He nodded his head yes.
But you’re doing something stupid, I said.
I left. After a while I turned to look, he was still standing there, passing the back of his hand over his eyes.
When I got home I let some time go by, then I began calling him at his house—they always said he wasn’t back yet. I didn’t like it, this thing, and I ended up having some ugly thoughts. I thought of going to look for him: the certainty that I shouldn’t have left him alone there, in the middle of the street, increased. Then I imagined that I would find him with Andre, somewhere, and the embarrassment of the gestures, the words to say. It was all complicated. There was no way to distract myself. The only thing I could do was keep calling his house, always apologizing profusely. The sixth time he answered.
Christ, Luca, don’t play any more tricks like that.
What’s wrong?
Nothing. Did you go?
He was silent for a moment. Then he said no.
No?
I can’t explain now, really.
OK, I said. Better that way. It will come out all right. I really believed it. I felt like talking some nonsense, so I began talking about Bobby’s shoes at the funeral. You couldn’t believe that he had actually bought them.
And the shirt? said Luca. They don’t even know how to iron shirts like that, at my house, he said.
But that night at dinner he got up suddenly, to carry the plates to the sink, and instead of going back to sit at that counter, with the wall in front of him, he went out on the balcony. He leaned against the railing, where he had seen his father a thousand times—but backward, his eyes toward the kitchen. Maybe he looked at everything one more time. Then he fell backward, into the void.
The ambiguous story of the death of Lazarus is told in the Gospel of John, and only there. While Jesus is far away, preaching, he finds out that a friend of his, in Bethany, has fallen gravely ill. Two days pass, and at dawn on the third day Jesus tells his disciples to prepare to return to Judaea. They ask why and he says, Our friend Lazarus has gone to sleep, let us go and wake him. So he starts off, and, arriving at the gates of Bethany, he sees Martha, a sister of Lazarus, running toward him. When she reaches him, she says, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not be dead. Entering the city, Jesus meets the other sister of Lazarus, 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 other adults 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 small old 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 her something I 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 she started 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 proximit
ies 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 of sowing, and we live trusting in the cyclical nature of everything, summed up by the round of the seasons. From the plow we have learned the ultimate meaning of violence, and from the farmer the trick of patience. Blindly, we believe in the equation between hard work and harvest. It’s a sort of symbolic vocabulary—given to us in a mysterious way.
So I thought of starting again, because we know no other instinct, faced with the storms of fate—the stubborn, foolish steps of the farmer.
I had to start to work the land again somewhere, and in the end I decided for the larvae, at the hospital. It was the last solid thing I remembered—the four of us with the larvae. The going into and going out of that hospital. I hadn’t been for a long time. You can be sure that there you will find everything the way it was before, it doesn’t matter what happened to you while you were absent. Maybe the faces and bodies are different—but the suffering and the oblivion are the same. The sisters don’t ask questions, and they always welcome you as a gift. They pass by, busy, and at the same time a refrain sounds that is dear to us—Praise be to Jesus Christ, may he always be praised.
At first it all seemed difficult to me—the actions, the words. They told me about those who had gone, I shook hands with the new. The work was the same, the bags of urine. One of the old men saw me, and at one point he remembered me and started bawling at me in a loud voice, wanting to know where the hell we had gone, I and the others. You stopped coming here, he said, when I went over to him. He protested.
I dragged a chair over to the bed and sat down. The food is disgusting, he said, summing up. He asked if I had brought something. Every so often we offered them something to eat—the first grapes, some chocolate. Even cigarettes, but those the Saint brought, we didn’t dare. The sisters knew.
I told him that I didn’t have anything for him. Things have been complicated lately, I said, in explanation. They’ve gone a bit wrong.
He looked at me in wonder. Long ago, these men stopped thinking that things can go wrong for others, too.
What the hell do you mean? he said.
Nothing.
Ah, I see.
He had been a gas station attendant when he was young and everything was going well for him. He had also been the president of a soccer team in his neighborhood, for a certain period. He remembered a three-to-two comeback victory, and a cup won on a penalty shoot-out.
He asked me where the kid with the red hair had gone. He made me laugh, he said.
He was talking about Bobby.
He hasn’t been here? I asked.
That kid? And who’s ever seen him again? He was the only one who made me laugh.
In fact Bobby knows how to handle them. He teases them the whole time—it’s something that puts them in a good mood. For disconnecting the catheter, he’s a disaster, but no one seems to mind much. If one of them pees blood, they like it that a boy stares at their prick, admiring, and says Christ, you wanna trade?
He didn’t even say goodbye, the old man said, he went away and damned if anyone saw him again around here. Where did you hide him? He was cross about this business of Bobby.
