Vatican Waltz (14 page)

“I have never had those messages, daughter.”

“But if you did, and if you became convinced that they were genuine, wouldn't it be wrong to fail to act on them?”

Cardinal Rosario pondered the question for a few seconds, his body very still, his eyes resting on me in a way that was cool but not unkind. “Placed against the rules set down by Christ himself,” he said, “what are such messages worth?”

“What rules?”

“His own choice of priests.”

“But he had no priests then, Your Eminence.”

“Of”—the cardinal turned to Father Clement, spoke a few words in Italian, and the priest said, “close associates.”

“Mary Magdalene,” I said. “Martha. His own mother. Weren't those women precious to him?”

“All the people are precious to him.”

“Can't it be said that the cultural standards of his time and those of our time are different in terms of the role of women?”

He shook his head. “The faith,” he said, and again he turned to Father Clement for a word and the young priest supplied it. “The faith is timeless.”

“Of course, Your Eminence. But over the past twenty centuries the rules of the Church have changed, they've evolved according to custom and the society's evolution.”

“Nelle piccole cose,”
the cardinal said. “In small things.”

“But there have been many people who effected changes. The story of Saint Clare of Assisi—I was named after her…my middle name. Saint Agnes of Rome was an example of going against the mores of the time, a voice for the equality of men and women. Saint Teresa of Ávila was such a powerful figure. Saint Catherine of Siena, who returned the papacy to Rome.”

The cardinal was nodding. For the smallest moment I thought I might actually be persuading him with my short list of historical precedents. “Have you ever,” he asked in Italian, “performed what could be considered a miracle?”

“Not really,” I said. “No, I don't think so.”

“You hesitated before answering.”

“I…I'm in training to be a nurse, as I said. There have been a few times when it seemed as if I could change a patient's condition by touching him or her.”

“Bring the patient back to life?”

“I don't think so. I'm not sure. There was one time when that might have happened, but it might have had nothing to do with me.”

He nodded, studied me.

“I'm not…I haven't come here, Your Eminence, to talk about me.”

“You very much care for the Church,” he suggested.

“Yes, I do, Your Eminence, very much. And in my part of the world, she is dying.”

“Ah,” he said, as if my part of the world didn't count for much.

“I am not a radical in any sense of that word. I'm the farthest thing from a troublemaker, you have to believe me.”

“And yet at home, I understand,” he said, “you have caused there to be some trouble. With your monsignor.”

My eyes shifted to Father Clement. It seemed to me that, with the mention of Monsignor Ferraponte, the young priest's neck and face had started trembling; the heavy frames of his eyeglasses were moving in small jumps. I couldn't tell if he was angry, embarrassed, surprised, or frustrated, but he seemed to me to be making an effort to keep the cardinal from seeing his reaction. A chess game, Father Bruno had said, but it was more like poker, and I'd proven to be terrible at poker the two or three times I'd played. In cases where there was even a small bit of deceit or secrecy involved, even for the purposes of a game, I'd always been a miserable failure. I couldn't bluff. I didn't know when other people were bluffing, manipulating, working a strategy.

Once he was mentioned, though, I sat there wondering if it might have been Monsignor Ferraponte who'd actually arranged this meeting or if the monsignor and the archbishop had done it together, for their own mysterious purposes, and I'd wandered into some kind of Lamb of God trap, the consequences of which I could not even begin to imagine.

“If I caused him to be upset,” I was able to say out of the depths of my surprise, “it was not from any malice.” The cardinal's trimmed eyebrows lifted at the word. Father Clement explained it in two syllables of Italian. “Or any disrespect.”

Cardinal Rosario pursed his lips. “Did your spiritual director perform the holy sacrifice in a state of mortal sin?”

“Father Welch?” I asked. “I don't know.”

“Ah. But he has left the priesthood, no?”

“I don't know, Your Eminence. I think the archbishop intended that to happen, yes. And I think calling him my spiritual director isn't really accurate. I simply went to Mass at his church and went to him for confession. We had some conversations, we—”

“Perhaps he was using you to justify his own mortal sins.”

