Vatican Waltz (17 page)

“And you're like him?” Franco asked, gesturing to his son. “Religious?”

“Yes,” I said. “I pray a lot. It gives me great comfort. I can go to Mass without thinking about the bad aspects of the Church.”

Another grunt.

“In just the same way,” I went on, “that I can be an American and proud of my country without feeling connected to the bad things it has done in history. I take a more individual view of those things. There are good people and bad, everywhere, in all countries and all organizations. There is good and bad in everyone.”

Franco grunted again. He cut off a piece of sausage with his fork, chewed, washed it down with a gulp of wine.

“This is Franco's passion,” Lucia said. “His hobby. Some men watch soccer and argue in the bars about the different teams. He reads the newspaper, and anytime he meets a new person, after a while he starts to complain about the popes, the cardinals, and the priests. His son is a good boy, a fine young man, and all his father does is criticize the Church in his presence.”

“I said he was a good boy,” Franco said, looking at her. “Would you rather I get upset about soccer?”

There was a rough, teasing tone to their exchange, a kind of intimate banter. It was almost sexual, I thought, and I felt a twinge of envy, a quick, sad thought: I would never have someone to joke with that way.

“You used to work for the Vatican, didn't you?” I couldn't stop myself from asking.

He looked at his son instead of at me, and I wished I'd kept silent. “I did,” he admitted. “I was young. I needed a job. Like you and Bruno, I had a great respect for the Church, or for what I thought the Church was.”

“And you were disillusioned?”

A bark of harsh laughter escaped him. It reminded me of Monsignor Ferraponte's first response when I'd told him I was being called to the priesthood.
“Disincantato,”
he corrected. “Disenchanted.
Sì, disincantato.
Yes, because what I saw there, in the inner circles, had nothing to do with the love of Christ. Nothing.”

“Pope John XXIII seemed Christlike to me. Pope John Paul.”

He nodded vigorously and said,
“Sì, sì,”
before pouring himself more wine. “They were clean men wading across a river of filth.”

“That's a little strong, isn't it, Papa?” interjected Bruno.

Franco gave his son a stern look. “If you could see what I saw, you wouldn't say that.”

“I see some of it.”

“The higher up you go”—Franco swung his wine glass a bit too excitedly, splashing a few drops onto his sleeve—“the worse it is. Even the popes can't do some of the things they want to. It's like”—he turned back to me—“your president. He could be an honest man. I believe he is. But if your Congress is corrupt, if all they think about is power and money, then he will be in handcuffs. Am I right?”

“I don't really follow politics,” I said.

“A half answer.”

“Franco,” Lucia cut in. “Don't let the wine make you mean.” She turned to me. “It's because of me, his feelings about the Vatican.”

“Sure, because of you,” Franco said bitterly. “The Prince of Love, the religion of love, and when they have true love in the world, what happens? They bring out the rule book, like a lead pipe, and hit you over the head with it.”

“Now,” Father Bruno said to Lucia. “Now, I think, is the time for cake.”

She smiled and got up from the table, and when I made a move to follow she flapped a hand at me to stay. The silence that fell over us then was more than awkward; there were dissonant chords sounding in the sweet air, dark secrets and painful memories swooping and darting around the table like swallows at dusk. I wondered if Franco might still be bitter about my mother's leaving, still angry at my father for stealing her away. I wondered if she'd been forced to leave and if she'd seen, in my father, only someone who reminded her of her true love. Franco cradled his glass in both hands, staring at it, and I kept looking at him, wondering how much I could ask. He gave me an almost taunting lift of the eyebrows, as if to say: Go ahead! But for some reason, I don't know exactly why, to change the subject maybe, or to change the tone of the evening, or because I was afraid of what I might learn, I asked, “Does the word
‘grossetto'
mean anything to you? Is it an Italian word? Dialect?”

Franco lifted the corners of his lips into a bitter smile.
“Grossetto,”
he said, almost laughing. “Sure, it means something to me. It means ‘demon.' ”

“In dialect?”

