Emmaus (12 page)

In reality I would have liked to keep him on tenterhooks a bit, but I did it for Luca, I owed it to him, he would not have done that to his father, once for all.

So I said no, it wasn't his.

It was the answer he had come to me for. Something melted in him, then, and for the rest of the walk he was a different man, whom I had never seen. He began telling me about when he and his wife were young. He wanted me to understand that they had been happy. No one wanted them to marry, in their families, but they had very much wanted to, and even though they had given up for a moment, he always knew that they would, and so it was. We both came from terrible families, he said, and the only time that wasn't awful was the time we spent together. He said that there was a lot of moralizing then, but their desire to escape was so strong that right away they began to make love whenever they could, in secret from everyone. Her beauty saved me, a pure beauty, the same as Luca's, he said. Then he must have realized that that type of confession made me uneasy—he broke off. The sexual life of our parents is in fact one of the few things we don't want to know anything about. We like to think it doesn't exist, and never existed. We truly wouldn't know where to put it, in the idea we've formed of them for ourselves. So he switched to talking about the early days of marriage,
and of how much they had laughed, in those years. I was no longer really listening. In general these stories are always the same, our parents were all happy when they were young. I expected, rather, to hear when that went wrong, and where the polite wretchedness that we knew instead had begun. I would have liked maybe to know why at a certain point they had gotten
sick
. But he didn't talk about it. Or perhaps he did, but in a way that wasn't clear. I began listening again when in a pleasant tone he told me that his wife was so changed since the death of Luca, it was clear that she blamed him, she hadn't forgiven him. She's drawing it out, he said. Sometimes I come home and she hasn't even made dinner. I'm getting used to opening cans. Frozen food. Frozen minestrone, that's not bad, he said. You should try it. He was acting congenial.

At a certain point he stopped, bent one leg, and placed the briefcase on it, so he could open it. I thought I would bring you these, he said. He took some sheets of paper out of the bag. I think they're songs, written by Luca, we found them among his things. I'm sure he would have wanted to leave them to you.

They really were songs. Or poems, but more likely songs, because there were some chords next to them, in places. But the melody—that Luca had taken away forever.

Thank you, I said.

For what?

When we got to my house, we had to say goodbye. But I had the strange impression that we hadn't said anything.
So, before trying to find a way to say goodbye, I asked if I could ask him something.

Of course, he said. At that point he was so sure of himself.

Once Luca told me that during dinner, at your house, every so often you get up and go out on the balcony. He told me that you stand there, leaning on the railing, looking down. Is that true?

He looked at me in some bewilderment. Maybe, he said. Yes, it's possible.

During dinner, I repeated.

He continued to look at me in bewilderment. Yes, it's possible that I did. Why?

Because I would like to know if when you're there, looking down, it crosses your mind to jump. To kill yourself in that way, I mean.

It was incredible, but he smiled at me. Opening his arms wide. It took him a while to find words.

It's just that it relaxes me to look at things from above, he said, I always did it as a child. We were on the fourth floor, and I'd spend hours at the window watching the cars pass, and stop at the traffic light, and start up again. I don't know why. It's something I like. It's a child's thing.

He spoke in a sympathetic voice, and I even saw in his face something I had never seen, something of the child he had been, a long time ago.

How did you imagine such a thing? he asked, but gently.

Nothing, I said. I was thinking that if there was a truth in that business, not even he knew it anymore. I was
thinking that we have no possibility of understanding anything, about anything, at any moment. About our parents, our children—maybe nothing.

In saying goodbye, he put his arms around me, with the office briefcase hitting me on the back. I stayed very rigid, in that embrace. So he took a step back and offered me his hand.

I was copying the gesture, but I lacked the farmer's wisdom—the expert eye that understands the sky and measures its discontent.

After the passing of a time that I don't remember, news appeared in the papers that the body of a transvestite had been found at dawn, outside the city, buried in a hurry, in the gravel of the riverbank. The man had been killed with a gunshot to the back of the neck. The death had occurred forty-eight hours earlier. The transvestite had a name and a last name, which appeared in the article. But it also said that his name was Sylvie. Like Sylvie Vartan.

The news struck me, because we knew Sylvie.

It's hard to remember when—but we started flitting around the whores, at night, on our bicycles. At first they surprised us irresistibly, on the way home from the parish youth club, or from a meeting. But then we began to linger, waiting for the time when they showed up on the street corners. Or we'd go back, and pass by again, until
they appeared, out of the nothingness—when the life of the city was extinguished. We liked something that we didn't know how to define; certainly, it would never have crossed our minds to pay them—none of us had the money to do it. So it wasn't the idea of going with them that compelled us—what we liked was to pedal to within a few meters and then stand up on the pedal and pass them with the momentum gained, tall on our legs and light in the whirr of coasting. We did it without any caution, in the conviction that we were invisible—in a parallel world that not even we perceived. Sometimes it happened that we'd pass the same street corners during the day, we almost didn't recognize them. It was another city, our nocturnal one.

So we'd pass them by, and often in the end we wouldn't even turn to look. But maybe we'd go back, later, and from the other side of the street, farther away, we'd look at them—the boots, the thighs, those breasts.

They let us. We were like nocturnal butterflies. We appeared now and then.

But one day Bobby stopped right in front, placing one foot on the ground. Give me a kiss? he asked, with that insolent air of his.

