Sun Alley

by Cecilia Stefanescu

  Sal took the hand he had been keeping on the metal box out of his pocket. His palm was sweaty, so he wiped it against his T-shirt. The approaching figures could now be seen to be a man and a woman. The woman, wearing big sunglasses, was dressed in a sheer green skirt, through which one could discern the shape of her legs, and a white linen blouse. She was gesturing in an exaggerated manner and, from a distance, Sal thought she looked angry. The man was walking beside her, his hands behind his back and his head slightly lowered in a reverential attitude, paying close attention to her. After a few steps, Sal overheard pieces of what the woman was saying. Here and there, her voice acquired acute inflections and she would lose her temper. They were quite close to each other, and this slow approach made Sal feel drowsy. He turned to Harry, who kept talking: ‘Shut up a little!’

  Harry cast him a puzzled glance. The man and the woman had stopped. She was still talking, but just as they passed by the man looked up from the ground and straight into her eyes, saying, ‘You know, for me nothing has changed; everything is just the same…’

  Sal felt like turning around to look again at the dark-haired woman with shoulder-length curly hair and the tall, blue-eyed man with a youthful face. No sooner had they taken a few steps away than their voices faded away as if they had vanished into thin air; still he looked back spitefully. The two were moving slowly away, the man still holding his hands behind his back and the woman brooding beside him with her arms hanging limply alongside her body. Sal kept walking beside Harry, who was now engrossed in a stubborn silence.

  They reached the lattice fence surrounding the school’s football field. A few boys were already on the field warming up, shaking their legs, running on the spot or doing squats. Seeing them, Harry started to shout at the top of his voice, followed by the other boys who shouted in return. He turned to Sal, reiterating, ‘Are you a fool, man? Would you have missed this?’

  Sal appeared to be about to answer, but then he changed his mind. When he stepped onto the hot concrete amidst the cheers welcoming Harry, a breeze touched his cheeks, and when he reached the middle of the field, a wave of heat hit him right in the face, rising like a curtain between him and the girls perched on the dilapidated benches who were watching the boys get ready for the game. And from that moment on, Sal forgot all that had happened to him. He jumped in place together with the others, he swung his hands in the air, he bent down and leaned sideways while the blended voices of the boys and the stifled giggles of the girls roared in his ears. And when they started to play, he let his feet carry him over the field in a continuous dash, with an almost indiscernible flight over the concrete.

  His mind was empty and his eyes brushed only intermittently against the faces of the girls who giggled and bashfully tried to cheer them on; his feet barely touched the uneven surface that covered the endless distance between the two goalposts. The boys were shouting, swearing, tugging his T-shirt, but without stopping for even a second, Sal kept running after the ball that rolled on tirelessly. At a certain moment he thought he saw Harry gesturing something, but he didn’t bother to find out what it was. He was chasing the ball, and then he was touching it with the tip of his shoe – bouncing it off his toes straight between the goalposts. It was then that he heard a choir of voices covering his own, after which came the arms and bodies of the boys swooping upon him in an upsurge of joy. A wave of sticky sweat trickled down his whole body. The other bodies touching his own made him shiver with bliss, and soon he was driven, just like the other boys, by the desire to win.

  He felt Harry hug him and shout in his ear how good they were, what a sucker he had been, what he had almost missed, how the chicks were staring at them now and so on and so on.

  ‘Sal…’

  Harry’s voice seemed to emerge from somewhere deep inside his mind, hot-blooded with success and heat. He managed to escape the boys’ embraces and, just as unexpectedly as before, he bolted and started for the exit. Outraged cries followed him, and Harry started jumping around in a desperate attempt to stop him.

  ‘Where the hell are you going, man? We haven’t finished the game – don’t be an asshole!’

