Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online

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