Emmaus (2 page)

It's hard for us to understand. In the afternoon we go to the hospital, the one for poor people. Men's ward, urology. Under the covers the sick men don't wear pajama bottoms but have a rubber tube inserted in their urethra. That tube is connected to another, slightly bigger tube, which empties into a transparent plastic bag, attached to the side of the bed. That's how the sick men pee; they're not even aware of it, and they don't have to get up. Everything ends up in the transparent bag; the urine is watery, or dark, as red as blood. What we do is empty those damn bags. You have to disconnect the two tubes, detach the bag, go to the bathroom
carrying that full bladder, and empty it into the toilet. Then we return to the ward and put everything back in place. The hard part is the business of disconnecting—with your fingers you squeeze the tube that's inserted in the urethra, and then you have to give it a tug, otherwise it doesn't slip out of the other tube, the one for the bag, but you try to do it gently. We talk while we're doing it—we say something to the sick people, something cheerful, as we bend over them, trying not to hurt them. They could care less at that moment about our questions, because all they're thinking about is that gunshot in their dick, but they answer, between their teeth, because they know that we're doing it for them, the talking. You empty the bag by pulling out a red plug in the lower corner. Often there are urinary sands on the bottom, like the dregs in a bottle. So you have to wash it thoroughly. We do this because we believe in the God of the Gospels.

As for Andre, it should be said that one time we saw her with our own eyes, in a bar—at a certain time of night, leather sofas and low lights, with a lot of those other people. We were there by mistake, because we wanted a sandwich at that time of night. Andre was sitting with others, with those people. She got up and went outside, passing close by us—she leaned against the hood of a sports car, double-parked, with its hazards on. One of those people arrived and opened the car doors, and they both got in. We were eating our sandwiches, standing up. They didn't move from there—it must not have mattered much that cars passed by, and even a few people on foot. She leaned over, putting her
head between the wheel and the boy's chest: he was laughing, meanwhile, and looking straight ahead. The door concealed everything, obviously, but every so often you could see her head through the window: she raised it and glanced outside, according to a rhythm of her own. One of those times he put his hand on her head to push it down again, but Andre shoved the hand away with an angry gesture—and yelled something. We went on eating our sandwiches, as if spellbound. They remained in that ridiculous position for a while, without talking—Andre seemed like a turtle with its head sticking out. But then she lowered her head again, down, behind the door. The boy leaned back. We finished our sandwiches, and finally the boy got out of the car, laughed, and adjusted his jacket so that it hung straight. They went back into the bar. Andre passed by and looked at one of us as if she were trying to remember something. Then she went in and sat down again on the leather sofa.

That was a real blow job, said Bobby, who knew what it was—the only one of us who knew, exactly, what a blow job was. He had had a girlfriend who did it. So he confirmed that it was a blow job, no doubt about it. We continued to walk in silence, and it was clear that each of us was trying to put things together, to imagine in detail what had happened behind the car door. We were making a mental image, focusing on the foreground. We worked with the little we had: I had saved up merely a glimpse of my girlfriend with the tip of my dick in her mouth, but just barely—she held it there, not moving, her eyes
strangely wide, a little too wide. From there to imagining Andre—it wasn't so simple, of course. But it must have been easier for Bobby, certainly, and maybe even for Luca, who is reserved about such things but must have seen and done more than I have. As for the Saint, he is different. I don't want to talk about him—not now. And anyway he is someone who, in thinking about what to do when he grows up, does not exclude the priesthood. He doesn't say it, but you understand. He's the one who found the work at the hospital—it's one of the things we do in our free time. Before, we used to go and visit old people in their tiny houses—they were poor, forgotten old people and we brought them food. Then the Saint discovered that business of the poor people's hospital, and he said that it would be great. In fact, we like going out into the air afterward, with the odor of pee still in our nostrils; we walk with pride. Under the covers, the penises of the sick old men are tired, and the hair around them is all white, white like their heads. They're very poor, and don't have relatives to bring them a newspaper; their mouths are putrid; they complain in a nauseating way. There's a lot of disgust to overcome, because of the filth, the smells, and the details of the job; yet we are able to do it, and in exchange we get something we wouldn't know how to explain—a kind of certainty, the rocklike substance of a certainty. So we go out into the darkness more solid, and apparently more true. It's the same darkness that every evening swallows up Andre and her lost adventures, in those other latitudes of
life: arctic, extreme. Odd though it may seem, there is a single darkness, for all.

