Sun Alley

by Cecilia Stefanescu

  Emi sat flabbergasted in the armchair open-mouthed in wonder.

  ‘Well, and since love has its own way, Tristan was soon brought to the shore of the kingdom whose princess was called Isolde. And she is the one who saves him from death. But Tristan is so blind that he doesn’t notice the beautiful girl with black curly hair cascading down over her shoulders and goes back to battle instead. And he keeps fighting until, one day, he is summoned by his uncle and ordered to find the girl whose arms are snow-white and whose hair is black and curly, covering her shoulders, so that she can become his wife and his queen.’

  ‘Isolde,’ Emi whispered.

  ‘Tristan set out to search for the woman described by Uncle Mark, not realising that it was Isolde he was seeking. And, as love has its own way, once again Tristan reached the shore of the kingdom whose princess was called Isolde. And there he finds the royal stronghold besieged by the barefaced man whom he had been warned against. Sure enough, as any barefaced man is wont to do, this one tries to deceive him, but Tristan figures it out in time and manages to kill him. However, as he is hurt again in the battle, Isolde nurses him for the second time and saves him from death. Taking a better look at her, Tristan understands that she is the chosen one his uncle has ordered him to find, and so he sails away back home with her.’

  ‘What about her? What does she say?’

  ‘Well, I suppose she says nothing; she wants to be a queen.’

  Emi seemed to brood for a while, making a disappointed face.

  ‘Wait. So on their way back, Isolde’s handmaid, a redoubtable witch, accidentally makes both of them drink a magic potion meant to make people fall in love for life. And the poor things drink it, and that’s when all the madness begins. Tristan falls in love with Isolde, and Isolde with Tristan. Love pushes them into each other’s arms, and all through their voyage they live as husband and wife, you know… but sometimes love is not enough. So at the end of the voyage, Isolde decides that she was destined to be queen. You might wonder how come love wasn’t enough… so did I, but I haven’t found an answer. The fact is that Isolde rushed into the uncle’s arms, secretly shedding a tear for Tristan. But rumour had already reached the king that his white queen, Isolde, had lost her innocence during her journey at sea with his nephew. And the anger caused by jealousy knows no limits. With extra -ordinary courage, perhaps even bordering on recklessness and pretence, Isolde volunteers to pass a test. She is ready to dip her hand in a molten tar cauldron under the oath that she had only been in the arms of two men, Mark and the monk who had helped her jump ashore from the boat. Isolde dunks her hand in the molten tar cauldron and, to the surprise of everyone present, she takes it out white as snow. But who do you think had been hiding under the robe of the monk who had helped her jump ashore?’

  ‘Tristan,’ Emi whispered, her face beaming with admiration and joy.

  ‘Yes. Do you realise? What a liar!’

  ‘Yes, Sal, she lied because she loved him. It doesn’t count.’

  Sal, taken aback, was now gawping at Emi. How could she say something like that? A lie was a lie, and Isolde, aside from cheating on her husband, had also lied to him unblinkingly. And love – he pondered for a while – love can’t justify such things. Not to mention the fact that Isolde wasn’t really in love with Tristan; it was the potion that had poisoned their blood and was now talking through her mouth. He rattled off his theory to Emi, but she made a wry face and answered:

  ‘You say that because you have never been in love!’

  The light had stopped shining, the wind had stopped blowing, the sounds had stopped vibrating and Sal’s heart had stopped beating. Everything had stopped dead. He didn’t dare ask her a thing, but unyieldingly carried on his story as if nothing had been said.

  ‘Then Isolde married King Mark and became what she had always wished to be: a queen.’

  But the spell between them had been broken. Sal rooted for the brave knight, Emi for the deceitful adventuress. Emi could feel the grudge, the resentment and the misapprehension in Sal’s voice. The only thing that prevented her from leaving was the curiosity of seeing what would follow.

  ‘But the couple’s love affair on the ship had been witnessed by other people, who started to talk, and the talk eventually reached the king. Doubt-stricken, Mark chased Tristan away, hoping he would rid himself of his nephew. But Tristan, like a true hero, held his ground. His love for Isolde was stronger than any threat.’

  Emi was fidgeting on her chair impatiently. ‘Well, I’d rather you told me how it ends. Do they stay together?’

  ‘Yes and no… Actually, they die in each other’s arms. So they stay together, but it kind of doesn’t matter anymore.’

  Emi seemed to miss the point at first; then she jumped right up from the armchair. ‘You are mistaken. If they die together, as you say, then thereafter they are still together! Love has conquered all!’

  Sal looked again at the locked weapon cabinet. ‘One evening, after they run away from King Mark’s court, Tristan and Isolde wander through a dark forest and becoming very tired, they lie down under a tree. In the morning, the king’s men find them sleeping side by side, with Tristan’s sword lying between them. They say it was a symbol of innocence, but I think it’s just a sign that their love was doomed.’

  Sal took a break to behold the reflection of his pale face in the window, furrowed by the gleaming blade.

