I heard you!’
Sal gazed at him. He could have sworn that Harry was telling a pack of lies just because of his uncharacteristically transfixed face and his thoughtful look.
‘Who else is going be there?’
‘What?’
‘For the game, man, who else is going be there for the game?’
‘Oh! Well, who do you think? Those two from 112, the Stoicovici brothers, Maxone, Toma…’
‘Is Toma coming, too?’
‘Yeah, he’s coming to gawk. Are you coming?’
Sal looked over Harry’s shoulder toward the boulevard. ‘That depends…’
‘Come on, are you coming or not?’
Sal nodded and set off beside Harry toward the school’s football ground. When they crossed Emi’s street, Sal looked along its distance, hoping to see her sulking on the street kerb waiting for him, but Emi was nowhere to be seen. He wished he had stayed with her; he really didn’t feel trashing it out on the field with the others. He was bored and tired. Shoving his hands in his pockets, his fingers sought the creases of fabric, trying to find their place, when something stopped him dead. In his trouser pocket he had encountered the regular shape of the metal box in which he had put the severed finger.
‘You know, man, I don’t know what to say, but I’d rather not go…’
Sal stopped and apprehensively dropped this line to Harry, hoping that he wouldn’t hear it and wouldn’t even notice his absence; that he would keep walking to the football field on his own. But Harry pulled a long face. ‘What’s with you, man, have you gone crazy? Why would you rather not come?’
Sal shrunk. ‘I don’t have my gear…’
Harry burst into laughter. ‘Big deal! Like it’s Champions League!’
He hurried off and Sal followed him. Harry had started talking again about the last game, the one Sal had missed, during which they – the guys from school 122 – had scored ten goals. As he struggled ahead with the hot air pressing upon his skin, he heard Harry’s words as from a dream.
The two crossed the road and turned left. At the end of the street, they could see the school, a white building with grates over the windows and casements painted bright blue. Harry continued to talk, kicking every now and then at any stone he would encounter on the road. Two silhouettes slowly started to move toward them, the only people they had met on the street in the last half hour.
Sal took the hand he had been keeping on the metal box out of his pocket. His palm was sweaty, so he wiped it against his T-shirt. The approaching figures could now be seen to be a man and a woman. The woman, wearing big sunglasses, was dressed in a sheer green skirt, through which one could discern the shape of her legs, and a white linen blouse. She was gesturing in an exaggerated manner and, from a distance, Sal thought she looked angry. The man was walking beside her, his hands behind his back and his head slightly lowered in a reverential attitude, paying close attention to her. After a few steps, Sal overheard pieces of what the woman was saying. Here and there, her voice acquired acute inflections and she would lose her temper. They were quite close to each other, and this slow approach made Sal feel drowsy. He turned to Harry, who kept talking: ‘Shut up a little!’
Harry cast him a puzzled glance. The man and the woman had stopped. She was still talking, but just as they passed by the man looked up from the ground and straight into her eyes, saying, ‘You know, for me nothing has changed; everything is just the same…’
Sal felt like turning around to look again at the dark-haired woman with shoulder-length curly hair and the tall, blue-eyed man with a youthful face. No sooner had they taken a few steps away than their voices faded away as if they had vanished into thin air; still he looked back spitefully. The two were moving slowly away, the man still holding his hands behind his back and the woman brooding beside him with her arms hanging limply alongside her body. Sal kept walking beside Harry, who was now engrossed in a stubborn silence.
They reached the lattice fence surrounding the school’s football field. A few boys were already on the field warming up, shaking their legs, running on the spot or doing squats. Seeing them, Harry started to shout at the top of his voice, followed by the other boys who shouted in return. He turned to Sal, reiterating, ‘Are you a fool, man? Would you have missed this?’
Sal appeared to be about to 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
