Vatican Waltz (15 page)

“I know the woman who owns this hotel. Claudia Maniscalco is her name. It used to be a true palazzo. Her family let it go into disrepair, and she moved back from Milano to oversee the renovations.”

He opened the door onto a room that was something out of a futuristic universe. The chairs were curved pieces of thin black metal, cushionless. The bed was huge and round. On the walls hung framed posters of American movie stars—Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Jayne Mansfield.

“Is okay?” he asked, in English.

“Yes, beautiful,” I said, though really, it was almost clownish to my eye. Expensive-looking, half absurd. It fit me about as well as a miniskirt or a garish tattoo.

He set my bags to one side of the bed, and then, as if he'd been pondering his response for half an hour, he said, “This is something we talk about often, my friends and I. Not so much about women becoming priests as men priests being able to marry and have a family. And we talk about the fact that even here, even in Italy, people do not take the Church seriously the way they once did. There are some elements within the Church, here and in other places in Europe, that are dangerous now, I think. The people in those groups are like a wounded animal. They can see what is happening. They see that they are no longer taken so seriously, that people are leaving the Church, that the young people are laughing at it. It hurts them, makes them angry, makes them afraid. Normal feelings. But what they do with those feelings is very bad. They begin to see those other people, those who do not go to Mass, those who were baptized and then left the Church, or those within the Church, like you, who are trying to change it, they see them as enemies, as the Devil, or under the influence of the Devil, and once they see a person that way, he ceases to become a full person, and then they can do anything to him, or to her. Anything at all. This is why I worry about you now.”

The long oration seemed to have been percolating inside him for years, and was connected, I thought, to the sadness I'd noticed in his face from the first minute. The emotion of it brought his sleepy dark eyes to life, and I saw a resemblance to my father there, just a flash of it.

“We talk about this,” he went on, “but we talk about it quietly, in secret, usually with only our closest friends. It is a little bit like living in Communist Russia a generation ago.”

“I should just go home now,” I said, thinking of facing my father with my head hanging, thinking of the questions he'd ask and the answers I'd have to give. “I should just let things be as they are and live the life I was living.”

“You could do that,” he said, “yes. But you are in Rome, you are in Italy. You should at least enjoy yourself. Rest now. Tonight I will come take you to dinner at my father's house, but tomorrow there are places you must see. Your Italian is so good, you'll have no trouble. One place you must see is a church, a very special church. It is called Santa Maria in Trastevere. I can make you a small map.” He took a pen from his breast pocket and, using a pad of paper that sat next to the telephone on a stylish black bureau, drew me a simple map with the river and main streets and told me I could walk to the church in probably twenty minutes, or he could drive me there now, on his way back to work.

I was suddenly worn out. I thanked him but said I wanted to rest. He wrote his phone number on the bottom of the pad of paper and said that if I needed anything, anything at all, if there was any kind of problem, I should be sure to call him. Then he hugged me against him and left in a way that seemed hurried, as if our quick embrace in a hotel room had made him uncomfortable or as if he didn't fully trust me with what he'd revealed.

I lay down on the circular mattress and stared at the ceiling, which had been painted a dark purple to resemble the night sky. I thought of Laura Annila and I understood her a little better then: if you stayed in your familiar world, if you didn't ask too much from life, if you didn't try to push a boyfriend to marry you or a cardinal to change the rules, you protected yourself from a certain level of pain. There would be unavoidable disappointments—arguments, illness—but not very much in the way of failure. You could blame your disappointments on fate or bad luck, the unfairness of class or race or gender; failures, though, would be all your own.

I decided—Father Alberto had recommended this for especially difficult times—to do the Prayer of Giving for myself. I pretended I was outside myself, looking on with the loving eyes of my grandmother, and I breathed in the pain I was feeling and filtered it through that love, and breathed it out again as something else—determination, forgiveness, acceptance. For the first few minutes it seemed a foolish exercise, something forced and false. But I kept at it, as Father had advised me to, and in time, inch by inch, I pulled myself out of the muddy swamp of defeat. Your will, not my will, I said. Your will, not mine. Over and over again until a different kind of hypnosis took hold. Bad, good, neutral—things happened the way they were supposed to happen; it didn't mean I shouldn't have tried. I couldn't know what might come of that trying, what seed of doubt I might have planted in the cardinal's mind, what tiny bit of support Father Bruno and his friends might feel from knowing someone else had made an effort.

