Emmaus (11 page)

I didn't even look to see if Andre was there, somewhere. I turned and left quickly—I was just afraid they might see me; nothing else mattered to me. When I got home, I was someone who had given up.

I don't know why, but I saw the Saint there, and nothing else mattered anymore, I told her.

She nodded yes, and then she said, I'm going, and she
started the car. She meant to say that she would go see Andre, and wouldn't hear any objections. I got out without saying much, and saw her go off, with the proper turn signal, and all—politely.

Since I did nothing to stop her, she came back the next day, and had talked to Andre.

She says that she was already pregnant when she made love with you.

In a low voice, again we sat side by side, in the car. But this time under the trees, behind my house.

I thought that Luca had died for nothing.

I also thought of the baby, in Andre's belly, my sex inside her, and those things. What mysterious proximities we are capable of, men and women. And finally I remembered that everything was over and I was no longer a father.

For that reason I did something I never do—I don't cry, I don't know why.

She let me alone, without making a move or saying a word, she clicked the switch for the brights, but softly.

Finally I asked her if Andre had said anything about Luca—if it had at least occurred to her that she had something to do with that flight.

She started laughing, she said.

Laughing?

She said, If that was the problem, he should have come and told me.

I thought that Andre didn't know anything about Luca, and that she had learned nothing about us.

But Andre is right, my girlfriend said, then, Luca can't have killed himself because of that, only you think so.

Why?

Because you're blind.

Meaning?

She shook her head—she didn't want to talk about it.

I moved toward her, as if to kiss her. She placed a hand on my shoulder, holding me away.

Just one kiss, I said to her.

Go, she said.

So I decided to start again. I began to think back, in search of a last solid moment before everything got complicated—the idea was to start from there. I had in mind the steps of the farmer who returns to the fields after the storm. It was just a matter of finding the point where I had left off the sowing, when the first hailstones fell.

I reasoned like that because in moments of confusion we habitually have recourse to an imaginary farmer—even though no one, in our families, ever worked the land, within the memory of man. We come from artisans and merchants, priests and bureaucrats, and yet we have inherited the wisdom of the fields, and made it ours. So we believe in the founding ritual of sowing, and we live trusting in the cyclical nature of everything, summed up by the round of the seasons. From the plow we have learned the ultimate
meaning of violence, and from the farmer the trick of patience. Blindly, we believe in the equation between hard work and harvest. It's a sort of symbolic vocabulary—given to us in a mysterious way.

So I thought of starting again, because we know no other instinct, faced with the storms of fate—the stubborn, foolish steps of the farmer.

I had to start to work the land again somewhere, and in the end I decided for the larvae, at the hospital. It was the last solid thing I remembered—the four of us with the larvae. The going into and going out of that hospital. I hadn't been for a long time. You can be sure that there you will find everything the way it was before, it doesn't matter what happened to you while you were absent. Maybe the faces and bodies are different—but the suffering and the oblivion are the same. The sisters don't ask questions, and they always welcome you as a gift. They pass by, busy, and at the same time a refrain sounds that is dear to us—Praise be to Jesus Christ, may he always be praised.

At first it all seemed difficult to me—the actions, the words. They told me about those who had gone, I shook hands with the new. The work was the same, the bags of urine. One of the old men saw me, and at one point he remembered me and started bawling at me in a loud voice, wanting to know where the hell we had gone, I and the others. You stopped coming here, he said, when I went over to him. He protested.

I dragged a chair over to the bed and sat down. The food is disgusting, he said, summing up. He asked if I had brought
something. Every so often we offered them something to eat—the first grapes, some chocolate. Even cigarettes, but those the Saint brought, we didn't dare. The sisters knew.

I told him that I didn't have anything for him. Things have been complicated lately, I said, in explanation. They've gone a bit wrong.

He looked at me in wonder. Long ago, these men stopped thinking that things can go wrong for others, too.

What the hell do you mean? he said.

Nothing.

Ah, I see.

He had been a gas station attendant when he was young and everything was going well for him. He had also been the president of a soccer team in his neighborhood, for a certain period. He remembered a three-to-two comeback victory, and a cup won on a penalty shoot-out.

He asked me where the kid with the red hair had gone. He made me laugh, he said.

He was talking about Bobby.

He hasn't been here? I asked.

That kid? And who's ever seen him again? He was the only one who made me laugh.

In fact Bobby knows how to handle them. He teases them the whole time—it's something that puts them in a good mood. For disconnecting the catheter, he's a disaster, but no one seems to mind much. If one of them pees blood, they like it that a boy stares at their prick, admiring, and says Christ, you wanna trade?

He didn't even say goodbye, the old man said, he went away and damned if anyone saw him again around here. Where did you hide him? He was cross about this business of Bobby.

He can't come, I said.

Oh no?

No. He's got problems.

He looked at me as if it were my fault. Like?

I was sitting there, on that metal chair, leaning toward him, elbows placed on my knees. He's on drugs, I said.

What the hell are you saying?

Drugs. You know what that is?

Of course I know.

Bobby's on drugs, that's why he doesn't come anymore.

If I had told him that he should get up immediately and leave, taking all his stuff, including the bag of pee, he would have made the same face.

What the hell are you saying? he repeated.

