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living, so the catastrophe can’t strike.
    What catastrophe? she asked. She wouldn’t stop.
    The one the Saint carries with him, I said.
    Luca looked at me. He wanted to know if I would stop.
    That terrifying catastrophe, I added, to be sure that she understood clearly.
    The woman was staring at me. She was trying to find out what I knew about it, and how well we knew her son. At least as well as she knew him, probably. The dark side of the Saint is on the surface of his actions, in the secret passages that he excavates in the light of the sun; his ruin is transparent, he submits to it without much reserve, anyone who’s around can understand that it’s a catastrophe, and maybe even what sort.
    Do you know where he goes when he disappears? the woman asked, firmly.
    Sometimes the Saint disappears, there’s no doubt about that. Days and nights, then he returns. We know. We even know something more, but this is our life, too, the woman has nothing to do with it.
    We shook our heads no. A grimace, also, to reiterate no, we didn’t know where he went.
    The woman understood. So she said it in another way. You can’t help him? she whispered. It was a prayer rather than a question.
    We’re with him, we like him, he’ll always be with us, Luca said. He doesn’t frighten us. We’re not afraid.
    Then the woman’s eyes filled with tears, maybe at the memory of how intransigent and infinite the instinct of friendship can be at our age.
    No one said anything else for a while. It could have ended there.
    But she must have thought she shouldn’t be afraid if we weren’t. So, still weeping, but faintly, she said, It’s that business of the demons. It’s the priests who put it in his head.
    We didn’t think she would press so far, but she had the courage—because deep down our mothers harbor, unnoticed, an incomparable audacity. They preserve it, dormant, among the prudent gestures of a lifetime, in order to use it fully on what they suspect is the appointed day. They will expend it at the foot of a cross.
    The demons are taking him away from me, she said.
    In a sense it was true. The way we see it, the story of the demons does come from the priests, but there’s also something that has always been part of the Saint, with the power of something innate, and it existed before the priests gave it a name. None of us have that sensitivity to evil, a kind of morbid, terrifying attraction—increasingly morbid, inevitably, because it is terrifying—as none of us have the same vocation as the Saint for goodness, sacrifice, meekness, which are the consequence of that terror. Maybe there would be no need to trouble the demon, but in our world sanctity is closely entwined with an unspeakable familiarity with evil, as theGospels testify in the episode of the temptations, and as the murky lives of the mystics tell us. So there is talk of demons, without the prudence that one should have in talking of demons. And in the presence of pure souls like ours—of boys. The priests have no pity in this matter. Or prudence.
    They eviscerated the Saint with these stories.
    What we can do, we do. We give lightness to our time with him, and we follow him everywhere, into the recesses of good, and those of evil—as far as we can, in the former as in the latter. We do it not only out of friendly compassion but also out of true fascination, drawn by what he knows, and accomplishes. Disciples, brothers. In the light of his childish sanctity we learn things, and this is a privilege. When the demons surface, we endure his upward gaze as long as we can. Then we let him go, and wait for him to return. We forget the terror, and are capable of normal days with him, after any yesterday. We don’t even think about it much, and if that woman had not compelled us to, we would almost never think about it. In fact I shouldn’t even have mentioned it.
    The woman told us frightening things