Emmaus Read Online Free Page A

concession. He doesn’t drive. As far as we remember, he has never raised his voice. All this seems a manifestationof 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 houseit’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 houseuntouched. 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