One at a time, the pieces come together, calmly, repetitively, reiterating the same swaying motion. The void regenerates as it flows out and the particles gather back together. The distances contract and life becomes even in time. You can measure it in your mind, however unbearable that might be. Measuring has an endless appeal. And the sounds become light steam, utterly vanishing. You yield to this boredom which you call infinite, although the name is just the frivolity of a myope, articulated in order to tame the beast repeating, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ like a blunt child.
It would draw near and move away, like a cold snake, like a series of numbers in endless arrays, always different. Scary and hard to grasp. Although what appeared was only the memory of the bygone fear, the astonishing avalanche was now breathtaking. It was fracturing time, cutting it in two. What-had-been in the mirror of what-was-no-more, generating its missing image and its memories of itself, that would be lost later when everything fell into regular shapes. The sounds had mellowed and lost part of their weight. They were delayed in reaching the huge ear that covered the body like a funnel. The ear had become larger than the universe and stood stiff and alert, shaped like a carnivorous flower ready to swallow the small insect on its gaudy petal. The size and the shadow of the funnel prevented the rest from growing, from releasing the sounds that would have saved it from solitude.
The perpetual noise nurtured the animal giving birth to the endless arrays of numbers in the huge cave. It looked like it would never end. It would sever the chain with its shiny blade reflecting the monstrosities and then they increased and decreased at will, with the tenacity of termites. At the end of a long waiting, a bud opened, and from it rose the sun with its rosy petals. Spiralled and demure, fluttering their volatile wings, they quickly spread their smell around. He followed that strong, deafening smell and let himself slide on that slime-covered chute, heading toward the shapes that had now started to connect.
He had almost fallen asleep – with his eyelids welded shut and his eyelashes entwined, the tears inside had formed a lake on the border of which he now stood dreamily, watching the vines move slowly, bubbling – when the first creature appeared on the horizon. It was something he could recognise, although he saw it now for the first time: an arched, continuous and motionless line, a shape that attracted him more than all the previous illusions. The siege of the shape, squeezing him now like an enormous whorl, left him breathless. As he struggled to inflate the hollow pillows in his chest with oxygen, he could see it better: it resembled him and was suffocated by his presence, but it just hadn’t managed to hold on. It had dropped from his yet unformed hands all the infinite rows of numbers and now it lay, lifelessly, at his feet.
VI
THE CITY OF PERENNIAL PLANTS
Harry’s building rose menacingly in front of the two children, who were beaming with excitement. Above them, the clouds had formed a wreath of filthy cotton wool covered in fine dust. The wind was blowing around their feet, knotting their footsteps. They stayed in place, their eyes riveted upon the iron door with latticework that resembled the patterning on Linzer cookies. From behind the door came muffled noises, as if all the things hidden in that building, ideas both said and unsaid, had gathered together and were waiting to be unfettered. Their eyes twinkled in the darkness that had now pushed the day away, and in the surrounding fog one could still spot traces of withered sunbeams. Emi took the first step toward the door and turned around to face Sal. Her round face gleamed faintly in the grey, rarefied air.
‘What do we do now?’
She had asked the question as if it depended on him whether they would go inside Harry’s building or not.
‘Do you have the ring with you?’
Emi took a step back. She looked at him for a split second, trying to read the right answer on his face. The truth was that she didn’t have it.
‘I left it at home. It’s too large; it falls off my finger. Did you want it back?’
Sal grabbed her hand and dragged her along. He opened the iron door and squeezed into the lobby. The smell inside had changed: it was pungent now, making his eyes sting. Emi had the sullen air of a child that had just been woken. She watched him, expecting him to show her something spectacular worth the suspense. Still holding her hand, Sal could feel her shaking. They arrived like that at the door that led to the basement. Stifled noises came from the staircase, differing in sonority and intensity: some from the inside, others clearer and with an echo, coming from outside. All seemed meant to maintain the unbending illusion of reality.
After opening the door, Sal relaxed a little. He no longer felt his heart pounding in his chest, nor his eardrums throbbing, nor his blood pulsating in his arteries ready to make them explode. He relaxed from the cool air coming from below, or maybe from the damp hand of the girl who had gone silent behind him, or maybe because he was no longer alone.
They stopped at the top of the stairs. They were blinking frequently, trying to gradually get used to the dark. Then they began to descend. He was glad that Emi had left the ring at home, although he didn’t understand where that relief came from. He wasn’t superstitious: he didn’t take three steps backward whenever a black cat crossed his way, he didn’t believe that fulfilment of wishes came from eyelashes fallen on the cheek and he didn’t knock on wood or make crosses with his tongue on the roof of his mouth. He wasn’t even terrified of seeing the woman lying on the table again. He was only worried about how Emi might react upon seeing her: he even imagined her running away, disappearing helter-skelter and refusing to see him ever again for being a freak who busied himself with digging out corpses. He stopped.
‘Are you sure you want to see her?’
White as a sheet, Emi’s face beamed in the dark. He felt pity for her. She was squeezing his hand with so much strength that she was about to crush his bones.
