Vatican Waltz (11 page)

“Near the Vatican. I rented the hotel online. They said it was walking distance.”

He assured me it was a good section of the city, not the nicest but safe for a woman traveling alone: “If you keep your wits about you.”

It was amazing to me how much speed the plane gathered as we went down the runway, and it was frightening to feel the lift in my belly, the way we bounced from side to side after the wheels left the ground. Once we were airborne, the man took out his computer, but before he began to work on it he said, “A Merton fan, I see.”

“Yes. I just bought this one.”

He asked if he could look at it and flipped through a few of the pages. “I read him in college,” he said, handing the book back to me. “It made so much sense then, the things he was saying.”

“And now?”

He shrugged, smiled. “Now real life has taken over.”

“What he's talking about seems exactly like real life to me.”

“Wait thirty years,” he said knowingly, and then he turned to his computer screen and we said nothing after that. Out the window, I caught just a glimpse of the northern end of Revere Beach, and then the coastline of the North Shore, a bright jumble in twilight: I could see water towers, squat gas tanks, gray roofs. A few miniature boats scratching thin white lines on the sea, heading home.

I READ A BIT AND
studied the textbook a bit, and then, after the meal, settled in with a blanket. I was thinking, for some reason, of the ways people limit themselves: of the man beside me, of Laura Annina, of my father not wanting to break his routine and see Italy again. Was it only fear, or were they enviably satisfied with their lives while I was too restless in mine? Maybe, I thought, as I slipped toward sleep, it had something to do with not having a mother. Maybe the spiritual itch started there. Merton, I remembered, had also lost his mother when he was very young.…

I was awakened by the attendants serving breakfast. Soon the pilot announced that we could see Italy out the windows on the side of the plane where I was sitting. I looked down and was surprised at how closely it resembled the map. I don't know why I should have been, but somehow I thought the actual land would be messier, the edges blurred.

We landed, and there was a short delay and then the confusion of immigration and customs. A bit like confession, I thought tiredly; that same twinge of concern as you approached it; that same feeling of cleanliness as you walked away. Just beyond the customs zone I saw a man—much too young to be my father's cousin Franco—holding up a sign that said
CYNTHIA PIANTEDOSI
. Spelled correctly for once. It was a nice way to be greeted. The person holding the sign turned out to be Franco's son, and to my surprise, he also turned out to be a priest. He shook my hand warmly, insisted I call him “Bruno,” not “Father Bruno,” and also insisted on rolling the larger of my two bags out of the terminal to a small blue van in the parking area. “This belongs to my father,” he said in Italian, “but he let me use it today to take you to the hotel. He sends his regards. Tomorrow night we will go to his house for dinner.”

“My father told me about you. I had no idea you were a priest.”

He smiled proudly, as if having been ordained was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. Beneath the smile, though, lay a shadow of something else—misery, confusion, doubt—that anyone on earth could see. “
Già cinque anni.
Five years already,” he said, his Italian so much cleaner than what I was used to hearing at home. “I have a minor position at the Vatican.”

In two minutes he had ferried me out of the airport parking lot and into a land of ugliness. I felt a wash of disappointment and then another wash of embarrassment at my own foolishness. For some reason I'd imagined that all of Rome, every bit of it, would be ancient buildings and ruins, and here out the windows what I saw was only modern-day commercial clutter: factories and electric wires, billboards, an acre of old cars crushed and stacked like cardboard boxes, the occasional unattractive apartment building, all gray concrete and flat, featureless planes. And my neighbor on the flight had been absolutely correct: the driving was madness.

Father Bruno seemed perfectly comfortable in the midst of the madness, though, changing lanes the way some people change radio stations. It was sport to him, hockey on wheels. He raced up to within inches of the bumpers of trucks, then waited for an opening, darted left or right, and went racing along in pursuit of the next bumper. I was curious to learn about the life of a priest in Italy but afraid to distract him, so I kept silent and he kept his eyes on the road and the pretend-happy expression on his face. After half an hour or so he took an exit and curved down from the elevated highway into the city.

