Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online Page B

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 peoplehave 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, likeFrench 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