Vatican Waltz (24 page)

When, much later, the light released me and I came slowly out of what I can only call the ecstasy of that prayer, my eyes were closed, my head bowed, and the cardinal was no longer beside me.

I looked left and right, then turned and saw him sitting in the front pew. Walking through the silver gates and down the three marble steps, I felt a twinge of embarrassment: I had no idea how long I'd kept him waiting. He stood, looking, it seemed to me, like a carpenter or stonemason who'd wandered into the church after leaving his labors and now was about to fall asleep. He did the strangest thing then: he took my right hand, leaned over, and kissed it, almost as a lover would. I resisted the urge to pull away. “Give to me,” he said, as if asking for my hand in marriage, “your blessing.”

“I have no blessing to give, Your Eminence. That's not right. It should work the other way.”

“Give to me your blessing,” he repeated, very calmly, as if I hadn't objected at all.

“I am not worthy to give anyone any kind of blessing.”

“Give to me your blessing,” he said a third time.

And then it was as if there were a completely different Cynthia Clare Piantedosi standing there. That name no longer fit; my actual past seemed no longer to drag behind me like a tattered sack of memories. I took hold of his hand in both my hands and I said, “Whatever good I have in me I give to you. May God bless you.”

“And you,” he said. “And protect you now, and give us both courage.”

Then he was leading me to the door. We stepped outside, where it was cool but no longer nighttime. The old priest was standing there, waiting as patiently as if it were midday and he were expecting a friend for lunch. I would calculate, later, that he'd been there almost two hours. He smiled at me tiredly. The cardinal said just what Mabu had said: “You should go back by the way of Via Arsenale. Father Bartolomeo will walk with you as far as that street, then it will be safe.”

I thanked him. He touched me on the shoulder with the fingertips of his right hand, held them there for a long moment, held his eyes on mine, then turned and went back into the church. I had an urge to follow him and ask if we could see each other again, but for some reason I did not do that.

As Father Bartolomeo and I stepped away from San Luca and out into the small piazza at the end of Via Prè, I was surprised to see that the sun had already risen, there, behind us, behind the range of hills. I was surprised, too, that, as we turned left and began the short climb toward Via Arsenale, Father Bartolomeo walked behind, not next to me. At first, I'm ashamed to admit, I was barely even aware of him. Still caught up in the magic of my meeting with Cardinal Zossimo, walking along in a spell of self-involvement, I realized only after we'd gone a block and a half that Father Bartolomeo had fallen behind and was laboring for breath. The trip along Via Prè had been slightly downhill, but now we were moving in a different direction, away from the water, climbing a steep rise, and he was struggling.

I stopped and waited for him. Strangely, he stopped, too—in order to catch his breath, I thought at first. But then I understood that, like a bodyguard or acolyte, he was purposely keeping a distance. I motioned him up; he smiled and shook his head. It was a peculiar dance, but I was suffused then with such a profound peace that almost nothing else mattered to me. I turned and went along happily in the morning light, uphill another two blocks until we crested the rise. At that point I looked back at the old priest and I said, “Please walk with me. I'm not in a hurry.” Still breathing hard, Father Bartolomeo moved up even with me, and together we turned left onto Via Arsenale. I asked him then if he or the cardinal had been the one who'd paid the hotel bill, and he only lifted and lowered his shoulders, once, chest heaving, face calm.

The air smelled of bus exhaust and baking bread. It must have been only five or five thirty in the morning, but already there were a few cars and motorcycles on the street, the sound of their engines echoing against the buildings' stone faces. We had to wait a moment in order to cross. When we were on the other side, Father Bartolomeo caught his breath and said, “I think it is safe now, from here,” and reached out to shake my hand good-bye.

I thanked him for waiting all that time, and he said, “My life is waiting,” in a laconic manner that was touched with the gentlest humor. His face was a collection of pouches with two sleepy blue eyes set among them. “The
cardinale,”
he added, “a special man, yes?”

“I felt that.”

“Maybe someday he will be the pope.”

