The day Andre came out of her mother’s womb was an April day—the father was traveling, the twins were at home with the grandmother. The clinic telephoned the house to say that the mother had been admitted to the delivery room; the grandmother said, Good. She made sure that the twins had eaten, then she sat down at the table and had lunch. After coffee she let the Spanish nanny go for a couple of hours and took the twins to the garden: it was sunny, a beautiful spring day. She sat down on a recliner and fell asleep, because it happened that she did that, sometimes, after lunch, and didn’t think it necessary to behave differently. Or it simply happened—she fell asleep. The twins played on the lawn. There was a pool with a fountain, a stone pool with red and yellow fish. At the center a jet. The twins approached, to play. They threw things they found in the garden into the pool. Lucia, the girl, at a certain point thought it would be nice to touch the water with her hands, and then her feet, and to play in it. She was three, so it wasn’t easy, but she managed it, planting her small feet against the stone and pushing her head over the edge. Her brother was half watching her, half picking up things on the lawn. In the end the child slid into the water, making a faint sound, as of a small amphibious animal—a round creature. The pool wasn’t deep, barely two feet, but she was scared by the water, maybe she hit the stone bottom, and this must have dulled the instinct that would have simply, naturally, saved her. So she breathed the dark water, and when she sought the air that she needed to cry, she couldn’t find it. She turned slightly, laboriously, pushing on her heels and slapping the water with her hands, but they were small hands, and made a light, silvery sound. Then she was motionless among the yellow and red fish, who didn’t understand. The brother came over to look. At that moment Andre emerged from her mother’s womb, and did so in suffering, as it is written in the book we believe in.
We know this because it’s a story that everyone knows—in Andre’s world there is no modesty or shame. That’s how they hand down their superiority, and underscore their tragic privilege. This predisposes them to rise inevitably into legend—and in fact numerous variants of this story exist. Some say that it was the Spanish nanny who fell asleep, but it’s also said that the child was already dead when she was put in the water. The role of the grandmother is always rather ambiguous, but one has to consider the general inclination to base a narrative on the certainty of an evil character—as she, in some ways, surely was. Also the story of the father traveling seemed to many suspect, apocryphal. Yet on one detail all agree, and that is the fact that Andre’s lungs took their first breath at the very instant when those of her sister lost the last, as if through a natural dynamic of communicating vessels—as if by a law of conservation of energy, applied on a family scale. They were two girls, and they exchanged lives.
Andre’s mother knew it as soon as she came out of the delivery room. Then they brought her Andre, who was sleeping. She hugged her to her breast, and knew absolutely that the mental operation to which she was called was beyond her—or anyone’s strength. So she was wounded forever.
When, years later, the grandmother died, there was a quite spectacular funeral, with people coming from all over the world. Andre’s mother went in a red dress, which many recall as short and tight.
Often Andre’s father, even today, spiteful or distracted, calls Andre by the name of her dead sister—he calls her Lucy, which was what he called the child when he picked her up.
Andre jumped off the bridge fourteen years after the death of her sister. She didn’t do it on her birthday, she did it on an ordinary day. But she breathed the dark water, and it was, in a sense, for the second time.
There are four of us, so we play music together, and we are a band. The Saint, Bobby, Luca, and I. We play in church. We’re stars, in our world. There’s a priest who’s famous for his preaching, and we play at his Mass. The church is always overflowing—people come from other neighborhoods to hear us. We do Masses that last an hour, but everyone likes it that way.
Naturally we’ve asked ourselves if we really are good, but there’s no way of knowing, because we play a certain kind of music, a specialized genre. Somewhere, in the offices of well-known Catholic publishers, someone composes these songs, and we sing them. There’s no possibility that any of them could be, outside of there, good songs—if an ordinary singer-songwriter were to sing one, people would wonder what had happened to him. It’s not rock, it’s not beat music, it’s not folk, it’s not anything. It’s like altars made from millstones, vestments of burlap, terracotta chalices, red-brick churches: the same church that commissioned frescoes from Rubens and cupolas from Borromini is now afflicted with a vaguely Swedish evangelical aesthetic—verging on Protestant. Stuff that has no more relation to true beauty than an oak bench has or a well-made plow: no relation to the beauty that, meanwhile, men are producing outside of there. And this goes for our music as well—it’s beautiful only there, there it’s right. There would be nothing left if it were fed to the outside world.
Still, it’s possible that we really are good—you can’t exclude it. Bobby especially insists, he says that we should try playing our own songs and doing it outside the church. The parish theater would work well, he says. In fact he knows that it wouldn’t work well at all—we should play in smoky places where people smash things and the girls’ breasts slip out of their shirts as they dance. It’s there that they’d tear us to pieces. Or go mad for us—there’s no way of knowing.
To shake things up, Bobby thought of Andre.
Andre dances—they all do, in that world. Girls dance. Modern dance, not the kind on point. They put on shows, or recitals, every so often, and since our girlfriends sometimes dance, we go. So we’ve seen Andre dance. In a certain sense it’s like church; that is, it’s a community cut off from the world, with parents and grandparents—it goes without saying there’s a lot of applause. But even that dancing bears no relation to true beauty. Only, occasionally, there’s some girl who moves on the stage as if producing a force, as if detaching her body from the ground. We realize this, we who don’t understand anything about it. Sometimes it’s an ugly girl, with an ugly body—the beauty of the body doesn’t seem to be important. It’s how they do it that counts.