  But Sal had peeled off. He was running as fast as he could; he was running back, on the tree-shaded street, stirring the yellow dust behind him. When he slowed his pace, he was already halfway there. Carefully, he studied the houses that languished like old ladies with their hands crossed in their laps and their chins cast down. The heat had been eased, and the leaves rustled above his head. From one of the houses came the noise of a coffee grinder, and he stopped and sat down on the pavement. He felt short twinges of pain in his tired legs, the still-tense muscles twitching from time to time. He watched the skin’s surface contract slightly and wince, as if animalcule colonies were swarming underneath. The coffee grinder’s noise suddenly stopped and a female voice cried from the bottom of the yard: ‘Would anyone like coffee?’

  Each morning at his grandmother’s after breakfast, the coffee steam would reach out to him and lure him out on the veranda. Next to his grandmother’s cup and that of one of her friends stood a small cup with a drowsy layer of cream floating on top. She was the only one who had offered him, as far back as a year ago, that token of maturity, his passport to the grown-up world. And despite the fact that the place smelled of lavender and mothballs, and mole-crickets would show up now and again from under the old furniture, his grandmother remained the only woman in the family with whom he got on well and who didn’t pester the life out of him. She was the one who listened to his long soliloquies when he woke up dripping wet, scared and eager for anything but sleep, after one of the nightmares in which a huge butterfly chased him through a thick-walled house.

  The loneliness felt in dreams was tremendous, more dreadful than all he had been through in Harry’s basement, uglier than the mole-crickets crawling undisturbed in his grandmother’s house, more shocking than Emi’s long silences she hoped to impress him with. That loneliness contained something overwhelming that would crush him, as if the mere effort of the mind produced an earthquake that crumbled down the whole stone-made edifice of his enforced and self-inflicted enclosure. He couldn’t tell Emi about his dreams, but in those moments when his grandmother sipped the hot coffee with her puckered lips, Sal would take heart and start to spin the yarn of his dreams. Grandmother Meri, after heaving a deep sigh with every sip, would nail her fat-lidded brown eyes upon him and appear thoughtful. She would neither reprehend him nor make fun of him the way his parents did at home. In those summer mornings, his grandmother would concentrate on his mouth as it uttered a rapid-fire stream of words like balls hurtling down a bowling lane.

  Sal would have loved to tell Emi about everything that crossed his mind, but especially about his dreams and his fear of death, about the colonies of insects that swarmed under his skin every time he made a great physical effort. Right now, he especially wanted to talk to her interminably, to describe in great detail–if he had had enough words to do so – the woman in the basement whom he had just discovered and to whom he could talk to nobody about.

  The back gate opened and a woman his mother’s age, dressed in a homely dress with pink and blue flowers, looked up and down the street. Sal, with his head turned in her direction, felt the urge to say hello, slightly bowing his head as his mother had taught him to. The woman looked him up and down, then shouted something behind her, but Sal couldn’t understand what she had said. He stood up hesitantly and hit the road again. If he had had the choice, he would have gone to his grandmother’s to take a nap in her living room, with its windows shaded by trees.

  With his grandma in mind, he retraced the whole street and crossed Emi’s street as well. When he came to himself, he was on the boulevard at the traffic light, unwilling to do anything. The metal box was bumping against his leg, through the fabric of his shorts, as he walked. The cars were zooming on one side and then on the other, and the red traffic light flickered its countdown. The people gathered on the other side were gazi
ng straight ahead, waiting for the green light.

  ‘Sal!’

  He looked right and then left. Someone was tugging his shirt from behind. When he turned around, he spotted Emi, who was panting with her hands on her knees. ‘Sal, where the hell have you been?’

  He looked at her delightedly. Emi straightened her back and started to talk, waving her thin arms in the air. Sal was watching her and, listening to her discontented talk, full of indignation at the unreliable people who left girls standing in the middle of the street and went God-knows-where, Sal decided that now was the best moment for him to share his finding with her. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her for a few steps.

  ‘Emi, I have to show you something, I really have to!’

  Emi stared at him in disbelief. He grabbed her other hand as well, the one that was hanging close to her body. ‘Actually, I want to give you something!’

  Emi seemed to cool down a bit. ‘Well, give it to me!’

  ‘No, no, not here. Let’s go to your place!’

  ‘You know perfectly well that, if we go to my place, my mother will stuff us with food and get in our hair and not allow us to talk.’

  Sal was silent.

