Emmaus (6 page)

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 elegant 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.

She should have thrown us out. We would have liked it. Martyrs.

Instead she asked a question.

What do you think I should do?

To me it was astonishing. But not to the Saint, who was following the thread of his thoughts.

Make her go to church, he said.

She should confess, he added.

He was so frighteningly certain that not even I doubted that it was the right thing to say at that moment. The folly of saints.

Then he told her about us, without arrogance, but with a confidence that was like a blade. He wanted her to know why we believed, and in what. He had to tell her that there was another way of being in the world, and that we believed it was the way, the truth, and the life. He said that without the dizzying height of heaven there remains only the earth, a small thing. He said that every man carries within himself hope in a higher and more noble meaning of things, and that they had taught us that that hope became certainty in the full light of revelation, and a daily task in the half-light of our lives. So we
work for the establishment of the Kingdom, he said, which is not a mysterious mission but the patient construction of a promised land, the unconditional homage to our dreams, and the eternal satisfaction of our every desire.

That's why no marvelous thing must fall in vain, because it's a stone of the Kingdom, you see?

He was talking about the marvelousness of Andre.

A cornerstone, he said.

Then he was silent.

The woman had sat listening without ever changing her pose, only darting a few quick glances at me, but out of politeness, not because she expected me to speak. If she thought anything, she hid it well. Allowing herself to be humiliated like that, and by a boy, besides, seemed to make no impression on her—she had let him have his say, about her daughter. Without betraying resentment, or even boredom. When she opened her mouth her tone was entirely courteous.

You said that she should go to confession, she said.

She seemed to have stayed there, before the whole speech. That made her curious.

Yes, answered the Saint.

And why should she do that?

To make peace with herself. And with God.

Is that why one confesses?

To wipe out our sins and find peace.

Then she said yes, with a nod of her head. As of something that she could understand. Then she got up.

There must have been a way of putting an end to all that, and the simplest was to thank us, close the door behind us, forget. Smile about it, later. But that woman had time, and she must have stopped being compliant long ago. So she stood there, silently, as if on the edge of a farewell, but then she sat down again, in the same exact position as before, but her gaze was different, with a hardness that she had kept in reserve, and she said that she remembered the last time she had confessed, she remembered when she had gone to confession for the last time. It was in a very beautiful church, of pale stone, whose very proportions and symmetry inclined toward peace. It had seemed to her natural then to seek a confessor, although she had no familiarity with the act, and no faith in the sacraments. But it had seemed to her the right thing to do, to complete that unfamiliar beauty. I saw a monk, she told us. White robe, wide sleeves over narrow wrists, pale hands. There was no confessional, the monk was seated, she sat opposite him, she was ashamed of her short dress, but she forgot about it at the first words, which were from the monk. He asked her what was weighing on her soul. She answered without thinking, she said that she was incapable of being grateful to life and this was the greatest of sins. I was calm, she told us, but my voice wanted nothing to do with my calm, it seemed to see an abyss that I couldn't see, so it trembled. I said that that was the first sin and also the last. Everything in my life was wonderful, but I was unable to be grateful, and I was ashamed of my happiness. If it's not happiness, I said to the monk, it's at least joy, or good
fortune, granted as it is to few other people, but to me yes, and yet I am never able to translate it into any peace of mind. The monk said nothing, but then he wanted to know if she prayed. He was younger than she was, his head completely shaved, a hint of a foreign accent. I don't pray, I told him, I don't go to church, I would like to tell you about my life, I told him about it, something about it. But I don't repent of this, I said finally. I would like to repent of my unhappiness. It didn't make sense, but I was crying. Then the monk leaned toward me and said I mustn't be afraid. He didn't smile, he wasn't paternal, he was nothing. He was a voice. He said that I mustn't be afraid, and then many other things that I don't remember, I remember the voice. And the gesture at the end. His hands approached my face, and then one touched my forehead and made the sign of the cross. Lightly.

Andre's mother had kept her eyes lowered during the story, staring at the floor. She searched for words. But then she looked at us, for what she still had to say.

I went back the next day to find him. No confession, a long walk. Then I went back again, and again. I couldn't help it. I returned also when he began to ask me to return. It was all very slow. But every time something was consummated. The first time we kissed it was I who wanted it. The rest he wanted. I could have stopped at any moment; I didn't love him so much, I could have done it. But instead I went all the way with him, because it was unusual—it was the spectacle of perdition. I wanted to see up to what point men of God can make love. So I didn't save him. I never found a good reason
to save him from me. He killed himself eight years later. He left me a note. I remember only that he spoke of the weight of the cross, but unintelligibly.

She looked at us. She still had something to say and it was just for us.

Andre is his daughter, she said. She knows it.

She made a small, treacherous pause.

I imagine that God knows, too, she added. Because he has not been stingy with punishment.

But it wasn't her look that struck me; it was the Saint's, a look I knew, which had to do with the demons. He is like a blind man at such moments, because he sees everything but somewhere else—within himself. We had to leave. I got up and found the right words to smooth over the sudden rush—it seemed I had gone there just for that reason, that must have been what I knew how to do. Andre's mother was perfect, she even thanked us, without a hint of irony. She shook our hands as she said goodbye. Before we left I caught a glimpse of something—leaning against the wall, in the entrance—that absolutely shouldn't be there, but that undoubtedly was Bobby's bass. He plays the bass in our band—his bass is shiny black, with a decal of Gandhi pasted on it. Now it was there, in Andre's house.

We could come back when we wanted, Andre's mother said.

What the hell is your bass doing at Andre's house? We didn't even wait till the next day to ask. A meeting of the prayer group at the parish church that night gave us the opportunity: we were all there, except Luca, the usual business at home.