‘Emi, you do want to go away with me, don’t you?’
At that moment, they heard a rustle outside the door to the basement as if someone stood there listening to their conversation. It was the first time they felt the proximity of a living presence and, however unpleasant the presumption that their words had been heard, it was better than the certainty that they would remain there alone and estranged. He held her tight. He wished he could drip the will to leave into her pores, induce all his energy and the clarity with which he saw the situation they were in. He also wanted her to understand that, although he didn’t like to say it to her all the time and use too many words, he loved her in his own way; he felt like squeezing her palm into his and feeling her sweat moistening his skin.
‘You have to tell me now: do you want to come with me, or are you staying here?’
This time, they heard a more distinct sound from the corridor. It was the sound of somebody’s footsteps, groping along outside as they had done. A door opened, very close to their door. They were surrounded by life, and the silence around them had broken. They had to go.
Sal climbed down from the table. He fondled its surface, still hot from their bodies, and then took a couple of steps back. He was waiting for her to answer, although he knew that the world frightened her and that her uncertainty, so cleverly disguised in fits of rebellion, usually overturned her heroic decisions. And so he would have happily delayed the moment. Love was not enough. He knew that, if Emi had had to endure the disapproving looks of adults and friends, she would have locked herself inside her room, would have suffered for a few days and would have come out tamed and helpless.
He put his ear to the door. The noises had died out, which meant that they could come out from the room. He turned to Emi. There was nothing left of her but a thin shadow, sweeping the walls as it moved. She approached him insubstantially, as if swallowed by air, until she clung to him. He could smell her breath, like the odour of rotten apples. He wanted to hold her in his arms, but his fingers stopped in midair and remained sprawled, as in a pantomime. She was before him, and yet she was immaterial. It was an optical illusion: Emi was still up on the dissection table, while the shapes brought to life in the room were the projections of an incandescent globe.
‘If you think that’s what we should do…’
Her voice had a faraway sound, coming from behind the palms that covered her face.
‘And, if it were so, I would at least want to know where we’re going, where we’re going to stay. It might be easy for you to say, but one day you might want to return home, while I, for one, can’t do the same. It’s more difficult for me.’
She breathed, and Sal was touched by the warm waft of air. He rushed and took her in his arms, but Emi was struggling angrily to get free. She forcefully pushed him away with her fists.
‘There’s no need for you to convince me – I’ll come!’
And that’s all there was to it: he had his answer. It wasn’t how he had imagined it. He had thought it would take more time, that he would need to invest more energy into it and that, in the end, they would both accept the idea. But Emi seemed to have resigned herself as if she knew it was just another whim of his. He had imagined that the petrified woman on the table would help: that the shock of seeing her would be so strong that, compared to her tragedy, nothing could scare them anymore. They were together, and that was what was important. But now together meant nothing anymore. He remained next to her, not knowing if it was wise for him to say anything else and disturb her thoughts. Pushing the door ajar, he saw a thread of light crossing the corridor. Emi was in the same position in which he had left her when climbing down from the table. For an instant, he feared it had all been a dream.
‘So, do we have a deal? Are we leaving?’
Emi climbed down and came to him; she was calm. She consented and crept out the door. When they were upstairs in the lobby, they looked at one another.
‘Tomorrow morning, I’ll come and pick you up. I’ll go upstairs to Harry’s now. Actually, I’ll go in a couple of minutes, to give you time to leave so he doesn’t see us together. If they have to piece together my disappearance with yours, it’s better that they do it later. It’ll give us more time. I’ll promise to meet him tomorrow. And you go home and act as if nothing has happened.’
Emi listened to him and then headed for the door. She cried to him again: ‘We have a deal!’
He could see her walking, with her ample, boyish, cocky gait. He smiled at the idea that everything had worked out so easily, but his train of thought was broken by an ugly forewarning that disturbed his calmness. It was growing inside him like a wave of heat and panic; it emblazed his cheeks and inflamed his stomach so that he rushed to the stairs and ran up all four floors, hoping that the physical exercise would make him forget.
He rang Harry’s doorbell and, in a few seconds, Mrs Demetrescu opened the door with a large smile. She looked like a clown, with her cheeks cut by the risen corners of her mouth and crossed by two parentheses. Mrs Demetrescu had a few friends over, and when he passed by the living room door, Sal greeted them respectfully and caught them all in a glimpse: talkative and in a hurry to take the words out of each other’s mouths, they fell silent when the boy showed himself. They greeted him back, all in one voice. While he crossed the corridor that led to Harry, the choir of voices grew back behind him. Harry was laying on his belly on the rug, bobbing his head with headphones over his ears, while Toma was sitting at the desk as usual, his face almost glued to the pieces of a dismantled portable radio.
‘Here comes the prodigal son!’
Sal started. He stared at Harry, knitting his brows. ‘What’s that?’
‘I’m saying that you vanished without a trace. I waited for you with Tommy, to go to Union Square together. We went alone in the end – if we had waited for you we wouldn’t have done shit.’
