Vatican Waltz (23 page)

After a moment, Father Bartolomeo touched me on the shoulder and led me toward a door at the side of the altar. I followed him into a small room. Inside stood a desk and two hard chairs, a bench; a few priests' robes hung in a half-open closet. It seemed to me a place from a remembered dream, a room I'd been to many times before. The priest turned to me. On his face he wore the same calm expression I'd seen in the office at the Curia. His body moved in the same languid way. He lifted his head as if his eyelids were so heavy he had to put his nose up in the air in order to see under them, and he smiled kindly, showing the poorly made teeth. “Please to sit,” he said to me. “Please to wait.” Then he made a small bow and left, not quite closing the door.

I tried to breathe calmly, telling myself—and mostly believing it—that nothing bad could possibly happen to me there. I ran my eyes over the room—all dark wood, elaborately carved. There were no pictures on the walls, no religious figures painted there, only the plain wooden desk that looked like it weighed a thousand pounds, a plain wooden cross, the hard-backed chairs, the bench, and one pair of polished black shoes beneath it.

It was several minutes before the door opened again. The man who entered was dressed like a beggar or street person in shabby, stained brown pants, running shoes, and a tan sweatshirt that looked twenty years old. He held out a hand and said, “Martino Zossimo,” and I stood and bowed my head to him. He was older than I'd expected, his face round and deeply lined but handsome, the hair thick and gray, the eyes steady, the nose sharp and bent to one side as if it had been broken years before, the ears protruding a bit. It was the face, I thought, of a person at peace. He gestured for me to sit and then sat opposite me.

“I am sorry for all the drama,” he said, and, unlike Father Bartolomeo's, his English carried only the smallest trace of an accent. “And especially for the late hour. The situation now, here, is difficult for me.”

Though I had no idea in what way it might be difficult for him, I said I understood. I thanked him for meeting with me.

“I have been expecting you for a long time,” he said.

“I came as quickly as I could, Your Eminence.”

“I don't mean tonight. I have been expecting to meet you for a long time. I have seen you in my prayers. In dreams. I have seen you exactly as you look now.”

When he said those words, it was as if a long, sharp sword pierced up through the middle of me, stirring something there, as if the point of it had touched the bottom edge of my heart. I suddenly remembered Father Alberto telling me, more than once, not to be falsely modest. I'd had no idea what he meant. Whatever modesty I possessed seemed to me absolutely grounded in reality, not false at all.

But somehow, and it was very strange, when I felt that piercing it was as if an eggshell, made of thin metal, cracked, broke apart, and fell into pieces at my feet. I had turned my eyes away, but when I looked back at the cardinal, I felt—so surprising—that we were in some way equals. Still, his equal or not, I felt raw and skinless there in the small room.

“You were not afraid to come here on Via Prè?” the cardinal asked.

“A bit.”

He smiled in a way that seemed sad to me. “It can be not so safe there in the night, though mostly the people would not want to hurt you but only to steal from you, to get money for drugs or to drink.”

“We have those places also,” I said.

“I knew that you would not be harmed there. I wanted a blessing for that street,” he said. “I walk there often, sometimes three or four nights a week. Often at this hour. Sometimes with Father Bartolomeo and sometimes alone. I wanted you to pass along that street because I knew it would be a blessing for those souls.”

For once I had no urge to question or dispute him. I was wonderfully at ease.

“You are here in some danger,” he said calmly, “but not from the people like those on Via Prè. Within the Church you have made powerful enemies.”

“People have been saying that to me almost from the moment I left the airport,” I said. “It's a hard thing to believe.”

“You are not afraid about that?”

“Not for myself, no.”

“You are sure?”

“Yes.”

“It would always be this way, I think,” he said. “People who are like you will always make certain others uneasy. If in this life you are warm, you are kind, your heart is open to the full love of Christ without reservation, then you must always invite hatred. I think sometimes of the mob calling for Barabbas to be let to go free and Christ to be crucified. There is always such a crowd. Always.”

He turned his eyes away for a moment, as if experiencing a familiar pain in his body. Then he said, “You have come to tell me something.”

“Yes, Your Eminence.” In as concise a manner as I could, I told him the whole story as it is set down here—the visions, the certainty I had that God was calling me to the priesthood, and that the Church, the American Church at least, was dying. I told him briefly about my meetings in Revere and Boston, the trip to Rome, the cryptic message that had been delivered to me at the Old Palace Hotel. He listened without surprise and with great care, like a good priest in the confessional, with his eyes to the side and down, but not missing a word or anything behind the words. When I finished, he looked at me directly. “I have people in the Vatican who are my friends,” he said, so quietly it seemed he worried there were spies outside the door, listening. “From one of those friends, I knew you had come. I knew about the meeting with Rosario. He is a sincere man, perhaps, but of the old ways. When Christ came to Earth, the old ways, which had been set in place to help and guide people, those ways had become tired and rigid and no longer so helpful. I do not mean the true, ancient spirit of Judaism. I mean the rules, the structures of power, the way the spirit of Abraham and Moses had become corrupted. Christ came exactly to break those things apart and show us again the true path. Now, I believe, now in our Church we have a time like that also.”

“It's frustrating, Your Eminence. I've felt caught at moments between the possibility that I'm committing a great sin and the other possibility—that the Church is wrong.”

“You could not make a sin of any kind,” he said. He looked at me a long time, and it seemed to me that in his silent gaze and in that strange remark he was telling me I should know something that he knew. He said, “I receive messages also, in prayer. If I had the authority to change the Church, I would help you in this, yes, of course. But I cannot.” He held out his arms and crossed his wrists in front of him. “I am tied like this,” he said, “even in this high office.”

“What then, Your Eminence?”

“I am being asked, I believe, to help you in a different way.”

“What way?”

