Vatican Waltz (22 page)

When my father finished, the only thing I could think to say was “I'm sorry, Papa. It's not true. I'm not trying to make trouble.”

“But it's true you went there to make the women be priests?”

“That part's true, Pa, yes.”

“Why?”

“I feel God is asking me to do that.”

“And you couldn't tell me?”

“I didn't think you'd understand. I'm sorry.”

There was only silence on the line.

“I'm sorry,” I said again. “The last thing I wanted was to embarrass you.”

“All right,” he said, but I knew it wasn't all right. He'd be sitting in the grandstand at the dog track or holding a hand of cards at the City Club, and he'd be imagining what Bobby and his other friends thought of him, the widower mechanic with the crazy daughter who never had a boyfriend. A troublemaker, a feminist, a radical girl who couldn't tell him what she was really doing over there in the Old Country.

After we said our good-byes I put the phone back on its cradle and sat in the chair with its gold-threaded upholstery and I had a half hour of feeling sorry for myself. I started out thinking about Bobby Merano and some of the other small-minded people we knew, and I went from there to wondering if Monsignor Ferraponte had been right after all and the whole trip was nothing more than a monument to my huge ego. I remembered something Cardinal Rosario had said: he'd somehow known about my conversation with the monsignor. I remembered the tone of the announcement of Father Alberto's death, the monsignor's small, forced expression of sadness. I remembered things Franco and Father Bruno had said about the Church's dark underbelly—the secrets, the fear, the lines that could be crossed once you decided somebody was controlled by the Devil. I thought of the righteous fury on the faces of the Lamb of God protestors when they were shown on TV.

I almost never felt physically afraid, I don't know why. And even after considering all those things, seeing what the possible connections might be, and realizing, at last, what certain types of people must really think of me, even then it wasn't fear I felt but something else. Sadness, maybe. Weariness. Disappointment. As if the last spots on a lens—my hopeful naiveté—had finally been stripped away and now I would have to face the world—and my Church—as it truly was.

For some reason it was hours and hours before I could get to sleep on that night. Sleep had always been such a dependable refuge for me. I always fell asleep almost immediately, slept deeply, rarely had a bad dream, usually woke up refreshed. But that night was different. I rolled this way and that in the oversized bed. I read some of
Wisdom
of
the
Desert
and came upon this entry:

Abbot
Pastor
said: Any trial whatever that comes to you can be conquered by silence.

I tried my silent prayer. I tried to understand what God was telling me through this series of failures. I saw that in the words of another famous Catholic writer I loved, Father Thomas Keating, my “program for happiness” was being stifled. We all have our programs, Keating said, our ideas about what shape we want our lives to take. God has to break those programs apart in order to let us see our real purpose.

Like everything else Keating wrote, that theory made sense to me, but the breaking apart was never an enjoyable process, rarely something we could accept without struggle. Lying there, trying to let the worries go and sleep take their place, I wondered if I'd made a wrong turn at some point and, trying too hard to hold on to my program for happiness, my life as I imagined it, I'd wandered into a spiritual dead end.

I had finally fallen asleep in that mood, discouragement teetering on the edge of despair, when the hotel phone made its odd, tinny sound in the darkness. The clock read 2:13. I sat up, wondering if it could be my father calling at what would be 8:13 p.m. Revere time. But the voice on the end of the line belonged to a stranger.

“Signora Piantedosi?” the man began in quiet, careful English.

“Yes.”

“You today came at the Curia, yes?”

“I did.”

“I was there. The priest. In the office. The old fat priest. Father Bartolomeo, they call me. You wanted to have the visit with
Cardinale
Zossimo.”

“I did, yes,” I said, suddenly wide awake. “When I went upstairs, I was told he was away, that I couldn't see him.”

The old priest coughed. “Now he is here. Genova. He reads your note. Now he wants to have with you the visit. He is sorry so late.”

I pressed the phone hard against my ear. “I can come tomorrow at whatever time. I—”

“No, now. This hour,” the caller said. “He wants that you should come to the Church of San Luca. Do you know her?”

“No, I know San Pietro. I know the Duomo.”

“No, no, San Luca. You can come walking for fifteen minutes to it from your hotel. He will meet you there.”

“I don't know where it is.”

“Okay. I will help you. Go across the street from your hotel, straight. An alley there. A
vicolo.
I meet you in the
vicolo
and take you to San Luca.”

“Now?”

“Now is the only time for him.”

“How do I know this is you? I mean, that it isn't a trick?”

There was a pause, then “You, when you went upstairs today, the man there he says the
cardinale
is at Turkey.”

“You were that man?”

