The Town with Acacia Trees

Chapter I: First Blood

Chapter I

First BloodWhen, on a bright day in late February, Adriana, returning early from school, stood on the doorstep and said she ‘‘wasn’t feeling well’’, Mrs. Dunea understood that something unusual was happening to her daughter.

Nothing hurt. It was only that she was pale and her eyes felt hot.

She tried to go back to school the next day, but stopped in the street, turned to look at her mother who was watching from the gate, and ran past her into the house, collapsing in tears on the corner of the open piano.

Was she sick? Mrs. Dunea found her usual repertoire of domestic remedies to be of little use in dealing with this patient without any symptoms or pain.

“Adriana, tell Mama what hurts.”

She didn’t know. Was it the spring sunshine, come too quickly? Was it the mingled light of morning and snow? Was it that smell, rotten and fresh, of two seasons meeting?

She didn’t know. All of these things, and maybe others, even more confused, were making her light-headed. Her step, usually small and firm, was opening out into long, languid strides, sinking into carpets, as if she was stumbling on a long, imaginary train while descending an enormous staircase. Adriana searched for an image through her modest catalogue of literary references and found it: a tragic infanta, in her finest gown, withering with tuberculosis and loneliness in an echoing palace, deserted.

Summoned from town, Mr. Iuliu Dunea, not blessed with his daughter’s literary sensibility, asked her in a fatherly way whether she might have eaten something which upset her stomach. At this indignity, his daughter burst out sobbing, then flung herself into the arms of her mother, who had just entered the room. The parents exchanged desperate glances over their daughter’s head, asking each other the question to which neither had the answer. After a minute, Adriana’s sobbing slowed, grew quieter, moved by its own tragedy.

Cautiously, Mr. Dunea cut short the scene, his sense of decency unable to accept this incomprehensible wave of hysteria, when all he had prepared for was some trifling complaint about a headache or an injured limb.

“Nonsense. I’ll send for the doctor.”

In the evening, as the day drew to a close, Adriana’s misery waned. She had gone to bed and, between the sheets, at that still early hour, she felt her body slackening, as if with a light illness or convalescence, a feeling she remembered from certain summer evenings, hours spent in the garden, reclining in a chair, waiting for sleep.

She let the doctor take her limp hand and smiled. He held it and consulted his watch without much concern, checking her pulse. He was not disposed to take his patient seriously, but became alert when he saw her naked body. It was a child’s body, yet its straight lines were beginning to lose their simple symmetry. The boyish chest was beginning to swell gently around its two red marks, rising in a new voluptuousness with her steady breathing. If Adriana had not gripped the quilt so tightly around her hips, the doctor would have seen, following the line of her thin legs from their ankles and then beyond her knees, her thighs curving with the same quiet effort towards maturity.

He raised his eyes towards the other end of the bed, from where her mother was anxiously following the examination, and gave her a knowing smile.

“It’s nothing, really, nothing at all. The girl is growing up.” And because Mrs. Dunea hesitated, avoiding his meaning, he persisted: “You see, Adriana is no longer a child. Soon, very soon, she will become a young woman.”

Bored by the doctor’s long visit, Adriana didn’t understand this either, at first. She repeated his words, dreamily to herself, over and over until their meaning finally took hold and startled her.

A soft heat passed through her cheeks and spread to the rest of her body.

“Fantastic!” Adriana would have shouted, if instead of Mrs. Dunea it had been Cecilia, her school friend, standing by her bed, and she would have clapped her hands with childish delight. She almost started, but an undefinable instinct ordered her to stop. She couldn’t tell exactly why, but she felt that such a joy would be forbidden.

The doctor’s formal tone, her mother’s embarrassed smile, the sudden silence, all of these added together into something deeper and more potent than their words, gripping the girl’s heart and rising in her throat, like a faint ripple of hot blood and mad laughter. Those simple words “Adriana is no longer a child,” which in any drawing room would have been accepted as a commonplace remark, hid underneath them a mysterious message which no decent girl could admit to understanding, not in front of her parents.