Bobby thought of Andre because she dances like that.
She dances, she doesn’t sing.
Who knows, maybe she sings and we don’t know it.
Maybe she sings really badly.
Who cares, have you seen how she is up there?
We circle around the point, but the truth is that she’s outside the boundary, she’s like no one else our age, and we know that if we have a music then we should look for it outside the boundary—and we’d like her to lead us there. We would never admit it, this is understood.
So Bobby telephoned her—on the third try he got her. He introduced himself with his name and last name, and it meant nothing to her. So he added some detail that seemed useful, like where his father’s store was, and that he had red hair. She got it. We wanted to ask if you’d sing with us, we have a band. Andre said something, we knew by the fact that Bobby was silent. No, to tell the truth we only play in church, at the moment. Silence. During Mass, yes. Silence. No, you wouldn’t have to sing at Mass, the idea is to have a real band and play in local clubs. Silence. Not the songs for Mass, songs made by us. Silence.
We three were standing around Bobby, and he kept gesturing to us to leave him alone, to let him go ahead. At one point he started laughing, but it was somewhat forced. He talked a little longer, then they said goodbye—Bobby hung up.
She said no, he said. He didn’t explain.
We were disappointed, of course, but we also felt a certain euphoria, like people who have achieved something. We were aware that we had talked to her. Now she knew that we existed.
So we were in a good mood when we arrived at Luca’s house. It had been my idea. No one ever goes to his house, it doesn’t seem that his parents like to have visitors, his father hates disturbance—but maybe ou
r going would mean something to Luca and to his mother. So in the end we were invited to dinner. Usually they eat in the kitchen, at a long narrow table that isn’t even a table but a counter: the three of them sit there, one beside the other, facing the wall. White. But for the occasion his mother had set the table in the sala, which in our houses is a room that isn’t used: it’s reserved for special occasions in life, not excluding wakes. Anyway it was there that we ate. Luca’s father welcomed us with true cheerfulness, and when he sat down at the head of the table, showing us our places, he had the air of a man without conditions, confident in his primacy as a father—as if he were the father of us all, that night.
But when the soup was in the bowls, and he had the spoon in his hand, the Saint joined his hands in front of him and began to say words of thanks—his head bent. He said them aloud. They are beautiful words. Gracious Lord, bless the food that your goodness has given us and those who have prepared it. Let us receive it with joy and simplicity of heart, and help us to give to those who are in need. One by one we bowed our heads and repeated his words. Amen. The Saint has a lovely voice, and ancient features—a faint beard, the only one of us. On his thin, already ascetic face. As we know, he has a fierce, adult force when he prays. So to Luca’s father it must have seemed that someone had taken his place—as father. Or it appeared to him that he hadn’t been able to do what we wanted of him—and that a boy with the face of a mystic had gone to his aid. So he disappeared. His voice wasn’t heard, for the entire dinner. He cleaned his plate, he swallowed. He never laughed.
At the end we all got up to clear. It’s something we always do, like good boys, but I did it so that I could go into the kitchen and look at the balcony that Luca had told me about. In fact I could see the railing, and it wasn’t hard to imagine his father’s back, leaning forward, elbows propped, his gaze on the void.
When we left, it seemed to us that things hadn’t gone very well. But I was the only one who knew; Bobby and the Saint had never talked to Luca. So we said only that the man was strange. Everything was strange in that house. We were thinking we would not go back.
That Andre knows about me—that I exist—I learned for certain one afternoon when I was sitting on a sofa, with my girlfriend, under a red blanket. She was touching me; it’s our way of having sex. In general our girlfriends believe in the God of the Gospels, as we do, and this means that they’ll be virgins when they get married—although no mention is made, in the Gospels, of any such practice. So our way of having sex is to spend hours touching each other as we talk. We never come. Almost never. We males touch as much skin as we can, and every so often we stick our hand under their skirts, but not always. They, on the other hand, touch our sex right away, because we unzip our pants and sometimes take them off. This happens in houses where parents, brothers, sisters are just behind the door, and anyone might enter at any moment. So we do everything in a state of precariousness veined with danger. Often there is only a half-open door between sin and punishment, and so the pleasure of touching each other and the fear of being caught, like desire and remorse, are simultaneous, fused in a single emotion that we call, with splendid precision, sex: we know every nuance of it and appreciate its derivation from the guilt complex, of which it is one of several variants. If someone thinks that’s a childish way of looking at things, he has understood nothing. Sex is sin: thinking it innocent is a simplification to which only the unhappy surrender.
