‘What do you want me to say?’
After a break, the woman resumed, seeming to struggle: ‘I have the feeling that things have deteriorated between us – that it’s over.’
Emi heard a long sigh followed by loud crying. She wished she could see the woman in the room, but that meant she would have to come out of her hiding place. The voice outside died away in sobs. The woman was panting for breath and in Emi’s mind the desire to see her took shape, stronger than her instinct to stay hidden, stronger than her fear of being disclosed. She wished she could step into their argument and reconcile them. Her soul felt hollow and she suddenly started to miss Sal, to miss him so ardently that she started to cry, too; first silently, then louder and louder, indifferent to whether she would give herself away or not. And the jasmine smell choked her so badly that she darted out and found herself in the middle of an empty room, exactly as she had left it before hiding in the closet. She woke up with her face bathed in tears and saw the boy gawking at her from behind the pellicle of sweat. She tried to fall asleep again and resume her dream, but Sal’s mother had entered the room and her face showed surprise of having found the two children cuddled together in bed.
That’s when Emi had found out what love was, in the strange dream whose story she had immediately forgotten, retaining instead the feeling of fear and apprehension she had experienced upon awakening and seeing the face of the sick boy begging her to stay with him, just like the woman in her dream. So that’s what it was supposed to be: a long suffering, an unceasing array of anxieties, followed by a slow death. Her parents had broken up a year before, but instead of suffering, Emi had been relieved. The coldness in the house had been replaced by some sort of tranquillity and by the freedom to do what she pleased.
She had discovered the roof a long time before, but it was only a year since the pleasure of sitting perched up there and spying on people’s moves had become absolute. And it was there that she retreated again, after saying goodbye to Sal and to Harry, to reflect on what had happened that day. She didn’t have patience to wait until the next day, but she also lacked the courage to go see for herself what was in Harry’s basement. She was experiencing the same curiosity as in that dream of long ago which she barely remembered. She opened the box from Sal and fingered the darkness inside it. The living finger and the dead one met. The living one grabbed the dead one and took off its ring. She put it on her ring finger, but the ring was wide: if she had lowered her hand, it would have slid off, rolling over the gutter and into the air. She lay on her back, put her head down and, a few minutes later, she fell asleep.
III
EMI IS DREAMING
He woke up with a heavy head and feeling nauseous. There was a commotion in the house, and he remembered that it was Sunday and that his parents were at home. The thought made him sad, because he would have to lie again that he was going out to play with the boys. For unknown reasons, his mother didn’t like Emi at all, and to avoid wry faces when he mentioned her, Sal preferred to mumble a lie. He heard a few knocks on the door, and then he heard his father’s voice urging him to wake up. It was nine o’clock sharp. He lay back down and closed his eyes. Outside he could hear the automated buzz of a drill press; its long, even noise had invaded his room and had now settled in his mind. In a way, it was pleasant not to think about anything, to let the wish to concentrate on anything in the exterior world beside the noise outside fade away and die. He propped his mind against it and abandoned himself to the feeling that he was floating above the bed, supported by the ceaseless sound. But the noise stopped and Sal jumped upright. His headache was now duller, its bolts seemingly digging into his skull with a squeak. The hustle and bustle outside his room got louder, and he could hear his mother’s shrill voice, chatting with the woman who was helping in the kitchen.
In less than an hour, Sal was back romping on the streets of the neighbourhood. First he had to stop at Toma’s to exchange games. He had no idea where he got them from, but at Toma’s he could always find Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Treasure Hunt, Spintop, Mikado… and now Tomo had allured him with a new and pompous game Sal had already heard an earful about called The Sphinx. Sal wasn’t much of a game freak, but he found playing in itself mind-expanding and it helped him to better orientate himself. It shed light on his friends and on the way in which he could approach them in tense situations. Actually, for some time, he had been regarding his friends and the streets they lived and walked on as a huge game with several strategic points, whose stakes were survival in isolation, keeping secrets and, last but not least, seducing the girls. Wasn’t that what he longed for all day long? Wasn’t that his carefully pursued aim? What would Harry have thought of him if he confessed one day that he’d rather chat with Emi instead of playing ball with them on the school field? How long would it have taken Harry to tell all the boys what he had found? An hour, perhaps, but Sal didn’t care; he wasn’t interested in what they said but in the fact that, once his friends abandoned him, the game wouldn’t matter any more. Once there would be no one left to hide from, his secret would disappear as well, vanishing with the ones that threatened it. And maybe, he assumed, the pleasure of getting together with Emi would disappear too, the pleasure of hearing her squeaking voice answer his phone calls at four o’clock in the afternoon, pretending not to know who was on the other end of the line as if it made no difference to her whatsoever who it might have been. The freedom of going to her place would have impaired their relationship. And the fact that they were hiding was steering them, one step at a time, to a more complex level, which he had trouble defining precisely but which he felt drew them together in an inexplicable and beautiful way.
Toma had the wealthiest family among them all. He lived in a proper house, with a ground floor and a first floor, with a terrace on which in summer the ping-pong table sat in state. The boys held championships, and they were always treated with iced Coke and all sorts of cakes laid out on a table brought especially for the purpose and set in a corner of the terrace. The championships made Sal especially happy because, when they gathered there, Toma was considerate enough to also invite the girls in the neighbourhood to liven up the atmosphere, and since the day Harry had decided it was so, Emi was one of those girls. Among the boys, warmed up by the exercise and competition, Sal and Emi felt as if they were in a cocoon. They would dart furtive glances at one another: their eyes speaking thousands of words, secretly making fun of their friends and flirting as if they had just met.
One day, Emi had dragged him through the labyrinth of what seemed to be Toma’s enormous house. The rooms were arranged in a circle; with doors that opened onto other rooms. You could start at any spot, then cross several rooms stuffed with paintings in thick frames – some simple wooden ones, others adorned and gilded, but now all crammed into each other – along the walls, You would bump against several old armchairs with silk upholstery arranged in symmetrical order and finally come full circle to where you had started. Sal loved to hang around that house and always discovered beautiful objects that he would touch hypnotically; he would have lingered for hours in contemplation if the boys hadn’t almost always called him back to play.
That day, Emi had sneaked in from the terrace and beckoned him to follow her. They crossed two rooms to get to a third, which was usually locked and where he discovered a cabinet full of old weapons in one of the dark corners they hadn’t managed to explore so far. Getting closer and pressing his nose to the window, Sal saw a few pistols with inwrought wooden butts placed next to two rifles, a harquebus and a musket and, in the middle, three swords aligned next to their scabbards with inlaid oriental decoration. The swords seemed to be the oldest items.
Sal touched the wooden edges of the cabinet with his fingers. He wished he could open it a little and hold in his hand the marvels gleaming beneath the window, but the weapons were locked away.
‘What are you doing here?’
Emi was glancing at him, amused. He showed her the cabinet. ‘Look!’
Emi drew near and looked over his shoulder. The weapons didn’t seem to make such an impression on her. She shrugged her shoulders and grabbed his hand. ‘Come on! I’ll show you something else!’
But Sal stubbornly