Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco

she had not been afraid. She had turned to look at the boy’s face, and everything had seemed to her very nat-ural, even obvious. She said that in some way she had liked what was happening. Then he had lowered the door, and then, yes, she had been afraid, with the worst fear of her life. The darkness that returned, the sound of the baskets dragged over her head again, the boy’s footsteps 83

    growing distant. She had felt lost. And that terror had never left her. She was silent for a moment and then she added that the mind of a child is strange. I think that at that moment, she said, I wished for only one thing: that that boy would take me away with him.
    She went on talking, about children and about fear, but the man didn’t hear her because he was trying to put together the words to say one thing that he would have liked to let the woman know. He would have liked to tell her that while he was looking at her, that night, curled up in the hole, so orderly and clean— clean —he had felt a kind of peace that he had never found again, or at least hardly ever, and then it was looking at a landscape, or staring into the eyes of an animal. He would have liked to explain to her exactly that sensation, but he knew that the word “peace” was not enough to describe what he had felt, and yet nothing else occurred to him, except perhaps the idea that it had been like seeing something that was infinitely complete . Just as many other times, in the past, he had felt how difficult it was to give a name to what had 84

    happened to him in the war, as if there were a spell under which those who had lived couldn’t tell the story, and those who knew how to tell the story had not been fated to live. He looked at the woman and saw her speak, but he didn’t hear her because his thoughts again carried him away and he was too tired to resist. So he remained there, leaning back in the chair, and did nothing, until he began to weep. He wasn’t ashamed, he didn’t hide his face behind his hands, he didn’t even try to control his face, contorted in sadness, while the tears descended to his collar, sliding down his neck, which was white and badly shaved, like the neck of every old man in the world.
    The woman interrupted. She hadn’t realized at first that he had begun to cry, and now she didn’t know what to do. She leaned over the table and murmured something, softly. Then instinctively she turned to the other tables and saw that two boys, sitting nearby, were looking at the man, and one of the two was smiling. Then she yelled something at him, and when the boy turned to her, she looked him in the eyes and said to him, loudly: 85

    “Fuck you.”
    Then she filled the man’s glass with wine and pushed it toward him. She didn’t say anything more. She leaned back again. The man continued to weep. Every so often she looked around angrily, like a female animal standing guard at the den of her young.
    “Who are those two?” asked the woman behind the bar.
    The waiter knew she was speaking of the two old people, over at the table.
    “It’s fine,” he said.
    “Do you know them?”
    “No.”
    “The old man was crying, before.”
    “I know.”
    “They aren’t drunk . . . ”
    “No, everything’s all right.”
    “But tell me, why should they come here and . . . ”
    To the waiter there didn’t seem anything wrong with weeping in a café. But he said nothing. He was the boy 86

    with the strange accent. He placed three empty glasses on the bar and went back to the tables.
    The woman turned to the old people and watched them for a while.
    “She must have been a beautiful woman . . . ”
    She said it aloud, even though there was no one to hear her.
    When she was young she had dreamed of becoming a movie actress. Everyone said she had wonderful self-confidence, and she liked to sing and dance. She had a pretty voice, rather common but pretty. Then she had met a salesman of beauty products who brought her to the capital to do