The cockroach was gone. Birds were fluttering noisily above, and clouds had covered the sky. He could smell the rain; the air around him was electrified and he could almost hear it buzz, prompting him to get up and walk farther. Before long, raindrops started to whip his cheeks and arms. Suddenly, the rain started to patter: a summer whim, as his grandmother used to say while bustling him inside, sheltering him as well she could from the short, rich gusts with all her body, with her large, soft breasts and with her armpits. He instinctively lifted his arms up, pulling his T-shirt over his head, and looked around at the slender trees and the plastic roof supported by four posts before deciding to seek refuge in the lobby of Harry’s apartment building to wait there for the rain to calm down.
Once inside, he shook the water off like a dog and then remained still, listening for noises in the building. Although he heard murmurs and squeaks, short cracks followed by a slow friction, a rugged rustle coming from the elevator shaft and brief trampling, the silence was still overwhelming. All these noises meant nothing compared to the absence of people and of the sounds made by them.
He breathed in several times, filling his lungs with air. A stench, at first faint as a breeze, then increasing as his sense of smell got accustomed to the interior, remained clinging to his nostrils like icicles in winter. It became stronger, stinging his nose and reminding him of the nail polish remover that diffused throughout the bathroom after his mother wiped the polish off her nails and left the soaked and reddened cotton swabs on the sink. He looked up through the tunnel made by the staircase handrail, making sure there was no one there. The flow of air made the smell grow stronger and then fade in waves. From upstairs he could hear a window banging rhythmically against the wall. After slamming like that for several minutes, while Sal pricked up his ears to hear the other noises inside, the noise of its shattered glass falling on the floor followed.
Sal expected someone would come out in the hallway to see what had happened, but nobody did. He decided to go upstairs despite the nausea already filling his chest and forcing up all his lunch: chicken soup with noodles, roast meat with boiled potatoes and tomato salad, followed by a jam and meringue cake topped with grated chocolate especially sent by Grandmother in a greased, paper-lined suitcase. Upon reaching each new floor, he leant with his hands upon his knees and tried to take a deep breath to push the food back down, but the inhaled air only managed to disturb his bowels more and bend him under the weight of his rebelling body.
On the second floor, from behind a massive wooden door with a carved golden handle, he could hear a recurrent rustle. Putting his ear to the varnished surface, Sal tried to make out what was on the other side. The rustle was pretty close, but its regularity betrayed a spring-loaded device.
He drew back and climbed to the next floor. There, overwhelmed by the heavy air, by the decomposed mixture of sweet and sour smells, he stepped on the floor covered with shattered glass, lifted his body with a powerful push by grasping the window sill and, with all his weight resting upon his thin wrists, leaned on the edge, then bent out and let the drops of rain fall on his face.
The feeling of relief only lasted for a few seconds, because as soon as he trickled back in, careful not to make any sounds, the nausea reappeared. He bent his head between his legs, curled up at his joints and threw up until only a thread of saliva trickled from between his red and swollen lips, trembling lightly like a murmur echoing the spasms of the flesh. He remained bent with his eyes covered by the fog of effort and nausea, his mind empty and his temples beating like a heart. With a last struggle, he straightened his back and limped up the remaining stairs to Harry’s apartment in what looked more like a crawl.
Outside, the heavy rain kept falling, while the smell made it harder and harder for him to stay inside. Thinking about the moment he would breathe in, filling his lungs with the stuffy air in his friend’s rarely aired house, hidden from light behind the thick, velvet, tasselled curtains, he dashed up the stairs to the last floor, moaning and cursing. Once there, he pushed his finger into the bulging electric bell and made it ring in a short spurt; when he saw that no one was coming to open the door, he rang a second time, this time for longer.
In front of the closed door, he began to ponder. It wasn’t the best idea to enter Harry’s house, for Harry would insist that he stay and, if he showed eagerness to leave once the rain had stopped, Harry would certainly sound him out, curious as he was. He crouched, rummaged through his pocket and took out a piece of chocolate wrapped in tinfoil. It had melted and its shape had changed, but Sal used his nail to remove the wrapping that was stuck to the brownish mass.
He had felt a softness in his legs, some kind of tremor hidden in the flesh, and had lost contact for a moment. However tempted he may have felt to lie down on the doormat and allow himself to be carried by his thoughts, he still thought that somewhere above him drifted Emi’s tousled and impatient head, with a well-defined wrinkle already visible between her eyebrows and a sparkle in her eyes that could have ignited the whole neighbourhood. Perhaps he could wait until Mrs Demetrescu found him and, in terrible alarm, lifted him and carried him under her arm as if he were a bundle of woodchips, bringing him inside the house and calling his already-worried parents in a firm voice with little trace of excitement. Sal heaved a long sigh and leaned against the doorjamb, calmly munching the piece of chocolate. He thought he heard, on the other side of the door, a stifled noise followed by a thud, and he stopped and listened.
‘Harry…’ he whispered, concentrating. ‘Harry, is that you, man?’
No answer. He knocked softly, carefully. It was only his breath in the hall, no other noise; his breath that had frosted the wood varnish on the door.
‘Harry, say something if you’re there.’
He drew back, looking up at the dark eye in the peephole. Rising on his toes, he thought he noticed motion behind the concave lens.
‘You must be very stupid not to open the door, Harry. Just stay there and giggle,’ he said, and from inside he could hear clearly now, as if it were very close, a stifled giggle.
He went downstairs two steps at a time, trying to breathe as little as possible. As he got closer to the ground floor and the smell became stronger, diversifying its nuances and penetrating his clothes and his skin, it inebriated him to such an extent that he nearly fainted. This was a building without pets and old people. He knew almost all of them, for together with the boys in his gang, he had harassed them all in various ways. It was not from the cleaned and scrubbed apartments that the smell came, nor from the stairs that were swept daily and then washed with a rag curled around a wooden stick.
By the time he reached the ground floor, he had figured out where the smell was coming from. Outside, the rain would have hidden the putrid smell, annihilating it. There was only one place left that he would have to inspect, although he wasn’t looking forward to doing so and had little courage left: the basement. On the ground floor, there were two apartments and the door that led to the basement, where the storage rooms were located. It wasn’t a very pleasant place to visit, especially when alone. But it was still raining outside, ceaselessly; it was raining cats and dogs, as Grandmother used to say while looking absentmindedly out the window, and Emi would undoubtedly have to wait. He opened the last door, while at the same moment a horrid stench hit him so violently he staggered and moved a step backward.
‘I’ll be damned…’
An infinite disgust impressed itself upon Sal’s face. He slammed the door wildly, as if someone were rushing at him from beyond the threshold, and remained with his hand on the door handle, seemingly trying to figure out what was to be done. A few long seconds passed.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Sal repeated in a stifled voice. ‘What the hell is this smell?’
He stood with his arms akimbo like a bewildered old man, assessing the danger. Opening the door again, he looked inside to the darkness that lay at his feet. He tried his best to be brave, but the pitch-black inferno of the building had opened its huge mouth and was preparing to swallow him, the way children swallowed pickled autumn tomatoes brought from basement storage rooms by the housewifely mothers who had been careful enough to store supplies for winter.
Sal’s fingers had gone white and he could no longer