She began to laugh. She was the same age as our mothers, and had a different way of living. From that point, we began to be more audacious. Not Luca and I, who follow. But Bobby. And the Saint, in that special way he has—and as if he'd been holding it in reserve for a long time. We'd stand there talking, but quickly, so as not to keep the clients
away. We'd contrive to bring a beer, sometimes, to those we'd found congenial. Or sweets. To two in particular, who worked the same corner, on a dark street. They took a liking to us. Theirs was the first house we went to. But to others later. Maybe it's that they'd had enough, on nights without work, and they'd invite us to come up with them. To their small homes, where the bells aren't labeled. Often there were incredible lamps—the radio was always on, even before you went in, as they were putting the key in the lock. You'd walk up the stairs because the residents wouldn't welcome you in the elevator—the only time we were afraid of being discovered was on the stairs and then on the landing. Maybe that's why they often spent a long time looking in their purses for their keys, teasing. They'd take off their heels or boots when they went up the stairs, so as not to make noise.

So we started out as butterflies and then it became something else. It was part of each of us, and we were afraid to think how deeply—while in front of everyone we returned to building the Kingdom, with discipline and purity. We were aware of some rift, between our life and our whores, a secret. No one knew about it and we didn't even report it in confession. We wouldn't have words to explain it. Maybe in the daytime we get from it an echo of shame and disgust, visible in a certain sadness that we carry inside—like imperfect vessels aware of a hidden crack. But we weren't even sure, the division between our life and those nighttime adventures seemed so solid that none of us believed we
really
lived them. Except perhaps the Saint, who in fact stayed in
those houses when we left—we didn't want to go home at a time of night that we wouldn't be able to explain. A precaution that he stopped taking, to the point where he started staying out for the whole nights. Days, sometimes. But it was a different thing for him, it was the breath of a vocation, which we didn't have: we stopped at the game. Where for him it was the path of his journey, against the demons.

That was how we knew Sylvie. We didn't like the idea of transvestites, a distortion that we didn't understand, but we soon discovered that they had a particular joy, and a desperation, that made everything simpler—that resulted in an illogical closeness. We had in common this childish expectation of a promised land, and without the least shame we shared the wish to find it. So they write in their bodies that they were everything—the same thing that could be read in our souls.

Further, they displayed a curious strength, based on nothing, and thus like ours. They gave it shape in an insolent beauty, and in the form of light, which you perceived clearly when you arrived on your bicycle at their street corner on a night when they weren't there. So the cars gave a wide berth, and the traffic signal ticked of a time without passion—the shop windows blind, reflecting the darkness. Sylvie knew it, and this was her life, which she explained to us, taking off her heels and putting on the coffee. By day she didn't exist. I never caressed a man's sex, except hers, while she told me how, and Bobby laughed. Without knowing how much to squeeze, until she said that I didn't know how
to do it, getting up from the sofa and pulling up her lace panties, then walking, hips swaying, toward the kitchen. She had important clients, and with the money she would bring her brother up from the South—it was the first of her dreams. Then many others, that were different every time she told us—promised lands. Come on over here, she said. Her voice hoarse.

A car was found, a few kilometers upstream, where the river became wider. Stained with blood. Someone had tried to slide it into the water, then had left it there. They traced it to the owner, he said it had been stolen. He was a kid from a good family, whom we had often seen in Andre's circle. He repeated that it had been stolen, then he broke down and began to remember the truth, little by little. He said there were three of them, he and two friends, and they had picked up Sylvie to take her to a party. He was driving, he had stopped at the usual corner, and asked if she wanted to come and have some fun with them. She trusted them, she knew them. So she got in, settling herself on the front seat, and they all went off together. They hadn't taken drugs, and weren't even drunk. They laughed and were happy. At one point the two friends sitting in back took out a gun, and this excited them a little. They passed it around, Sylvie, too, held it—she held it with two fingers and pretended it disgusted her. In the end the other two took it back, and played at shooting people from the window. I read their names in the paper, without emotion, and the Saint's was the first. The only thing I thought, absurdly, was how small
it was written, among all those words—one of many—and it was his name. At school, where they called him by his real name, and his last name, I always seemed to see him stripped naked, even humiliated, because he was the Saint, as we knew well. So there in the newspaper he was naked, and in a line with other names—already a prisoner. The boy sitting next to him, in the car, was another friend of Andre's, older. Interrogated, he admitted that he was there in the car that night, but swore it wasn't he who fired the shot. Then he had helped them bury the body and push the car into the water. Anyone would have done it, he said, to help his friends. As for the Saint, the paper reported that he hadn't said a word since he was arrested at his house—so I knew that he was still alive, and was still himself. I knew that he had made use of a precise model of behavior and was applying it lucidly. From Gethsemane to Calvary, the Master had established its immutable rules—every lamb can make use of them in the hour of sacrifice. It's the protocol for a martyrdom that we, using a term that, if you think about it, is sublime, call
Passion
—a word that for the rest of the world means desire. On the basis of careful ballistic tests the police were able to form a fairly precise idea of events. The one who had fired had first placed the barrel on Sylvie's neck, then had pulled the trigger. It didn't seem that it had gone off by accident. It was ascertained that it was the Saint's gun. No motive, the papers wrote—boredom.

I cut out the article, I intended to save it. Everything was complete, I thought—in the infinite shame of the best
of us. The long journey that our lack of movement concealed I saw now in the eyes of everyone, a secret becoming news, and turned into scandal. Like Luca's death, or Bobby's drugs, so the Saint's imprisonment would pass from hand to hand, an incomprehensible object—a plague from on high, without logic, without reason. And yet I knew that it was breath, the long-awaited seed of a perpetual flowering. I couldn't have explained it—it was inscribed in my coldness, which no one could understand. And in every act, which no one could decipher.