Emmaus (5 page)

That's how Andre passes through, sometimes.

On the other hand, the Saint's mother, wanting to talk about him, got it into her head to talk to us, her son's friends, and so she organized the occasion properly, she really organized it—she wanted to talk to us sometime when the Saint wasn't there. Bobby managed to get out of it, but not me or Luca—we found ourselves there, alone with that mother.

She's a plump woman, who pays attention to how she looks, we've never seen her without makeup or in the wrong shoes. Even there, in her house, she was all done up, gleaming, though in a homey, inoffensive way. She wanted to talk about the Saint. She approached it indirectly, but then she asked us what we knew about that business of the priest—that her son was thinking of becoming a priest when he grew up, or maybe even right away. She said it cheerfully, to let us know that she just wanted to find out a little more, that we shouldn't take it as a dangerous question. I said I didn't know. Luca said he had no idea. So she waited a bit. Then she resumed, in a different tone, more confident, putting things in their place; now, finally, she was an adult talking to a couple of kids. We found ourselves compelled to say what we knew.

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 girlfriend.

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.