I decided, after praying for a long while, prone, on the ridiculous circular bed, that moping around the hotel all afternoon was a bad idea. I would go and see the church Bruno had recommended. Being in a church always gave me a sense of calm, always seemed to take my life and shift it out from under its cascade of thoughts. So many of those thoughts were useless, or even counterproductive, a waste of energy. Most of them had to do with worrying about things that couldn't be changed, or hoping things would turn out a certain way. I had been able, for one example, to almost completely give up thinking about becoming someone's wife one day. It might happen. Even in the midst of my strenuous attempt to become a priest, I still hoped it would happen. But I didn't worry about it any longer. In that one section of my life, at least, I had turned my hopes over to God. If the right man came along, at the right time, if he asked me to marry him, if I loved him, if I thought we could make a nice family together and live in harmony, that would be exciting and fine. If not, it would be God's will, and I knew I could accept it.

An attitude like that wasn't the same as passivity. It was activity within a bubble of a certain size. If God decided to let that bubble break open and allow me to move out beyond it into the larger sphere of married women and men, that would be wonderful. If not, I had to continue to do everything I could within the confines of my present life. I wanted to feel the same way about pursuing the priesthood. That bubble seemed to have a very thick skin. I felt as though I'd been punching and kicking against it from the inside, trying to break a hole through it, and on that day it had become clear to me that the job would remain unfinished. And yet, despite all my prayers, I wasn't truly at peace with that.

I got up off the round bed and walked out into the courtyard, down the gravel drive, and through the tall front gate, and I felt the residue of the morning's disappointment like a weight on my neck and shoulders. Beginning to shift and rearrange itself beneath that weight, though—and I could feel this, too—was my conviction that the world spun the way its Creator wanted it to spin and that the secret of happiness was to align ourselves with His will. Going to a church always made me remember that. And I was hungry, on top of everything else.

A meal, I thought, a good meal, an hour in a beautiful church, and the weight would begin to seem bearable.

Just outside the gates of what I'd come to think of as the Old Palace Hotel was a very busy four-lane road and, on the other side of it, the Tiber River. In that part of the city the river was sunk thirty or forty feet below the level of the street, with rocky banks and stone walls rising up on either side. As I crossed a marble bridge there—flat, loud with traffic, decorated with carved angels—I noticed a man rowing along in a racing shell like the ones I sometimes saw on the Charles River. He was going fast, facing backward, working very hard, his efforts marked by small circular puddles where the blades of his oars left the water. For a few seconds after each stroke the circular puddles remained visible behind the boat in two neat rows, shrinking. Then, like impossible hopes, like twins with short identical lives, they disappeared.

On the far side of the river I saw a rat squeezing its body down between the bars of a sewer grate.

Glancing from time to time at Father Bruno's simple map, I followed a route that was positively wild with motorbikes, motorcycles, delivery trucks, and speeding cars. There was one brave soul juggling bowling pins at a stoplight—right in the middle of the street. I watched him for a moment—he dropped one pin, laughed at himself, collected donations—and then I went on, eventually turning onto a half-sunken lane and finding myself in a different part of Rome. This neighborhood was loud with traffic noise, too, but there were more pedestrians hurrying along the narrow slanted sidewalks. They carried briefcases or pushed strollers and didn't seem to be tourists. The neighborhood had a feeling of homey oldness; a sign on one worn stone house said
casa di Dante
.

I walked on, passing several small restaurants, until I came to one that seemed right, and I went in and was seated at a table among a crowd of Italians enjoying their midday meal. The waitress greeted me, handed me a menu in hard black covers. Opening it I saw that there were twenty or thirty different kinds of pasta listed under
primi
piatti
. When she came again, she brought bottled water, bread, and olive oil in a shallow dish, and I ordered something I'd never eaten before—spaghetti in oxtail gravy. I asked for a glass of wine, too.

