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 into his shorts pocket and rested it on the metal box. Coming across Emi had changed his state of mind: she hadn’t abandoned him, she had looked for him, and now the fact that she was disclosing her secret place proved that she had been thinking about him.
‘Where were you?’ Her voice had a squeaky sound. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. I went to your place and your mother told me you were out to buy ice-cream… Jesus, Sal, is that what you tell your mother when you come to see me-that you go out for ice-cream?’ Emi laughed, flinging her head back. When she laughed, her black, round eyes had a mischievous look. But they also had a bright shimmer that simultaneously subdued Sal and amused him.
‘I say all sorts of things… today it was ice-cream, tomorrow it will be something else. Tomorrow I’ll tell her I’m going to a table-lifting séance.’
Emi stopped, laughing even harder. ‘I see your point!’
She dropped down with all her weight, then jerked him forward, running and forcing him to run behind her. Sal complained, telling her that he was tired, but the girl had rushed ahead stubbornly, pretending not to hear. Sal’s temples were twitching, and he could feel how the small insects under his skin had started to rebel against the tyrant who was bothering their sleep. But despite his somnolence, his legs were rolling forward, obeying the girl who had suddenly become his bright spot. Eventually they reached her building and Emi, panting and her face gleaming with sweat, pressed both her palms onto his chest.
‘Not before you swear that you won’t say a word!’
Sal hurried to swear: ‘I swear!’
But Emi shook her head in distress. ‘Not like that; that’s rubbish!’
Sal stood perplexed. ‘Come on, say what you want me to do!’
The girl’s round, black irises disappeared behind her eyelids. Emi kept her eyes closed for several seconds, and when she lifted her eyelids again, fluttering her long eyelashes, she had once more that exhilarated look that somewhat scared Sal.
‘Look, it’s no big deal, but you need to have guts! Can you do it?’
‘You bet I can!’ Sal rushed to answer.
‘So this is what we’ll do: we’ll snick our fingers, drip a little blood on a shard of glass left over from my father…’
‘On a glass slide…’
‘Right, and then we’ll spit and mix it well together. You’ll smudge my forehead and I’ll
