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introductions and acknowledgments take only five minutes; the rest of the time is free for open dialogue. I tell the audience that I haven’t come here to explain anything and that, ideally, the event should be more of a conversation than a presentation.
    A young woman asks about the signs I speak of in my books. What form do they take? I explain that signs are an extremely personal language that we develop throughout our lives, by trial and error, until we begin to understand that God is guiding us. Someone else asks if a sign had brought me all the way to Tunisia. Without going into any detail, I say that it had.
    The conversation continues, time passes quickly, and I need to wrap things up. For the last question, I choose, at random, out of the six hundred people there, a middle-aged man with a bushy mustache.
    “I don’t want to ask a question,” he says. “I just want to say a name.”
    The name he pronounces is that of Barbazan-Debat, a chapel in the middle of nowhere, thousands of kilometers from here, the same chapel where, one day, I placed a plaque in gratitude for a miracle, and which I had visited before setting out on this pilgrimage in order to pray for Our Lady’s protection.
    I don’t know how to respond. The following words were written by one of the other people onstage with me.
    In the room, the Universe seemed suddenly to have stopped moving. So many things happened; I saw your tears and the tears of your dear wife, when that anonymous reader pronounced the name of that distant chapel
.
    You could no longer speak. Your smiling face grew serious. Your eyes filled with shy tears that trembled on your lashes, as if wishing to apologize for appearing there uninvited
.
    Even I had a lump in my throat, although I didn’t know why. I looked for my wife and daughter in the audience, because I always look to them whenever I feel myself to be on the brink of something unknown. They were there, but they were sitting as silently as everyone else, their eyes fixed on you, trying to support you with their gaze, as if a gaze could ever support anyone
.
    Then I looked to Christina for help, trying to understand what was going on, how to bring to an end that seemingly interminable silence. And I saw that she was silently crying, too, as if you were both notes from the
same symphony and as if your tears were touching, even though you were sitting far apart
.
    For several long seconds, nothing existed, there was no room, no audience, nothing. You and your wife had set off for a place where we could not follow; all that remained was the joy of living, expressed in silence and emotion
.
    Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end. Thank you, then, for your tears
.
    I should have said to the young woman who asked the first question about signs that
this
was a sign, confirming that I was where I should be, in the right place, at the right time, even though I didn’t understand what had brought me there.
    I suspect there was no need, though. She would probably have understood anyway. *
    M Y WIFE AND I are walking along, hand in hand, through the bazaar in Tunis, fifteen kilometers from the ruins of Carthage, which, centuries before, had defied the might of Rome. We are discussing the great Carthaginian warrior Hannibal. Since Carthage and Rome were separated by only a few hundred kilometers of sea, the Romans wereexpecting a sea battle. Instead, Hannibal took his vast army and crossed the desert and the Strait of Gibraltar, marched through Spain and France, climbed the Alps with soldiers and elephants, and attacked the Romans from the north, scoring one of the most resounding military victories ever recorded.
    He overcame all the enemies in his path, and yet—for reasons we still do not understand—he stopped short of conquering Rome and failed to attack at the right moment. As a result of his indecision, Carthage