One of us, as you've seen, is called Bobby. He has an older brother who looks just like John F. Kennedy. So he's Bobby.

One night, his mother was putting things away in the kitchen—they ended up talking about Andre. Our mothers talk about Andre, if the subject comes up, while our fathers pull back, with an indecipherable grimace: she's so beautiful and scandalous it embarrasses them to talk about her—they want to be seen as asexual. So Bobby's mother talked about her, with him. She said, Poor girl. Poor girl wasn't what came to Bobby's mind, if he thought about Andre. So his mother had to explain. She rolled the napkins and put them in the rings, not wood but colored plastic. She said that that girl was not like others. I know, Bobby said. No, you don't know, she said. And then she added that Andre had killed herself—it had happened some time ago. They were silent for a bit. Bobby's mother didn't know if it was right to go on. She tried to kill herself, she said, finally. Then she begged Bobby not to say a word to anyone—that's how we got to know.

She had chosen a rainy day. She was wearing a lot of clothes. Under everything she had put on a pair of her brother's underpants. Then she had continued with T-shirts, sweaters, and a skirt over pants. Also gloves. A hat and two coats, a lighter one, and then a heavy one on top. She had
put on rubber boots—green rubber boots. Like that she had left, and gone to the bridge over the river. Since it was night, no one was there. A few cars, unwilling to stop. Andre had started walking in the rain; what she wanted was to get completely soaked and become as heavy as a piece of wreckage. She walked for a long time, back and forth, until she felt the weight of all that sopping-wet stuff. Then she climbed up on the iron railing and jumped into the water, which at that hour was black—the water of the black river.

Someone saved her.

But those who begin to die never stop, and now we know why Andre attracts us beyond any common sense, and in spite of our every conviction. We see her laugh, or do things like ride on a motor scooter, and pat a dog—some afternoons she goes around with a girlfriend, holding her by the hand, and she has a purse that she puts useful things in. Yet we no longer believe in it, because we're thinking of how she suddenly turns her head, eyes terrified, searching for something—oxygen. Even the habit she has—her neck bent back, chin raised—the habit of standing like that. On the invisible surface of the water. And each of her disappearances, including those which are unmentionable and shameless, which we don't know how to describe. They're like flashes, and we understand them.

It's that she's dying. Andre—dying.

Then Bobby asked his mother why Andre had done it, but his mother got a little difficult there, he guessed that she didn't really want to tell the rest of the story, she closed
a drawer suddenly, with more force than necessary: our mothers waste nothing, not even the pressure of a wrist on a drawer handle—but she did it, and that was to say that she wasn't going to talk about it anymore.

Once we went to the bridge, at night, because we wanted to see the black water—
that
black water. Me, Bobby, the Saint, and Luca, who is my best friend. We went on our bicycles, we wanted to see what Andre's eyes had seen, so to speak. And how high the air really was, if we were to consider jumping it. We also had half an idea of climbing up on the railing, or maybe leaning forward a little, over the void. Holding on tight, though, because we are all boys who get home in time for dinner—our families believe in routines and schedules. So we went: but the water was so black it seemed thick and heavy—mud, oil. It was horrible, and there was nothing else to say. We looked down, leaning on the icy iron of the railing, staring at the fat veins of the current, and the bottomless black.