Sal backed away. ‘And? Did you get anything?’
Toma mumbled. They hadn’t bought anything. Anyway, they had discovered that they didn’t have enough money; moreover, Harry’s mum, who had driven them there, had been in a hurry to get back to work.
‘Guys, listen. Forget the shopping centre. I have something important to say.’
‘Shoot,’ Harry mimicked him.
‘I’m going to leave…’
Neither of the boys seemed too impressed. He repeated: ‘I’m leaving.’
‘Come on, you just arrived. Stick around a bit more.’
Sal found it difficult to lie. But he had to deliver an official lecture, as his father had asked him to, so he didn’t arouse suspicion. He had entered the room with a feeling of superiority, but the truth was that, seeing them both there, so absorbed by their world and carefree, he envied them and wished he weren’t forced to run away with Emi.
‘We’re moving because my mum is going to have a baby.’
‘What?’
Harry was staring at him, pop-eyed.
‘A baby.’
‘Yeah, I got that! What the fuck? You run off the field and leave us in the lurch, then you make an appointment and snooker us and now you come over with this stuff about your mother being knocked up. What fucking shit is that?’
‘Man, I don’t understand why you’re so mad.’
He sat down on his bottom with his feet beneath him. The boys he idled his time away with when Emi wasn’t around were like a charmed forest around him.
Once, on a dark spring afternoon, the whole pack had been heading to the basketball field of a professional high school nearby. Toma and Johnny were leading, talking about musical gear and videotapes and heavy metal bands; Harry was on his left, and Max, blowing chewing-gum bubbles and mumbling like an echo, was behind him, when they were caught in a heavy rain and took refuge in an abandoned garage.
They had all sat down to wait until the rain thinned out, but from the darkness behind them four strapping lads popped up, with T-shirts tightly fitted on their weightlifter bodies and stonewashed blu
e jeans clinging to their thighs, ready to burst at the slightest movement and denuding their stone-hard buttocks. They were all flabbergasted. It had started as a quiet afternoon. That day they had abandoned their jackets and remained in their T-shirts. It was the first sign that warm weather was approaching, and then the summer holidays. Moreover, it was a Saturday, when everyone, starting with parents and ending with bums, stayed in their houses or in some kind of shelter and took their afternoon naps or just slept to appease their hunger. At this time, the neighbourhood was deserted and stayed like that for an hour or so, after which it slowly started to become repopulated. At first you would see a few scattered people and then their number would grow imperceptibly, as if they were glassy shards of metal fallen off a file and gathered around a big magnet. That’s why they liked to wander then – without fear of consequences, since by the time the streets started to get crowded again they were already back in their own neighbourhood, over which they ruled.
The boys that had popped up from behind them didn’t have friendly faces and didn’t seem willing to tolerate them under the roof of the garage. The question that they all asked themselves in those moments was whether they stood any chance of retreating peacefully; knowing they had trespassed upon the older boys’ territory, they could no longer just leave. Judging by their villainous expressions, ready to draw their guns, the friends realised that the solution of running away was no longer a serious one. And they didn’t have too much time to think.
The moment they realised they were not alone, the boys had jumped to their feet and stopped dead, their backs to the street and their faces to the dark. The only thought was the humour of the situation they now found themselves in, shifting so quickly from pleasant languor to excitement and fear. It overwhelmed each and every one of them until their whole file, aligned as in the army, started to shiver. One of the giants approached Toma and grabbed him by the chin until the boy, standing on the tips of his toes, started to swim in the air, waving his hands about. A voice shook the shelter then, causing their teeth to chatter.
‘Say something now! You were the talky one!’ barked the guy.
Toma closed his eyes, shrinking behind his glasses.
‘Say something, motherfucker, or I’ll stick a knife in you and cut you like a pig.’
Nobody was breathing any more. Outside, the rain had stopped and Sal, bursting into laughter, realised that they could now leave. The brute put Toma down and turned to him.
‘Look at this guy! You think it’s funny, huh?’
He grabbed Sal by the arms and lifted him up now, squeezing him as in a vice. But Sal remained stone-still, his eyes riveted upon the eyes of the flesh-and-muscle heap, which shot fire back at him.
‘Ho, little prick! What, are you playing macho? You want to save the tiny one’s ass?’
‘You are three times bigger than my friend. And three times bigger than me. We would be out of our minds if we imagined that we could measure our strength against yours. Can’t you see? We are peaceable!’
The giant was dumbfounded. The others were laughing under their breath, while the boys had all closed their eyes so they wouldn’t have to witness what was about to happen.
‘What are you, motherfuckers?’ he answered, turning back to his own gang. ‘And what the fuck are you laughing at? Do you have any idea what it means? Yo, wanker, tell me, what did the little prick here mean?’
