voice on the other end of the line asked if he was noting it down and then recited the digits, which he scribbled in a hurry on the off-white cover of The Castle in the Carpathians. And since then, for three years, at four o’clock sharp, Emi answered his phone call no matter what.
Now, on his way to see Emi, Sal went past Toma’s house and looked up, just to make sure the two lenses weren’t visible behind the windows. Sometimes, Toma stood for minutes languidly watching Sal speak at random. Emi insisted, with raised eyebrows suggesting certainty, that Toma was in love with Sal and that he himself knew it quite well. Whenever Emi trumpeted her theories, Sal would blush angrily and fall silent, while Emi would laugh sharply and then encircle her arms around his neck, embracing him tightly.
While walking away from Toma’s house and thinking about all that, walking on the margin of the kerb as on an imaginary beam, Sal spotted a big, black cockroach on the pavement that had just emerged through the sewer grate and was now crawling idly along-side him. He squatted and got closer to better study the insect, slowly lowering his finger above the black shell that was sparkling in the sun.
Sal was fascinated by bugs. At home, in the living room, he had framed an insect collection in which all sort of specimens, from cockroaches to Mantis religiosa, lay pinned and which he had aligned like soldiers, scribbling below them the date when each had been captured. ‘Funeral stones,’ Sal explained to those staring in disgust at the still life hanging on the white wall of the room.
He thought a while and then lightly touched the cockroach’s hump with his nail. It stopped, curled up and slowly moved its legs, seemingly begging to be left alive. Sal lifted his finger and sat down on the kerb next to the cockroach. On his knee he had a freshly cicatrised wound he had received after falling off his bike. He lowered his nail onto the thick, brown crust that covered the old wound and started to scratch it. As he poked at the crust on his knee, a thin thread of blood began to trickle under his index nail. He moaned. A piece of the crust was coming off, revealing raw flesh. Raw flesh, as if, he thought, the flesh were raw only under this thin cover, so pleasant to the touch, called skin. While it was under the cover, the flesh lived independently.
The cockroach was gone. Birds were fluttering noisily above, and clouds had covered the sky. He could smell the rain; the air around him was electrified and he could almost hear it buzz, prompting him to get up and walk farther. Before long, raindrops started to whip his cheeks and arms. Suddenly, the rain started to patter: a summer whim, as his grandmother used to say while bustling him inside, sheltering him as well she could from the short, rich gusts with all her body, with her large, soft breasts and with her armpits. He instinctively lifted his arms up, pulling his T-shirt over his head, and looked around at the slender trees and the plastic roof supported by four posts before deciding to seek refuge in the lobby of Harry’s apartment building to wait there for the rain to calm down.
Once inside, he shook the water off like a dog and then remained still, listening for noises in the building. Although he heard murmurs and squeaks, short cracks followed by a slow friction, a rugged rustle coming from the elevator shaft and brief trampling, the silence was still overwhelming. All these noises meant nothing compared to the absence of people and of the sounds made by them.
He breathed in several times, filling his lungs with air. A stench, at first faint as a breeze, then increasing as his sense of smell got accustomed to the interior, remained clinging to his nostrils like icicles in winter. It became stronger, stinging his nose and reminding him of the nail polish remover that diffused throughout the bathroom after his mother wiped the polish off her nails and left the soaked and reddened cotton swabs on the sink. He looked up through the tunnel made by the staircase handrail, making sure there was no one there. The flow of air made the smell grow stronger and then fade in waves. From upstairs he could hear a window banging rhythmically against the wall. After slamming like that for several minutes, while Sal pricked up his ears to hear the other noises inside, the noise of its shattered glass falling on the floor followed.
Sal expected someone would come out in the hallway to see what had happened, but nobody did. He decided to go upstairs despite the nausea already filling his chest and forcing up all his lunch: chicken soup with noodles, roast meat with boiled potatoes and tomato salad, followed by a jam and meringue cake topped with grated chocolate especially sent by Grandmother in a greased, paper-lined suitcase. Upon reaching each new floor, he leant with his hands upon his knees and tried to take a deep breath to push the food back down, but the inhaled air only managed to disturb his bowels more and bend him under the weight of his rebelling body.
On the second floor, from behind a massive wooden door with a carved golden handle, he could hear a recurrent rustle. Putting his ear to the varnished surface, Sal tried to make out what was on the other side. The rustle was pretty close, but its regularity betrayed a spring-loaded device.
He drew back and climbed to the next floor. There, overwhelmed by the heavy air, by the decomposed mixture of sweet and sour smells, he stepped on the floor covered with shattered glass, lifted his body with a powerful push by grasping the window sill and, with all his weight resting upon his thin wrists, leaned on the edge, then bent out and let the drops of rain fall on his face.
The feeling of relief only lasted for a few seconds, because as soon as he trickled back in, careful not to make any sounds, the nausea reappeared. He bent his head between his legs, curled up at his joints and threw up until only a thread of saliva trickled from between his red and swollen lips, trembling lightly like a murmur echoing the spasms of the flesh. He remained bent with his eyes covered by the fog of effort and nausea, his mind empty and his temples beating like a heart. With a last struggle, he straightened his back and limped up the remaining stairs to Harry’s apartment in what looked more like a crawl.
Outside, the heavy rain kept falling, while the smell made it harder and harder for him to stay inside. Thinking about the moment he would breathe in, filling his lungs with the stuffy air in his friend’s rarely aired house, hidden from light behind the thick, velvet, tasselled curtains, he dashed up the stairs to the last floor, moaning and cursing. Once there, he pushed his finger into the bulging electric bell and made it ring in a short spurt; when he saw that no one was coming to open the door, he rang a second time, this time for longer.
In front of the closed door, he began to ponder. It wasn’t the best idea to enter Harry’s house, for Harry would insist that he stay and, if he showed eagerness to leave once the rain had stopped, Harry would certainly sound him out, curious as he was. He crouched, rummaged through his pocket and took out a piece of chocolate wrapped in tinfoil. It had melted and its shape had changed, but Sal used his nail to remove the wrapping that was stuck to the brownish mass.
He had felt a softness in his legs, some kind of tremor hidden in the flesh, and had lost contact for a moment. However tempted he may have felt to lie down on the doormat and allow himself to be carried by his thoughts, he still thought that somewhere above him drifted Emi’s tousled and impatient head, with a well-defined wrinkle already visible between her eyebrows and a sparkle in her eyes that could have ignited the whole neighbourhood. Perhaps he could wait until Mrs Demetrescu found him and, in terrible alarm, lifted him and carried him under her arm as if he were a bundle of woodchips, bringing him inside the house and calling his already-worried parents in a firm voice with little trace of excitement. Sal heaved a long sigh and leaned against the doorjamb, calmly munching the piece of chocolate. He thought he heard, on the other side of the door, a stifled noise followed by a thud, and he stopped and listened.
‘Harry…’ he whispered, concentrating. ‘Harry, is that you, man?’
No answer. He knocked softly, carefully. It was only his breath in the hall, no other noise; his breath that had frosted the wood varnish on the door.
‘Harry, say something if you’re there.’
He drew back, looking up at