He can’t come, I said.
Oh no?
No. He’s got problems.
He looked at me as if it were my fault. Like?
I was sitting there, on that metal chair, leaning toward him, elbows placed on my knees. He’s on drugs, I said.
What the hell are you saying?
Drugs. You know what that is?
Of course I know.
Bobby’s on drugs, that’s why he doesn’t come anymore.
If I had told him that he should get up immediately and leave, taking all his stuff, including the bag of pee, he would have made the same face.
What the hell are you saying? he repeated.
The truth, I said. He can’t come because at this moment he’s somewhere or other dissolving a brown powder in a spoon warmed by the flame of a lighter. Then he sucks the liquid into a syringe and binds a rubber cord around his forearm. He sticks the needle in his vein and injects the liquid.
The old man looked at me. I indicated the vein, in the crook of his arm.
While he’s throwing away the syringe, the drug courses through his bloodstream. When it reaches his brain Bobby feels the horrible knot dissolve, and other things that I don’t know. The effect lasts for a while. If you see him at those moments he talks like a drunk and scarcely understands anything. He says stuff he doesn’t believe.
The old man nodded.
After a while the effect wears off, it passes slowly. Then Bobby thinks he ought to stop. But after a while the body asks for that stuff, so he looks for money to buy more. If he doesn’t find the money, he begins to feel bad. So bad that you, in this bed, can’t even imagine. That’s why he can’t come here. He barely manages to go to school. I only see him when he needs money. So don’t expect him to show up, get over it; no laughs for a while. You understand?
He nodded yes. He had one of those strange faces that seem to have something missing. Like someone who shaves off his mustache on a bet.
Shall we empty this bag? I said, pulling down the covers. I leaned over the usual tube. He began to mutter.
What sort of people are you? he said through his teeth.
I disconnected the small tube from the larger, attentively.
You take drugs, you come here acting like good boys, and then you take drugs, shit. He was muttering, but slowly he was raising his voice. Will you tell me who the hell you think you are?
I had unhooked the bag from the side of the bed. The pee was dark, some blood was deposited on the bottom.
I’m talking to you, who the hell do you think you are? I stood up, with the bag in my hand. We’re eighteen years old, I said, and we are everything.
When I was in the other room, emptying the bag in the toilet, I heard him shouting, What the fuck do you mean? you’re all drug addicts, that’s what you are, you come here and act like good boys but you’re drug addicts! He shouted that we could stay home, they didn’t want us, drug addicts, there. He took it as a personal insult.
But before I finished and left, I also stopped by a new man, who was very small, who seemed to have fled i
nside his body, to some place where he perhaps felt safe. When I put everything back in place, the empty, washed-out bag hooked to the side of the bed, I ran a hand over his hair, which was sparse and white—the last. He pulled himself up a bit, opened the drawer of the metal night table, and from a shiny wallet took out five hundred lire. Take it, you’re a good boy. I didn’t want to take it, but he insisted. He said, Take it, buy something nice. I wouldn’t even think of it, of taking it, but then the image came to mind of him making the same gesture to a grandson, a son, I don’t know, a boy, it occurred to me that it was a gesture he had made many times, to someone he loved. Whoever it was, he wasn’t there. There was only me, there.
Thank you, I said.
Then, leaving, I tried to figure out if that sensation of solidity that I always felt, going down the steps of the hospital, would return, but I didn’t have time to figure out anything, because at the foot of the steps I saw Luca’s father standing, elegant—he was waiting for me.
I looked for you at home, he said, but they told me you were here.
He held out his hand, I shook it.
He asked if I would take a short walk with him.
I pushing the bicycle, he carrying his briefcase from work. Walking. I had had for some time a lump in my throat, so almost immediately I said I was sorry I hadn’t gone to Luca’s funeral. He made a gesture in the air, as if to chase away something. He said that I had been right, and that for him it had truly been torture—he couldn’t bear it in fact when people “exhibit the proper emotions.” They wanted me to say something, he said, but I refused. What is there to say? he added. Then, after a little silence, he told me that the Saint, on the other hand, had said something, he had gone to the microphone and with an unyielding calm had talked about Luca, and about us. What he had said, exactly, Luca’s father didn’t remember because, he said, he didn’t want to get emotional there, in front of everyone, and so he had fixated on certain other thoughts, trying not to listen. But he remembered well that the Saint was magnificent, there at the microphone, that he had an ancient solemnity. At the end he said that Luca had taken every death with him, and what remained for us was the pure gift of living, in the dazzling light of faith. Every death and every fear, Luca’s father said, specifying—Luca carried away every death and every fear. That phrase he had heard, and he remembered it clearly.
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