Emmaus

by Alessandro Baricco

  The Saint has a way of taking everything incredibly seriously, Luca said.

  She nodded her head yes.

  Sometimes it’s hard to understand him, and he never explains, he doesn’t like to explain.

  You never talk about it, among yourselves?

  Talk about it, no.

  And so?

  She wanted to know. That mother made us tell her that we prayed, while the Saint burned in prayer; and his legs had a way of kneeling that was like crashing, when we simply changed position—he fell to his knees. She wanted to know why her son spent hours with the poor, the sick, the criminal, becoming one of them, until he forgot the prudence of dignity, and the limits of charity. She expected to understand what he did during all that time devoted to books, and if we, too, lowered our heads at every reproof, and were incapable of rebellion, and of tense words. She needed to understand better who all these priests were, the letters they wrote to him, the phone calls. She wanted to know if others laughed at him, and how girls looked at him, if with respect—the distance between him and the world. That woman was asking us if it was possible at our age to think of giving one’s life to God, and his priests.

  If it was only that, we could answer.

  Yes.

  And how does it occur to you?

  Luca smiled. It’s an odd question, he said, because it seemed that everything around us was directing us to that folly, as if toward a light. How surprising was it to discover now how deep their words had gone—and every lesson since we were children, none unheeded? It should be good news, he said.

  Not for me, the woman said. She said that they had also taught us moderation, and in fact had done so before anything else, knowing that they would thus deliver the antidote to any teaching that followed.

  But there is no moderation in love, said Luca, in such a way that he almost didn’t seem himself. In love or in suffering, he added.

  The woman looked at him. Then she looked at me. She must have wondered if they were all blind in the face of our mystery, every father and mother, blinded by our apparent youth. Then she asked if we had ever thought of becoming priests.

  No.

  And why not?

  You mean why the Saint and not us?

  Why my son?

  Because he wants to be saved, I said, and you know from what. I shouldn’t have said it, and yet I did, because that woman had brought us there to hear this precise phrase said, and now I had said it.

  There are other ways to be saved, she said, without getting frightened.

  Maybe. But that’s the best.

  You think so?

  I know, I said. Priests save themselves, they’re compelled to; every moment of their life saves them, because in every moment they’re not living, so the catastrophe can’t strike.

  What catastrophe? she asked. She wouldn’t stop.

  The one the Saint carries with him, I said.

  Luca looked at me. He wanted to know if I would stop.

  That terrifying catastrophe, I added, to be sure that she understood clearly.

  The woman was staring at me. She was trying to find out what I knew about it, and how well we knew her son. At least as well as she knew him, probably. The dark side of the Saint is on the surface of his actions, in the secret passages that he excavates in the light of the sun; his ruin is transparent, he submits to it without much reserve, anyone who’s around can understand that it’s a catastrophe, and maybe even what sort.

  Do you know where he goes when he disappears? the woman asked, firmly.

  Sometimes the Saint disappears, there’s no doubt about that. Days and nights, then he returns. We know. We even know something more, but this is our life, too, the woman has nothing to do with it.

  We shook our heads no. A grimace, also, to reiterate no, we didn’t know where he went.

  The woman understood. So she said it in another way. You can’t help him? she whispered. It was a prayer rather than a question.

  We’re with him, we like him, he’ll always be with us, Luca said. He doesn’t frighten us. We’re not afraid.

  Then the woman’s eyes filled with tears, maybe at the memory of how intransigent and infinite the instinct of friendship can be at our age.

  No one said anything else for a while. It could have ended there.

  But she must have thought she shouldn’t be afraid if we weren’t. So, still weeping, but faintly, she said, It’s that business of the demons. It’s the priests who put it in his head.

  We didn’t think she would press so far, but she had the courage—because deep down our mothers harbor, unnoticed, an incomparable audacity. They preserve it, dormant, among the prudent gestures of a lifetime, in order to use it fully on what they suspect is the appointed day. They will expend it at the foot of a cross.

  The demons are taking him away from me, she said.

  In a sense it was true. The way we see it, the story of the demons does come from the priests, but there’s also something that has always been part of the Saint, with the power of something innate, and it existed before the priests gave it a name. None of us have that sensitivity to evil, a kind of morbid, terrifying attraction—increasingly morbid, inevitably, because it is terrifying—as none of us have the same vocation as the Saint for goodness, sacrifice, meekness, which are the consequence of that terror. Maybe there would be no need to trouble the demon, but in our world sanctity is closely entwined with an unspeakable familiarity with evil, as the Gospels testify in the episode of the temptations, and as the murky lives of the mystics tell us. So there is talk of demons, without the prudence that one should have in talking of demons. And in the presence of pure souls like ours—of boys. The priests have no pity in this matter. Or prudence.

  They eviscerated the Saint with these stories.