“I don't know, I don't think so. And I don't know that he committed any sin.”

“Ah. And do we judge that to ourselves, what a sin is?”

“I believe the Lord has given us a conscience to decide such things, yes. And I believe Father Welch is a good man.”

“Yes, daughter, He has given us a conscience, and He has also given us the rules of the Church in order to guide that conscience, in order to be sure that conscience is not confusing itself.”

“With all respect, Your Eminence, I haven't come here to discuss Father Welch. And I haven't come here to get anything for myself. Becoming a priest would give me nothing in the way of material things or a better living situation, and I don't care at all about status. I just feel that my Church is dying, and I believe that, in the depth of my prayer, Christ is asking me to help keep it alive. We're losing good priests, fine men like Father Welch, and there are thousands and millions of good women who love God as much as you and I do and who are kept from serving their Church in the most essential way, commemorating Christ's last night on Earth. I came here not to hurt anyone, certainly not to offend you. It's a long way for me to come. It would have been so much easier for me to stay home, live my life, pray, go to Mass. I've mentioned a few historical precedents, but I'd ask you now, as a Catholic to another Catholic, one soul to another, I ask you only to consider beginning a process that could change the rules about who can serve as a parish priest and who cannot. Please believe me, Your Eminence, I don't do this for my own ego or even my own wishes.”

Cardinal Rosario watched me, unmoved and unmoving. Except for the ticking of a clock on the wall behind me, the room was completely silent. It seemed then, for just a second or two, that he was looking at me as if he were an ordinary man, untitled, unrobed. Some green shoot of possibility seemed to be sprouting on the table between us: speeded-up time-lapse photography of one impossible hope.

But then he said, “Parish priests become the bishop. Bishops become the archbishop. Archbishops become the cardinal. The cardinal maybe, one day, becomes the pope.”

“I'm not asking for women cardinals, Your Eminence.”

“Not now, no.”

“I'm asking for the Church to consider a change that would very likely invigorate her around the world.”

Cardinal Rosario turned his head halfway in the direction of Father Clement.

“Invigorire,”
I said, before the priest, who seemed momentarily distracted, could translate.

The cardinal nodded as if he'd known the word, but had wanted to be sure. “You breathe in and then out,” he said, lifting one hand from the table and swinging it away and then back toward him. “The Church in various places at various times passes through periods of favor and disfavor. History makes those periods. Inside them, our Church,” he held his hands apart as if holding a ball, “grows larger and smaller, more popular and less popular. But she doesn't change.”

“I ask you,” I said, “I plead with you, Your Eminence, only to raise this issue at the next convocation of the cardinals, only to do that.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head sadly. Then he started to speak in quick, quiet tones to Father Clement, as if the meeting had already ended and I had been dismissed. “Cardinal Rosario,” Father Clement said, blinking in his nervous way, “sees in you a good woman. And he respects the recommendation of his friend Archbishop Menendez. Truly respects it. But he says that what you're asking of him is simply not possible, and with respect for you and admiration for your faith, he declines.”

“No hope, then?” I said. “Could we meet once more?”

Father Clement translated the question but did not need to translate the answer. The cardinal was moving his head side to side, eyes down, the second finger of his right hand tapping on the top of the left. His eyes came up to me, and he said, “My good daughter, be very careful now here on such a path like this. There are people here who, if they don't see you as I see you, would form the wrong opinion and perhaps wish you harm.”

And with that, before I could say anything else, the cardinal blessed me with the sign of the cross and stood and turned away.

I stood also. Father Clement held the door for the cardinal, and as he was doing so, as I was beginning to feel a whole city of hope breaking apart inside me, the bespectacled priest turned almost a hundred eighty degrees and looked at me. Cardinal Rosario was going out the door and couldn't see him. Father Clement had so much pain in his face I thought for a moment that he was going to ask my forgiveness. He seemed desperately to want to say something. I thought I saw him try to speak or smile, but his lips only wobbled and his forehead pinched up like that of a man about to weep. And then he closed the door almost all the way and I listened to their footsteps, out of time with each other, fading in the tile corridor.

