The girl hurried to lift his head off the floor. She had made a net around him, had spread her legs sideways and was all over him, suffocating rather than saving him. He pretended to be sick for a few minutes – he surrendered, benumbed in her arms, and secretly, through his eyelashes, watched her fidget and make wry faces, full of regret and grief. He was gaining ground just watching her change, but her image – the struggle between crying for help and her suspicion that his illness might be feigned -gave him confidence and made him feel sorry that he hadn’t really fallen sick so that he could squeeze out all her pity and compassion, all her guilt and promises for the future. Because that’s what usually happened on occasions like these, and a man of honour knows what it means to do someone wrong and to pay for one’s mistakes.
‘Get up, please do get up, please be okay, will you? Can you hear me? Will you tell me if you’re okay? You’re okay, aren’t you? Please forgive me, come on! Speak to me! Are you sick? Please, speak to me! Don’t be sick! Wake up! Open your eyes!’
And to the tune of her words, Sal released within, through his whole inside-out body, a moan of pleasure. She had said it, and all that was missing now was a recording tape to capture, clearly, her whimpering voice. If only someone could have fetched him a tape recorder at that moment, so that he could play it again and again to the boys, let it unwind, flowing through huge loudspeakers. He would let it haunt them as the ghost of their feeble consciences, throughout the neighbourhood, as if his eyes were watching over the whole neighbourhood and they were that whimpering voice, pining and begging for forgiveness. He got himself together and jumped up, before her spiteful eyes.
‘You faked it!’
‘Yeah, I wanted to see your reaction. You’re putting on too many airs. You know it’s not right, don’t you?’
‘I have no idea what you mean,’ she replied, offended, straightening her back.
‘I mean cutting up Johnny’s magazines – the ones he bought under the counter, the ones he paid for, went to great lengths for. I mean sneaking into Harry’s room, snapping at me. Do you think you can take my place?’
With her small, scattered teeth sparkling in the light, Emi threw her head back and started to giggle, waving the scissors and sawing the air.
‘Ha-ha! Is that what you think? I couldn’t care less.’
She turned her back on him, sniffing a few times in contempt. He let her scissor on and left the room, closing the door slowly as if he feared he might wake her.
In the kitchen, the boys chatted heartily. Max’s voice covered all the others, trying to command the noise. Max was famous for the lies he intricately constructed, like a professional storyteller; but because his stories were flamboyant, with countless ambitiously and thoroughly rendered details, he forgot them in a few days and started to mix them up, to alter them to the extent that a girl he had met at a certain moment on the street, and with whom he allegedly engaged in conversation, soon became a grown-up woman around thirty whom he had noticed in his mother’s consulting room when waiting for an opportunity to snitch a couple of medical leave of absence forms to use at school. They all made things up: they all had an imaginary girlfriend, kept in a drawer, well hidden, who popped out swaying her hips like an odalisque at convenient times.
The only one Sal was really tempted to believe was Harry. He was, in their small gang, the conqueror. He also seemed to have a secret life, helped by the fact that Mrs Demetrescu, his cheerful and masculine mother, who had been single since forever, was away most of the time. She would climb inside her white Dacia, which was always splattered with mud; she would manipulate it, jerk it, turn it around, spinning the wheel like a truck driver, and she would shout that she was leaving him to rule over the house and to remember always that he was the only man she could count on, as she slammed the door and exited like a hurricane.
Of course, Harry wasn’t exactly the only one, but he definitely was the one in sight. For Mrs Demetrescu, despite her lack of femininity and coquetry, constantly had suitors buzzing round her, but she had chosen to protect Harry and she preferred to carry on her romances, be they few or many, out of his sight. Ever since Mr Demetrescu had gone overseas (to a place seemingly at the other end of the world: somewhere, according to Mrs Demetrescu, in South America), forsaking them to the extent that for several years they hadn’t even received Season’s Greetings in embossed golden print with a signature scribbled underneath, Harry had become the gravitational centre of their three-bedroom apartment and the embodied idea of force and manhood behind the golden plate on which a name was carved, in luxurious type: Fam. Engineer Paul Demetrescu, Ph.D.
Nobody seemed to miss Mr Demetrescu, except for the neighbours who pitied the woman left behind, alone, to manage her good-for-nothing boy. But all this seemed exaggerated because Mrs Demetrescu didn’t seem to worry about her son’s blunders, nor did Harry, ‘good-for-nothing’ as they called him, allow any glimpse inside his secret life. There were only assumptions and hunches, encouraged by his perpetual wry smile, by the skinny jeans he wore emphatically and by the chewing-gum he champed noisily and ostentatiously, bursting from time to time huge green, pink or yellow bubbles. But Sal liked him like that, boastful and unreliable, perhaps because, due to his boastfulness and undependability, Harry was the only one Sal could trust. He was absentminded and, though inquisitive, Sal was only really interested in his stories about girls: beautiful or ugly girls, toothless or big-eyed, tall or stubby, swarthy or rosy, naïve or clever, long-lashed or thick-lipped, flat-chested or clad in puffed shirts – they only had to be girls to emanate that smell that threw them all into cruellest torment and burned their nostrils, sharpening them.
And in Harry’s puffed-skirt pursuits, he had also hunted Emi, positive that shortly after the boys gathered in his kitchen finished recounting their fantasies and clumsily emptying their sacks full of erotic dreams, he would return to the room and the girl, lost among the pages of the magazines, would allow him to fondle her breasts, moistening her deer eyes when he made her lean her head back and surrender with a moan. Maybe not even he, skilled as he may have been, knew exactly what the surrendering of a girl was like, but from the bottom of his muddy heart, he was hoping to find out.
‘Hold on!’ yelled Max in a hoarse voice. ‘Hold on, you haven’t heard the best part yet! After my mother left the consulting room, the bird started to undress.’
‘No kidding!’
‘Yes, man, why are you so surprised? She took her blouse off, slowly, one button at a time, while she was swinging to the beat of the song…’
‘What song, man? Didn’t you say you were in the consulting room?’
‘Yes, I was, you dick, but my mom keeps a radio on so she can hear the news.’
‘And tell me, who was singing? Marina Voica?’
‘No, Harry, it was that one with The House on the Hill…’
‘Look who’s talking,’ Max snapped. ‘Tommy, maybe you want some spanking!’
‘Come on, settle down!’
Sal had spoken from the doorway, and they all turned around to face him. He had felt the need to intervene and break in abruptly on the conversation in order to make the boys forget about his absence and, especially, to take up Toma’s cause. Actually, Toma had nothing to be afraid of because they all liked him, even though they called him ‘chicken’ and sometimes made fun of him, for in the end they were all touched by the mousy face and the small lively eyes moving behind the thick lenses. He seemed helpless, but they knew it was very likely that he was the smartest of them all, which is why all the exercise books for algebra and geometry homework succeeded each other on his desk and he filled them with fractions, root signs, integrals and exponents, tangents, bisectors, theorems and axioms. But if you asked Toma himself, the one he got on best with was Sal, because when they were alone Sal was the only one who listened to him talking about the gigantic computers that controlled space missions on the moon and on Mars and about the