Free Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco Page B

unless that was dancing, moving according to rules and a precise plan. Every so often other, recorded sounds and noises mixed with Bobby’s bass. Cries, all of a sudden—and in the finale.
    Bobby’s bass still had the Gandhi decal on it—this pleased me. But it was true that he played differently, not only the notes but the prop for his foot, the curve of his back, and above all his face, which was searching and without embarrassment, as if forgetful of the audience—a private face. You saw there, if you wished, Bobby as he was, since he had stopped being Bobby. We looked at him fascinated. The Saint laughed every so often, but softly, in embarrassment.
    Then there was Andre. She was in her movements, completely—a body. What I could understand was that she was looking for some necessity that would put the movements in order, as if she had decided to substitute for chance, or naturalness, a sort of necessity, which would hold them together,one inevitably dictating the next. But then who knows. Another thing you could say is that there was a particular, at times hypnotic intensity wherever she was; we knew it, we had seen it in performances at school, but it’s not something you can get used to. It takes you by surprise every time, and so it was then while she was dancing.
    I should add that it was just as Bobby had said: it didn’t mean anything, there was no story, or message, nothing, only that apparent necessity . Yet at a certain point Andre was lying on the floor, on her back, and when she got up she let fall the loose white shirt she was wearing, a snake shedding its skin, and became naked before our eyes. And so was given to us, with nothing in exchange, what we had always thought outside our reach—leaving us bewildered. Naked, Andre moved, and, whatever way we sat in the theater seats, it was suddenly inappropriate, even where we put our hands. I tried to keep my eyes steady in an effort to watch the whole scene, but they sought instead the details of the body, to seize the unexpected gift. There was also the vague sensation that it wouldn’t last, and therefore urgency, and disappointment when she approached her shirt. But she left it on the floor and moved away again—she avoided it. I don’t know if she knew what she was doing with our eyes. Maybe it didn’t matter to her, maybe that wasn’t the heart of the thing. But it was for us—it should be noted that I, for example, had seen a naked girl four times in my life I had counted. And she was Andre, not a girl. So we looked at her—and the point was that we got nothing sexual from it, nothing that had todo with desire, as if our gaze were detached from the rest of our body, and this seemed to me a kind of magic, that a body could pose like that, naked, as if it were a pure force, not a naked body. Even when I looked between her legs—and I dared to do it because she allowed me to—there was no sex for a long time, as if it had disappeared, only an unheard-of proximity, unthinkable. And this, I seemed to understand, was the only message, the only story that had been told to me on that stage. That business of the naked body. Before the end, Andre dressed again, but slowly, in a man’s suit, down to the tie—something symbolic, I imagine. The blond triangle between her thighs disappeared last, in the dark pants with the crease, and it was during that long act of dressing that coughing could be heard in the hall, as of people returning from a distance—so we were aware of the special silence before.
    Afterward we went to the dressing rooms. Bobby seemed happy. He embraced us all.
    Good? he asked.
    Strange, said Luca. But he had barely finished saying it when he had taken Bobby’s head in his hands, and leaned his forehead against his, rubbing it a little—we don’t make gestures like that, usually, don’t bring in bodies between males, when we yield to tenderness, to