She was watching him with moist eyes. He presumed that the tears came rather from the pain of his grip than from her concern about the girl. Nothing bad can happen to a six-year-old girl. He repeated it in his mind a couple of times, not because he wanted to infuse some life into his conscience, which would have been useless, but because that gave him inner strength to make her believe as well.
‘Yes, we’re going to the hospital… nothing is wrong…’
Then, without blinking, she broke loose from his grip and looked at him with milky eyes, buried inside the fluffy, swollen, pillow-like eyelids.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Jogging on the beach.’
‘You went jogging?’ she repeated mechanically, leaving the impression that she hadn’t even heard her own question.
‘I’ve been jogging every morning for ten days. What do you find so amazing? When I woke up, she was fine. I went to check on them. They were sleeping peacefully. And now, in the morning, the same.’
‘I see. You didn’t tell me.’
‘Yes, I did. But, anyway, it makes no difference now. It’s not what this is all about.’
He saw her absorbed in her own thoughts, drifting away. She was probably thinking more about his early departures and less about the girl lying in bed. At her first reproach, he would have flung in her face that she was selfish and saw only disaster around her. But they didn’t utter a word.
The day slowly elapsed in between Mari’s bed and the living room, where the three of them, huddled together, kept vigil over the child. Dori had nestled in Matilda’s lap, grasping her toes. She played with them mechanically, spreading them in her palm and then stroking them as if they were a small tamed animal she was just befriending. It was already dark outside, and the only signs of life came from the beach. They could hear the belligerent, sexual cries of teenage girls warmed by the sun and over-excitedly calling to boys to reunite in the pack. Those sounds pierced the air like poisoned arrows and sank between his shoulder blades. The girls had huddled up together and moaned in unison, although it was clear that it was Mari who struck the key note while the others’ grumbles followed like an echo; groggy from their sister’s agony, they reverberated like empty barrels whose volume multiplied indefinitely. Eventually, he pulled Matilda out of the room by her sleeve.
‘You should go to sleep and allow her to sleep as well. I’ll stay.’
Matilda’s eyes sparkled in the dark. She clenched her jaws so tightly that he could hear her gnashing her teeth. She was unmerciful when it came to her nest. He hadn’t taken that into account; if she sensed anything, her meanness would have pushed her to acts of significant cruelty.
‘Come on, please, go! And take Dori with you. There’s no point in keeping her up all night. Everything will be fine by morning, you’ll see.’
His voice was sugary and silky; he behaved cajolingly in perfect contrast to her sharpness and her harshness, to the intransigence with which she had related to the situation for the last several hours. And suddenly she collapsed into his arms, grabbing his T-shirt with her claws and swinging from one side to another in a lamentation that would have squeezed tears out of stones, let alone a man she called her husband, in whose hands she had entrusted her whole life. He saw her to the bedroom door and gently pushed her inside. She was still crying with occasional noisy sobs, like a doll that squealed pathetically every time their girls pressed their fingers on its tummy.
‘You promise to wake me up if anything happens?’
‘Sure. I promise. But nothing will happen, you’ll see.’
He helped her into bed and pulled the sheet over her. He departed in a hurry and, before closing the door, threw her another look from the threshold. She had remained still, wrapped as in a shroud, and he had the distinct impression that he had seen her before, or was going to see her like that again. She had the repulsive look of a corpse that, although it hasn’t yet started to diffuse the sweet stenches of death, makes you anticipate them and shiver beforehand with disgust and fear. He took Dori to bed in the living room and returned to Mari’s sickbed. He remained there until the next day’s dawn when, overcome by fatigue and tricked by the sunlight, he fell asleep.
When he woke up, he was lying on the girl’s bed. There was no one else in the room, and the light coming through the window had formed a huge orange fire in the middle of the room. He sat up in bed and pricked up his ears to check if there were any noises in the house, like the times he used to spy on his parents when he was a kid. His first thought was neither about the sick girl in whose bed he had awoken, nor about her potentially worrying absence, but about the woman who had waited the whole morning at the beach on her mat, petrified with grief and astonishment with every minute that passed, trying to understand what she had done or said wrong the day before. With a vacant look, he remained thinking about her. That thought, the image of her alone, helplessly worrying, making assumptions, swallowing her reproaches, dumbfounded him but also sent a thrill of sick excitation all along his body.
He got out of bed and left the room on tiptoe. The house was empty. Only a few things – the girls’ swimsuits and other freshly washed clothes – animated the stale air of the living room. He opened the windows and only then saw the swing in the garden, rocking slowly back and forth, and three pairs of tamely hanging legs, two smaller pairs on the sides and a bigger one in the middle. At first it crossed his mind to leave the house like a thief, to run to the car and drive away in a rush, heading for the beach with the reckless hope that he could still find her waiting for him. Only the futility of the thought kept him in his place, in blind, objectless contemplation. And so several days passed just like this. Actually, he couldn’t have said exactly how many, because he spent them in a state of anaesthesia and oblivion. Each morning, he would shave away with an imaginary blade any trace of her nearby presence.
