Free Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco Page A

revelation and destiny fulfilled—perfect ideogram. We get from it a certainty without edges—we call it faith.
    To lose it is something that happens. But I use here an imprecise expression, which alludes to faith as enchantment, which has nothing to do with us. I will not lose faith, Bobby can’t lose it. We haven’t found it, we can’t lose it. It’s something different, not magical at all. What comes to mind is the geometric crumbling of a wall—the instant when one point of the structure gives way and the whole thing collapses. Because the stone wall is solid, but in itsheart there is always a weak joint, an insecure support. Over time we have learned exactly where —the hidden stone that can betray us. It’s at the exact point where we place our every heroism, and every religious sentiment: it’s where we reject the world of others, where we despise it, out of instinctive certainty, where we know, with utter clarity, that it’s meaningless. Only God is enough for us, things never. But it’s not always true, it’s not true for always. Sometimes it takes just the elegance of another’s gesture, or the gratuitous beauty of a secular word. The sparkle of life, found in the wrong destinies. The nobility of evil, at times. A light filters through that we would not have suspected. The rock-like certainty breaks, and everything crumbles. I’ve seen it in many, I saw it in Bobby. He told me—there are a lot of true things around us, and we don’t see them, they are there, and have meaning, without any need for God.
    Give me an example, I said.
    You, me, as we truly are, not as we pretend to be.
    Give me another.
    Andre, and even the people around her.
    You think people like that have a meaning ?
    Yes.
    Why?
    They are real.
    We aren’t?
    No.
    He meant that in the absence of meaning the world still turns. And in the acrobatics of existing without coordinatesthere is a beauty, even a nobility, sometimes, that we don’t recognize—like a heroism that we’ve never thought of, the heroism of some truth . If you recognize this as you look at the world, even once, then you are lost—there is now a different battle, for you. Growing up in the certainty of being heroes, we become memorable in other legends. God vanishes, like a childish expedient.
    Bobby told me that that rocky slope in the mountains had suddenly seemed to him what remained of a ruined fortress. There was no way to walk up it, he said.
    We then saw him slip slowly into the distance, but never with his back turned, his eyes still on us, his friends. You would have said that he would return, after a while. We never thought that we would see him truly disappear. But he left the larvae, at the hospital, and all the rest. He still came to play sometimes in church, then nothing. I did the bass parts on the keyboard. It wasn’t the same, but above all our growing up wasn’t the same, without him. He had a lightness we didn’t.
    One day he came back to tell us about his show with Andre, if we really wanted to see it. We said yes, and that changed our lives.
    It was in a theater outside the city, an hour by car to a small town of dull streets and houses, surrounded by countryside. Provincial. But with an old-fashioned theater, in the square,with boxes and all—a horseshoe. Maybe there were some people from the place, but mainly it was friends and relatives who had come for the show, as if for a wedding, greeting one another at the entrance. We were apart, because there were a lot of them—those whom Bobby called real, while we were not. They disgusted me again anyway.
    Nor did the show seem much better to us. With all good will. But it wasn’t something we could understand. Besides Andre, there was Bobby playing, some slides projected onto the background, and three other dancers, who were normal people, or even deformed—bodies devoid of beauty. They didn’t dance,