  What we can do, we do. We give lightness to our time with him, and we follow him everywhere, into the recesses of good, and those of evil—as far as we can, in the former as in the latter. We do it not only out of friendly compassion but also out of true fascination, drawn by what he knows, and accomplishes. Disciples, brothers. In the light of his childish sanctity we learn things, and this is a privilege. When the demons surface, we endure his upward gaze as long as we can. Then we let him go, and wait for him to return. We forget the terror, and are capable of normal days with him, after any yesterday. We don’t even think about it much, and if that woman had not compelled us to, we would almost never think about it. In fact I shouldn’t even have mentioned it.

  The woman told us frightening things that happened at home sometimes, but we had already stopped listening. She had in her heart the burden of so much suffering, and now she was freeing herself of it, by explaining to us what it meant that the demons were taking away her son. It wasn’t for us. We started listening again only when we heard the name of Andre, dragged along in the flow of words—a question that irritated us, sounding with pointless clarity, right in the middle.

  Why is my son obsessed with that girl?

  We were no longer there.

  The woman understood.

  She set a cake out on the table, still warm, and a bottle of Coke, already opened. She wanted to talk about normal things, and she did so politely. She was so direct, and simple, that it occurred to Luca to tell her about his family, but not the truth—little things, as of a normal, happy family. Maybe he thought that she also knew, and he insisted on telling her that really everything was fine. I don’t know.

  You’re good boys, the Saint’s mother said at a certain point.

  Naturally we go to school every day. But that’s a story of embarrassing humiliation and useless aggravation. It has nothing to do with what we would define as life.

  When Andre cut her hair like that, all the others did, too. Cut short above the forehead and around the ears. The rest long as before, American Indian style. She did it herself, in front of the mirror.

  One followed her, then all the others—the girls who hung around her. Three, four. One day, my gir
lfriend.

  The way they move is different, after that—feral. Their speech is harsh, when they remember, and they have a new pride. What had existed invisibly behind their behavior became visible—that they are all waiting to learn from Andre how to live. Without admitting it—in fact sometimes they despise her. But they succumb—although it seems a game.

  Also thinness. Which Andre chose at a certain point, as a natural and definitive premise. It’s not worth discussing, clearly it has to be that way. There do not seem to be doctors who can utter the word malnutrition—so the bodies slip away without warning or worry, only surprise. They eat when no one sees them. They vomit in secret. Actions that were perfectly simple become obscure, growing complicated as we would never have believed, and as youth should not expect.

  There is no sadness in this, but, rather, a metamorphosis that makes them strong. We notice that they carry their bodies differently now, as if they had suddenly become conscious of them, or had accepted ownership. Having been capable of forcing the body, they free themselves of it with a lightness that borders on carelessness. They are beginning to discover how one can abandon it to chance. Place it in someone else’s hands, and then get it back.

  All this comes from Andre, obviously, but it should also be said that the derivation is almost imperceptible, because in fact they don’t talk to each other much, and you never see them in a group, or being physically close—they aren’t really friends, no one is a friend of Andre. It’s a silent contagion, fostered by distance. It’s a spell. My girlfriend, for instance, sees Andre because she dances with her, but otherwise she inhabits a different world, and different latitudes. When she happens to utter Andre’s name it’s in a tone of superiority, as if she knew what kind of makeup she wore, or pitied her fate.

  And yet.

  She and I have a private game—we write to each other in secrecy. In parallel with what we say and do together, we write, as if we were ourselves but in a second life. Of what we write in those letters—notes—we never speak. Yet there we tell each other truths. Technically we use a system we’re proud of—I invented it. We leave the notes in a window at school, a window where no one goes. We stick them between the glass and the aluminum. There’s not much chance that someone else might read them, just enough to provide a hint of tension. Besides, we write in block letters, the notes could be anybody’s.

  Soon after that business of the hair, I found a note that said,

  Last night after dancing we went with Andre to her house, other people were there. I drank a lot, sorry, love. At one point I was lying on her bed. Tell me if you want me to go on.

  I do, I answered.

  Andre and someone else pulled up my sweater. We were laughing. With my eyes closed I felt good, they touched me and kissed me. After a while hands I don’t know touched my breasts, I never opened my eyes, it was nice. I felt a hand under my skirt, between my legs, then I got up, I didn’t want that. I opened my eyes, there were others on the bed. I didn’t want them to touch me between the legs. I love you so much, my love. Forgive me, my love.

  We never spoke about it afterward, ever. What is said in the second life doesn’t exist in the first—otherwise the game is ruined forever. But I brooded about that story, and so one evening I came out with a sentence that I had been pondering for some time.

  Andre killed herself, a while ago, did you know?

  She knew.

  She will go on killing herself until she’s finished, I said to her. I also wanted to talk about food, about the body, about sex.

  But she said, Maybe one dies in many ways, and every so often I wonder if we, too, are not dying, without knowing it. She, at least, knows.

  We aren’t dying, I said.

  I’m not sure. Luca is dying.

  It’s not true.

  And the Saint, he is, too.

  What do you mean?

  I don’t know. Sorry.

  She said it, but she didn’t know, either, it was little more than an intuition, a gleam. We proceed by means of flashes, the rest is darkness. A clear darkness filled with dark light.