“This is more like I imagined Rome to be,” I said, wondering what my Italian sounded like to him. A small accent? Noise against his ears?

Another sorrow-lined smile.
“Roma,”
he said. “My home. My father moved here to work at the Vatican when I was very young. He's a lawyer, retired now.”

In that part of the city I saw no ruins or elaborate fountains, but there were at least some nice-looking, fairly old, stucco apartment buildings—lemon- and ochre- and apricot-colored, the windows bracketed with brown or green shutters flapping open to either side or closed tight against the morning. We sped past one church. It was squeezed lopsidedly between two younger buildings, as if they were its grandchildren holding it upright: pocked gray stone, worn wooden doors. The sight of it sent a wave of happiness through me. Everything else might be unfamiliar here, but I'd be at home in the churches, I knew that. My prayers would take me beyond superficial differences—language, smells, national habits, down into a quiet unity, a place with no flags or passports or accents.

By the time we'd gone another block we were caught up in a swirling soup of traffic, made worse by cars parked on both sides of the narrow streets, and then we at last broke free and entered a residential district of five-story apartment buildings with graffiti on the ground floors and rust stains by the gutters. There was a sidewalk sale going on, block after block of it. I caught glimpses of women standing beside tables covered with cardboard boxes. Clothes and books, it looked like.

Father Bruno made a left onto a narrower street and double-parked near a sign that read
ALBERGO
.
“This is the place you reserved,” he said, with the smallest note of disdain. “Not the best hotel in the city and not the best neighborhood either, but close to the Vatican and you can walk around at night here without worry.”

“Thank you so much,” I said. “I can carry my own bags in. It's no problem.”

“What time tomorrow is your meeting?”

“I'm supposed to be at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at ten thirty. I'm meeting Cardinal Rosario.”

“An important place and an important man,” he said, and, when I didn't respond: “I'll come for you at ten.”

“That will give us enough time?”

“Oh, yes. It is very close. You can almost walk there. I will be here at ten, don't worry. If you want to see the Vatican now, go to the end of this street and turn left and follow the people.”

“Thank you so much again,” I said.

“Niente,”
he said. “It's nothing.” He nodded and smiled, and when I closed the door he carried his unspoken sorrows away with him into the Italian morning.

I hadn't wanted an expensive hotel and had found this one, Albergo delle Mura, online. The lobby was small but gleaming, all tile and chrome, the people at the desk friendly enough. The room one of them showed me to, up three flights of stairs, was perfectly adequate. I closed the door and sat on the bed, and even though the sink in the bathroom was dripping and the single window looked out on nothing more interesting than the roof of an apartment building across the street, I felt absolutely bathed in happiness. I was in Italy, in Rome! It had thrilled me to hear Italian spoken, to see it on the billboards and signs. The colors and shapes of the cars, the style of the architecture, even the way the people walked seemed fresh and fascinating to me. Tired as I was from the time change and the long flight, I could hardly wait to go out into the city, but I unpacked first, took a shower, changed clothes.

Following Bruno's directions, I walked to the end of the street and turned left. A wall made of thin red bricks, faded and old-looking, slanted up and away from me. As he'd promised, there was what seemed like a river of tourists, so I followed them through the entrance marked
CITTÀ DEL VATICANO
and into St. Peter's Square: the fountain, the obelisk, the twin rows of stone columns at its circumference, the grand church with the pope's balcony and the famous dome. Seeing it that way, in person, sent another burst of joy through me. After a few minutes in a line that snaked through metal detectors and past two security guards, I stepped through the doors of the church that, in a certain way, stood at the center of my universe. Just inside the front entrance was Michelangelo's
Pietà
. Softly lit, protected by bulletproof glass, it was a treasure sent to us from some finer world. I stood in front of it for a long time. As had been the case with St. Peter's, I'd seen it before, of course, many times, in the book Father Alberto had given me, in photos, in a TV special. But the
Pietà
felt familiar in a way that St. Peter's did not, a way that had nothing to do with books and photos. After a while I understood that for years I'd been seeing it, or some image I associated with it, in my prayers. Something in the folds of white marble whispered to me in a language that was familiar but not quite understandable. I stood there trying to make sense of that, but the connection was vague, a strand of thought linking dream and day. According to the biblical accounts, Mary had been a young girl—fourteen or fifteen, probably—when she'd discovered she was pregnant. Pregnancy without marriage, in her time, meant nothing but disgrace, a future of poverty, misery, and shame. Joseph—many years older and really a mysterious figure—had saved her from that fate. But why had he married her? Pity? Simple charity? Loneliness? An intuition that the child she carried was an exceptional soul? And what had happened to him after Christ's birth? There wasn't a word in the Bible about that. Or about what Mary's life had been like after her husband died.

