was the Earth Mother and Joan of Arc rolled into one; she had gathered inside her all the mythical women from schoolbooks and all the heroic literature; she was the ideal and its opposite at the same time, while the girls looked like old ladies roused from their sleep, scared to death, impassively awaiting their fate. Reality started again to drift away from him while, almost at the same time, the woman in Matei’s arms became his lover again. Now he was wondering why they hadn’t run back to Bucharest, where they knew their ways around and where the city could have offered them a place to hide. Nothing was clear here, and they had surrounded themselves with hostile people. It didn’t matter anymore that she had lied to him; it didn’t even matter if she had cheated on him these days. Her smell was imprinted upon his face, around his upper lip, and it drove him crazy.

  ‘Don’t you want us to leave now?’

  He was surrounded by them, and she had remained in Matei’s arms, tightly attached with millions of straps and bands. She didn’t answer. The girls sat with their heads lowered, lacking the courage to participate in the tragedy in the living room, which had been their favourite playing spot till now. They weren’t claiming it; all they wanted was to return to their beds where the sheets pleasantly rustled and where the mingled smells of lavender, rose and jasmine urged them to sleep.

  ‘Matei,’ he suddenly begged the husband. ‘Can’t you see that she no longer wants to be with you? Let her go, please!’

  ‘Sorin, stop it!’ Matilda turned to the other two. ‘He wasn’t well today; it must be from the sunstroke!’

  She had uttered the words with a clear and metallic sound, like a judge passing a sentence. They weren’t the last words said that
evening, but she had spoken them as if they had been. Everybody remained respectfully silent, admitting that the host and mistress of the household should be the one to decide the outcome of that strange meeting. But, when all seemed to have lain down their arms, something like an unintelligible squeak came from Matei’s arms, reaching Sorin only much later.

  ‘I would like to go to the toilet,’ Emilia repeated.

  When nobody answered, she lightly broke loose from the embrace and started alone down the dark corridor. She was gone in a few moments, and a sigh of relief crisscrossed the room behind her.

  They waited for Emilia’s return for minutes on end. To some of them, those minutes seemed like years. They had all spread their wings, flapping them menacingly above, trying to win back their battleground. Matei had stopped looking at Sorin, and Sorin had stopped defying Matilda. Only the girls helplessly hung from their mother’s hand, fidgeting impatiently. Finally, Dori said that she was tired and that she wanted to go to bed. As she received no answer, she started to whimper in order to get her parents attention, then tore herself away from Matilda’s skirt. Mari, like an echo, imitated her sister, and little by little, the living room filled with a constant, droning lamentation. Amidst that noise, Sorin revisited the story Emilia had told him and asked himself, whether through an absurd twist or a memory trick, she could have been right; whether her story wasn’t actually the real face of their history. But he laughed, and his laughter escalated when he saw them all waiting for the liar, with her arrogant air, to come out of the bathroom and leave arm in arm with her husband.

  ‘Shouldn’t you go and see if something is wrong?’

  When he heard the question, he felt for the first time that Matilda had accepted the situation. Matilda… the mistress of their household. For a couple of years, life with her had seemed good and quiet. She would come every afternoon to pick him up by car from the greenhouses; she would make him breakfast in the morning and prepare his sandwiches for work. When the twins were born, there was a fire at the Gardens, so he had missed their arrival into the world. He hadn’t been there, and fear had added to his guilt. The fact that the fire had occurred right at the time of his two daughters’ arrival was a bad sign, while the idea that he would have to face two identical persons – two united bodies, two pairs of eyes that would look at him the same way, two minds working as one yet split apart and forever aspiring to reunite – made his hair stand on end. Actually, when he got to the Giuleşti maternity hospital, he found two elderly-looking, wrinkled and crumpled things. All the babies there looked alike, all were identical; if he had been given two other girls by mistake, he would have taken them calmly, as calm as he could have been at that time, and gone home with them without daring utter a word. It reminded him of when he was little and went to buy bread; he would take the change from the salesman’s hand without counting it and always found at home that there was less money than there should have been.