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Andre passes through, sometimes.
    On the other hand, the Saint’s mother, wanting to talk about him, got it into her head to talk to us, her son’s friends, and so she organized the occasion properly, she really organized it—she wanted to talk to us sometime when the Saint wasn’t there. Bobby managed to get out of it, but not me or Luca—we found ourselves there, alone with that mother.
    She’s a plump woman, who pays attention to how she looks, we’ve never seen her without makeup or in the wrong shoes. Even there, in her house, she was all done up, gleaming, though in a homey, inoffensive way. She wanted to talk about the Saint. She approached it indirectly, but then she asked us what we knew about that business of the priest—that her son was thinking of becoming a priest when he grew up, or maybe even right away. She said it cheerfully, to let us know that she just wanted to find out a little more, that we shouldn’t take it as a dangerous question. I said I didn’t know. Luca said he had no idea. So she waited a bit. Then she resumed, in a different tone, more confident, putting things in their place; now, finally, she was an adult talking to a couple of kids. We found ourselves compelled to say what we knew.
    The Saint has a way of taking everything incredibly seriously, Luca said.
    She nodded her head yes.
    Sometimes it’s hard to understand him, and he never explains, he doesn’t like to explain.
    You never talk about it, among yourselves?
    Talk about it, no.
    And so?
    She wanted to know. That mother made us tell her that we prayed, while the Saint burned in prayer; and his legs had a way of kneeling that was like crashing, when we simply changed position—he fell to his knees. She wanted to know why her son spent hours with the poor, the sick, the criminal, becoming one of them, until he forgot the prudence of dignity, and the limits of charity. She expected to understand what he did during all that time devoted to books, and if we, too, lowered our heads at every reproof, and were incapable of rebellion, and of tense words. She needed to understand better who all these priests were, the letters they wrote to him, the phone calls. She wanted to know if others laughed at him, and how girls looked at him, if with respect—the distance between him and the world. That woman was asking us if it was possible at our age to think of giving one’s life to God, and his priests.
    If it was only that, we could answer.
    Yes.
    And how does it occur to you?
    Luca smiled. It’s an odd question, he said, because itseemed that everything around us was directing us to that folly, as if toward a light. How surprising was it to discover now how deep their words had gone—and every lesson since we were children, none unheeded? It should be good news, he said.
    Not for me, the woman said. She said that they had also taught us moderation, and in fact had done so before anything else, knowing that they would thus deliver the antidote to any teaching that followed.
    But there is no moderation in love, said Luca, in such a way that he almost didn’t seem himself. In love or in suffering, he added.
    The woman looked at him. Then she looked at me. She must have wondered if they were all blind in the face of our mystery, every father and mother, blinded by our apparent youth. Then she asked if we had ever thought of becoming priests.
    No.
    And why not?
    You mean why the Saint and not us?
    Why my son?
    Because he wants to be saved, I said, and you know from what. I shouldn’t have said it, and yet I did, because that woman had brought us there to hear this precise phrase said, and now I had said it.
    There are other ways to be saved, she said, without getting frightened.
    Maybe. But that’s the best.
    You think so?
    I know, I said. Priests save themselves, they’re compelled to; every moment of their life saves them, because in every moment they’re not