I was surprised, for some reason, to hear the thought put into words. I felt again that strange happiness slice up through the middle of me, a blade of hope, a wound with no pain in it. “Everything would change then,” I said.

In response, he made the classic Italian expression I'd seen on Father Bruno's face during our meal at the Vecchia Roma: raised eyebrows, slowly closed eyes, turned-down corners of the lips. The famous Italian
forse.
Maybe. Possibly. We hope so, but probably not. At that moment the gesture seemed to me to encompass the whole of the tradition I'd been suckled on, the idea that life was always as disappointing as it was amusing, that one shouldn't place too much hope in its perfectibility, that the strong river of human fate and behavior might swell and shrink, twist this way and that, turn better or worse in various places in various eras, but it would never really cut an absolutely sinless route through the soil of earthly time.

Father Bartolomeo opened his eyes and smiled a cat's smile, as gentle and kind as an embrace. We said good-bye again. I turned and headed toward the hotel.

From there to the Savoia it was a straight line, less than half a mile. I went past the large gray church I didn't much care for, past the entrance to one of the university departments, then past a string of small shops. Café owners were setting out chairs and tables on the sidewalk, and there were sandwich boards there, too, chalked with advertisements for sales or daily specials.

As I walked, I thought about the odd way the meeting had been arranged—the hour, the location, the fact that I'd been directed through what must have been one of the poorest, roughest sections of the city. At first I suspected it was meant to be some kind of test of my courage or sincerity. But then I decided there must have been another reason: Cardinal Zossimo had wanted me to see or experience something there, the abject poverty, the fear, violence, and want those people lived with, the way they were locked outside the warm enclosure of respectable society—no room for them at the inn. For a cardinal, certainly, pampered and fussed over, and for a middle-class American woman who had plenty to eat, a house, and every material possession she wanted, it would be easy to pretend those lives didn't really matter or that they weren't full, important lives in the eyes of God. The cardinal must have hoped I'd understand that, not just in my mind but viscerally.

Not far from the hotel I looked up from my contented musing and saw that the street and sidewalk had become busier. One of the big orange city buses swept past from behind me, making the transition from invisible to apparent and raising a small hurricane of exhaust and noise a few feet to my left. I saw Mabu on the sidewalk two hundred yards from me, his huge head swinging this way and that as if he were watching for someone. He turned his eyes left and saw me. I raised a hand in greeting and was surprised when he started in my direction. He went slowly at first and then more quickly, and then, for no apparent reason, he broke into a trot. He was shouting something and pointing, but I couldn't make out the words because, behind the dying noise of the bus I heard the whine of a motorbike. It was faint at first—concentrating on Mabu's strange behavior, I was barely conscious of it—and then it grew louder and seemed so close that, without turning to see, I angled my steps away from the edge of the sidewalk. Mabu, trotting like a bull in a field, was pointing and yelling, more urgently now. I had started to turn my head and look over my shoulder—the motorbike was very loud by then—when I felt a rush of air and noise beside me and then a tremendous flash of pain behind my left ear.

And then nothing.

When people are brought to a hospital in an unconscious state—as was the case with me that morning in Genoa—they are routinely catheterized for the testing of their urine. “It's how we keep the medical students out of our way,” one veteran nurse had told us in our clinical rounds of the ER, but I knew it was more than that. Urine is something we all want to get rid of, naturally, flushing it away as soon as it's produced—as if, like past sins, we want to move it as far from us as quickly as possible. But our sins say a lot about us, and, for doctors and nurses, urine is a rich source of information, too. The liver takes toxins from the blood and sends them to the kidneys for filtering, and anything that's harmful or useless to the body will end up in our urine (though alcohol is metabolized so fast it doesn't show up there). It's particularly helpful in the case of female patients, because it lets the doctors know whether or not they can safely perform certain kinds of radiological exams.

