Emmaus

by Alessandro Baricco

  We went to bed when the drugs began to circulate a little too much: either you took drugs or you were really out of place. So we left, because that was not something for us. We had to look for Bobby, to find out where there was a bed, but he was already pretty far gone with weed. We didn’t like seeing him like that, and he didn’t like spoiling everything because of it. As if she had understood, Andre appeared and led us off, her tone gentle, her gestures controlled—emerging from who knows where; she hadn’t been at the party. She led us to a room in the other part of the house.

  At a certain point she said, I know, I also get sick of dancing after a while.

  It seemed the beginning of a conversation, and so Luca said that he never danced, but that to tell the truth when he did it seemed to him very cool, and he laughed.

  Yes, it is, Andre said, looking at him. Then she added, You don’t know it, but you are wonderful, you three. Bobby is, too. She walked away, because it wasn’t the beginning of a conversation, it was a thing she wanted to say, and that was all.

  Maybe it was that phrase, maybe the alcohol and the dancing, but then, left alone, we went on talking for a while, the three of us, as if continuing something. Luca and I lying in a big bed, the Saint settled on a sofa, on the other side of the room. We were talking as if we had a future before us, just discovered. Also about Bobby, and about how we had to bring him back to us. And many of our stories, especially unconfessable ones, but in a different light, without regrets—we felt capable of anything, which happens to the young. Our ears were buzzing, and when we closed our eyes we felt nauseous—but we went on talking, while through the blinds the light filtered in from the garden, to appear in stripes on the ceiling. We stared at them, still talking, without looking at each other. We asked the Saint where he went when he disappeared. He told us. We had no fear of anything. And Luca talked about his father, to the Saint for the first time, to me stories I didn’t know. But we seemed capable of anything, and we uttered words that we seemed to understand. Not once did anyone say God. Often we remained silent for a while, because we weren’t in a hurry, and wanted this not to end.

  But the Saint was talking when we heard a sound, close by—then the door opening. We stopped talking, pulled the sheet up—the usual modesty. It might have been anyone, but it was Andre. She entered the room and closed the door, she was wearing a white T-shirt and nothing else. She looked around, then got into our bed, between Luca and me, as if it had been understood. She did it all quietly, without saying a word. She rested her head on Luca’s chest, stayed there without moving for a while, on one side. One leg over his. Luca at first did nothing, then he began to caress her hair, you could still hear the music from the party, in the distance. Then they moved closer and so I sat up in the bed, with the idea of leaving, the only idea that occurred to me. But Andre turned slightly and said Come here, taking my hand. So I lay down behind her, my heart attached to her back, keeping my legs away slightly, at first, but then getting closer, my sex against her smooth skin, which began to move, slowly. I kissed her on the neck, while she brushed Luca’s eyes with her lips, slowly. So I heard Luca’s breath, and his half-open mouth, from so close. But where I slid my hands, he withdrew his—we touched Andre without touching each other, immediately in agreement that we would not. While she held us, slowly, always silent and looking at us.

  She was the secret—this we had known for some time, and now the secret was there, and only one step was missing. We had never wanted anything else. For that reason we let her guide us, and everything was simple, including the things which never had been, for me. I knew nothing like this, but obscurity had disappeared so completely that already I knew what I would see when, at a certain point, I turned toward the Saint, to see him sitting on the sofa, his feet on the floor, staring at us, without expression—a figure from a Spanish painting. He wasn’t moving. He was barely breathing. I should have been frightened, because his gaze was close to the one I knew, but I wasn’t. Everything was simple, as I said. He didn’t make a sign to me, there was nothing he wanted to tell me. Besides his being there, without lowering his gaze. I thought then that everything was true, if he saw it—true and without guilt, if he was silent.

  So I looked again at Andre—lying on her back she pulled Luca and pushed him away, between her open legs. We had trained ourselves for so long to have sex without intercourse that for us the truly exciting things are different, certainly not being male inside female—or the animal movement. But looking someone in the eyes who is making love, that I had never imagined—it seemed to me the greatest intimacy possible, like ultimate possession. So I had the sensation that I was truly carrying away the secret. I stared at Andre’s eyes, which looked at me, rocking with Luca’s thrusts. I knew what was missing, so I leaned over to kiss her on the mouth, I had never done that, I had wanted to forever—she turned her face, offered me her cheek, placed a hand on my shoulders, to push me slightly away. I continued to kiss her, searching for her mouth—she smiled, continuing to escape. She must have understood that I would never stop, so she slid away from Luca, like a game, she bent over me, took my sex in her mouth, her mouth far from mine, as she wanted. My gaze met Luca’s, it was the only time, his hair was sticky on his forehead, and there was nothing to do, it was wonderful. I fell back. I thought that now I would look at Andre while she sucked my sex, I would see her like that, once and for all. But instead I placed my hand in her hair and squeezed my fingers, bending my arm and pulling her head toward me. I knew, somewhere, that if I couldn’t kiss her everything would be pointless. She let herself be pulled, smiling, she came within a hairsbreadth of my lips, but she was laughing. She climbed on top of me to keep my shoulders pinned to the bed, she laughed a hairsbreadth from my lips, a game. I took her head from behind, and pushed her toward me, first she stiffened, then she was no longer laughing, then I moved my hips in a way that was new to me, she let me enter inside her, and I surrendered, because it was the first time I had had sex in my life. Not even with our whores, never.