  ‘See?’ Emi went on. ‘We’d better go up to the roof of my building.’

  They remained still for a while, pondering. It was the first time she had told anyone about her secret place. Something in his tone and in all the events of the day had made her mention it, and now she regretted doing so. It was the place from which she could watch over all, including Sal, and now that place was about to disappear, open to all the eyes in the neighbourhood. It was exactly as her mother had told her: boys couldn’t keep a secret, and only girls had the inner strength to love others and keep secrets for themselves.

  ‘On the roof at your place?’ Sal marvelled.

  Emi had pursed her lips, but now it was difficult to back off. ‘Let’s go, Sal, and make sure you hold your tongue and don’t tell anyone!’

  They started to walk slowly back to Emi’s building. The heat had abated and a soft breeze had started to blow. Sal put his hand into his shorts pocket and rested it on the metal box. Coming across Emi had changed his state of mind: she hadn’t abandoned him, she had looked for him, and now the fact that she was disclosing her secret place proved that she had been thinking about him.

  ‘Where were you?’ Her voice had a squeaky sound. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I went to your place and your mother told me you were out to buy ice-cream… Jesus, Sal, is that what you tell your mother when you come to see me-that you go out for ice-cream?’ Emi laughed, flinging her head back. When she laughed, her black, round eyes had a mischievous look. But they also had a bright shimmer that simultaneously subdued Sal and amused him.

  ‘I say all sorts of things… today it was ice-cream, tomorrow it will be something else. Tomorrow I’ll tell her I’m going to a table-lifting séance.’

  Emi stopped, laughing even harder. ‘I see your point!’

  She dropped down with all her weight, then jerked him forward, running and forcing him to run behind her. Sal complained, telling her that he was tired, but the girl had rushed ahead stubbornly, pretending not to hear. Sal’s temples were twitching, and he could feel how the small insects under his skin had started to rebel against the tyrant who was bothering their sleep. But despite his somnolence, his legs were rolling forward, obeying the girl who had suddenly become his bright spot. Eventually they reached her building and Emi, panting and her face gleaming with sweat, pressed both her palms onto his chest.

  ‘Not before you swear that you won’t say a word!’

  Sal hurried to swear: ‘I swear!’

  But Emi shook her head in distress. ‘Not like that; that’s rubbish!’

  Sal stood perplexed. ‘Come on, say what you want me to do!’

  The girl’s round, black irises disappeared behind her eyelids. Emi kept her eyes closed for several seconds, and when she lifted her eyelids again, fluttering her long eyelashes, she had once more that exhilarated look that somewhat scared Sal.

  ‘Look, it’s no big deal, but you need to have guts! Can you do it?’

  ‘You bet I can!’ Sal rushed to answer.

  ‘So this is what we’ll do: we’ll snick our fingers, drip a little blood on a shard of glass left over from my father…’

  ‘On a glass slide…’

  ‘Right, and then we’ll spit and mix it well together. You’ll smudge my forehead and I’ll smudge yours, and then we’ll swear to keep the secret.’

  Emi’s face was beaming with delight, but Sal just watched her with amusement.

  ‘So what? Do you think that will prevent us from talking? Spit and blood?’

  Emi put on a long face – not because Sal was deeming risible the importance of the oath, but especially because he could never participate in her games, or in any games for that matter. He did the same with the boys. That’s where his funny lies and pretences also came from, because it was beneath his dignity to take part in their nonsense. Sometimes she had the impression that Sal would rather have stayed alone all day, lolling about or meditating on the things he thought he saw, because Sal had this gift, which many thought was just a fancy, to see things that were invisible to everyone else. But she believed him, because she could read on his face the uneasiness bestirred by the beauty or the horridness of his findings – like now, when he showed reluctance in swearing to keep her secret.

  They stood by the gate looking at one another, sweaty and panting.

  ‘All right, Sal, we’ll do as you wish!’ Emi started to climb the stairs, two at a time, while he followed her at a slower pace. They went up all four floors, and on the last one, Emi squatted while she waited for Sal to catch up.

