‘Look at the sky in that direction! I think it’s going to rain again.’
Emi looked where Sal’s finger was pointing. In the distance, the sky had turned purple. The colour of their skin had changed, too.
‘It hasn’t been raining today,’ she sighed, wiping her forehead dry with the back of her hand. ‘Where did you get this finger from?’
‘Harry’s building…’
‘You found it there? On the ground?’
Sal put his arms under his head. ‘No, I actually cut it off.’
Emi opened her eyes wide, screwing up her lips in a surprised O. ‘No kidding!’
She seemed to ponder. Sal’s disclosure weighed more than his secret. She had to consider whether to sound him out further or not. What secret could she have offered in exchange? She rummaged in all the corners of her mind. No, she had none left… Emi’s trunk was empty; there was only some small change left at the bottom, which she was wondering now if she should lay on the table. But curiosity was gnawing her inside. And the finger was luring her with its black stone.
‘How do you mean you cut it? You cut it off someone’s hand? Is that what you mean?’
‘Well, yes…’
Emi stood up, looking blank. ‘I don’t understand. How could you do something like that? Whose hand did you cut it off?’
Sal suddenly felt sleepy. He was dying to close his eyes that very instant and sleep with no dreams. But he knew that Emi was going to use her weapons and, eventually, force all the details out of him.
‘Tell me, Sal, what have you done?’
And, as always, words started to pour out of Sal’s mouth like so many beads. As he told his story, time itself seemed to have stopped, because the light had frozen still and was bathing them now in its dead colours.
‘I want to see her myself!’
He had known perfectly well that this would happen and that, if he was against it, Emi would have gone anyway to Harry’s basement to poke about. And he didn’t find it in his heart to let her grope in the dark by herself. They climbed down from the roof and then dashed to Harry’s building. Sal was silent while Emi ceaselessly chattered about her dream from the previous night, about the ladybird collection she kept in a box, hidden in the bathroom cabinet, about spying from the roof and about the chilled elderflower juice waiting for her in the fridge when she returned home. But when they were about to enter the building, they ran into Harry. Sal sighed with relief.
‘Where did you go, you bastard?’ Harry exclaimed. Then he cast a murderous look at Emi. ‘It’s because of you that we lost the game, you know?’ He turned to Sal again with a mistrustful look and started to sound him out: ‘What were you doing here?’
Sal sized up the circumstances. They were looking for the body of a woman that he – Sal – had discovered in Harry’s basement, that afternoon when he had been the only one to take shelter from an imaginary rain. It was the answer he should have given, serenely, assuming a countenance that would suggest he wasn’t willing to go on with further explanations. It was the answer he felt floating in the air around Emi, who was piqued about the charges that had just been made against her. That’s why he made a step back and mumbled a lie. It was already dark outside, so nobody noticed him blushing. Only Emi, when grabbing his hand, felt his sweaty palm and gave out a muffled giggle because she knew that Sal was an awful liar.
They parted in front of Harry’s building, each heading in a different direction. Emi was mad about the encounter that had broken the spell between herself and Sal, and because she hadn’t been able to see for herself what he had seen so that she could give him the hottest secret in exchange. She wanted to tell him what she had found out pretty late herself, almost half a year before, when Sal had been sick in bed and gone for a week, giving no sign whatsoever.
Back then, Emi had shifted rapidly from feelings of spite and hate to despair, regret and vengefulness. Sal’s disappearance meant a lack of concern for her, carelessness and, ultimately, abandonment. Her mind was filled with a rapidly fading image of Sal, with the memory of his voice and the amazing stories he told when he felt like it, with the places they had roamed together. She understood gradually that these things had become important and were smouldering now inside her, like cake dough on the stove. And, albeit reluctantly, she had begun to register the indescribable feeling that haunted her, and to be scared by it.
When she found out, after three tormenting days of uncertainty, that Sal was sick in bed, febrile and delirious, a happy smile emerged on Emi’s face. Then a shadow covered her face again and she refused to leave her house. She locked herself inside her room, lowered her blinds and took it into her head not to eat anything anymore. She would say she was sleeping and now, looking back, sleep was all she remembered. One day not long before this episode with Sal, her mother had told her – matter-of-factly, while knitting her a pair of leg warmers – that love was a rare thing that you’d better not let someone in on unless you were sure it really existed in your soul. Actually, her mother added after a break, you’d better not ever let anyone in on it, because people are inclined to take advantage of any weakness. It is only in movies and in books that people say ‘I love you’ to one another at every turn.
But love is feebleness of the body, like some kind of disease that takes a long time to heal. And Emi, in all those days in which she had been waiting for Sal, felt her whole body weakened, with a feeling of emptiness inside and a vague pain radiating to the very depths of her being. She had made a vow, in those three days of self-imprisonment, not to breathe a word to anyone about what she had discovered. On the third day she decided to go and see him as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn’t even noticed his disappearance.
She found him lying in bed: pale as a ghost, bathed in a dense sweat, like a pellicle that blurred the features her eyes were used to. The Sal she knew had vanished under that pasty layer and was shouting out voicelessly, begging with his eyes to be released. Emi sat down on the side of the bed and took his hand, gripping it. First she gripped it gently, then harder and harder, with all her strength, but he remained still and his hand didn’t twitch for a split second in her grip. His eyes were open, and he was just staring ahead in a dreamy state. Emi stuck out her tongue, made all sorts of funny faces, but he remained stuck in idle reverie. Finally, convinced that Sal was absent from this world, at least for the moment, she lay down over him and took him in her arms. A few clear tears dropped from her round eyes, through which Sal saw her, magnified. After less than five minutes, Emi fell asleep. She woke up soon afterward and remembered then -which she would later completely forget–that she had dreamt something terrible.
She was fumbling down the dark corridors of a hotel. The hotel was shabby. The walls were covered in textured red silk and the doors, made of black painted wood, looked like embedded coffins. Emi was looking for a man in one of the rooms. She could already visualise him lying flat on his stomach, naked, across the crumpled sheet. With all her senses sharpened, she was advancing slowly on the red corridor, holding on with the tips of her fingers to the silk yarn on the wall to keep contact with reality. She stopped a little, pricking up her ears. From the other end of the corridor she could hear voices and a commotion. And then, out of the blue, she saw a bunch of people rushing toward her. She fumbled anxiously and pressed the first door handle, which opened right away. She entered an empty room, illuminated by two reading lamps; It was perfectly tidy. The noise on the corridor had died out while Emi inspected the room, but the voices burst out again outside the door. Emi opened the closet and hid inside it. It smelled like jasmine. Someone entered the room. She hunkered down with her mouth pressed against her knees, trying to hold her breath. The jasmine smell choked her to the point of suffocation. The person in the room stopped in front of the closet door and leaned against it. Emi squeezed her eyes tight, waiting for the door to open and for her location to be disclosed. And suddenly, outside the closet, she heard the faltering, tearful voice of a woman.
‘Please,