LITMIR.BIZ

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      Max, annoyed, had taken a step back. He was always cautious; he would rarely upset his parents and seldom disobeyed them, definitely not before holidays or vacations, and to his friends he would nourish some sort of perpetual promise: the promise of procuring medical leave of absence forms or of bringing them magazines, full of naked women, or cigarettes and chocolate, or office supplies from his doctor mother’s safe full of goodies. But he would leave lingering behind him the message of certain obligations that, when the time came, his indebted friends would have to fulfil for him. He hadn’t asked them anything yet, but Sal was watching him and was expecting to hear him utter the magic words any day now.

      ‘You didn’t say anything, man; it’s just that you yelled at him like…’

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘You know perfectly well like what. Leave him alone – he didn’t want anything.’

      Max headed for the door, disappointed. ‘Very well, then! You’re the ones who are going to be sorry. I won’t tell you another word!’

      The boys began to beg him to continue, mimicking disappointment in false voices: ‘Come on, Maxoooooooo, pleaaaaaaase, tell us!’

      But Max went out, shaking his head and slamming the door behind him. Everybody was relieved; it was hard to withstand his chattering. They had to constantly mimic listening to him, feigning interest, while in fact each of them was waiting for the appropriate moment to recite their own stories and compare their delusions in order to check their authenticity and the likelihood of ever manifesting themselves in the real world. Silence fell and Sal noticed Harry’s impatience. It was the first time he felt his knees give way under him. He knew what Harry was waiting for: he wanted to see all of them gone as soon as possible and to be left alone, at last, with the girl who kept on scissoring a room away.

      ‘Why on earth did you call that one?’

      ‘Who?’ Harry asked, pretending not to understand.

      ‘You know, that one,’ Sal said, pointing his chin toward the back room.

      ‘Oh.’ Harry played on. ‘Well, never mind – I gave her some magazines so that she wouldn’t bother us.’

      ‘Well, it seems that she has been bothering us already!’

      ‘How come?’

      ‘Well, Max left because he was ashamed of her, that’s why; you know him too well. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left before telling us all. He wouldn’t have given up so easily.’

      Johnny nodded in consent, convinced on the spot by Sal’s theory. Toma had been convinced before, while Harry remained gaping at him, unable to express eloquently and quickly enough his astonishment and his indignation.

      ‘Next time you better tell me who I should invite over to my house,’ he answered slowly, enraged.

      Sal spread his arms akimbo and a generous, conciliatory smile bloomed on his face, suggesting Isn’t it a pity for us to fight over a girl?

      ‘Next time bring Clitt or Iss!’

      Each time the boys laughed their hearts out. It was their favourite dirty joke; even Toma laughed when hearing it, although they suspected he had no clue what it meant whatsoever. But the laughter was infectious, and even when angry they couldn’t resist the joke. ‘Clitt or Iss’ had become the character haunting their dreams, wetting their sheets, tickling their senses and rousing their laughter; she was their dearest imaginary friend and, in secret, they all thought about her when happily awakening from sleep at night. And it was her, again, who conciliated them now, when they were close to butting each other with their thin and clumsy horns. ‘Clitt-or-Iss’… Sal smiled just hearing her name ring in his mind.

      Behind them, however, standing stiff in the doorway with angry blazing eyes, was Emi. The boys had fallen silent; he was the only one still laughing, trying to keep the good spirits going. But the girl had already overheard part of their conversation and, probably bored with so much scissoring; she had left Harry’s room full of scattered papers and was getting ready to scuttle away.

      Later, when he had returned home, Sal would never cease to wonder what on earth had made him so obstinate about helping her get away and why he hadn’t just left her to the ogre in that empty apartment that invited debauchery and neglect. He left right after her and found her in front of the apartment building waiting for him. They stood there a long while just staring at each other, not daring to talk. After a while, she suggested she should walk him home and, even though he knew it should have been the other way round, he allowed her to walk him home. When she stopped him and pushed his back against the fence-while around them mulberries were falling, staining their T-shirts with cherry-coloured traces – he stuck to the rough planks and felt her small palm resting on his bony shoulder for only a moment, while inside his eyelids, images flickered before her lips touched his hot cheeks.

      ‘Why be enemies when we can be friends?’

      Who could have resisted such an honest question, whispered closely on the edge of the road; who would have given an ambiguous answer? When they reached his building, Sal suggested that, to honour their new friendship, he should walk her home too, and so they went one way and then the other several times forgetting which way they were headed, for in the meantime darkness had come and they had to hide from their friends who were out to play in the evening shift. Harry, Toma, Johnny, Max the karate kids of year seven, the garrulous girls living in the horseshoe-shaped building, the tramps living next to the brewery: they all roamed the streets and had to be avoided by sneaking into buildings and unlocked gardens or behind the thick trunks of the trees in the small circular park in the middle of their neighbourhood.

      In the end, remembering that they were expected at home, they said goodbye in front of Emi’s gate and promised each other that they would speak very soon. Only when they were both in their rooms did they realise, and the discovery shocked them alike, that they hadn’t exchanged phone numbers, so Sal called directory enquiries and recited the address. The harsh 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.

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