  ‘You know,’ Sal told her out of breath, ‘my word should be enough. I would never betray you!’

  Emi lifted her head, gazing at him. Then she braced herself, took off and jumped to catch the hanging metal ladder that led to the roof. She lifted the hatch and put her head out, scrutinising her territory with her legs still hanging inside and half her torso outside. After a few seconds she disappeared, thumping on the hot roofing sheets. Sal heard her voice trilling from above, urging him to climb faster. Her secret was safe, he thought. When he had said that he would never betray her, the words had bound him more than an oath. While saying them, a thrill had crossed his body. He was stirred by a commitment that opened a long road ahead of them. He had butterflies in his stomach and felt a choking happiness.

  Emi was holding on to a television aerial and leaning over the gutter, inspecting the space below them. Sal advanced falteringly. When he reached her, he sat down on his bottom. The roof was still hot, burning and diffusing the heat stored at noontime and in the early afternoon, but as the seconds passed the unpleasant feeling started to wear off.

  ‘Look!’ Emi pointed somewhere in the distance. ‘I can see the roof of your house. In the afternoon, when I can creep out of my room, I climb here and stay on watch. I imagine what you could be doing under the roof. I imagine you living in a rum baba, Sal…’

  Emi turned to him and burst into laughter. Sal was delighted by the comparison of his house to a cake.

  ‘I remove the top and watch you sleeping on piles of cream… ‘

  The sun was melting into the horizon and, although the air was still sultry, the heat had somewhat abated. Sal invited her in a subdued voice to sit beside him. He groped again for the shape in his shorts pocket, just to check: it was still there, sitting quietly. He realised he didn’t exactly know what he was looking for with that strange gift on the roof, with Emi who was already staring at him with her round eyes wide open, waiting for the secret he was offering in exchange. Because that’s what Emi was waiting for, actually: an honest exchange, so she could set her heart at ease and keep on spying on her friends perched up here.

  ‘I have something very important to tell you. But you have to promise, like you had me promise, that you’ll keep your mou
th shut and that you’ll take my word for it. What do you say?’ Sal smiled at her, but Emi remained still. She didn’t seem to hear his jokes; she was eager for the swap.

  ‘Okay.’

  He put his hand in his pocket and took out the metal box. There were a few beads of sweat on its lid. Sal wiped it clean with the back of his palm and handed it to Emi. His hand remained, hanging aimlessly in the air, for several long seconds. Emi was still watching him, uninterested. ‘What’s that?’

  Sal held the box forth again, but Emi continued to stay in the same position, refusing to look at it. ‘Is this your secret, Sal?’

  He nodded. Emi extended her fingers for the metal box and grabbed it with disappointment. She opened it hastily and a slanting light splashed her face. The hacked finger, with the black-stoned ring sitting stately upon it, smiled to her from inside. Sal was beaming with joy. His sweaty face had ecstasy written all over it, and his eyelids were closing with excitement. Emi touched the stone with the tip of her index finger, stroking it gently. Dumbstruck with amazement, she looked at Sal with tears in her eyes and exhaled in a slow sigh. ‘Oh, my, Sal, what a beautiful ring!’

  Then she cautiously touched the red-lacquered fingernail. ‘How beautiful!’ she went on wondering, and then lay down on her back, satisfied.

  Sal lay down beside her. He thought about the things he had done during the day, about his walks, home from school and then out to Harry’s, about the goal he had scored and about the cheering girls and about the flower vases that smiled on the windowsill of the dentist’s office.

  ‘Did you buy yourself an ice-cream after all?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Maybe we’ll go down later and buy some waffles at the corner.’

  They could hear a siren wailing from below. Emi sighed. ‘Do you realise, right now, at this very moment, someone is passing by–someone who is sick, maybe even dying, someone who is going to die tonight…’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Do you realise, Sal?’

  At least twice a month, Emi had fits of melancholia that sometimes led to a sorrow that lasted a whole day. He liked to listen to her thinking out loud, because that was when she dared to reveal her tiny anxieties, speak honestly about herself and admit that behind her naughty face and her inquisitive glance, her girlish fears lay hidden.