  ‘There is no hereafter; this world here is all there is. If I took this sword and ran it into my stomach, I would abide with you for a while: I would probably see you screaming and crying, and then, in my eyes, you would disappear and there would be nothing left. The only things that would exist after that would be the room, the weapon cabinet, the furniture, you and my gradually cooling and decomposing body.’

  He remained gazing straight ahead for a few moments. Images of the story unrolled before his eyes like a slide show. He was trying to visualise the two lovers, but what he saw instead were a few familiar neighbourhood streets and himself stopping in front of a house that seemed very familiar: a house with a ground floor and a first floor. There, at the upper storey, the window was open and a piece of the white curtain was flapping outside like a flag of surrender.

  They found him collapsed on the floor, his left hand full of blood, lying among the glass shards of the weapon cabinet from which pieces of glass were still hanging. Sal only came back to his senses when they reached the hospital, but even then he couldn’t manage to explain where he had got the urge to run his small fist through the shiny, transparent surface.

  That’s when his warrior image had sprung into the minds of the boys. They had only seen something like that in action films–although Sal thought he resembled Clark Kent, lying breathless on the floor, more than Superman. On the white sheet, on one of the six beds in the desolate ward of the emergency hospital, Sal contemplated the gauze bandage under which his warm hand pulsated. For the first time, he encountered that dull pain, getting sharp now and again, that suddenly separated his body from his mind. A new body was being born on his inside, growing under his skin, different from all he had felt so far. It felt different from the bike spills and from the blows received from the gang of bullies on Toma’s street, the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old tough guys who had put their bikes away in the attic long before and were now shamelessly touching and poking girls.

  The pain had seeped into his blood and was now forcefully pushed through his arteries, making his blood cells rush chaotically through all his organs – this unprecedented pain that had thrown him into the seclusion of the white hospital ward, made him stay with his eyes riveted to the ceiling for several hours in which not a thought, not even the most trifling and insignificant of thoughts, crossed his mind. His senses were petrified in a barren dream; his mind was stuck on his own inverted image into which, little by little, he descended.

  If you wish, you can do anything. You can jump with the soles of your feet right on the ceiling; you can hop around the neon lamps p
laced in the middle of the room like cracks in the walls of an open box through which sunshine seeps in. You can brush away the cobwebs in the corner and you can write your name in the dust. You can stay there, hanging unseen. But at the slightest relaxation of the mind, the image would turn back over, and the dizziness would make Sal close his eyes and jump off the bed with his feet on the floor. And, one Sunday before lunch, while he was heading to Toma’s to get a new game, the truth suddenly hit him, with the force of a boomerang returning to the present after a circuit of his personal history and jolting him out of his dream.

  That evening on the ward – with his ears whizzing, feeling dizzy from the iodine smell after an unsuccessful attempt to sleep – he felt an obscure urge to climb down from his bed and leave his room. Now that he was alone, he wanted to take a few aimless steps on the neon-lit hall of the hospital. He advanced on the circular aisle without encountering anybody, without hearing any sound apart from the jerky whoosh of a machine that was pumping air. When he thought he had gone all the way round and was about to return to his room, he opened the door of ward number 23 and saw before him a woman with black, curly shoulder-length hair held in place by a plastic hair band. She must have been around thirty, with a very pale complexion and round eyes like two black buttons. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, dressed in a T-shirt that only just covered her briefs. Sal drew back a step, but the woman reached an arm toward him.

  ‘Wait!’

  He stood still with his hand on the doorknob, daring neither to enter nor to cut and run out the door. He realised now that he had felt like leaving the room and running away from that pale and long-suffering lady. But she beckoned him to come in. And, as Sal advanced, her eyes became increasingly vivid and bright, as if two gems had grown inside them and taken the shape of the cheap buttons on his mother’s two-piece suit.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Mary Jane,’ a smooth voice murmured in his ear, and he almost felt Emi’s lips tickling his nape. The woman reached her arms out to him, and Sal advanced until he found his hands grasped by the woman’s translucent hands, which had bluish veins protruding through the skin.

  ‘Are you lost?’

  Sal relaxed. Instead of chilling him, the cold touch gave him a feeling of comfort and bliss. The gems had become eyes, the wiry hair had become silky and the skin on her cheekbones was glowing with colour.

  ‘I’m looking for my ward.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘I cut my wrists and I lost a lot of blood.’

  The woman touched the tips of his fingers sticking out from under the bandage. ‘If you need anything, just tell me. What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Sal.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Sal… we are both so lucky… Probably that’s why we are sitting here together, in the hospital, all by ourselves, because we are both fools.’

  Sal withdrew his hands slowly and spotted her thin, bare legs, hanging limply.

  ‘Are you sick?’

  The woman burst into loud laughter, as if in that instant Sal had pressed a button and a tape machine inside her had released the hysterical screams. An inexplicable feeling of guilt snuggled within him and made him shiver. He didn’t know what to do–whether to hold her in his arms or to set off running as he had intended to do in the first place.

  ‘I would have been delighted to have such a handsome boy like you, to be able to snuggle up to him and to feel his smooth skin and his fresh smell.’

  ‘Do you have any children?’

