Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco Page A

had kept to myself—it was hard to tell it. I said that in fact I had tried to see Andre, the truth is that at a certain point I, too, had thought I should, and I had tried. A few days after Luca’s death, but more out of resentment than to know—out of revenge. I had gone one evening when I couldn’t take it anymore, driven by an unfamiliar spitefulness, and had gone to the bar where it was likely I might find her, among her people. I should have planned the thing much more carefully, but at that moment it seemed I would die if I didn’t see her, if I didn’t tell her—so, wherever she was I would go there, and that’s all. I would fight her, it occurred to me. Except that when I got to the street, across from the bar, everyone was outside, holding a glass: I saw her friends from a distance, elegant in their slightly bored lightness of heart. In the midst of them—apart and yet clearly in the midst of them—was the Saint. Leaning against a wall, he, too, holding a glass. Silent, alone, but they passed by and exchanged remarks with him, and smiles. Like animals of the same herd. At one point a girl stopped to talk to him, and meanwhile with her hand she smoothed his hair back—he let her do it.
    I didn’t even look to see if Andre was there, somewhere. I turned and left quickly—I was just afraid they might see me; nothing else mattered to me. When I got home, I was someone who had given up.
    I don’t know why, but I saw the Saint there, and nothing else mattered anymore, I told her.
    She nodded yes, and then she said, I’m going, and shestarted the car. She meant to say that she would go see Andre, and wouldn’t hear any objections. I got out without saying much, and saw her go off, with the proper turn signal, and all—politely.
    Since I did nothing to stop her, she came back the next day, and had talked to Andre.
    She says that she was already pregnant when she made love with you.
    In a low voice, again we sat side by side, in the car. But this time under the trees, behind my house.
    I thought that Luca had died for nothing.
    I also thought of the baby, in Andre’s belly, my sex inside her, and those things. What mysterious proximities we are capable of, men and women. And finally I remembered that everything was over and I was no longer a father.
    For that reason I did something I never do—I don’t cry, I don’t know why.
    She let me alone, without making a move or saying a word, she clicked the switch for the brights, but softly.
    Finally I asked her if Andre had said anything about Luca—if it had at least occurred to her that she had something to do with that flight.
    She started laughing, she said.
    Laughing?
    She said, If that was the problem, he should have come and told me.
    I thought that Andre didn’t know anything about Luca, and that she had learned nothing about us.
    But Andre is right, my girlfriend said, then, Luca can’t have killed himself because of that, only you think so.
    Why?
    Because you’re blind.
    Meaning?
    She shook her head—she didn’t want to talk about it.
    I moved toward her, as if to kiss her. She placed a hand on my shoulder, holding me away.
    Just one kiss, I said to her.
    Go, she said.
    So I decided to start again. I began to think back, in search of a last solid moment before everything got complicated—the idea was to start from there. I had in mind the steps of the farmer who returns to the fields after the storm. It was just a matter of finding the point where I had left off the sowing, when the first hailstones fell.
    I reasoned like that because in moments of confusion we habitually have recourse to an imaginary farmer—even though no one, in our families, ever worked the land, within the memory of man. We come from artisans and merchants, priests and bureaucrats, and yet we have inherited the wisdom of the fields, and made it ours. So we believe in the founding ritual