Another snort of not very nice laughter.

“He is a cardinal,” Father Bruno put in. “Giovanni Grossetto. From Venice. Very conservative.”

“Conservative?” his father said, tossing the word the length of the table like a spear. “He's a demon. His people, the Lamb of God people, they're all demons. They want to turn the Church back to the time of the Crusades. Kill the infidels!” he shouted, spilling more wine and glaring at his son. “They'll come for you one day, you'll see. The way Mussolini's
fascisti
came for Moretti. They'll come for you, and then you'll understand that I was right.”

“It's not the wartime, Papa. And you were what? Five years old then?”

“Old enough to see and to hear,” Franco said, almost shouting now, speaking so loudly I was sure Lucia heard him inside the house. “Three of my cousins died in Africa in the war, for nothing. Two of my uncles were taken away and beaten.”

“Not by members of the Church,” Father Bruno said.

“No, but the Church stood by. The Church let him do what he did.
Il
duce.
They could have stopped him. Lamb of God is a mind-set that grew out of that other mind-set.”

“Out of fascism, Papa?”

“Of course out of fascism! The fascist mind-set is not limited to Mussolini, you know, or to Hitler. It's a kind of thinking, a way of looking at humanity. Us and Them. We're right, they're wrong, they're inferior, they're dangerous and poisonous and weak—so we'll eliminate them and then human life will be perfect.”

“Most Catholics don't have that mind-set.”

“Most Italians weren't fascists, either, Bruno. It doesn't take a majority to change a society, or a faith. Only a small minority that yells, threatens, kills, that is willing to do anything to prove to themselves that they're right.”

“Not this again, please,” Lucia said as she came out carrying a thin torte with diagonal strips of crust laid neatly over a layer of fruit. She cut slices of it and set them on plates in front of us. “Do we have to have this same argument every time we entertain guests for dinner?”

“It's all right,” I said. “It's fine. My father says some of the same things.”

“Your father says those same things because his father was taken away and he never saw him again,” Franco said. “Did he tell you that?”

“No, never.”

“That's why he left Italy. Another uncle took him, and he was smart to leave. Those kinds of things don't happen in America. You don't have a Vatican in America. You don't have this dance between the Church rulers and the people, this Vatican waltz, everything smooth, silky, refined…except that one of the partners is holding a knife behind the back of the other. And if the partner tries a new step, something different, creative, beautiful”—he made a thrust with one hand—“in it goes.”

“We've had our own troubles,” I said. “Different kinds of troubles. We have Lamb of God, too. I was close to a priest, an older man, a friend. He was hit by a car, and there are people who think it wasn't an accident.”

“It wasn't,” Franco said confidently. “I can tell you from this chair, here, in Italy, ten thousand kilometers away, that it was no accident.”

I noticed that when the jug of wine was empty, Lucia carried it into the house but didn't refill it and bring it out again. Instead she reappeared with a pot of coffee, poured four cups, and we drank it with the torte—a succulent
dolce
, all butter and sugar and slices of apricot.

“Are we finished now?” she asked pleasantly, looking at Franco.

“She asked about Grossetto,” Franco said.

“Grossetto,” Lucia said to me, “Franco is convinced that Grossetto had Pope John Paul I killed.”

“Killed?”

“Poisoned. He was about to start an investigation into the Vatican Bank. Grossetto controlled the bank and wanted, himself, to be pope. Many people believe this.”

I was speechless for a moment. It was an idea straight out of a script for
The
Godfather, Part III.
A fantasy, I'd always thought. A Hollywood convenience. “Is that really possible?”

Franco laughed, bitterly. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry you came here and had your nice notions broken up into pieces. You have a true relationship with Christ, anyone can see that. Bruno has that. Lucia and I have that, though maybe you're not seeing it tonight in me. The best thing is to hold on to that and forget all the rest of it. Forget the pope. Forget Rosario and Grossetto and all that shit. Religion is like, forgive me, it's like what you do with a loved one in the bedroom. Beautiful but private. You don't invite the other people into that world. You don't need regulations and rules to govern your feelings there.”