Unconscious, my brain swelling and threatening to bleed, I was taken by ambulance, ironically enough, to the Ospedale San Martino in the center of Genoa. There the doctors did what they always do for a patient who comes through the doors with head trauma—an IV line was started, CT scans were taken, a brain surgeon was called in to review the films and be ready in case emergency surgery proved necessary. I wasn't awake for any of this, of course. I remember nothing of those hours—no visions or dreams, no sense of time or my own existence. Brain trauma produces a state very much like that of anesthesia, though in the case of trauma there's a much greater potential for death, paralysis, or other permanent injury.

The main risk is that bleeding and swelling of the brain will damage the sensitive tissue there—similar to what happens in cerebral hemorrhage or stroke—and then whatever function is controlled by that part of the brain will be lost or impaired.

What happened, in my case, was that two things—my own instinct and Mabu's yelling and pointing—very likely saved me from being killed or paralyzed. He saw what I couldn't see—a man on a motorbike speeding up Via Arsenale, driving with one hand. In his other hand the man had a short length of pipe. Even if his target—the back of my head—had been perfectly stationary, it would have been difficult enough for him to hit it square on, going at that speed. But, hearing the sound of the motorbike, I'd instinctively moved a couple of feet farther away from the street, which had forced him to adjust his course and ride closer to the curb. The pavement was sloped a bit there to allow rainwater to flow into the gutter, and—he was steering with one hand, his eyes were on me—the change of angle made him momentarily lose control of the motorbike. That small wobble and the fact that, just as he swung, I had wondered what Mabu was pointing at and had started to turn my head, made it a glancing blow instead of a direct one—enough to knock me flat on the sidewalk, unconscious, but nothing like what it could have been if he'd hit me dead-on.

I went over sideways, crashing and sliding into the legs of a flimsy metal chair at one of the café tables. The swinging of the club and the impact caused the driver to jerk the handlebars, which caused the front wheel of the motorbike to strike the curb. The driver let go of the pipe and grabbed the handle, but too late. He went over sideways, too, skidding along the sidewalk in front of me like a sack of grain thrown from a moving truck. By the time he'd gotten halfway to his feet, conscious but dazed and scraped up very badly, Mabu had reached him, and the friendly giant—according to the story I was told, at least—swung his right fist with all his weight behind it. The assailant—Armando Malatesta was his name—ended up in a second ambulance, and then in the next room over in the ER (and then, a few hours later, in police custody).

All this is a little bit beside the point, I guess, and all the details were told to me much later. I was taken by ambulance to the emergency room, treated there, and then moved from the ER to the CT scan, from radiology to a bed in Intensive Care. I lay there for the rest of the morning, medicated, monitored in ten different ways, and as unconscious as a block of stone.

When I finally came to the surface again—a slow, painful procession from darkness to light, through all kinds of shadowy realms of confusion and hurt—I became aware of a nurse in a white nun's habit to the left side of the bed and then a man on the other side, seated, holding my right hand in his. Bent nose. Protruding ears. This man, I realized after a few hazy moments, was Martino Zossimo, much more formally attired than the last time I'd seen him. When the nun saw my eyes open, she summoned the doctors. The cardinal squeezed my hand once, then stepped out of the way so I could be checked—lights shined in my eyes, fingers held up for me to count, the IV line adjusted, a short series of simple questions—was I in pain (yes, very much); could I remember my name (yes, but it was difficult to speak); was there anyone I wished them to notify (“Father,” I said, but I could not yet retrieve a name, address, or phone number).

I seemed to fall asleep again for a period of time—God knows how long it was—and when I awoke there was less confusion, less pain. I was very thirsty and a little nauseous but happy to see the cardinal's face staring down at me with an expression of such love it seemed to have a physical force to it. If I'd been able to form the words, I might have said that this feeling was precisely the thing I had been missing in my loneliest moments: the sense of being fully
seen.
It was as if he were looking at all the parts of me, good and bad, petty and generous, insecure and confident, ugly and attractive, and saying
yes
to each one of them. Somewhere in one of the books Father Alberto had given me, I'd read that in certain so-called primitive societies the ordinary greeting wasn't “Hello” or “How are you?” or “What are you doing?,” it was “I see you.”