After a while I left those questions and that magnificent sculpture and wandered around the rest of the enormous church. The nave was crowded with tour groups, nuns, kids, couples with guidebooks. There must have been twenty different languages in the air. I studied everything—the colors and designs of the worn floor tiles, the columns standing there like redwoods, Michelangelo's domed ceiling, the murals and stained glass, the main altar, the side altars, the confessionals, the yellow marble fountains, the resting place of one of my heroes, Pope John XXIII. It was a museum of my faith, and I wandered around examining every surface, every twist of decorative marble along the ceiling, every pew.

After a time I stepped into one of the side chapels, which was mainly empty, and knelt for a few minutes on the hard tile, wishing I could magically summon my grandmother and Father Alberto and set them down beside me there. I wanted to share St. Peter's with them, or, at least, be able to send them a postcard of the
Pietà
. I closed my eyes and pictured Mary's sculpted face. Most likely she'd looked nothing like Michelangelo's marble woman, not so beautiful, not so unlined and unworried. Brown-skinned, not white, occasionally weary or upset. It didn't matter. What mattered to me was that in those perfect features Michelangelo had captured the essence of the human predicament: the sorrows of bodily existence and the confidence of true faith. I told myself that making peace between those two things was the only balance I had to strike. Just that. Be afraid, be nervous, be sad—fine. But lay the blanket of faith over those cold, restless children. Let them rest.

I sat in a pew there for close to an hour, then went and stood in front of the sculpture again, and again it was like listening to music I knew and loved. This is enough, I thought. Even if nothing comes of the meeting with Cardinal Rosario, this is more than enough to justify the expense and the effort of coming here. Just this.

When I left finally, hungry and weary, I sat for a while on the lip of the fountain in the square, looking at Michelangelo's dome and the dark metal doors and the pilgrims filing in and out. I had the thought then—strange for me—that, for the rest of my life I would try to come to Rome on vacations. I'd save up for fifty weeks, then make an annual pilgrimage to this place. The strangeness came from the fast transition—in my mind, at least—from provincial girl to world traveler and from the feeling, so strong, that here, in the heart of the heart of the Church's rules and regulations, those things didn't matter to me at all. What mattered was having a solid building, a temple, that served as an anchor for my inner wanderings. That was what St. Anthony's had always been. Now my world was larger.

I walked out of the square, found a place to have lunch, and surprised myself that I was able, so comfortably, to order pizza and a glass of wine and make small talk with the waiter.

From there I decided, rather than going back to the hotel, to have a second espresso and walk across the Tiber into the heart of Rome. I had brought along a map but had decided, in my typically stubborn fashion, that I'd do without a guidebook. I'd end up where I ended up, see what I was meant to see. And it worked out fine. There were churches, it seemed, on every other block, and, in stark contrast to the United States, all of them were open. The smaller ones stood with so little fanfare in a row of other buildings that I sometimes couldn't tell from the facades that they weren't banks, shops, or residential buildings. I stepped into three of them on that walk, and they were all magnificent—huge oil paintings on the walls, images of saints in golden frames, neat rows of pews, altars made of pink, yellow, brown, or white marble. I said a prayer in each of them and lit candles for my father and mother and grandmother and Father Alberto and Father Welch and Matilda, for the monsignor and the archbishop and for the Church, for anyone who was suffering on this earth. In each place I prayed that something would come of my visit, that I would have the courage to meet with this important man and say what I had to say. And that he would have the courage and good grace to listen.