However, that day the house was empty, so we were doing things with a certain tranquility, verging on boredom. When the doorbell rang my girlfriend pulled down her shirt and said, It’s Andre, she’s come to get something—she rose and went to open the door. She seemed to know what would happen. I stayed on the sofa, under the blanket. I pulled up my underpants—my jeans were on the floor, I didn’t want to be found putting them on. They both came in talking, my girlfriend got back under the blanket and Andre sat on a little wood-and-straw child’s chair: she sat in that perfect way she had of doing unimportant things like sitting on a child’s wood-and-straw chair when there were normal chairs everywhere in the room, and even the sofa where we were sitting, which was large. And as she sat down she smiled and said Hi, without introductions or anything. The sublime thing was that she didn’t care about the jeans on the floor, the blanket, or what the two of us had obviously been doing under it when she arrived. She simply started talking, a short space from my bare legs, with a composure that seemed a verdict—whatever we were doing under the blanket was normal. It was the first time someone had so quickly forgiven me—with that lightness, that smile.
They were talking about a show, my girlfriend was dancing with her, they were putting on a show. They needed lights, I seemed to understand, lights and a seamless gray cloth runner twelve meters long. I was there but I had nothing to do with it and no one spoke to me. I would have gotten up, to wander away, but I was in my underpants. At some point, my girlfriend, as she was speaking, began caressing my thigh, under the blanket, slowly, it was a clean gesture, not exactly a caress, but a sort of unconscious gesture, intended to keep something going, between a before and an after. It was hard to tell if there was some trick, but anyway she was touching me, and I was pleased with her. In fact they will be virgins when they get married, our girlfriends, but that doesn’t mean they’re afraid: they’re not. She was caressing me, and Andre was there. Every so often, but I couldn’t tell if it was by chance, she touched my sex, trapped in my underpants. As she did she went on talking about cloth and seams, without even changing her tone of voice, nothing. Whatever she had in mind, the means was perfect. She touched my hard sex, without turning a hair. I thought how I really had to tell Bobby about this, I couldn’t wait to tell him. I was thinking of the words to use when Andre got up: she said that she had to go now and as for the cloth she would ask at the theater, for the lights she would think of something. It seemed they had resolved it, the telephone rang, it was there on the table, my girlfriend answered, it was her mother. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, then put a hand over the receiver and said My mother… Andre whispered to her to go ahead, not to worry, she was leaving. They said goodbye and my girlfriend nodded at me—she wanted me to go with Andre and close the door. I pushed the blanket away, got up from the sofa, and followed Andre out, along the hall. Reaching the door, she stopped and turned, waiting for me. I took a few more steps: I had never been so close to Andre in my life, and I had never been alone with her, in a space where the two of us were alone. It was even less space than it was, because I was in my underpants, and in underpants my sex can be seen a mile away. She smiled at me, opened the door, and started to go out. But then she turned, and I saw an expression that until an instant before hadn’t been there—those wide-open eyes.
The first sentence that Andre ever said to me was Sorry, but do you have any money?
Yes, some.
Could I borrow it?
I went back to look in the pocket of my jeans. My girlfriend was still on the phone, I nodded at her to say that everything was OK. I got the money, it wasn’t much.
It’s not much, I said to Andre, as I held out fifteen thousand lire, in front of the open door, where the fluorescent light of the landing mingled with the warm light of the entrance. Often on our landings there are thorny plants that never see the sun but nevertheless live, and they’re kept there for two purposes. The first is to make the landing itself seem refined. The second is to bear witness to a very particular stubbornness with regard to life, a silent heroism from which we are to learn something every time we leave the house. No one ever waters them, apparently.
You’re nice, Andre said to me. I’ll pay you back.
She grazed my cheek with a kiss. To do it she had to get a little closer, and her purse pressed against my underpants, it was just at that level.
Then she left. As if now she had a kind of fever.
As soon as I saw Bobby I told him all about it, slightly exaggerating the business of the touching under the blanket—i
t ended up that she had actually given me a hand job. He said then that they had surely planned it, it was all set up, one of those games that Andre played, it was incredible that my girlfriend had gone along, you shouldn’t underestimate that girl, he said. I knew it hadn’t been quite like that, but this did not keep me from going around for a while like someone who had a girlfriend capable of thinking up such plots and carrying them out. It lasted a while, then it passed. But during that time I was different with her—and she was different with me. Until, at a certain point, we got scared—and everything went back to normal.
That’s how Andre passes through, sometimes.
On the other hand, the Saint’s mother, wanting to talk about him, got it into her head to talk to us, her son’s friends, and so she organized the occasion properly, she really organized it—she wanted to talk to us sometime when the Saint wasn’t there. Bobby managed to get out of it, but not me or Luca—we found ourselves there, alone with that mother.
She’s a plump woman, who pays attention to how she looks, we’ve never seen her without makeup or in the wrong shoes. Even there, in her house, she was all done up, gleaming, though in a homey, inoffensive way. She wanted to talk about the Saint. She approached it indirectly, but then she asked us what we knew about that business of the priest—that her son was thinking of becoming a priest when he grew up, or maybe even right away. She said it cheerfully, to let us know that she just wanted to find out a little more, that we shouldn’t take it as a dangerous question. I said I didn’t know. Luca said he had no idea. So she waited a bit. Then she resumed, in a different tone, more confident, putting things in their place; now, finally, she was an adult talking to a couple of kids. We found ourselves compelled to say what we knew.
Emmaus Page 3