  We fell asleep when the morning light was on the blinds, the sofa deserted, the Saint vanished who knows where. We slept for hours. When we woke up Andre wasn’t there anymore. We looked at each other for a moment, Luca and I. He said Shit. He said it over and over, beating his head against the pillow.

  Not long afterward the news spread that Andre was expecting a baby—the girls said it, as of something that was supposed to happen, and had happened.

  Luca was terrorized. It was impossible to reason with him, I talked till I was blue in the face that we didn’t know anything, that likely it wasn’t true. And then who could say it was really ours, that child. I said it like that, ours.

  We tried to remember how it had happened. That things had functioned in a certain way we knew, but little more. It seemed to us important to know where we had scattered our seed, a very Biblical expression that the priests use in place of come. The problem was that we didn’t remember exactly—it might seem odd, but it was so. As I’ve already had occasion to say, we seldom come, and when we do it’s by mistake. We have sex in a different way—so, even with Andre, that didn’t seem to us the heart of the matter. Yet we concluded that in fact it was inside her that we had come, also—and that also was the only thing that made Luca laugh, but just for an instant.

  It could be ours, we understood.

  The idea was deadly, there was nothing to say. Scarcely born to the art of being sons, we became fathers, victims of an illogical precipitation of events. Beyond the huge complex of guilt, and a shameful, sexual guilt—how would we ever explain, to mothers, fathers, and at school? It was natural to think of particular circumstances, when we would speak and describe it, the details, the absence of reasons, the silences. The tears. Or our parents would discover it first—every time we came home and, pushing open the door, broke that silence, to apprehend if it was the usual mild sadness, or a void signifying disaster. That wasn’t living. And without even pressing ahead to think of the aftermath, a re
al child, its life, in what house, with what fathers and mothers, what money. We didn’t get that far, I never saw that child, even once in imagination, I never got that far in those days.

  More secretly, I thought back still further, where I saw us exiled in a landscape that wasn’t ours, sucked into that vocation for tragedy that belonged to the wealthy—it was a crack, and I could hear the sound of it. We had pushed on too far, following Andre, and for the first time I thought that we would no longer be capable of finding the way back. Apart from the other fears, this was my real terror, but I never said it to Luca—the rest of our adventure was enough to freeze him.

  We lived it by ourselves, it should also be said, keeping everything hidden inside us. We didn’t want to talk to Bobby about it, the Saint had disappeared into a void. We had stopped going to visit the larvae, at Mass we were a duo playing and singing, a punishment. I tried it, talking to the Saint, but he escaped, coldly. I managed to stop him once on the way out of school, and nothing came of it. We understood that he needed time. There was no one else around. No priest for matters of that sort. Thus we were so alone—in that solitude that breeds disasters.

  And we were so young.

  To talk about it with Andre didn’t even cross our minds. Nor would she ever come to us, we knew. So we asked around, without putting emphasis in the words, hands in our pockets. People knew that she was expecting a baby, she had said it, to someone, always denying the name of the father. It seemed a fact. Yet I never really believed it until the day I happened to meet Andre’s father on the street—he was at the wheel of a red sports car. We had been introduced at the show, just introduced, oddly he remembered me. He drove up to the sidewalk and stopped where I was. Those were days when, if anyone spoke to us, we feared disaster, Luca and I.

  Have you seen Andre? he asked.

  I thought he meant had I seen how marvelous she was, up on the stage—or even in general, what a marvel she was, in life. So I answered, Yes.

  Where? he asked. I said Everywhere. It sounded rather excessive, to tell the truth. So I added, From a distance.

  Andre’s father nodded yes, as if to say that he agreed, and had understood. He gave a look around. Maybe he was thinking what a strange type I was. You’re a smart kid, he said. And drove off.

  Four intersections farther on, where a signal flashed uselessly in the sun, the red sports car was hit by an out-of-control van. The impact was terrible, and Andre’s father lost his life.

  Then I knew that that child was there, because I recognized the squaring of a circle—the meeting of two geometries. The spell that ruled that family, welding every birth to a death, had been crossed with the protocol of our feelings, which linked every sin to a punishment. The result, by all the evidence, was a prison of steel—I distinctly heard the mechanical sound of the lock.

