Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco

Mary. And she says, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not be dead.
    Only I knew why. For the others Luca’s death was a mystery—the dubious result of unclear causes. Naturally the long shadow of the illness in that family was known without anyone having to say it: the father. But people were little disposed to admit even that, considering it something nonessential. Youth, rather, seemed the root of the evil—a youth that could no longer be understood.
    They sought me out, to understand. They wouldn’t really have listened to me—they wanted only to know if there was something hidden, unsaid. Secrets. They were not far from the truth, but they had to do without my help—for days I saw no one. An unfamiliar hardness, and even indifference—that was how I reacted. My parents were worried, the otheradults disturbed, the priests. I didn’t go to the funeral, there was no resurrection in my heart.
    Bobby showed up. The Saint wrote a letter. I didn’t open the letter. I wouldn’t see Bobby.
    I tried to extinguish an image, Luca with his hair stuck to his forehead, in Andre’s bed, but that did not leave me, nor would it ever leave me, so that is what I remember of him, forever. We existed in the same love, at that moment—we had been only that, for years. Her beauty, his tears, my strength, his steps, my praying—we were in the same love. His music, my books, my delays, his afternoons alone—we were in the same love. The air in our faces, the cold in our hands, his forgetfulness, my certainty, Andre’s body—we were in the same love. So we died together—and until I die we’ll live together.
    The adults were disturbed above all by our staying apart and not seeking each other out—Bobby, the Saint, and I. They would have liked us to be close, cushioning the blow—they watched us in wonder. In this they read an enduring wound, one deeper than they wanted to imagine. But it was like birds after a gunshot, scattering apart, waiting for the moment to become a flock again—or even only dark stains lined up on the wire. We just brushed against each other a couple of times. We knew the time that had to pass—the silence.
    But one day the girl who had been my girlfriend came, and I went out with her. We hadn’t seen each other for a while, it was all strange. She was driving a car now, a smallold car that her parents had given her when she turned eighteen. She was proud of it, and wanted me to see it. She was dressed nicely, but not like someone who wanted to start up again, or anything like that. Her hair tied back, low-heeled shoes, normal. I went—it was lovely to watch her drive, the gestures still precise, as if she were taking dictation, but meanwhile something like a woman had slipped inside the girl I knew. Maybe it was that. But also the knowledge that she had nothing to do with it, so that telling her would be like drawing on a blank page. So I did. She was the first person in the world to whom I told the whole story—Andre, Luca, and me. She drove, I talked. It wasn’t always easy to find the words, she waited and I talked, in the end. She kept her eyes on the windshield and, when necessary, on the rearview mirror, never on me—her hands on the wheel, her back not really relaxed against the seat back. At a certain point the streetlights went on in the city.
    She looked at me only at the end, when she stopped at my house, parking head on, a little away from the sidewalk—something my father can’t bear. You’re crazy, she said. But it didn’t have to do with what I had done, it had to do with what I should do. Go to Andre, she said, now, right away, stop being afraid. How can you live without knowing the truth?
    In reality we know very well how to live without knowing the truth, always, but I have to admit that on that point she was right, and I said so, and so I was forced to tell hersomething I