The wine was light and delicious, and the tomato gravy had actual pieces of oxtail in it; I was surprised how much taste that little bit of bone and meat added. The bread was slightly salty with a hard crust, the pasta perfectly
al
dente
. As I drank and chewed, I looked around the small room at the tables and chairs crowded close together, Italian couples and families at various stages of their meals. Ordinary life, I thought. Decent, ordinary life with its patches of fun and worry. Unlike the one American in their midst, these people weren't trying to change anything, weren't pushing hard against the inside of any bubble, weren't radicals, troublemakers, or fools.

But as I had hoped it would, the meal turned that line of thought in a slightly more positive direction. I thanked the waitress and then, after some wandering around the alleys and narrow streets, cars squeezing past so close I could have readjusted their side mirrors with a swing of my hips, I found the church Father Bruno had marked on his map. Santa Maria in Trastevere, it was called. It was set in an uneven, sloping square with a fountain in the middle. The square was a less trendy version of Campo de' Fiori, and the church was, at least from the outside, much less grand than St. Peter's. Between the plain gray columns out front and the chipped wooden entrance doors, a Gypsy boy, three or four years old, was kicking an empty plastic suntan lotion bottle back and forth as if it were a soccer ball. A woman who appeared to be his mother was half kneeling, half sitting on the pavement, holding an infant against her chest, one cupped hand extended. I put a five-euro coin in her palm, and the woman, so beautiful with her black hair and coppery skin, looked up and smiled. Just before I turned away from her, I saw that the infant wrapped in the folds of her dress was actually a doll.

To either side of the front doors irregular-sized chunks of white marble had been embedded in the concrete walls. There were letters cut into the worn surfaces, Greek or Latin, I guessed, no doubt thousands of years old. Inside, I needed a few seconds to let my eyes adjust. Thick stone columns stood to either side of the nave, though, strangely, they were all slightly different from one another—different type of stone, somewhat different color and shape—as if they'd been salvaged from four or five broken-up churches and combined there to make something new. There were plain brown pews that looked a thousand years older than the ones in St. Anthony's and orange, pink, brown, and white marble tiles set into the floor—triangles, rectangles, odd chunks arranged in circular patterns. It all seemed so smoky and used, so far from the sparkling neatness and bright lights of St. Anthony's and so far outside the orbit of attention St. Peter's occupied. But when I stepped toward the middle of the nave and looked at the altar, I saw that the shabbiness of the front of the building was just another disguise. Behind the marble altar stood a crescent of a dozen brown wooden chairs like the ones you'd expect to see bishops sitting in at Easter Mass, and above them was a fresco, all arms and faces, the scene interrupted by two windows with winged figures around them. Above that, two-thirds of the way to the ceiling, an incredible mosaic ran all the way to the top of the curved dome.

Midway up was a wide band that had a line of sheep in it, six to each side. Above the band were nine human figures, with Jesus and Mary at the center, both of them seated, bracketed by apostles to either side, all of it against a background of thousands of tiny gold tiles. I had a feeling similar to what I'd felt in front of the
Pietà
: I didn't really need to see the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, the Forum. God sparkled in those ancient chips of color and was singing to me through them. That was enough. That might sound like an immature thing to say, an idea born of a few minutes' excitement, but I suddenly had the sense that the real purpose of coming to Rome hadn't been to convince the cardinal or make a pilgrimage to St. Peter's, but to see this church.

I genuflected and walked up the aisle and noticed that, in the part of the mosaic that covered the curved half bowl of the apse, Jesus had his arm around his mother. They were sitting close together, his head a foot or so above hers, their bodies wrapped in robes. You could clearly see his thin fingers resting on her opposite shoulder. That, I thought, that was my Jesus. Not the tortured man hanging from nails on a cross, not the strict young future rabbi turning over tables in the temple, but an ordinary-looking, loving man, the embodiment of God, giving his mother an embrace that seemed to say, there is no distinction here, she and I are made of the same stuff.