Vatican Waltz (18 page)

“Lots of people are in that situation,” I said.

He said, “Yes, I agree,” with such sadness that I decided he must have a lover or must have given up someone he loved when he entered the priesthood. But I felt he'd been embarrassed and bruised enough for one night, so I kept quiet and watched the dark hillsides sweep past.

When Bruno dropped me off at the gates to the hotel, I thanked him twice, reached out and took his hand and squeezed it, and climbed out of the van. I noticed that he waited to drive away until I'd gone through the tall gates and as far as the end of the driveway.

WITH EVERYTHING THAT HAD HAPPENED
during that day, the late-night visit at the hotel, the disappointing conversation with Cardinal Rosario, the wonderful hour in Santa Maria, my half-crazed chasing of the tall man, the strange but enjoyable meal at Franco and Lucia's—it should not have been a good night for prayer. But occasionally the mind exhausts itself, running in circles, chasing happiness, grasping onto this tremor of fear and that splinter of insult, and if you let it, sometimes it will just grow tired of that and be quiet, like a little child who's run around the yard for most of an afternoon, then falls asleep in the flower bed.

I was still on American time and tired, but the child of my mind was still running, so I propped a pillow against the headboard of the circular bed and sat there with my eyes closed and my hands folded, asking for guidance.

As I often did, I prayed for the souls of my mother and grandmother and for Father Alberto, and for the health and well-being of my father. I prayed, too, that night, for Father Bruno, who seemed, like his father, to be caught between his feelings for the Church and his feelings for another human being. I prayed for Cardinal Rosario and the priest in the meeting, for Father Welch, Archbishop Menendez, Monsignor Ferraponte, my Aunt Chiara. In that hour, at least, it wasn't so difficult to accept the idea that God has His plans and ways, that there is an element of surrender involved in the true spiritual path, and that surrendering to God's will often involves pain. I had, I told myself, been practicing that surrender my whole life.

Eventually I sank down, beyond all thinking, beyond what seemed to me a vague vision of my own future troubles, and into a quiet place where I rested for a long time. In that place, my disappointment, worry, and sadness amounted to specks of dust on an impossibly large mosaic. I saw, as if they were set up before my eyes, the billions of lives in that mosaic—long and short, famous and anonymous, satisfied and miserable—there were countless connections among those souls, countless secrets, an abundance of love and trouble. All of it arranged just so in the endless, unfathomable universe. A complexity like that had to have been put into motion by some Grand Designer. To my mind, in that hour of prayer, it seemed clear that our response to that grand design should be a life of obedience, but not the strict, narrow-minded obedience of the Lamb of God people. The obedience I was thinking of was more difficult than that; it was an insistence on compassion and an acceptance of our true calling on this earth, whatever pain that acceptance might hold.

As I came slowly out of the prayer, I said one Hail Mary, then took off my clothes and lay down to sleep. In the absurd round bed, amid the swirl of a million possibilities, I tried to keep my mind fixed on the image of Jesus' arm around his mother's shoulders. Only that.

Breakfast was included with the price of a room at the Old Palace Hotel and was served on a second-floor balcony that overlooked the front yard's fruit trees and flowering bushes. Strong coffee with hot milk. A creamy coconut yogurt. Cheese, salami, bread, a pear nectar I liked so much I promised myself I'd find a store at home that stocked it and buy a case. From my seat at a round metal table for two I had a view down over the tops of the lemon and fig trees, across the busy road, across the river, over the roofs of some low buildings, and as far as the dome of St. Peter's. As I ate I found myself listening to a conversation of two couples at one of the other tables. They were talking about taking a trip to Assisi that day, and I had to restrain myself from asking if I could tag along. Two hours each way, I heard one of the men say. But the conversation and the sparkle of excitement I felt about being that close to the birthplace of two of the greatest saints, Francis and Clare, was like a layer of makeup over badly flawed skin. As fascinating as Italy was, the churches, the food, the ruins, and as much as I wanted to see the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel, I hadn't come to Rome to be a tourist; I'd had a purpose. Foolishly, I'd expected there to be some kind of ongoing conversation with people in the Church hierarchy. A series of meetings, maybe. A movement of sympathetic cardinals and clergy. The movement would come to the attention of the pope. Maybe we'd even have an audience.

It had been a fantasy, of course, I saw that clearly now. Egotistical, too. But I'd been so convinced of the authenticity of the visions, so sure that the messages came directly from God, that it was hard for me to believe I'd gotten one “no” and the case was closed.

I was sitting there with my refilled coffee cup and swirling disappointments when Claudia, the woman in charge of the hotel, stepped out onto the balcony. From the moment Father Bruno had introduced us, she'd been intimidating to me. Tall, trim, elegant, a perfectly proportioned face, black hair held back to show gold earrings studded with what looked like emeralds—deep down, in some hidden compartment of my thoughts, I had to admit that she was the kind of woman I wished, in another life, that I might be. Her English was nearly perfect. There was something regal about her. When I'd spoken to her, checking in, she told me the palazzo had been in her family for five generations.