“Enough,” Lucia said. “Look, you're embarrassing her. Enough now.” She reached across the corner of the table and put a hand on my arm. “Is there anything you especially want to see in Italy? We can arrange for you to see the Sistine Chapel, privately, if you want to get up early. Franco still has connections there, with the tour guides and so on. Would you like that?”

“Of course, yes,” I said. “Bruno recommended I see Santa Maria in Trastevere, and I did, and it was just wonderful. I feel I could go back there a hundred days in a row. I'd be happy to have a job there, mopping the floors. I've never seen a church like that.”

“That's what I mean,” Franco said. “That's the bedroom. You go into that building and you have intimacy, real intimacy with God. You don't need Mass for that. You don't need the cardinals and the rules.”

“But without the Vatican, that place would cease to exist,” Bruno said. “You can't just have religious feeling with no structure.”

“Stop, please,” his father said. “I hear the word ‘Vatican,' and my digestion goes bad.”

Another painful silence followed. I started to do Father Alberto's Prayer of Giving for the man sitting to my right.

“Do you have a lover?” Lucia asked. “A boyfriend?”

For the smallest moment I had the sense that she might be trying to fix me up with Bruno. I was too embarrassed to look at him, and I think he felt the same way. “I wonder sometimes,” I said, “if I push men away. Something about me likes my solitary world so much that when they show an interest in me I step back.”

“That will change,” she said. “I can see in your face that you will be a wife and mother.”

“She predicts the future,” Franco said. “And more often than not she's right.”

“Maybe it will be an Italian man,” Lucia suggested.

I couldn't find any response to that. I was blushing again. I felt painfully young.

For a little while then the conversation faltered. We sipped our coffee and looked around the shadowed yard, and then we took refuge in talk about the weather—drought, humidity, the beauty of a New England snowstorm. It was a way of sewing up the ragged torn cloth of our night together, but I found myself thinking the whole time about marriage and motherhood. Somehow—and this was strange—even with Franco's wine-fueled talk I could sense the bond of love between him and Lucia. He felt perfectly free to spout off in her presence, and she felt perfectly free to reprimand him. And that rough, honest love and her remark about seeing my future—it raised a welt of self-pity in me, a longing, an absence.

At last Lucia stood up, and I helped her carry the dishes into the kitchen, offered to help wash them, complimented her on the meal three times. She apologized for Franco—“His bitterness has strong roots” was the way she put it—hugged and kissed me warmly, said, “I hope we will see you here again.”

It was dark outside by then, a few stars sparkling above the valley and a ribbon of headlights and taillights running below us like a red-and-white river.

Franco stood up, somewhat unsteadily, and at the door of the van surprised me by taking both my hands and kissing me first on one cheek, then on the other. “I like you,” he said. “Bruno's a religious person. You're a religious person. Maybe I will reconsider one day and start going to Mass again.”

“Come and visit my father, he'd enjoy that.”

“No, no,” Franco said. “He left us. We didn't leave him. He must come back here before he dies.”

“I'll try to convince him.”

I got into the van, waved another good-bye. Bruno drove us along the driveway, down the dirt road, and as far as the highway before he spoke. “He embarrasses me,” he said, “but many of the things he says are correct.”

“I can tell he loves you. He reminds me of my father. Gruff, but you can sense the tenderness below.”

“Very far below,” Bruno said, laughing somewhat sadly.

“That woman isn't your mother.”

“No,” he said. “My mother left, long ago. Found another man, one who didn't work so many hours. Lucia is my father's girlfriend. She's lived in the house for more than twenty years, since I was a small boy. She's been like a mother to me, a good woman. My father's anger toward the Church comes in part from his love of her, because when my mother left, the Church forbade him from getting married again and so he was caught between obedience to the laws of the Church and obedience to the law of his heart.”