‘Yes, I am.’
He had watched her mouth, but didn’t perceive any movement of her lips; no waft of air, however small, had blown his way. Emi’s pale, round face glowed like a motionless and silent full moon. Nonetheless, he had clearly heard the determined, unflinching, almost inhuman voice. She was in front of him but, with all the fear inside her, she seemed half asleep.
Downstairs, they could hear nothing but their own breath. They advanced with caution. This time, Sal counted the doors in his mind. The last door was still attached to the broken padlock, a little ajar. He stopped outside it, staring through the slit, but couldn’t see anything through it. He felt scared for Emi again. She was quiet; he hadn’t even noticed when she had pulled her hand out of his. They entered the room and stopped in the semidarkness.
‘Sal.’
He turned round and grabbed her fingers again. She was reserved now and self-controlled. Her touch contained something vigorous; the moment they had stepped over the threshold of the room, the girl behind him had changed into a monstrous and authoritative creature. Her face was sparkling.
‘Is that all?’
He pricked up his ears. Down by his feet, a cold draught wriggled around their ankles. He wanted to ask Emi if she could feel it too, but he stopped himself short. Although he couldn’t distinguish clearly around him yet, he had a growing certitude that if he had closed his eyes for a second, he would have discovered that the dissection table and the room were empty and that nothing, of all he had seen, existed anymore. His heartbeats accelerated and he felt a claw at his throat, choking him.
Rummaging through his pocket, he found the small flashlight he had meticulously taken with him upon leaving home. He turned it on mechanically, trying to shake the fear off, then turned around and accidentally pointed the thin beam of light at Emi’s face so it trickled down to her like a trail of smoke. She was smiling, serene and relaxed. The shadows furrowing her cheek on one side made her look older; her curly, cropped hair made her look like a thistle in the artificial light. Centaurea calcitrapa.
Sal burst into laughter. His roars hit the empty walls, making a grim sound. He ran the
flashlight around the room, furrowing the walls with the beam and revealing small areas. Sal’s hand was shaking impatiently, and he handled the flashlight as in a sort of dance, as gymnasts would handle the ribbons. Then, when the performer had settled down a bit, the fragments came together and the first shapes emerged from the darkness almost unaided: the corners of the table, the metal pane reflecting the surrounding light, the boxes piled up in a corner of the room, the perches in another corner, buckets of dry paint with glued mason’s brushes inside, three plastic chairs stacked one on top of the other. He turned again to the table and, just to be sure, he swept the light over it one more time. Only a few seconds before, the absence of the corpse, however troubling, had made him recover his peace, but now a tiny midget had grown out of the cold and empty surface and lay crucified on the table. He was dumbfounded. He turned off the flashlight to be able to think, unseen.
‘Emi,’ he said, in a choking voice.
He heard rustling and a stifled giggle. He turned the flashlight on again and saw Emi, perched upon the table, amused.
‘So, is that all?’
He could feel the blood throbbing in his temples. This time, he had only been afraid on her behalf. The fact that something could happen to Emi froze his heart and made him lose his temper.
‘This is so not funny!’
‘Did I scare you?’
Sal leaned back against the wall and pointed the torch at her face. He didn’t have the heart to leave her there alone, although she deserved it. He tried to get a grip on himself, to gather his strength and find his words. He was going to tell her something, something important for both of them; he was going to make a pretty difficult announcement. He had been thinking a lot about the best moment to do so, had pondered upon the introduction and upon how he was going to continue once astonishment and pain had started to mingle on her face. He also had a solution, but he planned to let her in on it later after watching her reaction and feeding on her emotions for a while.
Emi put a hand before her eyes, signalling that the light was disturbing her. ‘Please could you turn that shit off?’
Sal put the flashlight on the table. ‘Come. Climb here next to me.’
Emi enjoyed bossing people around. Yet Sal felt no trace of humiliation or surrender when he humoured her, just as he did now, by going over and climbing half-heartedly on the cold pane next to her. He felt that her wishes mysteriously matched his yet unspoken desires. Maybe it was just their strong connection that explained everything, making him feel that they actually had identical wishes. It was hard to say. He could feel her next to him now, reclining on the table with the same voluptuousness with which she would lie on a blanket in the sun. She was a loafer with fits of authority, and he knew how crazy it was to listen to her unquestioningly. But he would still lend his charmed ear, as he was doing now.
‘Maybe you will say that I’m crazy, but although there is nobody here, I know that there was someone. I mean, I believe you when you say you saw someone.’
Sal listened to her carefully, then heard her burst into laughter.
‘What the hell?’
‘So you don’t believe me…’
‘I’d like to, but I can’t because of the wound on my calf.’
‘Your what?’
She ran wild like a hurricane, disappointed that she hadn’t seen what she expected to see: what she had been promised she would see, what she privately started to feel belonged to her. She sharpened her thin beak at once to peck at the flesh around his eyes and his mouth, making him bleed in silence next to her.
‘Look, I have the feeling that I’m boring you.’
Sal didn’t answer right away. He suspected it was another game, but he felt her tense.