If there was a force that could compel you to jump, we weren't acquainted with it. We are full of words whose true meaning we haven't been taught, and one of those words is
suffering
. Another is the word
death
. We don't know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery. It also happens with less solemn words. Bobby once told me that when he was young, fourteen, he happened to go to a
meeting at the church devoted to the subject of masturbation, and the odd thing was that he, at the time, didn't in fact know the meaning of the word
masturbation
—the truth was that he didn't understand what it was. But he had gone, and had said his bit and had a lively discussion, this he remembered well. He said that, thinking back, he wasn't even sure that
the others
knew what they were talking about. Possible that the only one there who actually jerked off was the priest, he said. Then, as he was telling this story, a doubt must have crossed his mind, and so he added, You know what I'm talking about, right?

Yes, I know. Masturbation, I know what it is.

Well, I didn't know, he said. I had in mind certain times when I rubbed against a pillow, at night, because I couldn't sleep. I put it between my legs and rubbed against it. Just that. And I had a discussion about it, that stuff, can you imagine?

But we're like that, we use a lot of words whose meaning we don't know, and one of those words is
suffering
. Another is the word
death
. That's why it wasn't possible for us to have Andre's eyes, and see the black water, from the bridge, as she had seen it. She who comes, rather, from a world without caution, in which the human adventure isn't protected by normality, but veers widely, until it touches the edge of every distant word, no matter how sharp—and first of all the one that means death. In their families, they often die without waiting for old age, as if impatient, and so familiar is the word
death
that not infrequently their recent past includes
the case of an uncle, a sister, a cousin who was killed—or who
has
killed. We die, every so often; they are murderers and murdered. If I try to explain the rift in caste that separates us from them, nothing seems to me more exact than to go back to what makes them irremediably different and apparently superior—the availability of tragic destinies. A capacity for destiny, and in particular a tragic destiny. Whereas we—it would be correct to say that we can't afford the tragic, maybe not even a destiny—our fathers and our mothers would say We can't afford it. That's why we have aunts in wheelchairs, who've had a stroke—they watch television, drooling politely. Meanwhile, in the families of those other people, grandfathers wearing custom-made suits swing tragically from beams, having hanged themselves because of financial ruin. So it might happen that a cousin was found one day with his head bashed in by a blow inflicted from above, in the setting of a Florentine apartment: the physical evidence is a Hellenistic statuette representing Temperance. We, on the other hand, have grandfathers who live forever: every Sunday, including the one before their death, they go to the same pastry shop, at the same time, to buy the same pastries. Our fates are measured, as if the result of a mysterious precept of domestic economy. So, cut off from the tragic, we receive in inheritance the costume jewels of the drama—along with the pure gold of fantasy.

This will make us forever lesser, private—and elusive.

But Andre comes from there, and when she looked at the dark water she saw a river flowing whose sources she had
learned in childhood. As we are beginning to understand, a whole web of deaths weaves hers, and into hers extends the warp of a unique death, generated by the loom of their privileges. So she had climbed up on the iron railing, when we barely managed to lean forward a little, over the black mud. She let herself fall. She must have felt the slap of cold, then the slow sinking.

So we went to the bridge, and were frightened by it. On the way home, on our bicycles, we realized that it was late, and we pedaled hard. We didn't exchange a word. Bobby turned off to his house, then the Saint. Luca and I were left. We rode beside one another, still mute.

I've said that of them all he is my best friend. We can understand each other with a gesture; sometimes just a smile is enough. Before girls arrived, we spent all the afternoons of our lives together—or at least so it seems to us. I know when he's about to leave, and at times I can tell the moment before he starts speaking. I would find him in a crowd, at first glance, just by the way he walks—his shoulders. I seem older than him, we all do, because there's still something of the child about him, in his small bones, his white skin, in the features of his face, which are delicate and very handsome. Like his hands, and his slender neck, and his thin legs. But he doesn't know it, we barely know it—as I said, physical beauty is something we don't pay attention to. It's not
necessary for the building of the Kingdom. So Luca wears it without using it—an appointment postponed. Most people find him distant, and girls adore that distance, which they call sadness. But, along with everyone else, he would simply like to be happy.