No answer; no motion. Sal was shaking all over. He braced himself, and without climbing down, clenching his teeth, he started again to grope, this time consistently: here was something resembling a shoulder, higher up something that felt like a neck, there was an Adam’s apple, the chin, the face… As he proceeded, Sal began to recompose, blindly, the human being – there was no doubt now – beneath him.
He jumped off the table, but didn’t move away. Drawing a deep breath, only then did he feel the heavy plant smell wafting around his nostrils again. This time it was faint, as if a draught moved the air from one side of the building to the other. It was strange, because he could swear it was from down here that the smells had risen.
Sal was more concerned with that presence now, with the body lying still on the table – he imagined it as a dissection table in order to better envisage the dark reality he was just probing. He was dying to find out what was there. It couldn’t have been Harry or another one of the boys. It was in fact, he finally admitted to himself, a woman, and that was the only thing he could say about the body he had plunged upon. He had felt, through his sweaty T-shirt, her breasts; he had clearly sensed their shape, he had anticipated them even before having touched them. He lifted a hand slowly, fumbled in the dark and then lowered it gently. Again, the skin with a silken feeling to it, a bit damp, like Emi’s skin was after she had run a whole afternoon on the streets in their neighbourhood and she fell in his arms, dead tired.
It was then that Sal managed to touch her at his ease, to grip her flesh without the fear of being questioned, without revealing the pleasure that made him tingle all over. But the body of the woman lying on the table was supposed to resist, was supposed to move, to struggle; the woman perched upon the dissection table was supposed to protest and to scold him…
The finger had come to a bend. It was heading upward now, in a slow, almost dreamlike ascension, to the peak, the nipple–he tensed, for he discovered an iceberg on top: the breast was cold, frozen, stiffly jabbing the boy’s palm as it explored larger and larger surfaces. A hand migrated to the abdomen; the other was on its way to the other iceberg. But the encounter with the left breast was even worse. The coldness, the skin wrinkled over the flesh, made him shiver. And time stopped still again, as if the coldness of the body he was groping had overflowed into the surrounding world, freezing it.
Sal blinked mindfully. He lowered his hand and felt her belly – it was a little swollen but soft enough for him to sink his fingers into the elastic surface, pleasant to the touch. He carried on until he encountered a smaller, bony bulge, covered in wiry hair. When he gave Emi a hug or when he touched her, accidentally, on her flat chest or her bare thighs when she wore shorts, he would feel her tense and that gave him immense pleasure – a pleasure that would follow him into the night and into his sleep. But with women it was a different story.
His cheek had many times been buried between the huge breasts of his grandmother’s friends, who admired him and who would always spit three times to guard him from the evil eye. ‘There you go, beauty. Come to Mummy; let me give you a hug.’ And he would abandon himself in their arms, uncomplainingly indulging in their adoration. His nose sunken deep between the two mountains, he was surrounded by the whiff of aged skin and of the perfumes the ladies would dab behind their ears, on their necks and inside their cleavage. It must be that women couldn’t feel boys’ touches; they were but ethereal beings that passed unnoticed through the world of curvy women, and neither their filthy thoughts nor their immodest desires could be read. If it were so – if Sal could at least make sure that the lady lying here on the table couldn’t feel him, if he knew he had the freedom to explore her body while she slept, to inspect every hidden corner, to examine every pore – how he would look down at Harry then, what stories he would have to tell the boys!
He decided to look for something he could light the room with. He drew back slowly and, groping around in the same manner he had got there, he crept back out. The dark hallway had awakened and was moving; the walls were quivering, and along them one could vaguely discern the aligned doors to the storage rooms. Sal got scared and took a step back, trying to calm his own heartbeat now blasting all over the basement: ‘There’s nothing to be scared of, there’s nothing to be scared of.’
Repeating this chorus in his mind, Sal decided to cross the dark hallway that seemed, nonetheless, much friendlier than the den he had just emerged from. Near the door, he stumbled upon something that made the basement resonate with the loud chime of the stuff scattered on the floor. Had he disturbed the sacred order of the stinking vault – had he awoken the haunting ghosts, overcome by boredom and with their ears buzzing from so much loneliness? Now he was filled with regret; he wished he could take his steps back so that the box with its belongings remained in its place undisturbed.
Sal bent down and groped along the ground. His hands bumped against all sorts of objects, and carefully, but still trembling with excitement, he searched among them. He felt an oblong shape like a flute; the material the object was made of, however, felt strange. He put it down and continued his probing, down on his knees. A metal box. He took it in his hands, fumbled for its rims with his nails and tried to open it. The box slipped from his hands and the corridor vibrated in a long, shrill shriek.
Sal stopped dead. Emi’s cheerful image and her luminous face flashed in his mind, and he felt his heart ache while his eyes began to glow. She was looking at him and waving her hand with her fingers unfurled, bidding him ‘Farewell!’ in her childish manner. He was suffering abstractly for the first time, and stopped in his tracks. When the girl’s image had disappeared, he found himself in a panic attack: doubled up in agony, standing on all fours and rummaging indiscriminately through the objects on the floor hoping that, if he made as much noise as possible, either he would be heard by someone who would come down to save him or the ghosts, deafened, would take flight in their shady gullies. He came across the sharp, cold blade of a knife that briefly nicked his skin. Sal released a sigh, this time relieved upon encountering a shape he finally recognised. He took the knife, stood up and headed to the storage room, groping in the dark.
It was chillier still. His head was heavy and his heartbeat was muffled, as if coming from a jar of molasses. He was afraid and, if he had had the guts to let the tears run, he knew the fear would have subsided a bit – or at least it wouldn’t have mattered so much. After a few steps, he stopped and decided to turn back.
He fell on his knees again and started scrabbling in the dark for the metal box he had dropped a few minutes before. The floor was slimy and touching it turned his stomach, but he continued to search and finally returned to his feet holding a box of matches with the tips of his fingers; from inside it he could hear the friendly sound made by the matches in their cardboard shell. Sal carefully opened the box and took out a match; he struck it once, twice, three times, but the cardboard was damp and the match broke in two with a short crackle.
He took another one out, and this time the match caught fire, throwing out a mellow light. But it wasn’t exactly what he wished to see. All along the corridor the moving air carried a cohort of dust specks. With his eyes wide open, he tried to make an imprint in his mind of all the details – the cobwebs hanging in corners like brocades, the black doors, the shiny floor reflecting the dark ceiling – and then he closed them. Two big beads of water trickled down his cheek like two tears. The flame of the match slowly singed his skin, and he let go of it and lit another. He squatted, looked for the metal box, found it, clasped it in his hand and let the cool metal ease some of the pain the burn had caused. A whiff of air put out his flame, but now he was more serene. He had a good supply of light in the matchbox, a penknife and a metal box – the latter he had taken as a souvenir. He returned, fumbling in the dark, to the door that led to the storage room; he opened it with his foot and, after entering, he stopped.
His eyelids felt heavy, as if someone had poured wax on them. Blinking was such an effort that it made him dizzy. The smell was gone and so was the fear; all that was left was a deep exhaustion. ‘That’s
