Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online Page A

what I heard was so absurd, it was like a dream. It all vanished in that fire. Children have a special talent for forgetting. But then they told me, and so I knew everything. Did they lie 74

    to me? I don’t know. I was never able to ask. You came into the house, you fired at him, then Salinas shot him, and finally El Gurre stuck the barrel of the machine gun in his mouth and blew off his head with a short, dry volley.
    How do I know? He told me. He liked to tell about it. He was an animal. You were all animals. You men always are, in war. How will God forgive you?”
    “Stop it.”
    “Look at yourself, you seem to be a normal man, you have your worn overcoat, and when you take off your glasses you put them carefully in their gray case. The windows of your kiosk are clean, when you cross the street you look carefully to the right and the left, you are a normal man. And yet you saw my brother die for no reason, only a child with a gun in his hand, a burst of gunfire and he was gone, and you were there, and you did nothing. You were twenty, holy God, you weren’t a ruined old man, you were a boy of twenty and yet you did nothing. Please, explain how it is possible, do you have some way of explaining to me that something like that can happen, it’s not the 75

    nightmare of a man with a fever, it’s something that happened, can you tell me how it’s possible?”
    “We were soldiers.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “We were fighting a war.”
    “What war? The war was over .”
    “Not for us.”
    “Not for you?”
    “You don’t know anything.”
    “Then tell me what I don’t know.”
    “We believed in a better world.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “ . . . ”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You can’t turn back, when people begin to murder each other you can’t go back. We didn’t want to get to that point, others started it, but then there was nothing else to do.”
    “What do you mean, a better world?”
    “A just world, where the weak don’t have to suffer for 76

    the evil of the others, where everyone has a right to happiness.”
    “And you believed that?”
    “Of course I believed it, we all believed it, it could be done and we knew how.”
    “You knew?”
    “Does that seem so strange to you?”
    “Yes.”
    “And yet we knew. And we fought for that, to be able to do what was right.”
    “Killing children?”
    “Yes, if it was necessary.”
    “But what are you saying?”
    “You can’t understand.”
    “I can understand, you explain and I’ll understand.”
    “ . . . ”
    “ . . . ”
    “You can’t sow without plowing first. First you have to break up the earth.”
    “ . . . ”
    77

    “First there has to be a time of suffering, do you understand?”
    “No.”
    “There were a lot of things that we had to destroy in order to build what we wanted, there was no other way, we had to be able to suffer and to inflict suffering, whoever could endure more pain would win, you cannot dream of a better world and think that it will be delivered just because you ask for it. The others would never have given in, we had to fight, and once you understood that it no longer made any difference if they were old people or children, your friends or your enemies, you were breaking up the earth—then there was nothing but to do it, and there was no way to do it that didn’t hurt. And when everything seemed too horrific, we had our dream that protected us, we knew that however great the price the reward would be immense, because we were not fighting for money, or a field to work, or a flag. We were doing it for a better world, do you understand what that means?, we were restoring to millions of men a decent life, and the possibility of 78

    happiness, of living and dying with dignity, without being trampled or scorned, we were nothing, they were everything, millions of men, we were there for them. What’s a boy who dies against a wall, or ten boys, or a hundred, we had to break up the earth and we did,