  She sighed. It had been a stupid question. The woman had just told him that she had none, but her proximity, the way she touched his arms – somewhat motherly, but with a certain sweetness and a scarcely restrained repentance – made him lose the thread of his thoughts.

  ‘I wished for it dearly. It’s not too late yet, but I don’t really know… When you’re confined in a hospital, alone, you kind of lose hope, don’t you?’

  Sal nodded, without a clue as to where the conversation was heading.

  ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m an only child, too. Some say it’s not okay, but I enjoyed it. They just let me be and I minded my own business.’

  She paused, visualising something in her past. ‘How come you ended up here?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I told you, it was an accident.’

  She took hold of his hands and inspected his bandages. Then her brows knitted.

  ‘One hell of an accident. What happened?’

  ‘Well, that’s the whole point – I have no idea. When I came to my senses, my wrists were cut. I was at a friend of mine’s, we were playing table tennis, and I went to the bathroom…’

  He took a break, considering whether to go on with the story or to stop there. But the woman seemed to be interested.

  ‘That’s about all. What about you, missus?’

  The word that was so hard to utter and that put such a precise distance between people, between grown-ups and kids, between those who don’t and probably won’t ever know each other, had come roughly out of his mouth.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘What happened to you? Why are you here?’

  She took him in her arms. At first, Sal resisted, but the woman was much stronger than him and, moreover, he was afraid of seeming rude, so he let himself be hugged. After a few moments of embarrassment, he clung to her soft shapes. And in acknowledgement of that, she whispered into his ear:

  ‘I tried to kill myself.’

  They sat motionless.

  ‘Do you know what that means?’

  Sal nodded his head. Of course he knew. Maybe Johnny and Max didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure about Harry. Toma had a hunch, but perhaps it wasn’t clear to him either. And he couldn’t say a thing about Emi. His heart was pounding madly in his chest. He was so happy she hadn’t succeeded that he was ready to fall onto his knees and ask her, beg her, to stay alive. What could have been so terrible?

  She stroked his cheeks with her moist hands.

  ‘It was a foolish thing to do, and I’m sorry now.’

  She pushed him back and looked into his eyes.

  ‘Sal, will you come to visit me tomorrow? And tell me what you dreamt of tonight? Will you?’

  Sal consented with a nod. He wanted to ask her permission and to lie next to her, to sleep side by side, embracing as they just had; he wanted to sniff her hair, to watch her eyelids lowered over the two black eyes that twitched in her sleep, below the noise of details. But the woman gestured for him to leave, pushing him away with her thin hands and showing him the door. Sal went out and found himself back on the aisle lit by the neon lamps with their ear-splitting buzz. He could smell her perfumed skin on his hands, and it aroused him. But she wasn’t simply his first living phantasm, which he could touch and which would keep him awake all night; she was also his oldest friend whom he had only fallen in love with later, at about six in the morning, when he managed to close his eyes and finally fall asleep. That was right before falling into a dream during which he realised that friendship was nothing without love and that tremendous discovery your body makes upon meeting the other’s body. He was spellbound. He stopped in the middle of the street, with his arms hanging down by his linen trousers.

  The next day the large-hipped nurse appeared in the ward, dressed in a very tight white coat with the first two lower buttons open, revealing her plump legs through the slit when she walked. She was followed by his parents; all with bright faces, they were animated by a state of unconditional joy they felt compelled to induce in him as well. It was then that he understood more precisely the meaning of the reassurance their happy faces carried and of the recommendations the doctor, arriving shortly after his parents, made in a warm, professional voice. Was he happy at home? How were his grades at school? How did he get along with his teachers? What about his classmates? What kind of friends did he have? What kind of magazines did he read? How did he l
ike to play? What kind of games? The lady doctor put it all down in a notebook. Then she turned to his parents, whose faces had lost part of their brightness in the meantime, and let them know in an authoritative tone that she wished to continue the conversation with them outside and that she wished to see Sal twice a week at the polyclinic. After she dictated its address, which the parents sullenly and obediently repeated aloud, the lady doctor was gone in a storm, saying goodbye over her shoulder. It was then that his parents threw him a ferocious gaze, in which Sal could clearly read: ‘So long, friends, magazines, games and everything else!’

  He crept past his parents, who were now dutifully listening to the nurse repeating all that the woman with the stethoscope stylishly hanging round her neck had said before, and slithered along the candy-pink walls, heading for his friend’s room. He put his ear to the slightly open door, through which he could hear a man’s voice. Through the slit, his eyes managed to carve out part of the white coat covering a figure leaning over the bed and half of the woman’s face. She looked even more beautiful by day than she had in the feeble neon light the night before, but also very familiar. She was sitting the same way, with her head slightly leaning back, but this time her eyes were full of tears and she looked as if she were struggling to understand what the man dressed in a white visitor’s coat was saying to her. Sal pricked up his ears and managed to hear him:

  ‘You disappointed me. I thought there was no need for explanations between us, but I see that I was mistaken… actually, I don’t know what you want from me. Do you want me to solve it all this instant…?’

  The woman burst into tears with violent wails and babbled something unintelligible. The man in the white coat leaned over her and pressed her head to his chest. But with inexplicable force, the woman pushed him away, crying: