Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    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