In her right hand she held a cream-colored envelope. She greeted her guests with a cheery
buongiorno,
then came over to my table and handed me the envelope, keeping two fingers on my shoulder and smiling in a playful way. “Very early this morning a mysterious stranger stopped by and left this for you,” she said quietly. She seemed amused, as if enjoying her role as a matchmaker. She gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze and went back inside.

The cream-colored envelope reminded me very much of the letter I'd received from Cardinal Rosario, except that my name, “
Sig. Cinzia Piantedosi,”
was printed in pencil in block letters on the front, not typed, and there was no return address. I thought Claudia had been joking about the mysterious stranger and that what I held in my hand was only a gesture she was making to soften the shock of the hotel's high rates. A ticket to a show or a museum. A coupon for a half-price dinner. I thought for some reason that I might be going to hear Andrea Boccelli perform—something Father Bruno had set up as a way of taking the sting out of the previous day's rejection.

I slid the blade of a clean butter knife under the flap. Inside was a single sheet of stationery, folded in thirds. On the top half of the page someone had printed three words in pencil, all the letters lower case:

martino zossimo genova

It made no sense.

I set it on the table and puzzled over the words. Claudia reappeared, pouring coffee, and, after hesitating a moment, I asked her what they meant. She glanced at the sheet of paper for all of two seconds before telling me, “Martino Zossimo. A cardinal in the Church. Famous man.”

“And Genova?”

“That is the city. ‘Genoa,' you say in English.”

“Who brought it, do you know?”

She shrugged, smiled, a socialite used to romantic intrigues. “A young man,” she said. “He came very early and sounded the bell.”

“Very tall?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Brown glasses? Heavyset?”

She shook her head a second time, pleasantly, noncommittally. She squeezed my shoulder again, in encouragement it seemed. “Young men can be very attentive here.”

When Claudia left me, I took the letter into my hands and pondered it. The writing was irregular and ungrammatical enough to have come from the man who'd been following me—he seemed, somehow, to know my name—but what kind of message was he trying to send? If it was from Father Bruno, he would have written a regular note or spoken to me in person. I thought for some reason of the priest Father Clement, who'd been translating for the cardinal. I knew that he'd wanted to say something there at the end, but how had he found out where I was staying? Why was he writing in code? And the description of the mysterious stranger didn't fit him.

I wondered if it was Father Clement's way of going behind the cardinal's back. Or if it was the cardinal's way of doing what he felt he couldn't do in public. Or if it was some kind of trick.

Martino Zossimo. Genova.

Martino Zossimo. Genova. So strange, that name seemed half familiar, I couldn't say why.

I CALLED BRUNO AND, WITHOUT
telling him about the message, asked if I could take him to lunch. I owed him for all his help with the hotel situation, I said, for driving me around the city, for introducing me to his family and treating me to such a fine supper. The least I could do was buy him lunch.

“Of course,” he surprised me by saying. “That would be very nice. After last night I thought you'd never want to see me again.”

WHEN BRUNO PULLED THE VAN
up in front of the gates, I told him I wanted to take him to his favorite restaurant, no matter how expensive it was. “I have plenty of money,” I said, “and no one to spend it on but myself.”

He paused only a moment before saying, “Vecchia Roma, then. It's in a neighborhood we still call the Jewish Ghetto, though there haven't been a lot of Jews here since the war.”

“Did Mussolini send them to the camps the way Hitler did?”

“Not with so much enthusiasm. There was no shortage of bad Italians in those days. Still, Mussolini refused to send them to Germany, and even later, after he was gone, many Jews were saved.”

“I was interested in what your father said about the years of fascism. My father never talks about it.”

“They were young boys,” Father Bruno said. We were stopped at a red light, and two men had rushed out to wash the windshield, sponging and drying it in seconds and accepting a tip with an accented
grazie.
Father Bruno said two words to them in what I assumed was Albanian. As he zigged and zagged in the traffic again, he said, “Young boys, but they saw and heard many things. About Mussolini, the Germans, the war. Mussolini twisted so many minds.” He paused, hit the brakes, tapped the horn, went on as if there had been no interruption. “That seems to happen in different places at different times, don't you think so? It's as if an idea infects a population and the infection is spread by some charismatic man with an enormous ego. My father was right: not everyone in the population gets sick, but enough people do to change the direction of a country, and sometimes of the whole world.”

He nodded as if agreeing with himself. He reminded me of Franco then—the passion, at least, not the anger. “A country, a family, a Church,” he went on. “Sometimes I think about all the thoughts in all the minds of everyone on Earth. It seems to me it's like the air around us. The weather can change from sun to rain, from calm to windy. No one knows why that happens. A bad wind blows through the minds in a country, and everything turns bad. One wonders why God allows it.”