‘Wanker’ shrugged his shoulders, revealing his wide, milky-white teeth, split by a gap through which the wind was whistling. They had suddenly become interested. But to everyone’s amazement, when the situation just seemed to have unwound a bit and the aggressor was about to let go of his prey, Toma dashed headfirst and hit the bundle of muscle, proceeding to pummel him repeatedly with his feet and fists. He looked like an insect squirming on the brim of a glass full of alcohol, inebriated by the fumes: swinging between life and death without knowing it.
The one who had been about to speak up fell silent then, watching the boy with a touch of pity. The gang had remained stone-still. Toma was writhing, his face distorted in a grimace of bitterness and pain. His blows seemed to act like a boomerang, bouncing back from the bundle of steel muscle to the bag of bones with spectacles that barely stayed on the tip of his nose, hanging by a hair like the destiny of the lad who was brainlessly braving against the odds.
Sal was dumbstruck with admiration and horror as he saw Toma flying in slow motion toward the back of the garage, hitting the stacked sheets of corrugated iron that made a glorious noise. He landed at the feet of the four others, who had regrouped now, in assault position, in a semicircle. But none of them managed to take another step ahead.
Three of the intruders had placed themselves forming a human wall, while the fourth turned Toma into a sack of blood and bones. The sounds he still managed to make sounded more and more like gurgles mingled with hiccups and snorts. It only lasted for a few minutes, but to them it seemed like an eternity.
The boy’s body was swinging like the hand of a clock, cleaving the air. In the end, it landed on the ground, its temples resting in the dust that had swelled in the atmosphere after all the uproar. After the correction had been administered, the wall fell apart and the boys could see Toma lying on his belly, full of blood and defeated but with a touch of pride in the way he drew his shoulders back, as if saying that he may have received a sound beating, but he still had something to gain from this incident: a victory over him that would change him in the future. They remained on the spot even after the bullies scattered one by one, throwing threats about ‘next time’ as they left.
What could they have done? They took Toma in their arms and carried him home like that. The blood dripped behind them, drop by drop, out of the boy’s feeble body, forming a chain of red beads on the pavement. They had such a long way to go back to their neighbourhood that it seemed you could have filled a jar with all the drops. Sal’s mind was split between the image of his brave friend and the deal he had later formed with the others when danger had appeared. They had left him alone, as you would leave a piece of clothing on the line before a storm.
Toma was rolling his eyes and mumbling meaningless words from time to time, but neither of them felt like solving word puzzles any more. Half humiliated and half terrified, they were carrying the body of their friend with spite, as if they had been carrying a corpse. If someone had encouraged them, they would have immediately abandoned that body, reminding them as it did of the failure of their newly sprouted manhood and of the kindness they had all been brought up to foster. Once they reached the threshold of Toma’s house, without even conferring with each other and exhausted from the mental and physical turmoil, they lay him down on the door mat, which bore an inscription in black handwriting on a brown background bidding them ‘Welcome!’
They left him there and moved away. Only one of them returned in a haste to press the doorbell. That was the sign that it was time for them to scuttle away, each to his own house, and forget all that had happened. But Sal just stood there flabbergasted, waiting for the door to open and for Toma’s severe and obtuse parents to come out; he wanted to watch their sour expressions change before his eyes upon seeing their mutilated child, to see their wry faces struggling to hold back their tears. He imagined that pain would defeat them, drowned in helplessness and unknowingly contaminated by the germ of failure and regret, of irreparable guilt that floated in the air. The door opened at last, and the Cerberuses swallowed him inside in one mouthful.
Nobody was reprimanded, neither on that day nor on the following days. The days that followed were really some of the worst days in Sal’s life: they were the days in which he tried to figure out who he actually was. The boys had all vanished. After a period of silence, he summoned them to the little park at the intersection of the streets where they lived. He arrived a few minutes late and watched them gather one by one, penitently heading for the meeting place with long faces and their screwed-up eyes cast down. He knew what would follow: he knew
perfectly well that the feeling of guilt that he himself had been fighting against during that interval would bring forth violent outbursts and release heavy words.
He watched them like that and deliberately lingered for another half an hour. He wanted to see whether the waiting would loosen up the stiffness between them and would untie their tongues. Then they would forget what had kept them captive inside their houses; they would leave it all behind, returning to their previous lives and their little problems. He wanted to catch them unawares in that certain moment, in which they would be relaxed and would have definitively forgotten that one of them was missing.
The boys remained silent for a couple of minutes. They mumbled a greeting, their gazes flying over the burgeoning trees, all seemingly brooding. They were thinking, Sal said to himself, how it would be if their guilt disappeared and they became the carefree children they had been before. They sat scattered on the benches aligned on the park alleys and began to wait. Johnny was holding a book in his hand and leafing through it mechanically. Harry sat sprawled on the bench, a hand resting between his legs in a cowboy attitude, and contemplated the horizon with empty, expressionless eyes. Meanwhile, Max, with his usual superior air, sat with his eternally worn cap pulled down to the bridge of his nose and his bizzare disco clothes, from which only the music and the glittering globes reflecting phosphorescent colours were missing. These boys were all his friends and, at the same time, they were Toma’s only friends.
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