I WAS LEFT ALONE IN
the conference room. I sat back down and waited there for probably five or six minutes in a kind of daze, expecting someone to come and escort me to the street. The door had been left slightly ajar, and finally I heard sounds in the hallway—voices, passing footsteps—and I made myself stand and go down the stairs and walk out of the building. It seemed strange that they would let me leave unaccompanied, because the whole place—the twelve-foot ceilings, the tile corridor with its dark, heavy-looking doors and huge gold-framed portraits of popes, cardinals, and Church patrons—had a mysterious feeling to it, as if secret work were being done in those closed conference rooms and offices. I retraced my steps along the corridor, down the white marble stairway, past the man at the glassless window with his ledger book sitting open in front of him. He might or might not have acknowledged me; I didn't notice. I was wrapped up tight in a skin of depression, something so rare in my life that for those few minutes I almost felt as though another woman had occupied my body.

I remember stepping out into the air—which seemed suddenly so much warmer than when I'd arrived—and thinking that some message about me must have been sent down to the man in the outdoor booth because he seemed to have been watching for me and he looked at me as if I were an enemy who'd managed to find her way inside the gated compound. She needed to be observed carefully to make sure she left without stealing a gold ornament or spray-painting obscene messages on the wall. Keeping a distance of six or eight feet between our bodies, he escorted me past the Swiss guards and through the huge open gate, then stood there as if to make sure I wouldn't try to rush back in.

I waited on the sidewalk, half hypnotized. Father Bruno hadn't yet come to fetch me, and I realized with a great sweep of sadness that I'd been in the building only about twenty minutes. All that money—my father's and my own—all that effort and trouble: the difficult half hour with Monsignor Ferraponte, the slightly hopeful conversation with Archbishop Menendez, all those talks with Father Alberto and Father Welch, the books I'd read, the hours of prayer in which I'd felt so personally addressed by God, the sting of leaving my father behind—in the span of twenty minutes all of it had been turned to ash.

When Father Bruno drove up, when I climbed into the passenger seat of the van and he started off, I burst into tears and wept the way I hadn't wept for as long as I could remember. My chin was resting on my chest; the tears dripped into the lap of my dress, making spots there the size and color of raisins. I felt like an absolute and perfect fool. Father Bruno reached a hand across and rested it lightly on my back.

We went only a few blocks and then, in the great Italian tradition of food as medicine, he stopped at a small café—more illegal parking—and told me I had to go in with him, stand at the bar, and have an espresso. We did that. No conversation, just the white china cups with a red line around the top, the hot dose of sugary caffeine, the company of a few strangers and a barista named Gino with waxed curls at the tips of his moustache.

Back in the van, Bruno said, “A woman like you going into a building like that. How could you come out happy? Am I wrong?”

“I don't know. Not wrong. No.”

He asked me to tell him what the meeting had been about, and I felt then that I had nothing to lose, that there was no hope, no possibility of any good outcome now. I couldn't feel more foolish than I already felt, so I gave him the story, start to finish.

He made no response. It seemed to me that he was pretending to concentrate on the driving, whereas on the two other trips we'd taken, he hadn't given the road more than half his attention. At last he said, “I have your things in back. I packed up everything and moved you out of the hotel, and they gave me a fifty percent refund. I found you a much nicer place.”

“Please keep the money,” I said. “For gas. For your time.”

“I used it to pay part of the bill at the new hotel.”

Without saying anything else, he drove across the river into a pretty, residential section of the city and pulled up at another tall wrought-iron gate in front of what looked to be a small palace. The building was made of white limestone, with at least a dozen windows in the front wall and several balconies where, in a romantic movie, in another era, a young prince and princess might have sat enjoying a carafe of wine on a September afternoon. The grounds were planted with shrubs and small trees, all of them past bloom and waiting, in an orderly silence, for the start of winter. Bruno lifted my bags out of the back of the van, pushed a button that made the gate swing open, and carried them down a gravel driveway, one in each hand. A courtyard huddled there, shaded by trees and a grape arbor. Several rear doors opened onto it. He led me through one of them and, at an interior door, took a key from his pocket.