He surprised me by pulling the van up to the gate of a construction site and parking on a patch of dirt next to the entrance. There were
NO PARKING
signs everywhere.

“You won't get a ticket here?”

He smiled, a rare sliver of joy on his square, sad face. “No,” he said, “it's the Italian way. We all break the rules. But we break them only to a certain extent. Look, see? If people really need to get through this gate, they can. They'll only have to drive slowly for a few seconds, and that's not too painful even for Italians. They'll squeeze between the side of the van and the far gatepost. Even a truck could go in or out. Right now everyone is eating lunch anyway, even the police are eating lunch. But this is the way we are.”

“I noticed it in the way people drive,” I said. “Crazy, breaking every rule, ignoring lane markers and speed limits.”

“Yes,” he said, and there was another spark of joy. “But I think we are very good drivers, very courteous in some eccentric way. We are not a people who follow the rules, or maybe it is better to say that we are creative with the rules.”

“Even the rules of the Church?” I asked as we got out of the van and walked shoulder to shoulder along a torn-up, dusty sidewalk. I felt something different with him then. The visit to his family, awkward as it had been, seemed to have pushed us into a new kind of friendship. He was a notch more relaxed, less formal; I want to say
younger
.

“Yes,” he said, “even the rules of the Church. Maybe especially the rules of the Church. If you go to Mass here on Sunday, in almost any church you will see a group of men standing at the back, talking to each other. They carry on a conversation that lasts from the beginning of the service to the
‘Andate in pace,'
though sometimes they'll fall silent just as the host is being raised.”

“That must make it hard for the priest.”

“It does, it does.” He laughed a short, quiet laugh. “But that is our way. Sometimes if you go into a restaurant, the people will overcharge you. Other times they'll pretend to forget you had three glasses of wine instead of two and they won't add that onto the check. Everything here is done that way. We have a happy chaos. We're not like the Germans and the Austrians. Everything there works perfectly, but there is not so much fun, not so much joy in being alive.”

“Maybe,” I said, as we walked into a restaurant that had a dozen or so outdoor tables elegantly set with white tablecloths under a pale white canvas tent, “maybe that's why the Lamb of God people came to be…in reaction to that happy chaos.”

“Yes, maybe,” he said, “but there's something about those people that most Italians instinctively dislike. We give respect to the pope and the Vatican, yes, naturally, but then we will go home and do what we please. Look, we have the lowest or second lowest birth rate in all of Europe. Do you really think all those married couples are using the rhythm method? Or abstaining?”

At that point the conversation was interrupted by a waiter, who seated us at one of the outdoor tables. For a moment Bruno—who was wearing, as he had every time I'd seen him, his black pants and short-sleeved black shirt, open at the collar—for a moment, in spite of the clothing, he seemed to me not so much like a priest but like an ordinary young Italian man sitting down to lunch with a friend. In the way he opened the menu, in the way he ordered for both of us, pasta and wine and then a meat dish for what Italians call
il
secondo
piatto,
the second plate, the weight of sadness and formality seemed to lift away from him. I felt much closer to him because of it.

When we'd sipped our wine and taken the first bites of a delicious and perfectly cooked spaghetti with tiny yellow clams and baby octopus mixed into it, I said, “I received a very strange letter this morning at the hotel.” I could see that the news had his full attention.

“Claudia brought it to me at breakfast.” I took the envelope out of my purse and handed it across the table, and he set down his fork, unfolded the letter and read it, then handed it back to me.

“Eat, please,” I said. “This food is too good to be allowed to grow cold. Do you have any idea what it means?”

He swallowed before answering, sipped his wine, picked at one of the miniature octopuses with the tines of his fork, and then raised his eyes. “Do you remember a few years ago, when there were the G8 meetings in Genoa? Do you remember that the young people rioted?”

“Not really,” I said. “I don't pay much attention to the news.”

“Well, they rioted in the streets because they felt that the powerful people who run the world were making these giant economic arrangements with each other, trade deals and so on, that benefited them, that increased their wealth, but at the expense of the working people. Because of their greed, they were driving the world economy into the mud. The young people lit cars on fire, broke windows. There was wildness in the streets. They fought with the police and many people were hurt, and some, a few, were killed. Well, this man”—he pointed toward the letter—“Cardinal Zossimo, went out into the streets and spoke to them. Not as a representative of the powerful but as a human being. He spoke to them about violence and how rarely it succeeds in bringing any good change to the world. He said he agreed with them in principle, but at the same time he spoke as a member of the Church hierarchy, the elite, the powerful, asking them to be calm. Some people hated him for that, called him a hypocrite. But many many people, myself included, have a great admiration for him. Think of it, a cardinal going out into the wild streets like that, unprotected, to speak to the youth. Who else has done that in history? Can you think of anyone?”

“There was an archbishop in Central America,” I said. “I don't know which country. Nicaragua, maybe. Or El Salvador. I remember he was assassinated saying Mass.”