Emmaus Read Online Free PDF Page B

been able to do what we wanted of him—and that a boy withthe face of a mystic had gone to his aid. So he disappeared. His voice wasn’t heard, for the entire dinner. He cleaned his plate, he swallowed. He never laughed.
    At the end we all got up to clear. It’s something we always do, like good boys, but I did it so that I could go into the kitchen and look at the balcony that Luca had told me about. In fact I could see the railing, and it wasn’t hard to imagine his father’s back, leaning forward, elbows propped, his gaze on the void.
    When we left, it seemed to us that things hadn’t gone very well. But I was the only one who knew; Bobby and the Saint had never talked to Luca. So we said only that the man was strange. Everything was strange in that house. We were thinking we would not go back.
    That Andre knows about me—that I exist—I learned for certain one afternoon when I was sitting on a sofa, with my girlfriend, under a red blanket. She was touching me; it’s our way of having sex. In general our girlfriends believe in the God of the Gospels, as we do, and this means that they’ll be virgins when they get married—although no mention is made, in the Gospels, of any such practice. So our way of having sex is to spend hours touching each other as we talk. We never come. Almost never. We males touch as much skin as we can, and every so often we stick our hand under their skirts, but not always. They, on the other hand,touch our sex right away, because we unzip our pants and sometimes take them off. This happens in houses where parents, brothers, sisters are just behind the door, and anyone might enter at any moment. So we do everything in a state of precariousness veined with danger. Often there is only a half-open door between sin and punishment, and so the pleasure of touching each other and the fear of being caught, like desire and remorse, are simultaneous, fused in a single emotion that we call, with splendid precision, sex: we know every nuance of it and appreciate its derivation from the guilt complex, of which it is one of several variants. If someone thinks that’s a childish way of looking at things, he has understood nothing. Sex is sin: thinking it innocent is a simplification to which only the unhappy surrender.
    However, that day the house was empty, so we were doing things with a certain tranquility, verging on boredom. When the doorbell rang my girlfriend pulled down her shirt and said, It’s Andre, she’s come to get something—she rose and went to open the door. She seemed to know what would happen. I stayed on the sofa, under the blanket. I pulled up my underpants—my jeans were on the floor, I didn’t want to be found putting them on. They both came in talking, my girlfriend got back under the blanket and Andre sat on a little wood-and-straw child’s chair: she sat in that perfect way she had of doing unimportant things like sitting on a child’s wood-and-straw chair when there were normal chairs everywhere in the room, and even the sofa where we were sitting, which was large. Andas she sat down she smiled and said Hi, without introductions or anything. The sublime thing was that she didn’t care about the jeans on the floor, the blanket, or what the two of us had obviously been doing under it when she arrived. She simply started talking, a short space from my bare legs, with a composure that seemed a verdict—whatever we were doing under the blanket was normal. It was the first time someone had so quickly forgiven me—with that lightness, that smile.
    They were talking about a show, my girlfriend was dancing with her, they were putting on a show. They needed lights, I seemed to understand, lights and a seamless gray cloth runner twelve meters long. I was there but I had nothing to do with it and no one spoke to me. I would have gotten up, to wander away, but I was in my underpants. At some point, my girlfriend,