  In the Gospels there’s an episode that we love, along with its name: Emmaus. A few days after the death of Christ, two men are walking on the road that leads to the town of Emmaus, talking about what happened on Calvary, and about some strange rumors, about open graves and empty tombs. A third man approaches and asks what they’re talking about. So the two say, What, you don’t know anything about what happened in Jerusalem?

  What happened? he asks. The two tell him. The death of Christ and everything else. He listens.

  When, afterward, he is about to leave, the two say, It’s late, stay and eat with us. We can eat together and continue talking.

  And he stays with them. During dinner, the man breaks bread, tranquilly, naturally. Then the two men understand and recognize in him the Messiah. He disappears.

  Left alone, the two men say to each other, How could we not have known? For all the time he was with us, the Messiah was with us, and we didn’t realize it.

  We like the linearity—the simplicity of the story. And its realism, without frills. The men’s only gestures are elementary, necessary, so that in the end the disappearance of Christ seems taken for granted, like a habit. Linearity pleases us, but it would not be enough to make us love that story so much, which we do love so much but for yet another reason: in the whole story, no one knows. At the beginning Jesus himself seems not to know about himself, and his death. Then the men don’t know about him, and his resurrection. At the end they ask themselves, How could we?

  We are familiar with that question.

  How, for so long, could we know nothing of what was, and yet sit at the table of everything and every person met on the road? Small hearts—we nourish them on grand illusions, and at the end of the process we walk like the disciples in Emmaus, blind, alongside friends and lovers we don’t recognize—trusting in a God who no longer knows about himself. For this reason we are acquainted with the beginning of things and later we experience their end, but we always miss their heart. We are dawn and epilogue—forever belated discovery.

  Perhaps there is a gesture that will enable us to understand. But for now we’re alive, all of us. I explained it to my girlfriend. I want you to know that Andre is dying and we are alive, that’s all, there’s nothing else to understand for now.

  We are also solid, and have a strength illogical for our age. They teach it along with faith, a phenomenon that is indefinable but a hard rock, a diamond. We go through the world with a confidence in which all our timidity dissolves, leading us over the threshold of the ridiculous. Often people have no defense, because we act shamelessly; they simply accept without understanding, disarmed by our candor.

  We do crazy things.

  One day, we went to see Andre’s mother.

  It was partly because the Saint had the idea. Since the day of the blow job in the car, and then later, because of other things that happened. I think he had the notion of saving Andre, in some way. The way he knew was to persuade her to talk to a priest.

  It was a foolish idea, but then there was that business of the hair, and the note from my girlfriend—the thinness, too. I couldn’t keep still about it, and it’s typical of the way we act to approach things indirectly and make them a question of salvation or perdition, something grandiose. It didn’t even cross our minds that it’s all simpler—normal wounds to heal with natural acts, like getting mad or doing despicable things. We don’t know about such shortcuts.

  So at a certain point it seemed to me reasonable to go. We have childish ideas—if a child is bad, you tell its mother.

  I said so to the Saint. We went. We have no sense of the ridiculous. The elect never do.

  Andre’s mother is a magnificent woman, but with a kind of beauty that we have no attraction or susceptibility to. She was sitting on an enormous sofa, in their house, which is luxurious.

  We had seen her other times, just in passing, the luminous wake of an el
egant apparition, behind large dark glasses. A designer purse on her arm, which is bent in a V, like French women in the movies. The hand is lifted, and there it remains, palm facing upward, open, waiting for someone to place a delicate object in it, perhaps a fruit.

  From the sofa she looked at us and I can’t forget the respect that at first she seemed capable of—she didn’t even know who we were, and everything must have seemed surreal. But as I said, life had broken her, and probably it was a long time since she’d been afraid of the absurd creeping into the geometry of good sense. She kept her eyes slightly wide open, maybe because of medications, as if in a deliberate effort not to close them. We were there to tell her that her daughter was lost.

  But the Saint has a beautiful voice, like a preacher. However crazy what he had to say, he said it in a way that sounded pure, without a hint of the ridiculous, and with the strength of dignity. Candor is stunning.

  The woman listened. She lighted a cigarette with a gilded filter, smoked it halfway down. It wasn’t easy to tell what she was thinking, because there was nothing on her face but that effort not to close her eyes. Every so often she crossed her legs, which she wore like a decoration.

  The Saint managed to say everything without naming anything, and he never even said Andre, but only your daughter. So he summed up all we knew, and asked if this was really what the woman wanted for her daughter, to lose herself in sin, in spite of her talents and her marvelousness, because the woman hadn’t been able to point out to her the rough road of innocence. For then we really couldn’t understand it, and that was why we had come—to tell her.

  We were just boys, and, having finished our homework, had taken the bus to get to that beautiful house, with the precise purpose of explaining to an adult how the way she lived and behaved as a parent was leading to ruin a girl we hardly knew and who would be lost, dragging down with her all the weak souls she met on her path.