Emmaus (3 page)

A couple of years ago, when we were fifteen, we were at my house, on one of those afternoons, lying on the bed reading some Formula 1 magazines—we were in my room. Just next to the bed was a window, and it was open—it overlooked the garden. And in the garden were my parents: they were talking, it was Sunday. We weren't listening, we were reading, but at a certain point we started listening, because my parents had started talking about Luca's mother. They didn't realize that he was there, obviously, and were talking about his mother. They were saying that she was a wonderful woman and it was a pity that she was so unfortunate. They said something about the fact that God had given her a terrible cross to bear. I looked at Luca; he smiled and made a sign to me to sit still, to not make a noise. He seemed amused by the thing. So we went on listening. Outside, in the garden, my mother was saying that it must be something terrible to live with a husband so ill, it must be an agonizing solitude. Then she asked my father if he knew how the treatment was going. My father said they had tried everything but the truth is that one is never really cured of those troubles. You just have to hope, he said, that he doesn't decide to do away with himself, sooner or later. He was talking about Luca's father. I began to be ashamed of what they were saying, I looked again at Luca;
he made a gesture as if to say that he didn't understand, he didn't know what they were talking about. He placed a hand on my leg, he didn't want me to move, to make any noise. He wanted to listen. Outside, in the garden, my father was talking about a thing called depression, which evidently was a sickness, because it had to do with drugs and doctors. At a certain point he said, It must be terrible, for the wife and also for the son. Poor things, my mother said. She was silent for a bit and then she repeated, Poor things, meaning Luca and his mother, because they had to live with that sick man. She said that one could only pray, and that she would. Then my father got up; they both got up and went inside. We instinctively lowered our eyes onto the Formula 1 magazines, we were terrified that the door would open. But it didn't. We heard my parents' footsteps, in the hall, as they went toward the living room. We sat there, immobile, our hearts pounding.

We had to get out of there, and it didn't end well. When we got to the garden, my mother came out to ask when I would be back, and so she saw Luca. Then she said his name, in a kind of greeting, but animated by surprise and dismay—unable to add something, as she would have, on an ordinary day. Luca turned to her and said, Good evening, signora. He said it politely, in the most normal tone there is. We are very good at pretending. We left while my mother was still there, in the doorway, motionless, a magazine in her hand, her index finger holding her place.

For a while as we walked, one beside the other, we said nothing. Entrenched in our thoughts, both of us. When we
had to cross a street, I raised my head, and as I was looking at the cars go by, I looked at Luca, too, for a moment. His eyes were red, his head bent.

The fact is that it had never occurred to me that his father was
sick
—and the truth, however strange, is that Luca hadn't thought anything like that, either: this gives an idea of how we're made. We have a blind faith in our parents; what we see at home is the just, well-balanced way of things, the protocol of what we consider mental health.
We adore
our parents for that reason—they keep us sheltered from any anomaly. So the hypothesis doesn't exist that they, first of all, can be an anomaly—
an illness
. Sick mothers do not exist, only tired ones. Fathers never fail, at times they are irritable. A certain unhappiness, which we prefer not to register, occasionally assumes the form of pathologies that must have names, but at home we don't say them. Resorting to doctors is unpleasant and, when it happens, moderated by the choice of doctor friends, familiars of the household, little more than confidants. Where the aggression of a psychiatrist might be useful, we prefer the good-humored friendship of doctors we've known all our lives.

To us this seems normal.

So, without knowing it, we inherit an incapacity for tragedy, and a predestination to a lesser form of drama: because in our houses the reality of evil is not accepted, and this puts off forever any tragic development by triggering the long swell of a measured and permanent drama—the swamp in which we have grown up. It's an absurd habitat,
made up of repressed suffering and daily censorships. But we can't see how absurd, because we're swamp reptiles, and it's the only world we know: the swamp for us is normality. That's why we're able to metabolize incredible doses of unhappiness, mistaking it for the proper course of things: the suspicion does not arise that it hides wounds to be healed, and fractures to be pieced together. Similarly, we are ignorant of what scandal is, because we instinctively accept every possible deviation betrayed by those around us simply as an unexpected supplement to the protocol of normality. So, for example, when, in the darkness of the parish cinema, we felt the priest's hand resting on the inside of our thigh, we weren't angry but quickly deduced that evidently things were like that, priests put their hands there—it wasn't something you needed to mention at home. We were twelve, thirteen. We didn't push the priest's hand away. We took the Eucharist from the same hand, the following Sunday. We were capable of doing that, we are still capable of it—why should we not be capable of mistaking depression for a form of elegance, and unhappiness for an appropriate coloration of life? Luca's father never goes to the stadium, because he can't bear to be in the midst of so many people: it's something we know and interpret as a kind of distinction. We are used to considering him vaguely aristocratic, because of his silence, even when we go to the park. He walks slowly and his laughter comes in bursts, as if he were making a concession. He doesn't drive. As far as we remember, he has never raised his voice. All this seems a manifestation
of a superior dignity. Nor are we alerted by the fact that everyone around him displays a particular cheerfulness. The exact word would be
forced
, but it never occurs to us, because it's a
particular
cheerfulness, which we interpret as a form of respect—in fact he's an official at the Ministry. Ultimately we consider him a father like the others, only perhaps more opaque—foreign.