“No, I am the old priest, in the office. Now is the time for you to come to the
vicolo.
I am not now there, but in a little minutes I am. You must come alone, please, without telling the people. You come across from the hotel into the
vicolo.
Just go and go. Pay attention to nothing there. I think no one will bother you. You are understanding me?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Good-bye, then.
Ci
vediamo.
”

I SET THE PHONE BACK
in its cradle and sat on the edge of the bed. In the darkness I seemed to be surrounded by a vapor of doubt that was broken only by the occasional muted sound from the street. A car passing. A motorbike engine sputtering like machine-gun shots. An ambulance klaxon, its looping siren so different from the ones I was used to at home. I closed my eyes and asked for guidance. Either it was some kind of trick being played by the people who supposedly found me threatening or it was the eccentric cardinal doing something he felt he couldn't do in public. I said a short prayer, asking that I not be ruled by fear on the one hand or egotism and naiveté on the other. I prayed to be shown some kind of sign. But there was no sign, and somehow I knew, even as I prayed, that there wouldn't be. There were the street sounds, the
plink
of the hotel elevator and the padding of soft footsteps on the corridor carpet. I had, for one moment, an image of the Blessed Virgin, just a white flash of her, and then only quiet. I remembered the way I'd been as a girl, seventh grade, ninth grade, twelfth grade—feisty, fearless, unafraid of confrontation, trusting in my fate, knowing that whatever happened to me in school or on the streets, I could always go home to the warmth of my grandmother, the solid presence of my father, the peace of St. Anthony's nave.

Still I hesitated. A minute. Two minutes. Strands of sleepiness dragged at my temples, but the phrase that kept going through my mind was “
all
this
way
.” As in “You've come all this way, and what will you have to show for it?”

I stood up and got dressed, pulled over my head and shoulders the light cashmere sweater my aunt Chiara had given me the Christmas before she died, decided to leave a note on my desk saying I was going to meet Cardinal Zossimo at the Church of San Luca. And then I went quietly out the door.

Downstairs, there was an unfamiliar clerk at the front desk, snoozing, his head on his hands. Apparently he hadn't been told about phone messages. Mabu was sleeping there, too, filling one of the big leather chairs to overflowing. The sound of the elevator doors had made him open his eyes. He lifted his huge head off the cushion and looked at me tiredly.

“Signorina,”
he said in his accented Italian.
“Dove va?”

“I have to go to San Luca. I have to meet someone.”

I saw his eyes shift to the clock behind the sleeping clerk. “But
Signorina,”
he said, “now is not a good time to walk in the city. There are people now who would hurt you, who would steal from you.”

“I have to,” I said.

As I went across the tile toward the front door, he sat up and moved to the edge of the chair. “
Signorina,
please.”

I thought of telling him that in America hotel guests could come and go as they pleased at any time of day or night. But he was so genuinely concerned, and I was carrying, as if in the fibers of the soft sweater, so many threads of uncertainty, that what I said was “Come with me. Just across the street. I'm meeting someone there in the
vicolo.
”

“The
vicolo?
That is a very bad place. And you're going from there to San Luca?
A
quest'ora?
At this hour? In all the city of Genoa, this is the worst street a woman like you should walk on at night.
I
am even afraid to walk there at night, and look at me. I am afraid of almost nothing.”

“I'm afraid of almost nothing, also,” I said. When I kept moving toward the entrance, Mabu sighed and stood up, shook the sleep off himself like a bear shaking off water after a river crossing, tucked in his shirt, and pronounced the famous Italian word
“Allora.”
It means something like “All right, then.” But he said it, as Italians often do, with a hopeless resignation, as if he were a soldier agreeing to one last assignment, sure to be fatal.
“Allora,”
he said, “
Vado con lei.
I am going with you.”

The front door was locked from the inside. Mabu turned the lever and opened it, and we went out. The air was beautifully cool, touched with salt in a way that reminded me of Revere on certain nights. A young couple, two figures cut from charcoal, strolled arm in arm along the far sidewalk. A few of the stores had kept on an interior light, and there were streetlights and the lights from one passing delivery truck, but for the most part the city was dark and asleep. I said one Hail Mary, took a breath, and with Mabu at my side crossed the street toward the alley. There was no one waiting for us. The alley—its shadowed mouth bordered to the left by an eight-foot-tall wooden construction fence—led steeply downhill toward the water. I hesitated a moment and stepped into it.

“Signorina,”
Mabu said, “please. There is another way to go to the Church of San Luca. A few minutes longer, but much safer. Please.”

“I can't,” I said.
“Non posso.”

Our footsteps echoed in the
vicolo.
I saw a church to my right, closed up tight and completely dark, bottles, broken glass, and cigarette packages on the pavement in front of it. One yellowish streetlamp a bit farther on. In its frail light I noticed a rat scurrying down the gutter, a syringe there, sparkling. It was only when we were almost to the end of the alley that I saw a figure lurking in the darkness close against the construction fence.