He held his eyes on me, and I had the sense that there was something he wanted to say. He broke eye contact, started to speak, hesitated, then said, “We must wait a little more time,” he said at last. “We must trust in God.”

“I do,” I said, perhaps too loudly. By then I was leaning a few inches toward him in the small room. “But God is pushing me to do this, I feel it. I believe that with all my heart. Pushing me always to do this thing, and nothing comes of it for me but more and more disappointment.”

He watched me. He tucked his hands into the tight sleeves of his threadbare sweater. It was a gesture only a priest would make. “I am the cardinal,” he said, a strange waver of pain in his voice. “But I see in you what I would want to see in me.”

I told him, and it was true, that the life I was living was such a quiet life, of benefit to so few people, that at times it made me ashamed. It wasn't that I wanted to do great things and be known for them. It was more a feeling I had that some mysterious ability was going to waste, a spiritual ability, and I hadn't the slightest idea how to change that.

He surprised me by saying “Many women now feel as you do. And some men also. But I think, it will sound to you perhaps typical to say this, I think that there has been lost in this time the understanding of what is not seen.”

“You mean the traditional things: women having children? Loving their husbands? Keeping their homes?”

He was shaking his head in disagreement. “For women and for men,” he said. “The discussion now, in the Church and outside, has become—” He turned his eyes sideways for a moment, searching for the right word, it seemed, and then said, “has been made too solid…too concerned with exterior things. The value of the interior world has been lost now in society, even in most parts of the Church. It is seen as a waste, not productive. But think of what did Christ do. Not so much. Not so very much in the exterior world. A small number of miracles in all his years on Earth. A small number of months of talking here and there. A short life, and look. His message was a very large message, but mostly an interior one, I think.”

“But he was Christ. He changed the world so much.”

“Of course, yes. But there were the good people before him, and the bad also. And after him good and bad, the same.”

“You seem to be saying I should let this go, then, the idea of the priesthood.”

“I think,” he said, again, with what seemed to me that same subtle reluctance, “I think God is asking of you something else…something larger.”

“What then? Asking what? Forgive me, Your Eminence, I'm confused.”

“You encounter, constantly, every day, many people. Walking now on Via Prè, you touched the people there.”

“I gave one sweater to cold children, that's all.”

He was shaking his head. “Because of what is inside yourself,” he said slowly, “you change the life of every person who sees you.”

I was tired then, confused, worn out. Thinking of how I might have changed the lives of the prostitutes on the corner, I very nearly laughed.

“When the priest says Mass,” the cardinal went on, “everything inside of him says this Mass. To the extent that he is good, the goodness is passed across to others not only in his words but in the motions of his body, the tone of his voice, the light in his eyes. When a husband and wife make the love, everything that is inside them makes the love. Their history. Their thoughts and the record of their thoughts. Everything they have ever been is joined, and if their lovemaking produces a child, all of that is passed along to that child. When a mother touches her son, everything of her as a person lies inside that touch. Because of it the atoms change in the son.”

“But the external world matters, doesn't it?” I said. “If a woman can't be a priest, if a priest who wants to can't marry, the atoms change in them, too. What they do from then on, the effect they have on people, is changed.”

“Exactly,” he said, as if we'd been agreeing all along.

“What are you saying I should do, then? Tell me.”

Instead of answering, he said, “I watched my sister die. From the cancer. A holy woman. We were very close always. She had a great patience. She prayed, she suffered. She felt despair. I think we see those same things in Christ's life and in the life of his mother and of others close to him. We have Christ's own words, ‘My Lord, my Lord, why have you forsaken me?' and we have him then rising in the glory. At the very last, after a great torment, my sister left this world in peace.”

“I'm sorry for her suffering,” I said. And then, when he just kept looking at me: “So I should wait?”

He nodded, as if I'd finally understood what he'd been trying to convey. “I believe we must both of us wait…but not so long now.”

“I feel like I've done all the work I can do in terms of what God is asking of me.”

“I feel that also, in one way, yes,” he said. “But I think that now God will send you a new task.” He looked away and back, and for the third time I had the feeling there was something he was keeping himself from saying. “And to me a new task, also.” He sighed, as if the vision of the difficulty of these coming tasks was already burdening him. He said, “You have seen this beautiful church?” And it was clear that he didn't want to say any more.

“Only for just a few moments, when I came in.”

“Then let us go and pray together before the Holy Mother. That is what we can do now. If you would.”

We went back out into the smell of candle smoke and old stone. I started to kneel at the altar rail, but the cardinal took hold of my elbow, opened the silver-leaf gates, and led me through them to the place where the priests stood when they were saying Mass. It was as if, for those moments, in that one place, he was fulfilling the visions I'd been having for so long, allowing a woman into the inner sanctum of the faith, as an equal. If he foresaw some other destiny for me, then at least my visions had been correct to this one extent: I was on the altar, praying. “Here,” he said, and we knelt side by side on the cool tile, beneath the swirling marble Mary. “Just a few minutes here we will pray,” he said quietly.

And we did that. I bowed my head. After a time I could feel an actual, literal weight slipping off my bones, as if the question I'd been struggling with all those years had at last been answered. In place of that worry and struggle, something much larger than myself and my catalogue of wants seemed to take hold of my mind and carry me up and up. Such a sense of fullness came over me then, a joy much stronger than the joys I'd felt before in prayer. In my arms and legs and hands it was as if I could feel the individual cells singing in celebration, and I understood it to mean that I was in a holy place, in the presence of a truly holy man, and that he had passed on to me some great, mysterious gift. I raised my head and opened my eyes and looked above me at the mural. In the center of the cupola—something I could not have seen from any farther out in the church—was a globe of golden light, a golden quietness amid the swirl of bodies. I felt as though I were being absorbed into it.