  I didn’t talk to Luca about it—he had begun to skip school, he didn’t answer the phone. I had to go get him to make him leave the house, sometimes, and it wasn’t always enough. Everything was difficult in those hours, the pain of keeping things going. One morning I got the idea of taking him to school, so I went to his house, at seven thirty in the morning. At the entrance I met his father—he already had his hat on, briefcase in hand, he was about to go to the office. He was serious and terse, it was clear that that visit of mine, at an abnormal hour, caused him enormous suffering, but he accepted it, like the arrival of a doctor. Luca was in his room—he was dressed but was lying on the bed, which was made. I closed the door, maybe I intended to raise my voice. I put his books in his bag—a military knapsack, such as we all have, from the secondhand stores. Don’t be an idiot, I said, and get up.

  Afterward, as we walked to school, he tried to explain, and to me it even seemed that I found a way of making him see some sense, of dissolving his fear. Yet, at a certain point, he was able to say, with the precision of simple words, retrieved from the depths of his shame, what really was consuming him: I can’t do this to my father. He was convinced that that man would be wounded to death by it, and he wasn’t ready for that horror. Really, that was not something I knew how to respond to. It disarms us, in fact, the inclination to think that our life is, above all, a conclusive fragment of the life of our parents, merely entrusted to our care. As if they had charged us, in a moment of weariness, to hold for a moment that epilogue precious to them—it was expected that we would restore it, sooner or later, intact. They would then put it back in place, creating the roundness of a completed life: theirs. But to our weary fathers, who had trusted us, we return sharp-edged fragments, objects that slipped from our fingers. In the muffled slide of such a failure, we find neither the time to reflect nor the light of a rebellion. Only the immobility of the sin. So our lives will return to us, when already it’s too late.

  In the end, since Luca wouldn’t go, I left him alone to fill the void of those morning hours. I preferred to follow the dictate of things, in an orderly fashion. School, homework, obligations. It was something that helped me. I hadn’t much else. Ordinarily, in such situations, I have recourse to confession and, secondarily, penance. Yet I felt no urge toward one or the other, in the conviction that I was no longer entitled to the privilege of the sacraments, perhaps not even to the consolation of a pious expiation. So I had no medicine—apart from respect for habits, only the instinct to pray endured. It gave me relief to do it on my knees, for a very long time, in random churches, at the hour when there is just the occasional shuffling of old ladies, every so often the banging of a door. I was with God, without asking anything.

  When the day of Andre’s father’s funeral arrived, Luca and I decided to go.

  Bobby was there, too, the Saint wasn’t. But we were on one side of the crowded church, Bobby on the other, and he now dressed differently—he had begun to pay attention. It’s not something we do. We had seen big groups of people, but seldom so serious, so restrained. Dark glasses and brief nods. Standing, during the Mass, without knowing the words. We know that type of recitation, it has no true connection with any religious feeling, it has to do with elegance, with the need for ritual. But there is no resurrection in those hearts, nothing. At the sign of peace I shook Luca’s hand, with a look. We alone knew how much we needed it—peace.

  From a distance we looked carefully at Andre, obviously, but under the jacket nothing was legible, the decisive thinness and nothing else. We didn’t know enough to understand if we could deduce anything from it.

  Outside the church, we embraced Bobby, and then we had no doubt that we should go and say something to Andre, that it would be only polite. Without admitting it, we expected something, the clarity of a signal that she would know how to give. There were people in line, in the sacristy, we waited until Andre stood a little apart from her mother and brother, we watched her smiling, she was the only one not wearing dark glasses, and very beautiful. We approached slowly, waiting our turn, without taking our eyes off her—now that she was there, I suddenly remembered how I had missed her body every moment since that night. I looked for the same thought in Luca’s eyes, but he seemed preoccupied and that was all. Andre greeted an elderly couple, then it was our turn. First Luca—then I held out my hand, she shook it, Thank you for coming, smiling, a kiss on the cheek, nothing else. Maybe a moment more, delaying, but I don’t know. She was already thanking someone else.

  Andre.

  It’s not ours, I said to Luca, the church behind us, as we walked home. It’s not possible that it’s ours.

  She would have let us know, I thought. I also thought that in that kiss on the cheek everything had disappeared, like the water that closes over, heedless of the rock lying on the streambed. So I was exhilarated, I had been given back my life. I said it to Luca, anyway. He was listening. But he walked with his head bent. I became suspicious, and asked if Andre had said something to him. He didn’t answer, he only tilted his head slightly to one side. I couldn’t understand what had happened, so I took him by the arm, roughly: What the hell is the matter? His eyes filled
with tears, like that other time, leaving my house. He stopped, trembling.

  Let’s go back, he said.

  To Andre?

  Yes.

  To do? He was really crying now. It took him a moment to become calm enough to speak.

  I can’t go on, let me go back there, we have to ask her, that’s all, we can’t go on like this, it’s stupid, I can’t go on.

  He might even be right—but not there, with all those people, at a funeral. I was embarrassed. I told him.

  What do I care about their funeral, he said.

  He seemed sure.

  I said that I, no, I wouldn’t go. If you really want to go, go by yourself.