The cardinal
saw
me. I saw him in return. He helped me sip from a cup of water, then reached out and took hold of my fingers again, but before anything could be said there were more ministrations by the nurses, another visit from a pair of doctors, a bit of business during which the cardinal was asked to leave the room. There was pain—background music, really, unpleasant but not loud, muted by opium derivatives—and very slowly, like birds who'd scattered away from a footstep, my thoughts formed themselves again into a more or less straight line. At that point the cardinal and I were left alone, and it was at that point, too, that he gave me a sketchy account of what had happened. I looked down at my hand, which seemed unnaturally pale against the red cloth of his sleeve.

“Why?” I asked him. “Who?”

He shrugged, told me the man's name, described him—Italian, mid-thirties, tattoo of a dragon on one side of his neck—asked if I'd seen him before. I had not.

All this was done in quiet tones, with spaces between the questions and answers, the information fed to me in drops, carefully, watchfully, the way you feed bread to someone who's thrown up everything she's eaten for the past three days. By then my thinking mechanism was functioning well enough for me to thank him for taking time out of his schedule to visit me. At those words I noticed a twist of emotion cross his face. “There's something more,” I said.

He nodded, pursed his lips, watched me. We had been speaking the whole time in English, but just then, for God knows what reason, he switched to Italian and said,
“Sei incinta.”

The word comes, perhaps, from
cintura,
which means “belt,” and even in my dazed state I understood it immediately.

“You're pregnant,” the cardinal had said.

“But that can't be!” I said, so forcefully that I winced against a jolt of pain.

He didn't speak or move his eyes. The weight of love there was trimmed with a filigree of understanding, as if he were a step ahead and waiting for me to catch up.

“That can't be, I've never—” I said, but at that point I remembered the other fact that can be gleaned from a woman's urine, and I closed my mouth and looked away from him. On some unconscious level I could feel that what he'd told me was true, and a shiver of fear went through me, a ripple of the most absolute unworthiness. Then, beneath the pain, beneath the medication that had dulled the pain, and beneath and beyond the surprise came something else: I understood that I would have to let go of the unworthiness at last, that larger forces work through us if we let them, and that going around in a suit of apology was not modesty at all; it was a lie. Father Alberto had tried to tell me that in a dozen different ways. Now, finally, I understood.

I wasn't thinking then of the problems I would face: trying to explain the situation to my father; the struggles of single motherhood; the responsibility of raising this spirit inside me to adulthood and the trials he or she might face then. It seemed to me, all at once, that the spells, my “mission”—even though I'd misunderstood it—and everything else in my past had, in fact, been pointing to this moment, and I was filled with what I can only describe as pure confidence, a “perfection of freedom” to use Thomas Merton's beautiful phrase. I'd often seen, in my Ob-Gyn clinicals, a certain expression on women's faces just after they'd given birth. A release from the pain of labor, yes, of course; but something more than that, too. We are all of us linked to something so much greater than ourselves, and for that little while, at least, those women understood that, in their bodies. At that moment, so did I.

“It is important now,” the cardinal was saying, “to leave Genova. You may not be safe here. You should not raise the child here, in any case.” There was a slight hesitation, one exhaled breath, almost a sigh, as if he were letting go of his own last and best-loved program for happiness, his good reputation, his dreams of a certain kind of future, something he'd been holding to tightly for all his adult life. “There are people in the countryside,” he said, “my friends. They will find a safe place for us. They will help us.”

I felt then as I imagine one feels at her first lovemaking and also at the very moment of death: there was, simultaneously, a sense of surprise, a newness, but also a breaking wave of undeniable familiarity, as if, in some mysterious subconscious realm, this great thing had been experienced or known before.

Because in the grammar of the language I had been hearing since my earliest moments on Earth, there was no ambiguity at all. The cardinal had not said “
Ti aiuteranno,
They will help
you.
” He'd said
“Ci aiuteranno.”
Which means: “They will help
us.
”

The End