Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online Page B

millions of other children were waiting for us to do it, and we did, maybe you should . . . ”
    “Do you really believe that?”
    “Of course I believe it.”
    “After all these years you still believe it?”
    “Why shouldn’t I?”
    “You won the war. Does this seem to you a better world?”
    “I have never asked myself.”
    “It’s not true. You have asked yourself a thousand times, but you’re afraid to answer. Just as you have asked yourself a thousand times what you were doing that night at Mato Rujo, fighting when the war was over, killing a man in cold blood whom you had never even seen before, without giving him the right to a trial, simply killing him, for 79

    the sole reason that by now you had begun to murder and were no longer capable of stopping. And in all these years you have asked yourself a thousand times why you got involved in the war, and the whole time your better world is spinning around in your head, so that you will not have to think of the day when they brought you the eyes of your father, or see again all the other murdered men who then, as now, filled your mind, an intolerable memory. That is the only, the true reason you fought, because this was what you had in mind, to be revenged. And now you should be able to utter the word ‘revenge.’ You killed for revenge, you all killed for revenge, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s the only drug for pain there is, the only way not to go mad, the drug that enables us to fight. But it didn’t free you, it burned your entire life, it filled you with ghosts. In order to survive four years of war you burned your entire life, and you no longer even know—”
    “It’s not true.”
    “You no longer even remember what life is .”
    “What do you know about it?”
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    “Yes, what can I know about it, I’m only an old woman who is mad, right?, I can’t understand, I was a child then, what do I know about it?, I’ll tell you what I know, I was lying in a hole, underground, three men came, they took my father, then—”
    “Stop it.”
    “Don’t you like this story?”
    “I’m not sorry for anything—we had to fight and we did, we weren’t sitting at home with the windows shut, waiting for it to pass, we climbed out of our holes and did what we had to do, that’s the truth, you can say anything now, you can find all the reasons you want, but it’s different, you had to be there to understand, you weren’t there, you were a child, it’s not your fault, but you can’t understand.”
    “You explain, I’ll understand.”
    “I’m tired now.”
    “We have as much time as we want. You talk, I’ll lis -
    ten.”
    “Please, leave me alone.”
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    “Why?”
    “Do what you have to do, but leave me in peace.”
    “What are you afraid of?”
    “I’m not afraid.”
    “Then what is it?”
    “I’m tired.”
    “Of what?”
    “ . . . ”
    “ . . . ”
    “Please . . . ”
    “ . . . ”
    “ . . . ”
    “ . . . ”
    “Please . . . ”
    Then the woman lowered her eyes. She drew away from the table and leaned against the back of the chair.
    She glanced around, as if suddenly, at that moment, she had realized where she was. The man was kneading his fingers, one hand clasped in the other, but it was the only thing in him that was moving.
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    At the back of the café, the three musicians played songs from other times. Someone was dancing.
    For a while they stayed like that, in silence.
    Then the woman said something about a celebration many years earlier, where there was a famous singer who had asked her to dance. In a low voice she told how, though he was old, he moved with astonishing lightness, and before the music ended he had explained to her how a woman’s destiny is written in the way she dances. Then he had told her that she danced as if dancing were a sin.
    The woman smiled and looked around again.
    Then she said something else. It was that evening, at Mato Rujo. She said that when she had seen the trapdoor raised