She was surprised to see that she had raised her hand and didn’t know what to do with it. She tried to find a plausible gesture to disguise the action, but failing, awkwardly let it drop, to the amusement of her mother and the doctor. Adriana feared them. She wanted to be alone. Slowly, she turned away under the bed covers, the weight of her body contentedly sinking into the mattress, and whispered in a drowsy, childish voice:

“Mum, I’m so… oo… tired…”

The following days were unbearable. Adriana held the entire house hostage with the threat of her tears, ready to start at the first word uttered too harshly or too softly, no matter whether she was in the house, in the garden or visiting neighbours. She couldn’t stand noise. She couldn’t stand silence. At twilight, she felt despondent, when around six o’clock (it was March), the garden, viewed from her window, lost its familiar shape in the growing darkness. She was irritated by the glare of the morning light, raw and white like the flare of phosphorus that her science teacher had once lit on a sheet of blotting paper. The piercing sun which flooded the streets made her feel dizzy and sick.

Her cheeks looked sallow, almost the same colour as her eyes, which now had increasingly dark circles around them and sank almost to the corners of her lips, where sometimes a clouded smile flickered. She grew agitated, afraid of the slightest noise, horrified by her own voice, her breathing became quick and heavy as if after a great race. She’d glance around her, disorientated, stopping in mid-sentence, as if intently listening to a secret unfolding inside, and then speak again so quickly that it was impossible to tell whether she was apologizing for the interruption or evading an explanation. She would then move feverishly, swiftly, dropping one task and taking up another that she had forgotten the previous day, before forgetting it again two minutes later, feeling awkward and stupid, screaming with annoyance at everything, until, exhausted and ashamed by these petty miseries, she’d suddenly stop and burst into tears.

At those moments she thought she could feel her heart rending in two and her blood exploding in a silent, deadly flood. This thought filled her with pity: misunderstood, alone with this incurable illness, only fifteen years old, she knew herself fated to end her days like a flower shrivelling on the first hot summer night, imprisoned by the walls of this house, the city and its people − a poor, sad and neglected girl. And she sighed.

But one night the mystery of her strange illness was solved. She woke up from her restless sleep with a shiver. Adriana didn’t know what it was − had she touched the iron frame of the bed with her foot? Could this be the reason for this metallic coolness shifting now through her body, like a sheet of icy water?

She could feel this chill splintering inside her, melting in a muffled simmer of heat, and then that thread of ice becoming tangled in sweltering blood, until her whole being was consumed by that great, irresistible flame. She could feel herself slipping away, slowly. There was no resistance left in that body which now surrendered, undone.

She could feel her body stretching to its limits, the unfinished thighs, arms, cheeks, still soft as dough, yet underneath, something else, like a grub scratching weakly at its cocoon, struggling free.

She wanted to cry out. Not because she was afraid, but because her voice would have proved she was alive and by uttering a word she might have rescued herself from drowning in her body’s agony. She could have called out, searched for herself again. Yet she was silent. It was too much effort: it exhausted her. She allowed herself to slip back into that endless fatigue, resigned to her misfortune.

“What if I’m dying?”

A tear trembled in her eye. The thought appalled her. No, no, she shouldn’t die here, all alone, without anyone knowing, cursed by the oppressive night, her life ended by this unknowable ache, she couldn’t end her life without a cry, without a sigh, even.

She clenched her fists and pressed them roughly into her flesh. She could find herself now at last, limb by limb, she could rebuild her unfamiliar body with her touch. It took a desperate concentration to break through that weariness, to reclaim her numb flesh, to whip her paralysed limbs into life.

But something slackened her resolve, and her body sank again under its own weight. Another wave of exhaustion swelled somewhere in the blood. Something inside was trying to break apart. Her whole body was ringing with the tremor of wounded flesh. The girl tried one last time to resist it − then surrendered to the soft pillows, spread her legs and turned her head to the side, sighing with satisfaction and sadness.

She felt something warm on her thighs and remembered – distant, obscure – the taste of blood.