Mari had recovered: she was back in bloom and excessively lively, as if the sickness that had confined her in her bed had infused her with miraculous powers and she had now revived in the form of a pesky elf that pestered everybody and consumed their energy. The day would pass very quickly because of her and the fights she constantly provoked. But the shrieks ringing in the house were better than the silence to which he had awoken on that afternoon. And the rain that followed was better than the sunny days in which people went to sunbathe.
Somewhere, in a corner of his mind, she was still on the mat that was now soiled with a mixture of wet sand and seaweed; water was streaming through her black hair that had curled even more and shone under a black sun. While it rained, they stayed in the house and invented games. The girls seemed to enjoy the weather change most, and hence they had taken hold of things and people. As parents, they were both paralysed by guilt. Neither of them showed their wish to go out of the house anymore. They ate all the supplies in the fridge and then ordered food to be delivered to them at home. They opened the huge Monopoly board and played all their money, buying and selling. More often than not at the end of the game, when the stinking rich girls, falling about with laughter after having defeated their parents, begged for another round, he would lift them both under his arms as if they were two twigs and spin them around the house. And, in that pleasant vertigo, he saw her multiplied, hundredfold, thousandfold: her image would magically recompose from tiny sparkling pieces of light and shadow, from coloured fragments, and explode into the room in smaller images, all merry, all optimistic. But one day, he fell to the ground with the girls. Dori and Mari pulled away crawling, awoken from their splendour, while Matilda released a terrible yell. She rushed at them and picked them up, gathering them in her arms and crying: ‘What are you doing? Do you want to kill them?’
He looked at her dumbstruck. And, thus, the period of peace ended. That afternoon, the first sunrays appeared as well and, together with them, the girls’ desire to get out of the house broke out. Although they had both had a serious fright and come away with a couple of bruises from the fall, they we
ren’t angry with their father at all. After a few minutes, their faces had resumed their bright and inquisitive expressions.
‘We want ice-cream!’ Dori decreed, stamping her foot on the ground like a soldier.
They went out, heading for the centre of the resort where people had gathered, humming and delighted by the return of the good weather. They had been in the house for four days. He had the feeling that his skin had darkened and that, under the brown hair, he had started to grow scales like a set of armour, permanently keeping him in the shade in an unpleasant coolness, foreboding death.
‘Daddyyy! Daddyyy! Tell us another flower tale!’
The girls had started a travel journal, assigning a flower to each day that had passed. Under the flower, stuck with sellotape in the centre of the page, they wrote its Latin name and a story, told by their father, following their imperative requests. Mari had come up with the idea and Dori had enthusiastically clapped her hands right away. Each would then put down the version of the story they remembered so that, upon reading them, the two notebooks were in fact totally different, although to neophytes they might have seemed identical.
‘Be patient until we get back home. I tell you stories every day.’
They put on long faces, disappointed. Two pairs of wide-open eyes stared at him in disbelief.
‘But do you promise, when we get home?’
‘Sure.’
‘Do we have your word?’
Matilda stormed at them, ‘He promised once!’
The girls rushed to the first open-air restaurant terrace they laid eyes upon. Their mother tried in vain to persuade them that they would find something better only a few more steps away. He watched them silently argue. As touching as the image of the two tiny kids who had formed an impenetrable wall against the adult slightly bent above them may have been, as touching as their resolute whispering was, their negotiations always seemed to him like those between the fishiest of mobsters. Matilda had often upbraided him for not being more involved in the girls’ education, for turning them into tomboys, on account of his silence and his long absences. But one day he had made an effort. He wanted to scrape, from under the sediment of his memories, those fragments of his life long ago on top of which a layer of mineral cotton seemed to have settled. And he remembered perfectly well that grown-up people’s words couldn’t stop the minds of children from running about and devising means of escape. He decided that he would allow them to do everything they wished, accept the consequences and change according to the suffering they would put themselves through. They had to become what they were dreaming of. They had to become their own dreams. Just as he had become, just as she herself had…
The twins stopped, looking at one another as if looking in a mirror. They had pulled silly faces upon hearing the voice still mumbling behind them. They seemed to wonder whether to answer or not. If they had turned back, they would have had to take into consideration the reproaches made against them. Because of that, or maybe just instinctively, the girls chose to walk ahead, maintaining their empty and meaningless gaze. They sat on the wrought-iron chairs, rubbing their buttocks contentedly against the fluffy, sponge-filled pillows like brooding hens. Their elbows were propped against the table and they waited for their slave-parents to fulfill their wishes. He drew near them and sat down obediently, waiting for everybody to decide what they wanted. He knew that Matilda, after being angry for a few minutes, always resumed her good spirits. She hated it when the girls disobeyed her, but because they did it more often than not, and she couldn’t accept taking second place in their preferences, she would change her state of mind toward them in no time. They had formed a semicircle in front of him, consulting about what each of them would order: the girls wanted ice-cream, but as the photos on the menu showed dozens of goodies, they were now following with their fingers what their mother was reading to them and oscillating between combinations of berries, pistachio, chocolate, mocha, peanuts and caramel.
