Sun Alley. Cecilia Ştefănescu
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 gazing 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