The truth, I said. He can't come because at this moment he's somewhere or other dissolving a brown powder in a spoon warmed by the flame of a lighter. Then he sucks the liquid into a syringe and binds a rubber cord around his forearm. He sticks the needle in his vein and injects the liquid.

The old man looked at me. I indicated the vein, in the crook of his arm.

While he's throwing away the syringe, the drug courses through his bloodstream. When it reaches his brain Bobby feels the horrible knot dissolve, and other things that I don't
know. The effect lasts for a while. If you see him at those moments he talks like a drunk and scarcely understands anything. He says stuff he doesn't believe.

The old man nodded.

After a while the effect wears off, it passes slowly. Then Bobby thinks he ought to stop. But after a while the body asks for that stuff, so he looks for money to buy more. If he doesn't find the money, he begins to feel bad. So bad that you, in this bed, can't even imagine. That's why he can't come here. He barely manages to go to school. I only see him when he needs money. So don't expect him to show up, get over it; no laughs for a while. You understand?

He nodded yes. He had one of those strange faces that seem to have something missing. Like someone who shaves off his mustache on a bet.

Shall we empty this bag? I said, pulling down the covers. I leaned over the usual tube. He began to mutter.

What sort of people are you? he said through his teeth.

I disconnected the small tube from the larger, attentively.

You take drugs, you come here acting like good boys, and then you take drugs, shit. He was muttering, but slowly he was raising his voice. Will you tell me who the hell you think you are?

I had unhooked the bag from the side of the bed. The pee was dark, some blood was deposited on the bottom.

I'm talking to you, who the hell do you think you are? I stood up, with the bag in my hand. We're eighteen years old, I said, and we are everything.

When I was in the other room, emptying the bag in the toilet, I heard him shouting, What the fuck do you mean? you're all drug addicts, that's what you are, you come here and act like good boys but you're drug addicts! He shouted that we could stay home, they didn't want us, drug addicts, there. He took it as a personal insult.

But before I finished and left, I also stopped by a new man, who was very small, who seemed to have fled inside his body, to some place where he perhaps felt safe. When I put everything back in place, the empty, washed-out bag hooked to the side of the bed, I ran a hand over his hair, which was sparse and white—the last. He pulled himself up a bit, opened the drawer of the metal night table, and from a shiny wallet took out five hundred lire. Take it, you're a good boy. I didn't want to take it, but he insisted. He said, Take it, buy something nice. I wouldn't even think of it, of taking it, but then the image came to mind of him making the same gesture to a grandson, a son, I don't know, a boy, it occurred to me that it was a gesture he had made many times, to someone he loved. Whoever it was, he wasn't there. There was only me, there.

Thank you, I said.

Then, leaving, I tried to figure out if that sensation of solidity that I always felt, going down the steps of the hospital, would return, but I didn't have time to figure out anything, because at the foot of the steps I saw Luca's father standing, elegant—he was waiting for me.

I looked for you at home, he said, but they told me you were here.

He held out his hand, I shook it.

He asked if I would take a short walk with him.

I pushing the bicycle, he carrying his briefcase from work. Walking. I had had for some time a lump in my throat, so almost immediately I said I was sorry I hadn't gone to Luca's funeral. He made a gesture in the air, as if to chase away something. He said that I had been right, and that for him it had truly been torture—he couldn't bear it in fact when people “exhibit the proper emotions.” They wanted me to say something, he said, but I refused. What is there to say? he added. Then, after a little silence, he told me that the Saint, on the other hand, had said something, he had gone to the microphone and with an unyielding calm had talked about Luca, and about us. What he had said, exactly, Luca's father didn't remember because, he said, he didn't want to get emotional there, in front of everyone, and so he had fixated on certain other thoughts, trying not to listen. But he remembered well that the Saint was magnificent, there at the microphone, that he had an ancient solemnity. At the end he said that Luca had taken every death with him, and what remained for us was the pure gift of living, in the dazzling light of faith. Every death and every fear, Luca's father said, specifying—Luca carried away every death and every fear. That phrase he had heard, and he remembered it clearly.

Strange boy, he said.

I didn't say anything. I was thinking of that time at his house, the business of the prayer at the table.

For a while we went on without words, or speaking of nothing. We had, naturally, to confront that subject of Luca's reasons, and we circled around it a bit. In the end he reached it by the main road—he asked me about Andre.

She's a special girl, isn't she? he asked.

Yes, she is.

She came to the funeral and was kind, he said. Outside, he added, Bobby was sitting on a step, crying. She went to him, took his hand, made him get up, and led him away. It struck me because she walked straight, and walked also for him. I don't know. She seemed like a queen. Is she? he asked.

I smiled. Yes, she's a queen.

He said that it was their way of speaking, when they were young. There were girls who were queens.

Then he asked what there was between her and Luca.

What he knew was that Luca was in love with her. Not that he talked about it, at home, but he had understood from certain things—and then the talk of others, later. He also knew that Andre was expecting a child. He had heard a lot of rumors, during those weeks, and one was that that baby had to do with Luca. But he couldn't say in what sense. He wondered if I could help him understand.

He didn't kill himself because of that, I said.

It wasn't exactly what I thought, but that was what he should think. Besides, he would get there himself.

He waited. He insisted again on knowing if that child could be Luca's, that rumor tormented him.

No, I said. It's not his.