They were surrounded by a crowd of people who were drinking refreshing beverages, waiting or chatting about how clear the sea had been up till then and how it would be after the storm, about places to eat well and places you should stay away from, about clothes stores and sunscreens with high protection factors, about hotel rooms and houses to rent, about friends and acquaintances and then, again, about food. Actually, food seemed to be the favourite subject in an immensity of pleasures, boredom and wellbeing. The waiter took his position next to their table, with a notebook in his hand and a pen resting against the white sheet of paper. Matilda ordered for the three of them, although the girls were still grumbling, obviously unhappy with the final choice.
‘We ordered three different sorts of ice-cream, so we can taste them all,’ she announced to him, as if he hadn’t been there. ‘And lemonades. What would you like?’
He mused for a few seconds. ‘I’ll have a beer.’
Matilda repeated the final order to the waiter, then turned to the girls and whispered something to them. They all burst into laughter, looking at their father who had put on a poetic and dreamy air. But the cheerfulness was slowly starting to vanish into a cotton-wool silence. He was struggling to distinguish the voices, to tell the close sounds apart from the distant ones. They had all become equal, blending into a single long, constant noise similar to a stifled hum. He let himself be driven by a primal instinct, like an animal sniffing its pray from miles away. And in that balancing of heads that were bending, swaying up and down over spoons of sweet delights, a horizon opened to him that made him shiver with happiness and terror at the same time. Three tables away, right in front, he picked out Emilia’s silhouette. She was stiff, in an unlikely position, stone-still like a statue. Not even her eyes moved in her head; her shoulders were thrown back like a soldier, her back was bent, her arms hanging along her body. The man in front of her was serenely leafing through a newspaper.
He looked around, making sure nobody saw him, but the girls were busy giggling, Matilda had overturned her bag, rummaging for God knows what, and everybody around had fallen silent. He could hear her husband rustle the newspaper pages, he could even hear the words enunciated in his mind, he could hear his thoughts and then he suddenly relaxed, realising that they were both above any suspicion. After that short revelation, he decided to get up from the table, unnoticed, to make his way to them and to stop, placidly, by the silent couple who had been lingering for almost two whole hours in the noisy garden. He lowered his hand upon the copper-coloured arm, which quivered as if an ice cube had trickled drops of clear, cold water upon the chocolate, scorched, fuzzy surface. The lights were out and all the spotlights had turned now upon the three protagonists. The woman had raised her eyes and lowered them back down in a split second. The man hadn’t noticed him yet and was turning page after page. In the sepulchral silence, a stifled voice sounded close to them:
‘Emilia, don’t you recognise me?’
They both looked up at the same time. The man who was standing showed too much boldness for such a hot summer day. Nobody around would have dared introduce themselves with such an attitude, with such a firm, inflexible voice, with such a tomcat gaze. They were all astounded, but in different ways: one was afraid and had been rendered speechless, one found it hard to believe that he had had the guts to make such a gesture and, finally, the third one was expectant. Not more than a few seconds passed and not more than a few glances were exchanged. If someone had known or had been willing to recognise the signs, they would have shown in all their comical nakedness, in their fresh, albeit outmoded, frankness. But, as happens most of the time, nobody paid attention to the two people who sat, distraught after a day at the beach and waiting for a refreshing drink – nobody, not even Matilda, busy regrouping the twins who had started to fidget again.
‘Do you recognise me? I’m Sorin…’
The silence had made his lungs airtight, his ears were tingling and the earth was spinning like a windmill.
‘Sorin, from Sun Alley…’<
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They had been in danger of being found out many times. Of course, they had never planned ahead; they hadn’t built strategies, they had no escape solutions handy, but it went without saying that they had to be prepared for such situations. It only took a careless mistake from one of them, and that would be enough to cause everybody to come to harm. But seeing her had been so unexpected, and the time elapsed since they had last seen each other had passed so painfully, that the luck of bumping into one another in such a dull place was so priceless and he got carried away by emotions. He had been pulled to her by a thin string, invisible to the inattentive eye. He watched her struggle to regain her composure. She left him standing with his hand outstretched for several seconds. She was transfigured, theatrical, out of key, as if she had no clue who the man in front of her was but suspected he must be some kind of acquaintance. He took a deep breath, steeling his heart, and, laughing, turned to the bearded man who had put the newspaper down and was following the scene half curious, half amused.
‘She doesn’t recognise me. We used to be friends, as children…’
He paused shortly as if to think things over, but then decided to rudely raise the stakes as if in a poker game.
‘Women have a tendency to erase the past. Emilia was my first girlfriend. We haven’t seen each other for at least twenty years.’
The man stood up ceremonially. His face was subdued and he seemed excited. She stood up too, so as not to be the only one seated, and held her bag to her chest; she probably considered she would be able to control the situation better that way. The men shook hands, introducing themselves at once, so that their names, spoken in two voices, mingled. Emilia had remained with her arms crossed in front of her, her fingers clenched and her shoulders bent.
‘Please, do sit down!’
The two of them sat down and looked at Emilia, who had remained in the same uptight position, though now a little less hunched.
Sun Alley Page 16