But at night Luca sits beside him on the sofa, in front of the television. His father places a hand on his knee. He says nothing. They say nothing. Every so often the father squeezes his son's knee hard.

What does it mean that it's an illness? Luca asked me that day, as we walked.

I don't know, I don't have the slightest idea, I said. It was the truth.

It seemed pointless to go on talking about it, and for a very long time we didn't mention it again. Until that night, when we were coming home from Andre's bridge, and were alone. In front of my house, with our bikes stopped, one foot on the ground, the other on the pedal. My parents were waiting for me, we always have dinner at seven thirty, I don't know why. I should have gone in, but it was clear that Luca had something to say. He shifted his weight onto the other leg, tilting the bike slightly. Then he said that leaning on the railing of the bridge he had understood a memory—he had remembered something and understood it. He waited a moment to see if I had to go. I stayed. At our house, he said, we eat almost in silence. At your house
it's different, also at Bobby's or the Saint's, but we always eat in silence. You can hear all the sounds, the forks on the plates, the water in the glasses. My father, especially, is silent. It's always been like that. Then I remembered that many times my father—I remembered that he often gets up, at a certain point, it often happens that he gets up, without saying anything, before we've finished, he gets up, opens the door to the balcony, and goes out on the balcony, pulling the door closed behind him, and then stands there, leaning on the railing. For years I've seen him do that. Mamma and I take advantage of it—we talk, Mamma jokes, she goes to get a plate, a bottle, asks me a question, like that. Through the window there is my father, back to us, a bit bent, leaning on the railing. For years I haven't thought about it, but tonight, on the bridge, it occurred to me what he goes there to do. I think my father goes there to jump off. Then he doesn't have the courage to do it, but every time he gets up and goes there with that idea.

He raised his eyes, because he wanted to look at me.

It's like Andre, he said.

So Luca was the first of us to cross the border. He didn't do it on purpose—he's not a restless kid or anything. He found himself next to an open window while adults were talking incautiously. And, from a distance, he learned about Andre's dying. They are two indiscretions that damaged his—our—homeland. For the first time one of us pushed beyond the inherited borders, in the suspicion that there are no borders, in reality, no mother house
untouched. Timidly he began to walk a no-man's-land where the words
suffering
and
death
have a precise meaning—dictated by Andre and written in our language in the handwriting of our parents. From that land he looks at us, waiting for us to follow.

Since Andre is insoluble, in her family they often cite her grandmother, who is dead now. According to their version of human destiny, the worms are eating her. We know, however, that the Judgment Day is waiting, and the end of time. The grandmother was an artist—you can find her in the encyclopedias. Nothing special, but at sixteen she had crossed the ocean with a great English writer: he dictated and she typed, on a Remington Portable. Letters, or parts of books, stories. In America she discovered photography, now she turns up in encyclopedias as a photographer. She liked to photograph derelicts and iron bridges. She did it well, in black and white. She had Hungarian and Spanish blood in her veins, but she married Andre's grandfather in Switzerland—thus becoming very wealthy. We never saw her. She was known for her beauty. Andre resembles her, they say. Also in character.

At a certain point the grandmother stopped taking photographs—she devoted herself to keeping the family together, becoming its gracious tyrant. Her son suffered from this, her only son, and the woman he married, an Italian
model: Andre's parents. They were young and insecure, so the grandmother broke them regularly, because she was old and had an inexplicable power. She lived with them and sat at the head of the table—a servant handed her the plates, saying the name of each course in French. Until she died. The grandfather had departed years earlier, it should be said, to complete the picture. Died, to be precise.

Before Andre, Andre's parents had had twins. A boy and a girl. To the grandmother it had seemed rather vulgar—she was convinced that having twins was something poor people did. In particular she couldn't bear the girl, whose name was Lucia. She couldn't see the use of her. Three years later, Andre's mother became pregnant with Andre. The grandmother said that, obviously, she should have an abortion. But she didn't. And here's exactly what happened next.

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.