Emmaus Read Online Free PDF Page A

exist. Some say that it was the Spanish nannywho 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 didit 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 beautifulonly 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