‘I think,’ Emi went on, ‘that since those things happened between us, you’ve drifted away from me.’
‘What things?’
But as soon as he asked the question, Sal realised what she meant. ‘Those things’ were the issue. And all that he was going to say would only confirm to Emi her theory: that he had found a solution to get away.
‘There is something I need to tell you,’ his voice croaked.
He didn’t mean to start like that, but the words had just come out. He was bothered by the sepulchral silence around them; he wished he could hear at least the sounds of the building, some sign of life that would make his story more humane and less dramatic. She gaped at him, the shadows making her look like an aged child. She wondered if he would love her as much if she were wrinkled, with dark circles under her eyes and a puffy face. Fat worms would probably creep into her skin some day, sucking out her youth, her freshness and her poise.
Poise was a word his grandmother would use. When referring to a woman she admired, the synonym for beauty was poise–which probably meant a lot of things apart from physical features, since upon uttering it, his grandmother would straighten her back, sway her hips, push her chest out and simultaneously bring together all five shrivelled fingers on her right hand. It was as if she wanted to say that although she spoke a simple word, she actually had in mind five ingredients, five magic potions whose formula was known by no one but her. When she would see Emi withered, she would open her fingers and let all her secrets fall through them.
‘I have been thinking about the best way for me to tell you this. If I start with the beginning, you will link my words to what you said to me earlier. And it would be wrong. We would fight, and then I probably wouldn’t get to tell you the end of the story. So I will start with the end.’
He took a break and moistened his dry lips.
‘Long story short, we must run away.’
He took her hand again, but he felt some resistance, so he squeezed it tighter.
‘We must run.’
Once he was under the impression that he had things under control, he started to tell her that his father had recently informed him that they would be leaving the neighbourhood and moving to another place, that his mother was going to have another baby, a brother or sister for him, and that consequently they would need another room. Furthermore, his father had been happy: this meant Sal would be able to make new friends, diversify his activities and find new conversation topics, because now he was excessively silent, had no visitors at home and hung around with girls – and when his father said ‘girls’, he had a look on his face that implied that they both knew to whom he was referring. He had advised Sal to begin saying goodbye, little by little, to all his acquaintances in the following month. ‘That’s the appropriate way,’ his father had added. From that, Sal inferred that their new house was too far away for him to keep seeing his friends or for them to spend time together.
He had been thinking for a week about what to do, and finally he had an idea. He couldn’t understand how he hadn’t thought about it from the very start. It was simple and doable. To run away together. Their good behaviour so far, the silence his father complained about, the conformity and the sacredly respected curfews would be their cover. Nobody would suspect anything beforehand because they would do it all according to their daily schedule. Money was not an issue: he was going to snatch all the money his father had in his wallet that day, and they would go from there. The plan was to get on the first tram that came to their stop and get off one stop before the terminal, then take a bus in a totally different direction from where they had come and get off, again, one stop before the terminal.
‘And where will we end up?’
Sal shrugged. He had no idea, and it was all for the better. He couldn’t have said where they were heading, even if someone had tortured him. He could only have said that they were heading for freedom, that their flight was the tunnel that would lead them out of the cell where they were held captive, and that the only alternative was life in hell. After showing their concern about the fact that he was seeing Emi too often, his parents had told him compassionately that love would come much later and that for now he should enjoy childhood and the company of his friends. They had a c
ondescension that enveloped them like armour and prevented them, at the same time, from seeing and acknowledging reality. The look on their faces told him: ‘Shut up! We know better than you do what love is. This relationship is a piece of kids’ nonsense – your minds have become infested with things you can no longer handle. We know better what love is about. Can’t you see? Look at us!’
He had been unhappy and morose all day long. For the first time, it had crossed his mind that maybe it would be better if he were one day to wake up to an empty house and hear his voice hit the walls of the rooms with an echo. Then he would grab the telephone and call Emi over. They would lock themselves inside and then live happily ever after. Now he understood perfectly that something like that was no longer possible. It was out of the question for him to wait for a miracle. The moment they had informed him that they would move house, it had been clear that it was all up to him and that, if he didn’t make a decision soon, everything would be gone.
Emi asked him once again: ‘And where will we end up?’
The truth is that she couldn’t decide whether to trust Sal or not. Her mother had taught her that you should never believe what boys told you, because every one of them wanted a certain thing, and that, if you could afford to have relationships, the secret of their success was to be cool and indifferent. Now she was forced to make a decision that would upend her beliefs.
It crossed her mind that it might be cheap histrionics through which Sal was making her open up her soul, so that he could laugh at her afterward. But when had he done something like that before? Never. He had never given her reasons to doubt not only his friendship, but also the love that floated around their every meeting. Why, then, was he forcing her to do crazy things, things that would cost them the freedom of seeing each other and hanging around together? She wished she could consent and then grab his hand and pull him down to lie beside her. They could fall together into that reassuring darkness. Compared to the words that had been uttered, the darkness had become friendly and safe. She wished they could stay on a little, to settle down and to keep the silence untouched.
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