“Attenti,”
Mabu said. He moved a half step in front of me, and I realized that his huge hands had been made into fists. But as we drew closer I had the sure sense that the figure in the shadows was anything but threatening. It was a man dressed in black, I saw, and then I recognized him. The heavyset priest held out a hand and said, “Father Bartolomeo.” His face, as he shook hands with Mabu and me, was a trembling mask of flesh—age and tiredness, not fear. In fact, he seemed, as he had at the Curia office, unnaturally calm.

“Thank you for coming,” he said to me. “Now let us to walk.”

“I didn't want to come alone.”

“
Va bene.
That's fine.”

Everything about him spoke of a lack of hurry or the inability to move quickly or both. I could sense that Mabu was confused. When Father Bartolomeo, who'd met us at the T where the
vicolo
intersected a very narrow street, gestured that we would be taking a left and traveling along that street, Mabu mumbled, “This is not a good place.”

The priest smiled and nodded as pleasantly as if we were three coworkers out for a noontime stroll in one of the city's parks.

But as soon as we turned off the
vicolo,
I was confronted with a scene that might have been a Renaissance painter's vision of Hell. The street itself, little more than a cobblestone lane, was not navigable by cars. The narrow buildings pressed close against each other side to side, and you could have tossed a clothespin across above our heads from one window to the next. Even at that hour, there were clusters of men here and there, sitting on the stoops or standing against the buildings. I thought of Father Bruno, because some of them looked African or North African or perhaps Albanian, some Italian. Two of them were drunk and arguing in hoarse voices. I heard a man screaming angrily in one of the rooms above. Two women in tiny skirts stood at the corner of a side alley, three-quarters hidden in shadow. Strangely, as our odd trio passed, one of them turned and bowed with such reverence I wondered if she'd recognized the priest and was mocking us. “She's bowing to
you,
” Father Bartolomeo said in his untroubled voice. His voice, the woman's bow, the sense of the three of us being linked on this strange errand,
a
quest'ora
—there was an odd, otherworldly feel to all of it, and thoughts spun around my ears in quick wisps of puzzlement.

Via Prè was not quite as dark as the
vicolo
had been. The pavement was illuminated by widely spaced lamps and one or two lighted windows on the upper floors. A man hissed at us, then burped loudly and laughed in a way that made the skin of my arms prickle. A mongrel slinked past close against the wall. A little farther along I was shocked to see three small children sleeping on a stoop, bathed in the light of a basement window. They were dirty-faced, poorly clothed, clutching each other as if they were cold. On impulse, I took off my sweater and walked over to them, draped it across them as best I could, and we went on. No one spoke. After we'd been walking on Via Prè for ten minutes, our footsteps tapping out an odd, eerie beat, the alley opened a few yards to either side, forming a small piazza. There on our left stood a yellow-walled church with a narrow street running next to it. The priest led us to the door, but before he opened it I turned to Mabu and thanked him. “Go back now and sleep,” I said. “I'll be fine.”

He looked down at me from his great height.

“I'll be fine,” I repeated. “I'm meeting a good man. The Cardinal of Genoa.”

There was a splash of surprise on his broad features. He looked at the priest, and when Father Bartolomeo nodded, Mabu looked back at me and pointed farther down in the direction we'd been walking.
“Va giù,”
he said. “Go down there. When you return to the hotel, go in that direction. Then left on Corso Emmanuele, then up the hill, left again on Via Arsenale. That way it will be safe.”

I thanked him again and saw that he was going that way himself so as not to have to return along Via Prè.

The priest pulled open the right half of the wood-panel door and we went quietly into a nave that was lit only by votive candles and two small lamps.

I waited for my eyes to adjust, then went and knelt at the altar rail. Outside and in, the church had a shabby, unkempt feel to it, but there in front of me stood a spectacular sculpture of Mary, all in white marble. She had one hand over her heart, her marble clothes were rippling as if in a breeze, and at her feet floated a tumbling mass of young children and one slightly older girl, all of them in various postures of confusion or adoration. Strangely, perhaps, the sculpture made me think of my mother giving her life for me, and I was suddenly afraid. It wasn't a physical fear but something deeper, the fear of not being worthy, of having used badly the life that had been passed on to me at such cost, of having run away from something I should long ago have faced. Perhaps, without meaning to, I had made some enormous mistake, and in the face of Mary's marble perfection that possibility seemed to point toward a great, looming regret. Above her, a magnificent, multilayered mural climbed the walls of the apse and filled the curved ceiling below the dome. It was a kind of medieval Via Prè: there were crowds of bodies, some of them drooping over the edge of the ceiling as if they would fall onto the back of the altar. Above them, in the shadows, I could make out more bodies, thin scraps of cloud, outstretched hands, angels swirling around the center of the cupola. I knelt there in my small vapor of doubt and worry, waiting, breathing.